One Night With a Billionaire - By VickiLewis Thompson Page 0,44

collectors all over the world. He should probably have it insured and protected in a climate-controlled safe.

Rachel Miller’s first wolf carving, if it surfaced, would bring a pretty penny on the auction block. To her credit, she’d never identified him as the buyer of her initial effort, and neither had Ted. Apparently no one except the three of them knew this work existed.

She’d sent him a note a couple months after he’d made his purchase, though. He knew that note by heart.

Dear Mr. Hunter,

You bought my wolf carving from the Polecat General Store on July 14. You were my first sale. There have been others since then, but yours was the most significant. It inspired me to leave my veterinarian internship and try my luck as a full-time carver. I was in the store that day and we met, but I didn’t have the nerve to identify myself and thank you for making the purchase. I want to thank you now. You literally changed my life.

With gratitude,

Rachel Miller

He hadn’t needed the note to tell him that he’d met her that day. His acute hearing had picked up snatches of her conversation with Ted, and he’d pegged her as the granddaughter who’d inherited Ike’s cabin. Ike had been a carver, although not nearly as talented as Rachel.

Then Jake had met her gaze, and her nervous excitement had given her away. Although he wasn’t an artist, he could imagine that putting your stuff in front of the public would be scary, and having someone buy it might take some getting used to.

He’d debated for days whether to respond to that note, which was still tucked under the carving on his mantel. In the end he’d decided not to. If he’d replied, she might have thought they could be friends. But he’d known from the moment they’d met that friendship wasn’t going to cut it. He wanted her, and he couldn’t have her.

That made living across the lake from her cabin a difficult proposition. Closing his eyes, he pictured how she’d looked three years ago, her hair falling to her shoulders in shades ranging from dark walnut to warm cherry. Her gaze had locked with his for one electric moment, making him think of summer storms and silvery rain.

She’d worn jeans and a faded T-shirt, an unremarkable outfit intended simply to cover her tall, lithe body. She hadn’t tried to entice anyone with those clothes. Yet she’d enticed him without trying. He couldn’t explain why that was, except that it was somehow linked to the carving on his mantel.

Her ability to capture the wolf’s spirit in her work had spoken to him on an unsettlingly deep level. Something wordless and intense had passed between them that day at the general store. He feared that she saw things about him that she shouldn’t see.

He’d also sensed she was attracted to him, and if he was right about that, any further contact would be unfair to her and irresponsible of him. Thinking about her still brought a surge of lust that should have weakened by now. Instead it grew stronger by the day. And that was damned inconvenient for a werewolf who despised the concept of Weres having sex with humans.

He’d dedicated himself to that cause for personal and family reasons, and he wasn’t about to stray because of his tempting neighbor. He had a duty to uphold Were tradition, partly because his mother, Daphne, had been a Wallace, a direct descendent of what had once been werewolf royalty in Alaska.

Under the leadership of the Wallaces, the Alaskan Were community had amassed a fortune following the gold rush in the late 1890s. As the pack had prospered, splinter groups had migrated throughout North America. No Wallace pack members lived in Alaska anymore. His mother had mated with Benjamin Hunter, whose pack was based in Idaho, and that’s where Jake had grown up.

Werewolves, including the Hunter pack, had created financial dynasties in all major North American cities, a fact unknown to the human population. The pack based in New York was the only one to continue the Wallace name.

Jake’s mother had settled in Idaho with her mate, but she remained proud of her Wallace heritage. Before Jake had reached puberty and developed the ability to shift, his mother had taken him to visit the historic Wallace lodge set deep in the forest near Sitka. It was now a private museum known only to Weres.

That trip had convinced Jake that he wanted to live in Alaska and