strong, callused heat on her skin. His touch would be rough, thorough, unhurried. It made her shiver just thinking about it.
First, however, she had to get him to talk to her.
Her cat stretched inside her, fur rubbing up against the insides of her skin. It, too, was fascinated by the man who worked among the newly planted trees with such total and quiet concentration. It wasn’t his looks that had first drawn her attention—though the man was certifiably hot—it was the way he worked with plants. She’d watched him without him noticing her for over an hour, seen him handle the fragile seedlings with a breathtaking gentleness.
Yet the very hands that had done that had also lifted up a fifty-pound bag of soil as if it weighed nothing.
The combination of raw physical strength and incredible gentleness was deeply compelling. Add in the clear respect he commanded from even the most hard-edged men and women in SnowDancer, and there was something about this brown-eyed wolf that had Desiree’s leopard padding inside her skin, wanting a taste.
He looked up at a hail from a SnowDancer lieutenant right then.
A jeans-and-T-shirt-clad Indigo crouched down beside him a moment later, her long black hair pulled into a ponytail, and the two of them fell into an easy conversation. He even laughed in response to something the wolf lieutenant said. So, he wasn’t worried about talking to dominant females. It was specifically Desiree that he didn’t want to talk to. That left her in a quandary. Leopard or wolf, some rules were written in stone.
If a submissive said or even intimated no, a dominant backed off. Immediately.
Submissives simply didn’t have the ability to fight against a dominant, especially not when it came to sexual aggression from someone they were meant to be able to trust—a packmate or an ally. The submissive would simply get more and more uncomfortable and distressed. Desiree scowled, hating the idea that she might hurt the beautiful man with the careful hands. She didn’t want to; she just wanted to know him. One more try, she told herself, and if he made it clear he didn’t want her, she’d clamp down on her need to touch him and no damn argument.
That thought was uppermost in her mind the next evening when she turned up before sunset to do a security shift. She liked the evening shifts up here—it was quiet, and thanks to the sizeable area they had to patrol, she rarely ran into the other soldiers. Desiree wasn’t a loner by any means, but she was feline enough to enjoy a touch of peace and quiet at times, especially when the starlit night sky was as stunning as it got up in the Sierra Nevada.
Not that the sky was the focus of her attention tonight.
Felix, however, was nowhere to be seen. It hadn’t taken her long to figure out his name—all she’d had to do was engage one of his packmates in conversation and it had popped out naturally enough, since Felix was in charge of this entire planting operation. Lips twisting in disappointment at not seeing him, she put down the gift she’d brought in the hope it would break the ice, and left to do a security sweep of her section.
After the way the packs had been attacked, no one was taking any chances. Desiree had fought in San Francisco itself, come up against Pure Psy attackers in hand-to-hand combat, but it had been the most brutal here. The reason for the denuded ground, however, was a violent power that had saved the lives of SnowDancer’s soldiers and devastated the enemy.
Hawke’s mate, Desiree thought, was one hell of a woman.
When she finished her sweep, it was to find her gift sitting exactly where she’d left it. Sighing, she leaned back against a tree . . . and straightened almost immediately. There he was, on the very edge of the current planting area, using a shovel to turn some soil. She’d noticed that about him—even though he was technically the boss here, he liked to get his hands dirty.
About to head over to him with her gift, she glanced around to make sure no one else was nearby. It wasn’t that she didn’t want people to know she was courting him—hell, she was as possessive as any dominant and she wanted him. But it might make him uncomfortable. Only when she was certain the coast was clear did she walk forward, keeping her stride easy so as not to make