A black wolf trotted up to my side, tongue hanging out and panting. He bent down, sniffed, and licked my neck. I stroked my hand down his side and in a fluid movement, he inexplicably transformed into a man.
A very naked man.
And there I was, stroking his side. Horror swept over me and I realized that Reno was right—I must be hallucinating. But was the wolf real, or the man? Before I could formulate a word, he covered my mouth with his hand.
“Shhhh. I just want to look at you. I’ve never seen a human up close.”
He was stoned. I could see it in his pale eyes. I knew that look because I’d seen it in my mother’s face a million times. He twitched his pudgy nose and tilted his head, studying me like a bug beneath a microscope. My extremities were numb and I felt glued to the earth.
“I can’t breathe,” I mumbled against his palm. Couldn’t anyone see? No, because after a quick glimpse around, all I could see through the high grass were wolves, naked men, and people dispersing from the property. I was too far from the crowd.
He settled his weight on me, looking deep into my eyes. “Shhh, pretty pet. Pretty little human pet.”
When he lifted up in the air, I barely registered what was happening. It was as if he were elevated by an invisible force.
I gasped, able to breathe again. I couldn’t see Reno’s muscles through his white shirt, but I knew they were sculpted and hard like granite. He had a dangerous look on his face and his hand was clamped around the naked man’s throat. “Tristan! Get your mutt before I kill him myself.” Then Reno knocked him in the jaw, causing the man to spin around and hold his mouth.
“I just wanted to look at her!” the man whined. “I didn’t break any rules.”
Reno stepped forward, every muscle tensing. “You broke my rule.”
A man with long blond hair jogged over and looked between all of us before he grabbed the naked man by the hair. The man immediately shifted, and Tristan slapped the wolf on the snout before they walked off.
My hands trembled as I sat up, disbelieving what I’d just seen. What kind of drugs did I take? Everything seemed so vivid and I couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t.
Reno flexed his fingers, making fists and then opening his hands again.
“Reno?”
“Yeah,” he said in a cracked voice.
“I’m scared. What’s happening to me?”
And then his arms were beneath me, lifting me, holding me. Reno cradled me protectively against him and made his way to the house.
“You’ll stay in my room tonight. No one will come near you. No one.”
I believed him. There was a promise in his voice, and I remembered he was a man who had guns.
“Why didn’t you kill him?” I asked, remembering how easily he’d aimed the gun at the car of men for simply calling me a name.
“Because of pack rules I’m bound to,” he ground out. “Had he been a rogue, his ass would have been mine.”
I didn’t understand what he was talking about, but I quickly became distracted. “I’m hungry.” I’d never been so hungry in my life. I snatched a bag of chips from a table we passed and pulled out a triangle dusted in orange cheese.
Crunch, crunch. Mmm.
Chapter 12
I opened my weighted eyes and glanced around a bedroom blanketed in darkness. A filter of dim light trickled through a curtainless window to my right. The sheets were cool against my hot skin and my memory drifted back. I’d thrown up after eating two hamburgers, and then Reno had forced me to drink water. I didn’t know if people could die from water overdose, but on the second glass, I spit it in his face.
Which had officially murdered my chances of ever seeing him again. My inner voice was too irritated with me to complain about it, so she gave me the silent treatment.
I began crying, overcome with emotion.
Reno emerged from a small chair in the left corner. “Go back to sleep, princess.”
My arms flew out at him angrily, slapping at him as he tried to touch me. What did it matter? He’d never want to see me again after an embarrassing display from a woman stoned out of her mind.
He caught my wrists and held them. “Settle down,” he said in a thick voice.
“You let this happen to me!”
“Dammit,” he roared. “I tried to run after you and lost track. I would have been there sooner if—”
“Not that! My mother.”
He sat on the edge of the bed and his voice softened. “What are you talking about?”
Reno still held my wrists as tears spilled violently down my cheeks. “I said I’d never do drugs, Reno. I’ve spent my whole life trying to be a better woman than that. Going to school, working hard, paying my bills—but none of it matters. No matter how much I try, I’m no different. I’m just like her.”
But my words failed me somewhere in the middle and broke into pieces. Maybe it was the drugs still in my system, or maybe it was almost twenty-three years of pain causing my heart to shatter. Maybe it was the realization that I was my mother’s daughter after all, and the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.