Beloved Wolf

“Don’t listen, do you, bitch? Huh, huh?” the man growled against her ear, his putrid breath and body odor turning her stomach. “Move and die, bitch, move and die.”

Then his hands were on her, touching her through her light coat, for the evening had been warm, and she hadn’t expected to be on the streets anyway. She could feel him brace most of his body weight on the knee jabbing into her back, while he used his left hand to reach under her, twist her upper body painfully and clumsily pinch and paw at her throat, her breasts. He bit her shoulder, hard.

Maniac. The man was a maniac. He didn’t want her money—or he’d take it once she was dead. What he wanted was her. Her body. He wanted to hurt her.

She was only twenty yards from a main street, and she was helpless. He still held the knife in his right hand as he groped at her with his left. His stronger body pinned her against the gravel. If she cried out, she’d die.

Did it matter if she moved, if she fought? The man was out of his mind, out of control. He had a knife. She’d die anyway.

But she’d be damned if she’d die without a struggle.

Sophie might be a city girl now, years away from her roots on a California ranch, but she’d been a tomboy once, a girl child with big brothers she’d often fought with, sometimes in fun, sometimes in earnest.

Brothers. Oh, God. Michael had died, and his death had nearly destroyed her parents, her entire family. If she were to die, too… No! No, that couldn’t happen! She wouldn’t let that happen! Mommy! Daddy! I won’t let that happen!

Forgetting the pain in her right knee, forgetting the knife blade she could feel pressing against her jaw-line, forgetting the violation she felt as the man’s hand slipped inside her V-neck blouse, his filthy, jagged fingernails tearing at her skin, Sophie reacted.

She dug her elbows and knees into the gravel and bucked like a wild pony out to unseat the rider on its back. Fear lent her strength, and surprise gave her a second advantage. The off-balance man toppled to one side, so that she could backpedal away from him on her hands and buttocks, putting precious space between them.

“Help! Help!” she screamed at the top of her lungs. “In the alley. Help me!” As she screamed, Sophie grabbed on to a huge plastic garbage can and somehow got to her feet, her right leg all but useless. She pulled the top off the garbage can and threw it at the man, then blindly reached into the open can and pulled out the first “weapon” to come to hand—the sliced-off top of a pineapple.

What a ridiculous weapon. But, then, the alleyway ran behind a block of upscale restaurants. What had she expected to find, a fully loaded .357 Magnum?

Sophie threw the pineapple top at the man, followed by a huge, empty can of tomato puree and two handfuls of rotting vegetables, all the time screaming for help. She knocked over smaller, metal garbage cans, making more noise than impact, but making herself as undesirable a victim as possible. “In the alley! Help me! Help me!”

The man cursed, ducked a wilted cabbage and ran off down the alley moments before two well-dressed men entered the alley, coming to Sophie’s rescue.

“Oh, thank God,” she said, falling against one of them as the other ran back toward the street to call an ambulance and the police.

Sophie’s right knee hurt her so much that she didn’t even know that her attacker’s knife had laid open her cheek from ear to chin, that she was losing blood rapidly. She knew nothing at all, for within moments she had sunk into blessed unconsciousness.

Louise Smith sat up straight in her narrow bed, her eyes wide with fright, her body drenched in perspiration in the heat of the Mississippi night. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

She slipped from the bed, stumbled to the light switch, then pressed her hands against the top of the dresser, blinked at her reflection in the mirror. She saw a woman who somehow didn’t look all of her fifty-two years—except for her large brown eyes, which held the misery of the ages. She ran a hand through her wavy, golden-brown hair that showed very little gray and took several deep, steadying breaths, trying to beat down the panic that still held her in its grip.

See? It’s just you. Nobody else is here. Nobody can harm you. Nobody knows. Nobody. Not even you.

She’d been dreaming. She dreamed so often. All the dreams were confusing. Some of them were good, for a while, but all of them ended unhappily, with no answers, no resolution.

But this had been different. She couldn’t remember a dream. All she could remember was a flash of fright…and the certainty that she was needed, that someone needed her help.

A child. A little girl. A little girl who called her Mommy.

But where was she? Where?

Louise left her bedroom, padded toward the kitchen and a glass of water, knowing she would not be able to sleep anymore that night.

Joe Colton burst from the elevator before the doors had fully opened and raced down the corridor toward the nurse’s station, his foster son River James right behind him. They’d flown from the family ranch in Prosperino, River at the controls, within an hour of the phone call from the San Francisco police, arriving shortly before dawn.

“My daughter—Sophie Colton,” Joe demanded of the unit clerk, who was otherwise occupied in filing her nails. “What room is she in?”

The young woman looked up at him blankly. “Colton? I don’t think we have a Colton.” She swiveled in her chair, spoke to a nurse who’d just come into the station. “Mary, do we have a Colton?”

The nurse stepped forward, looking at Joe. “May I ask who you are, sir?”

“I’m her father, damn it!” Joe exploded, his large frame looking more menacing than paternal at that moment, his nearly sixty years having made small impact on him other than to dust some silver in his dark brown hair.

River took off his worn cowboy hat, put a hand on his foster father’s arm and smiled at the nurse. “Senator Colton is a little upset, ma’am,” he said, being his most charming at the same time he emphasized the word senator, even if Joe had left office years earlier. “His daughter was mugged last evening. Colton. Sophie Colton.”

It might have been the dropping of Joe Colton’s title, or it might have been River’s lazy smile, but Mary quickly stepped out from behind the desk, asking the two men to follow her down the corridor.

“I’m sorry, Senator,” Mary said as they walked, “but your daughter was the victim of a crime. We can’t be too careful. She came back from surgery a little over an hour ago and is probably sleeping, but I can tell you that she made it through the surgery without incident. Have you been apprised of her injuries?”

“Oh, God.” Joe stopped, put a hand to his mouth and turned away from the nurse. Obviously the long night had taken its toll. That, River thought, and the fact that Meredith Colton, Sophie’s mother, hadn’t seen any reason to accompany her husband to San Francisco.

“Yes, we have, but we’d like to hear a recap from you, if you don’t mind,” River said, stepping up, taking over for this so very strong man who had already buried one child. River knew he couldn’t understand all that Joe must have been going through since the call about Sophie had come into the ranch, but he had a pretty good idea that the man had been living in his own special hell, reliving the call about Michael, fearing the worst for his daughter.

River, however, had been more mad than frightened, once he’d spoken to the patient liaison at the hospital, who had assured him that Sophie’s injuries, although extensive, were not life threatening. While Joe Colton had sat in the back of the small private jet, praying for his daughter, River had been at the controls, wishing himself in San Francisco so that he could knock down Chet Wallace. Then pick him up, knock him down again. And again.

Joe collected himself and motioned for the nurse to continue down the hallway.

“She suffered a mild concussion, Senator,” Mary told them, stopping in front of Room 305, her hand on the metal door plate. “I want to prepare you for that, as she may be confused for a while once she wakes. Plus, she’s got lots of scrapes and bruises, from her contact with a brick wall, as I understand it, and the gravel in the alley. Those have been cleaned up, of course. And there are some fairly deep scratches on her…on her chest. They’ll be painful, but aren’t serious, and we’ve already begun treatment with antibiotics. We can’t be too careful with human bites and scratches. I—I’m sorry.”

The bastard had bitten her? River hadn’t known that part, wished Joe didn’t have to know that part.

Joe moaned low in his throat. River squeezed his work-hard hands into fists.

Mary continued, “The orthopods put her knee back together—torn Medial Meniscus, which is fairly common—but she’s in a J-brace and will be on crutches for at least five or six weeks, and then will need some pretty extensive rehab. And,” she added, sighing, “Dr. Hardy, chief of reconstructive surgery, sewed up the knife gash on her face. She’ll need follow-up plastic surgery, at least that’s what’s on Dr. Hardy’s postop notes, but at least she’s been put back together. It’s a miracle the knife didn’t hit any large blood vessels or nerves. Still, even though the cut wasn’t dangerously deep, it took over one hundred stitches to close her up again.”

“Oh, God,” Joe said. “My baby. My beautiful, beautiful baby.”

River clenched his teeth until his jaw hurt. Sophie. Beautiful Sophie. Dragged into an alley. Mauled, beaten, cut, damn near killed. And for no reason, no reason at all. Just because a bastard high on drugs had gone berserk. Just because she’d been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now her entire life had been changed forever.

“I think we’re prepared to see her now, ma’am,” River said, motioning for the nurse to step back so that he and Joe could enter Sophie’s room. “We promise not to disturb her.”

“Certainly,” Mary agreed, then walked past them, back to the nurse’s station.

“Ready, Joe?” River asked, a hand on his foster father’s back.

“No,” Joe told him, his voice so low River had to lean close to hear him. “A parent is never ready to see his child lying in a hospital bed.” He lifted his head and took a deep breath. “But let’s do it.”

River pushed open the door, let Joe precede him into the room, then followed after him. He didn’t want to see Sophie this way, injured, helpless. That was not how he had seen her when he’d first come to live at the ranch and she’d chased after him until he’d let down his guard and let her into his life. His Sophie, four years his junior, which had been such a huge gap when they were younger. The angry young man and the awkward, braces-on-her-teeth, skinned-knees, pigtailed, hero-worshiping kid.

She’d driven him crazy, made him angry. Gotten under his skin. Wormed her way into his bruised, battered and wary heart.

And then she’d grown up.

Oh, God, she’d grown up.