Wild and Free

  Wild and Free

  Kristen Ashley

  Published by Kristen Ashley

  Kobo Edition, License Notes

  All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by Kristen Ashley

  First ebook edition: December, 2014

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Discover other titles by Kristen Ashley

  Connect with Kristen Online

  Author’s Note

  The US of A is gloriously vibrant with color and culture and for those of you who read my novels you know I like to reflect that in my work.

  With Wild and Free, when Abel came to me, he had a Chinese (which became a Chinese-American) family.

  As I don’t know how to speak any Chinese dialect, because of Abel’s family, I got to go on a voyage of discovery. As a wordsmith, it was an exciting one. But in trying to find Mandarin words for the expressions I needed, doing this flying blind, it ended as a frustrating one.

  You see, with Mandarin (as with all languages so it shouldn’t have been a surprise) there isn’t exactly an agreement on what name is a name for a boy, or a girl, or a surname, or a first name. There also isn’t agreement as to what endearments are appropriate say, between friends, family or lovers.

  In researching this (and researching it and then some and more), I knew I would not find the answers on the Internet. I had to find a real-life source. I asked for that source on my Facebook page and got the usual swift and generous offers of assistance. We polled several folks who offered to help about the Chinese names and Mandarin endearments I used in this book and—get this—not a single person agreed with how I’d used the endearments!

  I love this. I love how dynamic and pliable language is. I also love that it proved I wasn’t entirely an idiot while doing my research (since I found the same on my own). Not to mention, it isn’t like I haven’t seen this before (for instance, those who did not get my hero calling his heroine “buddy” in At Peace and the same with “mama” in Lady Luck).

  So I decided to let the endearments stay as they are. For those in the know, they might not agree with how I’ve used them. I just rest in the knowledge that others will.

  And for those who don’t know any Mandarin and thus may not understand the words, I’ll give you my decidedly inexpert translations here:

  Qīn ài de: dear/my dear

  Tian xin: good and beautiful

  Bao bei: treasured/precious (used in English terms of the endearment “baby”)

  A big thank you to the folks who offered to help and gave their assistance.

  Now I hope you go forth and enjoy Abel, his brothers Xun, Wei and Chen, his daughter/sister/mother, Jian-Li and the rest of the humans, vampires and werewolves in Wild and Free.

  Prologue

  Mine

  Delilah

  Oh my God, they were hunting me.

  Hunting me!

  I ran, my breath ragged, a stitch cutting agony through my side as I heard them getting closer. Closer.

  Fast.

  Too fast.

  I was a girl and maybe not Jackie Joyner-Kersee, but I wasn’t out of shape. They’d gain but not that fast.

  No way.

  That didn’t mean they weren’t gaining that fast.

  They were.

  And I was terrified.

  I turned into an alley, hoping in the darkness to lose them, and ran with everything I had left.

  Straight to a dead end.

  “Shit,” I breathed, panting, turning, feeling them closing in on me.

  Then there they were, on me as in on me. In the blink of an eye I was on my back, one of them pinning my body down with his on mine, one holding my arms down over my head, one holding my legs at my ankles while, I stared to the side in disbelief, two humongous, terrifying dogs circled, snarling and snapping their sharp, alarming teeth in my direction.

  “Rip her throat out and have done with it,” a voice coming from over my head bit out, and my attention went back to the enormous man who was lying full on top of me, pressing the breath out of me, and staring down at me in a way I did…not…like.

  I tried to struggle, but the hands at my wrists and ankles held so strong, it was preternatural how strong they were. I wasn’t pinned. I was completely immobilized.

  “In a minute,” he grunted, his eyes not leaving mine. “Christ, smell her. Divine. Fuck me, absolutely fucking divine.” His face changed to a look I liked even less and he finished, “First I’m going to feed.”

  He was going to feed?

  Oh man. What did that mean?

  I didn’t know. What I knew was, it was not good.

  “Are you insane?” a voice coming from my feet asked like he thought the dude holding me was, indeed, insane. In fact, very insane. At the same time, ugly-scary growls came from both of the dogs.

  It seemed to me these were warnings, but the guy on top of me was apparently insane because he ignored the warnings of the huge, vicious, snarling dogs. His head dipped toward me, slanted, then his mouth was at my neck.

  Oh shit. Oh shit!

  This was definitely not good.

  I belatedly opened my mouth to scream.

  Not that first sound came out because suddenly I wasn’t immobilized. Nothing was on me, nothing holding me down.

  I still didn’t move.

  This was because something I couldn’t see, and not only because it was dark, but because it was happening so…damned…fast, was whirling around me.

  I would know what that was when sickening, warm gushes of blood spurted across my chest and neck about a half a second before I saw a canine head (with no body, mind) roll across the asphalt in front of me. More blood splashed the pavement beside me in a hideous surge and I heard the heinous noises of body after lifeless body thudding to the ground.

  Then I was up, my own body swinging like it was flying through the air, but I felt hands on me. A breeze was blowing through my hair, I was moving so fast, and then my back slammed against the brick wall of the building at the side of the alley.

  I blinked, not feeling the wall at my back but the intense hard-muscled warmth of a body pressed to my front and before my eyes. A man.

  A shock of black hair.

  An intriguingly tilted set of eyes, the hue I couldn’t make out in the dark, but shockingly, I could see one was a color that was light, the other a color that was definitely dark.

  Strong jutt
ing jaw, sharp cheekbones, heavy brow.

  The slash of an angry scar that went across his forehead, through his left eyebrow, disconnected then rejoined on his cheekbone to slide all the way down his face, curling around his jaw and disappearing.

  I panted in his blood-stained face.

  He stared, intense and frightening, into mine, his gaze, honest to God, like a touch.

  I stopped panting because I stopped breathing.

  His face came closer and my stomach clenched, my muscles tensed near to snapping, my chest burned, but his head veered and he touched his temple to mine, slid it back, rubbing it through my hair.

  I sucked in breath only to hold it again when his hands left my armpits. One traveled down my side and then curved to become an arm around my back, holding me so strong, I was plastered to his front. The other went up, over my shoulder and in to curl tight and freakishly warm around the side of my neck.

  His chin dipped and I felt his lips at my ear.

  “Mine,” he growled in a deep, guttural, forceful way that even I, who had no clue what was happening, I just knew I didn’t like it one…single…bit, agreed.

  When he said “mine,” he meant me.

  Uh-oh.

  Chapter One

  It’s Only Just Begun

  Delilah

  He tossed me on the bed.

  I bounced, staring at him as he prowled away from me and across the room.

  I should have fought. I should have tried to run. I should have done anything but let him take my hand and drag me to his bike.

  I didn’t.

  When we got there, he didn’t let me go even as he swung astride it. Then he pulled me on in front of him, started up the bike, and we took off.

  My dad was a biker. I’d been on a bike so often, if I had a nickel for each time, I’d be a millionaire. Hell, I even had my motorcycle license and my own bike at home in Dad’s garage.

  But I’d never ridden up front while someone else was driving.

  If I didn’t struggle and run when he took me to his bike, I should have done it when he stopped us in another alley, this one dark, dank, and not smelling all that great, located behind a Chinese restaurant.

  And if I hadn’t done it then, I should have done it when he shoved a big Dumpster out of the way like it weighed no more than a shoebox, lifted the grate under it, and dragged me down a flight of stairs into a dark hall, to a steel door, and through, to this room.

  No one lived in a scary basement room off an alley under a Dumpster.

  At least no one I wanted to know.

  Vaguely, as I sat on that bed, it came to me that I hurt. My shoulders had scraped against the pavement when that guy took me down. But I ignored the ping of pain, seeing as I was clearly In Trouble, capitalized in a way that shit should be in neon. Blinking neon. In huge letters.

  My mother’s voice all of a sudden came into my head. “You’re nuts. You’ve always been nuts.”

  This is what she’d said when I’d told her what I was doing during my vacation days.

  She believed this and I knew she did because she said it to me more than once, starting from when I was about four.

  It was safe to say I wasn’t real tight with my mother.

  “My little girl goin’ on a quest,” Dad had said when I’d told him. He’d also had a big grin of pride and approval on his face and he’d given me a tender cuff up the side of my head. “Good for you, Lilah. ’Bout time you took off and found what you needed to fill that hole in your gut.”

  Dad understood.

  Dad always understood.

  I didn’t.

  And now I understood it less.

  My mind came back into the room when the guy walked toward me carrying some material in his hand. When he did, I couldn’t believe I’d let my mind wander.

  I watched him warily as he moved.

  He was tall. Tall and lean. His shoulders were broad, his hips narrow, his legs long.

  He had bulk, but it was spare. Regardless, even if I hadn’t experienced what I’d experienced not thirty minutes ago, one look at him and you knew he had power. That scar. The way he held himself. The economical way he moved. He was not a guy who went to the gym to hone his body because he was into fitness or wanted attention. He was a guy who, if he went to the gym rather than drinking raw eggs and doing one-armed pushups on the asphalt of the alley where he’d parked his bike, he did it as a statement that no one should mess with him, because if they did, he’d fuck them up.

  He had that scar and it was nasty.

  But I’d put money down that the other guy got worse.

  “Shower,” he grunted as he tossed the material on the bed beside me and I continued to stare at him. “You reek of them.”

  “I…uh” was the only thing I could get out, seeing as there was no way in hell I was going to shower in this weird basement room with a guy in attendance who I did not know, who also terrified me.

  And this was saying something, considering I was covered in blood and I’d never wanted a shower more in my life.

  “Now,” he growled.

  “Who are you?” I whispered.

  He didn’t reply.

  It was then I saw his eyes, and in the light of the room I could make out the colors.

  One was a startling light blue. The other was a deep, rich brown.

  I’d never seen eyes like that. Not in my life.

  They were enthralling.

  “What are you?” I asked, still in a whisper, this one breathless.

  “Shower,” he repeated.

  I blinked, pulled myself together, and leaned a bit back. Even though he wasn’t close, just standing beside the bed, that was close enough. “I want you to let me go.”

  “Case you hadn’t noticed, not safe for you out there.”

  Uh.

  What?

  “I was…they were—” I began on a stammer, wanting to believe they were just bad guys out to do bad things and I’d gotten in their sights, but knowing in my gut it was something different.

  Very different.

  Freaky different.

  “Hunting you,” he finished for me.

  How’d he know that?

  “They were just—” I tried again but cut myself off this time when he leaned slightly toward me.

  “Hunting you,” he bit out.

  “That’s what it felt like,” I said quietly.

  “’Cause that’s what it was,” he replied, straightening.

  “Why?”

  He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “No fuckin’ clue.”

  “You…you”—I scooted back several inches on the bed—“just killed three men and two dogs.”

  He shook his head. “Not dogs. Wolves.”

  What?

  “Wolves?” I asked, my voice pitched high. “What are wolves doing in a city?”

  “Hunting you,” he replied, losing patience. I heard it in his tone, saw it in his face, even in the lines of his body, and actually felt it in the room. “Now shower.”

  “You killed them,” I reiterated.

  “I did,” he agreed nonchalantly, like he did that crap every day.

  And he could.

  He probably did.

  Yes, neon, blinking, huge letters In Trouble.

  “Why did you do that?” I pushed. “How did you do that? There was only one of you and five of them.”

  “Jesus, you need to shower,” he clipped.

  “I’m not going to shower!” I cried. The terrifying insanity of the situation finally crashing down on me, I lost it—justifiably, to my way of thinking. “You just killed three men and two wolves! You’re covered in blood. I’m covered in blood and in a crazy basement room under a Dumpster where I do…not…want…to be!”

  “Would you rather be dead?” he returned.

  “No,” I snapped, then went on sarcastically, “but, you know, phoning the police rather than ripping five beings apart might have been a better option.”

  “Yeah, good i
dea,” he retorted, matching my sarcasm. “I call the cops, they come in, and then those boys in blue are all dead because those things, they were not gonna stop until they took you out. They’d destroy anything that got in the way of them doin’ that. You want that on your conscience? Because I sure as fuck don’t.”

  “Cops have guns,” I pointed out.

  “And those things can take a bullet to the heart and survive it.”

  Was he insane?

  “That’s crazy,” I scoffed.

  Suddenly, his face was an inch from mine.

  But he didn’t move.

  Or I didn’t see him move.

  Even so, there he was.

  Right there.

  I sucked in a breath.

  He spoke.

  “You need to take a breath. That doesn’t work, you need to take another one. Then you need to feel it. Feel it. And you know exactly what I’m talkin’ about. When you feel it, you’ll know this shit isn’t crazy. This shit is something else. I don’t know what the fuck it is. I just know you’re not gonna get dead because of it, seein’ as I’ve waited three lifetimes for you, and now that I’ve got you, I’m keepin’ you.”

  I stared into his eyes, unblinking, not speaking, my heart racing, his words freaking…me…out.

  “I’m gonna go,” he finished. “You shower. I want their stench gone by the time I get back.”

  Then he did just that. He went, pulling the big steel door open like it was made of flimsy plywood and slamming it behind him.

  I stared at the door.

  I’ve waited three lifetimes for you.

  What did that mean?

  I’m keepin’ you.

  I knew what that meant and I didn’t like it one bit.

  Then it hit me that I was sitting on an unmade bed in the basement room occupied by a crazy, murderous man who could move as fast as lightning and tear apart humans and animals in the blink of an eye.

  That was when I burst from the bed and ran to the door.

  I pulled on it, putting all my weight into it, but it didn’t budge.

  “Shit,” I hissed and tried again.

  No go.

  “Goddamn it!” I yelled and whirled, taking in the room.

  It was not small, not large. It had cement floors. Down one wall, in the far corner, I could see a shower cordoned off by glass block. No shower curtain. Next to that, a swaybacked, claw-foot tub, which, if I wasn’t in my current circumstances, I would have thought was pretty cool. On either side of that, against the wall, narrow wire shelves holding towels and toiletries, not many of either, most of the shelves bare. A sink next to that, exposed piping under it, a utilitarian medicine cabinet over it. Next to that, glass block walls on both sides of a toilet. No door. No privacy. He either lived alone or his company didn’t mind sharing a variety of intimacies.