Merrick's Destiny Read online

  Merrick’s Destiny

  Moira Rogers

  eBooks are not transferable. They cannot be sold, shared or given away as it is an infringement of the copyright of this work.

  MERRICK’S DESTINY

  Perfect Strangers Collection

  Copyright © 2012 MOIRA ROGERS

  Cover art by Amanda Kelsey

  Edited by Trinity Scott

  ISBN: 978-1-936387-46-5

  ISBN 10: 1-936387-46-8

  All Romance eBooks, LLC

  Palm Harbor, Florida 34684

  www.allromanceebooks.com

  This is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or business establishments, events, or locales is coincidental.

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever with out written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  First All Romance eBooks publication: February 2012

  Chapter One

  The first time Merrick Wood laid eyes on his mate, she was sitting on top of him, her hands sliding quickly over his chest.

  “Come on,” she muttered, immediately following the entreaty with a string of blistering curses. “Come on, wake up. You weigh a ton, and we’ve got to move.”

  His mate, to be sure. No other possibility explained why his first instinct upon waking was to wrap his hands around her waist and hold her in place. Anyone else would have been under him by now, her face in the dirt and his knee at the small of her back. A bloodhound’s training left little room for error, and he’d been a bloodhound for enough decades for the ache in his bones to feel like old age, finally coming to claim him.

  He was too old to do something as damn-fool stupid as get himself mated, even if the foul-mouthed chit straddling him was a pretty little thing. Strong thighs, too. He could feel them on either side of his body, and sliding his hands down revealed they were encased in leather.

  No sweet lady, not spewing obscenities that would put color in the cheeks of the hardest border outlaw. Not a lady, and not a whore, either—he’d never met one who covered her best assets in men’s clothing, in heavy knit shirts and sturdy vests.

  Not a lady. Not a whore. His mate—and a complete stranger. “Where the hell am I?”

  The woman groaned. “Oh, fuck me. You’re addlebrained, that’s for sure, but can you walk?”

  Good damn question. He tried to turn his head and hissed out a breath as the world throbbed in time with his heartbeat. Judging from the ache in his skull, he’d hit the ground hard. His inability to recollect how he’d ended up with a spitfire mate was undoubtedly connected.

  But he was a bloodhound, not a man. Ignoring the pain, he gripped her waist again and held her aloft as he sat up. Every muscle in his body protested the abuse, but nothing seemed broken. Especially not his dick, which expressed ill-timed approval of how she felt in his lap.

  Maybe it wasn’t the first time. Maybe he’d hit his head hard enough to concuss a hound, and he’d have to wait for his amplified healing to fill in the memories of all the times she’d been astride him.

  A simple question could solve the mystery. “What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  “P-Paralee—” She sputtered the answer, then shook her head. “We don’t have time for this. I didn’t make it past the Black Hills before I had to bring her down. We’re in the Deadlands, honey. And that—” she cupped his face and turned his head to the right, “—is going to draw every scavenging bloodsucker for miles.”

  A hundred yards to his right, fire surged toward the sky. The shattered remains of what must have been a sleek airship littered the ground, broken wood and twisted brass turning black as the flames crept toward the back end of the ship. Much farther, and the whole thing was liable to explode.

  Heavy drag marks trailed from the side of the ship to where they sat. The slip of a girl in his lap must have hauled him clear before the fire started, though he had to weigh twice what she did.

  No wonder she was cursing her fool head off. A smart person would have left him to die already, and rage drove him to his feet. Blind fury at her for risking herself. He caught her arm and propelled her toward the hill rising away from the wreckage. “Move your ass.”

  She snatched up a heavy leather satchel and scrambled over the rise just as the first explosion rocked the night.

  Every step was agony, but Merrick had stopped being bothered by agony when he’d become a hound. Magic and science had torn apart his broken body, and the Bloodhound Guild had put it back together. Stronger, capable of healing with a speed that made pain an irrelevant warning.

  They’d made him fast too. As nimble as Paralee was, Merrick caught up to her before the second explosion blew shrapnel and flames skyward. When the first piece of burning wood hit the ground next to him, instinct overcame reason. He caught her around the waist and bore her to the ground, covering her body with his own as pieces of the crashed airship rained down around them.

  She grunted and shoved up against him. “Are you going to keep doing that?”

  Interesting. “This isn’t the first time?”

  “Not hardly. You grabbed me when the ship was going down too.”

  The words brought a scrap of memory, an image riding protective terror. He could see his own hands closing over hers, dragging her from the ship’s wheel as the fabric above their heads caught fire amidst prayers and screams. “What happened to the rest of the crew?”

  “They’re dead. The ones I could find—” Pain twisted her features into a grimace. “They’re dead.”

  Insensitive bastard. He mentally kicked himself as he pushed up on his arms, giving her space without letting her up. More jagged bits of memory intruded—her seated at a table, the lone woman in a sea of men, laughing uproariously at an off-color joke. “I’m sorry.”

  “I don’t want you to be sorry,” she snapped. “I want you to have your wits about you. You’re a bloodhound, and we’re stuck in the Deadlands. I need you.”

  Merrick gritted his teeth against the swell of feral satisfaction the words brought. His beastly half had the sense of an animal in heat, and no wit to appreciate nuance. Her I need you wasn’t sweet submission. It was ruthless practicality, and the plain truth. They were stranded in the Deadlands after dark. Vampires ventured forth with sunset, joining their ghouls in the hunt.

  He rose to his feet and took stock of his injuries. A throbbing head. A scrambled memory. Enough bruises and scrapes to turn him all the colors of the rainbow. A damn near overwhelming need to strip Miss Paralee bare and examine her body for the same scrapes and bruises.

  Shelter first. Then he’d explain the unfortunate realities of being stuck in the Deadlands with a riled bloodhound. Maybe not the part about being mated to one, though, not until he could remember how in hell it’d happened. “We went down in the Black Hills, you said?”

  “Just shy of.” She brushed her hair from her face and looked around. “That has to be the start of the Laramie Range to the south, there. If we head that way, we’ll hit the north fork of the Platte.”

  If that was true, they wouldn’t have far to walk to reach familiar territory. He’d lived in these mountains as a human, and worked them for decades as a hound. “Let’s step quickly, then. We need shelter to ride out the night, and for me to heal up a little.”

  “I managed to salvage some supplies.” She stood and looped the strap of the satchel around her neck. “No weapons but my sidearm, though. Well, and you, I suppose.”

  Laughing hurt, but that didn’t stop him. His coat was missing, but at least he’d been wearing his gun belt when they crashed. A quick check proved his boot knives had survived the adventure, along with the flint and tw
ine resting in the pockets sewn alongside his calves.

  He’d survived with less, but a glance upward showed only a quarter moon. “Shit.”

  “What’s the…” She followed his gaze and snorted. “New moon, huh? All the more reason to make it back to civilization. There’s a lovely whorehouse in Denver, you know—wall-to-wall French women who’ll gladly stick their tongues places you didn’t even know you had. Or so I hear.”

  “Sounds good.” Sounded fucking well miserable. Three days of sexual fury were coming for him, one way or another. He’d lost count of the number of new moons he’d passed—nearly six decades worth, by now. Sexual debauchery enough for ten lifetimes, and never a whisper of regret on the fourth day, when the fever broke and he rose from the tangled sheets as a man with a job.

  One stupid moment had changed all that. Somehow she’d done what those other women never had. Dug hooks into his soul, become the something he’d always need more than breath. If she turned him away when the moon went dark, he’d feel the emptiness in his gut. He’d ache. Suffer.

  If she never accepted him, the crazy beast inside him would pine itself to death, and take him with it.

  God damn, he had to seduce the life out of her, get those sleek thighs wrapped around his hips again. And then he had to figure out how he’d ended up mated to her to begin with.

  Well, maybe not in that order.

  #

  For a man who’d claimed to have lost most of his memory, Merrick Wood sure did look at her like he knew her. No, scratch that. He looked at her like he was going to, like no force on earth would stop him from unraveling her deepest, darkest secrets.

  He was going to be sorely disappointed.

  Paralee peeled off her vest and dug through one pocket until she found her self-striking flint. A run of dry weather ensured good tinder, and she breathed a sigh of relief as her bundle caught easily and began to lick at the dry wood arranged over it. That was one worry off the list—at least they’d have flame for cooking and heat.

  A quick glance at Merrick left her flushing and shivering at the same time. A bloodhound was supposed to be a walking furnace, and she’d heard more than one tale of folks surviving even the deadest cold of winter by huddling close to a hound to share his body heat.

  Fuck that.

  She cleared her throat and found her voice. “Are you sure the fire won’t be visible outside the cave?”

  He didn’t glance up from the odd-looking pistol he held. “Storm’s coming in from the northwest,” he replied. “The rain will break up the smoke, and vampires can’t get close enough to see the flames without me sensing them.”

  “All right.” She pulled her flask out of the satchel and offered it to him. “Colton. That’s the rest of my name, by the way. Paralee Colton.”

  “Paralee Colton.” He rolled her name slowly over his tongue, as if he liked the way saying it felt. When he accepted her flask, his fingers dragged across the back of her hand, too long and unhurried to be a mistake. “I suppose you already know my name.”

  “It was on my passenger manifest. Merrick Wood, representative of the Bloodhound Guild.”

  He nodded and took a sip from the flask. “So you’re the captain?”

  Lucius Hammersmith had never deigned to call her such, not while she was flying his bird. “Pilot.”

  “Hmm.” He rubbed at the back of his head with a wince. “So how did we get here? Last thing I remember clearly is meeting a contact in San Francisco. Your boss, was it? Seem to recall him saying he had his own ship.”

  Christ, the man rippled when he moved, and she couldn’t help but watch the teasing play of muscle beneath his shirt. “Lucius isn’t—wasn’t my boss. I was helping him out while his regular pilot recuperated.” Johnny’d be glad as hell he’d been laid up instead of flying the Siren now.

  “So what do you do the rest of the time? Fly your own ship?”

  “I used to.” Before her own precious ship had gone down in a blaze of flames. “Got shot down last year running supplies over the mountains. She’s docked in for repairs.” Extensive repairs that Paralee could never afford now that Lucius wasn’t around to pay her anymore.

  His eyes narrowed, but all he said was, “Tough run of luck.”

  “Not really. Most captains who fly the Deadlands don’t even consider you seasoned until you hit half a dozen.” He was still eying her, so she kept talking, mostly to fill the silence. “I used to crew for this crazy Spaniard named Rosendo. The bloodsuckers shot him down seventeen times before they managed to kill him.”

  “Damn suicidal line of work then. Almost as bad as mine.” Capping the flask, he laughed. “Most bloodhounds are crazy fuckers. What’s your reason?”

  Admitting the truth felt like revealing something deeply hidden, like handing him everything he would need to piece her together. “I just want to fly, and that’s easier to do out here. They’re too desperate to give a damn about the fact that I’m a woman.”

  That sent his gaze sliding from her face to her breasts, almost as if the reminder had given him permission. He looked away a second later, returning his attention to his pistol. “We’ve got fire, shelter and water in the creek. Next thing we need to see about is food.”

  It felt too much like a dismissal, as if he’d considered her revelation and found it lacking, declined to offer one of his own. Silly, Paralee. “Check the pack. Dried beef and crackers, I think.”

  “Enough for the night, then.” He turned the weapon over in his hands and sighed. “That’s a damn good thing, because I don’t think I could leave to go hunting.”

  Bloodhounds supposedly healed fast, but she hadn’t been sure at first that he was even alive. “Are you hurt that badly?” she asked, rising. Two quick steps took her to his side, and she ran a questing hand between his shoulders, up to the back of his head. “Perhaps I misjudged—”

  “No,” he rasped, twisting fast enough to catch her wrist. He stared up at her, the look in his eyes far too intense—too intimate—for a stranger. “I didn’t say I couldn’t hunt. I said I can’t leave. I can’t leave you here before dawn.”

  He still spoke as if it were a matter of his own strength, not hers, but that made no sense. She opened her mouth to tell him she could take care of herself, but the words died on her tongue. “Why not?”

  “Because, my sweet.” Merrick rose abruptly, crowding into her space. “Sometime between when I set foot on that ship and tonight, fate started dealing from the bottom of the deck. After sixty years, she finally saw fit to give me a mate, but damned if I can remember how.”

  A mate. Paralee stared at him, her concern melting into irritation. “No. No, fate did no such thing. I haven’t even touched—” Belatedly, she snatched her hand away and backed up a step. “We don’t know each other, and we’ve certainly never been intimate.”

  “Doesn’t take fucking,” he grumbled, looking away. “Or knowing a woman all that well. If you take issue with that, you’ll have to bring it up with the crazy half-cracked scientists who made me.”

  “Gladly, once we get back to civilization.” Oh shit, the new moon. She swallowed hard. “What does it mean? I mean—no, what does it mean?”

  He released her, his face closing off. “It means that I’m going to a kick up a fuss if you get scared or put yourself in harm’s way, and I’m fully capable of losing my good sense if you get hurt.” He cut her a slashing look. “It doesn’t mean I’m going to force myself on you like a fucking animal, so don’t give me those big eyes.”

  Indignation stiffened her spine. “I’m not an idiot. If you were planning to do that, you wouldn’t bother trying to sweet talk me.”

  Merrick stared at her, seemingly torn between outrage and laughter. “You think this is sweet talk? Christ, woman, what sort of men do you fuck?”

  “None of your business.” She turned away, her cheeks flaming, and reached for her bag. A quick search yielded several small packs of rations, and she shoved two at Merrick’s chest. “Do I need t
o take a watch shift, or will you wake up if we have company?”

  “Paralee—” He caught both her hands and brought them to his chest with a sigh. “Hell, this isn’t how I should have done it. But you need to know, because surviving a trip out of the mountains is hard enough when the place isn’t overrun by vampires. We need to understand one another.”

  The mountains were always crawling with vampires, at least as long as she could remember. “We stick to the sunlight, and we work together on the trail. That’s all we can do.”

  “You need to understand me,” he said as if she hadn’t spoken. “You’re going to be the most important thing in my world, and if you’ve got a scrap of compassion for me… Well, you’ll let me care for you a little, whether you need it or not.”

  He spoke of emotion, sentiment—unthinkable things. Things that could hurt worse than anything else. “Can you make it stop?”

  He stared at her for too long. “Only once we’ve parted ways.”

  “Fair enough.” For the time being, it changed nothing. He might be more solicitous of her, concerned about her, but the end result was the same. They would be traveling together, helping each other. “I understand.”

  “Good.” Merrick’s hands still held hers, and he stroked his thumbs over her knuckles. “You sleep tonight. We can find somewhere more secure to tuck in before dusk tomorrow.”

  The tiny, careful touch left her trembling. “All right.”

  He released her, and she almost swayed at the loss of contact. She needed something to occupy her thoughts, keep them—and her hands—off him, so she busied herself with readying a sleeping spot near the fire.

  Smoke drifted from it toward a certain spot on the high ceiling of the cavern, and Paralee watched it curl upward as she absently consumed her rations. An opening—perhaps nothing bigger than a crack, but it pulled the night air in from the mouth of the cave, creating a chill that permeated everything more than a foot from the fire.