“My God, you really are a piece of work,” Bobbi grumbled. She reached into her pocketbook and pulled out a handful of twenties, which she slapped into Pixie’s waiting palm.
“My protector’s name is Tommy the Rat.”
Jax felt alarm rumbling through him at the thought of Bobbi going back to the warehouse district by herself and taking on some scumbag pimp. There was no reason he should be worried about her, she was nothing to him but a pain in the ass, but for some reason, the thought of her in danger raised his hackles and made him want to shift right there on the spot.
Was it because she was his fated mate? He’d never had strong feelings for a woman, so it was impossible for him to know what it felt like to actually care about someone else’s safety. He’d spent his life avoiding emotional entanglements, because he knew the devastating consequences of giving your heart to another.
Whatever. As soon as this case was over he was going to find himself an assignment far, far away from here, and he’d stay away as long as it took for him to let these unwanted and dangerous feelings die a permanent death. That can’t happen, a little voice in the back of his head taunted him. Once you’ve met your fated mate, you’re a goner.
He ignored the taunting voice and turned to Bobbi. “I don’t want you going down there. I’ve got friends on the police force. I can take care of this.”
She raised an eyebrow at him. “What difference does it make to you?”
“It’s better to do it by the book.” Now, that was a crock. As if Jax ever played by the rules. “When we go down to the police station today, I’ll talk to a captain I know, and Tommy will be in custody by tonight. He’s got a long record; we can make sure he goes away for a long time.”
Pixie glanced at Bobbi questioningly, and Bobbi nodded. “As for the informant thing, I do not want you seeking out information,” Bobbi said to Pixie. “If you happen to overhear anything involving a major felony, let me know, and I will make sure you’re compensated for it. But do not launch any little investigations on your own. Too dangerous.” She wrote down her cell phone number and slid it over to Pixie, who stuffed it in her pocket.
“Call me tomorrow to let me know you’re not dead,” she added as Pixie stood up.
“What if I am dead?”
“Contact a spirit medium and have her give me a ring. You know how I worry.” Bobbi flashed a feral smile. “And give Jax back his watch.”
“What the hell?” Jax stared down at his wrist in astonishment. He hadn’t felt a thing. With a sigh and a great show of reluctance, Pixie fished in her jacket pocket and pulled out the watch and handed it back to Jax.
“She’s good, isn’t she?” Bobbi grinned, and then quickly checked her purse to make sure nothing was missing.
When she grinned, he caught a flash of her white, even teeth. Her generous lips looked as if they’d been stung by a bee, and kept forcing all kinds of unwanted images into his head, but the way she moved, the way she carried herself, she didn’t even notice how attractive she was. She was all business, with a ready laugh and an undercurrent of steel, and not even a hint of flirtation.
Jax shifted uncomfortably in his seat as his raging erection strained against his boxer shorts.
Pixie gave a jaunty wave and walked off. “I really should have gone through her jacket pockets before I let her go, but honestly, I just don’t want to know,” Bobbi sighed.
Jax stared after Pixie as she melted into the crowd. “Nice company you keep.”
“I’m a classy kinda gal. Shall we?” she stood up, shoving the hamburger into her mouth.
Jax let a slow smile spread across his face. “We shall.”
“What are you up to, Jax?” Bobbi asked suspiciously.
Chapter Five
“You look way too pleased with yourself,” Bobbi observed as they walked towards police headquarters, a squat, tan brick building located a dozen blocks from the coffee shop.
Jax smiled innocently and shrugged. “Can’t a man just be happy that he’s enjoying the company of a beautiful woman?”
“Oh. My. God. Your eyes just turned brown.” Bobbi snorted indignantly. Okay, the big, good looking jerk was definitely up to something. And despite her struggle to appear calm and in control of the situation, she was deeply rattled.
As an Enforcer, she worked around handsome, macho men all the time. Occasionally she had brief dalliances with them, as long as they understood that work always came first with her, and she’d never stay in one place or with any one man for any length of time. No-one ever got under her skin.
When she was around Jax, though, it took all of her mental reserves to maintain a cool, professional demeanor. He set her nerves to sizzling and made her panties go damp every time she saw him. Images of him kept flashing through her mind, little mental movies of what she’d like him to do to her, and her traitorous nipples were hard and pebbled underneath her shirt.
God, this was annoying. It was like she’d swallowed a dose of female Viagra and now she was walking around with a raging hard-on that she couldn’t get rid of.
Did he feel the same way? Probably not. The arrogant bastard would be more than willing to take her for a roll in the hay, but she doubted that he was losing any sleep picturing the two of them tangled together naked.
“You’re awfully quiet,” Jax said, as they walked.
“I’m deep in thought.”
“So, if we’re going to be working together, I need some more intel. I need to know what I’m working with. What your capabilities are.”
“Fair enough. I’m an Enforcer, so you know that I’m trained and highly proficient in hand to hand combat, and firearms if necessary. I followed you for several days without you noticing, and I managed to get away from you without too much difficulty. I’m an experienced investigator. And you? What do you bring to the table, other than an ability to throw people across the room?”
“You’ll find out soon enough why Hammersmith wanted me in on this particular investigation. I also live here, and I’ve gotten to know the city pretty well.”
“You’ve lived here for one year now. Why did you quit your job with the sheriff’s office in Florida?” She’d done her homework on Jax. Strictly for professional reasons, of course. Among other things, she’d found out that he appeared to be single, not that it mattered to her in the slightest.
He looked a little disconcerted. “It wasn’t a good fit. I work best alone,” he said evenly, shooting her a glance.
She shrugged, although she was shocked to realize that his desire to get rid of her stung. That was so not like her.
As if reading her thoughts, he added, with that sexy grin and a gleam in his eye, “I’m a lot more fun when I’m off work, anyway. That’s really the best way to get to know me.”
“So what’s your take on the deaths so far?” she asked, changing the subject. It didn’t do to dwell on how much she wanted to get to know him better, in the biblical sense.
“I’d prefer to discuss that at the briefing.” Fine. He was deliberately shutting her out. She could live with that. “So, do you live here in town?”
She shrugged as they walked up the police station steps. “No. My home base is in Arizona, but I travel all over the country. I don’t have a pack or close family, so when the National Shifter Council needs assistance, they send someone like me.” The National Council was made up of shifters of all species, and dealt with matters that were more than state-wide, matters which threatened the security of shifters all over the country and even all over the world. State shifter councils were in place to govern the affairs of individual packs and prides.
“No close family?”
She hesitated. “Distant relations. Nobody close any more.” He was not only touching on a very raw nerve, he was touching on the real reason she’d pulled strings, called in favors, and gotten herself assigned to this particular case.
“What about those older brothers?”
“We drifted apart,” she said irritably
. “And my personal life is irrelevant to this investigation.”
They walked in through the big double doors and Jax waved at the receptionist at the front desk, who simpered and arched her back to give him the full view of her surgically enhanced rack.
“Hey, Sabrina,” Jax said.
“It’s Samantha. You’re so silly. Isn’t he silly?” she giggled to Bobbi. Bobbi forced a polite smile and nodded agreement.
“He certainly is. He’s downright ridiculous,” she smiled through her teeth, shocked at the rage that had flared up inside her when the receptionist flirted with Jax.
Could this be because of the whole fated mate thing? She was trying really, really hard not to think about that.
The receptionist waved the two of them through, pressing a button that opened a door into the back of the police station.
Jax and Bobbi walked down a long hallway to a briefing room where a police captain and two other police officers were waiting. . One of them, a human with a slight paunch and slicked back hair, nodded at Bobbi, his gaze roving over her figure appreciatively.
“I remember you,” he said. “You came in yesterday to turn in all those wallets that you found lying on the sidewalk.”
“Just doing my duty as a public citizen,” Bobbi said.
The officer adjusted his belt and leaned back against the wall. His smile looked more like a leer. “We could use more public citizens like you.”
Suddenly the air crackled with tension, and Jax let out a low, rumbling growl. Bobbi could literally feel the waves of anger radiating off him. It was like the crackling of static electricity. The hair on the back of her neck stood up.
She glanced back at him, startled. “Did you just growl?” she murmured.
“Nope.” He bit the word out, eyes glinting with anger.
The two of them took a seat at the table.
Captain Isaac Thorne, another human, nodded hello to Bobbi and Jax. Thorne was a muscular African American man, somewhere in his fifties, Bobbi judged, with a shaved head and a neatly trimmed mustache.
Jax, because of his involvement with Hammersmith Security, occasionally worked in cooperation with the Playa Linda Police Department. Bobbi had met Captain Thorne when she flew into town earlier that week. The Enforcer’s Council had arranged to work with the police department, in the hopes of quickly resolving the case before any more incidents of Shifter Rage occurred.
The police force in Playa Linda was almost all human, with a few token shifters who’d been hired to avoid accusations of discrimination.
“We’ll cut to the chase,” Thorne said. “This isn’t just a shifter issue. It’s an issue which has the potential to affect human and shifter relations all across the globe. We’re in communication with the National Enforcer’s Council and Hammersmith Security, and we’ll all be working in cooperation. This could get really ugly, really soon if there are any other incidents. There have been two so far. The judge who went crazy and took out half the damn courtroom last week, and the one that the public doesn’t know about.”
He glanced at Bobbi. “I don’t know how much you’ve been told about this, but a very well regarded surgeon, Dr. Hamish Leitner, went crazy at a family reunion on September 23, less then a week before the incident with the judge. He was on a hunting retreat with a bunch of family members when he leaped onto his uncle and ripped his throat out, and then killed two more family members before his own brother shot him to death.”
Bobbi nodded. “I know about that. And it’s not two shifters, it’s three.” At the startled glances from around the table, she said, “On Sept. 22, a wealthy, married businessman went to Mexico on an alleged business trip, which was actually a pleasure tour. He’s a leopard shifter. He went crazy while he was down there, killed the two prostitutes he’d been partying with, two hotel security guards responding to the screams coming from his room, and a Mexican police officer, before they managed to kill him. Everybody assumed that he’d gotten into a bad batch of drugs. No autopsy was done in Mexico; his body was shipped back here and buried. His family managed to hush it up by bribing officials down there; he’s got a wife and five kids.” She paused. “His name was Herman Bass, and he was from Playa Linda.”
Shock and dismay registered on the face of every person in the room.
“Do you know about the Caged Heat connection?” the captain asked Bobbi.
“No, I confess that I do not. What is Caged Heat? Is that some kind of drug?”
Jax let out a snort of laughter. “Some people find it addictive.”
“Both men were members of a high end, private S&M club called Caged Heat, which serves the wealthiest residents of Playa Linda.”
“Really.” This was interesting news. “That connection can’t be a coincidence. And it sounds as if Herman could have been a member. He certainly had the money. And the prostitutes that he killed were both wearing bondage gear, so we know he had the predilection.”
“We’re going to have to have his body exhumed and examined by the coroner’s office,” the captain said.
“What are you looking for?” Bobbi asked. “What connection has the coroner discovered so far?”
“The section of the brain known as the amygdala, which regulates aggression, was swollen and malformed in both men. We haven’t been able to discover a cause yet.” The captain shook his head. “We’ve got to figure this out before any more attacks take place. It could be a disaster for shifter-human relations. We don’t want another Syracuse.”
In Syracuse, in the 1980s, a particularly virulent outbreak of mutated rabies known as Rab-X had infected dozens of shifters. Hundreds of humans and shifters were slaughtered by the infected, the entire city was quarantined, and the army and national guard were called in.
Anti-shifter riots spread across the country, along with calls for all shifters to be forcibly relocated to reservations which would be under military guard. Ever since then, any case of shifter rabies sent both humans and shifters into hysterics.
Everyone in the room shuddered at the thought. Everyone except Bobbi.
Phoenix, she thought. We don’t want another Phoenix. Except that hardly anybody knew about Phoenix, and even less people would care.
She swallowed hard and stuffed down the anger that swelled up inside her. Life isn’t fair, she reminded herself. You can beat your head against the wall, or you can try to help as many people as you can, make life as fair as you can possibly make it.
“Get me a picture of Herman Bass. See what you can pull up from public records and I’ll tell you if I recognize him from Caged Heat,” Jax said to a police officer, who flipped open a laptop and began typing away.
At Bobbi’s startled glance, Jax flashed her a savage grin. “I’m a member, courtesy of a friend of mine that I do some work for.”
“Oh,” she said quietly, as she felt a blush start to spread across her cheeks and her nipples grew even harder.
All kinds of thoughts were warring in Bobbi’s mind. Images of Jax at the club, stripped to the waist…images of herself tied down and squirming as Jax caressed her with the tendrils of a flogger…was she blushing? Please, God, don’t let me blush, she thought, staring hard at the scuffed tabletop and desperately trying to think unsexy thoughts. Fat men in thongs, she thought. Toe jam. Foot fungus.
Jax, naked, erect, taking her from behind…
No! Maggots. The smell of the morgue. Squeaking rats scampering in back alleys…
Her and Jax in a back alley, with her pinned up against the wall, and him sensually tormenting her while he held her pinned firmly in place…
She squirmed in her seat, and crossed her legs, pressing them tightly together. Well, at least now she knew why Hammersmith had picked Jax to investigate this case. If he had a membership at Caged Heat, he was the perfect person to send in undercover.
The officer turned the laptop towards Jax, who squinted at the driver’s license picture for a moment and then nodded. “Yes. I recognize him. He’s a member at Caged Heat
.”
Bobbi glanced at Captain Thorne. “Could it be some kind of outbreak from a virus that hasn’t been identified yet? You need to get the Health Department to shut that place down.”
“We’re definitely considering it, but we’d like to gather some intel first. Among other things, we don’t know the name of all the employees at the club, and we also want to gain access to their client list. And we’re hoping to do it quietly and discretely.”
“How?” Bobbi had a sinking feeling that she knew how.
“We want to try infiltrating the club,” Thorne said. “The problem with shutting the club down is, we may never discover the source of these attacks. What if one of the patrons, or employees, is bringing poison or some kind of mutated virus to the club?”
“And that’s where we come in,” Jax said to Bobbi.
“We.” He’d said “we.” From the wicked grin on Jax’s face, it was clear her earlier suspicions had been correct. She knew exactly where this was going.
The captain was looking over both of them and nodding approvingly. “This is absolutely perfect, I have to admit. The club is invitation only; there’s no way that we’d be able to get someone in there undercover. But with Jax already having a membership, he can go there without arousing any suspicion. And Bobbi’s new in town, so nobody will know that she’s an Enforcer.”
Bobbi nodded, pasting a smile on her face. “Yes. It’s absolutely brilliant.” Jax was watching her with a speculative gleam in his eye. She wanted to smack him.
She barely heard anything else that was said. Her mind was whirling. She and Jax were going to a BDSM club? Together? She’d have to let him do whatever he wanted to her…and totally keep her cool, when his mere touch sent red-hot pulses of desire rippling through her body? ?
A sudden commotion in the hallway jerked her back to reality. The door to the briefing room flew open, and a group of men in suits muscled their way in. Bobbi’s heart sank when she saw who the men were escorting.
Stanford Roosevelt.
Following them in to the room was the police chief, Clinton Davis.
The Alpha Meets His Match Page 4
