Bite of the Moon: Paranormal Shapeshifter Romance Boxed Set (2 page)

Chapter Two

Sheriff Kane Martin looked down at the woman in front of him. Her brown eyes were wide and wild, and her chest heaved with exertion, as if she was sprinting to the finish line instead of standing still. He tried not to stare down the v-neck of her pink t-shirt, but her cleavage swayed with her breathing in the most tantalizing way. She also smelled good, like caramel mixed with…he sniffed, trying to decide what the other scent was, and decided it must be a perfume. Something floral.

Charlotte Wills was easy on the eyes
and
the nose.

Kane blinked and shook his head at the thought. What was wrong with him? Curvy girls weren’t his thing, never had been. Charlotte, with her flared hips and generous breasts, wasn’t his type, but yet there he was, fixated by her presence. He wanted nothing more than to dig his fingers into those hips as he filled her. He shook his head again, trying to clear his mind. Where the hell had those thoughts come from?

He’d sworn off women anyway. Thinking about sex with anyone was off limits as far as Kane was concerned. Becoming a werewolf had ruined his sex life. A beast lurked inside him now, hungry and too strong for even Kane’s iron control. He couldn’t be sure of what he might do under the influence of lust, so he’d kept to himself ever since his first shift. Just watching poor Charlotte struggle with her own wolf proved he was right to be concerned.

But as he watched her breasts go up and down in her soft, feminine pink shirt that stretched tight across her chest, he reconsidered. Maybe celibacy had been a mistake. Maybe he was actually
losing
control by depriving himself of female company, because at the moment, he kind of wanted to rip off Charlotte’s shirt and fill his hands with her breasts. Would he have more control if he gave in to his urges? He pondered the idea of having taken the wrong approach to the werewolf sex thing so deeply, he failed to realize Charlotte had started crying.

But his nose quivered, alerting him to her distress. Smelling emotions was the weirdest thing Kane had ever experienced. So far, he’d worked out that anger was bitter, fear was sour and any kind of upset had a salty tang, almost as if the salt in their tears had become airborne. More positive emotions lightened a person’s scent, like bubbles in champagne.

He wrapped an arm around her shoulders. "Come on, don’t cry."

She hiccoughed. "I hate this. I can’t even stay human."

"It will get better," he said, pulling her into a full hug.

"How do you know?" She wailed the question into his shoulder.

"Because Tao, Leo and Kai don’t hate who they are. We’ll get there, Charlotte." His hands started to slide down her back to cup her backside and he abruptly brought them up to a more appropriate area of her anatomy. What was wrong with him? She smelled good, so what? That didn’t mean anything. Pizza smelled good, too, but that didn’t make it a health food. "Calm down," he said as much to himself as Charlotte.

She sniffed one last time and the intensity of the feelings in her scent eased a bit. Kane relaxed a fraction, too.

"Thanks," she said. "If I hadn’t run into you, I’d be wolfing it home. Then I’d have to walk back and get my car once I became human again."

"Glad to help."

"Sorry I took you down." A flush reddened her cheeks.

"Better you than a tweaker, trust me." He grimaced remembering a raid a few years ago. The people running the meth lab had been higher than kites and armed with semi-automatics. One particularly big guy had slammed into Kane with the force of a tank and knocked him clean to the ground, where he stayed for the entire bust, fighting to breathe.

"A tweaker?" She looked at him, confused.

"A meth addict," he said.

Charlotte eyes widened. "Yeah, I guess I would be better than that." She sighed. "Well, I'm going to go back to Java Jump and get my car. I want to get home before this wolf of mine loses it. Thanks, again."

Kane raised a hand in farewell. "Anytime." He watched her walk away, transfixed by her round backside. A picture flashed in his mind of his hands gripping the flesh there, urging her to take all of him inside her. He rubbed his forehead, trying to get his mind out of his pants.

He had work to do.

The bulge in his pants experienced a profound moment of disappointment about that.

A thin, reedy voice warbled behind him. "Kane."

He spun on his heel to find Georgia Harris staring at him, her rheumatic hazel eyes gleaming with interest. She wore a comfortable navy track-suit paired with orthopedic shoes and a thick wool coat. Her steel gray hair had been styled in careful, deliberate curls all over her head and a garish red lipstick graced her mouth.

"Morning, Mrs. Harris," he said. The woman looked frail, but he knew better.

She wagged a finger at him. "I saw you with that fine looking girl. Saw your hands traveling all over her. Wait until I tell your mother."

Kane gaped at her. What did Georgia Harris, town gossip and tourist t-shirt shop owner think she’d seen exactly? He distinctly remembered keeping his hands in the ‘friend zone.’ "We’re just friends."

Her eyebrows went up and her mouth thinned into a red line. "Uh-huh. We’ll see."

"Don’t make this bigger than it needs to be." Kane tried to sound authoritative, but couldn’t keep a pleading note from his voice. The last thing his mom needed was false hope.

"So you haven’t told your momma, then?" Georgia glared at him.

He narrowed his eyes at the elderly woman, trying to puzzle out her game. "No. Why would I?"

She ignored his question. "Your poor momma. The one thing she wants most in this world and you won’t give it to her." She wagged a finger at him again. "You’ve been tomcatting up and down this side of Michigan, refusing to be a man and settle down for far too long."

"That is none of your business," Kane said, his voice firm. Although, he admitted to himself that what she said was true. Kind of. He hadn’t been
that
bad, and anyway, those days were behind him.

She crossed her arms. "You tell me. How many girls have you met and never called again? A hundred?"

At his shocked expression, she upped the number. "Two hundred?"

"Mrs. Harris, that’s ridiculous." He didn’t think he had more than fifty numbers in his phone and he always meant to call, but it just never worked out. His job was kind of crazy and the really hot girls had a tendency to move on after a while. No one had time to wait on him, so he’d never gone much past a one-night-stand. "I don’t know why you think so poorly of me, but—"

"You never called back my Jenny." Mrs. Harris glared at Kane through narrowed eyes.

Ah. So that was it. "Jenny's married now, right?" Jenny Harris had been nice and all, but a little too much like her mother for Kane to want a long-term relationship. Both women had a penchant for verbal evisceration.

"Don’t talk down to me, young man. I don’t have Alzheimer’s. Yes, Jenny’s married and quite happily, too. She’s had three kids and still looks as good as she did at nineteen." She gave him a pointed look, as if wanting to be sure he understood what he was missing. "And here you are this morning, right in front of my shop, making out with your latest love’em and leave’em conquest."

"That’s not what you saw."

She arched a gray eyebrow. "What are you saying, Kane? If she’s not a quickie, then what is she?" Her face brightened then, and a smile split her blood red lips. "Oh. I see."

"What? You see what?" he asked, wary.

"You finally found
the
one." Mrs. Harris clapped her hands together. "Congratulations, Kane."

"The one?" He blinked at her, confused.

"Don’t be shy. I changed your diapers when you were a baby. You had the tiniest little wee-wee." She chuckled, the sound unpleasant. "Your momma and I have been friends since before you were born. She’ll be thrilled, just thrilled to hear you’re getting married."

"Married?" he echoed, flummoxed. How had this conversation gotten away from him? "No, she’s a friend, Mrs. Harris," he said, his voice edged with a growl. His wolf stirred, prowling under his skin, wondering if he should jump through.

The old lady winked at him. "You haven’t announced it yet, I understand. When are you going to tell your momma?"

Kane opened his mouth and then shut it with a snap.
What the hell?
"Mrs Harris, we're friends. That's it, nothing more." He allowed a growl to edge his voice, hoping to get the old gossip to give up her game, but she'd already made up her mind, and she'd never been one to let something so trivial as facts get in her way.

Georgia shook her head as she unlocked the door of her shop. Just before she stepped inside, she looked back at him. "Your momma is going to be so happy. This is going to help her more than anything those doctors did for her. You know that, right?"

Kane stood, rooted in place, as the old gossip disappeared into her shop. He tried to wrap his mind around how his day had gone sideways so fast. All he’d been doing when the universe decided to shit all over him was making his usual rounds of the business district. Crime was almost non-existent, especially when the tourist season was over, but he liked to keep an eye on things.

For some inexplicable reason the whole werewolf thing had bit him in the ass. Again. When he’d become a werewolf, he’d thought it would be like a super power he could use for the greater good. Instead, it just got him into trouble.

As for his mom…well, Georgia Harris was dealing low blows this morning. Kane wanted nothing more than to make his mother happy, especially after everything she’d gone through, but he wasn’t a liar or a cheat.

And he did
not
have a little wee-wee. Mrs. Harris was just being downright mean with that comment.

Straightening his spine, he walked down the street, giving all the storefronts a once-over. The main drag of Glen Vine was quiet now that Charlotte had moved on. Even the birds had fallen silent, subdued by the rain from the night before. Everything but Mrs. Harris' shop and the bookstore were closed. Once winter settled in, nothing would be open. No one came to Glen Vine once snow blanketed the area.

Kane walked the perimeter of each property, noting whether or not it was the same as the last time he'd been through. He liked to keep an eye on things, knowing crime didn't start with a bang, but a whimper. Little things mattered. Such as, were the locks secure or showing signs of tampering? Were there footprints in the muddy ground under the windows? If folks got away with little things, they became brave and would skip the lock to break the window. Just having law enforcement walk the area on a regular basis was a good deterrent.

Christine, the bookstore owner, must've caught wind of his scent, because she stepped out on the porch of the log cabin that housed her business and gave him a slow nod as he passed. Like Charlotte and him, she'd been bitten, too. Even a handful of werewolves in a small town like Glen Vine was a lot. He bumped into his pack mates constantly.

"Everything okay, Sheriff?" She glanced in the direction of Mrs. Harris' place.

Kane waved a dismissive hand wondering how much she'd heard or seen. He tried not to be embarrassed. "Yeah. Just one of those days."

"It's always one of those days lately."

"Hopefully it'll be a nice, quiet winter and things will calm down." It had been a hell of a summer, starting with wolf attacks that turned out to be
were
wolf attacks. Nine had been bitten, filling Glen Vine with folks who couldn't keep from sprouting fur and fangs. The attacks had formed them all into a loose pack of survivors who hadn't quite figured out how to thrive. That and how to stop thwapping things with their tails. Even with werewolf super healing, Kane still felt twinges in his tail bone from last night's run. He'd walloped a tree trunk so hard he'd actually yelped.

"From your lips to God's ears," Christine said, moving a hand from her mouth to the sky. She paused then, thinking. "Or should I say moon?"

Kane just shrugged. Hell if he knew. The werewolves who'd stuck around to help them with the aftermath of the attacks always talked about the moon as if it was a deity in its own right. Maybe it was, but Kane didn't feel any spiritual pull. Not unless you counted the way the moon seemed to yank his wolf right out of him.

The radio at his belt chirped, pushing him to move and get on with the day. There were things to do, people to see, crimes to solve. Werewolf problems would have to wait. He tipped his hat in farewell to Christine and, pulling out his radio, said, "This is Sheriff Martin. Go ahead."

"Sheriff, we’ve had reports of gun shots," came Danielle’s smooth, cultured voice. She was the star singer of her church choir, and everything she said came out like a melody. Danielle not only worked dispatch at the police station, but she was also a werewolf, another member of his pack.

Kane shrugged. "Send out a patrol and see what’s up, same as always. You didn’t need to call me." Normal protocol would be to dispatch a few officers. It only escalated to the sheriff level if someone had been hit.

She lowered her voice. "Sorry, Sheriff, but there are wolves involved. I thought you’d want to know."