.

being forbidden to interfere in any way with a tag.

      Tranquilizing these bad guys so they could be injected with a tracer chip was the first stage in tracking them. Or should have been. The difficulty here was that the hole the hunter had ID’d had been founded by a psychopathic alpha who had created minions by biting innocent people all over town. Rumor had it that this alpha killed each of his own creations unfortunate enough to get tagged.

      Jonathan could feel them in there—the bad guys. Their presence riffled up and down the skin covering his arms. The street smelled of sweaty, fetid fur and bad moods.

      His attention veered past the hunter, to where wrongness tinted the silvery moonlit air with a reddish haze. A murmur of acknowledgment rose up from deep inside his chest. Two werewolves hovered there in the alley, standing guard. Those two would have pinpointed the presence of a hunter as easily as she had pinpointed them. The game worked both ways.

      Hell, he could scent her from where he stood, half a block away. Everything about this hunter disturbed the air, and none too subtly. He tasted on his tongue the gaminess of the leather she covered herself with. He tasted the electric fire of her nerves, as well as the musky sweetness of her anticipation. For her, this dangerous job was akin to forbidden sex, and that startled him, though it shouldn’t have.

      There had always been stories about hunters and how they ferreted out their prey by means of a strong, almost feline sexual attraction to them. Their bodies, more refined than the normal, everyday humans they believed themselves to be, got all gummed up with excitement as they took up a chase, he’d heard it said, and urgently needed sexual release after coming into contact with their Were counterparts.

      And okay, the thought of that got a rise out of him.

      “Another oddity in a long list,” he muttered, because weren’t love and hate said to sometimes reside on the same plane of emotion? Hunter and hunted? Man and woman, of whatever species? It was a fact that opposites attract, so why shouldn’t he have dreams about this particular woman? This hunter?

      Jonathan cleared his head of forbidden thoughts because now was not the time to indulge. She wasn’t supposed to know of his existence or his organization’s. It was best to keep the vow he’d taken to remain in the periphery as far as the hunters were concerned.

      He beefed up his concentration.

      The beat of Miami’s all-consuming, after-hours partying lay in the distance like someone else’s audible heartbeat being broadcast on a citywide public-address system. On this silent stretch of deserted street, he heard his own heartbeat and imagined he heard the hunter draw a breath. Then the silence was broken by a sudden popping sound—the familiar ping of his own vertebrae starting to reclass.

       Surprise!

      Heat flashed across his skin. The same sort of electrical heat he’d tasted from the hunter. Stick your finger in a socket kind of stuff that happened every time he shifted, and yes, also every time he laid eyes on this particular female.

      He had inched forward, out from beneath the awning’s flimsy cover, without realizing he’d done so—led by his stiffened male body parts, he supposed—to find himself standing on the curb.

      He looked down, saw his shadow and sighed.

      In one gigantic supernatural heave, fueled by the flood of falling moonlight, Jonathan rearranged his outline, taking him from human to beast in the time it took him to turn his head. Changing him from a thirty-two-year-old strapping man to a large, imposing creature, half man and half wolflike entity.

      Two shapes, human and wolf, meeting in the middle.

       All the better to eat you up, leather-girl.

      Tilting his wolfish head, Jonathan felt the closeness of those two other wolves. He perceived their anger. Inhaling again the sticky-sweet fragrance of defiance marring the scene, he then loped in her direction for a closer look, despite the rules.

      That sexy young woman planted smack-dab in the thick of danger might be a hunter and all business, but she was also the one. For him.

      Every one of his instincts told him this—whether or not hell might freeze over before she ever found out.

      CHAPTER TWO

      That sudden sting of razor-sharp claws was a shocking development. Nikki knew she had been hurt decently, but her anger over being attacked knocked the pain to the background.

      The freak had come at her fast. Now he was stumbling. She’d hit him with enough tranquilizer in that dart to take down an elephant, which meant she only had to deal with the remaining monster, wherever he was.

      “One down.”

      The burn of her anger felt like being dunked in a volcano. Liquid fire replaced the blood in her veins as she tensed. Her lips went numb.

      Vocalizing the oath stuck on her tongue was impossible. She’d already hesitated a few seconds too long. She whirled as the second monster propelled itself forward, slashing wildly at her with its hands and teeth. She dropped to a crouch in time to avoid further injury. The monster roared his defiance over her show of agility with its mouth wide-open.

      Opportunity knocked.

      Raising the gun, she sprang to her feet and jammed the heavy metal into the advancing werewolf’s mouth, breaking several of his front teeth. Ducking out of the way while he registered that blow, she hit the brick with one shoulder, bounced back and rammed the shocked Were hard with her body.