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I could feel both my job...and possibly my skin-protecting secrets...slipping through my fingers no matter how hard I clenched said appendages into fists. Still, I stretched my legs to catch up as the two werewolves ahead of me strode up the steep hillside with complete disregard for darkness.
“I hear you, Allen,” Gunner said, answering a murmur that I hadn’t been able to make out as I lagged, trying to tease out the third shifter’s signature scent. Allen was one of the males who’d ridden in the back seat of the SUV during the drive over, I gathered. Given how easily the trio had teased Gunner then, it was hard to imagine what might have provoked such a cool reaction from his boss now.
Giving up on the puzzle, I broke into a trot and broke out of the thicket just a step behind as the werewolves paused in an open area where a metal drainage pipe produced a flat, muddy area perfect for capturing passing animals’ tracks. “But I’ve decided,” Gunner continued, flicking a single glance in my direction that suggested I’d been the topic of conversation. Then his eyebrows rose, a clear signal that whatever conversation I’d missed was now over and done.
Shrugging, Allen got down to business, shining a flashlight between us to reveal indents of bird toes, pinpricks of insect feet...and one perfectly formed canine print just at the edge of the mud slick. The animal had traveled up the slope since the last rainfall, lacking the savvy to skirt around the muddy spot. As a result, its passing had been recorded as perfectly as any fossilized dinosaur track imprinted in Jurassic clay.
So, yes, the print definitely existed. Still, I couldn’t imagine why Gunner’s underling was so certain the imprint represented the foot of a werewolf. After all, its moderate size would have more closely matched a domestic canine like a Labrador retriever...or possibly a very large fox.
Did I mention that fox shifters out-mass the wild version by quite a wide margin? Kneeling down beside the track, I found my fingers stretching toward what might very well be the first sign of an unrelated fox shifter that I’d ever come in contact with.
“Don’t touch that!” My hand was slapped back so abruptly I didn’t even feel the sting before the shifter who had drawn us here began pointing out clues to his eagle-eyed alpha. “There’s no scent,” Allen informed us unnecessarily. “Note the white lines where baking soda stuck to his pads....”
“Or her pads,” Gunner interjected, his voice so cold I cringed back away from his menacing form. Gone was the thoughtful protector who’d helped me stifle my sneezing only a few minutes earlier. Instead, Gunner had regressed into exactly the sort of terror-inducing alpha I’d assumed him to be at our first meeting.
So maybe I’d guessed wrong about Allen objecting to my presence. Perhaps Gunner was the one who wanted me gone ASAP.
“Yeah, I guess so,” the lower-ranking shifter agreed, eyes lowered in instinctive submission as he responded to the same cues that triggered my own urge for flight. Still, the underling’s tone didn’t match his body language, the emphasis on “guess” suggesting he considered a female killer a profoundly unlikely hypothesis.
And after a moment of skin-saving silence, the male proved his courage by speaking up once again. “Should I run to the store for some plaster of Paris?” he asked, his voice becoming increasingly animated as Gunner’s reproof faded from his memory. “I can take a casting to compare to the feet of shifters around town....”
For the first time in several minutes, I was tempted to smile. There was something so geeky about the enthusiasm infusing the underling’s voice. As if arts and crafts were far more interesting than the blood and gore of a crime scene. He seemed to be envisioning a Cinderella-like hunt for our perpetrator...albeit with a much less fairy-tale ending. How surprisingly un-werewolf-like of him.
Unfortunately, Gunner shut the initiative down with the verbal equivalent of a slap. “No,” the alpha growled, voice brooking no further debate. “We’ve learned all there is to learn here. Wrap it up and head back to base. I’m taking Mai home.”
***
SO I GOT BACK INTO the vehicle with a surly werewolf...this time without the added buffer of teasing pack mates watching from the back seat. Only my problem wasn’t the expected inability to run away from an angry alpha. Instead, Gunner opened my door like a gentleman then hesitated there on the roadside rather than slamming the barrier shut in my face.
“About earlier,” he started. Then, running one hand through his hair, he shook his head as if his behavior was far too complicated to explain verbally.
“Gunner?” I asked when the silence between us had lengthened to awkward levels, half a dozen vehicles having whizzed past us on the highway. I only realized this was the first time I’d used his name aloud when my companion’s scent shifted to dewy pleasure seconds before the door closed between us with a firm yet gentle snick.
Then the male was in the seat beside me, was pulling out into traffic as he headed in the direction of my neighborhood without bothering to ask where I lived. He’d clearly researched my statistics in the time we’d spent apart this afternoon. Which should have chilled me...but instead created a warm puddle of pleasure centering around the bottom of my gut.
“You need to get home to your sister,” Gunner said finally, deftly switching lanes to zip past a slow-moving vehicle. “So I guess that gives us nine and a half minutes to discuss your pay rate.”
“My pay rate?”
For the first time since entering the vehicle, I swiveled to face the confusing male beside me, not daring to hope that I’d heard him right. Because, possible two-sided attraction aside, I’d blown it multiple times over the course of our job-interview-turned-criminal-investigation. Why would Gunner still want me on his team?
“Funds provided for services rendered,” the alpha elaborated, his tone turning honey smooth. Well, if Gunner was going to be flirtatious...then I could afford to push whatever slim advantage I might possess.
I cleared my throat then launched into the bare truth. “I need more than cash under the table,” I informed him, the dour face of Kira’s social worker rising up in my mind’s eye. “I need a job description that sounds conventional and dependable, a weekly paycheck that I can report to Social Services. And I need seven thousand dollars on top of that, up front, to pay for Kira’s school.”
My requests were outrageous, but Gunner merely shrugged, taking one hand off the wheel long enough to toss his phone into my lap. “The passcode is 9653,” he told me. “Text Allen and tell him what you need.”
It was a good thing A came at the beginning of the alphabet, because Gunner’s address book contained more contacts than I was likely to muster in ten lifetimes. Still, when I found the appropriate entry, I had to laugh. Because the plaster-of-Paris werewolf was apparently Gunner’s accountant too.
“Tell him what you told me,” Gunner prodded as my fingers hovered over the phone’s touchscreen, unwilling to repeat my demands in print. “Five minutes until we arrive at our destination,” he warned.
So I typed. I added a link to the payment portal for the academy, the email address of my least favorite social worker, and an explanation that it was me sending the text with Gunner’s consent.
And the whole time I was doing so, a slender sliver of wishful thinking made me imagine what it might be like to revoke my outcast status, to have friends ready and willing to come to my aid. Perhaps that’s why I knocked the previously requested seven thousand down to six thousand—surely I could come up with an extra grand from Arena fights before the deadline. It just seemed pushy to ask for so much money when my new employer was taking time out of his busy schedule to run me all the way home.
Not that the drive was a hardship in such a high-class vehicle. The faintest smile lingered on Gunner’s lips when I glanced in his direction, and the SUV’s brakes were silent as we pulled to a halt in front of my apartment complex seconds after I hit send. But Gunner stilled me with a hand on my arm before I could reach over to open the door and emerge from the vehicle.
“Your sister’s sleeping,” he noted, nodding toward the darkened window three floors above our far-too-close-together heads. “She won’t know the difference if you come run with the pack tonight. I can get you home before dawn.”
And with his attention turned directly upon me, the magnetism of Gunner’s proximity flowed between us like the glowing magic of a star ball. I could imagine his fingers sliding across my cheekbone, his lips settling at the pulsing indentation at the base of my throat. There was so much more to this alpha than mere physical attraction. He was protective, funny, kind...
...And dangerous. So dangerous I didn’t even trust myself to answer aloud as I shook my head and pushed my way out the door.
“Tomorrow then,” Gunner answered before the metal barrier slipped out of my fingers and cut him off from view.
Then I was sprinting toward the dimly lit entrance of a building that suddenly felt more like a fox’s underground and secretive lair than like a human’s welcoming and airy residence. It took all the self-control I could muster not to turn my head and look back.