LITMIR.BIZ

       Chapter 1

      Hot Miami nights in September were the bane of tourists and locals alike...but they suited Rafe Landau just fine.

      Werewolves seldom reacted to heat the same way humans did. With body temperatures so elevated most of the time, a few degrees one way or the other didn’t matter. And humidity was Rafe’s friend. Sultry nights like this one were perfect for keeping criminals inside in front of their air conditioners. Or so he hoped. A detective’s job didn’t involve much downtime in a city this big. Having a night off from the usual chaos was a blessing.

      Rafe sipped his soft drink on the narrow balcony of his semi-affordable oceanfront apartment, where the crash of waves almost completely masked the more invasive city sounds. Behind him, the blonde he planned to share a couple of hours on a mattress with shuffled toward him on bare feet.

      “Got anything to drink in your bachelor pad besides sodas?”

      Her voice was grittier than her looks. Rafe liked his temporary bed partners natural, without medically enhanced curves, dyed hair or overdone makeup. His preferences could have been a throwback to the times when wolves ran naked in the wild and nature ruled, but the fact was that he liked to see, taste and feel the women he dated with nothing artificial in his way.

      Tonight’s date had already discarded most of her clothes; she was down to flimsy green lingerie that looked good on her. Her shoulder-length hair was tousled, her lips pouty. And her current state of undress made her invitation perfectly clear.

      “Cupboard by the sink,” Rafe said, directing her to the stash of wine people had given him on various occasions, which he never drank. Other than a few swigs of beer on social occasions, the acuteness of his Were sense of taste and smell made alcohol off-limits.

      “Wine?” she called out from the small kitchen, and followed that up with, “Warm wine?”

      “I wasn’t expecting company” was Rafe’s standard reply in situations like this. He liked his women to feel special. This one was extraordinarily beautiful and probably damn good in bed, but she wasn’t the first he had invited home this month.

      He supposed that he had been compensating for the painful memories, finding comfort in random companionship.

      He had started feeling sorry for every woman who had caught his eye lately, believing him to be trustworthy because of his detective status and hoping that he might be available. The main thing he needed from a human female partner, however, was something none of them had been able to provide. Not that any of them could help being human. Although he could pass among them most of the time, he wasn’t really like them, and he had a secret to guard.

      The fact that he was one of more than two dozen werewolves in a tightly knit Miami pack wasn’t exactly something he could be open about, and it kept him from any real connection.

      He glanced over his shoulder. Hell, he was fairly sure he remembered this woman’s name. Brenda? Brandi? Something starting with a B.

      Maybe he was wrong about the B. Randi? Candy?

      He might call her again sometime when he was lonely, even though they had nothing in common, really. It was dangerous for Weres to fraternize for too long or become regularly intimate with a species outside their own.

      But available she-wolves were a rarity in Miami and tricky to be around due to that little phenomenon known as imprinting. A lingering meeting of the eyes, Were-to-Were, or one outstanding sexual climax between them, and a werewolf was as good as engaged.

      “Do you want some?” his date asked, clinking glasses on the counter.

      “No,” Rafe said. “You go ahead.”

      A breeze had come off the ocean to ruffle his hair—hair that was too long for a cop and too short for Rafe’s taste. It was a good wind. Felt nice.

      He closed his eyes.

      The scent of lilac perfume preceded his date onto the balcony. “Nice view,” she observed.

      “Yes,” he agreed. “I’m damn lucky to have it.”

      He took in the long lines of towering hotels perched along the beach. Lights glistened on the water. Colorful umbrellas dotted the scene during the day. His place was the only remaining small, privately owned building among those multistoried stucco behemoths. A holdout. His refuge. The manager liked having a cop around.

      “How much is the rent?” his companion asked, making conversation, interrupting Rafe’s communion with the darkness and the breeze. At this point in the evening he should have been paying more attention to the green lingerie, but he frowned.

      Some little thing nagged at his consciousness, served to him on that wind. A new scent arrived that was hard to define with Brandi so close. It wasn’t salty ocean waves or the usual array of smells wafting in from the restaurants down the street. This was something else.

       What?

      Rafe’s pulse accelerated slightly as he caught and held a breath, searching for a way to reconcile the new scent with the sudden burning sensation at the back of his throat. He set down his drink and peered at the ocean, hoping to attach a name to what he couldn’t quite capture, though his unusual talent for identifying and categorizing problems was what had made him the youngest decorated detective in the Miami PD.

      Not perfume, he decided. The incoming scent wasn’t floral. It couldn’t be the warning signal of a wolfed-up Were, since the moon wasn’t full tonight, and anyway, he was intimately familiar with the scents of his kind.

      The way his body had automatically tensed suggested he would have to find a polite way to send the woman beside him on her way and find the source of the mysterious smell that had taken precedence over her lilac perfume. There was the

Скачать книгу