Tamed By The She-Wolf. Kristal Hollis

oversize duffel bag. Grimacing, he began stretching it over his naturally bronze stump.

      Angeline folded her arms over her chest, hoping he didn’t notice her weakness, a traitorous heart that tweaked because of the traumatic loss he had suffered. “Tristan should’ve warned me.”

      If he had, she might’ve refused.

      Watching Lincoln pull the state-of-the-art prosthetic leg from his duffel, guilt stabbed at her conscience. He would only be in town a few weeks. She could grit her teeth and be neighborly for that long, couldn’t she?

       Chapter 2

      Half naked and legless wasn’t how Lincoln had imagined meeting his guardian angel in the flesh. Angeline’s long auburn hair framed a face Lincoln would have recognized even if he were a blind man with only his hands to feel the shape of her feminine brow, her high, angular cheeks and soft, full lips. God only knew how often he had traced every angle and plane of the woman in the worn photograph he’d carried with him for the better part of the last fifteen years. Now that he’d encountered the she-wolf in the flesh, his heart wouldn’t stop fluttering and the tingly sensation in his stomach would make him sick if it didn’t stop soon.

      Attaching the prosthetic to his stump, Lincoln didn’t dare take his gaze off Angeline, fearing she would disappear like she had so often in his dreams.

      The old picture entrusted to him by the dying Dogman on Lincoln’s first mission hadn’t done Angeline justice because it had failed to capture her fire and strength of will. Unlike the fragile, ethereal female he’d envisioned, the real woman—strong, sassy, sexy—took him utterly by surprise.

      “When is the last time you ate?” Despite the gentleness in her voice, Angeline’s hard, no-nonsense gaze didn’t soften.

      “On the plane, somewhere over the ocean,” he said over the loud rumblings of his stomach. Grabbing his camo pants, he stuffed his good leg into the pant leg and then slid the other pant leg over his prosthetic without embarrassment over his nearly nude state. For Wahyas, nudity was as natural as eating and breathing.

      “I’m coming off a ten-hour flight from Munich. I got stuck in customs for over two hours in the Atlanta airport because the TSA agents had never seen the bionics used in my leg. Then I had a nearly three-hour drive to get here and all of the drive-throughs in town were closed.”

      He wouldn’t starve, though. Inside his duffel were the rations he’d consumed for so long that he no longer remembered the taste of real food.

      Wordlessly, Angeline stood and strolled into the kitchen. Lincoln quickly wiggled the pants over his boxers. He didn’t particularly like the undergarments but had learned to tolerate them during his recovery when the friction from long pants made his stump feel as if it were on fire.

      “Bon appetite,” Angeline said, returning with a large foam box in her hands.

      She opened the lid. The spicy scent of a mountain of buffalo chicken wings made his mouth water. His eyes might’ve, too, because she had offered him food. Actual everyday, take-for-granted, comfort food. Not canned or freeze-dried rations. Not bland, pasty mess hall slop or the airline’s processed micro meals. Real, honest-to-goodness food, only mere inches from his face.

      But, remembering the near-empty refrigerator and pantry, he waved away her offering. “Thanks. But no.”

      Times were tough and he didn’t want to take advantage of her kindness.

      Her nostrils flared slightly and her full, luscious lips flattened.

      “I meant no offense,” he said, pulling on a black sweatshirt. Wolfans took food seriously. Refusing food insulted the one offering it. “But I don’t need your supper.”

      His stomach protested. Loudly.

      “I’m not the one whose stomach is about to eat itself.” She jabbed the box toward him. “Take them, they’re yours.”

      “I saw the fridge.” He gently pushed back the tempting container. “You need to eat those more than I do. I have rations that will hold me over. And I’ll pay you for the beer.” He dug a wallet from the duffel and held out a fifty-dollar bill.

      Mouth open and shock rippling through her gaze, she stared at his hand. Suddenly, full-bellied feminine laughter shook her body.

      Before the explosion, Lincoln had found a woman’s laugh sexy. In his current circumstance, scarred and crippled, he felt belittled and hurt. He’d built up a fantasy about this woman. One where her kindness and gentleness had soothed and safe-guarded him. In reality, Angeline mocked him the same way the Program’s bureaucrats had when Lincoln had insisted that he could still perform his sworn duties.

      The money slipped through his fingers and drifted to the floor. Whether she used it or not, Lincoln didn’t care.

      He stood, steady and effortlessly. After a month of endless practice, he could stand, walk, run, jump and climb stairs with ease. Kneeling could be a bit tricky, but he managed. Shifting into his wolf form had proven to be the most challenging. No longer could he simply strip down and crouch before turning into his wolf. Now he had to carefully remove the artificial leg, otherwise it would turn to ash during the transformation.

      As life changing as the loss had been, he was grateful to be alive. If he’d died instead of Lila, no one would go to the lengths Lincoln would to find his missing wolfling.

      He slung the strap of the duffel bag over his shoulder then trudged toward the door.

      “Where are you going?”

      “To sleep in my truck until I can straighten this out with Tristan,” he snapped, too exhausted to keep the frustration and anger from his voice.

      “I wasn’t laughing at you, Lincoln.”

      His hand froze on the doorknob.

      “It’s sweet of you to overpay for the beer to help me out with groceries, but I don’t need it. The fridge is empty because I don’t like to cook, not because I can’t afford to buy food. That’s why I laughed.”

      She eased behind him. “You see, I can take care of myself. And if I ever needed anything, my family and my pack would step up. That’s how the Walker’s Run Co-operative works.”

      A few years ago, while in Romania and assigned to a protective detail for the Woelfesenat’s negotiator, Brice Walker, Lincoln had learned of the Walker’s Run pack’s co-operative. Consisting of wolfans and a handful of humans aware of the existence of Wahyas, the Co-op gave the Walker’s Run pack a public, human face and a clever way to hide in plain sight among the unsuspecting townsfolk in Maico, a small Appalachian community in northeast Georgia where the pack resided.

      Pivoting toward Angeline, Lincoln noticed the genuine concern etched on her face. Clearly, she hadn’t meant to upset him and he felt like an idiot to have allowed a trivial misunderstanding to bruise his pride.

      Nine weeks in the infirmary at Headquarters had turned him soft. Lincoln had hoped time away from HQ might help him regain his bearings. Now, he might need to reassess that decision.

      How could he stay focused on increasing his stamina and sharpening his combat skills so he could return to Somalia and find Dayax when his guardian angel had escaped his dreams and lived only a few door down from where he would be staying?

      “You can have this back.” Slowly, her long, tapered fingers slid into his hip pocket to deposit the fifty. The ensuing jolt to his system rendered his entire body flaccid, except for his shaft, which instantly hardened.

      “As I said before, bon appétit!” Moving her other hand from behind her back, Angeline presented him with the box of chicken wings. “And no there’s no need to sleep in your truck. I have a key to Tristan’s apartment.”

      “Why?” Lincoln wondered about