Blake, Abby - Suddenly Wolf (Siren Publishing Ménage Everlasting) (4 page)

She glanced around the room, somehow convinced her dream lovers were here, were real. But the room was empty, and she was completely alone. Andrea lifted her pajamas away from her sweaty skin and shakily decided she may as well get her day started.

She was about to step into the shower when the rest of her dream, the part that had come before the incredible ménage scene, unraveled in her head. She lifted her pajama top, smoothing her hand over the soft skin, assuring herself that she hadn’t really been shot. But it had seemed so real—well, except for the werewolf part, because there was no such thing as werewolves—so she turned off the shower, pulled on her robe, and headed down the stairs.

If she’d been shot, there would be some evidence—blood, a spent casing, a bullet. She felt a little silly searching for something that obviously wasn’t there, but she could swear she smelled blood exactly where she’d been shot in her dream.

But that had to be psychosomatic. She’d only dreamed of being shot. There was no way she could smell blood where there wasn’t any. Yet her logic didn’t stop her from heading upstairs, pulling on some clothes, and scrubbing the area over and over.

Andrea scrubbed harder, trying to get the smell out of the wood grain of the floorboards. In her time as an officer in the LAPD she’d seen the evidence of enough violent deaths to know what should be there if she’d been shot. The fact that she was still walking around and felt better than ever—faster, stronger, her senses greatly enhanced—would certainly discount her theory.

Where the hell she dreamed up Isaac, Daegan, and Xavier from was still a mystery, but she took it as a sign that her libido was sending her a rather loud message. She’d been divorced for several years now. Maybe it was time to get back on the dating horse, so to speak.

Of course the fact that she’d dreamed they were werewolves just proved she watched too much television.

The doorbell to the store jingled, and Andrea quickly stripped off the gloves and dropped them into the bucket behind the counter. It wouldn’t be convenient to try and explain what she was doing to someone trying to buy jewelry.

When she turned around, she found the sheriff’s deputy standing near the front door. “Hi, Louise,” Andrea said, trying to sound casual despite the fact that Louise was one person she didn’t really want to talk to right now. She and Louise had been good friends ever since Andrea had moved into town, but right at this moment she wasn’t sure she wanted to try and explain why she was cleaning away imaginary blood. Considering she was still standing, it would take a shitload of arguing to convince a psychiatrist that she wasn’t crazy. Hell, she was beginning to question that herself. “What brings you here?”

“Jed Hawthorne,” Louise said with amusement in her voice. “He’s spent the last fifteen minutes down at the station blabbering about how he remembers shooting someone last night. He said it was you, but unless I’m talking to a ghost, I reckon he’s mistaken.”

“Ghost, yeah right,” Andrea said, trying to hide the note of panic in her voice. If Jed had been here, then was it possible that the rest of her “dream” had really happened, too? If werewolves were real, was it possible that ghosts did exist? What about vampires, shape-shifters, elves, sprites, leprechauns? Andrea’s head was starting to spin, and she struggled to come up with an explanation that didn’t involve the supernatural. “I…um…had three drunks in ski masks come in late last night. I figured one of them was Jed Hawthorne. They called the skinny guy with a beer gut Stan, but I’m not sure who the third one was.”

Louise looked concerned and was probably pretty annoyed that that Andrea hadn’t reported the attempted robbery.

“Did they have a gun?”

“No,” Andrea lied. Well, it wasn’t a lie, not really. If Jed had actually held a gun on her, then that would mean she had been shot, and since she had no wounds, she must not have been shot, so he must not have had a gun. Feeling better from her own rambling logic, no matter how flawed, Andrea tried to come up with a plausible explanation instead. “Jed did point his finger at me like a little kid playing cowboys, so maybe that’s what he remembers.” Hey, the theory worked for her, as long as she didn’t look at it too closely. “Anyway, I just figured it was a joke and let them stagger out of here.”

Louise laughed, but Andrea didn’t miss the relief in her friend’s voice. It was a small town. The sheriff and his deputy spent most of their days dealing with traffic accidents on the nearby highway. An exciting night would involve having two drunks in the drunk tank instead of just the usual one.

“Jed’ll be relieved,” Louise said, glancing around the small store. “Of course, you’re more than welcome to press charges. Technically what they did is still considered attempted robbery.”

“No,” Andrea answered quickly—maybe a little too quickly judging by Louise’s searching look. “I mean, I don’t want to press charges. It was just a drunken prank, but maybe you could use it to get them all into an AA program.”

“Not bad,” Louise said with a conspiratorial grin. “By the time I’m finished with them, they’ll be too frightened not to sign up. I swear if I have to spend one more shift listening to Jed’s drunken snoring, I might just go back to my old job at the grocery store.”

Andrea grinned with her this time. They both knew Louise was far happier as a sheriff’s deputy than she ever was as the manager of the local grocery store. Although, her life would have been simpler if the current sheriff wasn’t a walking dick.

Louise closed her notebook and turned to leave. “We still on for lunch this Friday?”

“Sure,” Andrea answered, determined to live her life normally no matter what was going on in her head.

Just as Louise was about to step through the door, she turned back. “Oh, by the way, I’ve had a couple of reliable reports about a wolf hanging around the area. Give us a holler if you see it. I’d rather Cal Sanders get to it with his tranquilizer gun before some of the yahoos start shooting in the middle of town.”

“Will do,” Andrea answered on a wobbly voice. Wolf sightings? Could that have been one of the Cloveck brothers in furry form? No, because the Cloveck brothers weren’t real. She’d made them up. Again Louise gave Andrea a concerned look, but thankfully she waved good-bye and stepped out the door.

This was turning out to be one hell of a week.

Chapter Three

By closing time Andrea almost had herself convinced that last night had just been a strange, protracted dream. There was no such thing as werewolves. Therefore they couldn’t have saved her life, which meant Jed hadn’t accidentally shot her. Going by that logic, she felt certain that the Cloveck brothers were simply part of her libido reminding her that it had been a very long time.

Perhaps it was time to pull BOB back into service.

She glanced at her watch and wondered if she had enough time to duck down the road and grab some new batteries. Although, come to think of it, the last time she’d used her vibrator she’d made a mental note to buy a new one, so maybe that wasn’t such a good thought.

Abandoning the idea of a date with the battery operated boyfriend, Andrea headed to the door, flipped the sign from open to closed, and turned the key in the deadlock. She was walking away when a strange sense of déjà vu filled her. She looked over her shoulder, feeling certain that the Cloveck brothers were somehow behind her, maybe even in the room with her. Her vision wavered as the feeling of being watched permeated every thought.

“Where are you?” she whispered.

But of course nobody answered. She was alone, just like she was this time every night. Andrea took a couple of deep breaths and tried to brush the irritating notion aside. She finally managed to convince herself everything was okay when a loud banging sound came from the front door. She practically leapt from her skin, but sweat trickled down her spine when she recognized the two men peering through the window.

No. Fucking. Way.

“Open up, Andrea,” Daegan said as soon as he spotted her in the dark area of the shop. “We can see you, beautiful, so there’s no use hiding like a frightened maiden.”

Fabulous. The damn man knew exactly what buttons to push to make her do precisely what he wanted. Maiden? Sheesh. She marched to the door, unlocked the deadbolt, and opened it a crack. “I’m closed. What do you want?”

“You,” Daegan said casually as he pushed the door open and walked in as if he owned the place.

“Yeah, well you can’t have me, so go away.” But she was still shaking in reaction. Their arrival had blown her denial fantasy to smithereens, and she was both happy and angry about it. Isaac wrapped his arms around her, and she gratefully snuggled into his warmth. She had no idea why she was allowing him to hold her, but she did it just the same.

Daegan must have realized something was wrong because he stepped closer and ran a finger down her face exactly as he’d done the night before. “Are you okay, beautiful?”

Still off balance in an emotional sense, she somehow managed to dredge up her sarcasm and pour it into a single word. “Peachy.”

Daegan laughed and then wandered over to the spot where she’d spent most of the day cleaning. “I got as much of it up as I could last night, but it was kind of hard in the dark, and I sure as hell didn’t want to attract attention by turning on the lights.” He moved back to stand beside her. “You did a good job. I can’t even smell the blood anymore.”

“Yeah, well turns out my nose is pretty sensitive today. I had to keep scrubbing.” And even as she’d done it, she’d wondered what it meant. If she accepted everything she’d seen and heard last night, then it meant her life had changed forever. With these two standing in front of her, it seemed unlikely that she could once again convince herself that the events of last night were all imagination.

She turned into Isaac’s embrace, happy for the moment to deny the undeniable.

She didn’t even realize she was crying until Daegan pressed against her back and whispered, “It’s going to be okay, Andrea. I promise you everything will work out.”

“I nearly died last night, didn’t I?” Hell, was that breathless, tiny voice really hers?

“You would have if we hadn’t changed you,” Isaac said quietly. She nodded against his chest, swallowing hard as emotion crowded her thought processes.

“We’re sorry we didn’t have a chance to give you the choice,” Daegan said, “but we couldn’t let you go.”

“Because I’m your mate?” she whispered. She still had no idea what that meant. The way they’d described it felt an awful lot like an arranged marriage. Even if it was some higher power calling the shots, she much preferred the idea of making her own decisions. “But what if you don’t like me? What then?”

“Trust us, beautiful. We already like you. Love will come.”

“Seriously?” It sounded way too simple. These men were strangers. Just because her body seemed to have a mind of its own at the moment, it didn’t mean the future was bright and easy. She’d done the whole married thing before, and to say it hadn’t gone well was a seriously huge understatement.

“So how does this ‘mate’ thing work?”

“It starts with what we call a mating link. You’ll feel a connection to us, just the way we feel connected to you.”

“Because of what you did last night?”

“No, changing you doesn’t make you our mate. You were our mate even before you became a werewolf. If you hadn’t been dying we would have taken time to get to know you before making you a wolf.”

“Oh, so I would have gotten a choice?” She didn’t mean the words to sound so snarky—they’d saved her life after all—but she couldn’t quite shake the feeling that the future she’d planned had been stolen before she’d truly begun to enjoy it. Of course, that was probably more the shooter’s fault than Isaac and Daegan’s. She shook her head sharply, trying to think rationally. “So then what? Last night you said claiming me was the werewolf equivalent of a marriage.”

“That’s right. When we all agree the time is right,” Isaac said with a kind smile, “Xavier, Daegan, and I will give you a mating mark—it’s a special kind of bite that will leave a silvery sort of scar on your skin—and when you have control of your wolf side, you’ll do the same for us.” Isaac looked so hopeful she wondered if she should remind him again that she wasn’t going to marry, or mate, three strangers.

“Come on. We’ll help you lock up and take you to dinner. We can do the whole dating thing if you like,” Daegan said with a happy grin.

“Ah, sure, I guess.” She glanced around the room, wondering if perhaps this was the hallucination. They both seemed so nice and not the least bit annoyed even though she’d spent a good deal of time yelling at them last night. “I need a shower though.”

Daegan’s chuckle was pure sin. “We could help.”