Free Once A Wolf by Susan Krinard Page A

tempting, caught up in a battle with her own fair tresses, all
    but spitting with frustration? Por Dios, she was.
    He got up again and walked toward her. She drew back.
    "It might be easier if you had help," he said, crouching beside her.
    " From you?" she asked with a lilt of incredulity.
    "I often brushed my mother's hair when I was a boy. Hers was very thick and black, and it was
    beautiful, like yours."
    An odd, almost wistful expression crossed her face, as if she had never considered that he
    might have a mother. "She must grieve over the life you lead."
    "My mother is dead," he said, and shrugged. "Long ago. But some things one doesn't forget."
    He pulled the brush from her hand and caught up a lock of her hair. Tension sang through the
    strands. She jerked back.
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    "If you move, you may cause yourself discomfort," he said. "This will go much faster if you
    cooperate." He began to stroke, barely touching, the way he would groom a half-wild horse.
    Strange to think that such a one as this needed gentling. She regarded herself as a fine and
    proper lady—yet wouldn't a lady flutter and faint in the hands of an outlaw? She would not be
    a wolf, but her spirit was too strong to remain in the cage she had designed to hold it.
    Or had Cole fashioned that cage himself?
    He finished with one small section of her hair and gathered up another. Each strand was
    delicate, touched with lighter and darker hues. It seemed to slide through his hands as if it had
    a life of its own.
    And Rowena didn't stir. He could not have said why she chose to surrender. It was, at best, a
    reluctant capitulation. Perhaps this restrained sensuality was one of the few such indulgences
    she permitted herself.
    But her gaze never left his face, and with each stroke of the brush he felt a corresponding tug in
    his own body, an increasing desire to bury his hands in the quiescent flame of her hair.
    It was seldom that he pondered deeply on his own thoughts. He was a man of action, not
    reflection. He'd assumed on the train that his plans for his captive would be more work than
    pleasure—except the pleasure of trampling the MacLeans' nonexistent honor. His Lady of Fire
    was just idle fantasy.
    He was beginning to change his mind.
    Lady Rowena did not behave like a shrinking virgin. For an instant he entertained the thought of
    her lying naked in MacLeans arms; he remembered the moment on the train when he'd
    envisioned MacLean kissing her, and his bizarre reaction of possessive rage.

    He could feel it starting again. Ridiculo; she could not have lain with a man before marriage. Not
    as she was in New York, or in England. Not his Lady of Ice. You.
    Her voice brought him sharply back to himself. He let her hair fall. She swept it behind her
    shoulders and gave him a frown that would have made any lesser man tremble.
    "I know you," she said. "I am sure of it now. We met before you ever came to New York." She
    stood up. "Who are you?"
    He'd known the time must come when she would recognize him, if ever she acknowledged
    even a fraction of her werewolf senses. He rose to face her.
    "I have been many men, señorita."
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    "In England," she said. "You were there. At Greyburn." Her face transformed with memory.
    "The Spaniard—"
    "Don Alarico Julian Del Fiero, also at your service."
    "What a fool I've been," she whispered. "Braden wrote to tell me that the man who claimed to
    be Del Fiero—you—" She shook her head. "The real Del Fiero wrote to Braden months after the
    Convocation. He never made it to England. Something prevented him—someone." Her eyes
    sharpened with accusation. "You took his place!"
    "You have unmasked me, my lady."
    "You helped Braden fight the Boroskovs, and disappeared. Now I see why you know so much
    about me. But… Braden knew nothing of your family. He was searching for loups-garous all over
    the world. You could have