Bew T. and the Beast

Book 1

Keira Leggett

Published by Keira Leggett at Smashwords

Copyright 2014 Keira Leggett

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Contents

Prologue

Chapter one

Chapter two

Chapter three

Chapter four

Chapter five

Chapter six

Chapter seven

Chapter eight

Chapter nine

Chapter ten

Chapter eleven

Chapter twelve

Chapter thirteen

Acknowledgements

Prologue

In this modern version of the classic Beauty and the Beast tale, the 'beast' is a beautiful young woman who is the result of DNA experimentation. Part wolf, she escapes into obscurity and safety in the mountains where she is befriended by a pack of timber wolves. Her life had become safe and comfortable until the day the wolves brought her an injured man who needed her help. He also discovers her secret and soon things become complicated and dangerous for both of them.

Chapter one

Her eyes flew open. Something was wrong. She held perfectly still in the darkness and listened intently.

The howl of a wolf pierced the night just outside her window. She tensed and waited. There was an answering call in the distance. Then silence. She slipped quietly out of bed. Naked, she made her way effortlessly through the dark to her computer tables. A shake of the mouse brought the monitors to life. A cold blue light filled the room as she checked the security feeds from multiple cameras around the main house and grounds.

Nothing uninvited was inside the building. Nothing had penetrated the perimeter security systems. There was nothing unusual about the grounds inside the fences. There it was. A movement by the gate. Hair fell in front of her eyes as she leaned closer to the monitor. She brushed it aside absently as she had done countless times before.

There was a man laying still in the snow. Well shit, she said to the empty room.

She sighed as she slid on the Levi’s she had left crumpled on the floor that night on her way to bed. She had not bothered to wear underwear for years now. The only point to women’s underwear, near as she could figure out, was purely for decoration and it had been a very long time since that had mattered to her. She enjoyed dressing up sometimes and she did actually own lingerie, but she did not think it was a critical part of her every-day life on the mountain by herself.

It was also hard for her to feel pretty even with lacey intimate things to wear. She thought of herself as ordinary looking at best. She was not skinny but not a voluptuous woman either. She did have curves in all the socially accepted places. She was a medium height, she had a medium sized chest and chronically messy hair. That is what she thought. The truth would have surprised her. Her ‘Irish child bearing hips’, as they had once been called by her doctor, gave her an hour glass shape and her hair had a way of making men think of the bedroom but what really got her noticed was the way she carried herself with the confidence of an Alpha female. That and her eyes. They were sometimes green and sometimes amber but they were always startlingly direct. They made people feel as if she could see exactly who they were deep inside.

Since her I.Q. was literally off the chart, her senses were super naturally charged and she was a skilled empath people were right to feel that way. She looked around for her shirt. Screw it, she grumbled to herself and grabbed a silk bathrobe which was the closest thing that she could find to cover herself with instead.

She looked at the monitor again. The man had not moved. She pulled the down comforter off of her bed, and barefoot, she jogged with it over one arm through the vast house not bothering to turn on the hall lights. She paused briefly to type in the security code by the front door disabling the alarms. It always gave her a moment of perverse pleasure typing in the code words biteme, even though she had had to install a special key pad to do it. That was okay. She had more money than she could possibly use in one lifetime and she had no shame at all in indulging her whims.

The cold air hit her like a wall. It was refreshing to her. With her bare feet sinking into the fresh, soft snow she paused to listen to the night and to smell the air, trying to assess the situation. The wolf that had been there a minute ago had left but his paw prints were clearly visible in the snow around the body. She knew those foot prints well.

Wise choice Rogue. You know how I feel about visitors, she said.

She talked to herself a lot. It was not like there was anyone around to care. She had tried talking to houseplants and pets before and she had come to the conclusion that they did not find her nearly as interesting as she found herself to listen to so she gave up the pretense eventually. The air was filled with the smells of a winter night on the mountain plus a hint of wet wolf. And of course blood. There was lots of blood.

She keyed in the password at the gate at the front of her vast yard which slid to one side with a grating sound that seemed very loud in the stillness. Every creature in the woods around her knew something was up and they were holding their collective breaths watching to see what she would do about it. Most of her animal brethren were not terribly supportive in a pinch but they did seem to find her entertaining to watch.

As she bent down towards the man she could sense his heartbeat. It was very faint and slow. Anymore she could not even tell whether she was hearing, seeing, or just ‘knowing’ some things like that. It all blended into one amorphous sense most of the time for her. She had always been that way. For many years she thought that it was normal. For even more years than that she had tried being in denial about it and finally she just took herself and her heightened sensitivities as far away from society as she could get. She was happy that way. It was peaceful.

Until now.

So he was alive. That was a mixed blessing. She should just walk away. It was not her problem. At least she did not want it to be her problem. The fact that the wolves had brought him to her spoke volumes to her though. If he had been a hunter or any kind of threat they would have left him to die without a second thought. If they were hungry enough they might even have been pleased. She smiled. That was not even a little bit true of course but it amused her to picture every big bad wolf ever depicted in a story and what it supposedly would have done to the guy it had found. Those stories were so very wrong. She also knew, and not just because they shared some DNA with each other, that wolves were extraordinary in their ability to judge character. If they thought this man should live they were probably right.

Crouching beside him, her basic triage training came flooding back to her. She had all kinds of usually useless information stored in that formidable mind of hers. She quickly determined that aside from the bruises and abrasions she could see that his major injury was from a bad bash to the head. Head wounds were always messy. She would have to risk the threat of him having a possible spinal injury and move him anyway as shock and hypothermia were already well underway for him.

She rolled him over to get a better grip to carry him with and a camera, still hanging around his neck, thudded to the ground. It was a very expensive camera. On closer inspection she noted his very expensive wilderness wear as well. It was not flashy but it was very good quality and it was actually appropriate. This guy was not fooling around. Apparently he knew what he was doing. He had probably been looking for the elusive timber wolf pack that wandered around in the Olympic Mountains. That was another good reason to let him quietly disappear in yet another mountain climbing accident. She was fiercely protective of her friends and like for herself, she did not welcome attention being brought to them.

Too bad I’m not a cold blooded killer she said to the unconscious man. Unless someone really deserves it. You, my friend, do not seem to be actually evil. You might be stupid but you’re probably not evil.

Wrapping him carefully in her comforter, and making a mental note to never buy a cream colored comforter again, she let out a little grunt as she swung him to her shoulder and adjusted him so he would not fall off when she moved.

Ah, see? Psycho strength isn’t just for chopping fire wood after all, she said to no one in particular.

She was trying not to jar him too much as she moved quickly to bring him inside and paused only long enough to secure the gate behind them again. Even when she was out here in the middle of nowhere, she was always vigilant about security. If anyone ever came looking for her she did not want to make it easy for them to get to her. She did not allow mutant hunting on her mountain.

Once inside the house she paused to close the door and reset the alarm system. She snorted.

My first house guest and you aren’t even awake to appreciate it. Now where to put you?

She had three bedrooms. She had kept decorating them in different styles until each one was unique and satisfied some part of her personality.

One was the epitome of all things that were feminine. Complete with the dramatic four poster bed with sheer flowing drapes, and far too many pillows and the deep jetted tub that was equipped with all of the fragrant, colorful, bubbly, fizzy and sparkly things a woman could dream of. Everything in that room was soft to the touch. There was giant teddy bear stuffed under the bed. She did not know which embarrassed her more. The fact that she had the big teddy bear at all, that she sometimes like to sleep with, or the fact that she felt the compulsion to hide it.

Another room had started out as a library and it was full of an eclectic collection of reading materials. It had a fireplace and an insanely comfy chair in it. She had even added one of those wet bars that are cleverly disguised as a giant globe. It had seemed appropriate to the setting, even though she did not drink very often. The room was filled with curios from all over the world as well. She had not been to the places that they had come from but she enjoyed touching them and imagining what it must be like where, and sometimes when, they had come from. The room had a ‘window seat’ that was a full sized bed with heavy velvet curtains that could be pulled closed to keep away the chill that would often come from the window. She had never actually shut them but she liked the idea that she could do it if she ever wanted to.

The room that she usually slept in was more of an atrium than a bedroom really. One full wall was a fireplace built with river rock and in front of it sat a natural looking