Gray Wolf Security: Wyoming

by Glenna Sinclair

  “You should stay. Have some breakfast at least.”

  She shook her head. “There was a fire and the cattle are scattered. My friend is in the hospital healing from burns, another friend recovering from a shattered jaw and thigh bone. Another friend is missing and—”

  “Slow down,” I said, climbing onto the bed beside her. “Start from the beginning. Shattered jaw and thigh?”

  She shook her head, a little sob escaping her lips.

  “Sutherland…”

  I took hold of her hand and tugged it away from her face. “Tell me what’s going on.”

  She peeked at me from under her long lashes. “You’ll never believe it. It sounds like some badly written romance novel or something.”

  “It’s okay. I’ve read a lot of bad scripts in my time. Even made a few movies based on them.”

  Her smile was almost playful. “Yeah. I think I’ve seen them.”

  I groaned, but she laughed and it made it all worth it.

  I stretched out and lay back down beside her, gathering her against my chest and holding her, my hands exploring her bare belly, her thighs. She sighed as she pressed her body back against mine.

  “I think I’ve lost control of my life. Everything that could possibly go wrong is suddenly going very badly wrong.”

  I knew the feeling, but I couldn’t exactly tell her that. People looked at me and saw a man who had everything. No one could really make themselves believe that I had struggles just like the rest of humanity.

  But, again, I don’t suppose mine were quite like hers.

  “We run this security agency from the ranch—I don’t know if you heard about that.”

  “Gray Wolf? Everyone talks about it in town.”

  She nodded, a sigh slipping from between her lips. “Sometimes I forget what a small town Midnight really is.”

  I kissed her shoulder, but didn’t comment. I wanted to hear what she had to say.

  “My husband, Mitchell, was a Green Beret. He and his unit had this bond that even his death couldn’t break. They watch out for me, his brothers. Ash Grayson, the owner of Gray Wolf, offered me the opportunity to run a branch of his security firm from my ranch to help me keep my finances in the black. He knew I was struggling, knew I would never ask for help. So, he brought me this business opportunity. And it was working perfectly there for a while. I was able to pay off this stupid mortgage I took out on the place, able to catch up on everything that I’d fallen behind on.

  “But then Ash brings a team out here and goes after this criminal organization, these drug dealers from back east. And everything just fell apart. The operation went really bad, people were shot, and Ash was kidnapped. And then they handed over this other guy…”

  She stopped, clearly agitated. I slid my hand over her belly again, pretending to be more interested in her amazing body than her words. Truth was, however, as alluring as her body was, as much as I ached to be inside of her in that moment, her words were more important to me in that moment than she could ever appreciate.

  I wasn’t just being supportive. I had to know what was going on in her world.

  She took a deep breath. “The thing is, I think there’s a mole in my office. I can’t trust anyone because these bad guys…they keep finding out what we’re doing and when we’re going to do it. Like yesterday…we raided their safe house, but they had gone just an hour or two before we got there.”

  “Who do you think is telling them?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed. “I think it has to be someone close to me and that makes it really hard to figure out what my next move should be.” She reached up to brush her hair off her face. “I think Ash tried to leave me a message, tried to leave us a message. But I can’t decipher part of it and the rest…I think maybe he’s trying to tell me who I can and cannot trust. But I don’t know.”

  “Have you told anyone else about this message?”

  “No. I don’t know who I can trust.”

  I kissed her shoulder lightly. “You can trust me.”

  She rolled onto her back so that she could look me in the eye. “Can I?”

  “Yes.” I touched her face, pulled her jaw up so that I could steal a kiss. “You can.”

  We kissed for a long moment, her lips painfully gentle against mine. When she pulled back, there were creases on her forehead, worry lines that made me a little sick to my stomach. I hated to see the turmoil in her eyes.

  “It was initials. I think I know who he was indicating with them, but I’m not sure why. I think…I think he might have been trying to tell us who he believed we could trust and who we couldn’t. But I don’t know…my husband’s initials were there, too, but he’s been dead for more than twelve years. I don’t know why he would include him.”

  “Maybe it has something to do with their relationship. Or something else he thought you would understand.”

  “Or maybe it’s someone else’s initials. Or it was all meant for someone else, someone who would understand it better than I do.”

  “And maybe Santa Claus will come in June.”

  She smiled, but the smile didn’t touch her eyes.

  “You can’t keep second guessing yourself, Sutherland.”

  “But this is important. He’s already been missing for two days. If we don’t find him soon, I’m afraid it’ll be too late.”

  “You can’t focus on what might happen. You have to focus on what you can control.”

  She nodded as she chewed on the inside of her cheek. “Maybe.”

  “Definitely.”

  “I think there’s something else, someone else, he was trying to warn me about. I just…I don’t know who one set of the initials indicates. If I did, I might be able to figure this whole thing out.”

  “Tell me about your husband.”

  She stiffened against me, her body as tight as a board. “I don’t think I can talk about him right now. Not like this.”

  “It might help you figure out why Ash would put his initials where you could find them.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Just tell me about him.”

  She closed her eyes, still chewing at the inside of her cheek. Then she sighed.

  “He was in the Green Berets when we met. A soldier who took his oath to his country very seriously. And I…I joined looking for a place where I belonged. Meeting Mitchell offered me that.”

  I pulled her tighter against me, understanding better than she’d ever know how it felt to never feel as though you belong. I was adopted. She was a foster kid.

  Did she know I knew that?

  She snuggled back against my shoulder, her hair soft as silk against my bare skin.

  “I grew up in the foster care system in Texas,” she said. “I never had a forever family, never had anyone I could call mine. Meeting Mitchell, learning to trust him, opened a door I’d never been allowed to walk through. We were only together for a year, but it felt like a lifetime, you know?”

  “How did he die?”

  “He was on patrol and there was an improvised explosive device planted in the road. He died minutes after it went off.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She relaxed a little against me, some of the tension slowly leaving her muscles. She curled into me a little more, her hand moving over the backside of my arm.

  “Ash and Donovan and Kipling…they were with him when it happened. They each made the trip out here to Wyoming for the funeral. Kipling and Donovan stuck around, tried to make sure I was okay. I was six months pregnant at the time, running the ranch on my own because Mitchell’s father had just passed on a short time before him. Kipling…he was incredible, doing everything he could to make sure I was okay. Then he shipped back to Afghanistan, put in his final few months before his tour was over. He was just a few weeks from going home when he learned that his wife and daughter had been murdered. I really messed him up, that whole ordeal. But he still made time to come see me a couple of times a year, still made time to make sure I was ok
ay.”

  “Sounds like a good man.”

  “He was. He is.”

  She brushed the hair from her forehead. “Maybe that was what Ash was telling me, reminding me that Kipling was still on my side.”

  “Do you think so?”

  She laughed softly. “I don’t know. I’m so confused…”

  I brushed the hair from her neck and kissed her there. “I think what you need is to not think for a while.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I think you need to empty your mind, to forget about all this bullshit for a while. I think you need to relax.”

  “I think I need to go see Kipling.”

  I shook my head, my fingers brushing her erect nipples as they slowly made their way down the length of her body to the perfect V between her legs.

  “I think you need to clear your mind.”

  I took one of those nipples between my teeth and teased it, scraping them with the sharp edge of my veneers, finding a deep satisfaction in the moan that slipped from her throat. But then she pushed me away, climbing off the bed.

  “I can’t do distractions today, Bodhi.”

  “You can’t run around my bedroom stark naked and not expect to be distracted.”

  A sound like the mix of a laugh and a sigh floated to me over her shoulder as she marched to the bathroom to gather her clothing. I groaned as I climbed out of my own warm bed to follow her. She was bent over, creating a perfect picture in the center of the large room, my hand itching to go places she’d just vetoed. I was a good boy, though, staying back, leaning in the doorway, doing nothing but watching.

  She blushed when she turned and saw me, when she saw exactly what her nudity did to me.

  “If only your legion of female fans could see you now.”

  “Would they be impressed?”

  She smiled despite the sternness that had been in her voice before. “Definitely.”

  “Are you?”

  “Quite.”

  “Then why are you trying to leave?”

  She sighed, clearly torn between her sense of responsibility and her desire to remain with me for a few more hours. She came toward me, her clothes clutched against her chest to hide her perky breasts, but doing little to hide the carefully groomed triangle below. It took everything I had not to touch her, not to wrench those clothes out of her hands and bend her over the sink, to not slide my hand into the perfect gap between her thighs and do things she could never imagine to that lovely triangle.

  “You are dangerous for me, Mr. Archer,” she said. “I could really learn to enjoy this, to enjoy your kindness.”

  “And that’s an issue?”

  “It will be when you lose interest and move on to the next woman in line.”

  “There’s a line?” I stood up straight and looked around as though searching for that mysterious line. “Where?”

  She smacked my arm. “Quit pretending you’re oblivious to your charm and your power over women.”

  “There’s only one woman I care about charming.”

  “Yeah? Would that be me or the girlfriend you forgot to mention back in Los Angeles?”

  I groaned. “I thought we dealt with that. I broke up with her.”

  “Yeah, so you say. But you would never have mentioned her if your brother hadn’t told me. A brother I didn’t even know you had, by the way.”

  “I have a sister, too. And a full set of parents back in New Zealand.”

  Her eyebrows rose. “Your brother said you were adopted.”

  “I was.”

  “I guess we do have a few things in common.” She studied my face for a long second. “Why hasn’t the press been all over that? Why isn’t some paparazzi out searching for your birth parents?”

  “Because it’s none of their damn business.”

  There was more fire in my words than I’d intended, but it didn’t seem to bother her any. She actually smiled a little. And then she walked off, dropping her clothes on the narrow loveseat by the open balcony doors. She bent over again, like she knew what it did to me to see her in that position, as she searched for her panties buried in the tangle of her jeans.

  I wasn’t going to play games any more. I didn’t give a shit what anyone wanted from me, didn’t care what she thought she wanted. In that moment, all I really cared about was what she was putting on display, waiting for me to come and get it.

  I moved up behind her and ran my hand over her ass, slipping two fingers between her cunt lips and watching them disappear into the heat of her slender body. She groaned, but she made no attempt to move away. In fact, she moved her hips just slightly, urging me close to the places her body ached to feel my touch.

  “Tell me you want me,” I said, my voice roughened by need.

  “Bodhi,” she said, my name a lover’s cry on her lips.

  “Tell me you want me,” I demanded again.

  She reached down, touched her hand to mine, tugging me closer to her. It was more than I could take. I yanked my hand away and grabbed her, grabbed her arms with bruising force, pulling her over to the glass wall that looked out over the front of my property. She cried out as her face pressed against the cold of the glass, but she didn’t move when I stepped back slightly, when I let her go to grasp my cock, to guide it to her gorgeous ass. She stood still, breathing hard, one eye watching me as I rubbed the tip of my cock against her wet cunt. She turned her head as I teased her, as I made her feel for a second the torture she’d been forcing on me all night.

  “Tell me you want me,” I groaned against her ear. “Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “I want you to fuck me,” she said in a low, barely audible voice.

  “Say it again.”

  “Fuck me,” she said, her voice stronger this time. “Please fuck me, Bodhi!”

  That was all I’d wanted. I thrust against her, sliding easily inside of her wet cunt, her body more than ready to welcome me. And – hell! – it felt like heaven. I’d been with a lot of women, but this woman…she was going to be my downfall. But I was going to have a hell of a time on the way down.

  She moved against me, moving her hips to make sure I touched her in all the places she needed to be touched. And her muscles…she was a damn talented woman. Her body did things to my cock I’d never felt before, her cunt muscles moving against me like a hand milking my cock. And when she came, it was just that much worse, that much more intense. I filled her quickly, more quickly than I’d intended to, marking her as mine even as her body relaxed, as she began to pull away long before I was ready.

  She was leaving before our bodies were even separated from one another.

  Funny how that tore at my soul. Funny because I was usually the one with one foot out the door before the deed was even done.

  It was karma. It was payback for all the broken hearts I’d left in my wake.

  Fucking irony.

  Chapter 10

  Sutherland

  I don’t know why I went to Bodhi last night. I guess I just really didn’t want to go back to my house, back to where Kirkland and Joss and Donovan and all the others were sitting around, lamenting another bad operation. Even Steve was a little downhearted when we didn’t find anything more at that ranch than the blood in that one room. They’d taken everything and what they couldn’t they’d shredded.

  Our only clue now, were the initials Ash scratched into the window frame, but I still wasn’t completely sure what it meant. Bodhi’s idea that Ash might have been trying to refer to sometime in Mitchell’s past had seemed sound until I considered that the message hadn’t been meant for me. But it did bring up a lot of memories that I wasn’t sure I really wanted to entertain right now.

  Like the night of our first date. Like the morning he proposed to me. Like the first time he’d promised me I’d never be alone again. It was a promise he hadn’t been able to keep himself, but he gave me a child who had.

  I closed my eyes as I sat behind the wheel of my truck, the memory of Mitchell’s words wa
rming my chest:

  We were meant to be, my love. Meant to be together, meant to build a future together, meant to bring a dozen beautiful children into this world. You have a family now. You will never be alone again.

  It was the first time since I was a small child that I cried in front of another person. No one had ever said anything like that to me before. Mitchell was a lot of first for me. He was the first man who ever told me he loved me. He was the first man to make promises to me that I believed. He was the first man—the first person—I ever truly trusted. And when we stood at the altar in that tiny church, he was the first man I could honestly see myself spending the rest of my life with. He was the only man I could see spending the rest of my life with.

  When he died…there weren’t words for the grief and the overwhelming disappointment that had swallowed me whole. He was everything and he was gone in just the blink of an eye. There hadn’t been enough time…

  Someone honked behind me, jerking me out of my reverie. I waved my arm out the truck window, waved them around me. As I watched them go—another of those fancy trucks the developers who’d moved into town were driving—I found myself thinking about Bodhi, about the kindness he’d shown me over and again since our first meeting. How I’d ever thought he was behind the sabotage of my ranch, I don’t know. He’d never done more than show up every time I needed him. He had this sort of sixth sense about those moments, always seemed to know just when I needed him.

  I wondered what my daughter would think if she knew half of what was happening between Bodhi and me. She was rarely around when he was, but the one time she was, he’d been so kind, stopping to speak to her even as she was—what do they call it these days? Fangirling. She had such a crush on Bodhi Archer. She’d dragged me to see every one of his films. She even had a huge poster of him on her bedroom wall, a poster I was forced to look at each time I walked in there to wish her a good night’s sleep or make sure she was doing her homework.

  Would Elizabeth resent me if she knew what Bodhi and I had been doing? Or would she be excited about the possibility of him becoming a fixture in our lives?