for a loss," he said. "Take this and use it when you most need it."
Leslie put her free hand behind her back. He was trying to make up for her puppy's death with a present, just like people had tried to do after her mom had left. Presents didn't make things better. Quite the opposite, in her experience. The giant teddy bear her mama had given her the night she left was buried in the back of the closet. Although Leslie couldn't stand to get rid of it, she also couldn't look at it without feeling sick.
"With this you could get a car or a house," the man said. "Money for an education." He smiled, quite kindly - and it made him look totally different, more real, somehow, as he said, "Or save some other puppy from monsters. All you have to do is wish hard and tear up the card."
"Any wish?" Leslie asked warily, taking the card, more because she didn't want to be the focus of this man's attention any longer than because she wanted the card. "I want my puppy back."
"I can't bring anyone or anything back to life," he told her sadly. "I would that I could. But outside of that, almost anything."
She stared at the card in her hand. It had one word written across it: GIFT.
He stood up. Then he smiled - an expression as merry and light as anything she'd ever seen. "And, Miss Leslie," he said, when he shouldn't have known her name at all, "no wishing for more wishes. It doesn't work like that."
She'd just been wondering...
The strange man turned to Mrs. Cullinan and took her hand in his and kissed it. "You are a lady of rare beauty, quick wits, and generous spirit."
"I'm a nosy, interfering old woman," she responded, but Leslie could see that she was pleased.
As an adult, Leslie kept the card the fairy man had given her tucked behind her driver's license. It looked as clean and fresh as it had the day she'd agreed to take it. To the shock of her doctors, Mrs. Cullinan's cancer mysteriously disappeared and she'd died in her bed twenty years later at the age of ninety-four. Leslie still missed her.
Leslie learned two valuable things about the fae that day. They were powerful and charming - and they ate children and puppies.
Chapter 1
ASPEN CREEK, MONTANA
"Go home," Bran Cornick growled at Anna.
No one who saw him like this would ever forget what lurked behind the Marrok's mild-mannered facade. But only people who were stupid - or desperate - would risk raising his ire to reveal the monster behind the nice-guy mask. Anna was desperate.
"When you tell me you will quit calling on my husband to kill people," Anna told him doggedly. She didn't yell, she didn't shout, but she wasn't going to give up easily.
Clearly, she'd finally pushed him out to the very narrow edges of his last shred of civilized behavior. He closed his eyes, turned his head away from her, and said, in a very gentle voice, "Anna. Go home and cool off." Go home until he cooled off was what he meant. Bran was Anna's father-in-law, her Alpha, and also the Marrok who ruled all the werewolf packs in his part of the world by the sheer force of his will.
"Bran - "
His power unleashed with his temper, and the five other wolves, not counting Anna, who were in the living room of his house dropped to the floor, even his mate, Leah. They bowed their heads and tipped them slightly to the side to expose their throats.
Though he made no outward move, the speed of their surrender testified to Bran's anger and his dominance - and only Anna, somewhat to her surprise at her own temerity, stayed on her feet. When Anna had first come to Aspen Creek, beaten and abused as she'd been, if anyone had yelled at her, she'd have hidden in a corner and not come out for a week.
She met Bran's eyes and bared her teeth at him as the wave of his power brushed past her like a spring breeze. Not that she wasn't properly terrified, but not of Bran. Bran, she knew, would not really hurt her if he could help it, no matter what her hindbrain tried to tell her.
She was terrified for her mate. "You are wrong," Anna told him. "Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. And you are determined not to see it until he is broken beyond repair."
"Grow up, little girl,"