The Sheriff & the Shifter: Complete Story Collection by Dessa Lux

Author:Dessa Lux [Lux, Dessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-09-25T22:00:00+00:00

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3

"Meeting the Wolf"

Ray let his truck slow to a crawl as he passed through the old archway that marked the point where the dirt road in the woods became the Londons’ private drive. Neither was much more than a double track, grass growing between the wheel ruts. No one had had occasion to drive this way between the time the fruitless investigation into the fire ended and the time Tom got out of the hospital. Even now that Tom was living out here, traffic wasn’t exactly steady. Tom made maybe a trip or two each week into town, and no one visited.

Until now. Until Ray made an honest-to-God date to come out here on the afternoon of his day off and see Tom in his natural environment—on his home territory.

In his other shape.

Ray honestly wasn’t sure he was any more thrown by that last part than he was by the idea of pursuing something serious with a twenty-year-old. He could kid himself that this was a third date—or a first one, even, and the last two were just encounters out somewhere, unplanned—but he knew it was more than that. He knew enough of what Tom was to understand the magnitude of Tom showing his throat, offering to reveal this kind of secret. Tom was incredibly serious about this, and Ray... Ray was maybe getting a little old to be married quite so monogamously to his work. He wanted somebody to take care of, somebody who wanted more than a night or two being pushed around. He wanted something real.

And if the something real he seemed to have landed himself in the middle of involved a twenty-year-old shapeshifter, well, that just went to show the universe had a sense of humor every bit as absurd as Ray had always suspected.

He reached a fork in the lane. To the left, he knew, he would find the charred ruin of the big house. He’d driven that route plenty of times during the investigation of the fire—and a handful of times since, checking out reports of disturbances, rousting out kids poking around the site of the famous local tragedy.

Following Tom’s directions, Ray turned his car to the right instead, easing onto a track that had the tree branches trimmed back on either side. He rolled cautiously along it for a couple of hundred yards, and then Tom’s blue Mustang came into sight, parked in front of a long low building—the old stable, converted fifty years ago into general workspace with a couple of apartments tucked up under the eaves. The weathered building had been untouched by the fire, and some recent repairs to the last few years of neglect were visible—a few new sections of shingles on the roof, one window frame more freshly painted than the others where a broken pane had been replaced.

Ray parked alongside the Mustang and got out, looking around. Between one glance and the next he spotted the shape standing in the trees, just across the narrow track from him.

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