Authors: Gigi Moore
Chapter 1
The Double R, McCoy, Colorado
Current day
Desiree Jensen knew she dreamed because she had never been so turned on before in her life. She wouldn’t allow this current type of heat and lust to ever seize her. She couldn’t.
Lust meant only two things—loss of control and recklessness—and neither boded well for her. She left both to her younger sister, Maia. One reckless and unrealistic daughter in the Jensen clan was enough. The jury was still out on her older sister, however. First, Tamara wasn’t technically a Jensen, and despite moving to Colorado with her mother and Maia and living on The Double R for just under a year, Desiree still hadn’t gotten to know Tamara as well as she knew Maia. It wasn’t for lack of trying. Tamara just had better things to do than getting to know two long-lost younger sisters that their mother had failed to tell her about. Tamara was a newlywed and busy doing all the hot and lusty things a newlywed did with her new husband, Jess Reynolds, and his twin brother, Jax.
Desiree groaned and shuddered now in her sleep, unsure if she reacted to the idea of having two strapping men at her beck and call the way Tamara had or if she reacted to the vision of the two faceless men stalking her in the woods.
She’d never ventured too far beyond the edges of the ranch by herself, and this was another reason she knew she dreamed. Admittedly, she wasn’t as curious and fearless as her sisters and had no desire to see what lay beyond the woods that bordered The Double R.
Wolves.
She knew she was being ridiculous. Unlike Maia, willing to fly halfway across the country simply on the basis of a
dream
, Desiree had researched the area to which she, her mother, and her sister had all been destined. She had read up on Colorado’s wildlife and knew that wolves had been extirpated from the ecosystem since the 1940s. There had been a couple of rare sightings near the Colorado-Wyoming border since gray wolves had been reintroduced into the ecosystems of Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, and Arizona, but nothing more.
Desiree had read about proposals to reintroduce the wolf to the wilderness ecosystem of Colorado, but ranchers in the area were dead set against it.
She supposed she should be comforted by all this, but from her research, Desiree knew that dispersing wolves—especially single, male wolves—could travel long distances, and it was just a matter of time before wolves started migrating into Colorado from the north and south.
Maybe her delving so deep into the issue had been a little too meticulous, even for her. It had done nothing but taint her expectations of Colorado, with Desiree now expecting to encounter wild wolves at every turn, despite the facts.
However, none of this explained why she kept seeing two wolves in
her
dreams along with the two faceless men.
Were the animals and the men connected in some way?
Desiree shook her head, logic overriding fanciful possibilities even in her sleep.
She licked her lips as the faceless figures moved out of the shadows, morphing from naked, broad-shouldered men to large timber wolves to men and back to wolves again before charging toward her.
Desiree woke with a scream, cotton pj tank and shorts clinging to her sweat-soaked body as she sprang to a sitting position in bed. Her skin wasn’t the only thing wet, and she felt heat rush to her face at the thought of her arousal right before Maia burst into her room with half the household not too far behind her, from the sounds of it.
Desiree squirmed in her bed, her arousal becoming more obvious, at least to her. Her panties were soaked!
“What in tarnation?”
Desiree blinked as someone hit the switch for the overhead, bathing the room in light from the seven-bulb chandelier. Before she could object, Maia rushed across the carpeted floor to her side and sat on the bed.
“Oh, Desi, was it the wolves again?”
Desiree grinned at the protective way Maia pushed damp, stray tendrils away from her face and caressed her cheek.
She
was the older sister, if only by more than two years. She was supposed to comfort Maia. Granted, she had done her share of comforting when they had been kids and Maia had first started to have her “visions.”
“I’ll be okay,” Desiree croaked, more mortified than frightened as she raised her gaze to glance at everyone crowded into her bedroom. As large as the suite proved—about as big as the one-bedroom condo she had given up in New York to move here—she still felt a little claustrophobic. “I didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
“No trouble,” Jess or Jax said. After almost a year, Desiree still had some difficulty figuring out who was who.
“Sure you’re okay, baby?” her mother asked.
“I’m fine, Mom. You guys can all go back to bed.”
“If you’re sure,” Tamara said.
Desiree smiled up at her, still unaccustomed to not being the oldest sister.
She watched as everyone filed out of her bedroom, all except Maia, who hadn’t moved from her place on the bed.
Maia remained silent until she heard the door snick closed behind their mother. As soon as they were alone, she turned to Desiree with concern in her eyes. “They’re getting worse, aren’t they?”
Desiree shrugged. She didn’t want to deal with her sister’s interrogations, not when she felt so vulnerable and still so damned turned on. Her nipples tingled at the idea of the wolves charging toward her and what they would have done to her in the dream once they reached her.
Would they have changed back to men right before they reached her? What would the men have done to her?
Desiree shifted her legs under the lightweight comforter, her pussy sizzling and moist.
What kind of twisted, bestiality,
ménage a trois
fantasies did she entertain?
“They’re just dreams. They don’t mean anything,” she said as if to convince someone.
“I think it means more than you think when you keep dreaming about wolves in a state where they barely exist, according to you. Do you know something we all don’t know?”
“Maia, they are just dreams. Not visions.”
“Dreams and visions can sometimes be the same thing. You just have to know how to interpret them. And you know that gifts run in fam…” Desiree started to shake her head, but Maia put up a hand, palm forward in a stop sign, before continuing. “Ah, ah, ah. Don’t try distancing yourself from your heritage or go knocking my visions. I was right about our missing sister, wasn’t I?”
Desiree opened her mouth to speak then shut it because she couldn’t argue with the truth. She wanted to, though. “Tamara wasn’t exactly missing,” she finally whispered.
“Sure, Mom knew where she was. But did we? So that makes her missing.”
Desiree sighed. She didn’t want to remind Maia that up until her vision, neither of them had known Tamara existed until they got confirmation from their mother. She was too tired to argue with her sister’s logic anyway, especially when it made a weird sort of sense. She just wanted to squeeze some more sleep into what was left of the night.
More like get back to that dream to see what those men have planned for you.
Oh God, since when had she become a freak? Was this what nearing thirty did to a woman? Was she turning into a nymphomaniac?
Maia had been teasing her about turning the big three-oh just months before Desiree’s twenty-ninth birthday last summer, claiming she couldn’t wait until Desiree’s hormones finally caught up with her and kicked her in the ass.
“Honestly, Des, sometimes you act like a woman twice your age. You really need to
take it easy and get laid once in a while.”
Maybe Maia was right, and her hormones were punishing her for keeping them so carefully in check all these years.
Not that she was frigid, despite what a couple of her past lovers implied, and despite what one in particular had taken from her.
“You know what I think,” Maia said, and Desiree silently thanked her for interrupting the direction of her thoughts. She did
not
want to entertain the possibility that Maia and some of her past lovers might be correct about her underused libido. She did not want to believe that she was now damaged goods. However, she had a feeling that Maia wasn’t really going to give her a reprieve, and her sister’s next words confirmed this. “You’re sublimating.”
“I’m what?”
“I’ve seen the way you watch those night wranglers ever since we’ve been here. Lord knows
I’ve
noticed them.”
She knew of which night wranglers her sister spoke. And all she had to say on that subject was that a woman would have to be in a coma
not
to notice Carson and Sam Quarry. Not that she’d say anything to her sister. She didn’t want to give the girl any more ammunition than necessary. “You’ve seen one cowboy, you’ve seen them all.”
“Now you’re just trying to blow smoke up my ass, sis, but I’m not buying it. Ain’t nothing ordinary about those two, and you know it. In fact, there’s something decidedly out of the ordinary about them, if you ask me.”
Desiree would admit nothing. It was bad enough those two haunted her dreams as much as the wolves and the…Sheesh, she was stupid! Were those two the faceless men in her dreams?
She closed her eyes, picturing the two tall, broad-shouldered brothers. The oldest had raven-black hair and emerald-green eyes, and the younger one had chocolate-brown hair and golden-honey eyes. Each was gorgeous in his own right.
She compared her vision with the memory of the two figures in her dream and realized that though she couldn’t see the dream-men’s faces, they and the cowboys were incredibly similar in appearance.
Was
she sublimating? Was she having sex dreams about the two cowboys because the idea of having actual sex with them proved plain unacceptable to her in any way, shape, or form?
Desiree opened her eyes to see her sister staring at her with a gleam in her espresso eyes.
“Must have been some wet dream, though I’m not sure where the wolves come in.”
“It
wasn’t
a wet dream.”
“Uh-huh.”
Desiree sighed and flung herself back on the bed, shaking her head. “Just get out of here and stop psychoanalyzing me, Freud.”
Maia chuckled and reached to caress Desiree’s face, expression changing from amused to serious. “Do yourself a favor, girl, and just go for it.”
“That’s what you would do.”
“You better believe it. Just so happens I haven’t seen anything on this ranch worth my time or energy.”
“Yet you throw two of the most eligible cowboys at
me
? What’s the matter? They’re not good enough for you? Or should I say wild and reckless enough?”
“They’re more than good
and
wild enough, but they don’t belong to me.”
Oh God, was Maia saying what Desiree thought she was? Was she about to spout the soul mates jazz in which she so fervently believed?
It wasn’t that Desiree didn’t believe in commitment and love, she just didn’t like the idea that she wasn’t in control of her own destiny. She had choices. She could choose to be an irresponsible, reckless adult, or she could choose not to.
“I know what you think of my visions and my ideas on love and romance, but before you knock it—”
“I’m not knocking anything. I just don’t believe in soul mates.”
“You should, since I have a feeling yours are closer at hand than you know.”