Free Quest (Shifter Island Book 4) by Carol Davis Page A

Helene, becoming more and more familiar with them, learning how they acted, how they thought—how could she not have known about Luca, particularly after this last couple of days? How could she not have even begun to suspect?
    He’s a werewolf.
    A shapeshifter. A perfectly natural—though not well-known—part of the world. She’d heard about them since she was a kid, back when she and her siblings and their friends had been fascinated with ghosts and dinosaurs and bug-eyed space aliens and things that hid in the closet and under the bed and up in the attic.
    The stories said there were creatures out there that no one could quite track down: animals that were there in plain sight one moment and gone the next, as if they’d vanished into thin air.
    Bears. Big cats of every possible variety.
    And wolves.
    She’d moved into her little cottage twenty minutes outside of Denver thinking that her neighbors were an ordinary retired couple: gray-haired, but still fit and very active. Fond of gardening, hiking, and observing the stars with what looked like a very expensive telescope.
    Although they’d greeted her warmly at first, for several weeks they’d seemed standoffish. Allison had found no fault with that; they were part of her grandparents’ generation, and she couldn’t expect them to embrace her as a close friend.
    Then, one night when she was fighting a bout of insomnia, she’d seen something she couldn’t explain.
    A glimpse of a swiftly moving gray shape.
    One that had transformed into a woman. Into her neighbor, Helene.
    “Do you want to leave?” Luca asked her now.
    He looked as if he very much wanted to leave, as if this dinner had turned into a nonstop collection of small tortures. He’d never really been much for hanging out with groups of people—although he’d done it, if she asked—and even though Julie and Matt didn’t qualify as a group, they were surrounded by strangers inside the restaurant.
    Beyond that, she wanted badly to haul him back to bed, and suspected he felt the same way.
    They were standing alongside the building, in a part of the parking lot that was turned a deep gold by the last of the late-afternoon sunlight. Luca’s well-tanned skin looked like burnished gold. And his eyes…
    How did I not see this?
    She’d seen his eyes turn golden a thousand times when they were together, and it had happened several more times during the last couple of days. But they were normally brown, shot through with lighter streaks. Brown often turned golden in the afternoon light. In lots of different kinds of light.
    You didn’t want it to be true. So you didn’t even consider it.
    It came back to her now: his talking again and again about a connection between them. A bond, the same word Helene and Russell used to describe their relationship. He’d said they were meant to be together.
    He lived on an island, for heaven’s sake. Away from people.
    Away from human people.
    “Do you not feel well?” he asked quietly, wrapping his fingers lightly around her elbow. “We can leave. We should leave. And… we should find a place to sleep that smells better than the hotel you chose. You shouldn’t be breathing those chemicals while you sleep.”
    “Luca?”
    You didn’t want it to be true.
    But here he was.
    She felt cold all of a sudden, even though the afternoon was mild and they were standing in a pool of warm sunlight—so cold that she began to shiver, and had to wrap her arms around herself. The idea of going back inside, where the air conditioning was running, seemed intolerable. All she could think of was a need to be back home in her quiet little house, where she could curl up wrapped in the quilt Helene and Russell had given her for Christmas…
    Luca pulled her in close and held her tight to his chest. “You’re safe,” he told her. “I won’t let anything harm you.”
    “I know that,” she whispered.
    “Did someone threaten you in there? In the toilet room?”
    She thought