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it was time to make a stand. Then someday when a gorgeous, intelligent man rode in her car, she could show some interest instead of feigning dislike to protect him. Any suitor who showed the slightest interest in Katie Duncan was doomed to the wrath of her stepfather, who wanted her body for himself.
    The terror of those days and nights came rolling into her thoughts. The days of malicious mind games played on both her and her mother. The awful groping when he caught her alone in the halls. The dreaded hunts that she only participated in to buy her mother some precious moments of peace. The tense nights of listening for heavy footsteps that paced back and forth in the hall outside her bedroom door, never entering, but so close that she would ball up her fist, stuffing it in her mouth to keep from screaming. Katie would hide under the blankets, wide awake until the light of day, and then descend to breakfast to see her mother bearing the marks of his rage at the woman’s infertility and her daughter’s refusals. Thinking about her stepfather, she felt the urge to retch again. Luckily there was nothing in her stomach to throw up.

Chapter Five
    “That must have been some midnight run,” Nan said slyly, wiggling her eyebrows at her husband. Bill looked like he was struggling to keep the grin off his face. Nan was an attractive lady, dressed for the morning in pressed jeans and a sky-colored cable knit cashmere sweater that perfectly set off her laughing blue eyes. “The pretty lass couldn’t loan you an old overcoat?”
    She seemed pleased with his predicament, probably hoping David had found a girl with a broad enough mind to accept his unique heritage, since it seemed he was doomed to not find a mate among his own kind. The picture the lord of the mountain must have presented this morning had been undoubtedly hysterical as he stood in the center of his hall dressed—or rather undressed—in his outlandish getup.
    The couple had worked for his family since David was a child. After the death of his parents, events forced David to make a new start in North Carolina in a city settled by some of his distant relations generations ago. Like the family heirlooms they were, the pair had decided to accompany him. Nan was the housekeeper, cook, and mother figure while Bill looked after everything on the estate that Nan didn’t already have handled.
    Both were privy to the secrets of David Finn’s heritage and took full advantage of that knowledge when needed. David was used to dealing with the ribbing of his housekeeper and thanked God that Nan’s husband, at least, had some sense of decorum.
    Bill had let go the man who usually plowed the drive in favor of doing it himself just for the pleasure of driving the shiny new green tractor outfitted with a snow blade. Today, he was dressed in tan Carhartt  winter coveralls against the cold. The big man scowled at his wife, his nose and cheeks as red as apples, and his bushy gray eyebrows meeting in the middle of his forehead like two wooly worms. “What kind of woman sends a man out in the cold in a pink blanket, I ask you? David, you should have ducked out on her and gone to wolf, lad. That girl is as coldhearted as the ground outside, I tell you!”
    David glared at both of his nosy employees and muttered something about having some work to do in his office. Later, showered and clothed, he sat in front of his computer in thoughtful repose. The large size of the rooms and the expansive windows with sweeping views of the woods and mountains usually kept his wolf spirit from feeling caged and uneasy.
    But there was no comfort for him right now, even though his wound from the night before was almost gone. There was only a faint white scar marking the crown of his head, and that would disappear soon enough. A heaping plate of Nan’s granola pancakes, thick slabs of crisp bacon, and a steaming cup of black coffee sat on a tray nearby, untouched.
    Katie Duncan was in trouble. The danger