Page 3 of Cowboy Wolf's Kiss

I might hate the Pack that just let me go, but their Alpha wasn’t wrong.

I was a broken Wolf.

And no one wanted a broken Wolf amongst their own.

Chapter One-Emmet

Six weeks later…

“I can’t believe of all the fucked up places I’ve been, I wind up in Dry Creek, where the last thing it is, is fucking dry!”I snarled as I tried again to push the fence post back into an upright position.

Rain pelted down on me, soaking the already completely saturated and muddied ground, and making more of a mess than I could even comprehend.

Each drop felt like a tiny fist beating on me, and I could barely hear myself think over the roar of the storm.

The sometimes beautiful scenery of the ranch transformed into a blurry canvas of grays and browns.The scent of damp earth mixed with the tang of metal and rotted wood from the felled fence, beneath that was animal fur and dung.

The joyful cacophony of bleating goats a second to the rolling thunder and nonstop tinkle of raindrops hitting the tin roof of their shelter.

“Goddamn it, Dolly Sue, stop head-butting me,” I growled at the big-breasted goat who kept knocking into my backside as I worked.

I knelt in the mud, fingers sinking into the slick earth as I assessed the damage.

Fuck.It was broken at the base, and I knew then I would have to replace it.Growling in irritation, I used my strength to grip the bottom of the post and yanked it up and out of the ground.

The mud worked against me, sucking on the piece of wood like Jed did on those ever present toothpicks in his mouth.It took some finagling, but once I had a good grip, I was able to force the thing out.

I tossed it aside with a huff and stood back to look at where the next four posts were already collapsing under the weight of water soaked logs.The tree that came down, creating this disaster, was still in the way, crushing the southern part of the fence beneath its heavy, sodden branches.

This was a mess I couldn’t fix in a single day.The whole damn fence had to come out.The posts needed new holes, not to mention the fact that half the wood was rotted through.

Thoughts of rebuilding felt overwhelming, but it had to be done.But as I looked around, I also saw life teeming in the chaos—green shoots poking through the ground, resilient against the storm.

Somehow, amidst all the destruction, there was a promise of renewal.

“Quit it, Dolly Sue!”I shouted as my rear end met with another round of butting goat heads.

“That ain’t Dolly Sue, Emmet.That there is Dolly Mae,” Jed, a crazy old Prairie Dog Shifter, and official Motley Crewd Ranch goat wrangler, and vice president of our line of goat's milk byproducts, calledDolly’s Dairy Products, corrected me.

Rather unfuckinghelpfully too, if you asked me which, of course, nobody was.

Jed sort of came with the hybrid farm ranch in Barren County that my boss, and now Alpha of our mixed up group of Shifters and supes, Maximillian Leeds, bought from his own grandmother.

Honestly, if you follow all that, then you’re doing a damn sight better than I was.

“Gonna have to move these old girls, else they’ll wander,” Jed told me as he ambled on, using a clicking sound to entice the goats back over the broken fence.

He was right.But I had no idea where we would put them with all the construction we had going on and all this damned rain.

I couldn’t even tell you how I got to Dry Creek or more specifically to that ranch other than to say, I was duped.

After the Winter Falls Pack banished my sorry ass, I walked thirty miles to a bus stop and got on the first transport out of there.

My Wolf had been snapping and snarling, hating being cooped up on that bus, and I’d been asked not to get back on by two very skittish looking humans in security uniforms.

It wasn’t the uniforms that got me to listen to their suggestions, but rather the matching set of 9 mils they had aimed right at center mass.

Now, for a bullet to kill a Wolf Shifter, it wasn’t that it had to be a silver bullet.That bit of superstition was just that.An old wives’ tale.

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