had ever known. If other shifter races existed, the wolves would be aware of them. They were too territorial not to be.
He broke through the trees and came skidding to a halt, his claws scrabbling at the ground for purchase. He had been running too fast. Not since he was a cub had he approached an unknown situation with such lack of restraint. More than troubling, if his brother or his former laird could see him now, they would fall on their asses laughing.
Even that assurance of humiliation barely found purchase in his mind; his attention was too focused on the source of the scent.
She lay on the ground, her raven black hair covering one breast, but the other one completely exposed to his gaze. Though not overly generous, it was perfectly formed and tipped with a rose pink nipple that begged for his lips and tongue to wake it. From the shape of her delicate feet, to the feminine slope of her hip, to the gentle curve of her shoulder, and all bits in between, she was perfectly formed to engender carnal hunger in Barr and his beast.
The black curls gracing the juncture of her thighs glinted with a blue sheen under the sunlight just like the long tresses covering her head. ’Twas truly like the ravens of the air. Carrion birds they might be, but they had an elegance of color and form not to be ignored.
Barr spared a quick but sincere hope Muin had missed with his ill-timed arrow. The thought of loveliness such as this, even in the mere form of a bird, destroyed for mere superstition sickened him.
Barr’s naked woman continued to lie unconscious on the forest floor. Her fragile beauty called to his protective instincts, touching a part of his wolf that had never before come to the surface. Though tall for a female, she would still be puny beside his human body. He wanted to put himself between her and any potential threat.
’Twas not a feeling he usually experienced for any but those he called clan, and never had he felt it to this depth.
Her current state only made the need to protect grow, until his wolf snarled with it. Her lovely, pale skin was marred by numerous small scratches, as if she’d been running through the bushes. Perhaps another wild boar had found her bathing and she had been forced to flee?
He loped forward, sniffing at her with his enhanced senses. Perplexed in both mind and instinctual memory, the elusive sense of otherness continued to tease at him. But something else was there, too. Blood. In greater amounts than the scratches would account for. He had not perceived it before because that other scent had so confused him. But blood it was.
Her blood.
A killing rage hazed the usually sharp gray and white images his wolf’s eyes saw. The wee one was wounded, her perfect, milk pale skin obscenely marred by a hole in her upper arm, still oozing sluggish rivulets of red.
He quickly examined the area around them, but saw no sign of what had made the injury. However, it did not appear to be from a stray tree branch. The wound did not have the jagged edges of an injury inflicted while running, by something as innocent as a tree branch in the wrong place. He nudged her arm with his snout so he could see the other side.
Whatever had pierced her had gone all the way through, leaving a matching tear in the skin opposite.
Had she fled from attack, not by a wild animal but something much more dangerous? A human.
There were no clans to the north of them from this side of the Donegal holding. It was all wilderness and Barr could not decide where she, much less her attacker, had come from.
A soft moan slipped from between her small, bow-shaped lips, the hand of her uninjured arm moving restlessly as if reaching for him. He had transformed back to human by the time a set of alluring brown eyes flickered open.
Dark pools of confusion stared up at him as she blinked slowly once and then twice. A small furrow forming between her brows, she went to move, but then fell back with a gasp, pain marring her beautiful features.
“What happened?” The words came out in a whisper as if speaking was difficult.
The sense of otherness disappeared as if it had never been. He was so startled by it and by her asking him the question he burned to