by Dunbar, Natalie; Glass, Seressia; Jeffries, J. M. ; Banks, L. A.
“Talk to Malcolm about what?” Her gaze was open; trusting, but becoming more furtive the longer it took him to respond. “I mean, we saw those guys casing, we think. But we weren’t really watching long enough to know for sure. Right now, I don’t wanna alert Malcolm unnecessarily until we see them doing something that offers ironclad proof they’re up to no good.” She ran her fingers through her hair. “God, the last thing I want is for Malcolm to come down here, see this very obvious mess, then start asking a whole buncha questions that we can’t answer and get him all riled up for a speculative reason. This was really outta line.”
The words oh shit imploded in triplicate within his brain. Now that the big head was doing all the thinking again, he knew clearly that this could not end well. He’d done everything in reverse, being so jacked up. He’d struck a deal with Ecstasy before consulting Malcolm; he’d called Malcolm first, before consulting Laurel; he’d made love to Laurel before asking her about birth control necessities; had entered her before putting on a condom, if one was required; had loved her hard before telling her about the seventy-five grand sting. Butch just closed his eyes.
“Baby, listen… uh, Malcolm needed more—”
Static on the two-way stopped his words. An efficient female voice he didn’t recognize broke through the receiver and made him put rational distance between him and Laurel.
“Yo, Laurel. Heads-up. Malcolm is on his way about the request for more sting dollars. He’s getting off the elevators now.”
Butch couldn’t even look at her now.
Chapter Four
Malcolm was at the door before Butch could barely get his shirt tucked in good. Laurel’s eyes were so wide he thought the woman would pass out. She straightened her suit, raked her fingers through her tussled hair, snatched up the fallen fries and spilled pop bottle, and hurriedly slung it all into the trash as she dashed across the floor like something was chasing her.
Laurel flung the door open so hard that it slammed against the wall. Butch hung back and leaned against the destroyed desk, trying to casually body shield it from Malcolm’s notice.
The boss walked in, glanced around, and then brushed invisible lint off his navy-blue designer suit lapels as though needing somewhere discreet to send his line of vision for a moment. A wry smile tugged at Malcolm’s mouth as he entered the room and calmly shut the door behind him, tilting his head.
Butch watched Laurel watching Malcolm as his nostrils flared just a tad, and he straightened to look at Butch. Two alpha males of approximately the same height and build, one a bit older, stared at each other, exchanging a silent understanding. There had been no territorial breach, per se, but Laurel was like Malcolm’s baby sister. If a heat mating had gone down under Malcolm’s roof, then it had better be a permanent one, unless Laurel wanted it otherwise. It was all in the eyes, a non-verbal warning etched in the cool glare Malcolm assessed Butch with. The silent statement was easy to read: Don’t play with my sister’s heart or I’ll butcher you, Maverick.
“Then I guess you already told her,” Malcolm finally said, swallowing his smile, “and I take it everything is cool with the arrangement?”
Butch cringed as Laurel looked from Malcolm to him. Oh… shit… this would end very badly indeed.
“Tell me what, Barron?” Laurel’s voice was tight, her eyes losing the trust in them. Suspicion slowly replaced it.
“Uh, baby—Laurel, what had happened was—”
“You didn’t tell her?” Malcolm looked at Butch hard, then glanced around the disheveled office, and shook his head. “Maybe I need to come back in another hour. I’ll be sure to bring a body bag for your carcass.” He narrowed his gaze on Butch. “Lay a canine on her while she kicks your ass and you know our friendship will be severely strained, right?”
Laurel folded her arms over her chest and stared at Butch without blinking. “Tell me something very quickly and very rational, Barron Maverick,” she said in a warning tone. “So help me.”
For a moment, all he could do was stare at her. A rosy tinge of embarrassment stained her cheeks. Her flushed face shamed him for putting her in this predicament. In all honesty, he’d only meant to come up to her office to make peace, but wound up making love. Now the boss was in the bull, and he knew she’d flip.
“I needed to get some deep, undercover information.” Butch pushed off the desk and began to pace while talking with his hands. He had to ignore the way Malcolm’s gaze slid over the desk and his eyebrow arched. This was raggedy; yeah, he knew it, but the circumstantial evidence had him framed. “So I asked a contact to siphon some information outta those first three Weres—”
“Stop,” Laurel said, coming closer to him while holding up her hand. “You began a sting, in my yard, without telling me?”
“Well, uh, sorta—but, the deal is this—”
“It’s seventy-five Gs, Laurel,” Malcolm said flatly. “The source is reliable, we need to work with her, and only a female vamp can get that sort of 4-1-1 out of beta males that fast.”
“You didn’t…” Her hands went to her sides, and then slowly became fists.
“Laurel, uhmmm… what had happened was—in the parking lot, she explained—”
“In the parking lot?” Laurel whispered through her teeth.
Malcolm headed for the door.
“That was your howl out there, because of that?”
“I’ll have accounting draft Ecstasy Jones a cashier’s check, or does she want cash, man?” Malcolm said evenly. “Cash,” Butch said, looking out of the window. The punch connected with his jaw so hard and so fast that it
caught him off guard, knocking blood and spit from his mouth. Laurel was up on a desk, eyes glowing. “I’ll get it from the vault,” Malcolm said coolly, opening the door. “Large bills or small?”
Butch dodged the lunge and leapt over a row of monitors and desks. “Don’t leave me in here with her, man! Laurel, calm down. I can explain.”
Two monitors crashed into the far wall as Malcolm gently pulled the door closed behind him. A desk overturned, and three chairs became rubble as they splinted from the impact of being hurled against the wall. He ducked behind the desk for a second, and then peeked out. The most magnificent creature, the only one in the world for him, was slowly advancing on him, her silver-black coat glistening, canine teeth fully extended into a beautiful snarl, eyes glowing gold inside her gray irises.
Just seeing Laurel that way did something very insane to his mind. He shifted instantly, transforming to his real self to stand four-feet at the shoulders in a thick, jet-black coat. Laurel lunged, got his arm, severely lacerating it, but he loved every minute of it as he finally flipped her to pin her down, his huge jaws poised over her throat.
When she stopped struggling, he cautiously pulled his jaws away, careful not to cut her with a canine. “I didn’t do her in the lot,” he rumbled, panting more from her being beneath him than the fight.
Laurel snarled and normalized into a naked woman under him, tears in her eyes. “This is just like before,” she said, looking away, her hand absently stroking his coat.
“No it’s not,” he said quietly, dropping down to lay on her naked in his human male form.
She put her hand between their mouths when he leaned in to kiss her. “How much are you getting off this bounty hunt?”
He sighed. Money was the last thing on his mind, but he knew he had to oblige her. He owed her that. “A little over a quarter mil,” he said, hoping she’d lower her hand.
“From where?” she asked in a brittle tone, grabbing a fistful of his hair to pull his head back to stop another attempted kiss.
Her body was burning up under his, setting his on fire. Seeing her shift had torched his libido. The moon was still out. An adrenaline rush was thudding in his groin. She was still so wet and he was oh so close to being inside her. Why did they have to fight now? “Baby—”
“Where?”
“Every municipality that got robbed had a bounty,” he r
ushed out. “The Preternatural Authorities.”
“Then you pay your own freight or I want a third of the bounty to reimburse my budget that you spent without my authorization. In fact, I want it paid back, regardless. We clear?”
“Yeah. No problem,” he said, his hands in her hair. “Just…”
“Don’t even think about it,” she said, dropping her tight hold on his curls and shoving him off her. “You must be crazy!”
It was a valid assumption. A very true one, as he watched her saunter over to her pile of clothes and begin to tug them on. The plea that he was sure had to be in his eyes entered his voice. “You sure you don’t wanna… I mean, it’s… Malcolm didn’t have a problem… and—”
“Put your clothes on.”
She didn’t even turn around. That was the worst part of it. Just watching her lovely ass move as she dressed. Begrudgingly, he got up and found his pants to yank them on. But the sound of male footsteps made him snarl. The scent that came with it made him find his gun. Not tonight.
She turned as the door opened, hurriedly tucking her blouse in her pants, and froze.
Guy was standing in the opened doorway with a room service tray and a plate under an aluminum cover. “I bought you a steak because the fellas said you had to work graveyard shift tonight,” he said, snarling at Butch as he slowly cast the tray on the only desk standing in the room. “But I see you already ate.” He glimpsed around the room and stared at the barrel of the gun.
Laurel closed her eyes and hugged herself. “Guy, listen… it’s not what you think.” Butch slowly set the gun down on a freestanding chair. “You wanna do this in the parking lot like old times?” “Why not?” Guy growled. “Seems like everybody’s tripping down memory lane tonight.”
“Hold it,” Laurel said, stepping between them. “If either of you do that, I swear, I’ll tear both your throats out. Like I need this shit with everything that’s about to go on in this hotel!”
Butch backed up. Guy’s gaze raked his naked chest and then Laurel, but he finally backed up, retracting his canines. “Thank you,” she said, glancing at both of them, disgusted. “And thank you for the steak.” “Don’t mention it,” Guy muttered, then turned and strode away.
She gave Butch a hard look. “I’m going to take a five minute shower. When I come back, your ass better be down on the casino floor working to protect my seventy-five grand investment.”
What could he say? Laurel had a right to be pissed. The casino was loaded, and the rival clan was definitely up to no good. An insane part of him still wanted Guy and his pit bosses to bring the noise. He needed to get that out of his system once and for all. The sex scent on him was already drawing beta females near, and, unfortunately, a few alpha females, too… which only made the males he passed glower with a curled lip.
His battered jaw looked like he’d been in a fight over a female and lost, or maybe punked down off his mount—since Laurel’s scent lingered. That only made the nearby betas aggressive enough to openly challenge an alpha male that had been rank-stripped. The other alphas were serving him grisly expressions to further display their dominant rank over his, as though thoroughly disgusted that a male his size could’ve been so humiliated and still had the nerve to come out in public. Fuck ’em all, it wasn’t their business.
But going up to his hotel room to take a shower had been out of the question. If Laurel came down first and didn’t see him, then it would get real crazy.
His jaw hurt, and his lip was busted from his own canines and Laurel’s blow. His arm hurt like hell. Her canine gash was still tender and probably would take twenty-four hours to heal. The Mardi Gras Bar opposite the entrance seemed like a good place for a man to go to lick his wounds. He could see the action from afar, have a drink, and try to chill.
“Didn’t take half as long as I thought,” a cool female voice said in his ear. “They must have been really messed up by the scent in the casino.”
“Merlot?” Butch asked without looking at Ecstasy as she slid onto a barstool next to him.
“Darlin’ that’s only for show—you know I drink private label.”
Butch nodded and hailed a bartender, but a hostess brought a drink over to Ecstasy before Butch could discreetly put in her order for blood-mixed private label.
“What’s this?” she said, holding the glass with two fingers and looking into it with an arched eyebrow. The hostess shrugged. “The gentleman over there sent you some Hypnotic.”
She walked away, and Ecstasy sent her line of vision across the room. Butch bristled. True, Ecstasy wasn’t his woman, but some things were protocol. He glanced where Ecstasy’s gaze lingered.
“A new vamp high-roller wonders if I’m under a hypnotic spell, trying to pick up a thug werewolf. Creative expression. I like him. May have to do him later.” Ecstasy set down her glass with precision and blew the challenging male a kiss over her shoulder.
Butch growled.
“Well, you do look like a thug, Maverick. What the hell happened to your lip?” “Long story,” he muttered, rolling his glass between his palms. “I can kiss it and make it better,” she said, chuckling. “Gimme a break.” He took a sip of Dewar’s and flinched from
the sting of alcohol in his mouth.
“I really can kiss it and make it better, you know,” she said, accepting the drink the bartender wasn’t sure why he’d made for her, but did. “Come here. We regenerate from nicks and scrapes… and fangs all the time. I already have your blood in my system, so a quick kiss will fix the lip and bruised jaw.”
She slid a cool, graceful palm under his chin and turned his cheek so he faced her. “Ouch. The bruise that came with it was nasty, too. Did she do that?”
“No,” he muttered, to embarrassed to go into detail.
Ecstasy leaned forward and tenderly brushed his mouth. “Liar.”
When she pulled away, she ran the pad of her thumb over his mouth. “She benefited from all my prep work to get you turned on. I so envy her.”
“Why, you wanna bust me in my mouth, too?”
She smiled. “Yeah, something like that.”
He let out a heavy breath. “So, tell me, what’s going on?” He needed to switch subjects. Feeling down in the dumps, a drink in front of him, the moon still up, and a gorgeous babe understanding it all beside him was a recipe for disaster.
“The betas were interesting,” she said, twirling her wine glass and taking a slow sip. “Fast, but interesting.”
“I don’t need the gory details, just the facts.”
She sighed and chuckled. “The increased meth production is for the vamps coming in.”
Now she had his attention. Butch frowned and gave her a sidelong glance. “I don’t follow.”
“You did secure my money, right?”
He took a sip from his glass and set it down hard. “Yeah, did I ever.”
She sidled up closer to him and spoke in a private tone. “The high-roller vamps coming in tonight are billionaires. Therefore, their parties are lavish beyond your wildest dreams. The penthouses will be rocking until dawn, but before that, they all have to go to the special basement suites without windows.”
“So, far, I’m not getting new information,” he said evenly, glancing at her, and then going back to his drink.
“Those old boys are so decadent that they’ll take anything to keep the party going past dawn in the special basement suites. Normally, you know we practically pass out at sunrise, correct?”
He looked at her from a sidelong glance. “Yeah.”
She leaned in closer. “The batch is tainted with blessed sodium… like holy water and Red Sea salt, et cetera.” She trailed her finger down his thigh. “Old Masters won’t dabble in a drug that could reduce their performance while under the power of darkness… they own the night. But they’ll take a hit of anything that can make them stay up past dawn.”
“Whoa,” Butch said slowly, not even feeling her lazy trail up and down his leg. “But those guys got a
nose, they’d smell—”
“Uh, uh, ahhh…” she said, wagging her finger. “Seems the rival clan has been robbing banks and whatever to build up an arsenal and to pay a few witches off to create an aphrodisiac in earlier batches.” She sat back with a triumphant smile when Butch’s jaw went slack. “Very shrewd.”
Butch leaned closer to her, glancing around, raising nearby hackles from fellow patrons. “This isn’t normal were-clan style. They had to have a backer. Vamps normally won’t trust anything coming from us—not anything to ingest.”
“Correct,” she murmured, sipping her Merlot-blood mix slowly. “The witches are expensive, and the initial batches had to be couriered over to a vampire the old boys trusted… and it had to be tested. Perhaps family from one of the guys you dusted that had been involved in the identity theft ring, hmmm? Anyway, word got around that the werewolves who were enemies with your clan had something that worked—and wanted to make peace to let the vampire nations know they weren’t in the earlier incident. They had to make a credible separation.”
“All right, so there’s new get-high out there, but the vamps can create crazy drugs on their own. Why would they need the were-clan?”
“It’s all packaging and witchcraft, lover. Yes, they can make their own drugs, but somebody got the chemistry just right.” “What does it do?” He had to keep his voice low and glanced around without moving his head.
“Think of it like daylight Viagra. Now, it’s a hot commodity, but the old boys are always wary… will only take it directly from the manufacturers—never the underling dealers. Hence why Cutter, Fang, and Mad Dawg are here tonight, not to distribute, but to be present as a manufacturer’s oath of approval… showing themselves as unafraid to be seen silently backing up their product warranty. Under normal conditions, if you screw a big buyer, you’re dead. So, most reasonable manufacturers send a middleman. Their presence sends a message that they stand behind their product. The betas will hand it off during the tournament to the buyers’ middlemen, and so forth. Then it gets couriered up to the penthouses while the old boys work the tables with their games.”
