Chapter One
Those bastards had cut her fence again.
Virginia Howard cursed, kicked a clump of grass at her feet and eyed the damaged span of fence before her. Large sections of it lay bare and broken, the barbed wire that had stretched between the posts sliced clean through. It curled around the posts, shiny and mocking.
“Brand new God damned fence.” And God knew how many cattle lost. She’d never get them all rounded up before dark, even if they all bore the Lazy H brand. But some were still clean skinned, new calves or additions to her stock that weren’t due for branding until the fall.
She cursed again, though the epithet morphed into a growl. That those cowardly asses would pull such a stunt this close to the full moon only proved their real purpose. Driving her out of business would be good, but what they really wanted was to drive her down. Make her submit like a good little lady.
Some of them didn’t like independence in a woman, especially one who’d already refused a few of them. They obviously meant to make her an example.
“Well, fuck that,” Ginny muttered. A click of her tongue brought her horse, Lightning Bug, trotting over. She’d held out on her own, just the way she liked it, for as long as she could. Now she had no choice.
She needed the alpha’s help.
Jack Owens had an office next to the mayor’s in the run-down old City Hall building, but the only people who visited it were humans. When werewolves needed to speak with the alpha of the Lonely River Pack they went to his home, a sprawling ranch house on the edge of town that bordered on a large private forest. Humans never strayed in the woods that belonged to the pack, making it a safe place to run for all wolves.
And they needed that now more than ever. More than fifty years had passed since the last Great War, when biomechanical warfare had been introduced by both sides. No one knew how it started, how the nanotechnology meant to incapacitate enemy soldiers had corrupted and begun infecting civilians.
Had begun killing.
The remaining humans had reacted to the War the only way they’d known, by shunning technology and essentially setting themselves back into the nineteenth century. All computers and complex machines had been destroyed. Vehicles sat, abandoned, on cracked asphalt roads grown over with vegetation. Most cleanup had been done in the cities, where space was at a premium. In places like Greenbriar, people tended to let the now-useless machinery stand and work around it.
Werewolves, once hidden, had been immune to the Plague. And, as the numbers of humans thinned, the wolves had been able to come out of hiding to build societies for themselves. The humans left had no choice but to accept them, though many hated them. Were frightened of them.
That was dangerous, and made it important that wolves have a place of their own, away from humans, where all were welcome.
Even Ginny. Jack had extended the invitation more than once, always with that quiet smile that clashed with the look in his eyes. Patient. Predatory. The alpha never pushed her, but he was always there, letting her know with a look or a touch that he was biding his time.
It would have been easy enough to ignore, if only she didn’t want to answer the sensual challenge in his eyes. The wolf inside her yearned for him, for the strength and power she knew mirrored her own. And the woman wanted something else entirely.
He was so damn handsome , with thick blond hair and eyes the color of the sky on a clear winter morning. And he was tall, broad through the shoulders, leanly muscled in a way that made her want to press her hands against him, to test the resilience of the hard planes of his body.
But she couldn’t. A man -- a wolf -- like Jack Owens wouldn’t let her walk away after a night of hot sex. He’d lay claim to her, keep her.
Ginny had to force down the panic that rose. She belonged to no one. She was free to say and do anything she
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