Gregory pressed his head against the cool glass of the door to the motel office and cursed under his breath. What the fuck had he just done? He couldn’t believe he’d been so impulsive. He shouldn’t have kissed Hayden, but he’d been angry when he’d heard his mate call himself ugly. His cat had been furious and had quickly risen to the surface. Gregory had wanted to show Hayden that he’d been telling the truth, that he did think he was beautiful, that he was genuinely the most beautiful man he had ever seen. But, whatever his reasons, that still didn’t make it right. He should have had more damn sense. If he couldn’t be more careful, he was in danger of scaring the jaguar off. If only Hayden would shift he’d understand everything… He’d know.
Gregory pushed open the door to the office and strode inside. The one-storey building was old and run-down, but it was the type of place that wouldn’t ask any questions. Besides, he’d stayed in worse places. The elderly man behind the desk was watching a TV set on a bracket on the wall in the corner of the room. Gregory glanced at the set briefly before turning back to the man.
The man chuckled then turned to face Gregory, his smile wide. “Garfield,” he drawled, shaking his head. “What a riot!”
Gregory’s mouth twitched. “Hilarious. You got a room?”
The man pursed his lips and opened a register on the desk. He took his time looking through the pages to see what he had available, but Gregory had no idea why he’d bothered. He could see the room keys hanging on pegs on the wall. Every peg held a key, bar one.
“Yep, looks like I can sort you out. Hundred bucks,” the man said, licking his lips.
A hundred bucks for this dump? Gregory shook his head, but reached for his wallet and handed over the money.
“We don’t do breakfast,” the man said, “but, if you want coffee, there’s a machine just there.” He nodded to the wall near the door. “Office is open all night. Name’s Larry, by the way.”
“Thanks, Larry. Is there a payphone around here?”
“Sure is, it’s ‘round near the pool, opposite the furthest unit.”
Gregory nodded and took the key, which had a small block of wood hanging from it with the room number painted in thick red numerals.
“Thanks,” Gregory nodded. “Have a good night.”
Larry grunted a reply and before Gregory left the office the man had turned up the volume on his movie and was laughing along with it again.
After collecting Hayden from the car, Gregory led the way to their room, which was located at the end of a long row of identical units. Gregory unlocked the door, pushed it open and switched on the light. The decor was just as he’d expected…old. The furniture was tatty and in certain places the wallpaper was peeling away from the wall.
“One bed?” Hayden asked looking from it to Gregory, eyebrows raised.
Gregory groaned inwardly. It hadn’t even occurred to him to ask for two beds, he’d just taken what Larry had given him. How the hell was he going to sleep next to Hayden all night and keep his hands to himself? His dick had been hard non-stop since he’d met Hayden and now he had to lie next to him in bed? Christ. This was going to be a true test of his willpower.
“I don’t mind,” Hayden said quietly, and as Gregory watched, his face coloured to a deep shade of pink. He could smell the arousal seeping out of Hayden’s pores and it made his already hard cock ache with need. Oh, God. Gregory was done for.
He went to check out the bathroom to pull himself together. He was a grown man, but his body was reacting as though he were a damn horny teenager. It was embarrassing.
“How is it?” Hayden asked.
“It’s basic, but at least it’s clean. You can use it first. I need to find the payphone to make a call.”
Hayden moved quickly to his side. “Are you going to call Kelan?”
Gregory had to hold his breath and shove his hands in his pocket as he slid past Hayden to stop himself from reaching out, grabbing the jaguar and sealing their lips together. That damn kiss in the car was to blame, he was sure of it. He couldn’t get it out of his head. That kiss had made his already anxious cat whine in frustration and claw at him from the inside, begging him to take what was theirs.
“Uh, yeah. I need to ask if it’s okay for you to stay there and I don’t want to do it on my cell. I don’t think the council are monitoring my calls, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.”
“Okay,” Hayden replied quietly. “Guess I’ll see you in a while.”
Gregory thought he heard a trace of jealousy in Hayden’s voice but he didn’t comment on it. He nodded. “Keep the door locked.”
He went out into the motel forecourt and circled around to the back of the units until he found the small pool area. The phone was just where Larry had said it would be, opposite the last unit. He dug in his pocket for some quarters, fed them into the phone and dialled Kelan’s cell.
“‘Lo.”
“Kelan, it’s Gregory.”
“Hey, what’s up? How’s the drive?”
“Good… Listen, I can’t talk for long, I’m on a payphone, I didn’t want to risk using my cell. It’s about that favour.”
“I’m listening,” Kelan said.
Gregory pulled in a lungful of air before he spoke. “Kelan, I found my mate.”
“Well, hell, congratulations. I’m happy for you.”
“Thanks, but, uh… It’s not quite as simple as that. He doesn’t know.”
“Huh?”
“He doesn’t know he’s my mate.” Gregory could practically hear the cogs turning in Kelan’s mind.
“Is he human?” he asked at last.
“No, he’s a cat.”
“Then how can’t he tell?”
Gregory sighed. “It’s a long story. The problem is he’s the cat the council had me go to Vegas to collect. But there’s no goddamn way I’m handing Hayden over to them, so I told them he got away from me, that I couldn’t find him.”
“Say no more,” Kelan said. “He’s welcome here.”
Gregory finally let out the breath he’d been holding. “You sure?”
“Of course. I don’t blame you for not wanting to tell the council about him. He can stay here for as long as he likes. I’m sure I can find work to keep him occupied. But we’ll have to be careful. Dean has been here and he’s been asking about you.”
“Shit, what did he want to know?”
“If I’d heard from you. I didn’t tell him you’d been in touch, but I’m not sure he believed me.”
“Is that what you wanted to tell me earlier?”
Kelan hesitated before he spoke. “There’s something else, but I’d rather tell you face to face.”
“Sounds ominous.”
“It’s not good news, Gregory. Look, don’t worry, just get yourself here and we’ll figure out the rest.”
“Thanks, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this.”
“No need, ‘sides, I know how you feel. I’d do anything to protect my mate.”
Gregory looked across at the row of rooms to where his mate was showering somewhere inside. “Yeah, I think I’m finally beginning to understand that concept.”
By the time Gregory got back to the room, Hayden had already taken his shower and climbed into bed. He had the sheets pulled up to his chest, his bare arms folded on top. Christ, is he naked under there? Gregory muffled a moan and crossed the room to the bathroom, trying to ignore his throbbing dick.
“What did Kelan say?” Hayden asked, stopping him in his tracks.
“He said you can stay on the ranch, but Dean has been sniffing around, asking questions, so we need be careful when we get you there. We can’t risk him seeing you.”
“Who’s Dean?”
“He works for the supernatural council, and he’s very influential.” He sighed. “Let me grab a shower and I’ll tell you the whole story, okay?”
While Gregory stood in the tub, letting the hot water ease his tired muscles, he debated how much he should tell Hayden about the t
rouble in the council and the things he suspected of Dean. In the end, he decided to be honest with his mate… Well, as honest as he could be without telling Hayden about their bond.
He dried off quickly and pulled on his briefs, padding into the bedroom barefoot. Hayden was laying on his side, propping up his head on one hand. Gregory sat on the edge of the bed and took a deep breath.
“You sure you want to hear this? Some parts of it are…disturbing.” Something flashed in Hayden’s eyes then, but Gregory couldn’t be certain what it had been. Hayden nodded and sat up in bed, the sheets bunching around his waist.
“Please.”
Gregory tried to keep his eyes off his mate’s temptingly smooth chest when he spoke. “About six months ago my partner Ashton and I were sent on an assignment in Missouri. We had to bring in a wolf that had killed someone in his pack, gone crazy. The job wasn’t any more complicated than dozens we’d been on before, but Ashton was uptight the whole time.”
“Ashton was your partner at the council?”
“Yeah, we’d worked together going on ten years, had each other’s back. I thought Ashton was so edgy because his mate Tania was eight months pregnant with their first child and he was worried something would go wrong, or that she’d go into labour early and he’d miss it.”
“That wasn’t the reason?”
Gregory scrubbed a hand over his face. “I don’t think so. Ashton called Tania right before we picked up the wolf. He was upset after that phone call—seemed…distracted, I guess. I think maybe they’d had an argument. I know that Tania hated what Ashton did for a living. She worried he’d get hurt and had been constantly nagging him to quit. It had been causing a lot of tension between them. Anyway, we picked up the wolf and drove him back to council headquarters. When we got there, our superior Riley called Ashton into the office.
“I could tell it was bad news from the look on Riley’s face. They’d only been inside a minute when I heard Ashton shouting… Well, screaming would be a better word to describe it, so I went in. Ashton was tearing the place apart, upending tables, throwing things—he was crazed. In the end Riley had to sedate him.”
“Had something happened to his mate?”
Gregory nodded. “She’d been killed. Riley said it looked as though some burglars broke in, tried to rob the place and Tania got in the way. A neighbour heard her screaming and called the sheriff. By the time they got there it was too late. She was dead, the baby too, and there was no sign of the shifters that did it, no clues. A wolf in the sheriff’s department called the council and they brought her body back to headquarters. The story sounded plausible until I got a look at her body. It was a mess. They tore her apart, Hayden. I’ve seen a lot of dead bodies during my time on the council, but hers was one of the worst. Her wounds weren’t consistent with someone killed in a rush. Whoever did it took their time…got real pleasure out of it.
“Ashton was in pieces for months. I had to force him to eat, to shower… Hell, it was a struggle to make him get out of bed. Then one day he came into work as though nothing had happened, just another day at the office.”
“Why the sudden turnaround?”
“I think his grief finally turned into anger and he needed to do something about it. Ashton pulled me aside that day and made me promise to help him find out who had killed Tania and their baby and make them pay for what they’d done. He said he wanted justice, but I know it was revenge he was craving. I couldn’t blame him. I probably would have wanted the same thing if I was in his shoes. I agreed, of course. I would have done anything to help him and I was glad to have my friend back, but he wasn’t the Ashton I’d known for all those years. He was different, changed in some fundamental way.”
“Some people never recover from losing their mate,” Hayden commented.
Gregory hung his head. He wanted to reach out and grab Hayden’s hand, to tell him about their bond, but he forced his mouth shut and fisted the sheets beneath him to keep his hands busy.
“I found out recently that Ashton wasn’t the only council member to lose his mate. There’s a definite pattern beginning to emerge. The others’ mates all died under similar circumstances.”
Hayden gasped. “So you think someone at the council had her killed?”
“I’m sure of it.”
“But why would they do that?”
“The council doesn’t look favourably on its members mating. It’s no secret that they discourage it, which in itself is ludicrous because what shifter is going to stay away from their mate once they’ve found them? Their reasoning is that because the bond is so strong, because a shifter will do anything to protect their mate, it creates a weakness and they become a liability. Weak shifters are of no use to the council.”
Hayden nodded his head. “I guess I can understand their reasoning but it’s hardly realistic. Did you ever find out who was responsible?”
A lump rose in Gregory’s throat, but he tried to swallow it down. “At the time we thought we had. A wolf at the council called Blake Deveraux started to help us. I never really understood why. I thought it might be because he felt sorry for Ashton and didn’t believe the council’s story about his mate’s death. He said he’d learned that the man responsible was someone called Stan Michaels, a high ranking member of the council, but he hadn’t been able to find any concrete proof.”
“Around the same time, there had been trouble in Wolf Creek, the town in which Kelan is alpha. We believed the council to be behind the trouble so Kelan called a meeting to discuss what we could do. He said he had a friend working on the council and, when Ashton and I went to the meeting, we met him. His name is Dean White and he holds a very powerful position. He’s the man I told you about earlier, the one Kelan said has been asking questions about me.”
“But I thought you said he was Kelan’s friend?”
Gregory nodded. “Kelan thought he was someone that could be trusted, and at first so did I, but now we’re not so sure. At the meeting Dean said he’d received information about Stan Michaels, that Stan had been involved in illegal activity with Joe Walker, one of Kelan’s pack members. While we were dealing with some wolves at the council, Dean told us he’d had word that Stan was on his way to meet with Joe. I tried to find Ashton to tell him, but he’d already left.
“I called his cell and he told me he was on his way to make Stan pay for what he’d done. Kelan, Dean and I followed him to Joe’s, but by the time we got there, Ashton had already shot Stan, but he hadn’t killed him yet. I pleaded with Ashton to think about what he was doing, but there was no reasoning with him. I know he wasn’t in his right mind—he must have been thinking about what had happened to Tania. He shot Stan a second time, and then Dean shot Ashton, killed him.”
“I’m sorry for what happened to your friend,” Hayden said quietly. “But it sounds like Dean was doing his job. What makes you think he’s behind the murders?”
Gregory sighed and lowered his gaze. “I did some checking into Dean’s background and it turns out he’s an excellent marksman. So he knew exactly what he was doing when he killed Ashton—it wasn’t just an unlucky shot. He didn’t have to kill him. Ashton wasn’t a threat to any of us. I think it was Dean that had been feeding information to Ashton about Stan and he was worried that Ashton would say something that would point the finger at him, so he killed Ashton to silence him.”
“What would Dean gain from making it look as though Stan were responsible for Tania’s death? Do you think he did it just to throw suspicion off himself?”
“You know that there are members in the council that believe shifters should live openly, should come out to humans?”
Hayden snorted. “That’s ridiculous. It would never work.”
“I agree, and that’s one thing Dean and I see eye to eye on. He’s incredibly vocal about his views on shifter politics. Well, Stan belonged to a group that had been campaigning for shifters to come out, expose ourselves. He’d gained a large following by all accounts. From what I’
ve been able to find out since, Stan had created a petition to take to the elders to propose they allow us to reveal ourselves to humans if we desired. The word at the council is that there are a lot of names on that list.
“Apparently, Stan had been working his way through each pack, trying to get the majority of members to sign. But he always went for the troublemakers in the pack first. He sought out the shifters that would love nothing more than to stir things up. I guess those pack members feel superior to humans and were happy to sign. Dean has been fighting to put a stop to the petition before it gets before the elders, but I think he’s taken it a step too far. I think he used Ashton to get to Stan. That got one very large opponent out of his way. But I haven’t been able to find a connection between Dean and the death of the mates at the council. I’m sure there’s something there, but I’m missing it.”
“Wow,” Hayden said at last. “It’s kind of a lot to take in.”
“I know. And I debated whether or not I should tell you, but it’s a volatile situation and I figured, if you’re going to be staying at the Crazy Horse, you needed all the facts, needed to know what is going on around you.” And you’re my mate, Gregory added mentally. If the council members find out about you, you’re in great danger, too.
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Hayden asked.
Gregory gave his mate a tired smile. “Yeah, stay away from any council members, especially Dean White.”
Chapter Four
When Hayden opened his eyes he wasn’t surprised to feel Gregory’s arm wrapped around his waist, or a heavily muscled leg pushed between his own, the coarse hairs tickling where they touched. They’d started the night on opposite sides of the bed. Hayden hadn’t been able to fall asleep for hours because he’d slept so much in the car. While he had lain awake, halfway through the night, Gregory had turned in his sleep and sought him out like a heat-seeking missile. He’d wrapped an arm around Hayden and pulled him closer until their bodies were touching from head to toe. The shelter of Gregory’s arms had made him feel safe. It made him smile to think Gregory wanted to snuggle against him, even if he wasn’t aware he was doing it.
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