Wolf Trouble

by Paige Tyler

  As Xander came over to join her, Khaki couldn’t help but listen in a little to Dixon’s conversation. Mason wasn’t talking about what had happened at the junkyard at all. Instead, he was saying something about crime picking up in the city thanks to the power vacuum being left behind after the death of the crime boss Walter Hardy. Mason predicted that crime would only get worse as other power players moved in and tried to take control.

  Khaki was still considering what that would mean for the SWAT team when Mason changed the subject.

  “You’ve done a good job bringing Blake in,” Mason said to Gage. “She fits in with the rest of your team perfectly.”

  Xander leaned in close to her ear, whispering in a voice so low no one but she could hear it. “Wonder if Mason realizes exactly how perfectly you and I fit together?”

  She laughed. “Maybe we should take a picture of that position we tried out the night before last so he can see how perfectly we fit. Well, how perfectly you fit at least.”

  Xander’s eyes flared. His arousal teased her senses, making heat pool between her thighs. They’d been spending a lot of time together since they’d been outed, but all it took was one look from him and it was like the first time all over again—pure and immediate animal attraction.

  “You are so bad,” he whispered, sitting back.

  For obvious reasons, they refrained from any PDA while on duty, but they were also careful to keep their hormones in check around the rest of the team. The guys were fine with the fact that she and Xander were a couple outside the job, and they claimed they barely noticed when she became aroused. Still, it was embarrassing to think of the whole team knowing about it every time she got all hot and bothered. But it was tough when almost anything about your man could set you off.

  She sighed and took a deep breath, telling herself that all she really needed was a good dose of Xander’s scent to make her happy. Well, maybe not all, but it would hold her over.

  Xander wasn’t dealing quite as well. There was still a glint in his eyes and while his yummy I-need-you-now scent was less intense than it had been, it still lingered in the air.

  “Calm down, big boy,” she told him softly. “You’re just going to have to wait until later.”

  “Speaking of making me wait, where were you last night? I know you went out shopping with Mac, but I thought you’d come by after.”

  She smiled. “Things with Mac ran late. We stopped at Tiny’s place, and his wife spent four hours finishing my tat. I figured you’d be asleep by then and didn’t want to wake you up.”

  Xander’s eyes flared. “It’s done? Show me.”

  Khaki laughed at his eagerness. She’d gotten the outlining portion done last week, but had kept the work covered with a gauze bandage. She didn’t want to spoil the big reveal when she finally showed him the ferocious, but still very feminine, wolf’s head positioned perfectly in the middle of her lower back. She had no doubt it was going to drive Xander crazy, in a good way.

  She was about to answer when she realized that the entire SWAT had stopped what they were doing to look at her. Sheesh, talk about pressure.

  She looked at Xander. “Should I show everyone at the same time, or do you want to see it first?” The guys didn’t even wait for Xander to answer. They all jogged over and crowded around her.

  Xander’s mouth edged up. “While the idea of a private showing is definitely intriguing, I think that in this case, everyone deserves to see it. We’re a pack, after all.”

  She smiled coyly at the guys as she turned around and pulled up her shirt, showing off the tattoo on her lower back. They “oohed” and “ahhed” as soon as they saw it.

  “That looks outstanding,” Xander said, admiration in his voice as he lightly ran his finger over the tattoo.

  The wolf head was a lot like the ones the guys had on their chests, but she’d had a few little additions to make it unique, and since she was the only female werewolf around, she figured that was okay.

  “Um…exactly how far down does the wolf’s ruff go?” Becker asked curiously. “Your shorts block the view.”

  She dropped her shirt and turned to pin him with a stern look. “Trust me, Becker, you are never going to know how far it goes.”

  Becker groaned in disappointment, but before Khaki could say anything else, the other guys began ribbing him about not having the imagination to even know what she was teasing him about.

  “So how far does the ruff go?” Xander asked in a seriously sexy voice after the rest of the team went off to play another game of volleyball.

  She smiled. “You’ll just have to wait until we go home. Then you can put me in all kinds of interesting positions so you can find out for yourself.”

  The growl that vibrated from Xander’s throat was music to her ears—and other parts farther south. Taking her hand, he dragged her toward the parking lot.

  “Sorry we have to blow off the cookout,” he said in a voice Khaki knew the other werewolves could easily hear. “But something suddenly popped up.”

  The guys laughed.

  “How about you take a photo of the whole tattoo for us?” Becker asked as Xander opened the door of his truck and helped her in. “You need to throw us a bone every once in a while, at least until the rest of us find The One.”

  “Don’t worry, Becker.” Khaki grinned. “I’m sure your girl is out there somewhere. You just need to be ready when you find her.”

  Whatever Becker might have replied was cut off as Xander cranked his truck and sped out of the parking lot. Khaki scooted across the bench seat and snuggled close to him.

  “You really think there’s someone out there for each of the guys?” Xander asked as they headed for his place. “Even Becker?”

  “I hope so,” she murmured. “I’d hate to think that we and Sergeant Dixon might be the only members of the Pack lucky enough to find our Ones.”

  Xander didn’t say anything to that, and when she looked at him, he was regarding her seriously.

  “What?” she said.

  “We really are lucky, aren’t we?” he said. “Finding each other like we did?”

  Khaki put her head back on his shoulder with a smile. “Yeah, we really are.”

  She’d had to go through a lot of ups and downs to get to this really good place. But the journey had definitely been worth it.

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  In the Company of Wolves

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  In the Company of Wolves

  Dallas

  Eyes glued to his binoculars, Officer Eric Becker surveyed the dimly lit warehouse across from the rooftop he was positioned on. It was four o’clock in the morning and the place was about as quiet as you could expect a major import/export warehouse located outside the Dallas/Fort Worth Airport to be.

  “Anything yet?” Xander Riggs queried softly through Becker’s earpiece.

  Becker checked the heavy shadows along the west side of the warehouse before answering his squad leader.

  “Nothing yet. But they’ll be here. This target is too good to pass up.”

  “They’d better show,” fellow SWAT officer Max Lowry muttered over the internal communications channel. “I have a hundred dollars riding on it.”

  “Which I’ll be more than happy to take off your hands when it turns out Becker is wrong,” the team’s resident medic-slash-sniper, Alex Trevino, added.

  “Cut the chatter and stay alert,” Xander growled.

  Silence descended over the radio as Becker’s teammates went back to watching their assigned sectors. Like him, they were positioned in a loose circle around the main warehouse either on rooftops or hidden inside trucks or shipping containers. The idea was to let the thieves slip past them and into the warehouse. Then Xander would give the word and they’d move in, trapping the bad guys in their net. Of course, t
he plan would only work if the thieves made an appearance. But Becker wasn’t worried. He’d studied the ring’s MO long enough to know they’d show. And soon. It was as quiet as it was going to get down there.

  A secure and bonded freight forwarder like World Cargo was open for business 24-7, but there were always lulls in the workload, and the biggest one was right now, after the midnight rush and before the pace picked up again at sunrise. It might seem like the warehouse was deserted, but there were four security guards roaming the twelve-foot-high perimeter fence, with another stationed in an armored shack located just inside the gated entrance. Becker couldn’t see them from his vantage point, but he knew there were two more guards inside the warehouse. It was risky leaving all the guards in place for this operation, but if they didn’t, the thieves would know something was up.

  Movement out of the corner of Becker’s eye caught his attention, and he swung his binoculars to scan the long row of windows that covered the upper level of the warehouse. A moment later, a uniformed security guard walked past. That must have been what he’d seen.

  Becker relaxed and swept his binoculars over the rest of his sector as he considered how the death of organized crime boss Walter Hardy had paved the way for these new thieves to move into the city and take over.

  Hardy had been a major player in Dallas, but it wasn’t until Sergeant Gage Dixon, the commander of the SWAT team, had gone all werewolf on the jackass and ripped out his throat that people really understood what kind of grip Hardy had maintained on almost every criminal enterprise in the city.

  For a few blissful weeks following Hardy’s death, violent crime rates had dropped to the lowest levels the city had seen in nearly forty years. Of course, that wasn’t the reason Gage had killed the man. He’d ripped Hardy to pieces because the son of a bitch had been dumb enough to kidnap the woman the SWAT team’s pack alpha werewolf had fallen in love with. Not a smart thing to do. The fringe benefits of the guy’s sudden departure from the local gene pool should probably count as a public service.

  Unfortunately, nature abhors a vacuum. Within a couple months, every violent offender with a gun and delusions of grandeur was making a play to take over control of the old man’s territory. At first, the scumbags spent most of their time killing each other. Soon enough though, deals started being made, alliances started being formed, and it looked like Dallas was heading for a serious turf war.

  But then a group of outsiders showed up and the shit really hit the fan. Normally, it would take a crew moving into a new territory months to take over, but these guys were organized, heavily armed, and ruthless beyond frigging belief. Within weeks, they’d put a serious dent in the local criminal leadership, wiping out a lot of people in the process. But if rumors were to be believed, this crew didn’t have a huge army of gun-toting soldiers. Instead, they supposedly depended on a relatively small group of enforcers who were vicious and scary as hell.

  When these enforcers weren’t busy intimidating the crap out of every criminal in the city, they spent their free time stealing stuff. In the last week alone, they’d taken out two jewelry stores, an art gallery, and an electronics store that had cases upon cases of the newest iPhones sitting in secure storage—a week before the phone was due to hit the street. Combined with the other heists, these guys had pulled in nearly half a million in a week. They were good—and dangerous. According to the few witnesses who’d gotten a glimpse of the enforcers, they tended to carry some serious firepower. That’s why Becker and the rest of his squad were here. Deputy Chief Mason was worried that when the Dallas PD finally caught up to these guys, there was going to be a lot of shooting. Luckily, Becker had some really sneaky ways of finding people like the ones they were after.

  Becker was just musing over how easy it had been to create a search algorithm to predict the crew’s next target based on the types of places they’d already hit when another shadowy movement through the warehouse’s windows caught his attention. He swung his binoculars up, expecting to see the security guard again, but instead he saw a man dressed head-to-toe in black and carrying an MP5 submachine gun.

  “Shit. They’re already inside,” he shouted into his mic.

  Jumping to his feet, Becker headed for the rappelling rope coiled and waiting for a quick descent down the backside of the building. He wrapped the rope around the snap link attached to his harness, then tossed the other end over the side.

  “How the hell did they get in there without us seeing them?” Xander demanded in his ear.

  “They must have gone inside with one of the earlier shipments,” Becker said as he stepped to the edge of the building and kicked himself backward into space.

  The rope slid through his gloved hands as he sailed down from the third-floor roof in a single large bound. He ignored the heat in his hand, waiting until he was only a few feet above the ground before jerking his right hand behind his back and braking hard. His downward momentum immediately stopped. He hit the pavement, then ran toward the warehouse, sliding his M4 off his back at the same time.

  “They’ve been waiting for the perfect time to slip out of hiding and take down the interior guards,” he said.

  “Should we try to warn them?” Khaki Blake, teammate and Xander’s significant other, asked across the radio.

  Becker could hear the sound of feet pounding on pavement in the background—the rest of the team running for their entry positions.

  “Negative,” Xander ordered. “The suspects could have the guards’ radios.”

  Becker swore as he raced to the side entrance where he was supposed to meet up with fellow SWAT officer and explosives expert Landry Cooper. They had no idea how many bad guys were in the warehouse or where they were. If the guards weren’t already dead, that meant the suspects now had two hostages they could use as human shields to hide behind on their way out. That made this operation a hell of a lot harder.

  He absently heard Xander tell the on-scene commander to keep the rest of the Dallas PD officers at a distance. Xander didn’t want their fellow cops running into the building shooting at everything that moved, including SWAT.

  Cooper was already waiting at the heavy metal security door when Becker got there. Cooper punched the code into the cypher lock on the wall, then Becker led the way in. He and Cooper hesitated as soon as they got inside, both of them waiting for the rest of the squad to signal they were ready to go.

  That was when Becker realized there was something really strange going on in the warehouse—so strange that it took him a second to realize what had him pinging all of a sudden.

  “Shit,” he muttered, finally recognizing the familiar scent in the air. “We might have a problem, team. The guys we’re going up against are werewolves. Every one of them.”

  There was stunned silence on the other end of the radio.

  “You sure?” Xander asked.

  “He’s sure,” Cooper answered before Becker could say anything. “I smell them too.”

  Xander’s curse was succinct over the radio. “Everyone stay together and watch yourselves.”

  Becker didn’t need to be told twice, and he doubted anyone else did either. The idea of facing criminals who were just as strong, fast, and hard to take down as the SWAT team was more than enough to keep them on their toes.

  He and Cooper moved slowly through the warehouse, checking behind every box and pallet as they covered each other. How the hell had another werewolf pack moved into Dallas without them realizing it?

  He was still trying to come up with an answer when gunfire sounded from the far side of the warehouse.

  “Contact!” the SWAT team’s lead armorer, Trevor McCall, shouted over the radio. “Khaki and I are engaged with three of them, all heavily armed. They’re definitely werewolves. I put four rounds into one of them and he’s still going.”

  More automatic weapons fire came from somewhere off to the left of Becker, then even more from the right. Bullets ricocheted off the concrete floor and steel shelving units, punch
ing holes in shipping crates and containers, and making it damn near impossible to figure out which direction the bad guys were shooting from.

  “I’m pushing the exterior security guards and the rest of the DPD to the outside perimeter,” Xander announced. “We can’t let regular cops engage with these guys or it’ll be a bloodbath. This is all on us.”

  “Roger that,” Becker said.

  “Incoming!” Cooper shouted.

  Becker turned just in time to see two hulking figures dressed eerily similar to him and Cooper in black garb, tactical vests, and toting automatic weapons, which the bad guys were aiming in their direction.

  Becker ducked behind the closest crate while Cooper dove for cover behind another as bullets whizzed past them. Using the crate as a shield, Becker stuck the barrel of his M4 out and took aim. He hated the idea of killing fellow werewolves, but he didn’t have a choice. This crew would take down him and every member of his pack without hesitation. It was pack against pack, and there was no question about what he had to do.

  Becker put two rounds through the thug on the right, just above the top of his tactical vest. The werewolf stumbled back, but then charged forward with a growl, his eyes turning a vivid yellow-gold, his lip curling in a snarl, exposing his fangs.

  Becker lifted his weapon a little higher and squeezed the trigger, putting three 5.56 mm ball rounds through the werewolf’s forehead. That stopped him cold and he immediately went down. On the other side of the aisle, Cooper took out the second werewolf.

  That left about a dozen more. And unlike their buddies, they quickly figured out he and Cooper were werewolves too. After that, their tactics changed. They came at him and Cooper from multiple directions at once, using their keen hearing and sense of smell to pinpoint their location. They even attacked from above, climbing on top of shelving units and trying to pin them down in crossfire.

  In the two years he’d been with SWAT, Becker had never gone up against anyone who was even close to being a match for him and his pack. These guys were fast, and they were strong. But while they fought like berserkers, they didn’t fight as a pack. That gave Becker and Cooper the advantage. When they put down yet another werewolf—this one fast and wiry, who’d climbed and hopped around on the shelving units like a frigging monkey—the rest of them turned tail and ran.