Otherworldly Bad Boys: Three Complete Novels Read online

  “What the hell does that mean?”

  * * *

  Six months ago, she was a wolf, and she knew it. She’d never felt anything like it before, being aware of herself in wolf form. She was herself, she could think her own thoughts, but everything felt heightened. Her senses were keener, more intense.

  She whined. Her paws were chained above her head. It was uncomfortable and unnatural. She didn’t like having her underbelly exposed. It felt like danger.

  “Dana, can you hear me?”

  She turned her head, but she realized she didn’t need to. She could smell him. He was a tantalizing mixture of scents—spicy, earthy, and dangerous. But also... strangely... like home.

  Cole.

  She belonged to him.

  “Make a noise if you can hear me,” he said, standing next to her without his shirt on, looking so vulnerable and small in human form.

  She whined again and rattled the chains above her head.

  Cole grinned. “You did it.” He reached into his back pocket and pulled out a key. “I’m going to let you out of the chains, and then I’m going to shift as well.” He fitted the key to the lock that held her chains in place. “Once we’re both wolves, we fight. If you kill me, you’re free. If I kill you...”

  He lowered the key, looking troubled. He sank his hand into her fur, stroking her. “Oh, Dana.”

  She only wanted out of the chains. He could do whatever he wanted then. Killing each other, though. Out of the question. She could no more kill Cole than gnaw off her own leg.

  He put the key to the lock again, and, in a moment, she was finally free.

  She landed on her front paws, giving a little bark of pleasure at the sensation. Things were right again.

  Cole was peeling off his pants, and she could already see the wolf shift taking over him, dark, dark fur overtaking his body, rippling over him like the tide.

  She waited for him to change.

  When he was fully a wolf, she leapt at him playfully. It was better to be this way, not in human form. Things were easier now, more straightforward.

  He growled at her, baring his teeth, the hair on his neck lifting.

  Silly Cole. He was still thinking that he could kill her. She knew better. She rubbed her head against him, her muzzle deep in his fur, his Cole-scent strong and intoxicating.

  When he was human, he smelled the same, but less so. It was muted, quieter. So she knew the smell. The smell spoke to her, drove her, called to her, and it told her what she needed to know.

  Cole swatted her away with one paw, but she could already see that he wasn’t trying to hurt her.

  He yipped at her, seeming confused.

  Her wolf body knew the movements deep in its marrow. It was like a dance, ancient and primal, something she had always known. Something that was waiting to be let out.

  Cole drew himself up, opening his jaws. His teeth glistened white and deadly. He was preparing to spring at her.

  She wasn’t having any of it.

  She moved, turning her face away from him, lifting her tail. She wasn’t aware of what she was doing in that she did it without any real intention. She didn’t set out to accomplish anything. Instead, it seemed that instinct had just taken over, told her how to move and what to do.

  But now the air was thick with the potent Cole scent. He was close, and she had presented herself to him, made it clear what she wanted.

  She knew it was right. They were connected. She knew that he wouldn’t resist. The dance had been started. Cole would play his part, because his instinct told him how to. He would be ruled by his body, by the undercurrents of their nature. It had begun.

  This knowledge filled her with bursting joy and a feeling of absolute rightness. She suddenly felt connected to everything—to the moon, the trees, the sky, the basement.

  To Cole.

  He was responding now, performing his own steps in the dance.

  She felt his teeth at the back of her neck, not biting into her, simply holding her in place, helping him to keep his balance.

  Because he’d mounted her and they were connected then, quite literally connected.

  She was pierced by him, held in place as he took her, and it was...

  Exactly right. Her whole being sang with the perfectness of it, how she was meant to be here, under Cole, around Cole, taking him inside her. They belonged to each other. She knew this better than she knew anything else. He was her mate, her only one.

  It was natural to give herself to him. It was right. She felt whole and luminous, as if she’d completed a great task that she’d struggled to finish, as if she’d been searching all this time for some part of her that was missing and that she’d found it now.

  They were flesh and fur, bone and teeth. They were a fury of movement, savagery, primal and animalistic. They were growls and howls. They were part of each other, part of everything else. They were moving the way they had always meant to move, the way the great deep urge of the universe directed them. She had sunk into something so much bigger than her. Power flowed through her. She didn’t own the power, but it flowed through her as long as she kept on this path, as long as she didn’t fight.

  This glorious world was hers. She could find it any time she wanted. She simply had to let out the wolf.

  * * *

  “That’s disgusting,” said Hollis.

  Dana shuddered. “I know.”

  “I didn’t even know that werewolves could...”

  “Oh yeah,” she said. “Once we shift we have fully functioning wolf parts.”

  He grimaced.

  “It was an accident, Hollis,” she said. “The wolves did it, not us. Cole wanted to kill me not...”

  “Do you doggy-style?” His grin was ugly.

  Dana went to the door. “Get out.”

  “If you make me leave right now, I’ll go to press with everything I have. It will be bad, Dana.”

  She was shaking. “I don’t care. Do your worst. I don’t want to look at you anymore.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Bang, bang, bang. Avery rapped on the outside door to Tom Hathaway’s house, the second potential to have received correspondence from Cole. “SF, open up!”

  They’d been knocking for about ten minutes without getting an answer. Tom lived in a trailer at the edge of the woods. There were two rusty three-wheelers in his driveway. A folding chair sat next to his front door, with a card table next to it. The card table was covered with beer bottles. The beer bottles were all full of cigarette butts.

  “He’s not here,” Dana said to Avery.

  He turned to her. “Can I break in?”

  “You broke in at the Shirley house,” she said, thinking about Avery using his shoulder to bust the door open.

  “Yeah, but we were tracking a rogue. We were saving lives.”

  “We didn’t save any,” she said.

  “I know that,” he said. “But this is different. There might be different rules.”

  “We’re trackers,” she said. “We’re not supposed to do stuff like investigate and talk to people. We’re supposed to track werewolves.”

  “Yeah, well, we can thank your boyfriend for changing all of that.”

  “He’s not my—”

  “Sorry.” Avery leaned against the door to the trailer, and it swung inward, creaking on its hinges. He straightened. “Huh. It’s open.” He walked inside.

  She followed him. “Seriously, Brooks, do not ever call him that again.”

  “I’m sorry, Gray. I’m tense. I shouldn’t have—holy shit.”

  “What?”

  She peered around him. The back door of the trailer was open, leading out of the kitchen.

  There was an angry red trail leading outside, smeared on the linoleum floor. Dana could smell that it was blood, and that it was werewolf blood. “You think that belongs to Tom?”

  Avery scrambled out of the door, sniffing the air. “Could be Tom. I’ve got the scent. I’m tracking this.”


  She went after him. She guessed that was what she got for making comments about how they tracked things, not investigated. The universe had given them something to track. Poor Tom Hathaway.

  The trail was short. Only about twenty feet into the woods, they came upon the body of a young man. He was propped up against a tree, his skin waxy and pale. Flies alighted on his body in a small swarm. There was a round, red hole in his forehead, a little off-center.

  “Someone shot him,” said Dana.

  “That’s not our department, is it?” said Avery.

  * * *

  Sheriff Miles Hanley looked pretty pleased with himself as he stood outside his car in front of Tom Hathaway’s trailer. “Well, he was murdered by a human, so it’s our jurisdiction. I don’t see how it matters one way or another if he was a werewolf.”

  “We’re not concerned with why he died or how he died,” said Avery.

  “Unless we find something that makes us think it’s connected,” said Dana.

  “All we want is to search the trailer. He was in contact with Cole Randall, and we want to see those letters. That’s all we want,” said Avery.

  “That trailer’s a crime scene,” said Hanley. “He was obviously shot inside. I can’t let you go in there and poke around. You might destroy evidence.”

  “It looks like he was shot in the kitchen,” said Dana. “We’ll stay out of the kitchen.”

  “We don’t know where he was shot, now do we? Not until we conclude our investigation,” said Hanley.

  “All right,” said Avery. “We can respect that. But once you’re done with the crime scene, done with your investigation, then will it be okay for us to search for the letters?”

  “Don’t see why not,” said Hanley.

  “Okay,” said Dana. It was better than nothing. “How long will that be?”

  “Oh, a few months, I reckon.”

  “Months?” said Avery. “You’ve got to be kidding. How long could it possibly take to investigate that trailer?”

  “Listen, Sheriff,” said Dana, “this could be very important. Finding those letters could give us the key to saving innocent lives. Please, we only want to look for the letters.”

  “No,” said Hanley. “I don’t think so. Truth be known, I’m not too keen on you furry types. Always getting into trouble. Tom was the same way. Look what happened to him.”

  Avery and Dana exchanged a look. She could see that Avery’s face was red with anger. She touched him on the arm and gestured with her head away from the Sheriff.

  “Thank you for your time, sir,” she said in her nastiest voice. Then she led Avery over to their car. They both got in.

  “Bastard,” Avery exploded as the door shut.

  “I know,” said Dana, imagining letting her wolf out of Sheriff Hanley, sinking claws into that smug, satisfied expression of his. It would feel damned good. “I could kill him.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s why I thought we should back off.”

  Avery took a deep breath. “Man, I can’t stand it when they’re like that to us, you know? We might be werewolves, but that doesn’t mean we’re not human beings. They treat us like lepers. It’s fucked up.”

  “He’s not going to budge,” said Dana. “We’ve got to call King and tell her what’s up.”

  “Right,” said Avery. “Do you think there’s anything in those letters, or you figure it’s more crap like he sent to Amber?”

  “I don’t know,” said Dana. “He sent more than one. It seems like Cole and this guy had a regular correspondence going on.”

  “Yeah, so that’s got to mean something,” said Avery. He sighed. “But we don’t even know if Tom kept them.”

  “Yeah,” said Dana, “and why is he dead?”

  He raised his eyebrows. “You think it’s connected to Randall?”

  She shrugged. “Maybe we were getting too close to figuring something out?” Although Cole seemed to want her to figure it out, like he was doling out clues to her. She didn’t think he’d try and stop her if she got too close. That wouldn’t be playing fair.

  “Maybe,” said Avery. “We’ve got to get our hands on what Cole wrote to him.”

  * * *

  When they got Ursula on the phone, she told them to come back to headquarters. She said she might be able to talk to someone higher up than Sheriff Hanley and get them access later, but there was no reason for them to hang out there. They drove back.

  There was nothing to do but wait. Ursula wouldn’t be able to call until the next day at least. Avery asked Dana if she wanted to waste time in town. They could grab burgers and play a round of pool.

  But Dana wasn’t in the mood to go out, so she declined.

  She’d managed to keep herself together for work, but now that she didn’t have that distraction, she couldn’t help but worry about the situation with Hollis.

  She wondered if she should have seen this coming. She’d known, ever since she first started dating Hollis, that he was used to getting his own way. He seemed incapable of understanding the word ‘no,’ and he had never given up pursuing her. She didn’t know what it was about her that Hollis had latched onto, but he had. He’d latched on hard.

  And now he was pissed. She thought it was partly because he wasn’t getting his way. The rest of it, of course, just made sense. She figured any guy on earth would be pretty angry if they found out their girlfriend was attracted to the man who had kidnapped her. Especially if she’d broken up with him and lied to him about it.

  Of course, to add insult to injury, she hadn’t actually broken up with Hollis. She’d just ignored him.

  The thing was, Dana was pretty sure that Hollis wasn’t simply going to get over all of this. He was going to want revenge. He’d want Dana to pay for what she did. He was hurting. He saw hurting her as leveling the playing field.

  But she couldn’t let him do this to her.

  If there was a story published telling the world about her complicated feelings towards Cole, it would completely destroy her.

  Not to mention how mortifying it would be.

  Hollis didn’t have confirmation from her. Thus far, all his information came from breaking into Chantal’s office. He said he needed Cole to go on the record about all of it to have a credible source.

  She didn’t know if any of it really mattered. Journalists had ethics and rules, but she wasn’t sure if breaking those rules could actually kill a story. Maybe Hollis would still publish what he knew, whether Cole talked or not.

  But maybe if Cole didn’t talk, it would stop everything. It was the only thing she knew to do.

  Chantal had said her access badge would work again.

  She needed to go down to see Cole again.

  But she was going to ask him for a favor. Last time, he’d gotten her to give up her bra without giving her anything. What would he demand in payment for his silence?

  * * *

  “Back so soon?” said Cole in the darkness of his cell. It was the same drill as last time. She’d come down in the middle of the night. Her access badge might be working again, but that didn’t mean that she was supposed to be down here. Ursula hadn’t given her permission to see him. She could still get in trouble if anyone found out.

  The lights snapped on.

  Cole was standing next to his bed. Dana stood against the door, trying to keep as much distance between them as possible. Now that she was close to him, she felt as unsteady as she always did. It was so hard to stay focused with Cole close. And she couldn’t let him distract her. She needed to keep the upper hand here, especially since she was asking him for something.

  “You need to stay over there,” she said.

  Cole laughed. “Shook you up last time, didn’t I?” He took a step towards her.

  “Stop,” she said. God, he wasn’t listening.

  He didn’t. He took another step.

  What could she threaten him with? What did he want? “Go and sit on your bed, or I will leave, and I will never c
ome back to see you ever again,” she blurted.

  He froze in place. “I don’t believe you.”

  She lifted her chin. “Do you want to take the chance?”

  He hesitated for a minute. Then he went back to his bed and sat down. “Honestly, Dana, I thought you liked me.”

  “I hate you,” she said.

  He laughed. “No, you don’t.”

  She didn’t. Not exactly. But she wished she hated him. That had to count for something.

  “Want to know what I’ve been doing with your bra?”

  “No.”

  Cole laughed again, clearly enjoying her discomfort. “So, you came all the way down here, against the wishes of your boss, because you wanted to stay away from me? I find that hard to believe.”

  She took a deep breath. “I have something to ask you.”

  “About the rogues?” he said, inspecting his fingernails. “I think I’ve told you all I can about them. You’ll need to start thinking a little bit more traditionally, I’m afraid.”

  “No,” she said. But what did he mean, traditionally? There was something in that Sullivan stuff she’d read, wasn’t there? God damn Hollis for distracting her from looking it back up again. “I need to ask you... a favor.”

  “Really?” Cole leaned forward, resting his chin on his fist, propping his elbow on his knee. “Oh, this is quite unexpected.”

  “A reporter’s coming to see you,” said Dana. “His name is Hollis Moore.”

  “Right,” said Cole. “I got a letter from him. Your beau. Really, Dana, you might have told me you were spoken for.”

  Dana grimaced. “So, he told you that I used to date him, then? He would. Anything to get you to talk to him.”

  “Used to?” said Cole. He smirked. “He didn’t make it sound that way.”

  “He what?”

  “Oh, he seems to be under the impression that the two of you are quite entangled,” said Cole. “I was looking forward to making him squirm. Are you telling me that’s not the case?” “We haven’t been together since... before,” said Dana. “He didn’t know about what happened between us, but he got hold of my psychiatrist’s records—”