Page 1 of What a Wolf Demands

Prologue

Bon Rêve, Louisiana

One Month Earlier

“You boys ready for another round?” Lily Agincourt wiped her hands on her apron and blew a strand of hair off her damp forehead. She was sweating like crazy. The air conditioning must be broken again. Not that it had ever worked that well to begin with. Freon could only do so much against the relentless heat of a Louisiana summer. Her thin cotton T-shirt clung to her back and belly, and her jean short cutoffs did little to relieve the sticky discomfort of an eight-hour bartending shift.

One of the men sitting at the bar ran a suggestive look down her body. “Only if you’re on the menu, Lily.”

How original. In her mind, she envisioned grabbing one of the heavy glass pitchers off the counter and smashing it over his head. It was a pleasant fantasy—and one she’d entertained often over the past five years.

But it was just that: fantasy. And it had to stay that way. For one thing, assaulting customers was a surefire way to lose her job. As crappy as the tips were at Bart’s, her paycheck kept the lights on.

Most of the time, anyway.

But job security was only half the reason she had to behave herself. The other half had everything to do with the fact that the three men sitting at her bar weren’t just burly good ol’ boys with arms thicker than her waist.

They were also werewolves. Loup-garou, as some in the South called them. And unlike her, they were the pure-blooded kind, capable of making the Turn. Capable of sprouting claws that could tear her to pieces in seconds if she so much as looked at them funny.

In fact, they would probably love nothing more.

So she didn’t smash anyone’s head with a pitcher. Instead, she forced a smile and addressed the man who’d spoken, careful to keep her gaze in the vicinity of his chin.

“I think Bart has some gumbo in the back if you’re hungry, Luc.”

Pierre-Luc Thibeaux narrowed his eyes, his heavy brows pulling together in a frown over a jutting forehead. On either side of him, his companions sat up a little straighter, obviously sensing the shift in his mood. The air became heavier, as if the oxygen weighed more. Each breath was like trying to fill a balloon.

Over in the corner, two other wolves paused their pool game and turned their heads toward the bar. The country music drifting softly from the old jukebox took on a sinister quality.

Lily froze. Shit. What had she said wrong? Her heart pounded. She took deep breaths in an effort to slow it. Not that it mattered much. Every man in the bar could hear her heart beat. Hell, Bart probably heard it all the way in his office.

Luc leaned forward, and a sheen of unnatural blue rolled over his dull brown eyes as he studied her face. When he spoke, his voice was lower than a regular human male’s. “Are you being smart with me, Lily?”

Gaze on his chest, she gave her head a small, barely there shake. “No, Luc. I wasn’t trying to be smart.” A bead of sweat made a quick sprint down her spine. “I would never try to be smart with you.”

For one thing, his mental prowess wasn’t anything to write home about. Luc Thibeaux might descend from one of the most prominent werewolf families in Bon Rêve, but his name was just about the only thing going for him. Maybe that explained why he was still single at forty-five. Werewolves lived a bit longer than humans—about a hundred thirty years—but they tended to marry young. The species’ abysmal birth rates had a lot to do with it. Most mated couples only managed to produce one child. It didn’t take a math genius to understand what that meant for the race’s long-term survival.

Of course, if Luc was representative of the options available to werewolf females, the race might be doomed sooner than everyone thought.

He let the silence stretch for what felt like a full minute, then slapped his hand on the counter, making Lily jump. “Well, all right, then,” he said, his eyes once more a muddy brown. He glanced at his companions. “What do you say, boys, should we make it another round?”

Tension drained from the bar. In the corner, the two wolves resumed their game, the soft click of billiard balls cutting through the music.

“Hell, yeah,” the man on Luc’s right, a red-haired wolf named Charlie Lafont, said. He shot Lily a sneer that somehow managed to be both contemptuous and sexual. “I’ll take anything Latent Lily here is serving up.”

Lily stiffened, the old nickname rolling around her mind like a marble. Back when she and Charlie attended Bon Rêve’s tiny high school, he and his friends had delighted in tormenting her after she failed to make the Turn. In the human world, teenagers were preoccupied with peer pressure and dating and burgeoning sexuality. Werewolves dealt with all the same things, but they also had to worry about making that first transition from two legs to four. Most wolves Turned with the onset of puberty. And since girls usually matured faster than boys, female werewolves expected to make their first Turn by thirteen or fourteen.

For some wolves, though, the Turn never came. No one knew why, but not every biological werewolf had the ability to shift from human to animal. In werewolf culture, such wolves were called latents. Although latents possessed an inner wolf, they had no way to express it. When a werewolf’s animal urges compelled him to hunt or attack, he Turned and gave himself up to fang and forest. Latents experienced all the same urges and desires, but they were forever trapped in human form. In many cases, the beast’s pull became too much. Imprisoned in human flesh, some latents went insane.

Pure-bloods like Luc and Charlie had a lot of words for latent wolves.

Tragic.

Dangerous.

Burden.

Useless.

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