Escaping Monsters - Rita Stradling Page 0,2

stretching. Bones bubbled out, and skin smoothed, until somehow, I wasn’t looking at a wolf anymore. Instead, a man peered at me from all fours. His eyes were a vivid green, and they seemed to shine in the moonlight. He was massive and muscular. Short dark hair stuck up around his face—and his face was one I recognized.

“Triple cappuccino, dry,” I said, and then I raised a hand and covered my boobs. “Holy shit. I know you.” It probably wasn’t the standard way to react after seeing a wolf turn into a man before your very eyes, but this guy was one of my regulars at Cup’o’Joe. He’d been coming in every morning for about a year. He always rattled off his order like a drill sergeant, paid in cash without giving a tip, and then watched me from the counter as I made his drink as if he expected me to spit in the cup. I’d never successfully engaged the guy in a conversation, and half of the time, he’d take a single sip and toss his drink in the trash can on the way out the door. The guy was a dick… and, a werewolf?

“What’s going on? Is this some kind of trick?” I looked between the men. “Kane?”

Triple cappuccino guy stood up, towering over me. Across the counter, the guy seemed a hell of a lot less massive than he did now, plus, he was as naked as the day he was born. As I was standing only in a lacy pair of panties, I suddenly felt extremely vulnerable.

“What the fuck?” Triple cappuccino pointed a thick finger toward my crotch and his gaze snapped over to Kane. “I didn’t pay you to fuck her, Michael. We had an agreement.”

For one confused moment, I was thinking that this werewolf had mistaken my husband for someone else, his name was Kane, not Michael, but then the man I knew as Kane raised his hands. He nodded to me and said, “You paid me to marry her and take her on a honeymoon. Do you really think Teagan wouldn’t have grown suspicious if I refused to have sex with her?”

The fuck?

I didn’t give myself a second to consider the full implications of my husband’s words. My instincts kicked in, and I ran straight for the tree line. Undergrowth cut at my feet as I leaned into a run, and a branch scraped along my arm. Within seconds, I heard the thudding of footsteps behind me. Growls ripped through the night, and I glanced over my shoulder to see a glimpse of glowing green, predatory eyes. I lunged to the side, and the sediment under my feet suddenly gave way.

I tried to get my feet under me, but there was only a ledge and then nothing but open air. I screamed as a tree root smacked into my ankle, and pain sliced through my leg as it snapped the wrong way. My stomach flew into my throat, and I just managed to inhale a deep breath when my back slammed into the water’s surface.

My whole body felt as if it was shattering, and then I sunk under the dark water. The river was churning in every direction, ripping me one way and then the other. I fought upward and broke the surface, managing to gasp in one giant gulp of air, before the current pulled me back under. The ice-cold flow held me down like a massive hand, and my lungs ached.

A blinding explosion of pain seared into my arm and ripped me up to the water’s surface. I gasped in air, looking around only to see that a spike from a log was impaling my arm and blood streamed from the wound. The log had yanked me up like a fish on a hook. I blinked at the injury, somehow unable to feel it.

Screaming, I fought the immense drag of the passing water and wrapped my other arm over the log. It slammed into my stomach and wiggled in the current. All I could do was scream, horrid, ragged cries as the river did everything in its power to rip me from my log. Ahead, an outreaching tree hung into the frothy flow, and I kicked furiously with my one working leg. The river swept me closer, and my log hit with a loud crack. The spike yanked out of my arm, and the world went black. I woke with a jolt, caught in the limbs of the tree.

Dragging my