Wolf Shield Investigations: Boxset

by Dee Bridgnorth

  “Doesn’t your girlfriend miss you? Or your roommate? When you spend these random nights away from home?”

  He chuckled. “You’re too much. You really are.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means you can’t trip me up that way.”

  “Who says I was trying to trip you up?”

  “You wanna know if I have a girlfriend? Is that it? Why don’t you just ask?” He tipped his head to the side, looking her up and down—for the first time, maybe, without an ounce of lust or his wolf howling in the back of his head. “This doesn’t seem like you.”

  “What doesn’t?” There was that note in her voice again. Challenge. Defiance. Maybe he wasn’t the only one who thought they’d gone too far, gotten too comfortable with each other. That had certainly been what drove him all the way back to the office rather than spending the night at the Collins house.

  “Evasiveness. Dancing around the topic. You’re usually blunt.”

  “Do you have a girlfriend, then?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  He wanted to laugh at himself. There he was, giving her a hard time about being evasive, dancing around, avoiding the real topic. Now, he wanted to avoid answering. He wanted to give her some pat answer, to brush her question off, to brush her off.

  He had to walk his talk. The less she had to throw back in his face, the better.

  If only he didn’t always feel like there was a new battle to fight, like there was always something waiting around the corner to trip him up. Was it all in his head?

  “It’s not like I choose to be single,” he shrugged, deciding to come out with it even if his instincts made him want to fight against her probing questions. “I have nothing against relationships. They’re just not for me, not with the schedule I work on. My life doesn’t fit that sort of thing.”

  “So it’s not that you work so hard to avoid the fact that you’re alone,” she observed quietly. “You’re alone because you work so hard.”

  “I wouldn’t consider myself alone. Just single.” He lifted a brow. “What about you? Are you alone?”

  “Not unless I choose to be.”

  “And do you choose to be a lot?”

  “What’s this all about?” Her voice now bore a hard edge. She sounded more like the girl he’d met outside the house after she’d almost killed him with that damn car.

  Not like he could blame her for driving fast, now that he’d been behind the wheel.

  “You’re the one who opened the subject. I’m only pursuing it now. Don’t get pissy.”

  “You’re the one getting pissy,” she countered. “You wanna turn things around, make me squirm, all because you don’t like talking about your personal life.”

  “We’re not here to talk about my life.”

  “Do you like being in these uneven relationships? Maybe that’s your real problem.” She waved an arm toward the monitors, then the bulletin board. “You know all about my personal life. You hold all the cards. That makes you special. Important.”

  “I never said—”

  “You don’t have to,” she argued. “That’s just the way it is. You can ask pointed questions, look into the lives of every single guy I’ve ever dated.” She walked past him then, heading for the bulletin board where she pointedly ignored the death threat even though it practically glared at her.

  There they were. Nine photos. And they were just the men she’d dated since graduating high school.

  “So what?” he asked, following her. “That’s our job. It’s what we do.”

  “And the personal lives of every one of them, too.” She leaned in, scanning a list of items beneath one of the guys at random. “Ooh, he’s got a lot of credit card debt. Does that make him a suspect?”

  “No. Not right off the bat, anyway.”

  “Why do you check out the credit report if it doesn’t matter?”

  “I didn’t say it doesn’t matter.” He tapped the report with a forefinger. “If a ton of debt got paid off suddenly, in one fell swoop, that’s suspect. Get what I mean?”

  “Oh. So if somebody paid off his credit cards out of nowhere, you’d wanna know who and why and how.”

  “Exactly. If there was something sketchy in any of these reports—credit, legal trouble, speeding tickets, whatever—we’d see it, and we’d connect the dots. This isn’t the first rodeo for any of us.”

  His wolf, meanwhile, sensed something in the air. All throughout this wordplay, there was something lurking underneath, something she didn’t want to say.

  “What’s really on your mind?” He positioned himself between her and the bulletin board, blocking her view. “What aren’t you saying?”

  “Not everybody has some secret agenda,” she smirked, waving her fingers around. “Not everybody’s avoiding saying what’s on their mind.”

  “I feel like you are, though.”

  “Your feelings are wrong.”

  “My feelings are never wrong.”

  Another smirk, this one accompanied by an eye roll. “Right, of course. Nobody’s as good as you at anything. Nobody knows anything you don’t know. I forgot.”

  How he could educate her on the instincts of a wolf. How many things there were for her to learn. The wolf stood at attention in the forefront of his mind, ears pricked, watching and listening and waiting to pounce.

  “Why is it so difficult to tell me what you’re really concerned about? Are you afraid of what we might find if we dig deeper into your family history?” He nodded toward the board with all its notes. “Afraid we’ll dig too deep and find something not meant to be found?”

  Confusion washed over her lovely face for one fleeting moment, though it wasn’t confusion as to what he meant. He knew that much.

  She wanted to know how he knew. How he could so easily pry into her mind and tease out the things she fought to hide.

  “Shut up,” she warned. “You don’t know anything about my family. Not really.”

  “No?” he countered, gaining footing. “So I guess I’m not supposed to know about your parents spending tens of thousands of dollars in therapy bills? For you?”

  Tears sparkled in her eyes, making them greener than ever. “You don’t know—”

  “I do know,” he assured her with a satisfied smile. “I do. It was for you. Sure, your mother went to therapy for years. Maybe your father should’ve after the accident. I bet there’s a lot of guilt tied up there, huh?”

  Her hand shot out faster than he would’ve imagined. Even his wolf was unprepared for a stinging slap that just about knocked his teeth loose. Too busy being on the offensive to think about defense, he realized a second too late.

  She turned on her heel and ran. Where? Not like she’d know since she’d never been there before. He knew he should follow her before she stumbled into anything she wasn’t supposed to see, but his feet were rooted to the floor.

  “Dude,” Val muttered, and he remembered she’d gone to get coffee for him. “That was harsh.”

  The worst part was knowing she was right.

  Chapter Seventeen

  The bastard!

  Kara ran blindly, realizing too late that she had no idea where she was or where she could go to get away from him. She only knew she had to, or else she’d kill him.

  “Bathroom,” she gasped to the first person she bumped into, a slim, nerdy-looking guy who was basically the physical opposite of Jace in every way. He sputtered, raising an arm and pointing down the hall. She fled toward it, passing one closed door after another before hurling herself into the small, blessedly empty room.

  Only once she was inside, the door locked and her body leaning against it, did the dam break. The pressure that had built in her chest to the point where she was sure she’d explode from it released itself in the form of gusty sobs and hot, stinging, furious tears.

  The bastard. He had no idea what he was talking about or how much pain he’d just picked at and made a joke about. Like there w
as anything funny about what she’d been through, what they’d all been through. Like their lives were nothing but entertainment, a sideshow for him to make snide comments about.

  She slid to the floor, hugging her knees to her tightening chest. The tears weren’t helping. She couldn’t breathe. Panic was taking over. She felt it. She knew she was close to losing control, that she’d be nothing better than a gasping, shaking, sweating thing if she didn’t rein this in.

  Come on, come on, you can do it. In. Out. She closed her eyes, tears still flowing, willing herself to breathe. In. Out. She was safe. She was fine. Nothing in this moment could threaten her; nothing could hurt her unless she allowed it, and she wasn’t going to allow it. In. Out.

  The floor under her. The door behind her. She felt them, really forced herself to notice them and feel them and describe them to herself. Cold. Hard. Solid. Supporting her. She was safe. She wasn’t in any danger. In. Out.

  When Jace’s face—his smug expression, his narrowed eyes—snuck its way into her awareness, she pushed it out with both hands. No, she wasn’t about to entertain any thoughts of him and only make herself feel worse. She’d already thought too much about him. She’d already let him in.

  What a mistake. She had to remember he was doing a job, nothing more than that. He could afford to be smug, to stand back and make judgments based on the little information he had because, in the end, it didn’t matter how many reports he ran or how much surface information his team pulled. It wasn’t anything when compared to the entire life of a family. It barely scratched the surface.

  “Kara? Are you in there?” The doorknob rattled.

  She squeezed her eyes more firmly shut. Couldn’t he take a hint? Didn’t he know he had already done enough damage? What—was he there to rub in how right he was about her and her family?

  “Go away,” she choked out. She didn’t want him to know she’d been crying, but the tears were so heavy in her voice, clogging her throat.

  Silence. She held her breath, waiting to see what he had to say. Maybe he wouldn’t say anything. Maybe he’d be smart enough to go away and leave her alone. Hadn’t he already done enough damage?

  “I was wrong. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I shouldn’t have said any of the things I said.”

  She could agree with him there—still, she stayed silent. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing her acknowledge his presence.

  “Are you just going to ignore me?” He waited a beat, then continued. “Because I can stand here all day. I don’t have anywhere else to be. Remember, you’re my job—so there’s no reason for me to leave this door. Not when you’re on the other side.”

  She scowled. Leave it to him to hang out in front of the door until she had no choice but to come out. Her principles were all fine and good, but she doubted they would hold up very well in the face of hunger.

  “Can you at least tell me to go away and mind my own business? Or am I going to have to stand here and talk to myself?”

  Now she wouldn’t have said anything even if he offered money. A lot of money.

  “Fine. I’ll just keep talking. I have all day.” There was a soft thump against the door, against her back. She wondered for a second what it was all about, then realized he had leaned against the door and was now sliding down its length the way she had.

  At least she could comfort herself with the thought that he probably looked ridiculous, talking to himself, sitting outside the ladies’ room. It wasn’t a lot, but it was enough to make her feel at least a little bit vindicated.

  “Listen. I’m going to be real with you. No dancing around. I could give you an excuse, tell you I’m exhausted. Granted, that’s the truth, but it’s also a convenient excuse for being a dick. I’ve been tired before, more tired than I am now. I’ve spent days on end without sleep. It was all part of my training, of course, and we all go through it. But that’s still no excuse to be cruel, and that’s what I was doing to you. I was being cruel. I’m not proud of myself.”

  She leaned the back of her head against the door, her tears stopping even if her cheeks were still wet.

  “I don’t know what it is, Kara. I mean that—again, it’s not an excuse. And it’s not like me to admit weakness, but it’s there. That weakness is there. There’s something about you that gets under my skin, and I don’t mean in a bad way. I don’t hate you, not at all. I don’t even dislike you. But still, there’s something about you that makes me want to jump to the defensive, and when that doesn’t work, I jump on offense. That’s not like me. It really isn’t. But I don’t know what to do about it.”

  She realized she was holding her breath, waiting for him to continue. When he didn’t, she wondered if that was all he had to say. She thought she deserved a little more of an explanation than that, but she knew better than to ask for one.

  After a long while, she ventured, “I don’t know, either. I feel the same way you do. Yeah, I can start a fight quicker than anybody I know. Most people will tell you that if you ask them. Maybe you already know that. Maybe that’s one of the things up on the bulletin board that I never got to look at. But you? I don’t know what it is. I just want to prove myself all the time. I don’t know what that means, what it says about me. I don’t like it.”

  “Maybe it would be better if your case is handled by somebody other than me. Maybe you were right all along. Maybe your instincts are sharper than mine.”

  She couldn’t help herself. “You mean, you don’t know everything? There are people in the world who know things a little better than you do?”

  “See, there you go,” he snickered. But he didn’t sound angry. That was a start.

  “Do you know what it’s like, feeling the world look at you and knowing they assume they understand you better than you understand yourself? Have you ever felt that way?”

  The last thing she expected was for him to relate. “Actually, I do,” he admitted. “Maybe not exactly the same way you do, but I’ve been in that place. I’ve felt people looking at me, and I’ve known when they looked at me that they thought they understood me. Little smirks, half-hidden whispers behind hands. The people doing the whispering never really tried very hard to hide the fact that they were talking about me, about my family. They wanted me to know. No matter how low some of those people were on the social totem pole, I was lower, and it made them feel better about themselves.”

  Suddenly, she wanted to know all there was to know about him. What was he talking about? What was his life like? There was so much she wanted to know and so little he would tell her. This was the most she’d ever learned about him, but it wasn’t enough.

  “And that makes it even more unfair, what you did to me.” She wrapped her arms around herself, rubbing the goosebumps had formed on her skin. It was chilly in the bathroom, and she wasn’t wearing sleeves.

  “I know. And you’re right to call me out on it. I appreciate that, whether or not you believe it.”

  “I don’t know if I do,” she admitted.

  “Listen. I don’t just say things to hear myself talk. And I’ve never been the kind of person to give out fake apologies or to say nice things just because somebody wants to hear them. I mean what I say. I’m glad you’re calling me out on it. It doesn’t look like this case is going to end anytime soon—and I’m not saying that to upset you or to paint a bleak picture. That’s just how it is. The better we can get along, the better it’ll be for everybody.”

  “I agree,” she murmured. It was the most generous thing she could think to say. If he was trying to be better, she could try too.

  Even so, something had to be said. “It’s not fair of you to say things like you did about my dad. About the accident.”

  “It’s unforgivable, and I am sorry. I really am. Your father seems like a good man, and I can’t imagine going through something that horrible.”

  Funny how a simple, tactful response prepared itself when he said that. She was ready to give him the usual It’s okay. Yes, i
t was very hard for my family reaction, the sort of thing she would’ve said to a stranger or anybody at all who approached the subject of the accident.

  For some reason, that seemed like too much right now. She had already done so much smiling and going along in her life, had already been told what to do and what to think and how to act and how to react more times than she could count, and she was so tired of it.

  Strangely enough, so strange she wouldn’t have believed it if it wasn’t happening right in front of her, she had the feeling he would understand. Of all people, he would get it, and he wouldn’t judge her.

  Maybe. But worse things could happen too.

  “Can I tell you something?” she asked. “It’s something pretty serious.”

  “Of course. You can tell me anything you want.”

  “You’d better not make me regret it.”

  “I promise you I won’t. You have my word on that.”

  And she believed him. She really did. She wouldn’t have been able to continue if she didn’t. Still, rather than talking right away, she stood up and unlocked the door. He understood what that meant. While she was splashing her face, he stepped inside and closed the door behind him.

  If any of this struck him as the least bit awkward, he didn’t show it. He leaned against the wall, hands in his pockets, and waited for her to get herself together. He had to be curious, but he did a good job of giving her time.

  “You’re going to think I’m crazy,” she murmured, looking at him in the mirror.

  He grinned. “That’s a good way to start off.”

  “I’m serious. Take me seriously.”

  Just like that, the smirk left his face. “You’re right. Sorry. Go ahead.”

  “Please, just promise you’ll hear me out before you make any decisions. It’s so important that you understand what this means. I’ve never opened up like this to anybody but my parents. Please, promise.”

  “I promise,” he replied, even holding up his right hand like he was taking a vow.