Forbidden by Cathy Clamp

back to town. Heck, maybe that was part of the coaching, to see if she could make a trail that could be followed. Or maybe Alek was in cahoots with the police chief after all, trying to get her lost up here so she’d lose this challenge. But she wasn’t going to go down without a fight.
    Her pack leaders had taught her well how to follow a trail. She remembered hunting with the other kids for sticks of deer jerky hidden under cacti or in the crevices of mesquite trees. You had to move fast to get to the jerky before the fire ants did. Nothing worse than fire ant stings on the tongue.
    She knew her own scent and had made sure to break small branches as she’d chased after Alek. On the way back, she’d look around as she ran, to start learning the terrain. But she would have to run, though at a slow pace, to beat the clock; she had to be at least a couple of miles from where they’d started.
    On the way out, she’d been consumed with keeping up with Alek, but he was too fast. She’d panicked a little when she’d started to lose ground. Speed had never been her best thing. She was fast enough to catch food and could probably get quicker with more training, but pace had never been an issue since she had endurance. She whispered the words her Alpha used during their runs together. “Focus on the one true scent, Claire. Don’t get distracted by the scenery.”
    And just like that, she fell into a quiet, familiar energy. She was a marathon runner, not a sprinter. She let her breathing slow, pushing air out of her mouth with each leg fall and pulling it in again with her nose to maximize the scent intake. Soon she started to be able to match scents to individual plants instead of perceiving an overwhelming rush of newness.
    It wasn’t like home—the grasses didn’t smell the same, nor the trees. But as long as she didn’t try to put a name to things, she could concentrate. Every so often she would catch a whiff of the musky maleness of Alek and she would falter and lose focus. Every time, Claire forced herself to ignore that scent, knowing that if she didn’t, she would follow it as if she were a homing pigeon. His natural wolf scent was intoxicating enough without whatever the hell cologne or soap he wore. Together they turned her mind to putty and her insides to liquid.
    Alek could be dangerous in more ways than one. She didn’t like to admit that chasing after him, she’d wanted nothing more than to overtake him, throw him to the forest floor, and rip off his clothes. Taste his smooth skin, wrap herself around him, bury herself inside that musk, and see if it was stronger when he was sweating and excited. She felt a shudder pass over her and a rush of warmth in her gut that made her stumble. Damn.
    No, she couldn’t afford a distraction like Alek Siska, not with lives on the line.
    It was probably better this way. Let him play whatever games he was playing. She would rise above them to do her job. It helped that she was pissed and feeling betrayed by him.
    The top of the sun edged beneath the shadow of the mountain and the sky’s blue dissolved into orange and fiery red, beautiful but almost too bright to look at. She remembered the old rhyme an uncle, his name long forgotten in her memory, used to recite. Red sky at morning, sailors take warning. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight.
    Tomorrow would be sunny, clear sailing. If only she could get through tonight.
    She moved from a jog to a run as the daylight dimmed and the shadows grew deeper. She had to rely more on her nose than her eyes in the thick trees and that made her head hurt.
    The more she ran, the angrier she got. Wasn’t it just common courtesy to explain what the hell he planned to do? Alek knew she’d just arrived, that she didn’t know the area. He knew they were short on time and that she had no idea what Ascension was or how it worked. Wouldn’t it have been nice if