Shrew & Company Books 1-3

by Holley Trent

  “Okay…” Sarah leaned back a bit and yelled “Patrick?” at the closed door.

  Moments later, the Irishman poked his head in. “You called?”

  “What other Were-groups are in this area?”

  “Bears, Wolves, and there’s a very small group of Goats.”

  “Are you friendly with the Wolves and Goats?”

  “Goats, we’re neutral with. Wolves?” Patrick blew out a breath. “No. Why?”

  “They’ve been infiltrated. Maybe you can have Billy give them a heads-up. Show of good faith.”

  “You don’t want to put Billy anywhere near the Wolves. He’s the reason why they’re not friendly, but I’ll take care of it. What do you want to do with him?” He bobbed his head toward the bound man in the chair.”

  Sarah sat back and crossed her arms over her chest. “I don’t know…”

  “Might I make a suggestion?” Felipe said.

  Sarah looked doubtful, but Patrick nodded.

  “The farm you found me at, I know it is near Bear land, but it was far down that long path. Remote. I only found it because I was walking the roadside and saw the old mailbox covered over in vines. I actually walked by the driveway entrance on first pass. Possibly the house had a basement. Perhaps you can keep Mr.—”

  “Tolvaj,” the Visa volunteered. Oh, he seemed eager to talk now, and it probably had nothing to do with how Sarah worked him over.

  “Fine. Mr. Tolvaj and his friend there until other arrangements can be secured. And if the Bears find them…” He shrugged. “They won’t know what to make of them.”

  “I like the way you think,” Sarah said.

  “Did you think I was just pretty?”

  Her response was a wink.

  He thought they made a pretty good team, although she’d probably never admit that. He liked working with her. In just those few minutes, he’d gained valuable insight on how her brain worked when she wasn’t busy playing hard-to-get. She was methodical, yet empathetic. Hard-hitting, but cautious. He bet that even before she’d taken on psychic traits, she had probably been the kind of woman people wanted to tell things. And he could just imagine how she was working with those girls at the strip club. She may have been tough, but she was the kind of woman who liked taking care of people. She’d probably make a good mother some day, should some man be lucky enough to pin her down.

  No, not some man. That thought made him bristle in unexpected ways. Possessive ways. He’d be that man if he had his druthers.

  Patrick edged into the room and helped Sarah untie the Visa from his chair.

  “Wait,” Felipe said, stepping in front of them. “I’ve got to ask—the circus, where will it move to? Where are the next stops? I need to know.”

  Mr. Tolvaj’s dark eyes swiveled in their sockets toward Patrick, who glowered at him, then to Sarah, who nodded.

  “Tell him, Mr. Tolvaj, if you know.”

  “I—I don’t know. They were supposed to move up to Roanoke followed by a stop in West Virginia. Charleston, I believe, but he might have changed the schedule.”

  “I’m sure he’s changed the schedule,” Patrick mumbled. “Do you have any way to contact him? How do you keep in touch?”

  Mr. Tolvaj shook his head. “There’s always one person in our away groups who is the contact. It’s not me. I believe that person is with the Wolves. He keeps track on all of us out in the field.

  Patrick blew out a breath and raked a hand through his hair. “We’ll double-check with the Cats you rescued and see if they know anything. Try to get you a lead.”

  Felipe nodded his thanks. If that was the best they could do, he would have to take it.

  A soft, warm hand on his forearm drew his gaze down. He cast his eyes to the fingers, then upward to the Shrew’s worried expression.

  Her gut must have been saying You’re going to get yourself in trouble.

  Her gut was probably right.

  He gave her a kiss on the forehead, and sidled around her, saying, “Don’t worry, querida. If I get in trouble, you’ll probably get into it with me.”

  “Just what I need. More trouble.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Sarah and the Shrews had started cycling in and out of the mountains once it became evident the Cat problem would take longer to fix than Dana had initially allotted for. The work they did for the Cats wasn’t going to pay the bills, so the women took turns picking up their usual sort of cases in Raleigh-Durham before returning to their posts at Patrick’s.

  Finally, it was Sarah’s turn for a respite from the mountains.

  She’d been slightly insulted, though, when Dana slid her the paperwork. It was a gig a twelve-year-old Shrew could manage, but when she saw the billing rate and total job time, she understood Dana was in her mother hen role again.

  Some sucker was willingly paying the Shrews a hundred thousand dollars for three hours of bodyguard work. Some Hollywood actor in town filming scenes for his next action movie, and he’d been invited to a gala event at the governor’s mansion.

  Sarah’s job was to be on his arm, but only a few people knew of the legal firepower she was carrying in her little sequined purse.

  As Sarah pulled away from the actor’s hotel, Felipe materialized in the front passenger seat of her car and pulled the seatbelt over his body.

  “Why am I not surprised you’re here?” she asked, easing her car onto the I-440 Beltline.

  He worked the little lever at the right side of his seat and cranked the chair back about a foot. Legs stretched, he asked, blithely, “You sensed me?”

  “No. Just seemed like a typical Felipe thing.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  “How long have you been on my tail?”

  “Just a couple of hours. I had just gotten back in from my trip and Doc was on the way out, coming back this way. I tagged along. She dropped me off at the gala. Are the men you protect generally so…”

  When his voice trailed off, Sarah looked up to see him making a waffling gesture with his hand. “So what?”

  “Solicitous?”

  Was that a note of jealousy in his voice? Her lips quirked up at the corners and she put her eyes back on the road.

  “His eyes were on your breasts the entire time I was there.”

  “I hear he has a reputation for that. He likes the ladies.”

  “He’ll have to find his own.”

  For that, she had no response. She drove in silence for a while, occasionally cutting her gaze over to him when she checked her mirrors to find him alternating between staring out the side window and studying the weave of his blue jeans.

  She’d grown used to his casual style, but she realized that was because most of his clothes were Patrick’s. They were about the same height and build, and Patrick wasn’t particularly territorial about his clothing. Felipe had needed clothes, so Patrick had opened his closet.

  She stole a glance away from the road and eyed his long legs and tight torso. She wouldn’t mind having some influence on his style, but imagined he wouldn’t take kindly to being dragged around a shopping mall.

  “You and Patrick have any luck finding the circus?”

  Felipe had been gone for most of the past couple of weeks with Sarah feeding them the occasional lead from home base. She might have been more successful with tracking the circus if she’d been investigating in person, but Dana had been plying her with one distraction after another.

  “No. Used to be this would be an easy thing. Jacques always updated the circus website with the next couple of stops, but he doesn’t do that now. I wonder why. You’d think he’d make it easier for me to find him.”

  Sarah had a thought. Maybe Jacques didn’t care about Felipe anymore beyond the trouble he could cause him…and maybe he didn’t care about Fabian, either. That would be good news for Felipe, but awful for Fabian if they couldn’t track him down.

  She cleared her throat. “I should have thought of this before, but have you tried searching the Internet for me
ntions of the circus in small town newspapers? That probably wouldn’t help you much if they’d already moved on, but you might be able to determine a trajectory from that.”

  He made a little chuckle. “You’re smart.”

  “I try to be.”

  “Patrick did try that. Didn’t come up with anything recent.”

  “Hmm.” She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel while she thought. Tracking was what she was best at. All she needed was a tiny lead and she could amplify it, or find someone who could. She wasn’t averse to relying on supernatural help if she could get it. Often, one of the very first things she did when rolling into a new town was to visit a gas station, and not just for fuel. She checked the phone booth for a local phonebook and called the psychics. She always knew which ones were legit, because when they answered their phones, they said things like, “Who are you looking for, honey?”

  “The other thing you might want to try is checking public social media accounts that don’t get picked up very high in search engine rankings. Twitter. Instagram. Look for people talking in general terms about the circus, and see if you can hone in from there on the one they’re referring to. Maybe even search the names of specific performers.”

  “I have no idea how to do that, but it sounds logical.”

  “I’ll show you later.”

  “Where are you going now?”

  “My place. I live near the airport. I have a small plane my dad gave me, and I like to be near it.”

  “Are you heading back to the mountains tonight?”

  “Why? Did Dana tell you to try to keep me here a couple more days?”

  He didn’t answer, but Sarah knew the boss lady well enough that he didn’t need to.

  “She’s thinking about forcing me into a paid medical leave, you know.”

  Obviously he didn’t, because his eyebrows darted up. “Medical leave? What for?”

  “Oh, variety of things,” she said, not bothering to suppress the note of darkness in her voice.

  “Can she make you do that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not real sure what North Carolina’s employment laws say about that. Most people would consider it a vacation, right? We’re talking full pay while I sit at home on my ass.”

  “You…want to talk about it?”

  She didn’t answer, because no, she’d didn’t want to talk about it.

  She turned off of the freeway and put the car on the artery that led to her house.

  She suspected whether she wanted to talk about it or not, she would have to. Maybe she had a knack for making people talk, but Felipe seemed to be working similar magic on her.

  ___

  Felipe stabbed the seatbelt release button, and wrapped his fingers around the door handle while Sarah fiddled with the garage door opener.

  He hadn’t known what to expect when she’d revealed she was driving to her house, but certainly he didn’t expect this. The house was a two-story Greek revival set back from the road on several acres. When she’d said she lived near the airport, she was overstating things a bit. They had to be more than half an hour out.

  “This is what you call close?” he asked.

  She shrugged and undid her seatbelt. “Close enough. Technically, this is Chapel Hill, but the Chatham County bit and not the rich people bit.”

  “I have no idea what that means.”

  They got out and closed their doors.

  He followed Sarah out of the detached garage, waited as she let the door down, then padded behind her toward the dark house. The way her hips swayed in that long, clingy, sequined dress fogged his brain sufficiently that he didn’t hear what she was asking that required a response.

  She stopped on the path between the garage and the house—very near the back door, turned, and stared at him.

  “¿Qué?”

  She blew out a breath and rolled her eyes. “I said the house was a good deal. I bought it off an old vet who couldn’t keep up the maintenance. I couldn’t afford the asking price, but the gent cut me a deal because he thought out of all the other folks making offers, I’d be most likely to hang onto it long-term. I moved in a couple of weeks before my last long case. I’m still unpacking. I asked if you would forgive the mess.”

  “Oh. Certainly.”

  “Mess” turned out to be yet another exaggeration. Yes, there were a number of unpacked boxes, the place needed fresh paint, and the fixtures needed updating, but compared to what Felipe was used to, the house was a tidy-enough mansion.

  His awe must have been apparent on his face, because Sarah grinned from the counter where she was divesting herself of her costume jewelry and raised an eyebrow at him. “What?”

  “You live here alone?” He moved through the ground floor, turning on lights as he went, idling a while in each room. Kitchen. Living room. Dining room. Parlor? Powder room…

  She moved in front of him in the hallway where he stood studying the chipping plaster on the ceiling and pointed to her zipper.

  He brushed her hair aside, resisted the temptation to kiss her bare shoulders, and let down the zipper for her.

  “Yes,” she answered.

  “Why does one woman need so much space?”

  She shrugged and wrapped an arm around her belly to hold her now-sagging dress up. “Five out of five Shrews would prefer to live someplace isolated than in a condo wedged next to some stranger. Ask Dana. She could tell you from personal experience.”

  “You’re not that antisocial.”

  She shook her head and skirted around him.

  He followed her up the worn staircase.

  “I can make nice when I have to,” she said. “But it’s a lot of work for me.”

  “Ah.”

  They trooped down the hallway and entered what must have been the master bedroom. Surprisingly, this room was finished, and recently so. It must have been the one thing Sarah had gotten done in the time since she’d purchased the house.

  The hardwood floors had been lovingly repaired and coated so they shone a glossy amber color. The baseboards and chair railings held a coat or two of satin white paint that popped against the wall colors the Shrew had closen. Below the chair rail, she’d filled in a dark gray color. Above, up to the high ceilings, a Tiffany blue that carried over to the bedding on her four-poster bed.

  “You look stunned,” she said with a laugh as she stepped out of her dress.

  “Now I am, yes.” He joined her at the bed where she was disrobing and relished the sight of her in her underthings. Firm breasts pushed high by her bustier’s boning, toned legs shown at their best advantage due to the high cut of her panties and the sky-high silver heels she wore.

  She kicked those off as he soon as he noticed them, teasing him with a cheeky grin. “Tell me why you’re stunned?”

  “Well…” He cradled her bottom and helped her up onto the high bed.

  With her lying on her back like that, his base impulse was to help her out of those lacy little panties. They had to be uncomfortable, the poor dear. But, he resisted the urge for the moment and instead heeled off his shoes and climbed up next to her. He rolled onto his left side and stared down at her lovely, but tired, face.

  “I suppose I’m surprised because this has the potential to be an actual home.” Any woman who would so lovingly personalize the room where she spent the most time probably understood that concept perfectly well.

  “Well, that’s the general idea. A girl’s gotta put down roots somewhere, right? I saw this place while Tam and I were on the way back from a job, and I knew I had to have it. Used the last of the money from my settlement to pay for it. It’ll be nice not having a mortgage.”

  He let his forehead furrow. “Settlement?”

  Her mouth opened, closed, and she pulled her bottom lip between her teeth. She worried at it a moment, then said, “Um. Settlement.” She pushed up onto her elbows and wriggled back on the bed until her spine met the headboard.

  Felipe followed, propping his back
on the headboard beside her and nudging her with his left arm. “Tell me.”

  “Hold on. I’m trying to figure out how to make it sound less like a cut-rate straight-to-Blu-ray movie plot.”

  “Come on. I’m weird, too. You won’t shock me.”

  The slight widening of her eyes suggested to him that she didn’t exactly believe that, but she started anyway.

  “There was a drug trial a few years ago. It was what was responsible for making the Shrews what they are.”

  “What was the drug supposed to do?”

  “What administrators told the participants was that it was designed to minimize the feeling of anxiety and stress in dangerous work situations. That seemed to make sense. Most of the women who got drafted came out of fields like military and police, or else grew up in war-torn areas. That’s how Dana, Tamara, and I got escalated to the next stage. Tam’s father was a Romanian official, and they lived in Bosnia for a large chunk of her childhood. Maria and Astrid fit other trial requirements that we didn’t know about at the time.”

  “What happened?”

  She toyed with a small rip in the duvet cover’s quilt work for a moment before she answered. “It wasn’t true. That was just what the drug company got approval to test. They were more interested in the off-label applications of the drug.”

  “Which were?”

  Her dark eyes rolled up, slowly, to met his. “Compliance. They theorized if we felt less stress, we’d be sweeter.”

  “I’m guessing it didn’t work.”

  “The only reason I’m not punching you for that comment is because it would be too ironic.”

  He put his hands up in a defeated gesture and offered her an apologetic grin. “I don’t like that kind of irony. Besides, I wouldn’t change a thing about you.”

  “Sure, you say that now…”

  “And so this drug, it mutated you?”

  She nodded. “It affected some of us more than others. All the women involved survived, though in a few cases that’s just a polite way of saying they’re not quite buried yet. They might as well be dead. They’re in nursing homes. Dana, Tamara, Astrid, Maria and I got lucky. Don’t know why, but after the worst of it, we got stronger. Developed some new traits during all that time we spent in hospitals.”