by Paige Tyler
Crap. Was Leclair hot for Mike?
If the way the woman’s heart suddenly beat faster was anything to go on, Rachel suspected the answer was definitely yes. Unfortunately, the chief got her act together too quickly for Rachel to be sure.
“Not the witnesses—Jennifer Lloyd,” Leclair said. “Last night, someone put a bomb in her car while it was sitting at the courthouse. Jennifer was finishing up something and asked one of her investigators to bring her car around to the front of the building. The bomb got the investigator instead of her.”
Gage frowned. “So, you want us to keep Jennifer Lloyd safe until the trial is over?”
Leclair nodded. “I know this isn’t something your team normally gets involved in, and yes, I know the DA’s office has a whole squad of people for this kind of thing, but I want her to have more protection than that.” She sighed. “Jennifer and I went to college together. She’d hate the idea of me pulling strings on her behalf, and I know it’s wrong to use my position to ask your people to do something like this, but I can’t let her go this alone. I simply can’t.”
Gage shook his head. “You don’t ever have to apologize for wanting to protect your friends and family. It’s what any of us would do. If you need our help, you have it.”
Leclair visibly relaxed at that. “Thank you.”
“Corporal Kendrick will head up the security detail, working with Officers Bennett, Martinez, and Duncan. If you need additional personnel, don’t hesitate to reach out to Senior Corporal Taylor. He’ll get you anything you need.”
Rachel heard Leclair’s heart quicken at the mention of Mike’s name, but nothing showed on her face. “Thanks for the offer, Commander, but I don’t think it will be necessary to bring in more of your people. Jennifer’s husband, Conrad, is as terrified as I am about this trial and has hired an entire private security firm to watch over her. The people he’s employed are all prior military, and I have no doubt they’ll do a good job. I simply want some of my own people sticking close to Jennifer, just in case.”
Gage nodded, but Rachel could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t a fan of working with a private security firm. Not that he had anything against private security or prior military. It was the fact that having people like them around increased the likelihood someone would see something they weren’t supposed to see—like glowing eyes, fangs, and claws.
The meeting wrapped up a little while later, after which Gage offered to take the chief over to the training building to meet the rest of the team.
“There might even be some donuts left,” he said with a laugh.
Rachel wasn’t too sure about that, though she hoped so. She was already craving another Boston cream.
“You okay?” Diego whispered as they followed everyone else out of the admin building and walked across the compound to the training one. “You seemed a million miles away for a while in there.”
She nodded. “Just thinking about other stuff I guess.”
Rachel could tell Diego wasn’t buying that, but before he could call her on it, the pungent smell of leather and gun oil made her stop midstep and jerk her head around to scan the perimeter fence and the collection of parking lots and warehouses beyond.
“What is it?” Diego asked.
She didn’t answer right away, too focused on the scents she’d smelled so many times over the past couple months wafting toward her on the morning breeze. But while they were familiar, there was something different, too. Something wild and dangerous.
As she sniffed the air, she studied the vehicles in the lots, then each warehouse, but didn’t see anyone. Then again, she never did. The scents seemed to pop up, then disappear just as quickly, making her wonder if she truly was losing her sanity.
When she still didn’t reply, Diego came around to stand in front of her. “Rachel, do you smell something?”
She shoved the scents of leather and gun oil away, immediately picking up on another one that was equally comforting but more real.
“Yeah—donuts.” Giving him a smile, she stepped around him and continued toward the training building. “Let’s go get some before they’re all gone.”
Diego caught up with her in time to grab the door and open it for her. Rachel murmured a quick thanks, refusing to look at him as she hurried inside so she wouldn’t have to see the concern in his eyes.
* * *
Knox Lawson dropped to lay flat on the roof the moment Rachel snapped her head around and looked in his direction, terrified she’d seen him even though he was on the top of a two-story warehouse across the street from the DPD SWAT compound. He stayed there with his forehead planted on the gravel-and-tar roof for a slow count of thirty, the ground rough against his skin, before slowly lifting his head to look around. He breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the woman he’d been stalking for nearly two months had turned to make her way toward another building with her big coworker. Damn, that had been close. He was a good four hundred yards away from the SWAT compound and easily thirty feet above the ground, and yet Rachel had looked straight at him like she’d known exactly where he was.
He liked to think that wasn’t possible, but the truth was, he didn’t have a clue what a werewolf was capable of, especially a female werewolf. He’d recently come to the conclusion everything he’d learned from the other hunters on the subject had been complete and utter bullshit. For all he knew, werewolves could read minds and Rachel had known there was some guy nearby staring at her ass.
Knox realized with a start he was growling softly as he watched Rachel walk away. He bit his tongue until his suddenly too-sharp teeth pierced the flesh, making him growl again, this time for a completely different reason. But even as the metallic taste of blood filled his mouth, he still couldn’t pull his gaze away from the woman’s curvy figure. How could she look that good in a pair of uniform cargo pants? He’d seen hundreds of women—maybe thousands of them—in military uniforms and none of them had looked as alluring as Rachel.
His whole body suddenly tensed as the big guy with Rachel opened the door for her, stepping aside to let her enter the building first. Before Knox even realized what he was doing, he was halfway to his knees, ready to jump off the roof and leap the fence into the police compound to stop the other cop from putting a hand on her as he motioned her into the building.
Knox stopped himself just in time, fighting for control of the animal inside him that howled at even the possibility that another man might touch the woman he’d been obsessed with for weeks.
Inside the compound, Rachel disappeared through the door, her coworker never coming close to touching her. Knox dropped back down to the roof, breathing deeply and gasping through a sensation unlike anything he’d ever felt before. Well, unlike anything he’d ever felt before getting shot at this same compound back in December.
Knox swore he could feel muscles all over his body twisting and flexing like they were trying to assume a different shape, sweat breaking out along his spine, and those damn teeth making an even bigger mess out of his tongue. When he finally got himself back under control, he took another quick look to confirm Rachel truly was out of sight. Then he lay there, letting the sweat cool on his body as he berated himself for losing it again.
What the hell was wrong with him? Stalking this woman for months and swiping her junk mail to figure out her name was bad enough, but freaking out at the mere thought of someone touching her was completely insane. Then again, insane was a good way to describe his life lately.
Knox had bailed on the Navy a little less than a year ago. The SEALs had been something he’d poured his heart and soul into for eight years, and he thought he’d stay for at least twenty, maybe more. Then a man he’d barely even known had gotten killed on a mission, and his death had changed everything. Knox had tried to explain it to his teammates at Coronado and to his family, but he’d never been able to put what he was feeling into
words. Probably because he didn’t want to. All anyone knew for sure was that one minute he’d loved being a SEAL more than anything, and the next, he couldn’t do it anymore.
While neither his SEAL teammates nor his family had turned their backs on him, they hadn’t tried to hide their disappointment, either. So he’d wandered around for a while—searching for what, he wasn’t sure. He thought he’d found it when he fell in with the hunters. He thought he was saving the world from monsters, but the first time he’d seen what the hunters did to one of the werewolves they’d caught, he realized he’d made the biggest mistake of his life. The werewolves weren’t the monsters; the hunters were. But by then, it was too late to back out.
The attack on the SWAT team at a frigging wedding reception of all places confirmed the hunters were psychotic. Yeah, they were werewolves, but still, they were frigging cops. Worse, there’d been women and kids at that party. He’d pointed that out, but the hunters didn’t care.
When the shooting had started, Knox made the decision to bail, figuring he wouldn’t be missed in the chaos. Afterward, they’d assume he was dead, right? It wasn’t like they gave a damn about him.
Then he’d seen a gorgeous woman with long, blond hair running through the compound in a beautiful dress, a handgun held low and confident in her hand. That’s when everything had really gone to hell. He hadn’t wanted to believe she could be a werewolf, but from the way she moved, he knew she had to be.
His attention was so focused on the beautiful, hypnotizing woman he almost missed the other hunter taking aim and planning to shoot her like the cowardly piece of crap he was. Knox didn’t overthink the situation. He’d spent the past eight years of his life reacting when shit hit the fan, so he jumped in just in time to take the bullet intended for her.
The bullet had hit him in the thigh, pain ripping through him as it hit bone and kept going. His vision darkened as agony overwhelmed him, and he knew the impact of the round had probably cracked his femur. He’d shoved away the urge to pass out, spinning and firing his weapon for the first time since entering the compound, putting a round through the center of the hunter’s chest.
Then he’d run, knowing he had to get out of there before he passed out. He had no desire to be involved with the hunters anymore, and if he stayed, he had no doubt he’d go to prison with them. He’d just reached the SUV they’d left near the perimeter when he felt a pricking sensation along his spine. He’d turned to find the blond woman staring at him with vivid green, glowing eyes, her weapon pointed straight at him. She was so damn perfect all he could do was stare back, even though he knew she was going to kill him.
But as the seconds dragged on, he realized she wasn’t going to shoot him at all. For the life of him, he still couldn’t understand why. The next thing he knew, the moment was over and he was jumping into the driver’s seat of the getaway vehicle and speeding out of there. He’d been tempted to put a bullet in each of the hunters in the SUV with him, but in the end, he couldn’t do that. He could deal with killing someone in the heat of combat, but murdering them in cold blood, not so much. Even if they were complete d-bags.
As a result, he’d been forced to babysit the three hunters, along with the dumbass Dallas chief of police, who was working with the a-holes, all the way back to LA, his leg bleeding and in pain the entire way. He’d tried to bail several times, but hadn’t been able to, and before he knew what was happening, the vampires had elevated him from hunter to private security. He attempted to decline the promotion, but then one of the bloodsuckers had pointed out how easy it was to separate a man’s head from his body, and he changed his mind.
Things got weird after that—if it was possible to get weirder than going from Navy SEAL to werewolf hunter to private security for a coven of vampires. But two days after the debacle in Dallas, the bullet wound in his leg had completely healed. That’s when he’d realized something had changed. Knox hadn’t known what was happening to him, and in the dark recesses of his mind, he’d been willing to admit—if only to himself—that he was scared as hell.
With everything happening in his screwed-up life right then, he’d never expected to see the beautiful werewolf from the wedding reception again—except maybe in his dreams. But Rachel had shown up in LA, and everything had spiraled completely out of control as he’d found himself inexplicably drawn to her. He’d barely understood what the hell he was doing as he followed her all over the city, then chased her back to Dallas after she and her friends wiped out the vampires.
It was scary, the hold a complete stranger had on him.
Knox was still on the roof, contemplating how much more bizarre the whole situation could get—beyond stalking a SWAT werewolf cop to her frigging place of employment—when his cell phone vibrated. Wondering who the hell could be calling him at this time of the morning, he pulled the phone out of his back pocket and rolled over, sitting up as he thumbed the green button and put the phone to his ear.
“Lawson. Who are you and what do you want?”
A deep, rumbling chuckle met his abrasive greeting and Knox knew who the caller was before the man said anything.
“Did I catch you in the middle of something with that lady friend of yours?” Theo Whittaker sneered. “You know, the one you never want to talk about.”
Knox ground his jaw. Theo was his boss as well as the owner of Direct Action Private Security. The man was also a frigging d-bag. He was constantly talking about the women he banged and assumed every guy on the planet wanted to boast about it too.
Knox had never intended to work private security. In the world he came from, private security was something you ended up in, not something you aspired to do—kind of like porn or prostitution. But stalking a female werewolf back and forth across the country had gotten expensive. Ergo, he’d needed a job. DAPS paid good money and was easy to get into for someone with his résumé.
“I’m not with anyone,” he said. “I told you before. There is no woman in my life. I was sleeping. You woke me up.”
“Bullshit. I can practically hear the heavy breathing over the phone. What, did you just finish getting—ahem—intimate with her?”
Knox cursed silently. Stalking Rachel from the rooftop across the street from the SWAT compound was the most intimate he’d been with a woman since he’d gotten out of the Navy.
Damn, that was sad.
“Is there a reason you called?” he asked, refusing to engage his perverted boss on the subject.
“We got a new job,” Theo said. “Some woman lawyer got herself on the bad side of a bunch of scary dudes, and her husband is paying us an ass-ton of money to keep her and their daughter safe. I need you to come with me to do a recon of their residence and start working up guard shifts. We’ll need to work with the local cops, too, since they’re going to be involved as well. I know this shit is your jam, so I want you with me from the jump.”
Knox didn’t bother to point out this shit was the jam of almost everyone in the company, since all of them were prior military. But if Theo wanted him to take point on this, whatever. It was a paycheck.
“So, this family we’re protecting. It’s just the three of them, right?” Knox asked, already working through the logistics of babysitting people he didn’t know the first thing about. “The lawyer, her husband, and their daughter?”
“Yup. Mom’s a looker, too,” Theo said. “At least she is in the pictures I’ve seen of her. Wouldn’t mind hitting that, I can tell you.”
Knox shook his head. “Theo, you’re a pig. You know that, right?”
The man laughed. “Hell yeah. And proud of it. Meet me at the office in thirty. Pick up breakfast on the way, would you?”
Knox hung up with a growl, his gums aching as his teeth threatened to rip their way right out again. He prayed he didn’t have to work much with Theo on this job. The man had been with Army Special Forces for years before getting out to open DAPS, so h
e was capable, but it was damn hard being around the guy without ripping his throat out with your bare hands—or your teeth.
He groaned at the visual. He’d just imagined wanting to sink his teeth into another human being’s throat. What the hell was wrong with him?
But the truth was, he knew what was wrong. And no matter how long he’d been putting it off, he was going to have to stop screwing around and finally talk to the only person who might be able to help him. And soon.
“But not today,” he muttered.
Getting to his feet, he headed toward the back of the warehouse roof and the ladder attached to the side of the building.
Chapter 2
Rachel jerked upright in bed, screaming in terror loud enough to wake the dead until she realized it had all been another nightmare.
Crap, she was so over this.
She flopped back on the bed, groaning in disgust when she noticed her sheets were soaking wet with sweat. She covered her eyes with her forearm and licked her lips, making a face at the metallic tang of blood in her mouth courtesy of her fully extended fangs. She only hoped her screams hadn’t woken her poor neighbors again.
Glancing over at the clock on her nightstand, she saw that it was only a few minutes past 2:00 a.m. Great. She’d gotten an entire three hours of sleep. Three more nights like this and it might add up to a full evening’s rest.
With a sigh, she replayed the dream, trying to remember exactly what had scared her so much. But it was difficult recalling any details. Nothing more than images of something dark and vaguely shaped like a man chasing her, clawing, stabbing, and biting at her back and shoulders as she tried to get away. But no matter how fast she ran, she couldn’t escape the thing in her dream. Even without being able to see it, she knew with every fiber of her soul that whatever it was hated her and wanted her dead. The worst part of the nightmare, beyond the pain and the fear, was hearing the thing laugh at her. Harsh, sick-sounding cackles that twisted her stomach into knots and made her want to curl up into a ball. The thing in her nightmare knew she was terrified and had reveled in that hopeless terror.
