Pack Dynamics

by Julie Frost

  “Yes, ma’am.” He put them on. “Ah, vision.” He noticed the protein shakes. “Is one of those for me?”

  “Megan? Laptops?” Alex said, handing the full glass across to Ben.

  “You should both be resting, but how many?” Her voice was resigned.

  “Six, please.” He reached back and squeezed her hand. “You’re a doll.”

  “I expect an amazing bonus next paycheck,” she said over her shoulder as she left the room.

  “She’s a treasure, Alex,” Janni commented. “How in the world does someone like you manage to keep her around?”

  “She claims it’s the piles of cash and killer benefits, but I think it’s my charm and personality.” At Janni’s snort, he shot her a wounded look. “What? I didn’t win you over at the party tonight?”

  Janni lifted an amused eyebrow. “If I hadn’t gotten the phone call when I did, I was prepared to run to the ladies’ room and hide there until you got distracted by something shiny.”

  “That’s my girl,” Ben said.

  Alex heaved a dramatic sigh. “Guess I’m spending the night lonely again.”

  “Poor thing,” Megan said, coming back in with an armload of laptops. “Such a hard life you have.” She helped him onto the bed, while he gave her an appreciative look, because damn if she wasn’t gorgeous, even dressed in oversized pajamas that hid everything. He wondered, not for the first time, how kissing her would feel, and then pushed the thought ruthlessly back. If he kissed Megan, she’d quit, and his schedule would be in ruins. More ruins.

  Megan correctly interpreted the look, rolled her eyes, and said, “I’ll get you some coffee. Looks like you’re going to need it.”

  O O O

  Megan got the coffee going, cringing at the fact that all they had was Kopi Luwak and deciding not to say anything to anyone about where that came from. She seated herself at the kitchen island and put her face in her hands, massaging her temples with her fingers while it brewed. The overwhelming smell of blood had the wolf within snapping at her leash, and Megan sat there and breathed for a few seconds, getting her under control.

  Janni came in and touched her shoulder. “You okay?”

  “Just another day in the life.” Megan smacked herself on the forehead with her fist. “Honestly, the man is impossible sometimes. He drives himself into the ground, ends up collapsing, and then I’m dealing with questions from reporters for days. And that’s not counting the times he gets hurt because he’s a risk-taker with lousy impulse control who plays as hard as he works. I only hope we can keep this out of the press. At least until it’s over.”

  “How long have you been in love with him?”

  Megan stared incredulously. “I’m not. Good lord, how could I be?”

  “I read the tabloids, and you didn’t see your face when you came in after you got the call, Megan,” Janni said. “It was equal parts utter fear and ‘I’m going to kill him.’ Believe me, I know the feeling.”

  “Ben too, huh?” They shared a look. But Megan wasn’t in love with Alex.

  She wasn’t.

  Janni sat down and shuddered. “Whoever had him did a real number on him. He’s going to have scars on top of his scars. I’d like five minutes alone with them. Just five.” She clenched her hand and inhaled slowly. “Dammit, he was getting better, and now …” Her face reflected some hidden pain. “He’s not quite like Alex, not an adrenaline junkie. But he’s got this misplaced sense of chivalry, and sometimes he’ll put himself in harm’s way to protect my mom, when they’re out on a case.”

  Megan stared. Ben was muscled like a whippet, but she’d met Pamela when Alex hired her firm, and … “She’s three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier than he is.” It was hard to believe that Janni was Pamela’s daughter, honestly. Where Pam was large and solid, Janni was small and delicate. Megan wondered what her father was like.

  “Tell him that.”

  The coffee finished brewing, and Megan put a couple of trays together. She handed one off to Janni, and they took them back to the bedroom, setting them on the bedside tables. “Thank you, Miss Graham,” Alex said absently, clicking away on his keyboard and grabbing the cup she handed him, trusting that she’d made it the way he liked without checking.

  Janni lay down on the bed beside Ben, wrapping her arm around his waist. She looked exhausted, and Ben wasn’t much better. He was somewhere in his mid-twenties, Megan thought, but the lines around his eyes made him seem a good ten years older.

  “You’re welcome, Mr. Jarrett. Anything?” Megan asked, jerking her chin at the screen.

  “Pretty sure it’s Ostheim,” her boss said. “We have to check some more, make sure the evidence is solid before we run with it.”

  “You’re not going after them yourselves, are you?” Her gut roiled at the thought, and her fingers curved into claws as the wolf decided she didn’t like the thought too much either. She jammed her hands behind her back.

  Alex, keeping his eyes on the computer screen, made a noncommittal noise. She knew that noise; it was the one that meant he was thinking about it but didn’t want to upset her.

  “At least tell me before you do it,” she said. “I don’t need what I think is a quiet evening interrupted by another phone call like I got tonight. Please. Alex.”

  His head came up at her use of his first name in front of other people, and he scanned her face with a little frown. She hoped her eyes were still the right color. “All right, Megan,” he said slowly. “I’ll at least do that much.”

  And that might give her a chance to talk him out of it. “That’s all I ask. I think I’m going to nap on the couch for an hour or so. Yell if you need anything.”

  He tilted his head. “You okay?”

  “Sure.” She tried for a bland expression, wasn’t sure if she achieved it. “Just tired. I think I’m allowed.”

  One side of his mouth quirked. “Don’t make a habit of it, Miss Graham.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Jarrett,” she said, and made her escape from the room.

  She didn’t like lying to Alex, but if she didn’t get out of the house, with its overpowering scents and emotions, she’d wolf out in front of him and everyone else, and that was on her list of “things to do never.”

  Alex’s house sat on fifty acres of land bordering the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, and they often heard coyotes howling up there during late work-nights. She figured it was remote enough that no one would see her or bother her. She went outside, found a dry spot under a bush to drop her clothes, and stripped. The wolf was eager, trying to shift before Megan was ready, but she made it wait a few extra seconds before dropping to a crouch and letting the Change take her. Bones lengthened, organs moved around, fur sprouted. The process was stretchy and weird, but not actively painful unless she tried to stop it during a full moon, which she counted as a small favor.

  The wolf leaped away through the sage and the rain. Her senses, already preternaturally acute, sharpened even more. Rain still slashed down in torrents, but she didn’t mind. She ranged across Alex’s property, knowing the boundaries better than he did, marking it, checking to make sure everything was as it should be.

  It wasn’t.

  She stopped, nose questing, crouching down behind a clump of brush that had trouble hiding a wolf the size of a pony. There, a stranger up on the hill. Watching the house. Her hackles rose—she knew everyone in Alex’s security force, and this person didn’t belong. The man hadn’t seen her, though, and she slunk closer, teeth bared.

  Scent of gunpowder and steel. Rifle. Not silver, because she’d both smell and sense that, so no danger to her. She could kill him here and now, no one would know, in a remote enough area of the property that his body might never be found …

  The human part of her recoiled. No. No killing. We don’t do that. Megan had never killed anyone in her life and wasn’t about to start.

  The wolf whined softly and rubbed her muzzle with a paw. Danger.

  Not the wa
y. The human was beginning to wonder if she was going to have to take control back, and the wolf subsided with ill grace.

  She needed to get back and let Alex know. However, human and wolf made a joint decision to sweep the rest of the property first, just to make sure no one else had invaded.

  O O O

  Alex ensconced himself in the yellow bedroom’s easy chair, his stocking feet propped on the side table. Ben sat against the headboard of the bed with Janni sleeping curled beside him.

  “Ha,” Ben said, poking a finger at his screen.

  Alex looked up. “Got something?”

  “They’re not covering their tracks as well as they ought to.” He sent it over to Alex’s computer.

  Alex lifted his eyebrows; this email had come into his company server from someone on the outside, into a dummy inbox. “Interesting. How far can you track this through anonymizers? Can you tell who received it?”

  “It’ll take me awhile.” Ben tapped furiously on the keys.

  “Question is,” Alex said, “what can we do with the info once we have it?”

  “They weren’t shy about hurting any of us.” Ben shoved his glasses up his nose. “I vote we return the favor. Maybe I’m not active military anymore, but I haven’t forgotten how.”

  “What was the whole point of them taking you, anyway?” Alex still couldn’t wrap his brain around it.

  “‘You people had better back off,’” Ben quoted, trembling a little with either anger or reaction—Alex couldn’t tell which—and rubbing at the healing marks around his wrists. “‘Or your girlfriend is next.’” His fingers tightened around Janni’s shoulder, and his lips tightened into a white line. Alex could see the visible effort he was making to keep himself together, and wondered a little at it.

  “Bastards,” Alex said.

  Ben clicked a link with a little more emphasis than he needed. “Yeah, well, they caught me unaware. It won’t happen again. They have no idea.” He frowned. “Wait …” Then tilted his head. “Okay, this is weird.”

  Alex craned his neck. “What’ve you got?”

  “An internal memo about lupus. Except Janni’s aunt has that, and this doesn’t scan. And there’s something about … bats?”

  “Send it over,” Alex said.

  A few clicks, and he was reading it. “Oh. Um.” He wasn’t sure how much he should say about this to someone who wasn’t an industry insider. Lycanthropy and vampirism weren’t something anyone talked about much, and it was usually hidden in code references like this. An idea nibbled at the back of his brain …

  And was interrupted by Megan bursting into the room before it could come to fruition. Her hair was wet and so were her clothes.

  “What the—?” Alex started. His feet hit the floor as he sat straight up.

  “There’s a man with a rifle up on the hill. Not one of your security guys.”

  “You went out in the thunderstorm? Megan!” Not that it was about the storm, it was about her safety, he was supposed to keep her safe, what the hell had she been thinking, and wasn’t she going to take a nap?

  “I can’t believe you didn’t have someone do a perimeter sweep. Preferably with a helicopter and a great big spotlight.” Her hands fisted on her hips.

  “I wouldn’t send a chopper out in this weather. I wouldn’t send you out in this weather either. What the hell, Megan?” He nearly hyperventilated, which was a bad idea, considering the fact that his lung still wasn’t quite right. The blood sang in his ears, and he missed the first part of her next sentence.

  “ … to take a walk. I like the rain. And apparently it’s a good thing I did.”

  He stared at her in disbelief. “Did it not occur to you that a man on the hill with a rifle could, I don’t know, shoot you?”

  “It didn’t occur to me that you wouldn’t have people looking for a man on the hill with a rifle after what happened tonight! I stayed hidden, and he didn’t see me.” She lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t you think we should do something about him?”

  “Well, yes, obviously.” He picked up the phone on the table beside the bed, dialed his Chief of Security Jeremy Hasgrave, and spoke a few words. “Should be taken care of.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  “Megan …” Alex closed his eyes and brought his emotions under control, reminding himself to breathe evenly because passing out in front of people who worked for him was embarrassing. “Please don’t do that again. If anything happened to you—” He swallowed. “It would be terrible. Very terrible. Okay?”

  She crossed her arms and gave him her patented you’re-such-an-idiot look, which he was used to. It didn’t faze him. “Please, Megan?”

  She sighed. “Yes, Mr. Jarrett. Do you need anything else?”

  Yep, he’d pissed her off. Excuse him for being worried about her. “No, Miss Graham.”

  She spun on her heels and stalked out.

  “That went well,” Ben commented. He had wisely stayed out of the conversation, keeping his eyes glued to the laptop in front of him while they had their discussion. “How long have you been in love with her?”

  “What?” Alex was rarely at a loss for words, but he sputtered for a few moments. “She’s my personal assistant. Falling in love with her would be incredibly inappropriate, not to mention incredibly stupid on my part. If I fell in love with Megan, she’d leave. And then who’d tie my tie and remind me incessantly about appointments I have no intention of keeping?”

  “Because you’re always so worried about what’s appropriate.” Ben snorted out a laugh. “Alex, you made a pass at Pam when you hired us, and she’s got twenty years and thirty pounds on you. You’re telling me you never tried anything with Megan?”

  “Once.” Now it was his turn to glue his eyes to his computer screen. “She shot me down so fast and so completely I’ve never quite recovered.”

  “Yeah, you ‘never quite recovered’ enough to be hitting on my girlfriend at a party,” Ben said with a grin. “Everyone knows your reputation, Alex.”

  “Janni never said she was taken. But we didn’t really have time to get to the whole ‘do you have a significant other’ conversation before she got that phone call.” Alex eyed Janni’s sleeping form. “Was she serious about hiding in the bathroom? Is that what I do to women these days?”

  “Maybe,” Ben said. His tone said “definitely,” and his mouth curled up at one corner.

  “I don’t believe this. My own employees are ganging up on me.”

  “I’m an independent contractor, not an employee,” Ben said smugly. “Good grief, I can’t imagine working for you …”

  “Hey! I take very good care of my employees.”

  Ben laughed. “Oh, I know. I just like twitting you.”

  “Well, stop it. My fragile ego can’t take much more.” Alex’s phone rang, and he looked at the number displayed on the screen and picked it up. “Yeah, Jeremy?”

  “I’ve got a guy in custody. He was armed with an H&K PSG-1 sniper rifle and sitting on the hill overlooking the rear garage, about five hundred yards out. What do you want me to do with him?”

  “Tie him to a chair in the kitchen by the scary knives. You know how.” Alex bared his teeth in an expression that wasn’t a smile. “We’ll be down directly.”

  He stretched, and his lung sent a stab of pain through him, reminding him not to do that. He turned back to Ben. “Want a look at one of them?”

  “Damn right I do,” Ben said.

  Chapter Four

  Ben’s breathing and heartbeat accelerated as soon as he saw the man Jeremy had zip-tied to the chair, Megan noticed. She watched the hacker out of the corner of her eye.

  “Ben?” Janni said, putting a hand gently on his arm. “Are you okay?”

  “Other than the fact that this is the guy who used a cattle prod on me, and then ducked my head into a bucket of freezing water when I wouldn’t tell him anything? Yeah, I’m fine, honey.” Ben swallowed, and Megan smelled sweat and adrenaline as he made an eff
ort to keep his fight-or-flight reflexes in check.

  He put the island of Alex’s gourmet kitchen between himself and their prisoner and eyed the sniper rifle on the counter between the fridge and the double oven. “‘Unseemly glee,’ I think the term is.” A light tremor shook his entire body, and that tic she’d spotted where he rubbed the scars on his wrists was back.

  “Is that so?” Janni said—and launched herself at the guy, nails foremost.

  Jeremy caught her in midair and swung her around, setting her down next to Ben behind the island. “Whoa, Miss Miller,” he said. “That won’t get us anywhere.”

  “It’ll make me feel better,” she snarled, panting between her teeth.

  “Claws in, Hermia,” Ben said. He stroked her hair, but she didn’t act like she wanted to be soothed much, and the tension radiating off him in almost visible waves probably wasn’t helping matters. Janni yanked a stool around and sat down, sulking, with her arms crossed, and Ben snuggled his face into her hair.

  Megan parked Alex’s chair beside Jeremy and stood next to them in front of the island, brow lowered, presenting a united front. “Well?” she said.

  “I’m not telling you anything, so you can just call the police now and get it over with,” the man said.

  “Oh, don’t worry, we’re calling the cops,” Alex said. “How much of you is left when they come and get you—”

  The man scoffed. “Like you pansy-asses would do anything to me.”

  “Give me five minutes with him, boss,” Jeremy said, balancing a knifepoint on the palm of his hand. “I’ll make him sing.”

  “Give me two,” Janni countered.

  Megan bet she could get him to tell them anything they wanted after thirty seconds, but that would involve showing him the wolf, so she stayed silent. For now.

  “Why don’t we start with what you’re doing on my property with a sniper rifle?” Alex said, gesturing to where it lay on the back granite counter. “It’s a nice gun, by the way. You’re not getting it back.”

  Megan thought the guy looked awfully confident for someone tied to a chair surrounded by people who would cheerfully cut his balls off. “Your security is for shit, man,” he said. “How is it I was even able to get on your property?”