by Renee George
"I'm a big girl," I told her.
She nodded. "Two months ago, Katrina Wells went with me to a party out at Jackson Smart's new place. Sometime during the night, I'd split off from her to hang out with Brad Sader."
"Brad Sader?" Brad was a fox shifter who had left Peculiar after graduation to go to college in the city.
"He was home for a weekend, but let's not get side-tracked," she said. "This isn't about me. Anyhow, I went off with Brad, and I left Karina alone at the party. Luke was there, along with Eric Johnson, Ronnie Talbert, and a few other people we knew. I didn't think--" Michele's eyes glittered with new tears. "I wouldn't have left her." She stared at me, her gaze stark.
"What happened?"
"She...she doesn't remember much. She felt funny and everything else beyond that is a little fuzzy for her, but when she woke up, Luke was on top of her."
I gasped. "No."
"I swear it, Kota. For the longest time, she thought she had hallucinated the whole thing, because she'd passed out and when she woke up, she couldn't remember much else, and Luke acted as if nothing had happened between them."
"How come you didn't tell me sooner? I was dating him for heaven's sake." Could steady, reliable Luke, from a good family, Dwyer really be a rapist?
"I only found out yesterday," Michele said. "And you had already broke things off with him. I swear if you were still seeing Luke, I would have told you. I wouldn't have let you keep going out with him. And Ree Ree made me promise not to tell you or anyone." Her brow furrowed, and her eyes darkened. "She's pregnant. The bastard took advantage of her, and he didn't even bother to use any protection."
"You say she felt fuzzy?" Maybe she'd been drugged in the same way that Cal and I had been drugged. Rage blossomed inside me, and until this moment, I didn't know my capacity to hate was so vast and wide. I had been dating a monster.
"Yes. She said she drank a cup of beer and felt strange and euphoric after."
"Does Kyle know?" He had been shooting daggers with his eyes at Luke the night before. He'd glowered at me at the clinic. Probably because of my connection to Luke.
Michele sighed. "Yes, he knows. He's so angry."
"Angry enough to kill Luke?" Hell, I was angry enough to kill him right now.
Michele's eyes widened. "No. He wouldn't." She stood up. "Would he? I overheard Mom's interrogation this morning. You think someone drugged you. Do you think that's what happened?"
"Maybe," I told her. "I don't know. Doctor Smith is running my blood work to see if there is any trace of some kind of tranquilizer in it. It could be revenge, and Cal and I were used to throw suspicion off the real motives."
"Ree told me that Kyle is standing by her. He wants to raise the baby as his own." She rubbed her hands down her thighs as worry darkened her features. "He wouldn't risk everything for revenge. But... he had shut down Katrina when she'd suggested they go to the police."
"The sheriff needs to know. If nothing else, we should tell Tyler, and he can investigate."
"Tyler and Luke were friends," Michele said. "Do you really think he's going to believe Karina? He puts her in the punk category with Kyle."
I stood up. "We'll make him believe her."
"Wait," Michele said. "Wait until I've had a chance to talk to Karina. She should have the option to talk to the police first."
"Okay." I started toward the door.
"What are you going to do now?" Michele asked.
If I couldn't tell the police about Luke and Karina, I knew someone else who had experience in law enforcement. Maybe between Cal and I, we could start our own investigation. I didn't want my sister to interfere, or worse, tell on me, so I said, "I'm going to find my phone."
Chapter Nine
"Howdy-do," said Etta Smith when she got out of her car. We'd both pulled into Jo Jo's drive about the same time. "Did Cal call you, too?"
"I don't have my phone," I said dryly. Why had Cal called Etta? "Is there some kind of meeting going on?"
"Apparently, he needs my expertise." She nudged my shoulder as we walked to the front door. "How come you didn't tell me you were interested in Cal last night at dinner? I would not have gone on and on about, you know." She waved her hand elaborately.
"The fact that we can't ever really be together," I said.
Her expression soured. "Yes. That. I mean, it doesn't mean you can't have fun. And Cal is certainly a lot of fun." She wiggled her brows.
"How much fun is he?" I asked tersely.
Etta chuckled. "I've heard," she amended. "I have no personal experience with Cal, er herm," she cleared her throat, "recreationally."
"So, he's never had a...mate?"
She placed a friendly hand on my shoulder. "Girl, he wouldn't be single now if he had found his one."
I heard several voices inside the house. Maybe this was a strictly lycanthrope pow-wow, and as the lone therianthrope, I was inserting myself into a situation where I would not be wanted. "I'm not interrupting anything, am I?"
The door opened. "We're trying to break into Luke's phone," Cal said as a way of greeting. "Hey, Dakota. Are you doing all right?"
"How good is your hearing?" I asked, my stomach flip-flopping at the sight of him in steel gray athletic tricot pants and a tight turquoise t-shirt that stretched across his chest in a way that displayed all his yumminess.
He smiled. "Pretty good. Besides, I saw you pull up outside."
"I'm doing okay." He wasn't wearing shoes, which just added to his sex appeal. "Uhm, you?"
"I'll be better once Etta cracks Dwyer's password." He gave the silver-haired beauty a pithy look.
Etta stuck her tongue out at him. "You know cracking a passcode is near impossible, right?"
"I've caught you reselling after market," he used finger quotes around the last two words, "phones. And you've been hacking computers since you were a pup."
Etta rolled her eyes. "First, you don't have to hack and unlocked phone to unlock it for resale, you just need to do a factory reset, but you don't want me to do that."
"I don't?" Cal said as we walked inside Jo Jo's house.
"Nope," Etta said. "Not if you want to look at Dwyer's call logs. A factory reset takes it back to zero. We'll lose any data he might've had on that phone."
"Well, shit-balls," Dale Rivers said as he came out of the kitchen and into the living room. "What can we do then?"
"I could pop the sim card out, do a factory reset, then put it back in. It won't show any texts or call logs, but it will give you any contacts he has saved. I'm not sure what good that will do you, though."
"What about storage?" I asked. "Luke liked to take pictures and videos. Is there any way to get into his gallery? There might be something on there. Some clue as to why someone would want him dead. I have a micro USB card in my phone that I store pictures on and use for games and such, maybe he does as well."
"That's a good idea," Etta said.
"I have one every once in a while." Just not lately, for example, running off in the night with a guy I could never really have.
Jo Jo came out of one of the back rooms. Over the years, he'd transformed from the lanky boy who used to chase Michele and I around school, to a man in his own right. His body had thickened, and become more muscular, but he still had the wiry look of a coyote shifter. The summer after high school he'd spent a couple of months with his mom's folks in Springfield, and he'd come home with tattoos and a dozen or more piercings. That's when he'd become interesting to Michele. She liked to walk the edge when it came to her personal life. Still, I hated how she'd strung him along the past two years. If he was smart, he wouldn't waste his heart on someone who couldn't reciprocate. The revelation jarred me. Wasn't that exactly what I was doing with Cal? Wasting my heart.
"Dakota," Jo Jo said. "I am so sorry." He crossed the room to me and gave me a hug. "Cal told me about Luke. I can't say I ever liked the guy, but I wouldn't wish him dead."
Luke had always been well respected in the community, and
I thought he and Jo Jo were friends, so the statement surprised me. "What did Luke do to make you not like him?"
"Nothing particularly. It was the way he treated people who he thought were beneath him. He didn't show you that side, because he wanted to impress you. But Luke thought of himself as superior to a lot of people. Especially those of us who didn't have the same advantages."
I tried to remember all the times I'd been with Luke. We'd either gone out on our own or, on a few occasions, hung out with his two best friends. Eric Johnson's parents owned the general store and Jackson Smart's parents owned the funeral home. He would have considered them in his class, so I wouldn't have noticed. My parents owned an auto shop, but with eleven mouths to feed, they certainly didn't have money. And I was a regular grease monkey for the love of Pete. "If he was classist, why in the world had he dated me?" I asked.
"Come on, Dakota," Jo Jo said. "Your parents are on the town council, they're friends with the mayor, they have direct connections to the Tri-State Council, your brother is a deputy with aspirations to become sheriff one day, and to top it off, you're a beautiful girl who is nice to a fault."
I crossed my arms over my chest and frowned. "I'm not nice to a fault."
"If you say so," he said. "But I've seen you apologize to a spider for accidentally stepping on it."
"Spiders eat mosquitoes. They are nature's great equalizers."
He chuckled and shook his head. Peripherally, I saw Etta staring at Jo Jo in a way that I recognized. It was the same way I looked at Cal. Apparently, I wasn't the only one who wanted what I couldn't have.
Cal stood beside me. "I have your phone and your clothes. I got them from the woods this morning. They're back in my room."
All eyes seem to be on me as I said, "Lead the way."
"You two kids don't do anything I wouldn't do," Dale Rivers said.
"Then that leaves it wide open," Etta added.
My cheeks warmed as I tried to ignore them. I followed Cal down a narrow hall to the second door on the left. The bedroom had beige walls, a full-size bed with a blue bedspread, unmade, a small dresser that had been painted brown, probably from the used furniture store in town. There was no decor to speak of, reminding me that these lycanthropes had come to Peculiar with not much more than the clothes on their backs in order to escape a tyrant.
I went inside ahead of Cal, and he closed the door behind us. When I turned around, he wrapped me in his arms. I sagged against him, the sound of his heart soothing my worries. "All I've wanted to do today is find you and hold you. If Chavvah hadn't given me strict orders not to go into town, I would have run straight to your house after she dropped me off. Watching her drive away with you was the hardest thing I've done in a while."
He smoothed my hair back and gazed down at my face. "I feel like my whole world is being turned inside out," I said. "What I thought was up is down, and what I thought was right is wrong." I decided to confide in him about Karina Wells. "My sister Michele says Luke took advantage of a girl when she was incapacitated at a party. He probably drugged her to have sex with her."
"To rape her," Cal said.
I nodded. "How could I go out with someone like that and not know it? I thought I was a good judge of character, but I was so far off base with him."
"Did you love him?"
"No," I said. "I never did."
"Then maybe you're a better judge than you think."
"Perhaps." The heat of his skin pressed in on me, and I slid my arms around his waist. "We have to find out who killed Luke. You were a police officer, right?"
"Highway patrol," he said. "It consisted mostly of pulling over speeding cars and assisting with the occasional wreck out on the highway. I didn't do a lot of investigative work."
"We should see if Doc Smith has our blood results in, yet."
"He'll give the sheriff those results when he gets them, but probably not us. They'll save that for when they interrogate us over our witness accounts."
"Interrogate?"
"If they think I'm responsible, they are going to grill us for hours."
"Why?"
"Because if we're lying, a deep dive interrogation might rattle us to say something incriminatory."
"But we're not lying. I've known Sheriff Taylor my whole life. He has no reason to doubt me."
"Not even to protect your lycanthrope lover?"
"We are not lovers!"
Cal gave me a small smile. "Not yet." He winked.
I smacked his chest, but not with any real conviction. "What have I gotten myself into with you?"
"Nothing yet, but I'm hoping we get lots of time to find out."
"Etta," I said.
"Weird segue," Cal said. "But go on."
"Etta works at the Doc's office. She could get a peek at the blood work, and maybe even the autopsy report. But do you think she would? She and her dad aren't on the best terms. This might be too much to ask." I tugged my lower lip between my teeth and Cal's bulge shifted in his pants. I met his gaze as a low, rumbly growl vibrated his chest.
"Sorry," he said. "When you bite your lip like that it does all kinds of things to me."
"For example?" I teased.
"I think you've already felt a demonstration." The bulge had become thick and hard against me. "Do you really need more examples?"
Mate. Mate. Mate, I told myself. One day, Cal will find a mate, and I will be a distant memory. I sighed at my inner nag. "Why are you pursuing me?"
"Seriously?" he asked.
"Yes, seriously." We were from two different worlds. "What do you want from me, Cal?"
He cupped my neck, his fingers weaving into my hair. "Everything. All of you. And if that's too much, whatever you're willing to give me."
"Why? Why would you want me when we can't possibly have a future together?"
"I can't predict what's going to happen down the road, Dakota. But when I think about my life, I know it's better if you're in it." He let his hand drop to his side. "But I can take no for an answer. If you don't want to be with me, or at the very least, date me, just say the word. It'll be difficult, but I'll let you go."
"Don't," I told him.
"Don't what?"
I raised my arms and locked my fingers behind his neck as I went up on my tippy-toes. I kissed him. "Don't let me go."
For a second he didn't move, and I had a horrifying thought he might reject me, but then his arms encircled me again, and he pressed his soft lips against mine. He pulled me closer, a rumble thundering in his chest as I opened for him, taking his tongue into my mouth. He picked me up, and I wrapped my legs around his hips as he turned and pressed me up against the wall. I moaned when he thrust his groin against my aching core.
Mercy, I thought, as I gyrated against him, wishing there was a whole lot less fabric between us down there. My breath quickened as he moved the kiss down my jaw to my neck, his hand skimming up my side to caress my breast. I moaned again. I wanted more. So much more. I slid my hand between us and rubbed my palm against his thick, hard, and really large erection. Holy schnizzle. "Jayzus," I whispered. "What a big, dick you have?" Had I just said that out loud?
Cal's chuckle against my skin confirmed that I had. "The better to--"
"Hey, you two aren't alone in the house!" a shout came from the hall. "Wolves and coyotes have really good hearing."
"Shit, shit, shit," Cal said.
I laughed as he set me down on the floor, because it was either that or cry. I grimaced. "Do you think they heard that last part, because that was really out of character for me?"
Cal grinned before kissing me in a way that curled my toes. After he whispered in my ear, "I'll play big, bad wolf to your Red Riding Doe anytime you want."
Oh, the fantasies that played out in my mind. "Let's just make it through this investigation first, then we'll figure the rest out."
A sharp knock snapped me out of the heady lust-filled haze.
Etta said, "Get decent. You two need to see what I found."
I frowned at Cal. "We are decent."
He raised a brow. "Speak for yourself." He stepped back, and his erection pointed in my direction. "It's going to take me a second, but you go on out. It'll be easier if I'm not looking at you."
I giggled as I opened the door and backed out of the room into the hallway. Etta grabbed my hand and led me down the hall into the kitchen where Dale and Jo Jo looked both livid and disgusted.
The smile I wore faded. "What's wrong?"
"I can't believe it," Jo Jo said. He slammed his fists down on the table next to a laptop. "That bastard."
My insides twisted. "Show me."
"No one should see these," Dale said.
"Show me," I said again. In less than a minute, I regretted those words more than I had anything in my life. There were lewd pictures of Karina Wells on his phone, and she wasn't the only one. I recognized Veronica Talbert as well. There were two more girls that I didn't recognize. Integrators, maybe. All of them had their eyes closed, posed in various positions. My stomach churned, and bile rose in my throat. Had he kept these photos for personal use or had Luke shared these photos with his friends? Either way was heinous. I wanted to go home and take a thousand showers to scrub every place he'd ever made contact with me. The vile inhumanity of how he'd treated these women disgusted me to no end.
I closed the laptop and pushed it away from me and met Cal's gaze. "I would never presume to take justice into my own hands," I said. "But if anyone deserved to die, I'm pretty sure it is Luke Dwyer."
Chapter Ten
"We have to take this to the sheriff. It goes a long way to proving there are more people with a motive to kill Luke than Cal," Dale said.
Like me, for an example. I clenched my fists. It sickened me that I had dated someone capable of such despicable acts.
"Dale's right. We can't let this go unreported," Jo Jo said. "People need to know the kind of guy Luke really was, not the kind of guy they thought he was. At this point, whoever killed him should get a medal as far as I'm concerned."
"It feels a little like using his victims. If they were all drugged, they might not even know it happened to them. We could be dredging up things better left undredged," Etta said. "Sometimes you shouldn't shake the tree."
