Blue Moon Brides: The Complete Series (45 page)

“You’re not going to cry, are you?” He sounded anxious and she bit back a smile. And, yeah, the damned tears. “You’re supposed to be happy,
boo.
I thought we could do this your way.”

He plucked the box from her fingers. “You wan’ to put this on?”

“You’re really going to ask my dad for permission to get married?” She couldn’t look away as he popped the ring out of its velvet nest and slid it onto her finger. It fit perfectly.

“Already did. Your mom too. Your brothers, however, I told to go fuck themselves.”

“Bet they loved that,” she said dryly.

He threaded his hands through her hair, affection and warmth filling his gaze. “
Boo
, I love you. I’ll put up with those other three.”

“You really love me?” She needed him to say those three words at least a dozen times more and only partly because she liked making him say it. Mostly, because of the amazing feeling she got hearing he cared that much.

For her.

“I asked your parents for permission to marry you. Hell, yeah, I meant it. You know what they put me through?”

She could imagine all too well.

He frowned fiercely, his big hands cupping her ass. “I’ll be getting’ this right. You’re my once in a blue moon chance. You’re my everything.”

“And you’re mine.” Leaning forward, she kissed him, putting her heart and soul into their kiss. Brought his hand to that heart as she broke their contact just long enough to breathe, “Tonight, tomorrow, no matter what color the moon is, you’re mine right here.”

Taken

by the

Pack

ANNE MARSH

Chapter One

Eden’s place drew the wolf like a magnet.

Pain razored down Jackson Breaux’s side where the vamp had skinned away the fur and laid bare the muscle.
Oui.
Not his favorite memory, but at least he’d walked away. The human trapper hadn’t been so lucky. The vamp had torn the poor bastard apart and made a slushie out of him.

The copper scent of his blood wrapped around him as he lurched toward the bayou’s edge. The buzz of the mosquitos almost masked the slide of something large into the water. At five in the morning, it was still dark, but the night already had a greyish tinge that promised sunrise was coming on fast. In maybe ninety minutes, the hot summer sun would climb up over the horizon and he’d be safe for another twelve, maybe fourteen hours. Vamps couldn’t take the light, which meant the sun was his all access pass to temporary safety.

Eden.

The wolf staggered, the man lost deep inside the beast cajoling and threatening the beast to keep its feet. As soon as he hit the ground, he was done for because he wouldn’t be moving again. Putting one foot in front of the other right now was an act of sheer will, because he was always the predator and never the prey. Except for tonight.

He’d killed the vamp. There would be others, though. There always were and that was a simple of fact of life as a werewolf. The wolf dug in its paws, straining to make the bank. Its back feet slid into the brackish water with a soft splash.
Christ
. Please let there be no alligators out hunting for an easy meal.

He wasn’t dead, but close enough. He was bleeding out and he knew it. There was no way his body could handle the shock of the shift. And, even if he did manage to transform back into his human shape, the kind of injuries he had would raise questions, as would the indisputable fact he healed inhumanly fast.
Oui.
Those kinds of questions would bring unwanted attention. And yet he needed meds. Painkillers would be good too. And then, when he’d got a patch job, he needed to get help back to the vamp’s other prisoners. He hadn’t been the only one locked up and tortured in the vamp’s lair. In addition to the purely animal, there had been at least one other shifter. Staging a rescue was paramount.

Just as soon as he stopped bleeding.

He reached the road with a whine and spotted the veterinary practice, the animal scent of its occupants better than a neon sign. The place had a peaceful, calming quality that the wolf liked.
Thank fuck.
That was all the veterinarian’s doing however.

Eden Roy.

She was everything sweet and good and right. No way would he drag her into his world. She’d asked him out on that half-a-date almost five years ago and he’d gone, until his brothers called for help and he’d taken off without so much as a backward glance. She’d undoubtedly dismissed him as a first class bastard—and she wasn’t wrong.
Oui.
One thousand eight hundred days, twenty hours and a handful of minutes since he’d last laid eyes on her and he’d spent far, far too much of that time thinking about her. Until Eden Roy, his dates had always been about the sex. Nothing more. Just an hour—or six—of fierce, hot pleasure, banging himself into a willing female body.

She'd made him want more. Not a different session length or different bag of tricks, but something else entirely different that had everything to do with the woman herself.

She’d left the bayou to go to school shortly after that night, but now she was back. He’d promised himself her return changed nothing and that he wouldn’t go near her. Wouldn’t drop in to see how she was doing or if she’d changed. If she smelled every bit as damned good as she had all those years ago.

Tonight, he broke that promise. The wolf whined again and, target acquired, started dragging itself toward the veterinary clinic.

The car that came barreling along the road was a shock. Eden’s practice was on the outside edge of town, where real estate was at its cheapest and people were at their scarcest. Country music rioted from the driver-side window, whiskey-soaked stories of cowboy and redneck love. That was one more thing he hadn’t known about Eden, that she had a weakness for love songs and guitars.

The woman driving the car, however, was every bit as small and curvy as he remembered. Her brown hair was scraped up in a practical ponytail and bristling with hairclips. No make-up, just a fresh-faced sweetness that made him want to howl. Or pounce. He really wasn’t sure his better side was going to win out here. Even with its injuries, his wolf wanted to pounce. To pin her and take her and make her
theirs.
In five minutes, he could strip those clothes from her body and sink his fingers deep into the wet heat of her pussy, owning her deep inside. Oblivious to the need burning through him, she belted out the words to the song, her fingers tap-tap-tapping the wheel. Happy. Joyous. Fucking infectious.

And here he was, ready to rain on her parade.

~*~

Dark o’clock and she was opening up shop. Being a veterinarian might be her passion, but sleeping in was her new pipe dream. Eden Roy contemplated her piece-of-shit car and decided that locking up was a waste of time—the driver-side window had broken mid-roll three months ago. Instead, she settled for a quick visual sweep of Port Leon. Louisiana was a hotbed of crime, and stupidity didn’t pay.

Handbag? Check. Cell phone and keys? Double check. Pet carrier with three kittens ready for their forever homes now that she’d pulled them out from underneath a porch before the porch’s cranky ass bastard owner could make good on his threat to drown the unwelcome inhabitants? Check, check, and check.

She got out, crocs crunching on the gravel. “Home sweet home, guys.”

At least until she got the little guys into their forever homes.

The kittens in the carrier mewed indignantly, giving her the feline version of the finger. She yawned, her jaw cracking loudly. Getting up at dark o’clock had to stop. Or go on hiatus.
Something.
She couldn’t remember the last time she’d had eight hours of sleep. Most nights, she managed half that. Working her way through college and vet school, then associating for a year to save the down payment for this place? Yeah. That hadn’t been a plus in the sleep column. The upside, though, was that this clinic was all
hers
.

Eden still got a thrill out of seeing her name over the door. With vet school eighteen months behind her and the ink on her diploma barely dry, the private practice was a dream come true. Never mind that her monthly revenues had her choosing between paying the utility bill and paying the rent. Or that she had officially given up her apartment twelve months ago and moved into the small utility room upstairs because yeah…there was that whole rent-paying thing.

It was probably just as well her few attempts at dating had been epic fail material, because she could hardly bring a guy home when home consisted of a camp cot and a dorm room fridge. Nope. There was nothing sexy about the place at all. She definitely had a date with her vibrator for the foreseeable future.

She headed for the door, juggling the carrier and her keys. The frogs in the bayou kicked up a musical racket. She’d get the kittens settled, do the early a.m. feedings and then maybe she’d have time for a quick nap before her assistant came in to officially kick off the workday.

Or a quickie with Bob, her vibrating wonder boy.

Damn
. She had no idea what had come over her, but these last few weeks, she’d been hornier than hell. Morning, noon, and night, the sweet throbbing ache between her thighs never let up or cut her a break. Even now her pussy was slick and juicy. The arousal was bad enough, had her
needy
enough to consider making a trip into town, finding herself a bar and a one-night man. She thunked her head against the door. She’d never been into the casual hook-up scene, but the desire was driving her crazy.

Bob the battery-operated boy wonder wasn’t cutting it in the orgasm department.

She looked at the kittens. Yeah. There was the walking, mewing advertisement for tomcatting around. She knew all about being careful, but casual sex with a stranger hadn’t been in her repertoire.

Yet.

~*~

The sweet, hot scent of a female in heat teased the wolf out of the shadows.
Jesus
. Eden was ready for sex. Strip her worn blue jeans down, push aside her panties, and he could be balls-deep inside her slick channel. Her body wouldn’t resist, although the man knew damned well the woman's thinking parts wanted nothing to do with him and that put her out of bounds.

Moonlight picked out a path for him, illuminating up the shortest route to her side like lights on a runway. He staggered forward. Front paws. Back paws. The wolf whined and her head shot up, snapped around. Her fingers tightened on her car keys as she shoved a plastic carrier full of kittens behind her body.

Oui
.

He’d be having words with her later about the best way to protect herself.

“Who’s there?” She sounded pissed off, not scared, and that was something, as was the small canister of mace dangling from her keychain. Unfortunately for her, the chemical packed nowhere near enough punch to stop a monster like him. He was too big. Too mean.

Too
determined
.

Fifty yards to his target. The wolf tried to make himself smaller because,
oui
, scaring the shit out of her now would be counter-productive…and then the moon came out from behind a cloud and all he could think was
mine
.

Even in the wolf’s black and white world, the goddamned moon was blue and its rays bathed her in a fucking ethereal light he’d waited a lifetime to see. His Pack had precisely one chance to find a mate: when a blue moon lit up the night sky and picked out a soul mate. He sure as shit hadn’t expected tonight’s moon to be blue—nor had he ever imagined
this
woman being his for keeps. Three hundred years of waiting for his mate and she’d been under his nose the entire time. Eden Roy. The girl next door who he’d run far and fast from because she was too sweet. Too nice for his brand of dark, kinky sex and his Pack. The universe clearly had a sense of humor.

Oui
, he thought as he collapsed at her feet and the darkness rolled over him. He never should have walked out on their date.

~*~

Holy. Shit.

The Louisiana bayou didn’t stock wolves, especially not the big ass, mean-eyed bastard collapsed in her parking lot. The wolf had to be pushing two hundred pounds, pure animal grace and strength that could be at her throat in seconds. As out of place in her parking lot as a lion, he was beautiful in an exotic, feral way.

Running her hands over that lush black fur would have been a treat, except the animal was an unmistakable killing machine and top-of-the-food chain lord. He wasn't a puppy she could pet. In fact, she was pretty sure she was on the
bottom
of said food chain where this guy was concerned.

Move it.

She jammed the key in the lock and slammed open the door. Wherever that beast had come from, she needed reinforcements before going closer for a second look.

She tucked the kittens behind the counter and grabbed a dart gun, loading the tranquilizers with shaking fingers. The wolf was impossible. And yet…yeah. Maybe somebody in the bayou had imported an exotic pet or there was a private reserve she hadn't heard about. When she peeked out the glass front door, the wolf was still there, sprawled on the ground. His sides moved so the animal wasn’t dead.

The thought of the wolf dying sent a fierce stab of
something
through her.

Not on her watch.

She grabbed the gun and a gurney, opened the door and stepped outside.

Time to tranq and see what she had.

Thirty minutes later, she snapped off her rubber gloves and tossed the used latex into the can. Days like this, the word
mad
didn’t begin to express her feelings. Someone had deliberately, cruelly skinned away a good portion of the wolf’s left flank. What kind of person did that?

The wolf exhaled roughly and she froze. Waking up should have been impossible, because she'd dosed the wolf with enough sedatives for a much larger animal. She wasn't taking chances, not with an injured animal with the kind of teeth he sported. And her unexpected guest was most definitely a
he
. She grinned. She'd bet he was one popular wolf in the wolfie world with the package he sported between his legs.

The grin faded as she mentally ran over the wolf's injury list.

Someone had tortured the magnificent animal. If he'd come from a private reserve, his previous owner had been a sick fuck, up to all kinds of no good and not okay. There wasn’t much she could do, but what she could do…she’d do. Grabbing the office phone, she punched in the number for the sheriff. Cruz Jones was most definitely one of the good guys. The guy was new to Port Leon, the brother of Riley Jones. Eden didn't know Riley all that well, but they'd chatted each other up a few times and Riley had made the introductions. She and Cruz had been dancing around each other for the last month or so, sizing each other up as potential dating material. Maybe she should ask him out. Take him to bed.