Rockwell Agency: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  Whitney was silent for a moment. “Lydia, what’s going on?”

  “I don’t know how to explain it,” Lydia said. “It’s supernatural, Whitney. It’s complicated. I—I just got out of a meeting about it myself. There’s a lot we don’t know yet. I need you to help us find answers. We can help him—we’re going to do everything we can to help him, but I need you to come down here. Please. I promise this isn’t just Jack wandering off.”

  “Of course,” Whitney said, convinced enough now that she was all business. “The kids can stay with my mom. I’ll be on the first flight. I’ll call you as soon as I have a confirmed seat, okay?”

  “Good,” Lydia said, sounding relieved. “Thank you, Whitney.”

  “I’ll be there as fast as I can.”

  Lydia and Whitney hung up, and Quentin was glad that Jack’s wife had agreed to come down. It seemed to make Lydia feel better, knowing that Whitney would soon be here. And Quentin was afraid that there was a higher possibility than he’d like to admit that they might need Jack’s wife here when things went badly. Norman had helped them a lot, but Jack knew that they were still well out of his depth of experience.

  He had to focus on one thing at a time, though, and the first thing they had to do was find Jack. He was driving back towards the agency now, but he took a detour, leading them more towards the apartment that Lydia had rented. They had last seen Jack in that area, before he had run, and he might be inclined to avoid wandering too far if he was unfamiliar with the area.

  Of course, the other possibility was that he had already fled the state, trying to get back to wherever he thought he was supposed to be. If he was in an alternate world, he might not live in Idaho, or Louisiana, or even the United States. He would have walked into this world with no idea where he was, or what he was doing here, or how he had gotten here. He might hunker down, or he might run back to the place that he thought of as home. He might have tried to call someone. He might have rented a car. He might have gotten on a plane. Surely, the other world had credit cards, and surely those would work here as well. If he had enough money, he could be on his way to anywhere.

  But there was no point in bringing that up to Lydia right now. They were going to do a search of the last places that they had seen him, and they were going to call in the others to do a general search around the city. They would call the police again, and the hospital, too. Who knew if Jack might have hurt himself or gotten himself into trouble in his panicked state.

  He drove them back towards the apartment, and they spent the ride in relative silence, the easy chatter between them from the way over was now a distant memory, as they dealt with their new information. When he got back to the apartment area, he drove slowly through the surrounding streets, both he and Lydia keeping their eyes peeled for Jack in the hopes that he might once again be wandering around, looking for some clue as to where he was.

  But they had no luck, and Quentin parked the car in the apartment parking lot and went up the elevator with Lydia again. Once they were in the apartment, which was still devoid of the power he had sensed there earlier that day, he called Barrett and filled him in. Barrett agreed to call everyone in and arrive to do a full search of the eastern side of the city. It was too big of a city for them to do much more than that with just the manpower that they currently had.

  “Everyone should be here within the hour,” Quentin told Lydia, walking over to where she was sitting on the couch, Jack’s things spread out in front of her. She was holding his phone in her hand, staring down at the screen.

  “I want to see these messages,” she said. “I know I shouldn’t, but what if there’s something in here—in his phone—that would give us a clue. What if he was way deeper into all things supernatural than I ever knew? What if he’s in the know about all of this?”

  Quentin sat down beside her. “It’s possible.” In his own mind, he wondered just how well Lydia really knew Jack. She seemed to have idealized him as the perfect friend and family man. She talked about his marriage as though it was the model that all married couples should use. She talked about his character and his parenting the same way. Clearly, Lydia had thought that Jack had some sort of perfect, idyllic life, but the truth was that he probably never had that. Now, whether Jack had purposefully tried to give Lydia that impression for his own reasons or whether Lydia simply loved Jack and wanted to see the best in him, Quentin didn’t know.

  But he had heard two conversations with Whitney now, and the marriage didn’t strike him as necessarily idyllic. He thought about Ryan and Angela, who were so newly in love, and he thought about Ryan’s level of panic when Angela had been in trouble. He thought about the risk that Jordan had taken when she had known that Wes, the man she loved, might die. She had shifted in front of a small crowd of people and ended up burning down a building to save him.

  That was love, Quentin thought. But Whitney wasn’t acting like that.

  Perhaps, that wasn’t fair, because he didn’t know their marriage or their personalities. Perhaps, they had a very loving but very laid-back marriage. Perhaps, Whitney had the sort of personality that remained calm in a crisis. Perhaps, they had been together so long that they had a deep love for each other, but it wasn’t the kind of passionate, desperate love that couples often had in the beginning part of their relationship.

  Owen was hardly an expert on relationships, having never had a terribly serious one himself. He had dated plenty, but his longest relationship had only been about eight months, and he had known early on that it wasn’t going to be a long-term relationship. But Candice had been nice, and he’d enjoyed the time that they spent together. He didn’t think he’d ever been in love, though, if he was honest with himself.

  He hoped to be in love someday. He knew it made Ryan and Jordan very happy to have found their own loves.

  Quentin looked up at Lydia as she continued to stare down at the phone, locked out of it by the wonders of technology. The moment that they had shared together in the bayou, when he had shifted for her and let her experience a dragon shifter up close, firsthand, came flooding back to him. It had been a moment of happiness amidst the chaos, and it had stripped him of all his reservations about Lydia. In fact, it had felt downright intimate.

  He wanted to reach for her hand again, so he did, and her fingers curled around his. Lydia looked up at him, her soft, brown eyes filled with worry and sadness. It made him want to comfort her, but he didn’t dare reach for her any further. The feelings stirring in him were unexpected and strong, and he didn’t know quite what to do with them under the circumstances. Quentin stared into those warm eyes, and she stared back at him.

  Lydia put Jack’s phone down, and her other hand slipped over his, so that his hand was trapped between hers. She leaned back against the couch, her head tilting against the cushion, and their eyes still stayed trained on each other. Quentin could feel his heart pounding in his chest, and he felt suddenly like a high school boy again wondering if the girl he liked wanted him to kiss her. He had never been in love before, but he was hardly a novice at romance, and he should have felt more confident, but he felt nervous instead. Nervous and so drawn to Lydia that he couldn’t help but lean in anyway.

  She watched him the whole time he tilted his head towards hers, and their gazes remained locked until the moment his eyes closed just before his lips brushed over hers. The sensation of her lips beneath his sent a tremor through him, and he sank into her kiss, reaching up to cup her face as he drew her closer and kissed her deeper.

  Lydia covered his hand with hers, her lips yielding to him and returning everything that he was giving her. It was soft at first and so gentle. And then Lydia threw her arms around his neck and pressed him to her, parting her lips beneath his and kissing him fully.

  Quentin didn’t know whether to moan with pleasure or laugh at her impulsive ways. He did neither, because either would have interrupted the way their lips were moving together. Instead, he anchored his arm around her waist and slid her
into his lap. She gasped at the action, and their kiss broke momentarily, giving Quentin the opportunity to kiss his way down her throat and up to the soft spot beneath her ear, and then along her jawline.

  His hand found hers, and their hands laced together. Her body curled around his, and he held her close, nuzzling his nose against the nape of her neck and tasting her skin. Neither of them had expected this—at least he could say that he hadn’t. But kissing her felt so right, and it seemed like they were on the same page.

  Until Lydia eased back, resting her forehead against his and looking down into his eyes. “I don’t want you to take this the wrong way,” she said, causing a sinking feeling in his stomach.

  Quentin pulled back from her, suddenly uncertain. “Okay …”

  “No, don’t,” Lydia said, drawing him back again. “I don’t mean it like that. I wanted you to kiss me. I’ve been wanting you to, or at least I would have wanted you to if I had let myself think about it. I’ve been trying really, really hard not to think about it because, you know, you didn’t like me that much, and then we were on the case. But I think—I mean, I know that I want to kiss you, and I liked kissing you and …”

  He touched a finger to her lips, the heavy feeling the kiss had produced fading enough to allow him to think rationally. “It’s not the right time,” he said, letting her off the hook so she didn’t have to be the one to say it. “I’m sorry. I never should have done that. I wanted to kiss you, too, and I still do. But you’re right. We’re on a case, and someone’s life is in the balance.”

  Lydia nodded. “Yes. And I swear if you had kept kissing me, I would have forgotten everything else. Even Jack.”

  “Jack who?” Quentin asked, lifting her hand and kissing her fingertips. “I’m kidding. Mostly.”

  “Did you really want to kiss me?”

  “Are you confused about that?” Quentin asked, laughing at the thought. “Didn’t I just kiss you?”

  “Yes,” she said, “but you’re you, and I’m me. Everyone wants to kiss you. Reasonably few people want to kiss me.”

  “I find that hard to believe,” Quentin said, stroking her cheek with his thumb. She was, after all, still sitting on his lap, so he thought he was allowed. “You’re beautiful. I find myself just staring at you. And thinking about you a lot. Even when I didn’t want to. I thought about searching for you, before you came walking back in this morning. I couldn’t get you out of my head.”

  Lydia covered his hand with hers again and leaned her head down. They were kissing again, their lips meeting over and over, as he wrapped his arms around her. He wanted to keep kissing her endlessly. He wanted to slip his hand beneath her shirt and feel her soft skin and explore her beautiful, slender, lean figure. He wanted to feel her body pressed against his and kiss her everywhere.

  But this time it was he who pulled back from the passionate kiss, though he did so with great reluctance.

  “If you want this to stay professional, then we can’t do that,” he said, cupping the back of her neck with one hand as he stared at her full lips and longed to delve back into them. Sliding his hand up, he brushed over her bottom lip with the pad of his thumb. “And we should … remain professional. Right?”

  “Right,” Lydia said, sliding her hand down his chest in a way that made it difficult to follow through on his own suggestion.

  He caught her hand before it went too low and brought it to his lips, placing a kiss at her palm. “Okay …” He looked into her eyes. “We’re being professional. Starting now.”

  Chapter 22

  Lydia

  Quentin had kissed her.

  God—he had really kissed her.

  Lydia could hardly believe it, and as she walked around the apartment, getting things together for people to come over and begin the search for Jack, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. He was gorgeous, and incredible, and kind, and fascinating, and gorgeous—had she mentioned gorgeous? Never had she thought that he might actually be thinking any of the same things about her that she had been thinking about him, but then he had leaned into her and his kiss had been so soft and then so intense. So passionate.

  Every place he had touched her, with either his lips or his hands, had glowed with pleasure, and she could have gotten completely lost in him. Except that Jack was in the back of her mind, needing their help. It felt wrong to kiss Quentin when she had just learned that Jack’s life was in danger, and she knew that he agreed with her.

  She hated that he agreed with her. Because if he had just pushed her a little …if he had just kissed her a little bit more …then she knew she would have let him lay her back on the couch so that his body covered hers. She knew she would have let him slide his hands beneath her clothing, and she would have pulled his off him, so that she could see all those beautifully sculpted muscles she had seen earlier, in the woods.

  God, it would have been amazing.

  But he was a gentleman, of course, and she liked him all the more for it. She really liked him. It wasn’t just that he was gorgeous and a dragon shifter, although neither of those two things hurt his cause in the slightest. But she also really liked him.

  Maybe …when they found Jack and figured out how to save him …

  If they figured out how to save him.

  That thought sobered her enough that she was able to focus on the task at hand rather than Quentin’s kisses, and she continued setting out items that belonged to Jack as well as slips of paper that contained her cell-phone number and some things that she thought might still be true of Jack in the other version of his world, so that if someone besides her found him first, they could perhaps set him at ease by appearing familiar with him.

  As she worked, Quentin walked back into the room with a sandwich in his hand. He held it out to her.

  “You’ve hardly eaten today, and if we’re going out on a search party, you’ll need energy.”

  Lydia looked up at him, and a crackle of attraction immediately passed between them. She flushed, looking quickly away again, and then she wondered why she had done such a thing. It wasn’t as though he didn’t know that they had just kissed. And he had told her that she was in his head, and that he wanted her. There was nothing to be embarrassed about—he didn’t know the vivid detail with which she had been imagining extending their tryst.

  “Thank you,” Lydia said, taking the sandwich from him and clearing her throat as she met his eyes again. “I’ve got items that belong to Jack and some information about him all set out. You said that your friends were bringing two search dogs, right?”

  Quentin nodded, appearing almost as nervous as she felt. He shifted between feet, shoving his hands in his pockets, awkwardly. “Yeah, Ryan has a few friends in the police force. On occasion, they’ll loan him two of their dogs that adapted more easily. Some of their dogs only responded to their specific trainers. But these two have worked with them before. We’ll give them the scent on these clothes, and it should give us a good shot of finding him. At least, a better shot.”

  “Will his scent not be different in the other world?” Lydia asked, more to herself than to him.

  It made Quentin laugh, though, and it broke some of the tension between them that shouldn’t have been there in the first place. “I don’t think so. It’s worth a try anyway, though.”

  Lydia nodded. “I haven’t heard from Whitney yet. I guess she’s still looking into flights.”

  “I guess so,” Quentin said. “Lydia …are you sure that their marriage is as strong as you were telling me it was?”

  It was a pointed question—one that she hadn’t wanted to spend much time asking herself. Ever since last night when Whitney had acted so blasé about Jack’s disappearance and said that he often disappeared to a bar or a casino, Lydia had wondered if she really knew her two closest friends as well as she had thought she did. She was often over at their house, but only two or three times a week. It was a lot of times to be over at someone’s house, but it still left four or five other nights that s
he wasn’t privy to. And even when she was over there, she always left by about ten o’clock, under the assumption that Jack and Whitney would want time for themselves.

  Maybe Jack was leaving on those nights, too.

  But it just didn’t make sense to her. It didn’t match up with the man she thought she knew so well.

  “I don’t know,” Lydia said. “I genuinely thought they were the perfect married couple. Now I don’t think that anymore. Because either way, she’s lying about him and doesn’t care if he’s missing, or he routinely disappears to go waste money on gambling and drinking. Which is worse?”

  “Neither is exactly ideal.”

  Lydia nodded, sweeping her hair back from her face and blowing out a breath. “Tell me about it.”

  A knock at the door interrupted any further conversation, and Quentin hurried to open it. When he stepped back to let their visitors in, four dragon shifters poured into the apartment all at once, along with two search-and-rescue dogs. It was a lot of noise, and Lydia stood by the couch, watching in a certain amount of awe as they all greeted each other, exchanging information and tossing around little quips as they did so. They were so easy with each other, all of them. Like a family. A pack. Well, she realized—like a clan.

  She desperately wanted to be a part of that kind of environment, and before Lydia knew it, she was walking over to the group of dragon shifters, her hands pressed together in front of her. “Hi,” she said, blurting out the word abruptly. She lifted a hand and smiled. “Hi. Thanks for coming.”

  Quentin seemed to sense her awkwardness, and he moved towards her, putting a hand on her shoulder. “Everyone, I think you’ve met Lydia already. Except you, Jordan. Jordan, this is Lydia. Lydia, this is Jordan. Take everything she says with a grain of salt. Actually, just ignore most of it.”