LickingHerWounds Read online

  Brave boy, to interfere with a leopard and his quarry…

  “Here…use my T-shirt!” Jet was tugging the too-big garment off over his head, his little face screwed up with childish concern at the sight of the badly cut and battered body.

  Shit! Shit, shit, shit!

  Issuing a deep growl of frustration, Cal shifted to his human form and took the proffered shirt, gently tugging it over the dirt-matted blonde hair and down over the emaciated form that was so thin it barely showed the curves of her womanhood. His hands tingled as if with a mild shock of electricity as he ran his fingers over her bloodied cheek. He leaned down and slipped his hands under her back and her legs, and as he lifted the limp form into his arms he rasped gruffly to the boys, “Run! Run as fast as you can. I will be right behind you.”

  The boys scurried off toward the house, which was just visible through the thinning trees, and Cal walked more slowly after them, his heart hammering against the hard wall of his chest as he held the creature gently to him. The warmth from her small body permeated every bit of his flesh that she touched. The scent of blood and fear did little to camouflage the scent that curled through his head as he carried her carefully so as not to jolt her injuries more. The heady, delicious scent of female…

  My female… Mine…

  Impossible! He’d read about interracial relationships…but interspecies? No way could he find his soul mate in a dog. No way in hell…

  But the pheromone track he smelled was telling him something else entirely.

  * * * * *

  Hallie came out of the kitchen as her sons raced through the door, shouting at her to come and fix the hurt lady. Wiping her hands on a tea towel, she had barely calmed the boys down by the time Cal came into the house carrying a small bloody figure in his arms. At first she thought he had found a child in the woods, until her son’s words sank in.

  Lady?

  “The lady was a wolf, Mom, and then she turned into a lady! She’s hurt real bad!” Jon’s voice piped up.

  “She didn’t try to hurt us, Mom! Honest! She was asleep and we scared her. Uncle Cal was gonna kill her but we told him you would fix her!” Jet’s golden eyes pleaded as he grabbed her wrist and tugged. Two pairs of hopeful, puppy-dog-round eyes waited for her response.

  She lifted her gaze to Cal’s face and stared at him in shock. “You brought a dog into this house? What the hell were you thinking, Cal?” Her voice was barely a whisper.

  “Mom, she’s hurt! You gotta fix her! She was scared of us, Mom. Can you figure? Scared of two kids? Can we keep her?” Jet’s voice was excited.

  Cal didn’t offer further explanations. He turned and carried the limp female up the curved stairs to his own room, with Hallie close on his heels. She followed him into his bedroom and as he bent to place the small figure on the comforter, she whipped it off the bed and flipped the sheets open. Then her mother brain kicked in and she gently brushed leaves and dirt from the arms and legs that were being tucked into the soft clean sheet. The caked blood and the deathly pallor of the creature dragged at her heart, despite the fact that Cal had brought home something that could pose a danger to her family. The Lykos had obviously been brutally attacked, and not by either of Hallie’s mates. Leopards killed the enemy…they didn’t torture them. This was senseless brutality.

  “Here…we’ll get her cleaned up and see what we can fix. Who the hell would do something like this?” She hurried into the bathroom for a wet towel. Her thoughts were chaotic as she worried what Gar was going to do when he came home to find a dog in the house. She knelt beside the bed and began to gently swipe at the crusted blood.

  “Her own pack did it. She was terrified. She won’t pose a danger to any of us.” Cal’s gruff voice made her glance up into his face.

  “You’d better be ready to back that statement up when she wakes up. I won’t thank you if she goes Lykos on us.”

  She bit her lip as she watched him reach to remove the bloody T-shirt.

  “Boys…go get me some bandages! And bring me the big bottle of antiseptic.” She called abruptly as the T-shirt came away to reveal a badly battered, emaciated female of indeterminate age. Hallie waited until the boys were out of hearing range, and she breathed worriedly, “Cal…I know she looks like a human girl…but that really is a Lykos.”

  Cal lifted his confused golden eyes to her face and she drew a deep breath. Oh shit. He was a goner.

  “I know what she is, Hallie. I would have left her there to die, but when I touched her I knew I couldn’t. I can’t explain. I just…needed to help her.”

  Hallie swallowed hard. No way in hell! She swallowed the lump that had lodged itself in her throat. He couldn’t seriously be thinking…

  Cal’s large, calloused hand gently touched her cheek, and she blinked up at him numbly. He gazed down at her and his thumb slowly rubbed over her lower lip.

  “You know that I love you and the boys. I would never endanger you. You have to trust my instincts here.” She caught his big hand and held it to her cheek, just gazing worriedly up at him.

  He saw her concern and bent to brush her lips softly with his. “Please understand?” he murmured as they heard the boys clambering noisily back up the stairs. He turned to his chest of drawers and drew out another pair of jeans, dragging them over his long legs before turning to the boys who were just slipping into the room with the asked-for items. He turned back to her and smoothed the worry lines away from her forehead with rough fingertips. “Please…”

  Dragging in a breath, she nodded jerkily and glanced at the handful of carefully wrapped gauze bandages that Jet lifted up to her face. Taking them and the large bottle of antiseptic from her sons, she cleared her throat and said, “You boys take your Uncle Cal down to the kitchen and help him make the hurt lady some venison broth. It must be good and hot, with plenty of bits of meat in it.”

  Cal met her gaze again. She heard his soft word in her head. Please…

  Relenting but still feeling nervous about this, she said, “I won’t bite her head off…unless she wakes up hostile.”

  Cal nodded and grabbed both boys and herded them from the room, leaving her to see to his little Lykos pet.

  She drew a deep breath as she carefully checked over Cal’s new puppy—and the first thing it was going to get when those cuts healed was a badly needed bath.

  Chapter Two

  She’d followed the big golden male slavishly, watching him tend the young ones so quietly and patiently. His manner and his way of speaking to the cubs had drawn her like a moth to a beckoning flame. Perhaps it was the hard, sinuous strength hidden beneath the gentle demeanor that caught at her heart. It brushed across her parched soul like a moisture-laden breeze. Were all cat shifters like this? Or was he an aberration? He was not at all like the ferocious beasts the horror stories had told.

  She had never before felt remotely attracted to any male…much less a cat shifter! But she couldn’t help following, watching from a safe distance as he moved through the forest. He was becoming an addiction to her, ever since the first time she’d seen him.

  That had been weeks ago, on the night the pack had been stalking a pair of human drifters along the highway. She had heard stories about the two cats that constantly plagued her pack, but she had never seen them until that night. The night she had been brave enough—or maybe stupid enough—to follow the pack on a hunt.

  The dark one came first, while the pack males were trying to separate the female cub from the old male. The ancient-looking human waved a crooked stick in pathetic, feeble attempts to prevent the pack from feasting on the cub’s flesh. They were uninterested in the stringy meat of the foul-smelling old creature, whose scent told them of the wasting disease so many humans carried within their bodies. It was the female cub that made the rest of the pack salivate. Oddly, the cub’s scent did not seem at all inviting to her.

  Maybe I’ve gotten too used to rodents and rabbits.

  One moment, the old one was swinging his frail
stick at Roman while the rest lunged in to snatch away the young one…and the next, Roman was lying dead, his thick neck broken and his head severed from his shoulders by one hellish snap of fierce jaws. The world changed and the pack hesitated in their pursuit of the cub.

  Being the pack omega, and forbidden by law to join a hunt, she had followed at a distance. She hung back, and the sight of the snarling black creature confronting five fully grown males and three healthy females sent a shot of terror through her body. The hunters turned as one and went after the intruder, leaving her alone in the brush. She realized that here might be her one chance to make the pack believe she was more than just an omega. If she could salvage the hunt and grab the young one, they might treat her with more respect.

  Shaken but thrilled that she had this chance to become an important member of the pack, she whirled and skittered toward the shrieking youngster. But as she neared the cub, the oddest thing happened.

  The human cub took one look at her and opened her arms wide with a cry. She widely missed in her lunge for the soft skin of the female’s neck and instead found herself engulfed in a tight, totally unexpected grasp as the creature clutched her neck and burrowed her face into her fur. So much for my great hunting skill…

  Her confusion at the unexpected behavior of the human made her hesitate and she struggled to extricate herself from the creature’s embrace so that she could attack again, perhaps with better accuracy. Unfortunately, once she was in a position to attack again she found herself hesitating once more, unwilling to shred the cub’s tender flesh with her teeth. Killing ground squirrels and mice was never a problem…so why should killing a helpless human cub be so hard? Her resolve to become an important member of the pack was melting away.

  And that was when she heard the rage-filled scream of another intruder and jerked around to face a blur of golden fur that leapt completely over one of the bigger pack males and sent two of the females yelping into the night with powerful swipes of wide-spread claws. Her distraction allowed the human cub to clutch her around the neck again but she ignored the creature, her terrified eyes on the snarling golden fury that seemed to be deciding her fate.

  As the cub clung to her fur, the menacing beast gave his head a massive shake and whirled to rejoin the fight, leaping into the fray with a rumbling snarl of fury, taking down the older, scarred male called Ferron.

  Unable to believe her unusual luck, she shook off the clutching arms and scuttled into the trees, but not so far that she couldn’t see how the fight ended.

  It took only moments before three of her pack lay dead, and she watched in shocked fascination as the two huge cats suddenly shifted to human form and bent over the bleeding old one. The female lay in a sobbing heap where she had shaken it off and the tall, pale-haired human reached down to his leg where a small bundle was attached to one massive thigh. She watched, transfixed, as the male worked free the thong that held the bundle and casually shook out and stepped into a rolled-up pair of trousers before approaching the weeping female and lifting her gently from the ground into his arms.

  It amazed her that, instead of devouring the succulent feast of hot young flesh her pack had hoped for, the cat seemed to be helping her. Why risk injury or death to steal a piece of succulent prey only to let it go again? She watched in surprise as the dark one assisted the old human to his feet and then, when those golden eyes scanned the brush directly where she crouched watching, she slunk quietly away to find the rest of the defeated pack.

  These cats are certainly not anything like I had expected them to be…

  When she had located the survivors they had been too frightened and shaken to care about her at all, despite their frustration and rage over being unable to secure their meal. She had, as always, caught a number of rodents and ground squirrels to slake their hunger, and had been banished from their den to find a warm bed and her own sustenance for the night.

  But when light had come and she had no luck hunting for small game to feed the healing males, they hadn’t been nearly so lenient, biting her repeatedly until she was nothing but a bloody mass of cuts and bruises. They’d warned her that she must pull her own weight within the pack if she expected them to tolerate her presence. They had called her worthless. Again.

  The pack had managed to bring down an old mule deer without her help and had sent her off to hunt for small creatures to fill her own aching gut. As she had dug into a rabbit hole that rendered no hare, she had come across the spoor of the fascinating golden shifter. And with barely contained excitement, she had followed it to its end.

  She had lain hidden in the thick brush inside a copse of trees and watched as the big male who had braved the pack to save a human cub seemed to be playing joyfully with two small males. She’d assumed from their odd scent that they were leopard cubs, but unlike Lykos cubs these seemed to remain in man form when young. She had never once seen them shift into their cat form. Odd. They would be better able to defend themselves in their cat form, wouldn’t they?

  So many new things she was learning…

  She had returned to watch day after day, marveling at the way these big cats treated their young. She had watched the big dark one as well as the small female playing happily with the young ones, and she had often wished that she could experience such joy. Deep inside, seeing these things made her feel lonely…as if she were missing some elusive part of herself. But she was especially drawn to the golden shifter…for many reasons.

  Especially after she had come into the copse one afternoon and found the golden male lying with the small female in a shady shelter of brush just beyond her hiding place. She had realized that in his human form, the male aroused feelings deep inside that she had never felt before.

  She already knew from covertly watching the alpha male and female of her pack that breeding in human form was by far preferred by the members of the pack. But her pack alpha didn’t look a thing like this male. And she didn’t feel any desire to experience Jock’s rutting. For it seemed to be only that.

  The cats liked to play while mating…and that knowledge made her shiver.

  The sounds that the small female made as the big shifter rode her made her sex grow wet and twitch, despite the fact that, as an omega, she would never be breeding material. And the female was acting as if their joining gave her exquisite pleasure, despite the disparity in their sizes. There was no biting or growling. There were sounds, to be sure, but sounds of pleasure and passion, if she were any judge.

  She found a quiet spot and had shifted to her human form, touching her own body where the male had touched the little female, and was shocked and surprised that her body in human form was quite enjoyable. She watched, touching her wet sex with her own hand, until her senses erupted in a wave of shocking sensation that made her think she had died. She barely kept from howling.

  Gods…if this is what the female is feeling, it’s no wonder she begs the male not to stop!

  And so she had come back again and again, hoping for another glimpse of the cats’ mating habits. Unfortunately, she had not seen the leopards mating since that day. But their entwined bodies and the sounds of their mating came to her often in her restless dreams, leaving her hot and shaky when she awoke.

  Last night, after she’d returned from her daily excursion to spy upon the seductively appealing enemy, she had entered the den to find that another of their pack males had been mortally injured by the huge black feline as they had tried to pick off a hitchhiker just outside the town limits of Rutledge earlier that day. The pack was down to ten…and only five of them were hunting males.

  She had taken the inexcusable liberty of speaking up when no one spoke to her first, asking why the pack didn’t try hunting the mule deer herd that ranged close to their den.

  Big mistake.

  Jock, who had taken over leadership of the pack after the black Seronta shifter had killed his predecessor eight years earlier, had turned on her in a foul rage and had very nearly succeeded in tearing her thro
at out before she had managed to struggle free and roll down the hillside from the den and into the swift-moving creek that was just deep enough to be over her head. Likely thinking her to be mortally injured after the mauling he had given her, he had left her to drown.

  She had somehow managed to get her nose above the churning water and had struggled up the opposing bank to lie hidden in the briars until she regained enough strength to move. And under cover of the night she had crawled and staggered away from the den and the only family she had ever known, instinctively heading toward the only creature she thought might protect her from the death that was sure to come when Jock realized she had not drowned.

  If he doesn’t kill me himself…

  It had taken her all of the rest of that night and half of the following day to reach the copse of trees where she had lain hidden so many times and, weakened by blood loss and hunger, she had slumped into the cool grass to await her fate. She was far too hungry to heal quickly. If the pack found her she would be toast…

  The sound of the cubs laughing and running brought her awake and she rolled up, staggering to her unsteady legs. They were alone. And when they saw her, they skidded to a stop and stared at her. Never in her life had she asked for succor from a living being, but something gave her the courage to beg them for help. They seemed to understand her mind speak and didn’t flee. She was certainly no danger to anyone in her weakened state. But then she heard another voice calling, deep and rough, asking the cubs what was wrong, and she couldn’t stop herself from begging the golden one for his protection.

  Sheer, mind-numbing terror filled her when the creature burst from the trees and landed between her and the cubs, and she sensed instinctively that her next move would decide her fate. Sinking to the soft earth, she prostrated herself before him, begging mutely for his mercy. Her fevered mind fought to remain alert but when that deadly paw pressed her chest hard enough to prevent her from getting breath, she gave him her last plea, and found she was nearly too weak to make the shift. She had little strength left and it took much concentration. Perhaps the sight of her human form would allow him to see her as other than a marauding, cub-stealing predator.