Outfoxed by Love (Kodiak Point Book 2) (4 page)

I’m under attack!

Not from enemy fire, or a true foe, nothing more deadly than a … kiss. A kiss that smashed through the walls he’d erected. An intimate press of lips that disarmed him completely and utterly. A sly ploy by a vixen who threatened him sweetly with his own gun.

“Still think it was a stroke of luck?” she asked
in a playful tone.

If someone would have told him getting bested by a woman and threatened with his own weapon would turn him on, he would have punched them out. But that was before it happened to him.

Straddled by Jan’s body, her face poised mere inches above his own, even the cold press of the barrel on his skin couldn’t quell his erection.

I am a sick fuck.
And a horny one. Didn’t mean he’d do anything about it. His attraction to Jan, an attraction reciprocated, didn’t change the situation. He still wasn’t the right man for her.

No one is good enough for Jan.
Which really sucked for her.

Still, the fact he couldn’t have
Jan—
along with anyone else—
didn’t change the fact he needed to do something. They couldn’t remain like this.
Well, we could, maybe with fewer clothes, more touching, more—

Oops, strangle that thought. Focus.
Boris could have easily taken the gun from her. If she intended to shoot, she would have by now, although he doubted she would and not just because the safety latch was still engaged. Little Jan was out to prove a point. Well dammit, she wasn’t the only one who could prove something.

With reflexes born from necessity,
Boris acted. It took only a heartbeat, or two, for him to grab her gun hand, hook his leg around her, flip their position so that he lay atop her
—
and for him to plunder her mouth.

She isn’t the only one who can play dirty.

A long, long time ago, back when Boris still believed he could have a future with this stunning vixen, he’d kissed her. A kiss he’d relived over and over. A bright shining moment he’d used when despair threatened. He’d convinced himself over the years that the one embrace they’d shared surely wasn’t so great. That he’d built up the pleasure of it in his mind.

Wrong.

If anything, the kiss they shared now was even more mind blowing than the first, or the second. As her soft lips tugged and teased his, as the wet tip of her tongue traced the seam of his mouth, he forgot what his plan was. Surely he’d had one when he’d decided to turn the tables?

Isn’t the plan to kiss her senseless so she stops arguing?
If so, he wasn’t doing a great job because she murmured against his mouth, “Big cat, right behind you.”

Fuck!

Boris rolled them both a moment before the large feline landed, claws extended, with a snarl. He could have blamed the cougar sneaking up on him on a multitude of things, such as the wind blowing in the wrong direction, but truth was, as usual, Jan distracted him. She took the edge off the predator in him, an edge that, as a moose, he fought hard to achieve.

Springing to his feet proved the proverbial red flag to their attacker. The cougar dove on him, sending them both crashing back to the ground. Calling his animal wasn’t an option. While Boris could hold his own as a moose against many predators, when it came to close quarters and
, for some reason felines, he fared better as a man.

Holding the snapping jaws from his
face, he tucked his knees under the feline body and then pushed, heaving the shifter over his head to hit a rocky outcropping.

He heard clapping and turned incredulous eyes on Jan, the one making the noise.

“Not bad,” she praised. “Although you lost some points on your tumble.”

“Are you seriously judging my wrestling technique? You do know I served five years in the
Marine Corps.”

“
And that makes you too good to be judged?” She shook her head. “Nope. If you get to judge me on the basis of my being a woman, then I get to grade you. Oh, you might want to look behind you before you fail.”

Boris stepped to the side as the cat lunged
. As the cougar soared past, he dove on its back.

“I’ll have you know,” he said with a grunt as he wrapped his arms around the furry neck. “That I once took on four cats at the same time and came out victorious.”

“They were the normal household variety,” Jan pointed out. “I’ve heard the story.”

“They were Siamese and belonged to Aunt
Betty-Sue. Ask anyone, those things are psycho. This guy, on the other hand,”
—
Boris squeezed tighter and the feline went limp in his grip, a lack of oxygen making it pass out
—
“is easier to subdue than the Scorpii in the desert hills of the Mid-east.”

“If you say so.”

“I do. And I’m done.” Boris stood and the cougar’s subdued body dropped. He opted to not kill it, not with Jan watching. Despite her nonchalance over the violence, there was no sense in shocking her with an up-close death sentence to the enemy cat.

“Not done.
We’ve got more company. Wolves.”

Indeed.
Boris could smell them coming. Feral wolves, again. Exactly how many of these did the enemy command? This kind of behavior was unnatural. However, the control someone exhibited over these wild ones skipped unnatural into downright unprecedented.

While he’d heard of some alpha lupines fooling the weaker ones in natural packs to follow, the numbers they’d already encountered, especially when you considered how many they’d killed, didn’t make sense.
Where is our enemy getting them from?

And how did he know to send them here?

Did it matter? The vicious canines bounded over the rocks and up the steep incline, nimble on their four paws. But they didn’t catch Boris unaware this time. He’d already stripped and shifted.

For this, he’d rely on his rack and his hooves to teach the small canine pack a lesson.

As he lowered his head to meet the charge from the first one, he noted Jan out of the corner of his eye taking aim and firing.

Well
, at least she knows enough about guns to unclick the safety and aim.
Judging by the yelp, she hit something too. Given how fast wolves could move, he doubted she’d landed a killing shot, but the loud noise would probably hold the rest at bay.

Then he couldn’t worry about her as he dealt with the attacking dogs. Many people were under the mistaken impression moose were docile herbivores, big
, lumbering, dumb giants.

Those people were the sticky stuff between his toes when he trampled their uneducated asses with his hooves.
Moose—and before anyone asked, a group of them were not called meese—weren’t the most aggressive of animals in the forest. They didn’t have razor-sharp teeth, a vicious snarl, or pointed claws. But they were fucking strong with a rack that spanned up to six feet. They were also big, weighing in over seven hundred pounds. Piss one off and then imagine all that weight applied to a well-aimed stomp. However, his hooves weren’t his only weapon. A whack from his antlers or a scoop, sweep, and fling also made for a great attack move.

In this situation, he relied on both those skills beca
use Boris was annoyed. It was one thing for him to not want to kiss Jan; it was another to have some mangy wolves—who should have known better—interrupt it.

So he showed them the error of their ways, his limber joints allowing him to not only kick with his forelegs but his back ones too. Another benefit of his kind
, he could even kick sideways.

In the zone, his mind cold and calculating, he took on the attacking gr
ay wolves. He tossed them around like stuffed toys.

Until he heard
Jan yell, “Ow, that hurt, you smelly mutt.”

At that point
he lost his mind and let out a roar that echoed.

If a moose could go ninja on some lupine
asses, then that’s what he did. No more Mr. Gentle Giant. His attack turned deadly. Forget kicking and tossing, he began stomping and crushing, biting anything furry that came within reach. He didn’t move much, letting the furry ones come to him instead, lest the icy peak prove too much for four-legged footing. A proneness to broken legs was a moose’s biggest fear and weakness.

When the area before him cleared,
if one discounted the broken bodies, he tossed his antlered head and peered around for more of the enemy to play with. He even dragged a hoof through the snow and snorted, a warm steamy breath huffing from his nose.

No
thing left in front of him, but from behind, he felt a sharp sting as something chomped on his haunch.

Before he could kick out his leg
and shake the mutt free, he heard a bang. The mouth clamped around his flesh loosened as the wolf attacking him hit the ground, dead.

Jan stood over the corpse and frowned. “Not even big enough for a good pair of mitts.”

Morphing back to his man shape, because his moose vision sucked, he declared, “Wearing skin is wrong.” As he said it, he took a peek around and noted the wolves were either littering the ground or limping off to lick their wounds. The cougar shifter he’d choked still drooled in the snow.

“It’s only wrong if you buy it. There is nothing wrong with skinning something you’ve hunted and making use of it. If
wolf flesh weren’t so tough, I’d eat it too. Then again…” She tapped her chin in thought. “Think we can drag one back? I’ve got a recipe for stew I’ve been meaning to try.”

Boris
, in the process of dressing, shot her an incredulous gaze. “Like hell you’d eat it. I’ve seen your idea of lunch. Salads and fruit.”

“Just making sure I eat health
ily. And I’ll have you know, I have a lot of meat in my diet. I might not have eaten much wolf meat, but I’ve partaken of my fair share of other prey. Stuff I’ve brought down. My daddy taught me not to waste what I hunt.”

“Because you go hunting so often,” he scoffed. Then again, maybe she did. Boris had done his best in the past few years to not pay attention to what the fox did during her time off. For all he knew, she liked to dance naked around bonfires. Now there was a visual to almost knock him to his knees, especially since he now had a clear image of what a naked Jan looked like.

Pale skin, rounded curves, fat pink nipples, blonde cur
ls at the vee of her thighs. Good thing he’d already managed to get his pants on, or he’d have had a fine time explaining his sudden erection at the recollection of her sweet body.

The lack of weight in his empty holster reminded him to hold out his hand.
“Now that the danger’s passed, do you mind handing over my gun?”

She tucked it behind her back in a childish ploy.
“Don’t I get to keep it since I proved I can fire it without blowing off my own foot?”

“No.” Sharing his gun was too much to ask. Sharing implied friendship, friendship led to conversation, conversation led to him grabbing her by the nape and dragging her in for another kiss.

And then … bad things might happen. Even if they did have sex and it was great, nothing could come of it. He couldn’t offer her the life she wanted, and he wouldn’t lead her emotionally astray.

Because once upon a time I swore to
beat the hell out of anyone who hurt her. Yet, if I’m the one dealing the pain, then that means I’d have to take care of myself.
How would he explain that to his alpha?

Ignoring her angry look
, he took the weapon she handed him and ejected the clip, replacing it with a fresh one. He then holstered it.

“Ready to go?” he asked as he
threaded his arms through the straps on his pack. He eyed the unconscious cougar on the ground. Given he planned to question the feline, forget leaving him behind. Damn he looked heavy, though, and they had hours of trekking ahead of them. But he’d dragged bigger.

“Who says I want to go with you?” Her mutinous expression went well with her crossed arms.

This time, he didn’t hold in his sigh. “Why are you testing me like this? What happened to nice Jan? The one who asks me if I want coffee?”

“That one is paid to serve java to idiots. I’m not on the clock now
, and I see no reason to pander to your ego.”

“My ego?
What’s asking if you’re ready to go have to do with my ego?”

“Maybe I’m tired of trying to cater to you.” She tilted her chin at a stubborn angle. “
For years I’ve tried to play nice and get you to notice me. Well, no more, moosehead. From now on, no more Miss Nice Fox. Say hello to the real me. The not-so-nice vixen.”

She wanted to be a bad vixen
? He could have groaned, as that concept immediately had her dressed in his mind in tight latex with ruby red lips curved in a wicked smile as she crooked a finger at him. Fuck, there she went addling his brain again.

It drew a scowl from him and a mocking
, “You don’t have it in you to be bad.” Too late, he recognized his challenge.