Gray Wolf Security: Back Home

by Glenna Sinclair

  “You’ll find Shaw and Audra in a dark van on this corner. They’re expecting you.”

  No time like the present, I supposed. I took a deep breath and headed out, my heart in my throat.

  ***

  The van was right where Joss said it would be. A side door opened as I approached, Audra sticking her hand out to help me inside. It was a surveillance van, just like the ones on television yet nothing like them all at the same time. The walls were covered in some sort of dark coating, a desk of sorts set up on one side where multiple computer monitors displayed images sent from cameras that must have been located inside and around the motel. Another monitor displayed computer mumbo-jumbo that I didn’t understand. Across from the desk was a long, low love seat like someone might have in their living room. It had a pillow with a blanket folded on one end that implied someone slept here last night.

  “Cozy.”

  Shaw lifted her hand, squeezing mine as she continued to stare at the computer monitors. “Welcome to the team, Kar.”

  Audra hip-bumped Shaw, moving her out of the office chair. Shaw settled onto the loveseat beside me as Audra took her place, staring at the monitors.

  “So, what do you know?”

  I shrugged. “Three bad men run prostitutes out of the motel down the street.”

  “Exactly.” Shaw gestured to the monitors. “We’re plugged in to the motel's own security system. They have an exceptional system, surprisingly enough. You’d think bad guys wouldn’t want so much evidence of their illegal activities, but to each their own…”

  “There are two guys who run the day-to-day business—”

  “Three now,” Shaw interjected.

  Audra nodded. “Three now. They just brought in this new guy this morning. We heard someone say he’s a friend of a friend of a friend…I don’t know, but yeah, there’s three now. They’re here almost all the time, running things hands on. And there’s a fourth—”

  “Todd Michaels.”

  “…he’s the one who seems to be in charge. They call him like a hundred times a day. I think he’s somewhere nearby, monitoring them just like we are because he calls them sometimes, too, before they have a chance to tell him about something that’s gone wrong or whatever. We just need to know where.”

  “We need someone on the inside.”

  “Joss said you wanted me to try for a hostess job?”

  Shaw nodded. She gestured toward the front of the van. “One of the girls, this blond named Felicity, hangs out at the diner on the corner before and after work. We thought you might accidentally run into her. She’s in good with one of the guys, Sam Wilson. She could put in a good word for you.”

  “What if they fill the job before I can do all that?”

  “They won’t. This Jorge, he likes walking the men to the rooms himself. I think he’s something of a voyeur—gets off on seeing the girls greet their johns.”

  “But they’ll hire you. This Sam Wilson seems to be in charge here at the motel. He likes redheads.”

  I reached up and touched the knot my hair was twisted into, wishing—not the first time— that it was any other color. I’d stuck out like a sore thumb at my mostly Hispanic high school. And the guys in the Marines? You’d think they’d never seen a woman with skin as pale and creamy as mine was.

  “Once you get in, we’re pretty sure they won’t expect you to do anything with the johns. But…”

  Shaw blushed. Audra turned and studied me for a second.

  “They have this thing…they don’t like to hire any women they haven’t…”

  “They call it sampling,” Shaw explained. “They might expect you to sleep with one of them for the job. Probably Wilson.”

  I shook my head immediately, tension burning through me like fire through dry brush. “That won’t go.”

  “Of course not.” Audra turned and pulled a small vial from a drawer. “If that’s the case, you shoot him up with this and it’ll knock him out. Undress him and he’ll wake up after forty minutes totally confused and vulnerable to suggestion. You can then sweet-talk him into thinking he just had the best sex ever.”

  “That must be some drug.”

  Shaw and Audra exchanged a glance. “It’s pretty good.”

  I didn’t like it. I didn’t like any of this. But I'd still be willing to put myself in a complicated situation if it meant getting these criminals off the street and helping a few women who were likely pulled into prostitution for reasons that were out of their control.

  I glanced at the monitors and watched a woman smile and lead a man into one of the rooms. My mother was a prostitute. I didn’t have any real memories of her, but Ruidoso wasn’t a big town. People talked. They said she didn’t know who my father was and that she abandoned me because she’d chosen some drug dealer over me. I had no way of knowing if it was true because she never came back, but I had no reason to doubt it.

  If someone had helped her all those years ago, maybe things would be different. Maybe I’d be different.

  Maybe one of those women had a little girl whose life could be made different by us intervening.

  “Okay. When do we start?”

  Chapter 5

  Joss

  Rose was more than happy to slip me the key to my old cottage on the compound. She said the kids were out back, playing in the little yard Mina got Ash to build for their kids and enjoying their unplanned day off from school. Carrington was upstairs, on the phone, she thought. Running his business from lockup. I imagined he was probably pretty pissed about the whole situation.

  I walked over to the small cottage. Ash once provided each of his operatives a cute little place to live here on the compound when he first opened Gray Wolf’s doors. Mine was off to the side of the main house, Kirkland’s just a stone’s throw over. Donovan and David had cottages around the back. There were more now, most occupied by the small, elite group Ash still ran out of the compound here. But mine was empty at the moment.

  It was kind of nostalgic, walking through that door. The furniture was the same, lacking only the few personal items I’d kept here. Not many. A blanket here, a vase there. I wasn’t really into keepsakes back then.

  I undressed on my way to the bathroom, flipping on the water in the old shower stall. It still had incredible water pressure—thank goodness! My tired muscles really needed the beating it would offer.

  It took me a minute to remove all the tape the nurse had secured the bandage with. It stuck to my skin like cement, pulling and tugging at the bruised and broken skin until tears filled my eyes. But I finally got it off, my shoulders made even sorer from twisting in odd directions, trying to see my back. It was a relief to step into the shower and have that hot water pound down on my body.

  I closed my eyes and leaned forward, the water rushing over my head. Memories of the past came rushing in on me: long evenings sitting outside with a beer, listening to Kirkland complain about the long succession of women coming and going from his life. Early mornings sneaking down to the beach with a surfboard to tempt the scythe of Death. The night I had to run from Carrington’s home with his daughter in tow, desperately trying to keep her out of harm’s way.

  Carrington in the shower with me, his hands gentle as they moved over my wet flesh.

  I stood up, turning so that the water could run over my shoulders and my back. I wasn’t supposed to get the stitches wet, but I was pretty sure this shower was more important to my sanity than keeping the damn stitches dry.

  I missed the past. I missed the uncertain early days of my relationship with Carrington. I missed the way he looked at me, the way he touched me in the rare moments we were alone together. I missed the heat in his kiss and how alive I felt whenever I was near him. When I met Carrington, I was a corpse walking with the living. I wouldn’t speak, wouldn’t interact. I wanted nothing to do with anything or anyone. The only thing that got me out of bed most mornings was the promise I’d made to Ash, a promise that I wouldn’t give up. But I so desperately wanted
to.

  And then Carrington…but now I’d fucked that up, too.

  How could our marriage come back from this? He could barely look at me. I couldn’t let go of the hurt that still wrapped itself around me like a wet blanket whenever I was reminded of his unfaithfulness. And he couldn’t get over the guilt that rested on his shoulders from what he’d done, from his part in Ash’s kidnapping last year. We’d let each other down and we couldn’t move past it. And now I’d moved out of the house in a stupid attempt to convince a criminal that killing Carrington, hurting our children, wouldn’t matter to me. That it wouldn’t punish me in the way he wanted it to because of what he believed I did to his nephew. For what I’d supposedly done to the man who killed my first husband and my only son.

  I screamed because it just felt good. How fucking frustrating was this entire situation?

  And then the tears came.

  I fell to the floor and pulled my knees up to my chest, sobbing as the hot water pounded down over my shoulders. I cried and cried for a long time, not even aware of the passing of time or the cooling of the water still rushing over me. It wasn’t until hands brushed my arms, a warm and familiar voice surrounded me, that I came back into myself.

  “Joss, you’ll catch pneumonia if you don’t get out of here.”

  I let him pull me to my feet, shivering as the cool air he allowed in through the open shower door touched me. He shut off the water and stepped back, grabbing a towel that he wrapped over my shoulders, rubbing the cool water from my skin.

  “How long have you been in there?”

  I shook my head, not looking at him. I wasn’t ready to see the look in his eyes, to see the pity and the guilt that had taken up permanent residence there.

  I brushed past him and stepped into the bedroom, rubbing at my skin as I dug clean clothes out of the bag I’d brought with me. A t-shirt and a pair of yoga pants, perfect attire for the long nap I intended to take. I could feel his eyes on me, knew there were questions burning on the tip of his tongue.

  I spoke first. “How are the girls? Are they okay?”

  “Yeah,” he said softly, “as okay as a couple of kids can be when they’re forced out of their house in the middle of the night because some madman is sending assassins after their mother’s boss.”

  I was expecting that response, but it didn’t soften the blow any.

  Carrington came into the room, pausing at the end of the bed, watching me try to dry myself off without dropping the towel.

  “Why didn’t you come by the main house, see them for yourself?”

  “I need some sleep. I was up all night.” I glanced at him. “I was going to head over for dinner later.”

  He inclined his head slightly, his eyes not leaving my face. “I thought you might be avoiding me.”

  “You found me.”

  “Yeah. I saw your car in the drive. Rose told me where you were.”

  I’d figured as much. I dropped the towel, suddenly just too tired to care about much more than getting into bed and closing my eyes for a while. I turned to pull on the yoga pants and heard him gasp.

  “What the fuck, Joss?”

  He flew around the side of the bed, his fingers brushing the stitches on my side before I could turn. He must not have seen them in the shower. I must have been turned just right. But he saw them now and his face was pale, anger and outrage and fear and concern all fighting for control on his face.

  “It’s nothing,” I said, brushing it off as I yanked the yoga pants up and tugged on the t-shirt.

  “You have a hundred fucking stitches in your back! That’s not nothing.”

  I picked up my bag and tossed it to the floor before crawling into its place, tugging a pillow out from under the bedspread and tugging it under my head.

  “Joss!”

  I wanted to sleep so desperately that tears came to my eyes, but I equally desperately wanted him to crawl onto the bed behind me and hold me. I wanted it so much that I almost asked for it.

  Maybe he read my mind. Maybe we were still that in tune with each other. The mattress shifted with his weight as he settled beside me, his hand sliding slowly under the back of my shirt. He brushed his fingers over the wound again, pain drawing a soft moan from between my lips.

  “Do I even have to ask? Was this Mahoney’s people?”

  “Don’t know. They were waiting for me last night.”

  “Where?”

  “The hotel parking garage.”

  He grunted. “Why didn’t you come here?”

  I didn’t know how to answer that. Tears rolled down my cheeks and I didn’t have the energy to brush them away. Carrington did it for me, wiping my cheeks as he settled down onto the bed beside me, his arms tugging me into the angles of his body as he enfolded me into them. I closed my eyes, hurt and pain rushing through me even as exhaustion refused to be ignored. Despite everything, I felt safe in his arms. I felt cared for. I felt protected.

  I fell asleep despite the pain and the nausea and the tears, fell into the deepest sleep I’d experienced in months.

  ***

  When I woke, it was dark but there was a hint of light coming through the narrow slits in the blinds over the windows. For a moment I was confused, taken back in time when I’d purposely wake at this time of the day to go catch a few waves. Any second, I’d hear the door slam at Kirkland’s cottage, some girl being evicted from his bed. And the electronic whir of David’s chair as he made his way to the main house in order to review the security footage that would have come in during the few hours he forced himself to sleep each night.

  But all was silent and my back throbbed like I’d taken a bad wave and was thrown on the rocks. Or been stabbed the night before.

  I groaned, reaching back to touch the offending spot. Instead, my hand brushed someone else’s flesh.

  “Morning,” Carrington’s deep voice whispered near my ear.

  It all came back to me in a rush. I rolled onto my back and found him there, still on his side, still fully dressed.

  “You stayed this whole time?”

  Instead of answering, he drew my face to his, stealing a kiss that was both tender and cruel, both loving and filled with an anger that only guilt could create. He didn’t seem to care that I’d been sleeping for more than twelve hours and probably had atrocious morning breath, nor that we’d separated days ago and weren’t really supposed to be engaging in this sort of behavior. He didn’t seem to care about anything but the feel of my body against his.

  Truth be told, that was all I cared about in that moment, too.

  He rolled on top of me, trapping me against the mattress, his hands forcing their way into my hair and under my shirt. His fingers tore at my flesh and my clothing, not caring which gave under his grip. I tore at him, too. Tore his shirt up over his head, ripped the flesh along his ribs with my nails, needing him so desperately that I didn’t care what I had to do to get him. I missed him, but it was more than that. I needed to forget, needed to lose logic for a while and remember what it was I was fighting for every moment of every day.

  Pain flared through my back as he pulled my yoga pants over my hips. I cried out, but refused to allow him to pull away, refused to allow him to end our furious kisses. I bit his shoulder as he brushed his hand between my legs, as he touched places that hadn’t been touched in weeks and weeks. I’d forgotten what it was like to be touched with pregnancy hormones pushing more and more blood into places that weren’t normally much of a priority. All he’d done was brush against me, an almost innocent touch, and now my head spun with the intensity of pleasure.

  I grabbed at his jeans, the muscles in his lower abdomen vibrating as it tugged at the zipper that kept him from me. When I got it out of the way, when my hand slipped inside and wrapped itself around his shaft, he cried out, his need as powerful as mine. He pulled away and I cried out in protest, but it was only to tear the yoga pants from my legs. Then he grabbed my ankles and jerked me down closer to him, his eyes wild as he fil
led me. He balanced my legs against his shoulders and leaned forward, filling me so completely that I couldn’t imagine ever feeling that complete again.

  I held his arms, felt his muscles vibrate as he moved to a beat of his own making. I brushed my foot over the side of his face and he turned to kiss it, drawing my big toe into his mouth for a long second, a moan sending tremors through my whole leg. Then he leaned down and kissed me, his tongue doing a dance that was only surpassed by what he was doing down below.

  How was it possible that it could still be this good between us? Outside of bed, we could barely look each other in the eye. But in it? It was like magic, the things he did to my body, to my mind.

  An orgasm shot through me so instantaneously, so forcefully that I nearly bit down on his tongue. I cried out, vaguely hoping no one was occupying Kirkland’s old cottage at the moment. They might think something more homicidal was going on in here. But none of it seemed to slow Carrington’s need. He just kept going, his eyes glued to my face except when the pleasure was too much to keep his eyes open.

  Another orgasm followed the first—yay for pregnancy hormones—as my nails bit into the skin on his upper arms. He began to shake, a sound like a groan followed by a growl falling from his lips. He swelled inside of me, his movements becoming a little erratic before they stopped altogether. He cried out, his head turned up to the ceiling for a long moment before he collapsed, rolling to the side so that our bodies rudely separated with a suddenness that was almost painful.

  We lay there for a long while, both of us staring up at the ceiling as our breathing very slowly returned to something like a normal rhythm. He rolled toward me after a while, his hand sliding slowly over my bare belly.

  “That was…”

  I smiled as I rolled toward him, lifting my hand to touch his face. The words were on my tongue, my heart thinking we were right back where we’d been before. And this news would push him over any line that might still exist in his mind between us.

  Carrington, I’m pregnant. I don’t know how it happened, but…