Furnace: A Fated Mate Romance Read online

  Her scream ripped through the air as she sat up, abruptly remembering that she was in a car and they were going over the edge of the road in a storm-caused mudslide. She slammed her hands down to brace herself, wondering why the car felt so cool and solid. There wasn’t any light to see by, but as her brain continued to return to functionality, Petal understood that she wasn’t in the car any longer.

  Nothing was moving, and she was alive. A quick check told her that she was unharmed as well. Minus a plentitude of bruises and aches of course. But no broken bones or other traumatic injuries. It was a minor miracle really. The hill below the road hadn’t exactly been a gentle slope. The nearest trees were easily three hundred feet below. That was a long fall before something might have stopped them.

  So what had happened? And where were they? Questions started to abound in her head.

  “Lex?” she called out tentatively.

  Her voice echoed back to her. She was somewhere inside. Her hands felt the ground beneath her once more, tapping on it. Solid rock. All at once Petal knew they were in a cave. No, she was in a cave. Lex was nowhere to be seen, and nobody else had responded to the sound of her voice.

  She was alone. Focusing through the headache pounding in her skull, Petal did the first thing she could think of. She found a weapon. It was a rock perhaps the size of a soup bowl. It wouldn’t be any good if someone had a light, but perhaps she could sneak up on them and hit them on the head with it. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was better than nothing.

  “Hello?” she tried again, but once more there was no response. “Dammit Lex, where the hell are you? Why did you leave me?”

  The sound of her voice had given her some idea of the layout of the cave. Petal determined that she was sitting against one wall. To her left and right the cave expanded. It was long and narrow, as best she could tell. Anything more than that would require light.

  A sound from off to her right caught her attention. It was the sound of something scrabbling on rock.

  She swallowed nervously.

  Like claws.

  Oh no. She had somehow made her way into a wolf den, and now the wolves had returned. They were going to kill her. Petal wasn’t sure what the best course of action was, but she knew she couldn’t just sit there and stay quiet. She needed to try and scare them off. If they weren’t expecting her to aggressively come at them, maybe she could startle them, get them to leave the cave. Then she could make her escape before they came back.

  She drew in as much courage that remained to her. It wasn’t much, but it would have to be enough. Petal sucked air into her lungs once. Then twice, letting them expand in size. Then she sucked in a third breath, and began to bellow at the creature even while she pounded her rock against the stone of the ground.

  “Get out!” Bam. “Leave me alone!” Bam! Bam! Petal started to advance toward the sound, feeling her way as she went. “Begone! Leave this place!” She kept hammering the rock in her hand into the side of the cave wall, the crack of sound echoing crazily. “Raaagghhhhh!” She did her best roar, not caring how it sounded.

  “Calm—”

  The voice sounded from just off to her left. Petal didn’t let it finish as she launched herself at the noise, swinging the rock with all of her might.

  Something wrapped around her wrist and stopped it cold. The sudden cessation of movement caused a backlash up her arm and into her shoulder that made her whimper in pain. It was only when it released that she realized it had been a hand.

  “That’s enough,” the voice said in an iron tone.

  “Lex?” she gasped, more relieved that she recognized the voice than with the way he’d spoken to her.

  “I hope you’ll believe it’s me. I lost my nametag though, so I can’t prove it.”

  She sagged into his arms, barely registering the sudden change in his voice. “Oh thank God it’s you.”

  “Who else would it be?”

  Suddenly feeling silly that she’d thought herself under attack by wolves, Petal just shook her head and rested against him. Lex, for his part, stood there and held her easily, as if she didn’t weigh a thing. After several moments of that she stood up, brushed herself off and gathered her thoughts.

  “Come on,” he ordered. “Let’s get you seated. You took a nasty bump on the head.”

  Strong, confident hands guided her back to her sitting area, where she realized for the first time she’d been half on top of a sheet of some sort. It felt crinkly and vaguely metallic.

  “It’s a reflective heat blanket,” Lex informed her. “From the truck’s safety gear.”

  “The truck,” she said suddenly, sitting upright. “What happened?”

  “What do you remember?” Lex’s voice came out of the darkness from the opposite wall, where apparently he seemed to have seated himself.

  Petal wished he would have sat down next to her, but she wasn’t about to tell him that. He appeared to be able to see better in the dark than her, but letting him know she was afraid of it wasn’t an option. She still had some dignity left. Probably. Maybe.

  “The storm. The rain. We were driving in the truck. The road washed out. Then…blank.” She smacked the palm of her hand against her head in frustration at her inability to remember everything that happened after. Immediately pain blossomed and she hissed as agony lanced deep into her brain.

  “Gentle,” Lex urged. “You hit your head pretty hard. You need to take it easy for a bit, okay?”

  “Yeah. Got that now.” Eventually the suffering eased and she found her breathing returning to normal. “Definitely got it.”

  “Just try to relax. I’ll tell you what happened.”

  Petal nodded weakly, forgetting that he couldn’t see her.

  “We were going backward as the road gave out in front of us. We went around a tree, but we were going over some branches of it. The bottom of the trunk went over the lip of the road, and the top rose into the air, the edge of the road itself acting like the fulcrum of a lever. Follow so far?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That took the truck with it, obviously.” He made an odd grunting noise before continuing. “Anyway, the branches suddenly going up flipped the truck around and onto its back. You blacked out when you hit your head. The road kept washing out and we went down the hill. I managed to pull you out, and get you to shelter here.”

  “Where is here, by the way?”

  “A cave I found,” he answered, tapping his fist against the sidewall loud enough to echo. “Thank goodness I did too.”

  Petal sensed more bad news. “Why do I get the feeling the story doesn’t get any better from there?”

  Lex snorted into the silence that followed. “Because it doesn’t. I also grabbed the truck’s safety gear. It was about all I could manage between the rain and the mud pouring into the truck.”

  She shook her head. “You let a company vehicle get dirty?”

  “Well, I was planning to write it off for insurance fraud anyway. I could use the money for a nice vacation down somewhere south. Where it’s warm.”

  “Insurance fraud? What were you going to say? That the door just magically opened and it filled with mud? Nobody is going to believe that,” she scoffed. “As if one of our employees would be dumb enough to drive it out on a road that was unsafe. Do you know how many regulations that employee was probably breaking?”

  “Hmm,” Lex said, sounding thoughtful. “I suppose you’re right. But what about the giant boulder that crushed the entire bed? Or the tree that slammed into the cab a minute or so after we exited it? Can we make either of those work?”

  “I don’t think we have boulder protection. But a falling tree? Oh yeah. Much better excuse.”

  “Glad to hear it. I can imagine my villa on the ocean even now.”

  “A villa on the ocean? I don’t think our trucks are worth that much.”

  He laughed, the sound helping ease her fear, as was the banter between them.

  “I assumed there would be a rewar
d for returning a lost beloved corporate executive as well.”

  “Oh probably.” Petal grew quiet after that, lost in thought. The truth was, she wasn’t beloved.

  Hell, I’m not even liked. Even my own boss is scared of me, preferring to send messages through our secretaries instead of directly to me. Nobody would be happy to have me back. They would probably celebrate if I didn’t return from this.

  All at once the direness of her predicament came rushing in, cloistering around her with a claustrophobic tightness she’d never felt with the cave itself. There was a very real chance that one Petal Olson didn’t come back from this. She’d never really considered how she was going to die before. It was just sort of assumed that she’d go at a ripe old age, surrounded by her family.

  Now that future wasn’t looking so accurate.

  “Can we call for help?” she whispered, changing the topic.

  “Unfortunately, no. The cell phones were charging in the dash, remember? In my rush to get you and the safety gear, I didn’t have time to get them.”

  “What? Those were our best chance for getting rescued!” she shouted, struggling to get to her feet.

  Lex was there in a flash, his hands somehow finding her shoulders and settling her back onto the thermal reflective blanket.

  “Petal, it wouldn’t have mattered.”

  “We could have been rescued by now!”

  “No, we couldn’t have!”

  She recoiled as he raised his voice for the very first time. The sharp tone cut through her building hysteria like a steak knife, deflating it swifter than it had formed.

  “What do you mean?”

  His arms guided her back down. This time he sat beside her, not even breathing hard from the little episode. Petal on the other hand was forced to take deep breaths to replace the oxygen she’d used up in her struggle.

  “Minutes after I got us free of the truck and mud the temperature started to drop rapidly. Everything started to turn to snow and ice. There’s several feet of snow outside the den now. We would have frozen to death before rescuers could ever have reached us.”

  “That sounds bad.”

  She could sense him nodding. “I’m not going to lie. It is bad. But, it’s also survivable. We have warm weather gear, including the blankets.”

  “Blankets? There’s more of them? Can I have them?” She was suddenly feeling a little chilly.

  “No. The other one is acting as our door, helping to keep the heat in. The ground is still quite warm, so we should be okay as long as we stay in here until it melts. I pulled enough snow up across the entrance to form a sort of igloo. That and the blanket should prevent the cold from really penetrating in here. We’ll survive. It won’t be that villa on the ocean, but we’ll live through it. I promise.”

  The confidence in his voice reached out and grabbed her. Petal basked in it, feeling confident about their chances with Lex at her side. He was a quick thinker, fast on his feet it seemed. Hopefully he could find a way to get them out of this mess.

  Otherwise she was going to die stuck in a cave with a lowly line worker.

  Romeo and Juliet it was not.

  8.

  Shelter

  Lex

  He breathed a sigh of relief as Petal accepted his story as true.

  The fact that everything he’d told her was true certainly helped. It just wasn’t the entire truth. He’d neglected to mention how he’d used his strength to form a sort of airbag around her upper body while the truck flipped and rolled down the hillside. He had the bruises on his body to prove it, as did she. Still, it was vastly preferable to having slammed her head into the much more unforgiving truck cab.

  Then there was the part where he’d been forced to wrap her up in the blankets and shift into his wolf form to secure them the cave. As it turned out, a small pack of wolves had laid claim to it for the night already. Oddly enough they had been rather upset about being turned out into the night and had decided that the five versus one odds they had were enough to deal with the interloper.

  Lex had proven them wrong, but it hadn’t been easy. He closed his eyes, thinking back to it.

  His eyes had spied the tracks in the fast-falling snow as he approached the cave. They were mostly covered. Even with the snow coming down as hard as it was, it meant that they had likely been inside for an hour or more. Long enough to get comfortable, and to know that nothing else had a claim to the cave.

  Lex had moved to the side of the cave before he set Petal down and wrapped her tightly in both blankets to ward off the cold before he could get her inside. Then he’d walked back around his little half-arch until he stood facing the opening head-on. By now the wolves inside would have smelled his presence, despite the swirling wind. He spread his legs and wiggled his fingers back and forth.

  “Come out, come out, or I’ll come on in,” he called out, altering the nursery rhyme for his own purposes.

  A low growl echoed from within the entrance to the cave. The opening was only perhaps three feet high and four feet wide, forcing the large creature that emerged to crouch as it emerged. The nearly pure-white wolf’s lips were pulled back, bone-yellow teeth exposed and ready to lock onto him. The yellow of its eyes was bright, visible even in the low light.

  Above them lightning lit the sky, setting the scene as the two of them stared down one another. Lex was standing mostly still, only his fingers moving, while the wolf stopped just outside the cave entrance.

  “You’re not the one I want,” he said calmly. “Bring out the bosses. I know they’re in there.”

  The leaders of the pack would likely be the biggest male and his mate. They led by sheer force, and the fact that the rest would likely be their children. Lex had no intentions on killing any of them, but the wolves would survive in this weather.

  Petal would not.

  But the pack leaders refused to show. Feeling slightly insulted, Lex let his true colors shine. Ripping his clothes free he stood naked, facing the wolf. Calling upon the power within, he transformed before the guard-wolf’s very eyes. He crouched low as the change swept over him, starting in his feet and working its way up his body. Toes became claws, and his skin sprouted fur as the werewolf burst from within.

  Mottled white and gray fur with the odd patch of black covered him from head to toe. His joints reversed themselves and his arms lengthened to match his legs, until he stood on all fours. The final change was his face, where his nose jutted forward into a muzzle.

  Lex snapped and growled at the wolf, baring his own teeth and pawing the ground. He stood easily almost a foot higher at the shoulder than the wolf facing him, with eighty or so pounds on the smaller wolf. The sudden change in dynamic produced a curious sound from the guard.

  Almost as if they’d been ready—which he was sure they had—the rest of the pack filed out of the cave, led by a massive charcoal-gray beast. Although still smaller than Lex, the wolf would have been a giant anywhere else. How he’d come to be living in the hills around Surrey without Lex finding out was a surprise, but not something he could deal with now.

  Okay boys and girls. Let’s get this rodeo moving. Time is a-wasting!

  Lex growled and snapped at them. Although he might be a werewolf, communicating with the others was not something he’d ever learned how to do. After all, they were wild beasts, and he was only possessed with the ability to turn into one.

  But a challenge was a challenge, and the wild wolves reacted accordingly, fanning out around him. With a normal wolf that would have been the perfect response. They could pincer him from the sides while three of them hit him from the front. Where they went wrong, however, was assuming that Lex would stay on the defensive.

  So he launched himself forward, moving faster than they could have been expecting. He was alongside the gray male in a fraction of a second, dipping his head low so he could nip at its hind legs. The beast yelped and tried to donkey-kick Lex, but he was already moving out of the way.

  They circled up, and
again Lex darted forward. The others closed on the male to protect him, which was precisely what he’d been hoping for. Lex went right this time, taking a little chunk from one of the black and white tufted females. The little scene repeated itself twice more, until four out of the five wolves all bore his toothmarks on their hind legs.

  Lex, however, was unmarked.

  Come on. Get the bloody point already. I don’t want to hurt you, but if it means you or Petal, I’m sorry, you don’t have a chance.

  At last the charcoal-colored leader seemed to get the point. He growled something to his pack, and they fell in behind him. He walked backward, watching their rearguard as they disappeared into the trees, waiting only until he was among them before turning and running after his charges.

  Lex sighed and waited a full minute before going to inspect the cave. It was empty. He returned to his human form and dragged Petal inside before returning for his clothes and the rest of the safety gear. Then he’d pulled the snow up until it covered the entrance. After that, he’d hung the heat blanket using some of the sticky strips contained in the safety gear, and returned to check on Petal.

  Where she’d almost brained him with a rock.

  “Lex?”

  He shook himself back to the present as her hand landed on his upper arm, giving it a little shake.

  “Uh, yeah?” he asked, his eyes fastened on her hand.

  It felt good against his skin. Not sexual, but just…good. Right. Proper. Weird.

  “Nothing, you just felt like you were somewhere else.”

  “Oh, sorry.”

  He looked across at Petal. His eyes were much better at seeing in the dark than a normal human, and he could make out her shape with the light that did trickle in from outside, sneaking past the snow and the blanket. He’d noticed the sky brightening, perhaps indicative that the storm was heading toward an end.

  What he saw in front of him was rather surprising. There was a core to Petal that he doubted many corporate executives possessed. She was smart, quick on her feet, and despite the disaster that had struck, she was somehow maintaining her wits about her. Lex had been completely and totally prepared to deal with a hysterical version of her.