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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2018 by Terry Spear

  Cover and internal design © 2021 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Stephanie Gafron/Sourcebooks

  Cover images © KDdesignphoto/Shutterstock, Jim Cumming/Getty Images, Brian Caissie/Getty Images

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Casablanca, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60567-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Epilogue

  Excerpt from The Wolf Wore Plaid

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Prologue

  1840

  Colorado Rockies

  The weather was so dry—too dry. Though the red wolf pack lived in stone or log cabin homes near the river, Serena Wilder’s father had warned that anything—a campfire, an electrical storm—could set off a wildfire and destroy their lives.

  Today was that day, the fire catching hold so fast that no one had time to locate each other. She’d been gathering thimbleberries for a pie, but tossed her basket aside, the berries spilling out onto the dry pine needles as the winds carried the flames through the dry brush. The pine needles and leaves discarded at the base of the trees added fuel to the already out-of-control fire.

  Serena was alone. Her twin sister, Bella, was gathering kindling somewhere else; her cousins, uncle and aunt, and her parents, were all doing chores. The men had been hunting for food. Her mother and cousins? She didn’t know. As a six-year-old girl, she couldn’t run as fast as a wolf to escape the fury behind her, so she stripped and shifted into her wolf pup form and ran toward the river. The smoke was so thick, she could barely breathe, and the flames danced from tree to tree high above her, the wind carrying the crackling sound like a warning: Run little wolf, or you’ll get burned.

  But the smoke could kill her first.

  The last few feet to the river, she leapt as far as her small legs could, landing in the wet reeds. Finding a beaver’s den, she buried herself in the sodden wood. She howled for her family, but didn’t hear any sign of them, just the river splashing over her hiding place. She prayed the flames wouldn’t catch hold on the wet wood, but as hot as it was, she feared it could. The wind blew and fire snapped and popped as it burned everything in its path.

  Crying wolf’s tears, she felt a lump the size of her home lodged in her throat. She prayed her family had found refuge somewhere safe.

  The fires raged, the ground too hot to cross, small fires still eating away at larger trees. Her clothes and her basket she’d woven were gone, burned up along with everything else. Rains came after that, putting out the fires, and once they’d stopped, she left the river and made her way to her stone house as a wolf. The roof and everything that had been inside, the furniture her father and uncle had made, was nothing but soggy, charred remains.

  She discovered her mother, still fully dressed, lying beneath a rock ledge, protected from the fire a short distance from the house. But Serena couldn’t wake her. She sat and howled for the loss of her mother, for her family. Slept there beside her, until Serena knew she had to eat and drink and find a way to survive. She never found anyone else—Bella, her father, or the rest of her family—but one day she heard a wagon coming, and, hating to do it, she shifted into her human form. Covered in soot, teary-eyed, and naked, she stood on the wagon trail, hoping someone would take care of her until she could fend for herself.

  Chapter 1

  Present Day

  Omaha, Nebraska

  Serena Wilder packed up her belongings at the library where she had worked for four years. This was her last day because she and two other women were no longer needed on staff. Between funding cuts and the newly-installed automations—automatic book check-ins and self-checkouts—she knew she had to find another job, but she hadn’t had any success. She packed away her remaining wolf postcards—not of any wolves she knew, but just the generic kind her friends had given her, because they knew how much she loved wolves, though not the reason why—that she had tacked to the board above her desk.

  Her other two laid-off coworkers—strictly human—had already left. Serena had always worked around books, from being a teacher in the early days, to working in the first libraries. She loved books. But she’d had to move so many times over the years, and she was always starting over. How could she not? Once she hit her late teens, she had aged so slowly. People would wonder.

  Now she’d applied for unemployment compensation, but she had a “waiting week” before she could be paid for subsequent weeks. After that, the amount of her highest quarterly earnings would be divided by thirteen and then again by two. So her compensation would be half of what she was already earning and wouldn’t be enough to support her.

  Serena was worried about paying her share of the house she was renting with a male gray wolf, Harold Gaston, but he’d assured her she’d get back on her feet and could pay him later. As a telephone line repairman, he made more money than she did. They’d met at a local diner, the first shifter she’d met in all her years of moving about. They didn’t feel anything for each other in the way wolves who wanted to mate would. Her momma had often shared the story of how she had met Serena’s dad. How they’d fallen in love from the beginning. And how she and her sister would have the same wolfish interest in another wolf when they were older—just like that. When she met Harold, she didn’t feel any of the romantic feelings she thought she should have; nothing about him made her heartbeat quicken.

  Serena was an avid romance reader, but she’d never been madly in love or even intrigued by a human, either, though her mother and father would have frowned at her even considering such a thing, if they’d still lived. Wolves mated with wolves for life. Not with humans, though she’d had a few human lovers over the years.

  With their sensitive shifter hearing, she found sharing a house with another wolf sure beat living in a noisy apartment complex. And she liked being able to talk to Harold about wolf shifter things that she couldn’t with anyone else.

  She had the rest of her day planned—go home, run, shower, and hit the road to apply for yet another round of jobs. Anything would do for now.

  When she
got home, she was surprised to find Harold standing inside, his sandy hair tousled, his small, black eyes studying her. She thought he’d had to work. He smiled at her, but he shoved his hands in his pockets. He seemed tense, troubled. “I had some business to attend to, so I took the day off. How are you doing?”

  “I’ve left the library for good.” She set her bag of wolf cards on the dining room table. “I’m going for a run. Wanna go with me?” It would make her feel better to run off some of the frustration she was feeling.

  “No, I’ve really got to take care of some business.”

  He didn’t say what his business was, but then again, they were just roommates; he had a right to privacy.

  Then she realized why she had been so surprised to see him home, besides the fact that he was supposed to be working. No brand-new red pickup truck was parked out front.

  “Having trouble again with your truck?”

  “Yeah, pain in the ass. Total lemon.”

  “Is that the business you have to take care of?”

  “It is.”

  “Did you want me to drive you then? I need to apply for some more jobs, but I’d be happy to help you out.”

  “No, I’ve got a friend coming by to take me to the dealership shortly.”

  But it was all a lie. He was all a lie. Maybe not the truck being a lemon part, but everything else…

  * * *

  When Serena returned home from running, she saw her car was gone. She panicked. Had someone stolen it? She raced through the house, looking for Harold, calling out to him. He was gone. So was her wallet and her car keys from where she’d left them on the dresser.

  It didn’t mean Harold had taken the car, but then she smelled the scent of a female gray wolf. He wasn’t supposed to know any other wolves. Warning bells began going off. She told herself that he could have just met her. But why had her wallet, keys and car vanished?

  She hurried to his room—everything was gone. She tried calling him, the call going to voicemail.

  She pulled out her laptop and logged into his email—thanking providence that he’d given her his password six months ago to look up something for him when his phone went out on him at work and he desperately had needed the information.

  She barely breathed when she saw he had a plane trip scheduled for him and a woman named Velvet Jamison this afternoon for Grand Cayman Island. Then she received an email on her phone from her bank thanking her for having an account with them and hoping she would consider opening another with them in the future. What the hell?

  She immediately called the bank and was told that her account was closed.

  “Tell me again how Harold Gaston could have cleaned out my bank account without my authorization.”

  “Whoever closed your account had two forms of valid ID. We’ll notify the proper authorities, Miss Wilder.”

  A lot of good that would do Serena. The bastard would be on Grand Cayman Island with her money, sipping a fruity cocktail with one of those flipping colorful umbrellas and enjoying the sun, while she was stuck here on this cold spring day in Omaha, Nebraska. He’d be beyond anyone’s legal jurisdiction. And all her hard-earned money would be sitting safely in his Cayman account. Or he’d spend it all. At least she’d learned where he’d gone. She was glad he hadn’t thought to change his password.

  “What do I do now? He took everything I own!” Serena said to the bank clerk. Well, not everything, but close to it. “I have $150 in cash and that’s it. He stole my car even!” Without enough money to pay $1,050 for this month’s rent, Serena would lose the rental home too. At least it had come furnished, so she didn’t have too much to leave behind when she packed up and vacated the place.

  She again thought of home. She’d been thinking of returning to the old homestead, wondering if there were any shifter wolf packs out there. She kept feeling like there might be, like there had been in the past. There also might not be, but she hadn’t had any luck in finding wolves in the places she’d been living—Tennessee, Georgia, Oklahoma, Arkansas, here. She hadn’t returned to Colorado since the human family had taken her from there and raised her. She yearned to find a wolf to love, who would love her in return like her mother and father had loved each other. Like her aunt and uncle had loved one another too.

  A distant memory stirred faintly. The walls of her family’s stone house had still been standing. What if her family’s home was still there? A dilapidated building, maybe? What if she could claim the land for her own? She remembered catching her father putting something beneath the basement’s stone floor one Christmas Eve. He’d explained to her the importance of the documents there—money for a rainy day, although for most things they bartered; a will; a deed to the house. Even if the house wasn’t salvageable, maybe the land was worth something.

  She shuddered. She had never returned there. Not after the wildfire killed her family. All she remembered was the smell of smoke hanging thick in the air, gray ash covering everything. And she had never gotten the sight of her dead mother out of her mind, assuming, years later, that her mother had succumbed to smoke inhalation.

  “Miss Wilder, we could give you a bank loan,” the clerk said.

  “A bank loan.” Giving a bitter laugh, Serena wanted to kill Harold. “That would be the day.” She wouldn’t even be able to get that once they learned she’d lost her job. Thank God, she had a credit card phone case, and had her phone with her when she went running, but she didn’t want to get herself in debt in the event going after Harold and her money didn’t pan out.

  She ended the call. Harold, the snake. She wanted every penny he’d stolen from her.

  Except she needed money to get to him. And since they were both wolves, she really couldn’t go to the police. Though the bank was sure to call them.

  The only money she figured she could get her hands on quickly was her family’s savings—if any of it was buried beneath the stone floor. It would be old money though; then again, may be worth a mint—if her home was still there and hadn’t been torn down. If it was, after all this time, surely someone else would have taken her property for their own. Not one of her red wolf kind. A human usurper.

  She ground her teeth.

  She didn’t want to see the woods where she had romped as a child. Or relive the horror she’d experienced when she had found shelter in the beavers’ lodgings. She didn’t want to set eyes on the home she had loved—not after her family had died so horribly there.

  But she couldn’t think of any other option for now. She had to have money, and then she’d go after the bigger prize. Harold. Teach him to mess with one of her kind. He’d never do it again.

  First, she had to find her car. Taking a taxi to the airport in hopes her car was there, she discovered his scent in the long-term parking area closest to the entrance he would have used to reach his gate and backtracked to where he must have parked her car. Between that and using her spare keys, she finally located it, her driver’s license and other set of keys sitting on the console.

  Now, it was time to take the next step—return home after all these years.

  * * *

  Two days later in the Colorado Rockies, someone or something stalked Serena as she left her car behind on the gravel road. She headed in what she thought was the right direction of her family’s home, after going through the small town near where they’d lived, though it had grown some in size. The livery was now a museum; the old hotel, renovated; the feed store was still a feed store; the post office, a shop. And myriads of other buildings that were once homes along Main Street were now shops, bed and breakfasts, or art galleries. But the town was still quaint, no large department store chains. A couple of gas stations, a grocery store, a bank, and a few other shops had been added. A few more homes spread out from the town. But it was still a sleepy Colorado country town.

  Beyond the town, she’d located the rock formations she and
her sister used to climb that reminded her of giant stepping stones, a monument to an earlier time. In her day, the road that traveled past the stones had been dirt. Now it was gravel, not even paved yet.

  Serena slipped between pine trees, barely making a sound as her hiking boots padded along the pine needle–covered floor. Whatever followed her proved clever, always keeping downwind of her, no matter how many times she circled, trying to locate it.

  Keep cool, Serena. Don’t let it rattle you.

  Yet, she couldn’t help the way her skin crawled. Every fine hair on her arms stood at attention. Her heart beat wildly and the sound of her blood pumping hammered in her ears.

  She’d lived among humans way too long and had forgotten how to use her wolf instincts. Listen to the sounds of nature, she warned herself. What do you hear? Ignore your panic. Listen.

  The rustle of the new green oak leaves shivered in the cool spring breeze. A distant creek gurgled over rounded stones as it had for thousands of years. A woodpecker pecked at rotting wood and a gray squirrel scampered up a nearby birch.

  Something, whatever it was, watched and waited for her to make a move, as silent and cold as falling snow, as dangerously sneaky as a forest fire.

  Damn it. Nothing would intimidate her in her woods. She hadn’t thought they would be so green, as if the forest fire had never happened. She wasn’t sure how she felt about that—as life went on without them.

  She breathed in the wildness, enjoying the fragrance of spring. It stirred happy memories—sad ones, too. She’d only planned to find her home, the hidden money, a will, and the deed, but already she was feeling a pang of regret for not having returned sooner, for not taking back her family’s heritage, if she could. She shook her head at the sentimental human part of the equation. All she came for was her money, the will, and the deed, so she could put the property up for sale after she took care of Harold and got what was left of the money he’d stolen from her. Afterward, she could live here until she sold off the property. But she’d been so upset over him, she realized she wasn’t thinking clearly. How would she prove she was the descendent of the family who had owned the property in the first place?