Karly's Wolf (Hollow Hills Book 1) Read Free Page A

there, staring in at the dog, who stared fixedly back at her with lupine yellow eyes.
    Now what?
    Bending, she picked her coat up off the ground and looked at the blood smears. She turned in a full circle, looking up and down both ends of the gravel road. Should she go back to town? Surely there had to be a vet…somewhere. If not in Hollow Hills, then maybe the next town over, wherever that was. And what about the cabin? The sun was going down, and it was getting very dark, very fast. If she lost what little daylight she had left, how would she ever find her way to the cabin?
    It was her second moment of supreme and shameful selfishness, but when Karly got back in the car, instead of taking the dog where he could get medical help, she continued on.
    She half wondered and maybe even expected the dog might be dead by the time that long and winding road culminated in a cul-de-sac in front of the small rental that was her new home. By now, the sun was completely gone and all she could see was black shadows set against a dark gray and star-studded sky. Set well back in the trees, the cabin blended with the shadows. Two narrow stories tall, each level seemed no larger than was required to house a single room, and it was dark. Not one welcoming light could be seen anywhere, apart from her own headlights reflecting back at her off the two front windows.
    Shifting into park, Karly stared at the cabin. She had never lived on her own before. She had left college and her mother’s house for marriage with Dan—a four-year descent that had taken her from happy straight into hell. Now she was alone.
    Well, but that wasn’t true anymore, was it?
    Glancing into the rearview mirror, she looked at the injured dog sprawled across the seat behind her. It was too dark to see him clearly, but she could hear his panting breaths, so she knew he was still alive.
    She really should take him to a vet. That was the decent thing to do. But she didn’t. She took the keys out of the ignition instead.
    “I’ll be right back,” she told him, trying to swallow her guilt as she pushed open the driver’s side door. The dog watched while she got out, following her with his eerie yellow eyes.
    Engulfed in the glow of the headlights, Karly climbed the front porch steps and unlocked the front door. In many ways, the cabin was better on the inside than the outside had led her to believe. In some ways, it was worse.
    The interior was smaller than it looked and there were only two light switches—one for each floor—located in the living and bedroom respectively. The lower floor consisted of the kitchen and living room, bisected by a bar-style counter. A very steep and narrow staircase, carpeted in bright orange shag, led up to a bedroom barely big enough for the full-sized bed it housed and a tiny closet of a bathroom. The unexpected marriage of old and new appliances was something straight out of Hayseeds-R-Us. A claw-foot tub and pull-string toilet waged an aesthetics war with the faux-Grecian pedestal sink and camouflage shower curtain, complete with deer heads poking out at odd angles. A chipped, rusted and very old medicine cabinet hung off-centered on the only wall wide enough to occupy it, and that was over the tub, not the sink.
    The entire cabin, both upstairs and down, couldn’t have been more than six hundred square feet. It was sparsely furnished, mostly clean (apart from a little dust) and haunted in the corners by cobwebs. That no one had lived here in quite some time was obvious. Now she did.
    Welcome home.
    Karly shivered.

 
     
     
     
     
     
     
    CHAPTER TWO
     
    The dog stood in the center of the bathtub with his head hanging low, his tail tucked and his yellow eyes locked on her face. His was a canine expression that held all the subtle nuances of ‘Why me?’ and ‘Lady, what did I ever do to you?’
    Karly bathed him anyway. Her gentle fingers probed through thick black fur, searching for injuries her eyes couldn’t seem to