Fighting for Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 3) Read online

  Fighting for Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves #3)

  Copyright © 2016 Roxie Noir

  All rights reserved.

  Fighting

  for

  Wolves

  Shifter Country Wolves #3

  Roxie Noir

  This book is intended for audiences 18 and over only.

  PREVIEW

  By the time the fight was over, Grey’s hands were shaking, even as she hugged Dane and he spun her in a giant circle. Not many things made her feel tiny, but his grasp did, and even as they celebrated Isaac’s win, she felt the heat rising through her body, the urge to wrap her legs around his frame.

  He put her down instead, grabbing her hand and squeezing it. In the ring, Isaac stared up at them, wagging his tail.

  Grey waved, grinning.

  “I’ll take you backstage,” Dane shouted into her ear. He led her by the hand through the crushing throng, shoving his way through anyone who wouldn’t move, not letting go of her, even for a moment. Finally, they got through the crowd to the other side of the pits, where Dane nodded at Pete, and pushed aside a white sheet that hung from the ceiling.

  Isaac sat in a folding chair, wearing just gym shorts, blood leaking slowly from a gash on his shoulder and puncture wounds on his chest.

  Grey gasped. It wasn’t just his wounds; Isaac’s torso was crisscrossed with scars, some long and thick, some short, some in the obvious pattern of wolf teeth or claws. The scars ran over his muscled, rugged frame like a street map.

  A map to a place where Grey really wanted to go.

  The moment they were in the makeshift tent, Isaac jumped up and walked straight for Dane.

  “Dane, I—”

  Dane grabbed Isaac’s face in both hands and kissed the other man so hard that Grey thought they might fall over, pressing their bodies together, Isaac’s blood seeping into Dane’s pale blue button-down shirt.

  Grey could only watch in a kind of hungry fascination, her eyes going wide as saucers. She’d never seen anything like it before. The pure, raw need in front of her. Its power astonished her.

  She also really, really liked it, with a feeling that went beyond liking or even lust. She wanted to join in — no, she needed it, and she held her breath, just watching.

  As they kissed, Isaac reached out and grabbed Grey’s shoulder, squeezing it and bringing her in a little closer. Then they broke apart, both chests heaving for breath.

  Isaac leaned down and kissed her as well. For a split second, Grey didn’t know what to do, but then her body took over and she took Isaac’s face between her hands, letting him draw her in, pressing her whole body against him as he opened his mouth, his tongue invading her. Grey pushed back, sliding her hands down Isaac’s neck before he let her go.

  Then Dane was there as well, his lips on Grey’s now, gentler and less frantic, his hand slowly sliding through her hair.

  She felt like she might simply melt on the spot.

  They parted as well, Grey left standing in the middle of the two men, her heart pounding through her whole body. Dane had Isaac’s blood all over himself, on his hands and shirt, and he looked down.

  “Sorry,” Isaac said, with a wicked half-smile.

  Chapter One

  Dane

  It was seven at night when Dane got the call. He was just clearing off his desk, getting ready to head home, and then his phone rang.

  Don’t answer it, he thought, even as he reached for the receiver. The world will still have problems in the morning, and when was the last time you actually ate dinner with Isaac?

  “Sorenson,” he said into the receiver.

  “Hey there,” said the voice on the other end. “Don’t leave just yet.”

  Dane could hear loud voices in the background of the phone call, along with shouting, the sound of tires, and sirens.

  “What’s going on, Ramirez?” he said. “It sounds like you’ve got the National Guard out there.”

  “Homicide,” said the other voice.

  Dane straightened his back in surprise.

  Now he was fully alert.

  “Homicide?” he asked, incredulous.

  “Yup,” said Ramirez. “Unless our victim managed to fall on a large knife several times.”

  “Shit,” breathed Dane. “Where is it? What happened?”

  He could practically hear Ramirez shrug over the phone.

  “Nice young girl found him in the alleyway between Main and First,” he said. “Says she was taking a shortcut home from a friend’s house. Guy got stabbed at least three times, maybe more. As for what happened, I think that one’s your job, detective. Get out here.”

  They hung up the phone, and Dane sat back down.

  Rustvale wasn’t the sort of place where this happened. It was a small town, and even though the wolves could get violent sometimes — last year, his own brother had set a car on fire and Dane had been the one to arrest him — there weren’t murders.

  Not in Rustvale. At most, they’d have vehicular homicides, hit-and-runs, or just accidents. This was beyond the pale.

  The phone rang again, and reluctantly, Dane picked it up, praying it wasn’t Ramirez with another body.

  “Sorenson,” he said.

  “Looks like a long night, so we’re getting pizza,” said Patty, the woman who worked the front desk. “What do you want?”

  “Pepperoni?” Dane said, his mind elsewhere. “Thanks, Patty.”

  I have to call the coroner, he thought. I don’t even remember his name. Are we still using half the morgue as file storage? We should get those out of there.

  Dane started pacing.

  When was the last time we had a murder? He wondered. Ten years? Twenty?

  He’d only made detective last year, when the previous guy had retired. There wasn’t much need for more than one on the Rustvale police squad. Dane managed to keep busy, but there certainly wasn’t enough work for two of him. Most of his job was investigating robberies, break-ins, and vehicle thefts.

  A couple of years ago, there had been a kidnapping case that had nearly paralyzed the town for a day. Then it turned out to be part of a custody battle in a divorce, and the kid was just with her mom, who’d taken her without the dad knowing.

  People didn’t get murdered in Rustvale, and they certainly didn’t get stabbed in alleys and left like a pile of trash.

  Snap to it, Sorenson, he told himself.

  With a sigh, he sat back down at his desk and turned his computer back on so he could look up the number of the coroner that Rustvale shared with the surrounding counties.

  We don’t even have enough problems for our own coroner, he thought.

  Dane shook his head and dialed the number.

  Ten minutes later, he grabbed his jacket and his badge and headed out the front door of the police station.

  “Hey,” said Patty. “Where you going? The pizza will be here any minute.”

  Dane half-smiled at Patty. She was an older human, the sort of receptionist who excelled at a few tasks, but hadn’t learned any new skills in about ten years.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I should’ve taken a raincheck, I gotta go to the scene.”

  Patty’s eyebrows arched upward, and her frosted pink lips thinned into a line.

  “Can you believe it?” she whispered. “A murder in Rustvale? You know, just last week I saw a couple of young men — up-to-no-good types — just take off racing down the highway on the loudest motorcycles. I bet they might have something to do with it.”

  Dane just nodded. It was impossible to ever tell Patty that she was wrong about something, and he’d given up long ago.

&nbs
p; “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “Thanks for the tip.”

  “Just trying to help,” she said, looking pleased.

  Dane walked down the steps of the police station, getting into his unmarked car. It was early April, and a few scraps of snow were still just clinging to the ground, only in places that stood in deep shadow all day long. Pretty soon, all the trees would start getting their leaves back, the flowers would start blooming, and Rustvale would blossom to life once more.

  He could practically smell it in the air. Wolves didn’t hibernate — they weren’t bears — but the winter always felt especially long to them, and when the days got warmer and longer, everyone seemed to get a little stir crazy.

  Stir crazy enough to murder? He wondered, getting into the car. He could feel it himself, a deep itch in his bones, the urge to run through the forests and fields, leaping into streams and chasing after rabbits in pure canine joy.

  Please, let this not have been a wolf shifter, Dane thought as he pulled the car out of the police station parking lot. We’ve got a bad enough reputation already.

  It seemed like he was the last person to get to the crime scene, since the small back alleyway was completely mobbed. Most of the people there were just onlookers, gawking at the most serious crime that Rustvale had seen in years. Scattered among them were reporters for the local news station, jockeying along with their cameras to get the best possible view. The crime scene tape blocked the path, and uniformed deputies stood in front of it, doing their best to control the crowd.

  “Detective Sorenson!” one of the reporters shouted. In the glare of the lights, he could just barely make out the reporter’s face.

  “Any idea who might do this?” she asked.

  He raised both hands into the air.

  “I just got here,” he said. “No comment just yet.”

  “Can you confirm or deny rumors that a vicious motorcycle gang has been seen in the area?” she asked, shoving through the crowd and presenting him with a large microphone.

  Deep down, his wolf snapped at the woman, but Dane held it back. He had plenty of practice in holding it back.

  Gingerly, he put a hand on the foam sphere at the end of the microphone and pushed it back.

  “I haven’t heard those rumors,” he said. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to get to work.”

  She shouted something else, but Dane lifted the police tape and walked underneath it, then over to where Ramirez, the police chief, stood looking down at a long knobby lump underneath a black plastic sheet.

  It was the body, of course. Dane took a deep breath and lifted the plastic sheet from the face, bracing himself for the worst.

  “Shit,” he said when he saw the victim.

  “You know this kid?” asked Ramirez.

  “Yeah,” said Dane reluctantly. “Not well. But I know him.”

  Ramirez just let out a long, low whistle, shaking his head.

  “Sorry about that, man,” he said.

  “It’s Nicky Grant,” Dane said, still staring at the kid’s face. It was true what they said about dead people: they really did look like they were just sleeping. “You know my fuck-up little brother?”

  “Zeke?” said Ramirez.

  “Yeah,” said Dane.

  Zeke was across the state, closer to the coast, doing a couple of years in the state prison outside Eureka for setting someone’s car on fire. The moron hadn’t even run.

  “Nicky sort of hung around with Zeke and his friends, though he was a couple of years younger,” Dane said. “I didn’t know him well, but he seemed like he was always getting into trouble, pissing people off. He thought he was a big-time gangster, but I don’t think he ever did more than smoke pot and talk a big game.”

  “Looks like he pissed off the wrong person,” Ramirez said. “Six stab wounds.”

  “You said three on the phone.”

  “I got a better look,” said Ramirez.

  “Well, I called the coroner,” said Dane. “Sounds like we know cause of death, but it wouldn’t hurt to do things by the book. We got the weapon?”

  Ramirez shook his head.

  “Not yet,” he said. “But I’ll have some of the guys go through the dumpster here and I bet we’ll find it.”

  Dane eyed the overflowing dumpster, glad he’d gotten a promotion. Once upon a time, he’d been the guy whose job it was to go through the dumpster.

  “Signs of a struggle, anything? Witnesses?”

  They both crouched down by the body, and Ramirez lifted the sheet the rest of the way off. In the background, Dane could hear cameras clicking away.

  Disgusting, he thought. This man is dead.

  Nicky’s hands had two long gashes in them, like he’d grabbed a knife blade.

  “Looks like he didn’t get much of a chance,” Dane said. “Might have grabbed the blade when it was already too late.”

  “Something like that,” said Ramirez. “Hard to say.”

  “Nobody heard anything?”

  Ramirez just shook his head.

  “No residences this end of the street,” he said. “The boutique out front closes at six, the other storefront is empty right now, and the Chinese takeout place is closed Mondays.”

  Damn, thought Dane.

  “I wonder if that’s by design or coincidence,” he said out loud.

  Ramirez shrugged.

  “Who found him?” Dane asked. “I should talk to them.”

  Ramirez pointed to a girl standing at the edge of the crime scene, arms crossed in front of her, frowning at the body, and Dane looked up at her.

  Then he sucked in his breath. For a split second, he felt like he was upside down in a wind tunnel, the world around him howling as he got nearly blown away, and then everything was normal again.

  She was gorgeous. Even though she wore a cardigan over her sundress, it couldn’t hide the swell of her bosom or the luscious curve of her hips, or where the dress nipped in perfectly at her waist. Her shoulder-length blond hair fell over her eyes, and she kept jerking her head to move it away, her arms folded in front of her, like she was uncertain or nervous or cold or all three.

  Dane wanted to do things to her, filthy, dirty things, like push her up against the brick wall in the alley and watch her lips move as she whispered his name—

  You cannot get a boner in front of this dead body, he reprimanded himself.

  Absolutely. Not.

  He tore his eyes away and stood, staring down. That fixed his problem pretty quickly.

  “Well, seems like there’s not much else to do here,” he said. “I can give her a ride down to the station and get her statement.”

  Ramirez frowned, just a little.

  “That’s probably not necessary,” he said, glancing at the girl. “She just found him, screamed, and ran to that liquor store next to the Chinese take-out place. Just get her statement here.”

  But then I’d only talk to her for a few minutes, Dane thought to himself. I need more than that.

  I need her.

  “We should really do this by the book,” he said. “I ought to get her recorded and all that, since it’s a murder investigation.”

  Ramirez nodded.

  “Good point,” the other man said, then clapped him on the shoulder. “I’ll get the EMTs to take the body to the morgue.”

  Dane swallowed and took a deep breath. He walked around Nicky’s body toward the girl.

  She stood still, just watching him walk over with big, deep blue eyes.

  “Hi,” she said when he reached her. She had a soft, musical voice, and she raised one hand to tug at her hair.

  “I’m Detective Sorenson,” Dane said. His heart beat so hard he was nervous that it might break a rib, but he kept going.

  “I’m Grey,” she said.

  Be professional, he thought. You talk to witnesses all the time. Just act professional.

  “You found the body?”

  The girl just nodded. She seemed jumpy and nervous — standard fo
r someone who’d found a body in an alleyway.

  “He was just right there,” she said. “I was walking home from, uh, from my friend’s house — the alley’s a shortcut — and I thought he was asleep at first, but then a car turned out in the street and I saw that there was this huge puddle of blood around him, so I screamed,” she said.

  “Listen,” Dane said. “Do you mind coming down to the station so I can take your statement there?”

  “Am I in trouble?” she asked, her eyes going even wider. She wove her blond hair through her fingers, tugging on it.

  “No, not at all,” Dane said, quickly. He had to fight the urge to take her shoulder in his hand and comfort her. “It’s just a little crazy here, and if we go back, we can record you properly, all that. Besides, you look cold.”

  As if just remembering the temperature, the girl pulled her cardigan around her a little more.

  “Sure,” she said. “I wouldn’t mind sitting down and not being near a dead body.”

  Dane led her to his car.

  “Do I get in the back?” she asked.

  He grinned.

  “I’m not arresting you,” he said. “Sit in the front.”

  In the car, she was mostly quiet, not that Dane could blame her. Even as a cop, he’d only seen a few dead bodies. In Rustvale, most of the deaths that he saw were elderly people who died in their own homes. After a day or two, a friend or neighbor would start to worry, and he’d get called in to break down the door.

  Sad, but not a crime.

  “You ever get into a high-speed chase?” she asked, her voice still soft.

  “Nah,” said Dane. “To be honest, this is probably the biggest case I’ve ever had.”

  “Sleepy town?” she asked.

  He shrugged, his mouth hitching up into half of a smile.

  Don’t smile, you weirdo, he told himself. She just found a dead body. Now is not the time.

  “Not quite sleepy, but not much happens here,” he said as he pulled into the parking lot of the police station.