She took another deep breath and could smell the acrid smoke, the heated air burning her lungs as if it were happening now, saw the flames stretching upward as she watched the fire in the fireplace.
Leidolf kissed the top of her head.
"I thought they'd come to rescue my family. I thought they'd arrived too late, the fire crackling, the heat from the flame like Hades as the houses crumbled and fell. I'd hoped my family had made it out in time. Then one of the men said something to the effect of, 'Their deaths won't bring my sons or nephew back, but at least I won't have to know they're living while my own kinfolk are dead.'"
Leidolf rubbed Cassie's arm. "Sounds like a revenge killing."
"But for what, Leidolf? My dad never liked Wheeler or his family. None of my family did. The boys were always stealing from the mercantile or other farms around. Half the time, the old man was at the local saloon gambling and drinking. Whoring, too, when he had the money. More than likely, his sons got into trouble over something and somebody killed them. But not my family. They wouldn't have had anything to do with murder."
Leidolf remained silent, but she didn't care if he didn't believe her. She knew the truth.
"I hated the Wheelers, stalked them for months, one by one. I wanted to kill every last one of them like they had killed my family."
"But you didn't, did you, Cassie?"
She swallowed hard. "I was too much of a coward."
He let out his breath. "You couldn't have killed them in cold blood."
She gave a haughty laugh. "After losing my whole family, you bet I could have."
Again, he didn't respond.
"I could have," she reiterated, wishing she hadn't let them live. Then she sighed deeply again. "I couldn't live on my own. Not that young. Not as a girl. My choices were limited. Either I had to move to the nearest California town and live as a human, attempting to hide the wolf side of me, and hope that someone I didn't know would take me in as a maid or something. I could have ended up with some really bad sorts. I just couldn't imagine life like that. Or I could live with..." Her eyes grew misty. "... the wolves. They didn't mind that I was half human. They accepted me as one of the pack."
"A wolf pack. That's why you study them? Hell, it's a good thing the alpha leader didn't try to take you as his mate."
Cassie cast him a tearful smile. "He had a mate. I just had to make sure I wasn't treated as the omega, lowest wolf on the totem pole."
"You'll be the highest one on the totem pole in my pack."
She stroked his muscular arm. "Hmm, well, I'm not joining a lupus garou pack. Not anytime soon. I have a job to do. And as soon as I take care of it, I'll have another, and another. The wolves need me as their advocate."
"I need you. Our kind needs you." He renewed his sensual strokes, every action designed to get her to capitulate.
And if she wasn't so dead set on not joining a pack, she might have given in. His declaration that he needed her might have done it, but that was followed too closely by "our kind needs you," and that's what brought her back to her senses. For the good of their kind. But what of the good of the lupus kind? They weren't as important in the scheme of things, as far as lupus garous were concerned. But they were to Cassie.
She sighed and closed her eyes, loving the way he touched her, wanting what he was offering, but not about to go there. From the way he spoke, he would have no interest in the regular lupus and her pups. Only in the one lupus garou he wanted to make his mate.
"The truth is that my shoulder's feeling much better." She looked up at him. "And I need to get back to work."
He wrapped his arms around her and frowned. "You can't go anywhere right now. Not dressed as you are. And not until nightfall in your wolf coat."
"You have to let me go," Cassie said, her voice verging on a growl. She would risk anything to locate the mother and her pups and ensure they were fed and protected.
"Why? What's so important about your research that you had gambled running as a wolf and getting shot over it?"
She could hear his attempt at keeping his voice even, but the testiness gave him away.
She had no choice but to tell him. Hell, he might even be reasonable about it. She doubted it. "What's important is the survival of a she-wolf and her pups. They have no one to protect them. No alpha male. No pack."
He didn't say anything for quite a while. Anything would be better than the silence. Then as though he knew she was still lying to him, he quietly said, "The wolf is a lupus garou."
She narrowed her eyes at him. "I heard the pups. She's strictly a lupus, not a lupus garou. A lupus garou wouldn't have pups in the wild."
"She behaved like one of our kind. I found her trail and followed it to a creek, but then she lost me. And believe me, no female wolf that had been in the area that recently would have evaded me. Except for a lupus garou like you. It was as though she had human thought processes, that she knew just how I'd look for her, and she did the unexpected."
An odd sensation tingled through her spine. Long ago, her sister and her cousin would evade each other using the water trick. Not that the ploy would be exclusively known to work for them, but still it gave her a ghostly chill of recognition. That she and her sister, Rhoda, and cousin, Aimee, had used the same device in games of escape and evasion.
Trying to ignore the eerie sensation slipping through her bones, Cassie thought about the times they had chased each other across the river, had made up spooky stories, and--she took a deep breath--talked about the kind of mate they wanted when they were older.
It didn't feel right that she would be the only one of the three girls to ever have a mate. She clenched and unclenched her teeth, then reiterated, "The female I encountered has pups."
"All right," he said, but he didn't sound like he agreed with her. "What if two of them are out there? One, a lupus with pups, and the other, a lupus garou."
Despite hating herself for it, tears collected in her eyes. She quickly blinked them away, but he took notice, like he seemed to about everything she did or said. "Maybe." She didn't think it could be possible that another lupus garou was running around the woods who wasn't part of Leidolf's pack already.
"Unless you're brand new at this business, you have to know that protecting our own kind takes priority over taking care of a feral wolf." His voice had an edge to it, and he was back to being his domineering, rather than his accommodating self.
She narrowed her eyes at him. "Not just a feral wolf, damn it." She was unable to see how he couldn't realize how important this was to her. "A mother and her pups."
"Feral wolves still. What were you thinking?"
She fisted her hands against his chest. "Of saving them! What do you think?"
Leidolf let out his breath in exasperation. She laughed at herself. Here she was thinking that being with one of her kind, with his pack, too, might even be vaguely viable, if he agreed to her conditions. Now she figured he'd just laugh at what she'd propose, and so she wasn't about to mention it.
And then he said the unexpected. "You do realize that your need to save the wolf and her pups has to do with a deeper desire to have babies of your own."
Surprised as hell that he would think that, she sat back for a second. Sure, she'd thought about having her own babies. All of which she attributed to spring and the she-wolf and her litter and Leidolf's pheromones triggering her own, but she didn't need some alpha male reminding her of it, damn it. She didn't even want to think along those lines. Ever. Babies meant settling down permanently. And she really wasn't ready for that.
She rose, her knees on the pine-needle bed, straddling him in a provocative way, her head above the king's, and if she had been sporting a tail about now, she'd have it raised high, too, showing her dominance rather than subordination to the mighty pack leader.