Rogue: Wolves of Angels Rest, #3

By Elsa Jade

The mating moon is rising…

Rafael Villalobos is a werewolf without his wolf. The beast is rogue, gone hunting without him, making Rafe even more of a menace to his pack than the wolf hunters who hate them. He doesn't know what the wolf wants…until it leads him straight to the sassy, luscious Darling Rowan.

Bitten by a rogue wolf that may or may not have been the sexiest Villalobos boy, Dare knows her quiet days as the county librarian are coming to an end. She'll be coming too, if she can just get a certain stubborn man to admit that the simmering heat between them is more than the mating moon.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Red Circle Ink
• Release date: May 3, 2016
• ISBN: 9781941547113

Book preview

Wolves of Angels Rest: Book 3

ROGUE

Elsa Jade

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The mating moon is full…

Rafael Villalobos is a werewolf without his wolf. The beast is rogue, gone hunting without him, making Rafe even more of a menace to his pack than the wolf hunters who hate them. He doesn’t know what the wolf wants…until it leads him straight to the sassy, luscious Darling Rowan.

Bitten by a rogue wolf that may or may not have been the sexiest Villalobos boy, Dare knows her quiet days as the county librarian are coming to an end. She’ll be coming too, if she can just get a certain stubborn man to admit that the simmering heat between them is more than the mating moon.

Copyright © 2015 by Elsa Jade

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as factual. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be scanned, reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.

Prologue

The moon called him.

He could no more resist its pull than the tides of the inland sea that had once washed over this land. But the water was long gone, leaving only dust and the bones of ancient rock. So much lost…

When he followed the moon, he didn’t have to think of what he’d lost. He didn’t have to think at all. The wolf swallowed him whole, made him whole, at least for the time he ran in the silver light.

If only its light would never set. If only he could keep running. Then he could forget.

But the voices kept calling him back, louder and closer than the moon. Each time they called him back, the wolf raged. It wanted to keep running too, not to forget but to find what was missing. He couldn’t make it understand there was no hope, and he couldn’t make them understand they had to let him go.

Pulled in every direction, he felt himself ebbing away like the lost waters. Soon there would be nothing left. And one day, when the moon or the voices called, nothing would answer.

Chapter 1

Was the moon ever going to be all the way full?

Darling stood in the open kitchen door, staring out at the night. The backyard of her aunt’s house glowed in the bright light, seeming smaller than she remembered even though she’d lived here her whole life. The white roses—so out of place in the Four Corners region of the desert Southwest—perfumed the darkness, and the pale undersides of the cottonwood leaves shimmered on the gentle wind. But for all its luster, the rising orb in the sky was still shy of a perfect circle.

When the full moon finally set, her best friend from high school would be a true mated werewolf. Maddie Joplin had fallen in love with Kane Villalobos, alpha of the Mesa Diablo pack, and chosen to become his mate.

No, that wasn’t quite true. Her friend Maddie had always been in love with him. Now she had him. Just as Leela Jones had taken Bastian Villalobos as a mate, even though she had always hated werewolves, having been raised in a paramilitary cult that proclaimed shapeshifters to be mortal enemies of humans.

Love. Hate. Mortal enemy. True mate. All by the light of the moon.

It sounded like the chorus of a really bad country-western song.

Nobody would sing it besides her though. Maddie had reluctantly explained everything about werewolves, but only because Darling had seen too much to be kept in the dark.

You can never tell anyone, ever, Mad had said. It would be…bad.

Bad how? They’d been sitting in this very kitchen earlier today while Maddie told her the outcome of the hunters who had tried to invade Angels Rest but had been repelled by the werewolves and the special few townspeople who knew about them. Maddie had asked Dare to use her day job access to get information on the Jonestown Militia but had forbidden her from trying to help beyond the computerized sleuthing. Too dangerous, she’d said.

Bad for me. Bad for the pack and the town. Mad hesitated. Bad for you. She dropped her gaze toward the new moonstone ring gracing her tightly interlaced fingers. Just because I’m a werewolf now doesn’t mean I want to threaten my friends.

Yeah, Dare muttered. Leave that up to Rafe.

Rafael, the last of the three Villalobos boys, had driven her home the night Maddie had saved Kane from Leela’s attack—it was a long story. Not that Rafe had bothered to tell her any of it. He’d just given her a long, hard look from those deep jade eyes and said, Forget all of this before vanishing into the dark.

Forget? Really? She was the county library and records clerk. It was her calling to find out and remember things. And somehow forgetting that creatures like werewolves existed in real life, even if they were living in secret, was sort of impossible.

Mad squirmed in her seat. Rafe would never hurt you.

With a snort, Darling rose and went to the kitchen window to look out through the backyard, past the big cottonwoods, to the red mesa looming over the desert beyond Angels Rest. You might be one of them now, but you don’t know everything about werewolves.

All these hours later, the blazing silver light had awakened her out of a dead sleep. She’d hoped some chamomile tea would calm her enough to go back to bed, but the jar was empty. She’d have to pick some fresh.

Except when she opened the kitchen door to walk out to the garden, she found herself frozen on the threshold.

Not because it was particularly cold. Although the high desert temperature dropped at night, the breeze that fluttered through the thin cotton of her bell bottom pajamas was invigorating. For the last few weeks, she’d even kept her bedroom window open so she could fall asleep to the lullaby of the spring frogs calling from the trickle of creek below the cottonwoods.

But now…

Her skin prickled a warning, almost like the rush of heat that let her know she’d been out in the desert sun too long. Too long meaning five minutes with her fair Irish coloring. But she was only standing in the reflected light of day.

Maybe Maddie was right. It could be bad to know too much…

Nope, that attitude was best left to the crazy fundamentalists like Leela’s grandfather who’d brought the hunter militia to Angels Rest.

Besides, she wanted tea, gosh darn it. And no werewolf was going to keep her from walking into her own backyard.

She stomped down the three stairs to the backyard, her pigtailed sleep braids flapping on her shoulders. The grass was cool under her bare feet as she crossed to the herb garden. Her aunt earned a living as an online psychic, and she liked to have all the proper trappings of a flower child, up to and including the occasional toke before work. Dare bypassed those plants and found the chamomile tucked against the back fence.

Though the sweet, soothing scent beckoned her to the little white flowers with their sunny yellow hearts, she found her gaze focusing past the towering cottonwoods up to the dark bulk of the mesa. Basalt spires rose from the sandstone and pierced the pewter sky like…werewolf fangs. Hidden among the spires were the petroglyphs carved into the stone that told an ancient story of shapechanging monsters. Archeologists would say it was myths from the Puebloans who’d roamed the land for centuries before white explorers stumbled on the place.

Pfft. Little did they know.

Not knowing—like feeling left out of the joke—was the worst. But then again, her whole life was nothing but unanswered questions. Why had her mother left town when she was barely three years old? Or, if getting out of Angels Rest was so darned important, why hadn’t she taken with her the child she named Darling of all things? Why had drinking and driving mattered more to her father than being a father? And who in their right mind would pay an online psychic two ninety-nine a minute?

Well, she was grateful they did, otherwise Aunt Betsy wouldn’t have been able to keep her. And actually, she was starting to understand why people were willing to pay so much for answers they couldn’t otherwise find.

Realizing her fingers were wrapped around the sun-blistered wood of the back garden gate, she paused. When had she opened it? She looked out to the wildness beyond. Aunt Betsy’s house was the last on the lane. Beyond the tidy picket fence and sentinel cottonwoods, a line