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“Yup. Beau Matherson. Investigator, sometime bounty hunter. Werewolf.” I tilt my head toward her in a mock bow, and a ghost of a smile tugs at her lips.
“Now, you gonna tell me what you were doing, sleeping down here in all this mud, like a river rat?”
This seems to bring her to her senses. She unfurls from her nest, then she clambers awkwardly to her feet, bracing her hands on anything that isn’t mud. I help her, advising her where to grab onto for support.
She draws herself up to her full height. And my breath shudders in my throat. She’s filthy. Absolutely caked in stinking river mud from head to toe. She’s wearing some frumpy old clothes that look like she pulled them out of a thrift store’s reject bin, and her hair is matted, so coated in filth I can’t even tell what color it’s supposed to be. But beneath all that is a knockout body. All lush, womanly curves.
Beauty glows from her, like a firefly in a storm.
My wolf whines its approval.
Fuck.She could annihilate me.
“I was walking, and I fell,” she says.
I wait, expectantly, but she stays silent.
“You have a home to go to?”
Her face freezes, then it starts to crumple. She sets her jaw and shakes her head fast.
“None at all?” I blow my cheeks out.
Well, shit.
“You are over eighteen?” I scan her face. Hard to guess her age with all that mud.
“Twenty-two,” she mumbles.
Good.
“How about we get you back to my place, get you cleaned up, then figure out what we’re going to do next?”
She gnaws on her pretty lower lip, and her eyes dart sideways, like what she wants to do right now is run.
“If you’re gonna bolt, best to do it in a clean set of clothes.” I point at my vehicle, barely a speck in the distance. “That’s my place.”
Her emerald eyes narrow as she takes it in. “You live in a…a bus?”
“Yup. Fully plumbed in. You can take a hot shower.”
She looks down at her clothes, and finally seems to absorb just how filthy she is.
“Okay, thanks,” she says, and flashes a little smile.
It goes all the way to her eyes, and I’m damned if it doesn’t light me up like a jack-o’-lantern. Next thing I know, I’m grinning like an idiot at the thought of having this little ragamuffin getting mud all over my bathroom.
I pull myself up the steep bank, covering myself in mud in the process, then I reach for her backpack, which is also filthy and wet.
“Oh—” she says, like she just remembered it, and the word is so laden with sorrow, I feel it in my own soul.
I’ll find out what she’s suffered, I vow. Just as soon as I’ve gained her trust. Then I’ll hunt down whoever’s hurt her, and I’ll tear them apart.
I try to carry her bag for her, but she snatches it back and grips it fiercely against her chest.
I shouldn’t like that show of feistiness so much.
We walk to my RV,and I have to go slower than usual, shorten my typical lope so I don’t get ahead of her. She’s short, barely comes up to my shoulder, and I try not to think that’s a perfect height for her to lay her head on my chest.
