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The other members of our EOD crew had cleared out by the time we made it back to Stooge’s apartment, and I crashed in my old bed without asking permission. It made me a little nostalgic to smell my own familiar scent on the sheets and to know that my apartment mate hadn’t even tried to find a replacement for my unruly self. Closing a door to a previous facet of my life had never been so hard.
Still, when we reconvened in the kitchen the next morning to flick cheerios at each other’s heads, it felt like old times. Only after I’d roundly trounced his ass did I power up the cell phone Stooge had stolen from Orville’s bedside table, figuring this was the place to start if I wanted to hunt down the shifter who’d so successfully delved into my own past a week earlier.
“That’s gotta be the informer,” my buddy said, preventing me from paging further through the alpha-wannabe’s contacts. Orville had snapped a photo to go with each name and number, and the lady in question was hot, hot, hot.
And totally not a werewolf. I wasn’t positive how I could tell with no scent to go on, but the cocky cant to her head suggested that the woman was human through and through and that she was entirely unaware of Orville’s wilder side.
“You just want that to be the informer so you can check her out in person,” I commented dryly, flicking past Cherry’s mug shot and continuing on down the list.
“Well, yeah,” Stooge answered as if I’d just mentioned that the sky was blue rather than yellow. “Wait a minute....”
This time, my buddy’s tone had lost its playful edge. And once I peered more closely at the image in question, I noticed what Stooge had caught in an eyeblink. “Chris” was a nerdy guy, but it was the bank of monitors behind his head that clinched the deal. Yeah, this barely legal teenager would’ve had the chops to track down my history in a single afternoon.
“What’s the game plan?” Stooge asked. But I’d already hit speed dial, holding the phone up to my ear as I tried to ignore the reek of Orville that still clung to its plastic surfaces.
“Hello?” The voice was groggy, as if my call had woken Chris from a nap. Or perhaps, I realized, glancing over at the microwave to discover it was only ten o’clock in the morning, our informant-to-be wasn’t an early riser.
“Chris,” I said, trying to keep any trace of alpha dominance out of my tone. I could feel his inner wolf on the other end of the line, could sense its submissiveness. One wrong move and I’d scare the kid away before I had time to fully reel him in. “I was hoping I could hire you to do a job.”
“A job?” he answered.
“A confidential job,” I clarified. “We can come to you with more information. Where do you live?”
“How about we meet at a coffee shop?” The shifter on the other end of the line was abruptly alert, all sleep fog absent from his voice. I could almost feel the adrenaline coursing through his body, in fact, a clue that he’d taken the phone away from his ear long enough to notice Orville’s number on the caller ID.
Based on my own experiences with the alpha in question, I didn’t blame Chris one bit for his caution.
“Okay,” I agreed readily before rattling off the address of an establishment that should be nearly empty at this time of day. Then, before the kid could chicken out, I finished, “Bring your laptop.”
Hanging up, I figured there was a fifty-fifty chance my recent correspondent would flee rather than obey. But I’d have to hope he was intrigued enough to show because Chris was the best lead I’d come up with to date. And I was bound and determined to construct an elegant solution to my pack-princess problem.
***
CHRIS APPEARED NO LESS geeky in person, but the wolf beneath his skin gave him a sharp edge that had cleared the surrounding tables by the time we arrived. Still, his inner beast was no match for my own. The kid cringed when he saw me coming, then raised both eyebrows as he took in the non-shifter nature of the man matching me pace for pace.
“You can speak freely in front of Paul,” I said, opting to use Stooge’s civilian handle while off the naval base. Then I dove into a long-winded explanation of the idea I’d come up with over the last few days—channeling Stormwinder’s massive credit line into a finishing school for female werewolves.
Being so up-front about my strategies probably wasn’t the greatest idea of all time. But I trusted my wolf to judge other werewolves’ characters thoroughly and accurately. My wolf reported that Chris’s inner beast was ten times more trustworthy than that of Orville, so my human half felt comfortable confiding in him at will.
Plus, I planned to put certain fail safes into place regardless. So it wouldn’t matter too much if one male drifter knew where Ophelia, Angelica, and Carla ended up.
By the time I was done speaking, Chris had downed both coffee and donut and was already clicking away on his laptop with one hand while navigating through his smart phone’s browser with the other. Smart and ambidextrous—nice combo.
Then he dropped the bomb. “You don’t really have enough cash here to do that properly,” he said without bothering to glance up.
“I don’t?” I queried. The credit line had seemed plenty big enough to me when I dreamed the idea up. After all, I was just planning on buying a building and hiring a couple of female teachers.
Okay, so, yes, I’d need to come up with another infusion of cash a little further down the line for ongoing expenses like taxes and salaries and oh, maybe, food. But I was hopeful I’d be able to rope in enough potential students by then to keep the school operating in the black all on its own.
“Well, realistically you’d need to charter a flight to the International Space Station or maybe set up an installation on the remotest corner of Antarctica,” Chris clarified. “I mean, you’re talking about putting a bunch of unattended pack princesses in this school, right? I don’t personally see the appeal, but males like Orville are gonna be beating down the doors to get those students out.”
Only when my shoulders relaxed did I realize they’d previously been hunched up around my ears in disappointment. Because my companion was right...and wrong. I’d spent half the night dreaming up a solution for that particular thorny problem, so I slapped a rumpled and scribbled-upon paper napkin down on Chris’s keyboard in lieu of a reply.
The younger male twitched away from me for the first time since becoming engrossed in my story, and I spared a second to dial back my inner beast’s aggressions. Because, yes, the notion of Blue-eyes getting kidnapped by a loser like Orville chapped my ass. But that worst-case scenario wasn’t going to happen, so there was no reason to get preemptively pissed about it.
Chris turned the napkin around a couple of times until he was finally able to make out my unruly scrawl. Then he grinned. “Yeah, this could work,” he admitted. “Assuming the fathers will go for it.”
Thinking of the way Angelica had the otherwise untouchable Chief Stormwinder wrapped around her little finger, I had a feeling the fathers would go for it. So I simply shrugged. “Can you set it up?”
“Sure,” the other male replied. “I can channel all of the money into an account now and pay for whatever once the bills start rolling in. I’m assuming you don’t want to wait to create a non-profit, so I’ll need to skim thirty percent off the top for taxes and a bit more for my time.”
“That’s fine,” I said, slapping the credit card down on the table. “But the money needs to come out all at once and it needs to come out now.”
“Please take my eight-hundred-thousand dollars,” Stooge muttered behind my back in a mocking, high-pitched tone of voice. I shot my partner a glare that was really a thanks-for-coming-with-me-man and he responded with an I-have-your-back smirk.
“Is that all you need?” I asked after a few more minutes. Chris was so engrossed in his typing that a pack princess could have plunked herself down on his lap without the geek being any the wiser.
“Sure, sure,” he said distractedly. “I’ve got the names right here....”
“Addresses,” I interrupted, realizing my oversight. “You’ll need addresses for the acceptance letters.”
Chris looked up from his work at last and for the first time all day his eyes met mine in a split second of alpha aggression. The youngster was pissed enough and my wolf was relaxed enough, though, so no sparks flew.
“I can find the addresses,” he replied flatly. Then, sliding my maxed-out credit card back across the table, he dismissed me as if I wasn’t an uber-alpha so strong I could command him to rip out his own spleen.
“Now get out of my hair,” the youngster finished. “I have work to do.”
