Cry Wolf (Alpha & Omega #1)(50)

"What's that?" she asked.

Charles gave her a grim smile over his shoulder. "Werewolf. "

"Can you tell where it came from?"

"East of here," he said. "The way sound carries out here, he's a few miles away."

She shivered a little though she shouldn't be afraid. After all, she was a werewolf, too, right? And she'd seen Charles wipe the floor with her former Alpha despite having been shot several times.

"He won't hurt you," Charles said.

She didn't say anything, but he was watching her face and his eyes softened. "If you really don't like me using my nose to tell what you're feeling, you can try using perfume. It works a treat."

She sniffed and smelled only the people who had loaned Charles their clothing. "You don't use perfume."

He grinned, his teeth white in his dark face. "Too sissy for me. I had to learn to control my emotions instead." Then he removed whatever starch she had left in her knees when he added, a little ruefully, "Until I met you."

He started up the mountainside again, leaving her scrambling behind him. Who was she that she could touch this man? Why her? Was it just that she was an Omega? Somehow she didn't think so. Not with that wry admission hanging in the air.

He was hers.

Just to be certain, she counted on her gloved fingers. This time last week she'd been waiting tables at Scorci's, had never heard of Charles or walked a mile in snowshoes. Would never have dreamed of enjoying kissing a man ever again. Now she was tramping through the snow in below-zero weather with a silly smile on her face, hunting a werewolf. Or at least following Charles, who was hunting a werewolf.

Weird. And kinda nice. And there were fringe benefits to following Charles around-the view for one.

"Are you giggling?" Charles said in his Mr. Spock voice.

He looked back at her, then executed one of those complicated turns that snowshoes required in order to reverse directions. He pulled off a glove and touched her nose, right where she knew freckles gathered. His fingers drifted down to trace the dimple in her left cheek.

"I like seeing you happy," he said intently.

His perusal stopped her laughter, but not the warm fuzzy feeling in her stomach.

"Yeah?" she said archly. "Then tell me that was really the last climb, and that this big flat spot we're standing on is where we're going to camp, and that I don't have to walk anymore today."

* * * *

She stood there looking like a cat in the cream, and he had not the foggiest notion why. He wasn't used to this. He was good at reading people, damn it. He had lots of practice, and Brother Wolf was all but empathic sometimes. And he still had no clue why she stood there looking at him with secret laughter still dancing in her eyes.

He bent until he could press his forehead against her wool hat and closed his eyes, breathing her in and letting the warmth of her spread over his heart. Her scent broke free of the bindings he'd set upon it and rushed over him like the smoke of a hookah.

No more human scent for them, but, absorbed in her, he couldn't make himself mind.

He still should have heard it. Smelled it. Something.

One moment he was standing next to Anna, the next he was facedown in the snow with something-werewolf, his tardy nose informed him-on his back and Anna underneath.

Teeth dug into the tough fabric of his jacket and ripped at his pack. He ignored the werewolf for Anna's sake and pushed himself (and the other werewolf) up to give her room to get out from under him, knowing it was probably a fatal decision.

Anna wriggled out from underneath him as fast as any sleight-of-hand magician's assistant could have. But she didn't listen to his order to run.

The attacking wolf didn't seem to notice her. It was so busy ripping up Charles's backpack it wasn't paying attention to anything else. Rogue, Charles thought-out of control if it was so far gone not to release its first hold for something more immediately fatal. Not that he was complaining.

Charles's human form was a little more fragile than the wolf, but it was almost as strong. Without Anna beneath him, it took him a bare instant to rip the bindings on his snowshoes apart to free his feet.

Silver foil packets dropped on both sides of him like confetti thrown at a wedding: freeze-dried meals. Doubtless Samuel would have come up with something funny about that-Let's just see who ends up a frozen dinner.

Grunting with the effort, Charles straightened his legs with as much speed and power as he could gather-and the move, combined with the werewolf's weight, ripped the fabric of Charles's coat and backpack. Holding on to the fabric and nothing else, the wolf was thrown off his back; a kick, and the wolf was ten feet away. Not far enough, and yet too far. He was between Charles and Anna-and he was closer to Anna.

Even as Charles frantically freed himself of the remnants of the pack-ruthlessly shredding anything that tried to stick-he realized how weird the attack was. Even an out-of-control rogue wouldn't have been entirely foiled by the pack. He'd have gotten a fang or claw in somewhere, but Charles was entirely unharmed.

The wolf had rolled to his feet but made no further move to attack. He was scared, that wolf. The scent of his fear flooded the air as he met Charles's eyes defiantly.

But he stayed where he was, between Charles and Anna. As if he were protecting her.

Charles narrowed his eyes and tried to place this wolf-he'd met so many. Gray on gray was not an uncommon coloring, though he was even thinner than Anna's wolf form, cadaverously thin. He didn't smell familiar-nor did he smell of a pack. He smelled as if he denned in Douglas fir, cedar, and granite-as if he'd never been touched by shampoo or soap or any of the accouterments of modern life.