Catnip & Curses
The Faerie Files Book 2
Emigh Cannaday
Copyright © 2021 Emigh Cannaday
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. I mean, fur real…when’s the last time a cat told you why they need an iPhone? Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Warning: the unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a fine of $250,000.
Cover design by Fantasy Book Design.
Contents
Foreword
Foreword
1. Elena
2. Logan
3. Elena
4. Logan
5. Logan
6. Elena
7. Logan
8. Elena
9. Logan
10. Elena
11. Logan
12. Elena
13. Logan
14. Elena
15. Logan
16. Elena
17. Logan
18. Elena
19. Logan
20. Elena
21. Logan
22. Elena
23. Logan
24. Elena
25. Logan
26. Elena
27. Logan
28. Logan
29. Elena
30. Elena
A Quick Word…
Also by Emigh Cannaday
About the Author
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1
Elena
Logan marched into our shared cubicle looking insanely triumphant, and a little unhinged.
“This oughta do it,” he announced, gripping a roll of masking tape in his fist like it was a set of brass knuckles. Unimpressed by the drama about to unfold, I leaned back in my chair and propped my boots up on the small table that separated our space. Then I fished around my drawer until I found a bag of kettle corn.
Adhesive screeched as it was pulled away from the roll in a long, drawn-out motion. I watched with mild interest as Logan made a huge fuss out of sticking one end of the tape on the center of the back wall of our cubicle. He ran it down the upholstered surface, then pressed it along the desktop before running into my boots.
His eyes met mine.
I shrugged, refusing to budge. “Really?” I shoved another handful of sweet and salty popcorn into my mouth. Logan’s dark blue eyes flickered in a way that made my blood run hot. I’d been pushing his buttons for over seven months—almost eight—trying to make him snap. Nothing seemed to work.
But today was another day.
“Really,” he growled, and grabbed my ankles in his free hand. No wonder he’d been a big-shot football star back in college. He still had the body . . . super tall and broad, with big, thick muscles. His powerful grip threatened to pull me up until I either fell off my chair or was dragged across the table and into his beefcake arms.
Part of me hoped it would be the latter. His warm, strong fingers on the calf of my skinny jeans were making me think all kinds of unprofessional thoughts. I knew my partner was off-limits—not because HR frowned on that kinda thing at the FBI, but because Logan had broken up with his fiancé right before we started working together. He’d made it clear he wasn’t DTF.
Believe me, I’d tried.
Although . . . that was over seven months ago. I knew he was interested in seeing people again because at some point, he’d started to explore the various dating apps. He’d let it slip one morning over breakfast at the Drip & Sip. Hearing him tell me about some of his dates made me want to scream. I mean, it was my own damn fault, since I gave him the third-degree every Monday morning about how his weekend went. On the rare occasion that he’d answer my questions, I immediately regretted it. All it did was make me want to cry in frustration. Most of all, it made me want him even more.
The rugged face with the boyish grin . . .
The way he always used the good manners his momma taught him . . .
The way his whole body tensed up when I pushed him too far.
There was a beast inside of Logan, just aching to be free. I wanted him to unleash all of that pent-up aggression onto me. And into me.
I needed out of the friend zone and into the bedroom.
Still holding my legs by the ankles, Logan moved them a few inches to the left, set them back down on the table, and went back to unrolling his stupid masking tape down the center of the cubicle. He snapped off the end and set the roll of tape beside his keyboard, then put his hands on his hips and gloated.
“There. You have your space, and I have mine,” he told me. I just looked him up and down, chomping on my kettle corn with renewed hunger.
“What do you want?” I asked with my mouth full. “A cookie? A gold star?”
Logan rolled his eyes and smoothed out a bubble in the tape.
“I want you to respect our shared workspace.” He took the opportunity to push a tall stack of papers across the tape. “Since you don’t seem to give a shit about where you work and I do, I’m taking action.”
I shot him a skeptical glance. “You call that taking action?”
“I’m setting a boundary. Isn’t it obvious enough for you?”
“All you did was put a line down the middle of our cube. You didn’t change anything. It’s gonna take a lot more than a roll of masking tape for me to change.” I popped another handful of crunchy sweet popcorn into my face. “For fuck’s sake, Hawthorne . . . that’s such a kindergarten move. I thought you graduated Quantico at the top of your class.”
His jaw feathered and his lips pressed into a flat line. Aww, he was legitimately pissed! Not a lot, but enough that I was finally getting to him.
“Respect the line, Rivera.”
A laugh caught me off guard and I inhaled a piece of kettle corn. Luckily I had a Fanta sitting nearby to help wash it down, because my partner sure as hell wasn’t about to save me from choking.
I was still laughing in between coughs as I pushed the stack of papers across the line and back to his side of the desk.
“Knock it off,” he warned, pushing it back.
“Dude, those aren’t my papers,” I said, sliding them over to his side again.
“Well, they’re not mine,” he huffed, and started to shove them back over to me. I got out of my chair and pushed from the other side of the stack.
“Yes they are!” I insisted. “They’re the co—” And that’s when Logan let go, causing me to fall forward, sending the papers flying across his desk . . . and under his desk . . . and his chair. My blood began to boil as weeks of meticulous filing were undone in mere seconds.
“Dammit, Hawthorne! You asshat!”
“You need to see a psychiatrist, Rivera! You’re a frickin’ hoarder!”
I scrambled to pick up the mess of paper all over the desk and the floor, while my partner was busy shoving it into a trash bin. I yanked the bin out of his hands and dumped the papers back onto his desk, along with a couple used tissues, apple cores, and an empty to-go cup from the fancy coffee shop on the way to the office. Logan went there every day to get a caffè Americano. Now the dark brown remnants of this morning’s breakfast were spilling all over his usually spotless desk.
“What are you doing, you psycho?”
“Stop throwing this away!” I howled. “Those are the cold case files Harris told us to prioritize!”
Logan’s eyes morphed into outraged dark blue flames as he registered what had just happened.
“Then why were they full of garbage?” he practically screamed at me. “There’s trash everywhere!”
“The candy wrappers weren’t trash, they were my lunch!” I snapped back at him.
“Oh, I’ve seen what you eat. It’s trash.”
“I have a system!” I cried out, exasperated beyond belief. “I used Three Musketeers wrappers for the witchcraft case in Three Lakes and Smarties wrappers for the university vampire murders. I used Jolly Ranchers for the missing sex workers at the ranch in Nevada, and Skittles wrappers for the succubus secret society in Scranton! It’s called word association! That’s how I work, you fucking meathead!”
Logan blinked a handful of times as he digested what he’d just learned. It made me even more upset that we’d been working together for over half a year and he still had no idea how my brain functioned. He clenched his jaw tighter, glaring at me as he got onto his knees and gathered papers from around the base of his chair and under his desk.
“Well?” he asked from the floor, still glaring at me. “Aren’t you going to help me clean this up?”
I gave an incredulous laugh, folded my arms over my chest, and stood my ground, lording over him.
“Hell no! I’ve been busting my ass for weeks organizing those files into chronological order. You said you’d take a look at them when I was done, remember?”
“You said you’d let me know when they were done,” he argued as he picked up one of the apple cores on the floor.
“I did let you know when they were done,” I told him. “It’s not my fault you weren’t paying attention.”
“You never told me to look at those files,” he insisted.
“I told you over a week ago. Maybe you should spend less time on Tinder.”
“Maybe you guys could just bone already and get it over with!”
I whipped my head around to see Allan’s head above the partition. He seemed to be caught somewhere between amused and annoyed.
“Excuse me?”
Allan rolled his eyes at me in blatant exasperation.
“It was cute for the first month or two, but it’s not cute anymore. It’s obnoxious.” He wrinkled his nose in blatant disapproval. “I can’t get anything done when you’re both here. All you do is bitch nonstop at each other. So why don’t you both do us all a favor and do each other before—hey!”
Something yellowish-tan and about half the size of my fist had just flown through the air and hit Allan in the neck. His jaw fell as he glared past my shoulder. Then he sank back down into his chair, disappearing from view. I turned and looked down at my partner, whose dark blue eyes were mortified.
“I can’t believe I just did that!” he hissed before scrambling to his feet. Now he was the one looming over me, all six feet and seven inches of him.
“Allan, I’m sorry about that,” he called to our colleague. A slender wrist rose up in the air from behind the cubicle wall, flashing us both an elegant middle finger.
Logan and I shared an embarrassed look and cleaned up the mess we’d made in complete silence. We were about five minutes into it when my phone rang.
“Rivera, you got a minute?” It was Chief Harris.
“Sure.”
“Is Hawthorne around?”
“Yep. He’s right here.”
“I need you both in my office. Now.”
My stomach clenched as I hung up the phone and motioned for my partner to stop what he was doing.
“Harris wants to see us.”
“What? Like, right now?” Logan appeared genuinely concerned. He was on the fast-track to upper management in the bureau, and the last thing he wanted was any kind of disciplinary action on his record. After our stint in Tennessee, he’d been on pins and needles after he shot their sheriff in self-defense. He was cleared but it still wore on him. Now he’d assaulted a colleague . . . with an apple core, but still.
“C’mon. We better not keep Harris waiting,” I said with a tight lip. Allan was a gossip and a busybody, but he wasn’t known for being a tattletale.
Maybe that apple core was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
“You asked to see us both, sir?” Logan said as we stepped into Chief Harris’ office.
“Sit down,” he said, not looking away from his computer screen. I tried to gauge his mood by the tone of his voice, although it was hard. He always sounded gruff, like the old grizzly who didn’t want anyone bothering him unless it was absolutely necessary. “Shut the door.”
Logan closed his door gently while I took a seat and waited for him to join me. I couldn’t believe Allan had ratted on us about something so dumb. An apple core? Really? And now we were gonna have this on our records?
“Alright, so . . . ” said Harris, clearing his throat. “I know the two of you are finally getting into a groove working as partners, but . . . ” He cleared his throat again and took a long sip of coffee. Then he placed the mug down and tangled his fingers together. A solemn expression had turned his face to stone.
I looked at Logan and saw him shift in his chair. His hands were folded neatly in his lap, but I could tell he was nervous by the way he kept glancing all around the room, unable to focus on one thing for more than a couple seconds.
“It’s my fault,” I finally blurted out. “I know we do things a little differently in the OCD, but maybe I took it too far. I take full responsibility for whatever disciplinary action you have in mind.”
Harris frowned a little as his weary gaze met mine.
“I don’t know what you did this time, but that’s not why you’re here. But now that you’re here . . . is there something I need to know about?”
“Nope!” I chimed. A sense of relief washed over me, and I made a note to buy Allan a drink the next time we went out after work. “Forget what I said. I was just talking out my ass.”
Unamused, Harris raised a scraggly eyebrow at me.
“You better get that resolved before tomorrow.”
Shit, I thought. He's about to deal us some bad news. Some real bad news by the looks of it.
A dozen questions entered my mind. Were we going to lose our jobs? Had something happened on one of our cases? Were we in danger? Then my mind went to scarier places.
Did that shapeshifter we arrested last month escape? Was there another vampire on the loose? Maybe it was a werewolf out there hell-bent on revenge. Man . . . I really didn’t like werewolves.
“Alright . . . ” began Harris, tangling his hands tighter together. “I brought you both in here because I have something to tell you.”
The energy in the room grew even more tense as Logan's worried gaze met mine.
“There have been some . . . oh, how do I put it?” asked Harris, waving his hand around as though he was trying to grab the best word out of the air. “There have been some new . . . developments within the Occult Crimes Division.”
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He leaned forward in his chair, tapping on his coffee mug while his eyes shifted between the two of us.
“You two are a great team, obviously. Rivera, you were born to do your job, and Hawthorne, you’ve managed to take it all in stride . . . ”
“But . . . ” I said, feeling a sense of dread growing inside me. Harris wasn’t the type to make a big deal about dishing out the compliments. He wasn’t an ass-kisser that way. This new behavior was getting under my skin. “C’mon, chief. Put me out of my misery already. What’s going on?”
Harris looked coldly into my face.
“We have two more agents joining the division. They start tomorrow.”
Logan looked more confused than ever, but managed a bewildered smile.
“That's great news, isn’t it, sir?” he said. “Our workload is crazy. We need all the help we can get.”
Harris didn't look so enthusiastic. With an unknown burden weighing on his shoulders, he sighed. “They're not like you. They're not OCD.”
“Okay . . . so what are they?”
“Are they still FBI?” Logan asked.
Harris let out another long sigh and slumped further into his chair.
“Yes, they’re with the bureau. They’re from Resource Planning.”
“Isn’t that like, accounting?” I asked.
Catnip & Curses (The Faerie Files Book 2) Page 1
