Moon Shifter 02 - Primal Possession

looked around behind the restaurant. A Dumpster was to his left, which gave him cover as he scanned the small area. There were a few cars on the makeshift gravel parking lot. Employee vehicles, he guessed.
    And that’s when he spotted Kat.
    She leaned against the passenger side of an extended cab truck with her back to him. Tall, lean, drop-dead gorgeous. Her long, dark hair was pulled up into a ponytail that hung halfway down her back. She wore formfitting jeans and a skintight long-sleeved black T-shirt. If she’d still beenhuman she’d have needed a coat, but thanks to her transformation from human to shifter, she had a higher body temperature.
    Sticking to the shadows, he moved behind the Dumpster and slid along the wall of the restaurant until he was at the edge of the building and twenty yards away from where Kat stood talking to some human male.
    A growl rose inside him but he tamped it back down and listened to their conversation. As the human talked about heading back to his place to “party,” Jayce nearly lost control of his beast. His inner wolf clawed at him with razor-sharp aggression, tearing and stripping away his insides, begging for freedom.
    When the human opened the passenger door for Kat and she actually got inside, Jayce’s claws extended and dug into his palms. The tearing of his flesh jerked him back to reality. Ducking back behind the Dumpster, he somehow managed to keep himself under control as the vehicle pulled out of the parking lot.
    Just barely.
    As they drove around the left side of the restaurant, Jayce raced back around the right side and headed straight for his bike in the front.
    Whatever Kat thought she was doing with that guy tonight, she’d better think again.
    Kat glanced over at the dark-haired guy with the buzz cut next to her. He shot her a quick look and winked as he steered his truck out of the parking lot of Kelly’s Bar and Grill. She wasn’t sure what she was doing with him and was tempted to tell him to stop, but something held her back.
    He was one of the bartenders at Kelly’s and had been getting off work right as she’d walked in. From the moment she’d sat down, he’d started flirting with her and buying her drinks. Too bad the alcohol couldn’t numb the pain inside her.
    Nothing could. For the past month, it had festered, growing like an out of control vine. It twisted and expanded with no regard for anything in its wake, least of all her heart or emotions. If she dwelled on the ways she’d been tortured a month ago, she tensed up and her inner wolf wanted out.
    Aiden, her friend and the wolf who’d changed her into a shifter, had explained it was a protective thing. Her inner wolf didn’t want her to suffer, so it tried to take over whether she wanted it to or not. Some kind of coping mechanism.
    Taking a deep breath, she forced those thoughts from her mind. Tonight she was taking control of her life again. Maybe sleeping with a stranger wasn’t the smartest way to go about it, but she needed to be in charge of
something
. It’s not as if the guy next to her could hurt her. He was human, and sure, he had a sexy edge to him, but she was still a hundred times stronger.
    She kept reminding herself of that.
She
was the one in control tonight.
    “Surprised I haven’t seen you in Kelly’s before,” the guy, Scott…something, said.
    She’d been there before a few times when she’d been human. But usually she’d hung out at the bars at the ski lodge where she used to work up until a month ago. Shrugging, she smiled and shifted in her seat, crossing her legs in his direction. She didn’t want to make bullshit small talk. That wasn’t what tonight was about.
    The man’s dark gaze drifted down to her covered legs, then back up to her chest. Even though she was clothed, the way he looked at her made her feel practically naked. That should have been a good thing, she told herself. She needed to be exposed in front of another person in a way she hadn’t been since that awful night. Maybe this would help with her nightmares. Anything to help her get rid of the nausea-inducing memories she couldn’t seem to outrun.
    So why did she feel so guilty being out with someone else? She and Jayce had broken up nearly a year ago. He’d made it perfectly clear she wasn’t good enough for him. Oh, sure, he’d loved her in the bedroom, but that was all he’d been willing to give her. He hadn’t been willing to make her his bondmate when she’d been