Then, like a fucking miracle, there she was.
In the woods.
My woods.
Walking alone at night.
Beautiful.
So goddamn beautiful.
Her long blonde hair was pulled back in a steadily falling ponytail, soft little strawberry-vanilla scented tendrils falling down to frame her soft, heart-shaped face that was dominated by deep green eyes and plump pink lips.
And that body that was wrapped in a pair of cargo pants and a simple button-down—neither of which were meant for hiking, let alone at night—was thick and plump, the kind of body a man could sink his fingers into.
I didn’t mean to get near her.
It was wrong.
Against the rules, even.
To fucking maul a woman in the woods in both wolf and human form.
It just hadn’t felt like there’d been a choice. I had to get closer. I had to breathe her in. I had to feel her.
Something deep inside of me demanded it.
More.
Everything.
The next thing I knew, I was peeling off her clothes, filling my senses with her.
If I thought she was pretty clothed, she was fucking perfect bared to me, spread for me, fingernails digging into my skin, her breathing ragged, lips moaning for me.
Fuck.
My cock was getting hard again, even after taking care of the raging hard-on I’d walked away from her with hours before.
I had a distinct feeling that my cock was going to be at a near-constant state of aching desire until I surged inside her, until I felt her walls closing around me, her pussy squeezing my release out of me as she came.
“I, ah, got the scent of something,” I admitted, not wanting to give anyone the whole truth yet, not until I was sure.
Sure that it wasn’t just the moon, just the scent of a beautiful woman.
I had to know she was actually a True Mate before I told everyone else.
It would be a huge deal to the pack. No one had met a True Mate in our generation. Which was making everyone desperate to find one, to continue the pack’s legacy, to create the next generation.
They would get nosy. Pushy. And would be extremely disappointed if I was wrong, and this random woman in the woods wasn’t my fated mate.
It was best to keep it to myself until I could see her again. Not on a full moon. With my damn wits about me.
“Then I guess you don’t need anything to eat,” he said, waving over toward the massive pavilion where someone was grilling off some meat.
“I can always eat after being out all night,” I said, shrugging, and following him toward the small crowd gathered around.
The entire day and night, all I could do was think about my mystery woman, about what it could mean if she was well and truly mine like every cell in my body was screaming out.
It was two full days before I could get away again.
And I went right back to the spot in the woods where I’d had her spread wide for me, her sweet taste flooding my mouth as she writhed under me.
To a normal man, they wouldn’t have any trace of her left. To me, though, her scent was all around.
Taking deep breaths, I followed the scent of her back through the woods. She eventually made her way back to the path that had lead through the woods for as long as I’d been around, and I felt myself tensing as I followed them down the mountain, reasonably sure I knew where they were leading.
To a small cabin at the foot of the mountains.
The home of a legend.
And, in my pack, not the good kind.
As I got closer, and the scent got stronger, indicating it was a place the woman had been around for a while, leaving her intoxicating smell all around, I knew it.
The worst was, in fact, the case.
She was living in the cabin.
Which meant she was likely a descendant to the old woman who’d been there until her death a year or two before.
Greta Wilson.
A name that was damn near a curse in my pack.
My stomach twisted into a painful pit as I followed the tree line down the side of the house until I could see in the window in the front.
There she was.
A kick to the goddamn gut in all her casual beauty.
Her long blonde hair was down this time, swaying around her shoulders as she swept the living room floor.
She wore a simple tank top and shorts.
No bra.
Her perfect tits jiggled with each movement, making my cock stiffen as I thought about them in my hands, in my mouth, about my damn face buried between them, or my head resting on them.
Mine mine mine.
The animal inside of me was growling, damn near clawing at the ground, wanting to run, to pounce, to take her down, to make her well and fully mine once and for all.
But the history, the connection, that was what was holding me firmly in place.