“Were you born this way?” Braden asked.
They were sitting at the small kitchen table in their dorm room eating the pizza they’d picked up from the cafeteria. Even though everything was different now that Braden knew her secret, it was still kind of weird hearing him say it out loud.
“You mean was I born a freak?”
Dreya cringed a little at how harshly the words came out, but there was a huge part of her that was still worried about what Braden really thought now that he knew what she was.
He scowled at her over the slice of double pepperoni, double cheese pizza in his hand. “You are not a freak.”
She held up her hands so he could see her fingernails, then let her claws extend out to their full length. “You don’t think so?”
Setting his pizza down, he reached across the table and took her hand in his, pulling it closer so he could get a good look. He turned her hand this way and that, tracing his fingertips over the claws, seemingly fascinated by the way her human nails molded themselves into her animal claws in one seamless extension at the end of her fingers.
The instinct to pull away so he couldn’t stare at her freaky curved claws warred with the bizarre pleasure she took from having him touch her. He had strong hands and fingers, yet he was also amazingly gentle as he touched the sharp tips of her claws.
“No, I still don’t think you’re a freak,” he said softly. “If anything, it’s like you’re some kind of werekitty. These claws of yours are exactly like what I would expect to see on a person who’s part cat.”
Dreya snorted. “You’re more right than you think. According to Kendra and Lucy, I’m a feline shifter. Somehow, there’s cat DNA in my genetic makeup.”
He looked up from her hands, regarding her casually. “A shifter, huh?” He grinned. “I like that word better than freak.”
Braden didn’t let go of her hand but instead gently massaged her fingers and lightly traced her claws. It felt really good.
But to her utter disappointment, a moment later, he let go of her hand and went back to his pizza.
“You didn’t answer my question,” he reminded her. “Were you born like this? Did your mom have to deal with little baby Dreya shredding her blankey and chewing her pacifier to pieces?”
Dreya couldn’t help but laugh at the image as she let her claws retract. “No, it doesn’t work that way. I was a normal seventeen-year-old girl until, one night, I woke up from a really bad dream and tasted blood on my tongue. I ran to the bathroom and discovered I had a mouth full of fangs, which just happened to perfectly match the claws on my fingers and toes.”
Braden did a double take. “Claws on your toes, too? I never thought of that. It must have scared the hell out of you.”
Dreya nodded, remembering the night vividly. She’d been sure she was going insane—or turning into a monster. “Understatement there. I completely lost it. I yowled so loud, I sounded like a cat on crack.”
“What happened when your parents saw you like that?”
“Nothing, because they never did.”
“They didn’t hear you scream?”
“They heard.” She took a bite of pizza and chewed. “By the time they came rushing in, the fangs and claws were gone, and I was standing in front of the bathroom mirror with a dazed look in my eyes and gashes on my tongue. My parents were worried less about the blood in my mouth than all the crazy screaming I’d been doing. They were worried I was on drugs and tried to pierce my tongue. It took me an hour to convince them I had a nightmare and bit myself. I left out the part about the claws and fangs, of course.” She shook her head at the memory. “I was terrified they were going to pop out the whole time my mom and dad were in my room, and they’d think I was a vampire or something.”
He reached into the box for another slice of pizza. “And you never told them? Not even after that first time?”
“No.” She sighed. “My parents are conservative. They both come from old money, and they both went to Ivy League schools. They’re very comfortable in their routines, whether it’s the people they associate with, the foods they eat, or even the kind of books they read. I’m not sure how they would have dealt with finding out that their only child was a freak.”
When Braden shot her a sharp look, Dreya shrugged. “At the time, it’s how I looked at myself. How would you see yourself if you woke up one day and had claws and stuff? I thought I was living a nightmare.”
Braden picked up his bottle of beer and took a swig. “So you kept a secret like that to yourself? Didn’t you at least have a sister or brother or a friend you could tell?”
She took a deep breath, transported back to those first weeks. “I don’t have any brothers or sisters. There were a couple of girlfriends at school I almost told, but every time I got close to spilling my secret, one of them would start gossiping about something they heard about someone, and I was afraid to trust them with anything this big.
“But then I went into a jewelry shop to pick up a custom necklace my mom had ordered. The owner and I started talking, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting in his office, crying my eyes out and telling him everything.”
“Rory,” Braden supplied.
“Yeah, Rory.” She gave Braden a small smile. “He listened to a teenage girl rant and rave for hours without complaining once. He talked me off the figurative ledge I was standing on at the time and saved my life. Even though he knew nothing about shifters, he figured out how to help me learn to control my abilities.”
“How so?”
“Well, for one thing, he taught me relaxation techniques to help keep my claws and fangs from coming out at the wrong time. He coached me on when to shift my eyes so I can see even better in the dark than I normally can and, more importantly, when not to shift them.”
Braden lifted a brow. “Your eyes look like a cat’s, too? Show me.”
Other than Rory, no one else had ever seen her eyes change. Heck, she’d never seen them. But instead of being nervous and self-conscious like she’d been in the gym earlier, Dreya was excited by the idea of sharing that part of herself with Braden.
Taking a deep breath, she closed her eyes, then opened them. On the other side of the table, Braden’s face filled with wonder.
“Damn,” he breathed. “That is so frigging cool.”
Dreya wasn’t sure, but she might have blushed a little at the compliment. “They glow brighter green in the dark, which is why Rory said I needed to be careful.”
“What else did he teach you?”
“How to put a filter on my sense of smell and hearing so I wouldn’t go crazy from the overwhelming scents and sounds that most people never even know are there.” She let out a wistful sigh. “I think I would have gone insane without him and what he taught me about myself.”
“You miss him a lot, don’t you?” Braden asked.
She looked away. “Yeah. And I hate that Thorn and the asshole he had murder Rory aren’t rotting in jail right now. It’s not fair.”
“No, it isn’t,” he agreed. “Unfortunately, life is rarely fair.”
Dreya regarded him thoughtfully. “You sound like you’re speaking from experience.”
Braden swigged his beer before placing the bottle down on the table. “Back when I first made detective, my partner got killed in a shoot-out.”
“Did you ever catch the guys who did it?”
He shook his head. “Didn’t have to. Tommy and I took out the whole crew. Unfortunately, I never found the piece of crap informant who gave Tommy the bad info that put us in that position in the first place.”
There was anger in his voice…and pain. She’d become familiar with both those things lately. “Do you think the guy did it deliberately?”
“Maybe. I don’t know. All I know is that Tommy is dead in part because of him.”
“In part?”
“Yeah.” He sighed. “I’ve always kind of blamed myself for it, too, because I didn’t do anything to stop him from going into that warehouse. People tell me there’s nothing I could have done, but I blame myself anyway.”
She knew what that felt like. “I spent a lot of time blaming myself for Rory’s death, too. If I hadn’t pissed off Thorn, or if I left town earlier, Rory would still be alive.”
Braden’s mouth curved in a sad smile. “Rory might have been the biggest fence along the northeast corridor, but I always liked the guy anyway. I wish he was still around so I could thank him for being there for you.”
Dreya felt her eyes tear up, and she blinked. “Yeah, I wish he was still around, too. For a long time, he was the only person who knew my secret. After Rory was killed, I never told another soul.”
Braden chuckled. “And yet, here you are, telling your secrets to the cop who arrested you. Is the world a strange place or what?”
She laughed and helped herself to another slice of pizza. If she didn’t keep an eye on him, Braden would hog it all. The guy ate like a machine.
The rest of the day’s training had taken a slightly different tone after her big reveal and learning that Braden was going to be her partner. It had suddenly turned into less about what she could do and more about what she and Braden could do together. But still, it had been physically exhausting, and she was famished.
After they finished eating, they grabbed a couple of bottles of soda from the fridge and moved into the small living room.
“What do you think Rory would say about you getting recruited by a covert organization for the federal government?” Braden asked. He looked good all stretched out on the couch a mere foot or two away.
She rested her head on her hand with a laugh. “He wasn’t a fan of the federal government, but since it’s not the FBI, I think he’d be okay with it. As long as it’s what I wanted.”
“Is it what you want? Tomorrow is day four of your deal. Are you going to stay and give this a shot, or are you going to go back to what you know?”
Dreya considered that. It wasn’t a simple question. When she’d first gotten here, she’d planned on bailing immediately, but Braden had talked her out of that. Even then, she’d thought of the DCO as little more than a way to avoid a prison sentence. But since that time, everything had changed. Finding out there were other people like her out in the world was huge. Realizing there were also people who knew how different she was and still wanted her to work here counted for a lot.
“I think I want to stay,” she finally told him. “It’s hard to put into words, but my instincts are telling tell me there’s something here for me. That this is where I’m supposed to be. Does that make any sense at all?”
He grinned. “Yeah, it does actually. And if my opinion matters at all, I think your instincts are right. This place is perfect for you.”
She smiled at him, feeling extraordinarily happy knowing Braden agreed with her decision. “Thanks. And your opinion does matter.”
“You realize these people are going to keep pushing you,” Braden said. “I get the feeling you’re going to have to do a lot of dangerous stuff. Are you up for that?”
“I’m up for it,” she said softly. “As long as you’re my partner.”
Dreya cringed the moment the words were out of her mouth. They’d spent the whole even talking about her, and she had no idea if he was planning to stay here even to the end of the week, much less long-term. Danica and Clayne had tricked Braden into being her partner for this training stuff. It wasn’t like they were recruiting him into the DCO.
If Braden noticed her misstep, he didn’t react to it. Instead, he stretched and got to his feet. “Then I guess we need to get cleaned up and go to bed. Clayne and Danica will be here early as hell tomorrow. They said something about getting you a gun.”
Dreya let out a shudder that was only half fake. Rory had hated guns, and she had picked up on that disdain. But if the DCO wanted her to carry a weapon, she supposed she’d have to get used to it. Not that she ever planned on using one, of course.
“I don’t mind getting up early,” she told him as they headed for their respective bedrooms. “I’m just glad I’m not so sore tonight, I need your help getting my clothes off.”
O-kay. That definitely didn’t come out the way she intended.
Braden gave her a hurt look as they stopped outside their rooms. “What? You didn’t like the way I undressed you last night?”
“No. I mean yes!” she said. “I loved it. You can help me undress any time you want.”
Braden lifted a brow, his dark eyes dancing with amusement.
Dreya felt her face heat. “That didn’t come out any better, did it?”
He chuckled. “I know what you meant. If it helps, I have to admit that I enjoyed helping you get out of those clothes. So, if you decide you ever need help getting naked, all you have to do is ask.”
Dreya opened her mouth to make some crack about partners being there for each other, but the sexy glint in his eyes robbed her of the words.
He was right there, standing so close she could feel the heat coming off his body. Maybe it was the relief of finally having another person to share her secret with. Or the way Braden didn’t run screaming when he saw her claws and fangs. Heck, maybe it was three days of living this close to a really hot guy who liked to take her clothes off. Whatever it was, she was going to kiss him.
Braden must have decided to do the same to her, because his mouth was coming down on hers even as she reached out to tug him against her.
The sensations hit her all at once, eliciting a moan from her throat. The hunger of his lips as he devoured hers, the sweetness of his tongue as it dipped into her mouth, the solid strength of his chest muscles as they pressed against her soft breasts.
She buried her hand in his hair, yanking him down harder, wanting to make sure he didn’t go anywhere. His hand found its way to her lower back, fitting her more tightly against him and letting her know just how excited he was.
When that hand on her back slid lower, firmly caressing her ass, she didn’t complain. This was absolutely insane, but she wanted him all the same. She barely knew him. He was a cop who had tried to put her in prison three days ago. On top of that, he was her new partner. Those were all good reasons to avoid any romantic entanglements. But none of that seemed to matter as their kiss burned hotter.
A quiver started to build in the pit of her stomach and then pooled lower. She was so turned on, she was surprised she didn’t combust. She only prayed her fangs didn’t slip out—she didn’t want to bite him.
She pushed that worry aside and focused on something else instead—like the fact that Braden was as turned on as she was. She could smell his arousal in the air, taste it on his tongue, and feel it in the hard-on pressed against her stomach. Sighing, she reached for the buttons on his uniform top, but he broke the kiss and took a step back.
She blinked up at him in confusion. There was no mistaking the same lust she was feeling mirrored in his eyes. He wanted her as badly as she wanted him.
“We have to get up early for training tomorrow,” he said in a ragged voice.
She let out a sound that was half growl, half purr and closed the distance between them. “I don’t care about tomorrow.”
Braden stepped back again, like they were doing a complex dance step. “You need to care. Tomorrow is only day four of the deal you made with the DCO. You can’t afford to screw up and blow this chance. Not after everything you’ve made it through already.”
The urge to say the hell with the DCO was overwhelmingly powerful. Dreya had never experienced anything like it. She’d been with guys before, but she could take it or leave it with most of them. With Braden, she was hungrier than she’d ever remembered being.
But he was right, and she knew it. She’d just told him she wanted to be here. She hadn’t proven anything to the DCO yet and didn’t want them changing their mind about her.
She forced herself to step back and put some much-needed space between her and Braden. “Thanks. It’s good that at least one of us has some control left.”
He nodded. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
Dreya got ready for bed quickly, refusing to let her mind wander in a sexual direction as she showered off, then hurried into her room. But then Braden hit the shower right after her, and she was forced to hold her breath to avoid inhaling his amazing scent. She didn’t know how she could smell it under all the body wash he dumped on himself, but she could.
Knowing he was right there, barely ten feet away, wet and naked, made her want to caterwaul in frustration. The urge to walk into the bathroom and slip into the shower with him was nearly impossible to resist. But she did, because she needed to focus on doing well in training tomorrow and impressing the people who would decide if she was going to work for them.
She hated having to be all mature and adult about crap like this.
Dreya pulled on her Betty Boop sleepshirt, biting her lip to keep from moaning out loud as the cotton fabric rubbed against her tingling nipples. Then she climbed into bed and lay there under the covers, trying to think of something—anything—other than the kiss she and Braden had shared. Just the thought of that kiss had heat swirling between her legs.
What was it about Braden that got to her so much? Yeah, he was attractive and muscular and smelled amazing. But it was more than that. Part of it was the way he looked at her like he thought she was the most beautiful woman in the world, not just when he’d been helping her get naked, but back when he’d been interrogating her at the police station. Something told her it wasn’t simply her body that he was attracted to either. It was all of her.
That was when it hit her. Braden had looked at her the same way right before they’d kissed…after he knew what she was. He knew she had fangs, and he still wanted to kiss her. That was incredible and arousing on a level she’d never experienced before.
The shower turned off, and Braden came out of the bathroom a few minutes later to turn off the lights. The scent rolling off him was almost enough to send her chasing after him. She was so excited, she wanted to jump him and sink her fangs into him. Dreya gripped the edge of the comforter, forcing herself to stay where she was.
In the next room, Braden climbed into bed. A moment later, she heard his heart rate slow and his breathing grow steady. He was already close to falling asleep, while she’d probably be lying there awake and frustrated for hours. How the heck could men change gears so quickly?
“Dreya?” he called, his voice barely above a whisper. “Can you hear me if I talk this softly?”
“Uh-huh,” she said softly, then realized she was going to have to speak louder if she wanted him to hear her. “Yes, I can hear you.”
“Good. Because I wanted to make sure you had one thing straight before you fell asleep tonight.”
“What’s that?”
“When I pulled away after kissing you and you said it was good that at least one of us still had some control. I want you to know that resisting the urge to drag you off to bed was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. Instead of saying I’d see you in the morning, what I really wanted to say was I hoped there was enough room in your bed for me. I just wanted you to know that, okay?”
Dreya smiled to herself and fluffed up her pillow. Why did it make her feel better knowing he’d come close to losing control, too? Maybe because if she had to lay here awake half the night, it was nice knowing he’d be lying awake just as long.
“Thanks,” she said.
Then she tugged her blanket a little higher and closed her eyes, thinking delicious, if very erotic, thoughts.
* * *
“Do your best not to shoot me, huh?” Braden said with a smile.
Dreya thought that was anything but funny, especially since they were standing outside something known as a shoot house, about to start a session of CQC—Close Quarter Combat—training using live ammo. In that regard, her partner wasn’t joking. If she weren’t careful, she could end up shooting him. Even if she didn’t hit him, she still had to worry about taking out Clayne or Danica, who’d be walking around on the catwalks that overlooked each room of the shoot house she and Braden would be moving through.
Dreya was definitely of the opinion that this kind of room clearance training was way too advanced for her, especially since the first time she’d ever fired a real gun had been this morning, exactly eight hours ago.
Surprisingly, she’d enjoyed shooting a lot more than she would have expected, mostly because Braden had gone to great lengths to help her pick out the right handgun for her. The basic 9mm Glock 19 was the perfect size for her hand, didn’t kick too much, and was easy to use.
It had also helped that Braden had stood right behind her through the first ten or fifteen clips of ammo, keeping her body in the right posture and steadying her arm. Having him so close, they were practically touching, had been seriously fun. Yes, she knew she should have been focused completely on the task at hand, but it turned out that shooting guns with Braden was kind of sexy.
But just because she’d been able to handle shooting holes in stationary targets set out at distances ranging from five to thirty yards didn’t mean she was ready to get all SWAT cop and go kicking in a bunch of doors and shooting her way through a house full of simulated bad guys. Whatever happened to the concept of learning to walk before you tried to run? But like Braden had said last night, these people at the DCO were going to push her, and right now, that meant sending the two of them through this CQC course.
She stifled a groan. Thinking about last night was a bad idea, because it totally distracted her. Not that it took much to get her thinking about that kiss they’d shared before going to bed. It had been the last thing on her mind when she’d fallen asleep last night and the first thing she’d thought about the second she’d woken up this morning. Seriously, that had been one memorable kiss. Dreya only hoped that after her five-day recruitment period was up, she and Braden might get a chance to make a few more memories as amazing as the one from last night.
Beside her, Braden grabbed two sets of foam earplugs from the table and handed one to her.
“Don’t overthink this, okay?” he said, his voice calm and steady. “We’ll do this the same way we did on the walkthrough, moving slowly and carefully. I’ll go first and cover the far left of the room, then sweep to the right corner. You immediately follow behind and cover the hinge side back corner first, then the knob side corner.”
That was exactly the way he’d explained it on the walkthrough, and Dreya had barely understood it then. She took a deep breath and forced herself to relax, putting Braden’s words into simpler instructions in her head. Basically, he would charge in first and worry about what was right in front of them, while she covered him by essentially dealing with “bad guys” who might be hiding behind the door, trying to shoot the first person through the door, namely him.
It had sounded scary tough on the walkthrough, and now that she was carrying a live weapon, it sounded even scarier. No, none of the pop-up “bad guys” in there would be shooting at them. But if she and Braden didn’t communicate well, this could get dangerous.
He glanced at her as he slipped into the heavy tactical vest they would both be wearing for this exercise. “You’ll be sweeping right across my back as you clear from one side to the other, so I’m trusting you, okay?”
She nodded as she tightened the straps on her own vest. The fact that he trusted her enough to let her carry a live weapon behind was important to her. She wouldn’t let him down.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Ready,” she said.
As she and Braden approached the shoot house in the fading light of day, he turned to give her a look. “No pressure or anything, but I think I just saw that guy you pointed out to me at breakfast—John Loughlin—walk up to the observation level. It looks like the big boss is going to be watching us.”
She groaned. “Great. Someone else for me to accidently shoot.”
Braden chuckled. “Don’t worry. You’ll do fine. You just stay on my ass and focus on covering me. I’ll worry about getting us through the house.”
Dreya nodded. Sounded like a fair deal to her. She definitely had no problem sticking close to his ass. It was sexy.
She pushed that thought out of her head and rolled her shoulders a few times, settling her tactical vest into place. Not only would the vest hopefully protect them from any stray round that might ricochet off of something hard, it also carried the sensors that would ring off if one of the targets “shot” them. She and Braden would lose points each time a sensor went off.
According to Braden, even a small house usually needed at least three or four well-trained cops working together to clear it safely. Doing it with two people, one of whom had never done anything like this, would have been considered suicidal in the real world. Here, it was just realistic training. She didn’t expect them to do very well in this event, at least not the first few times through.
“You good?” Braden asked.
Dreya nodded, her heart starting to beat faster.
Giving her a nod in return, Braden stepped forward and kicked in the front door. He went in first, sweeping his handgun from left to right across the room. Dreya followed at his heels, checking the hinge side of the door to see if anyone was hiding there, then quickly sweeping across Braden’s back to do the opposite corner of the room. If someone were there, they’d instinctively aim for her partner first, so while she moved carefully, keeping her finger away from the trigger anytime the weapon was pointed in Braden’s direction, she also moved quickly.
As soon as they confirmed the first room was empty, Braden led the way to the next door. The moment he kicked it in, Dreya felt a funny tingle along the nape of her neck.
Braden was already moving before she could say anything, though. She darted after him, not worrying about which side of the room she was supposed to cover but instead going with the tingle and her instincts.
She turned to the left the moment she got in the room, lifting her weapon at the same time, her finger already squeezing the trigger as she saw the man-shaped target pop up in that corner of the room. She hit it in the center of the chest with two rounds before it had even gotten all the way up.
Pulse racing, she spun and checked the right back corner of the room, then took three quick steps forward to check a small closet on that wall, even though her instincts seemed to tell her there was nothing there.
She glanced over her shoulder at Braden to see him nodding at her in approval. She gave him a quick smile, but he was already heading for the next room.
They continued moving through the house like that, Braden using his experience, Dreya trusting the instincts she’d honed through years of being a thief and avoiding cops, surveillance cameras, and alarm sensors. It was amazing how similar what she was doing now was to breaking into a well-guarded high-rise apartment complex.
It wasn’t long before her ears were ringing, even with the earplugs in, and there was a trail of brass cartridge cases, expended weapon clips, and bullet-riddled targets behind them. She didn’t honestly have any way to judge, but something told her she and Braden were smoking this exercise.
Then the lights went out.
Braden immediately stopped in front of her. Dreya halted, too, her eyes automatically shifting to let in more light.
“No shifter vision,” Clayne called out from above them. “We’ll be able to see the glow of your eyes, so we’ll know if you cheat, Dreya.”
She looked up to meet his gold gaze. “Then how are we supposed to get through the rest of the house?”
“You’ll have to figure out how to do it some other way.”
That was patently unfair, but she turned off her shifter version of night-vision goggles.
“I can’t see a damn thing in here, so I’m wide open to suggestions,” Braden said softly.
Dreya thought a moment. Just because she couldn’t use her night vision didn’t mean she couldn’t use the other talents available to her. Closing her eyes, she pulled up what she remembered of the house’s floor plan from their earlier walkthrough. When she had it, she put her free hand on Braden’s shoulder.
“The door is on our left.” She gently nudged him that way. “Just go where I guide you.”
Thankfully, Braden didn’t question her but instead turned and headed in that direction. They had to move a lot slower, and getting through the doors was more of an adventure than it would have been if she could have seen where they were going, but they did it.
Figuring out where the “bad guys” were positioned was harder. Without her night vision, the only way she could tell if there were any targets in the room was when she heard the slight creak of their gears as they popped up. The moment she did, she’d call out a general clock direction of the sound, and then she and Braden would fire in that general direction.
Unfortunately, it was hard reacting to the sounds fast enough, and the buzzers on the vests she and Braden were wearing went off a few times, indicating that one or both of them had been hit. But they kept moving from room to room, getting better and more accurate with each one they moved through.
Dreya was getting in the groove when Braden kicked open another door, and the late afternoon sun came bursting in.
“Time,” Clayne called from the catwalk above them. “Ten minutes, twenty-five seconds. You two were tagged three times, but you ended up with twenty-seven kills. Not frigging bad for a new team.”
Braden turned and gave Dreya a high five. “Not frigging bad, my ass. That was damn impressive. When those lights went out, I thought we were done.”
From the amount of pride surging through her, Dreya would have thought Braden had told her she’d won an Olympic gold medal. She started to thank him, but John interrupted her.
“Braden’s right. That was impressive.”
Dreya turned to see Danica, Clayne, and John coming down the steps from the catwalk, smiles on their faces.
“Considering this was the first time you’ve ever done anything like this together, you two were moving exceptionally fast,” the director added. “How’d you’d get through the rest of the course in the dark so easily?”
Beside her, Dreya noticed Braden looked as curious as the rest of them.
She grinned. “Maybe I cheated and used my feline night-vision goggles.”
Danica laughed. “Nice try, but like Clayne said, we would have seen the green glow of your eyes.”
John regarded her thoughtfully. “I once heard about a wolf shifter whose nose is so good, she can navigate a dark shoot house like this by scent. Is that what you did?”
Dreya wished her nose was that good. “No, nothing that amazing. I just memorized the building’s floor plan when we did our walkthrough earlier.”
“How’d you know we’d turn out the lights?” Clayne asked.
“I didn’t.” She shrugged. “I memorized it because it’s what I do.”
Braden had holstered his gun and now crossed his arms over his chest with a frown. “What do you mean, it’s what you do?”
“I’m a thief,” she reminded him, then quickly added, “or used to be one. I never knew what kind of safe I was going to run into or what kind of security system a place would have, never mind when I might have needed an alternate escape route. It’s not like I could climb around with a laptop in my backpack, so I memorized everything.”
That explanation didn’t exactly clear up the surprise on the faces around her, especially Braden’s.
“How long do you remember the stuff you commit to memory, like the floor plan of this shoot house?” he asked.
Dreya gave them another shrug. “Pretty much forever, I guess.”
Braden looked even more stunned at that, as did Danica and Clayne. While John seemed equally amazed, he also looked intrigued, like he thought that might be another skill the DCO could have her use.
“That’s even more impressive than your performance in the shoot house then,” Clayne said. “We’ve got the computer analysis of what you guys did in there if you’re interested?”
“Hell, yeah,” Braden said.
Dreya almost laughed at the excitement on his face. He looked like a kid at Christmas.
“I wasn’t just saying that, by the way,” John said to her as Braden joined Clayne and Danica by the computer console inside the small room off the shoot house. “I really am impressed. Not just by what you were able to do today but how you’ve handled yourself since we brought you in. You’ve come a very long way from where you started.”
She snorted. “I don’t know about that. I’ve only been here four days. I haven’t really accomplished much beyond running myself ragged.”
Although if he measured her performance by how far she’d run since she’d gotten here, maybe she had done something. But she doubted that was what he meant.
John smiled. “Trust me, you’ve accomplished much more than you think.” He tilted his head, regarding her thoughtfully. “What do you think of the DCO so far? Can you see yourself fitting in here?”
If someone had told her that she’d be contemplating going to work for a covert government organization, she would have told them they were crazy.
“Maybe,” she admitted. “Though to be honest, I’m still not exactly sure what you expect me to do here.”
John chuckled. “I wasn’t real clear about it that first day, was I? Right now, the goal is simply to find a way for you to use your special skills to make a difference in the world. How exactly we do that is mostly up to you.”
Dreya considered that. “Well, I’m good at two things—designing jewelry and stealing stuff. I’m not sure the DCO has a need for either of those skills.”
It was kind of weird telling her prospective employer something like that, but it wasn’t like he didn’t know she’d been a thief in her other life.
John’s mouth twitched. “Maybe not jewelry designing, but someone who can steal things without getting caught? You’d be surprised how valuable that skill is.”
She glanced at Braden. He was deep in conversation with Clayne and Danica, not paying attention to anything she and John were saying.
“I’m not so sure my partner would agree,” she murmured. “Since he’s a cop and all, I mean.”
John followed her gaze. “How do you like working with Braden?”
She smiled. “Actually, I like it a lot more than I ever thought I would.”
“Funny how these things work sometimes, isn’t it?” John mused. “One day, a guy’s trying to arrest you; the next, he’s your partner.”
Dreya laughed. She certainly hadn’t seen it coming, that was for sure. But she couldn’t deny that she and Braden made one heck of a team. Sometimes, like when they were going through the shoot house, it felt like the two of them had been working together for years instead of a few days.
She opened her mouth to ask John when she could officially start working for the DCO when his cell phone rang. He dug it out of the inside pocket of his suit jacket and checked the screen.
“I have to take this. Excuse me.” He put the phone to his ear. “What do you have, Evan?”
Dreya wandered over to where Braden was standing with Clayne and Danica to give John some privacy. Despite having exceptional hearing, she didn’t usually make a habit of listening in on other people’s conversations, but she couldn’t resist eavesdropping on the director’s conversation with Evan, especially after she heard the guy say something about a crisis.
“And you’re sure?” John demanded.
“We’re sure,” Evan said.
John cursed. “I’ll be there in five minutes.” He hung up, then glanced at her and the others. “Something has come up. I’ll talk to you later. Good work today.”
Giving them a nod, John jogged around the shoot house to where he’d parked his car.
“What was that all about?” Dreya wondered out loud.
Clayne shrugged. “Who knows? If it’s something that involves you, you’ll find out soon enough. If it doesn’t involve you, then you’ll never have a clue what it was about.”
“Well, that stinks.” She frowned. “Aren’t you the least bit curious?”
The wolf shifter chuckled. “You ever hear about what curiosity did to the cat?”
Dreya sighed. She could have made some smart-aleck remark but didn’t. She supposed if she were going to work here, she was going to have to get used to people keeping secrets.