by Kyle, Celia
And if that came with a little physical prying, all the better.
He didn’t know what kinds of secrets this curious woman held, but the simple fact they existed made him want to get into her head and figure them out. His inquisitive nature was one reason why he was in his chosen field. It was an empowering feeling, and the thought of peeling away the layers of Elissa sounded better every second her tongue was in his mouth.
Ragan pulled her closer, almost into his lap, as her lips broke free and nibbled at his ear, sending his desire into the stratosphere. Taking a risk, he gently cupped her breast, waiting for her to pull back and slap him. Instead she moaned and bit his neck in response. He very nearly burst right out of his pants.
All he had to do was figure out a way to get her back to his apartment without Charlie asking too many questions. Excuses raced through his mind as they shifted their bodies for better access, his elbow accidentally honking the horn. Neither of them even reacted to it, they were so engrossed in each other.
Just as he was about to ask her if she’d like to join him for a little afternoon delight, Elissa tore free from the kiss and slumped back in her seat, panting like a puppy. “I-I have to go.”
“Huh?” He stared at her, unsure what her words meant. Hell, he hardly knew what words were by that point.
Flustered and tousled in the sexiest way, she pulled her phone from her back pocket and waved it at him, as if proof of something. “It’s my boss. Gotta go.”
Ragan stared after her, jaw slack, heart pounding, and eyes fixed on her backside as she speed-walked down the street and around the corner, wondering what the hell had just happened. He blinked a few times and exhaled slowly, leaning back in his seat and putting a hand to his forehead.
So much for not getting ahead of himself. So much for control. He took a deep, calming breath and tried to get his mind out of fun-mode and back into work-mode. Charlie would want to see the security footage he’d found as soon as possible.
But first he needed to disassemble the pup tent in his pants.
Chapter Four
After spending several minutes trying to think of decidedly un-sexy things, Ragan finally managed to control the evidence of his impromptu make-out session and headed for the office with a bounce in his step and a happy whistle on his tongue. If the others were back from their assignments, they might tease him for being in such a good mood after doing what they considered scut work, but to him, it was a step forward. Both personally and professionally.
Not that he dared think of Elissa for very long or they’d tease him for walking into work with a hard-on.
Pushing open the glass door, Ragan heard a flutter behind him and glanced back in time to duck as a green and orange blur whizzed over his head and into Wildridge. Bellicent sat at the receptionist desk and squealed like she’d just seen a spider, but of course she loved spiders. How terrifying did a creature need to be to make goth girl scream?
“Kill it!” she screamed, huddling into a ball as the colorful blur dive bombed her before it flitted away. She cowered in the corner, arms wrapped around her scraggly black hair, so Ragan hurried in to save her from whatever evil was about to befall her.
“What the hell is it?” Ragan asked, scouring the outer office for sign of the tiny monster.
“Don’t hurt her,” cried a woman’s voice from behind him. “She’s just scared!”
Alice Sinclair, the owner of Mutts ‘N’ Stuff, the pet store next door, rushed in just as Bellicent grabbed a folder from her desk and swatted at something. Bellicent screeched, the blur screeched, Alice screeched. Ragan had seen this movie before and quickly pulled the glass door closed behind Alice to prevent whatever animal had escaped her shop escaping the office too.
“What is it this time, Alice?” he asked.
She snatched the folder from Bellicent and turned to find her tiny charge perched on top of a filing cabinet. “Love bird,” she murmured quietly as she slowly approached it. “Sweet things but a little strong-headed.”
Ragan burst out laughing. Only Bellicent would be afraid of a love bird!
“Don’t just stand there, you nerd,” the quivering mess of black death shouted. “Kill it!”
“No!” Alice shouted back, scaring the love bird into taking off again.
Ragan lunged for the little bird but didn’t even come close. Together they darted this way and that, trying to corner the terrified thing, but it was too small and too fast. They needed a net, but anything Wildridge might have in storage would be too big. The bird would fly right through the holes.
“What’s going on out h— Oh!” Charlie jerked to the side when the love bird flew a suicide mission toward his head. “Alice, I didn’t know you were bringing…company.”
The bird landed on top of Dyrk’s desk lamp, preening its wing casually, as if there weren’t a bunch of huge creatures closing in on it. And why should it worry? It could just take flight again and zip away before they got within feet of it.
“Sorry, Charlie,” Alice said with a nervous laugh, totally oblivious to the built-in joke in her apology. But that was Alice, slightly oblivious all of the time. “She slipped out when a customer distracted me.”
Alice was about Charlie’s age—firmly middle-aged—and stayed in pretty good shape. Better than Charlie, actually, considering his slight paunch. Still, she was a koala shifter—not known for their quickness and agility—so no amount of fitness would let her catch a bird that didn’t want to be caught.
“Of course it did,” Charlie said, smiling at the familiar excuse. “Bellicent, perhaps you could—”
“Could what?” she snapped, her glaring gaze darting away from the bird long enough to level on Charlie for a split second before returning to her mortal enemy.
A love bird.
“Bellicent,” he said, his tone firm with warning.
She glanced back and then huffed and rolled her eyes. “Fine.”
Standing, she rolled her shoulders and kicked off the ground, effortlessly shifting into the form of a rather sickly looking crow with bags under its eyes as deep as her human version. The crow zoomed toward the love bird, which shrieked and frantically flew away from the much, much larger bird chasing it around the office. It looked a lot less like Bellicent was trying to herd the bird toward Alice and a lot more like she was trying to skewer it with her big beak.
When the love bird fluttered against a window, Alice cried out in dismay and clutched at Charlie’s shirt sleeve. “Oh! Oh dear!”
A muscle in Charlie’s jaw tightened as they watched Bellicent delight in tormenting the poor, hapless bird, and he finally walked over to them. Without having to be told, Bellicent landed on a nearby desk, giving Charlie room to try his hand at catching the panicked bird.
As the tiny thing continued trying to find a way out the window, Charlie took a deep breath and exhaled slowly, releasing a plume of wispy, pale blue smoke. Drifting through the air, the smoke wrapped around the bird and formed a perfect bubble. The bird calmed instantly and remained so as the bubble floated blissfully back to Alice, settling in the palm of her hand. The bubble dissolved, leaving the escapee resting in Alice’s gentle grasp.
“There,” Charlie said, turning a bright smile on Alice.
Bellicent shifted back to her human form and coughed up a bright green feather before stomping back to her desk, naked as the day she was born. Alice shot her a wary look but then approached Charlie with a grateful smile.
“You’re too kind, Charlie.”
“It was a team effort,” he replied, nodding toward Ragan but noticeably ignoring Bellicent. “Good catch with the door, son.”
“You have a wonderful team here,” Alice confirmed, beaming at them, including Bellicent, who was tugging on her pile of gloomy clothes. “Thanks for your help, all of you. Sorry for the trouble. Again.”
Ragan chuckled. “That one was all Charlie, but anytime, Alice.”
She carefully carried her charge out of the office, leaving them
in peace. Ragan had never seen a dragon blow a smoke bubble like that before. Breathing fire was one thing, but a smoke bubble? And a blue one at that? Maybe he’d ask Charlie to teach him the trick. Then again, as fair and generous as Charlie was, he wasn’t usually forthcoming about personal things, including his powers, so there wasn’t much point.
“Thank you both for starring in the latest episode of Escape from the Planet of the Pet Store,” Charlie said with a warm chuckle.
Ragan smiled and Bellicent scowled, as usual. Then Charlie nodded for Ragan to follow him to the conference room.
“So, how did babysitting your hack go?” Charlie asked as he closed the door and took his seat at the head of the table.
Ragan nearly choked but then coughed to cover it. “I’m sorry I said that, Charlie. Not only because I was wrong about her being a hack, but because it put you in an awkward position.”
“Don’t mention it,” Charlie said, and Ragan took him at his word. When Charlie was actually upset, there was no question about it. “Sounds like you two got along all right in the end.”
“Better than all right,” Ragan pulled the thumb drive from his pocket—even if he meant something else entirely.
A minute later, Ragan played the video on his laptop. Charlie crossed his arms and stroked his chin as he watched with intense interest, and pride swelled in Ragan’s chest at the same rate Charlie’s smile grew.
“This is excellent,” Charlie murmured as they watched the video of the car peeling away again. “Really excellent, Ragan. Thanks to you, we have a tremendous head start. Is there any way you can, uh, work this contraption to figure out who owns that car?”
Ragan pursed his lips for a moment, trying to decide whether to admit how difficult that request was, given how blurry the license plate was and how generic the car looked. “I can try,” he decided at last. “That was my strategy for canvassing, and it went well enough.”
“It certainly did!” Charlie said, clapping his hands once and taking out his phone. “I’ll touch base with the others. You get on this and see if we can’t catch ourselves a burglar.”
Ragan couldn’t remember the last time he’d dived into his work with as much enthusiasm. Returning to his desk, he knew just where to start looking—traffic cameras. As a law enforcement agency, Wildridge had access to the feed of traffic cams all around Los Angeles. It would just be a matter of finding the ones in a radius around the Bradford home.
He was left with dozens. Narrowing down the window of time to the handful of seconds the getaway car might have passed by any given camera helped, but to say it was tedious work was a gross and all-too-polite understatement.
Fortunately, Ragan had somewhere for his mind to wander… Elissa.
She still consumed his every thought. Hell, her scent remained on his clothes, driving him to distraction. Charlie probably even got a whiff of her on Ragan’s clothes. Oh shit, was that why he’d made that sly remark about them? Ragan felt heat in his cheeks as he shook off the thought.
If this went well, he’d have even more reason to spend time with her. Of course, his excuse would be to give her more fodder for her story, which no one could argue with, but really his intentions were purely selfish. Maybe he could talk her into joining him for Sunday dinner with his family to show her off a little. They could pretend it was for the profile, so there would be no pressure from his family, whom he knew would love her.
Shamelessly letting himself fantasize a little bit, he pictured meeting her parents and siblings, getting to know her life, her tastes, everything about her. Then his mind wandered even farther into the future and saw them curled up on a couch, watching their little ones play on the floor. Would they be dragons or panthers? The thought of tiny black kittens with hellish leathery wings terrorizing the neighborhood brought a grin to his face that only faded when something on his screen caught his eye.
It was the sedan from the security footage. He couldn’t make out any faces inside, but he had a decent view of the license plate—part of it, anyway. Thirty seconds into a specialized search engine later, and Ragan sat back in his chair, heart racing so fast he could hear it.
“Well, hello, Mr. Cray Pardus,” he murmured as a slow smile spread across his face. “Nice to meet you.”
* * *
Tears burned the backs of Elissa’s eyes as she stormed out of her car and across the parking lot toward her apartment. She gritted her teeth and clenched her fists, annoyed at herself for daring to feel so emotionally distraught as to start crying. She considered herself a pretty even-keeled person, and she sure as hell did not take any joy in showing her weaknesses.
A lifetime of dealing with her father’s illegal antics, her aunt’s drunken fits, and just trying to get by as a young woman who was all but alone in a man’s world had taught her to avoid vulnerability as much as possible. It was a chink in her armor, just another pressure point to be exploited by other people who wanted whatever she had, or who wanted to unseat her from the hard-won throne she’d fought to claim.
Sure, she was just a columnist for a silly ezine, but even that was a great feat as far as she was concerned. Hell, at least this was a totally above-board position. She never wanted to have to resort to illicit means of supporting herself the way her father always had. She’d worked her ass off to get where she was, and the thought that Cray might be the catalyst to set off a domino effect of failure in her life was unbearable. And that Ragan might be the one to catch her made it even worse.
She still couldn’t believe she’d just made out with the guy responsible for hunting her down. The memories washed over her like a hot, horny wave. His hands coming up to cup her face. The sensation of his lips, sensual and soft against hers. The smell of his aftershave and his personal musky, masculine scent combining like the most exquisite cologne. The tightness in her chest as his fingertips brushed across her skin, the way her body warmed and trembled to be touched by him as though there was some kind of primal magic flowing from his fingers. As though there was more than just unprofessional flirtation between them.
In the moment leading up to their epic kiss, she’d felt so panicked and trapped. Kissing him was an act of desperation as much as one of pure, unfiltered desire. She’d only wanted to distract him so he wouldn’t catch on to the fact he’d parked directly in front of the sedan he was looking for. If she could stall him for a few minutes, disorient him a bit, maybe she could buy enough time to get out of dodge. After leaving him all hot and bothered—her too, for that matter—she’d made a point of walking away from her car, just in case he’d recognized it. Obviously he hadn’t because no one had followed her home when she finally mustered up the courage to return to the parking lot.
The whole ride home, she’d been gripped with fear and dread, even as the endorphins from kissing and touching an exceedingly handsome guy like Ragan coursed through her system. By the time she got home, however, all those warm, fuzzy feelings had worn off. All that remained now, as she flung open the door to her apartment and stomped inside, was righteous rage.
“Dad!” she shouted, slamming the door behind her. “I know you’re here!”
A rustling in the kitchen drew her onward and she strode in to see her father casually making a sandwich, as if nothing was amiss. She put her hands on her hips and glared at him with frustration. Cray stared at her, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, looking caught off-guard.
“Hey, sweets, what’s got you all worked up?”
“Oh, wouldn’t you love to know!”
“That’s why I asked,” he said with a heavy sigh.
“No. You don’t get to sigh and roll your eyes and act like I’m overreacting here,” Elissa spat. “It’s your fault I’m all wrapped up in this damn mess.”
“What have I done now?” he set down the knife and jar of mayo.
“What have you—” she began breathlessly and then stomped her foot and bit the inside of her cheek to keep from crying. She’d be damned if she’d let him see how upset and
scared she was. “You just couldn’t go straight. Could you? What is it this time, Dad? What’s the scam? What kind of trouble did you drag me into?”
“First of all, nobody’s in trouble yet. Don’t panic. And second of all, just for the record, everything I have ever done was to help you.”
Elissa nearly saw red. “Are you kidding me right now? You’re really trying to pin the blame on me and also play the martyr card? Nope. I don’t think so. Your ‘help’ is going to send my ass to human jail. Or Othercross prison.”
“Oh, is this about the security footage?”
“Of course it’s about the footage!” How on earth were they even related, much less father and daughter?
“Well, don’t worry about that,” he said as he put away the sandwich makings. “I guarantee that video is too grainy to show our faces. And besides, I would never let you go down for this, Elissa. I’ll take the fall, if it comes to that.”
She stepped over and slammed the fridge door closed when he tried to open it. “And get sent off again? Just up and abandon me like you always have, huh? This is getting really old, Dad. When are you going to grow up and just be…normal?”
Pain flashed in Cray’s eyes as he laid a hand on his heart, as if he was about to make a pledge. “I swear, I had no idea Buddy was up to anything illegal, Elissa. Swear on your mother’s grave.”
“Uh huh. Sure. I’ve heard it all a thousand times. You tell me you’re innocent and that everything is going to be fine, right up until the moment you plead guilty in court.”
Cray set down the package of turkey and mayo and then took a step closer, but Elissa fell back, moving to the doorway. She didn’t want him anywhere near her, which seemed to actually wound him.
With pure sadness in his eyes, he spoke softly. “Elissa, you might not want to believe this, but my only motivation for committing these crimes was to support you.”
