Lord of the Wolfyn - By Jessica Andersen Page 0,35

that into the context of what she’d just seen of the wolfyn. “That male back there.”

“Kenar. Keely’s brother.”

“He tried to enthrall me, but you stopped him.”

“Yes.”

She shook her head, trying to dislodge those few seconds when she had been utterly under the big creature’s amber-eyed spell. “I thought you said they wouldn’t try that in their home realm.”

“Kenar is…” He paused, as if searching for the words. “Keely and I might have used each other one night a year, but Kenar uses everyone all the time. But he’s smart. He makes it seem as though he’s following the traditions to the letter, when he’s really bending them to suit his needs. And because he’s the alpha and he’s kicked out the very few males who stood up to him, he can control his pack almost absolutely.”

“It sounded like Candida and Keely weren’t as firmly under his control as he thought.”

His lips tightened and he glanced back southward. “I hope she knows what she’s doing. Kenar is charming enough when he gets his own way. But he doesn’t take it lightly when he’s crossed.”

Reda nodded. “I know men like that. Saw too many of them on the job.”

He cut her a look. “What job?”

“I…” She hadn’t meant to go there, didn’t know how they had even come to be talking like this, like they were normal friends out for a normal walk. Or a normal first date or something.

“It’s okay if you don’t want to talk about it,” he said. But in her heart, it jarred, made her think he was too often ready to move forward and not look back, just like the major.

“I was a cop,” she said.

“A guardswoman,” he said with a strange note in his voice. When she glanced over, though, he shook his head. “It’s nothing. You said ‘was.’ What happened? This is about your partner?”

“I froze.” She crossed her arms, caught herself doing it and jammed her hands in her pockets instead. “You’re shocked, I’m sure. And yes, that was sarcasm.” When he didn’t say anything, she told herself to leave it alone, let it lie. Instead, she found herself saying, “We just went in for coffee, that’s all. Benz didn’t even want to—but I was cold, tired and cranky, and our shift was going to run over because a couple of guys had called in sick, so he stopped and went in for me. And he didn’t come back out.”

Maybe it was the wolfsbene, maybe the crazy reality out of reality she found herself in, but suddenly the memory was right there in front of her, where before she hadn’t been able to remember any of it clearly.

Chapter 7

“Seriously, Benz, what is taking so long?” Reda killed the cruiser’s engine, pocketed the keys and climbed out, slamming the door harder than she really needed to. “Did you have to grow the coffee beans or milk the half-and-half cow yourself?”

More likely he was chatting up the pretty brunette who worked the counter at the Porthole Packie. Normally, it didn’t bother Reda when her good-looking, easygoing partner went into casual-flirt mode, even when the flirtee was a good ten years younger than him and a coed at the nearby state college. Tonight, though, the thought set her teeth on edge. She might not have been all that into the guy who had just “it’s not you, it’s me”’d her, but being newly dumped—again—really ought to earn her some priority in the coffee department. Maybe even a bonus Snickers.

Which, apparently, she was going to have to get for herself. Muttering under her breath and ignoring the curious looks of a couple of passersby—what, never seen a girl cop wearing a uniform and a mood before?—she pushed through the portholed door and into the liquor store, which, like so many of the local places, had recently been forced to diversify to stay afloat, putting in a general store section that boasted damn good serve-yourself coffee.

As she came through the door, she automatically glanced up at the curved overhead mirror, which was angled toward the register area and backed up by video surveillance.

She froze at the sight of Benz standing on the wrong side of the counter with his hands up, a gun in his face and the coed cowering behind him with her eyes closed and her hands covering her ears. Then Reda looked from the mirror to the register, and saw it was for real.

In the nanosecond it took for the perp to look over, go white-eyed