Page 6 of Fire on the Moon

Chapter Three

“Got ’ya.”

The man pulled a gun, but before he could fire, a large dog sprang from behind a palm tree and leaped on the thug. The gun discharged as he went down, but his aim was wild.

Still, the noise brought his partner running. The man rolled on the ground, crying out as the dog chomped on his arm. The other man was trying to get a shot at the dog, but there was no way to do it with his friend and the animal shifting positions.

Francesca didn’t know where the animal had materialized from or why it had come to her rescue. But she saw it give one last chomp to the thug’s arm before suddenly leaping on the other man and knocking him to the ground.

The killer screamed and dropped his weapon. Both men were on the sand now, neither of them equipped to shoot the dog.

Taking the opportunity to escape, she slipped into the crowd of people who had gathered between the house and the Gulf, their gazes glued to the fire. As far as she could tell, none of them had seen her or the animal attack. For a split second she considered running up to one of them and explaining what had happened.

Then she tried to think logically. This had started—with a shooting. But she hadn’t seen it. Was she going to sound crazy if she tried to explain? Or would the cops believe her? Wasn’t the person who found a murder victim the prime suspect? Maybe she had shot her uncle and started the fire to cover it up.

Of course, she had another problem. She’d been so cautious about coming down here because her father had always implied that her uncle was a dangerous character who ran with bad company. She’d prayed he had changed. Apparently not. Scumbags had killed him. Well, she hadn’t seen it, but she had heard what they were saying. It sounded like he was in an illegal deal, he’d tried to double-cross someone they’d called “the boss,” and he’d been executed.

Those conflicting thoughts followed her down the beach as she took off running. Afraid to look back, she kept trying to put distance between herself and the murder scene. Just as she’d decided to slow down, she heard footsteps rapidly catching up with her.

Oh Lord, one of the bad guys had gotten away from the dog and was about to grab her.

She tried to put on a burst of speed, but she was already exhausted.

“Wait.”

She struggled on.

“Wait, I saw what happened. I want to help you.”

Saw what? The fire? The gun? The dog? Still afraid to trust anyone, she looked toward the houses that ran along the shoreline, wondering if she could slip between them and get away. The movement slowed her and the man who had called out put a hand on her shoulder.

“Stop running.”

The hand sent a zing of reaction through her, but she simply couldn’t give in to it, not after everything that had happened. When she tried to wrench herself away, she stumbled. She would have landed in the sand, but the man caught her, pulling her against his body. He felt solid and well built—well muscled without being a weight lifter type, and his arms around her were reassuring in a way she couldn’t articulate. He could have easily locked her in his grasp, but he wasn’t holding her tightly. The knowledge that she was free to step away from him kept her standing in his embrace, comforted by the sturdy feel of him.

As his hands soothed over her shoulders and down her arms, she struggled to stop trembling.

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“It’s okay. I can help,” Zane said again, hearing the thick quality of his voice. His natural impulse had been to help a victim. Yet as he cradled this woman in his arms, he was feeling a lot more than the need to offer aid.

She didn’t answer, and he understood why she couldn’t rely on him—or anybody else right now. She’d escaped from a burning building, only to see two men try to capture her. They’d been taken down by what looked like a large dog that had appeared out of nowhere. She didn’t know the dog was a wolf, and the wolf was him. And he couldn’t tell her he was the one who had rescued her. He wouldn’t give away that information to anyone he didn’t trust implicitly.

He’d left the men rolling on the ground, bleeding and nursing major bites. And he’d made sure some of those bites were in their hands so that firing a gun would have been almost impossible. As a wolf, that had been the best he could do to disable the thugs without killing them. Then he’d found his running shorts, shirt and shoes where he’d left them in the bushes and changed back to human form, pushing through the transformation before taking off after the woman.

She raised her head, looking dazed, and maybe that gave him his best chance.

“Let me help you.”

She focused on his face, and he knew she was trying to get a sense of him beyond the superficial exterior of a lean, fit guy in his early thirties who had come dashing down the sand after her when nobody else had turned away from the fire.

He tried to project honesty and calm.

“Who are you?” she asked in a shaky voice.

Your life mate. The answer leaped into his mind, stunning him. Yet he pushed the crazy notion down into the depths of his soul as soon as it had surfaced.

She spoke while he was still feeling dizzy with the possibility of truth.

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