Wolf Trouble

by Paige Tyler

  She pressed a finger to his lips, shushing him. “That’s behind us now. It was a tough wall for both of us to get over, but we’re on the other side now and that’s all that matters. If it makes you feel any better, I didn’t exactly know how to deal with the things you were making me feel either.”

  Khaki slid her finger off his lips, down his neck, then across his chest and stomach, snuggling against him again. The sex in the bedroom had quite possibly been the best she’d ever had. But then Xander had dragged her out to the living room, reminding her that the night was just getting started. That’s when she’d gotten her first inkling of how much stamina a werewolf possessed. And speaking of werewolf abilities she hadn’t known anything about, it turned out that she had a few herself. One of those happened to be flexibility, as she’d discovered when Xander had bent her over the back of the couch in a few ways that she hadn’t thought were possible. Even now, she shivered when she thought how hard she’d come while he pounded into her from behind. And from the side. And the front. And upside down too, if she remembered right.

  Her gaze wandered from the torn couch cushions to the broken chair beside the kitchen table. She didn’t remember how the chair had ended up that way, but she definitely remembered riding Xander while he’d been stretched out across the top of her heavy wood-and-tile dining room table. She’d set a nice, slow pace while he laid back and enjoyed the view. She’d done things to her own body on that table she’d never done in front of another man, and it had been the hottest thing ever. Xander must have thought so too. He’d come so hard he left claw marks in the wood.

  But the best part of the night had happened right here on her living room floor. That was where Xander had proved to her that sex didn’t have to be hard and vigorous to be great. Riding comfortably between her thighs with slow, measured thrusts, the climax he’d drawn out of her had been the longest, most powerful thing she’d ever experienced.

  As hard as it was to believe, thinking about all that amazing sex was starting to get her hot again. After all the orgasms she’d had, she should have been good for a month. Any other time, she would have been.

  But that was before she’d become a werewolf. And before meeting Xander.

  Khaki was toying with the notion of wiggling down his perfect body to see what she could do to encourage him into going one more round when something suddenly occurred to her.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “What?” Xander mumbled in a sleepy voice.

  She pushed herself up on her elbow again, trying to get a look at the clock on the wall in the kitchen. It was still dark outside, but it had to be getting close to sunrise.

  “What’s wrong?” Xander asked.

  She bit her lip, turning back to look at him. They’d both made the conscious decision last night to give in to the undeniable attraction that existed between them and sleep together, but that didn’t mean he was ready to throw away his career. Neither was she.

  “My car is still at the compound,” she said. “We need to get there before anyone else gets into work, or they’ll know exactly what happened last night.”

  “Shit, you’re right. I didn’t even think of that.” He sat up, giving her a hard kiss on the lips. “I blame that completely on you, of course.”

  She laughed. “I thought I was pretty good, but thanks for confirming it.”

  Khaki stood up and walked into the kitchen to check the clock. Behind her Xander mumbled something incoherent and thumped back down on the floor. “God, Khaki, what did you do to me? I’m so tired I can’t even stand up.”

  Her eyes went wide when she saw the time. She knew they’d been going at it for a while, but four hours?

  “Well, you better get it together,” she called to Xander. “It’s already four fifteen. If we’re going to beat everyone else in, we need to be at the compound in an hour.”

  She turned and went back into the living room to find Xander still lying where she’d left him. He looked so damn yummy, it almost made her resolve crumble. And the scent he was putting off? In-freaking-credible. If they’d had the time, she would have been over there rubbing up against him like a puppy.

  He opened his eyes and looked at her sharply. “Stop that.”

  “Stop what?”

  “Stop smelling like you’re thinking about walking over here and eating me. If you actually want us to make it to work on time, that is.”

  She already knew Xander could smell her arousal, but she didn’t realize her body transmitted her desires so immediately. She was going to have to remember that.

  Khaki took a deep breath and tried to think of something else besides jumping Xander’s bones. The only thing that kept popping into her head was the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man. Her Ghostbusters memory must have worked because Xander’s eyes went back to their usual brown.

  “We need to shower,” he said as he got to his feet. “And I mean really shower. We have to get our scents off each other or every guy on the team is going to know what we’ve been up to.”

  She hadn’t even thought of that. “Do you think showering will help? Is it crazy to think we can hide the fact that we’re sleeping together from a pack of werewolves who can smell the slightest trace of scent? What if we slip up and forget to wash behind our ears?”

  “It’s worse than that,” he said. “There are a couple guys on the team—especially Gage and Mike—who are walking lie-detector machines. They can pick up on stress responses, changes in breathing patterns, elevated heart rates, the whole bag of donuts. We’ll have to be careful what we say when we talk about each other and what we tell them to cover ourselves when we’re together, or they’ll catch us that way too.”

  Crap. She wasn’t a very good liar. She ran a hand through her hair. “It is crazy to try this.”

  Xander put his arms around her, resting his cheek against her hair. “Probably, but I can’t see any other way short of us walking away from the Pack. Or each other.”

  Khaki didn’t answer. She wanted to be in the Pack and on the SWAT team more than anything. She’d worked hard to get here, and she wasn’t ready to give it up.

  But at the same time, she wanted Xander too—with an intensity she knew it would be impossible to ignore. Openly declaring their relationship to the Pack wasn’t a possibility, not if they hoped to keep working together.

  Xander was right. They’d have to try and keep their relationship secret. It might be impossible and was likely going to blow up in their faces, but they didn’t have a choice.

  She went up on tiptoe and kissed him. “I’m not walking away from anything.”

  He smiled down at her. “Good. Then let’s get cleaned up.”

  Chapter 11

  “You should keep your shirt off all the time,” Khaki said.

  Xander glanced at her as he turned onto the road leading to the SWAT compound. She was sitting as far away from him as she could, which was too far away for his liking. He would have preferred to have her snuggled up close like she’d been last night on the drive to her place. But they couldn’t take the chance of getting their scents all over each other again.

  Any thought of wearing the same shirt he’d had on last night had disappeared the moment he’d found it this morning, shredded to pieces on the floor of her living room. He was going to have to remember that in the future or he’d be going through a lot of shirts.

  “Maybe I will.” He grinned. “If you ask nicely.”

  “I can think of one or two ways to ask nicely I’m sure you’d appreciate,” she said with a husky laugh that did crazy things to his cock.

  Down, boy.

  Khaki had been quiet for most of the ride, clearly lost in her own thoughts. Xander was feeling a little subdued himself. Not because he was worried about the Pack learning their secret, but because he was completely at peace with the decision he and Khaki had made to be together.

  He realized now that he hadn’t fully appreciated how hard his inner werewolf had been snarling at him to
say the hell with the rules and give in to his desires to be with Khaki. Now that he’d taken that leap, it was like his conscience was assuring him he’d done the right thing.

  While his mind might have been calm, his body was anything but. Even though they’d made love for hours last night, his need for Khaki burned like a flame deep inside him. Every time he looked her way, those glowing embers threatened to grow into a roaring fire. But if they wanted to not only be together, but work together too, they were would have to control their attraction to each other.

  It helped that Gage had called Xander’s cell phone right before he’d been about to step into Khaki’s shower. Nothing like hearing your boss’s voice at five o’clock in the morning to banish all those sexual thoughts.

  Gage had wanted to let him know that the FBI bank robbery task force was having another big, multi-agency meeting and they wanted SWAT to be there. Another bank had been robbed last night and all the evidence pointed toward it being the same crew that had hit the bank on Jackson.

  “It was a big haul and the FBI didn’t have a clue it was going down,” Gage told him. “I think they’re starting to feel the pressure on this one and it’s making them more willing to work with the locals.”

  After the way the last bank job had ended, with Khaki essentially calling Thompson a dumb shit in front of the entire world, Xander thought his SWAT team would be the last people the FBI would want to work with.

  “The meeting starts at eight,” Gage added. “Who do you want to take with you?”

  Xander’s gut was to bring Khaki, but he hesitated. He didn’t want to single her out and make it look like he was playing favorites.

  “Becker and Cooper, I guess,” he finally said. “They need the experience working with the feds.”

  “What about Khaki?”

  “I thought that might not go over too well with the FBI agent in charge,” Xander said. “Especially after the way Khaki got in his face the other day.”

  “All the more reason to bring her then,” Gage said. “It’s time to show the feds we’re not going to play nice anymore.”

  Xander didn’t argue. Suddenly, the idea of spending hours sitting in a big conference room listening to boring FBI briefings didn’t seem so bad, not if Khaki was there.

  Besides, the meeting got him and Khaki out of PT, and for that he was glad. He wasn’t sure he could get through a workout smelling the pheromones she put out when she exercised. He’d have to deal with it later, but after the night of earthquaking sex they’d had, he wasn’t sure he could survive it.

  “Do you think we showered enough?” Khaki asked as they neared the compound.

  Xander leaned over and gave her another sniff. While she still smelled as irresistible as ever, there was no scent on her but her own, mixed with the collection of fruity bath soaps she’d washed with.

  “No, you’re good. You smell like you were hit with a daisy grenade. How about me?”

  She laughed and leaned over to take a sniff. Then she sat back, an amused look on her face. “I definitely can’t pick up my scent on you. Hell, I can barely smell yours. I can’t believe you washed your whole body with a bottle of antibacterial hand soap.”

  He shrugged as he pulled into the compound. The parking lot was empty except for Khaki’s Mini. “It all smells like soap to me.”

  She shook her head but said nothing as she hopped out of his truck and got in her car to start it. She was smart enough to know that she needed to run the engine to keep the guys from knowing it had been sitting there all night.

  While she did that, Xander ran up to the locker room and changed into his spare uniform. He was only half-finished when he heard her on the stairs. He looked up to see her watching him. The hunger in her eyes was unmistakable.

  “Is now the best time to be doing that?” he asked.

  She smiled. “Doing what? I’m just watching.”

  He pulled up his uniform pants, having to work them over his growing hard-on. “Right, just watching. Well, you can watch all you want, but don’t go getting aroused. The scent is hard to miss.”

  Khaki put on a fake pout as he pulled on his T-shirt and tucked it in, then started lacing up his boots. “I’ll try, but it’s going to be hard not thinking about what we did last night.”

  It took every bit of willpower Xander had to stay where he was. He had to keep a little distance between them because if he got too close, he wouldn’t be able to keep himself from kissing her. And if they kissed…

  “I know it’s hard,” he said. “It is for me too. But it’s what we’re going to have to do if we want to make this work.”

  “I know,” she said softly. “I’ll do whatever I have to do to be with you.”

  * * *

  Xander and Khaki were at FBI headquarters with a couple of the guys from the squad waiting for the briefing to start when Becker leaned over and asked her what happened last night.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “I thought Xander was going to bring you back to the compound to pick up your car, but when we stopped by around three to pick up our vehicles and go home, your Mini was still there.”

  Her gaze darted to Xander. “Um…”

  Oh, shit.

  “We stopped to grab coffee on the way back from the club, and ended up spending the next two hours chatting about department politics, evaluation forms, and promotion criteria,” he said. “By the time we realized how late it was, Khaki was too tired to drive, so I dropped her off at her place, then picked her up this morning.”

  Cooper slanted him a strange look. “You brought her into work this morning?”

  Xander didn’t think Cooper had the experience necessary to tell when someone was lying, and he knew Becker sure as hell didn’t. He shrugged. “Yeah.”

  That must have been good enough for Becker because he changed the subject—something about drinking shots out of syringes last night. Cooper, on the other hand, didn’t look as satisfied, and Xander knew he and Khaki were going to have to watch out for him. Cooper was probably one of the most instinctive werewolves on the team. He might not be able to read all the signs that Xander was lying, but he had a gut that would tell him something was fishy.

  Fortunately, their favorite FBI agent chose that moment to make his entrance and walk straight to the whiteboard at the front of the room.

  Thompson slapped a picture of a dead woman on the board. About thirty, she had blond hair and a face that had probably been pretty when she was alive.

  “Greta Dobson was found in an alley this morning with her throat slit,” Thompson said. “We’ve identified her as the person who called in the tip about the bank robbery on Jackson. We know it’s her because whoever killed her left a hundred-dollar bill stuck to her chest with a knife through it. They figured out she tipped us off and executed her.”

  Xander cursed. He’d known this was going to happen.

  “The bank the gang hit last night rarely, if ever, has more than a hundred thousand on hand, except for twice a year during regional currency exchanges,” Thompson continued. “Last night the bank was carrying nearly four times that amount, and the gang knew about it. They were in and out of the bank in less than two minutes, including the time it took them to blow through a sixteen-inch-thick vault door. As usual, they left nothing behind that we can use, and without Greta Dobson, we don’t have a clue which bank they’re targeting for hit number three.”

  “You really think they’re ballsy enough to hit another bank in this town now that they have everyone’s attention?” a DPD officer in the back of the room asked.

  Xander knew he should keep his mouth shut since this wasn’t his party, but the way they’d killed that woman, then left a hundred on her, knowing the FBI would find out, pissed him off.

  “These guys are arrogant to a fault,” Xander said. “They’re going to stay and rub this in our faces. You can bet on it.”

  For a moment, Xander thought Thompson would disagree simply to be an asshole, but
the fed nodded. “That’s the FBI’s position as well. We have to assume the crew will still follow their same MO and hit another bank soon, if for no other reason than to show they can.”

  Unfortunately, the FBI didn’t have a clue where the crew was going to strike next. Which was why they’d wanted everyone at this briefing, including SWAT. The feds needed access to every confidential informant and source the Dallas PD community had available. They knew it was the only way they were going to catch the bank robbers, especially now that their own source of information was dead.

  So they spent the rest of the day calling everybody they knew, hoping someone had heard a rumor about somebody hitting a bank. While the tips came in and they started a list of possible targets on the whiteboard, Xander could tell that no one had confidence in any of them. His gut told him the bank robbers were going to hit their next target without anyone knowing about it in advance. These guys just seemed too good.

  When they got back to the SWAT compound, Gage asked Xander, Mike, Jayden, and Cooper to come into his office to talk about what bank the robbers might hit next. Xander had hoped to give Gage a quick rundown of the meeting with the FBI, then take off, but he couldn’t bail, no matter how much he wanted to. It would be out of character for him and might make the guys suspicious. So he supported his end of the conversation as they discussed possible bank targets and where they might find reliable sources of info on the suspects.

  Xander was doing little more than nodding occasionally while he thought about his date with Khaki that night when he realized the guys were talking about everyone’s new favorite subject—The One.

  “What if you don’t realize the woman you’re with is The One and you screw up the relationship before you even have a chance to see where it could go?” Jayden asked.

  “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” Gage said. “When you meet The One, you’ll know it. She’ll latch on to your soul like a dog with a bone and won’t let go. No matter what either of you say or do, it won’t change the fact that you’re destined to be together.”