Taming the Hunted Read online

  He attempted to help at first, but as she struggled with it, her body brushed against his and he stopped with a quick, inhaled breath. When she donned the shirt, she punched him as hard as she could in the gut for being a jerk and, to her surprise, he doubled over in pain.

  “Serves you right,” she told him through gales of laughter from the others.

  She praised her five-foot-six frame for being so short when the shirt came to mid-thigh as she wriggled into it from her sitting position. Jake was a big guy also. In fact, now that she wasn’t so distracted by hunger, or being naked, she noticed that there were maybe eight guys in the kitchen with her and not one under six-foot-four.

  Gathering her thoughts, she decided there were pressing matters to handle, such as why she was semi-naked in the first place and how the claw marks on her back had healed already. She remembered little and had no idea of how much time had passed, but it could not have been more than a few hours, a day at most.

  “You, you, and you,” she said, pointing to Gabriel, Raphael, and Jake, being the only three she had met before. “Stay. The rest of you out,” she commanded, sliding off the bench to stand for good measure.

  Gabriel looked taken aback at first. She didn’t miss the fact that the others all looked to him at her demand and only left after he gave them the okay with a slight nod of his head.

  “Marian, I—” Gabriel started, but she cut him off.

  “I have some questions, and I’m not leaving until they’re answered, and I have another sandwich,” she added as an afterthought.

  Jake, seeming to want to get out of the line of fire, moved to do the latter.

  “Right, most important questions first. Where are my clothes?”

  “That’s the most important question?” Raphael commented, looking to Gabriel.

  “I thought that would have been obvious,” Gabriel said. “But clearly not,” he added when she stared at him. “You were injured, and I needed to tend to your wounds.”

  “Not to mention your clothes were covered in blood and mud,” Raphael pitched in, looking a little excited by the idea.

  “You were there?” she asked, flinching as Gabriel wrapped his hands around her waist and lifted her back on the bench. He moved his hands lower to rest on her hips, a movement she found she didn’t mind as much as she would have thought. Their weight felt comforting around her and helped her feel grounded, protected in her current state of uncertainty.

  “I sent Steve to look for Terrance, the guy who attacked you. He had run away after the, ah, incident,” Gabriel explained.

  “I carried you in,” Jake said, looking proud of himself as he handed her a triple-decker sandwich with hamburger meat, cheese, pepperoni, mayonnaise, cold sausage, and lettuce.

  Marian smiled at him. He stood beside her against the bench, shooting nervous glances at Gabriel every few seconds.

  “How long was I out?”

  “Two days,” Gabriel said, watching her with an awkward protectiveness about him.

  She was aware that in her semi-naked state, her legs fell on either side of Gabriel as he stood protectively over her. Her bare flesh clamped against his legs and her warm middle clenched in need for his cock which rested just inches from her. Her eyes kept darting to the bulge in his pants. A fact she was sure he was aware of, although she never caught him looking. It appeared her hunger was not isolated to food. She pined for the fullness that Gabriel could provide, the feel of him inside her, moving, grinding along her slick, wanting pussy.

  She did the math in her head to distract herself from more pleasurable thoughts. Two days made tonight a full moon, and healing in two days was not a power humans possessed.

  She needed some answers fast, and sex, but first answers. Come nightfall, she would have a house full of werewolves to deal with, and if her next sentence went badly, she may have to think fast to get out of there.

  “So you’re the alpha werewolf, aren’t you, Gabriel?”

  There was a thump as his elbow slipped off the bench and caught the edge of the knife that Jake had used to cut the bread. His arm trickled blood on the floor. Cursing under his breath, he went to the sink to wash it off. The other two men stared at her open-mouthed. She expected as much and started on her sandwich whilst they composed themselves.

  “I, um…how?” Gabriel asked.

  Marian found it adorable at how lost for words he was. She wondered if this was a first for him, being trumped by a woman. He probably thought he was hiding their secret quite well. He didn’t look angry though, she observed with interest, just intrigued.

  She guessed from the way he’d looked at her when she first walked in that he knew she’d worked it out. Otherwise, she would have never been so bold to say it flat out.

  “How did you know?” he asked, his arm healing as she watched.

  “It’s my line of work.”

  “And what line of work would that be?” Raphael smirked, assuming, she was sure, that she was some kind of researcher.

  “I’m a hunter.”

  There was a scrape as Raphael’s chair skidded across the floor. He launched himself at her across the kitchen, scattering plates and glasses from the table.

  Gabriel was still between them though. In one swift motion, Gabriel bounced him out the window with a splitting crash, raining glass down over her head as she used her arms to protect her face. Jake issued a furious growl, but with a glance to his leader exited the kitchen, almost breaking the door from its hinges with an ominous crack in his haste.

  She was thankful only two of the pack members had remained with them when she revealed her secret. She wasn’t sure how far Gabriel would go to protect her at the cost of his family, especially as the shadows darkened on his own face at her announcement.

  He threw her over his shoulder with a squeak of protest from her. Turning, he dumped her into one of the more sturdy looking chairs at the table, making her head spin at the sudden change of direction. So fast that his hand was a blur, he flipped the armrests around on the chair and shackled her to it with the metal cuffs attached to the underside.

  “You are in so much trouble when I get out of here,” she growled at him as she regained equilibrium, but wasn’t sure if she was going to be able to act on the threat. As much as she hated to admit it, he was growing on her. Those large arms, the heat in his eyes every time he looked at her, and those shoulders that she longed to cling to as she writhed under his heavy body.

  “I have to look out for the pack,” he said, though his voice wasn’t angry. “Now sit still like a good puppy and I might let you go before dinner.”

  She struggled with the cuffs, but they were an inch thick, and she realized that in addition to that, the chair was bolted to the floor. How on earth had she missed that little detail? And who bolts their furniture down anyway? For a more important point, who had shackles attached to their kitchen chairs!

  She struggled a bit more, but gave up and kicked herself for not retrieving the long knife from the chopping board next to her before telling them what she was. Kicking sounded like a good idea though. Gabriel had forgotten that she had legs too, and they were swinging free.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she said, trying for the bluff first. He was too far away to get a good kick in anyway.

  “No. The whole room still smells of sulphur.”

  “What?”

  Gabriel leaned down to talk to her, his face level with hers. “You will learn that later, or sooner at the rate you’re going.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” she demanded, her patience with the situation growing thin.

  He sat and watched her, and she realized he was waiting for her to calm down again. Slumping back, she applied her patient face.

  “Good puppy, you’re learning.”

  His leering tone made her squirm with frustration. If she hadn’t been secured to a chair she would have thrown something at him for that, but as she was, she just rolled her eyes, aware that this little game didn�
�t help the growing arousal and heat that burnt in her body.

  “You have an increase in body hair,” he continued.

  She flipped her hair over her shoulder and noticed that it was at least a few inches longer. The weight of his words struck her. She looked down at her legs and saw, to her horror, that she really needed a razor.

  He crossed his legs at the ankle as he pulled his chair up before her, propping his chin on his fingers. “You will also become faster as the day goes on.”

  “And body heat?” She saw where he was headed with this. She had heard the stories of people who had been attacked by werewolves. Not many lived of course. Those who did were thought to have been better off dead. Her breathing became deep and ragged as her fear and anger welled within her. She was turning into her prey; she was a werewolf.

  The thought rocked her to the core. A building panic threatened to claim her sanity. She quenched that emotion, grasping it with a tight fist and shoving it deep into her body. Losing her head now could be dangerous; she knew she needed him. A lone wolf was easy picking, especially if that wolf had a lot of enemies. But could she trust Gabriel to see her through this?

  A lump rose in her throat. She tried to swallow it, and with it, her fear. Gabriel watched her as she worked through the realization that she may as well be dead. In her mind, she knew that had she not been secured to the chair at that point she very well may have ended it then and there. Bile rose in her stomach as she thought on the life now set out before her. More animal than human. Killing for fun rather than need.

  “It’s not all bad. A lot of the stories you have been fed are made to breed hate around us.”

  She looked at him. This man had protected her on more than one occasion in the past few days, and he barely knew her. The panic was fading as her training overtook her fear. She was a hunter, not a child. She had trained to accept any situation with a cool head. Could she do that now? It was her life, not his. Werewolves were a gray area for her kind. Neither evil nor friend.

  “Marian?” Gabriel’s gaze had not left hers since the realization hit her. He stayed when he could have left.

  Even now, his attention was for her, not his pack who she had threatened by her very presence. This was no place for her to adjust. A house full of wolves was not somewhere she considered safe when she felt so vulnerable in her new body, her new life. She needed to leave, and to do that she needed to trick Gabriel. As bad as that made her feel deep in her gut, it was the only way she could see of getting out.

  “Hey, have I heated up yet?” she asked, her pulse racing as she tried to calm herself and think clearly.

  He gave her a look that said he guessed she was up to something, then he glanced down, she presumed checking to see that he was still strapped to the chair. He reached over to feel her forehead. She struck out with her left foot, right in the crotch! He made it to the other side of the room faster than she could imagine, bounced off the wall, and doubled over with a huff of pain.

  She knew she wouldn’t be getting out of the chair now, but felt it well worth it to watch him hobble around the back of the kitchen whilst his genitals regrew.

  Gabriel took his wounded pride and other assorted injuries and vacated the kitchen without so much as a backward glance at her.

  “I’m hungry,” she yelled after him, not expecting an answer.

  Sighing, she settled in for a long wait with just her jumbled thoughts for company. Her wrists chafed as she pulled at them in their cold metal shackles. The chair was meant for a much larger person, one of the pack maybe, so her hands were looser than they should be in their confines. Try as she might she couldn’t get them out though, achieving scrapes and bruises for her trouble. She did note with interest that the small bloodied scratches she caused on her flesh faded and healed in a matter of minutes.

  She tried to sleep, to calm herself, but it was no good. Her senses were pressing on her, telling her that she needed to adjust and grow with it. It was growing dark outside when she started to get seriously hungry again. Her emotions were running wild. She could hear people moving about in the rest of the house, but no one had come when she called.

  She had never been the kind of person who liked being ignored. Being an only child raised by a doting aunt with no children of her own accounted for that.

  She kicked her feet against the chair. No one would believe it. The hunter had become the hunted.

  It was nightfall. She could hear owls outside, swooping out for their prey as the trees rustled in the ocean wind, and she was ravenously hungry. She started rocking backward and forward on the chair, pulling at the restraints. The cuffs weren’t budging, as she’d found out earlier, but the floor was made of wooden floorboards and it was an old looking house. She hoped they had termites, but felt that as her luck had taken a leave of absence over the last few days, it was just too much to hope for.

  She bounced in the chair, slamming her weight first up against the bonds then slamming her slight frame back downward, causing a loud crack from the floorboards. She tried it again and with a last crack, she found that the back two bolts had come loose. She rocked forward again and pushed up with her feet, causing the front two bolts to jump.

  At least being a werewolf had one advantage. Her strength meant she could escape from other wolves, which would definitely be a plus in her line of work. She balanced, bent forward with the weight of the chair on her back, and waddled over to the fridge only to get stuck between the table and the wall halfway around. That meant that the table had to go, and moments later it resembled a ski ramp more than a piece of kitchen furniture as she slammed it with her chair.

  Chapter 5

  Gabriel walked into the kitchen to find Marian sitting in the middle of a pile of woodchips in front of the open fridge, munching on a chicken leg. He looked to where the chair had been bolted to the floor and stared at the four large holes and the gouges in the wood.

  “Want some?” she asked before bending to take another bite.

  “That’s eighty year old wood you just ripped up!”

  “That’s probably why it broke so easy,” she mumbled around the chicken bone.

  “New rule,” he said, coming around to pull the meat from her hand. “You are to be watched twenty-four-seven.” His gaze flicked to her wrists still bound to the chair.

  The familiar fire burned in his eyes again as they roamed the peaks of her breasts through the large shirt. Marian grinned up at him. So the boy liked a little bondage. She was down for that if it meant his gorgeous, hot, manly self would hurry up and slake the fire that burned in her groin. It was easy to forget her anger at the situation when Gabriel was in the room.

  He sat with a sigh and watched her from the bench as she made her way through the contents of the fridge.

  Sighing, he rose and removed the cuffs from around her wrists, rubbing the blood back into them with long, firm strokes. “I’ll get one of the guys to make up some iron shackles for tonight in case you get out of control again.” His eyes said that he might use them even if she didn’t lose control.

  She watched him, thinking. Her face was inches away from his, his gaze boring into hers. The shirt she wore was pulled tight across her chest by the way she sat. She could tell it had an effect on him as he adjusted his position to accommodate the bulge of his swelling cock. His eyes roamed the crotch of her panties, visible just under the hem of the shirt.

  He brushed her lower lip with his thumb, gentle and tender as he moved it along the soft curve. Then he was flying across the room, again, as her fist connected with his chin.

  He yelled out in pain. She knew it hurt him and grinned at the thought.

  “I have some clothes upstairs that you can change into, we’re going out,” he snapped at her.

  She got up and gestured for him to lead the way as though she hadn’t just thrown him into a brick wall.

  She went upstairs and changed fast, not asking where he had gotten the women’s clothing. The shirts, she noticed, wou
ld fit a much bustier woman. Emerging from the bathroom, she found Gabriel giving her that same crooked smile that had sent such dangerous feelings to the pit of her stomach. She’d settled the matter last time by throwing him across the kitchen, next time she wasn’t sure it would be as easy. She would just have to think of another way to keep herself from falling for him.

  Taking a deep breath, she walked into the hallway, ignoring the mass of manliness behind her. Getting up the stairs hadn’t been as hard as going down them. She got to the end of the hall and hesitated long enough for Gabriel to get annoyed. Without asking, he threw her over his shoulder and carried her down. She braced her hands on his back and felt his muscles flex as he descended. Her eyes stayed shut. As soon as they reached the bottom, he put her back on her feet and went straight to the door. If he had to do that every time she needed to go to bed, she was going to lose the war over her body.

  She followed him outside, and they climbed into a black convertible. She tried not to watch his large hands as they moved over the keys and wheel.

  “If I’m going to be staying here, you will have to make me up a room on the ground floor,” she told him.

  He looked at her and there was a flicker of something in his eyes before he hid it behind a veil. She had decided whilst captive in the kitchen that, although she would like nothing more than to leave, she had to face facts. She was a wolf and someone had to show her the ropes of this new life. She couldn’t think of anyone better than tall, dark, and handsome next to her.

  “You will stay in my room,” he stated, as though insulted by the idea of her sleeping without him. “That way I can keep an eye on you.”

  “In case I turn into a slobbering dog in the night and attack small children?”

  “That’s not even funny,” he scolded.

  They sat in silence with only the radio breaking through the tension. “I have to go home tonight,” she commented.