Gray Wolf Security: Back Home

by Glenna Sinclair

  I nodded. “I can’t agree with that more.”

  “It’s your choice. But family supports one another in their choices. I’m sure you’ll find that in the Gray Wolf family.”

  I set the tea on the table and hugged her lightly. “Thank you, Mabel.”

  “We’re family, too, you know.”

  I looked over at her daughter, asleep in her little crib. “We are. And I adore my little niece and nephew. We’ll have to go on a family vacation together when this is all over.”

  “We will.”

  I got up and walked toward the stairs. “I’m going to rest. Could you let Carrington know if he comes in before I wake?”

  “Of course.”

  I headed up the stairs, surprised that I’d opened up to her when I hadn’t even been able to say any of this to Carrington. The thing was, though, I knew what it was I wanted when this was all over. I just wasn’t sure what reaction I would get from those who loved me.

  Could my marriage survive me not working for Gray Wolf again? We’d tried it once before and I’d gone stir crazy. Would that happen again? Would Carrington be able to survive me with idle hands?

  I guessed there was only one way to find out.

  Chapter 21

  Carrington

  Kirkland rested his hand on mine, adjusting my fingers around the grip and trigger of the pistol he’d just placed in my hand.

  “I can’t believe you’ve never fired a gun.”

  “Never had a reason to.”

  “I would have thought Joss would teach you.”

  “She offered once, long ago. But after watching her take out those Bazarov men in my living room, I didn’t think it was something I wanted to do.”

  “Why now, then?”

  “Because I realized that I needed to understand who my wife is.”

  “Sounds like a good reason.”

  Kirkland stood back and gestured to me to take the shot. We were in the middle of an empty pasture, a target placed in the center of a distant tree. I raised the gun, holding it between both hands as he’d taught me, trying to look down the sight. The problem was, I wanted to squint and look at the target, not the sight. It was more complicated than I’d imagined getting myself to focus on what was right in front of me instead of what was in the distance.

  I fired, but it was clear the bullet didn’t come anywhere close to the target.

  “You need to relax, try not to think too hard about it. And just squeeze the trigger, not pull it.”

  I tried again, but the second shot was just as bad. Kirkland came up beside me and took the gun, firing three times, hitting the target right in the center all three times.

  “You have to relax. The gun is an extension of you, not a separate thing. If you think of it that way, it’ll be easier to master.”

  “Easy for you to say. You learned to shoot in the military.”

  “I knew how to shoot a gun long before I went into the military. You live on the wrong side of the city and you learn these skills pretty quickly.”

  “You grew up in New Orleans, right?”

  “I did.”

  “Joss mentioned it once or twice.”

  “It’s a beautiful city if you’re a tourist or you live on the right side. If you don’t…it can be difficult. Especially for a half black kid whose white mother took off and whose black father was something of a cliché.”

  “I bet.”

  “Don’t pretend you understand.” Kirkland glanced at me. “You grew up with a silver spoon in your mouth. You have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  “Because I’m rich, I can’t empathize with you?”

  “No, you can’t.”

  I laughed a little, aiming the gun again. I fired and actually hit the tree this time.

  “Can Mabel?”

  Kirkland grunted. “What Mabel can and cannot empathize with is really none of your business.”

  “Didn’t she grow up in the church of the Latter Day Saints?”

  Kirkland glanced at me. “So?”

  “So she grew up sheltered. I can’t imagine that allows her to empathize with you very well.”

  “Can’t we just drop this conversation?”

  I fired the gun again, getting closer to the target. “And my wife? Do you think I can’t empathize with her?”

  Kirkland was careful to keep his eyes on the target in front of us. “It’s been seven years since you married her, nearly eight years, right?”

  “Nearly.”

  “I’ve never said a word directly to you about your relationship with her.”

  “No. But you haven’t hid your dislike for me, either.”

  “It’s not dislike. It’s a concern that you don’t see her the way you should, that you don’t treat her the way she should be treated.”

  “You think you could do better?”

  “I know I could. But she loves you and I love Mabel.”

  “What does that mean, exactly?”

  I dropped the gun to my side and turned to face him. He slipped off the safety glasses he’d insisted we both wear and focused on me.

  “I think Joss lost a lot when that drunk driver hit her husband’s truck. I think that she needed someone special to bring her out of that grief. And then your daughter walked into her life and pulled her out of her shell, pulled her back into the real world. And you…you were a package deal. You made her happy, gave her another baby and everything was right in the world.” Kirkland crossed his arms over his chest. “I wasn’t going to say anything, wasn’t going to be the one to take that from her.”

  “But?”

  “But then you cheated on her. And by doing that, you proved that you understand nothing about her.” Kirkland took the gun out of my hand and busied himself reloading it. “You didn’t understand the impact it had on her when her father died, and then her husband and son were killed. To her, all the men in her life were letting her down, leaving her when she needed them the most. She sent her husband on that run to the grocery store that night because she needed a break from her kid. Do you understand the kind of burden that put on her?”

  “I get it. “

  “No, you don’t. If you did, you would never have cheated on her.”

  Kirkland aimed the gun and emptied the clip into the tree, once again hitting the target right on the bulls eye each time. I took the gun back when he held it out to me, turning to the box of bullets to load it myself.

  “I didn’t cheat on her to hurt her.”

  Kirkland snorted. “What did you think it would do to her?”

  “I was punishing myself. And I was trying to push her away.”

  “You would have done better to just use a real knife to stab her in the back rather than a metaphorical one.”

  “I have since realized the mistake I made.”

  “Have you?”

  I finished loading the gun and looked at him, trying to keep my temper in check. It was growing more and more difficult, however.

  “Joss and I have talked about this over and over. We’ve gotten to a place where we can move forward. We don’t need your interference.”

  Kirkland snorted again. “I told her to go back to you, you damn fool, because I knew it was what would make her happy.” He shook his head, reaching over to help me aim the gun better. “I’m not interfering. I’m just putting in my two cents while she’s not here to hear it.”

  “Afraid she’ll finally see through you?”

  “Joss is the one person on this earth who has seen everything there is to see about me and she still loves me. So, no, that’s not what I’m afraid of.”

  I squeezed the trigger and watched as the lower half of the target exploded.

  “Then why didn’t you say this to her?”

  “Because she already knows. And because the only things she ever really wanted were you and your children. She even went up on a damn hot roof, laid on her pregnant belly, to stop a monster to protect you.”

  I glanced at him. “You
know?”

  “I told you, Joss knows me better than anyone else. And I know her better.” Kirkland crossed his arms over his chest. “For some damn stupid reason, you’re the only thing that makes her happy, truly happy. I knew she would be miserable if she didn’t work with you to save her marriage. But that doesn’t mean I won’t kick your ass if you ever cheat on her again.”

  “Fair enough.”

  I fired the gun again and again, finally getting all the rounds into the tattered remains of the target, never hitting dead center, but getting fairly close. Maybe this wasn’t so hard, after all.

  “I do love her.”

  Kirkland nodded, switching out the pistol for a rifle. “I know. That’s your one redeeming quality.”

  “How did you know about the baby? Did she tell you?”

  Kirkland glanced at me like he thought I was a damn fool. “I’ve spent the past year surrounded by pregnant women. I know what it looks like.”

  I raised the rifle and took aim at the tree. “I’m glad she had you to turn to during this whole ordeal.”

  “Yeah, me, too.”

  I fired, the rifle’s semi-automatic firing pattern pretty intense. But it felt good in my hands, felt good as the bullets slammed into the tree. I think I liked the rifle. Maybe I’d get one of my own for when McKelty began dating.

  ***

  Joss was asleep on the bed we were sharing in Kirkland and Mabel’s guest room, her laptop open beside her and articles I’d never seen before spread out around her. I wasn’t surprised to see Mahoney’s name on most of the articles, not surprised that when I moved the computer the screen popped on and revealed another article about Mahoney.

  She was driving herself to exhaustion with all of this. It worried me, especially the image of her on a hot roof that Kirkland had described for me. How much risk was she taking just to make the world safe to bring this baby into it? Was she putting the baby at risk to stop that man?

  But if I asked her that, it would only make her more determined to keep working on this case.

  I draped a light blanket over her and slipped into the bathroom to take a shower. I wasn’t in there but a few minutes when I felt the touch of her hands on my back.

  “Hey. I thought you were sleeping.”

  “I was. But I heard the shower come on and thought it would be nice to come join you. We haven’t done this in a while.”

  “We haven’t.”

  I turned and stole a kiss, sliding my wet hands down the length of her back. She moved up against me and her baby bump brushed me, the firmness of it pulling me out of my own thoughts—my decidedly dirty thoughts. I stepped back, pushing her against the far wall so that I could get a good look of the entire length of her. She was thin, thinner than she’d been months before. And that made the bump stick out more than it probably would have under different circumstances.

  “Almost fifteen weeks, right?”

  She nodded.

  I moved closer and ran my hand over it. “You’re going to show more than you did with Aidan.”

  “They say it happens differently with each pregnancy. Maybe’s it just because I’m all stretched out.”

  “I doubt that. You’re more physically fit than most women your age.”

  She blushed, still capable of bashfulness when taking a compliment. I lifted her chin, forcing her to look up at me.

  “I’m an asshole,” I said softly. “I don’t know why you won’t leave me, but I will forever be grateful that you didn’t.”

  “I love you.”

  She said it like it should explain everything. And I supposed that it did. Everything she did, everything she put herself through, it was all because she was protecting the people she loved. Me and the girls. The people of Gray Wolf. Family was all that mattered to her because she’d had two families stolen from her. Her parents, when her father died suddenly of a heart attack and her mother committed suicide. And then her first husband and her son.

  What a fool I was to try to take a third family from her.

  “I will spend the rest of my life trying to make it up to you. That’s a promise.”

  She rolled her head a little, her eyes coming up to meet mine. “Just love me.”

  It killed my soul to hear her utter those words. It was that simple and that was exactly what I’d lost sight of. But not anymore.

  I kissed her, loving that she was always so open to me, always so ready for my touch. Some might think that that made her vulnerable, but it was really a show of incredible strength. How many people could trust as blindly as she did? How many people could make themselves so open to rejection and pain as she could? She was a remarkable woman, my wife. And I’d nearly missed it.

  I lifted her up, holding her against the back wall of the shower with the weight of my body. We kissed for a long time, like two kids making out in the back of the family station wagon. She wrapped her arms around my neck, her legs around my hips. Despite the decidedly obvious baby bump, she was so petite, so slight, that she still fit against me like two spoons in a drawer. She’d always fit against me like our bodies were meant to be close in this way.

  Her breath caught in her chest as I ran my hand down along the curve of her ass, allowing my fingertips to brush those sensitive places at the core of her. She moved her hips a little to encourage me, to allow for more. I knew what she wanted, knew her needs almost as well as my own. And I gave it to her, massaging that swollen button of pleasure before slipping my fingers inside of her, touching other places that had the power to make her cry out.

  Joss pressed her mouth to my shoulder, her breath hot against my cooled skin. She bit down, her teeth sending waves of pain and pleasure through my body. I nosed her hair back and nibbled at her throat, too, loving the moans that slipped from her lips. Her hips moved again, the need inside of her rising to a level of desperation. I teased her, not just with my fingers, pressing myself against her, but refusing to give her what she really wanted. That only made her move her hips more, pushing me over that ledge between control and complete abandon.

  There was nothing like holding a naked woman in your arms. Touching her, feeling the vitality that rushed through her, the heat of her breath and the beat of her heart and the rise and fall of her breast. This had always been a moment of fantasy fulfilled before her. But now, with Joss, it was something different. It wasn’t just about physical pleasure. It was about emotional pleasure, too.

  I loved this woman. There was no doubt in my mind that she was the only woman I’d ever feel this level of desire for, this level of need. She was the only woman whose touch could fill my soul or shatter my heart. She was my life.

  And when I filled her, it was a reaffirmation of everything, a recommitment to the marriage we’d walked into blindly nearly eight years ago. I thought I loved her then. I had no idea who she was then. I loved her now. And I anticipated loving her even more tomorrow and the day after and the day after…for the rest of my life.

  I would never get enough of this, of the feel of her, of filling her with everything I had to give her. Now I truly understood the vows we took on our wedding day: for better or for worse.

  It was time for a little better, right?

  Chapter 22

  Joss

  I studied the information David pointed out to me, glancing nervously over my shoulder as Sutherland corralled her children and Kirkland spoke to a client over the phone. The main house of the ranch was utter chaos, but it was the kind of chaos that was comforting in its craziness.

  “Both the city and the county? And that didn’t raise eyebrows for anyone?”

  “Apparently not.”

  I was looking at permits to plug a structure into the city water and sewer system that was dated early this year and county permits dated slightly older that allowed building on a parcel of land that was just outside MidKnight city limits. The dimensions of the structure were marked on the permit, but the nature of the structure was redacted, like it was some huge secret the public w
asn’t privy to. I didn’t understand that since these records were almost always required to be of a public nature, but I supposed there was some rule around it here.

  “It’s his bunker.”

  “Are you sure?”

  I gestured at the screen of the laptop. “It’s being built on property Mahoney bought before he went to jail and its dimensions suggest that it is, at least in part, underground. I don’t see how it could be anything else.”

  David nodded. “I was afraid you’d come to that conclusion.”

  “I’m going to take a drive out there later to check it out. Do you feel up to coming along?”

  “Sure. Just let me go talk to Ash. He’s still waiting on more information from the governor’s office.” He slapped the lid of his laptop down. “He’s been looking at floor plans for the Denver courthouse just in case that’s the only way we’ll be able to get to Mahoney.”

  “Well, if this is what we think it is, we might be able to take his mind off that as early as tomorrow morning.”

  “Hope so.”

  David kissed the top of my head in a sweet gesture of affection before leaving the house through the back door, pausing to tease Sutherland’s daughter as she finished up her homework before school. I watched, feeling a little nostalgic for my own kids. Carrington and I called them this morning and they were still having the time of their lives. But hearing their voices only made me miss them more.

  “Bodhi,” I said as the man himself came down the stairs, that charming smile appearing as he saw me.

  “How are you, Joss?”

  “I have a couple of questions. I was wondering if you’d be willing to answer them for me.”

  “Sure.”

  He spoke in the affirmative, but there was a new tension around his eyes that seemed contrary. I studied his face, unable to separate the actor I used to often see on the big screen with this man sitting in front of me. I hadn’t had much of a chance to get to know him last year because that was before he and Sutherland were openly committed to each other. And this summer when we came up for Sutherland’s baby shower, he was so focused on her that there was little time to speak to him. This was the first time we’d ever sat face to face for a conversation.