Free Mountain Men II: Primal Hunger by Mandy Monroe Page A

or
if he had to be away he had no worries about her wellbeing. He knew
Gavin felt the same.
    They had gone through that whiskey
bottle and were well into splitting the second bottle when the
alcohol began to take effect. His shifter metabolism required a
much higher alcohol content to get drunk, but it wasn’t impossible.
The numbness he sought didn’t find him till after another bottle
and Bain finally slept draped across the desk.

Chapter Six
    “ She’s gone.”
    Gavin jolted awake, ignoring the
pounding in his head. A quick glance at the clock showed it was
late afternoon. There was no need to question who Bain meant, there
was only one ‘she’ that would cause that look of panic on his face.
Cold fear washed down his spine.
    “ For how long?”
    “ Not sure, woke a bit ago and saw
her car wasn’t here anymore. I checked her cabin just in case.
Everything’s gone.”
    Gavin glanced at the clock, running
fingers through his hair then scrubbing his face with his palm. He
was on his feet and walking out the door in a flash when a thought
came crashing through his head and he froze.
    “ Bain, we still don’t know where
Seth is.”
    Bain froze in his tracks and stared
at Gavin. Dread lit his eyes.
    “ Shit.”
    “ OK, if she took the time to pack
and load the car, she hasn’t been gone too terribly long. She
couldn’t be very far. He may be a hundred miles from here by
now.”
    Both men rushed toward the car,
attempting to squelch the growing dread that was rapidly mounting.
Gavin could feel his lion, irritated and restless, pacing in his
mind. His lion wanted his mate and, quite frankly, so did the man.
His need to see Maura. smell her unique scent, and assure himself
she was safe and whole, was a physical ache in his chest. His lion
kept growling Find! Protect!
Mate!
    It threatened to overtake his
rational thought. He forced those thoughts in the back of his mind
and took a deep breath. They needed to concentrate on finding
her now. E verything else could be worked out later.
    Gavin wanted to believe she was
fine, just upset, and left without incident. But his mating
instinct was blaring sirens of warning. As they got to the car he
opted to drive, Bain was too close to succumbing to his animal and
that would not be the best idea to have him that agitated and
behind the wheel.
    “ There’s only one route she could
have taken out of the park. It’s the only outgoing road. So we
should be able to track her at least that far.”
    Bain barely nodded and returned to
staring blankly. They rolled down the windows to attempt to pick up
her scent, as faint as it may be, there were slight traces of it
still wafting through the air. It had been some time before she had
been through, but not so much that her scent dissipated
entirely.
    Gavin felt like jumping out of his
skin as every mile crept by. He knew his speed was closer to low
level flying than high speed driving but couldn’t force himself to
slow down. He felt urgency to find her clawing at his insides.
After twenty minutes her scent became much stronger.
    Bain sat up with his nose in the
air about the same time Gavin detected the scent. They looked at
each other, threads of relief just began to become interwoven with
the cold dread they felt all morning. All of the sudden Maura’s
honey vanilla scent became tainted with traces of blood. If Gavin
thought he felt cold dread before, he was wrong. It was nothing
compared to the glacial cold that washed down his spine, when he
smelled her blood.
    Bain growled low in his throat.
Gavin couldn’t help but rumble a growl of his own. Their mate was
bleeding, she was injured, and she needed them. His lion was
throwing himself at the walls that separated them in his mind. A
few minutes later, the car rounded a sharp curve and screeched to a
halt. There, in the middle of the road, sat Maura’s car partially
covered by large rocks and boulders. Gavin and Bain scrambled out
of the car and made their way to