by Ramona Gray
“Yeah, but this also has a corkscrew so I can open a bottle of wine.”
“While you’re driving?”
“No, not while I’m driving…look, what’s the plan?” she said in exasperation as she closed the knife and tucked it back into her pocket.
“The plan is for you to go back to the car,” he said.
“Not gonna happen.” She tried the door. “Shoot, it’s locked. Hold on.”
He watched in disbelief as she pressed one of the buzzers for the apartments.
“Hello?” The voice that came out of the speaker was tinny and bored sounding.
“Oh, hey, um, I’m in apartment 415, and I, like, totally locked myself out of the building,” Eleanor said in a high-pitched singsong voice that was completely different from her usual. “Do you think you could, like, do me a huge favour and buzz me in? I would be, like, so grateful.”
“Yeah, sure, whatever.”
The door buzzed and Eleanor whipped it open before giving him a look of delight. “Did you like the way I disguised my voice?”
“You didn’t need to disguise your voice,” he said. “The guy didn’t know who you were.”
“Man, you are no fun at all,” she said. “I thought being a spy would require disguises and shit like that.”
“I’m not a spy and neither are you,” he said. “Go back to the car, please.”
“No way,” Eleanor said and slipped inside the apartment building before he could stop her.
“Eleanor!” He followed her inside. He wanted to take her by the arm and march her back to the car, but he didn’t have the time. Besides, he was terribly afraid if he touched her, he would kiss her. Maybe even push her up against the wall and finally have a good feel of those amazing tits before he slid his hand into her jeans and touched her pussy until she was wet enough to take his cock.
“Wes? Earth to Wes.” Eleanor snapped her fingers in front of his face. “Hey, are we doing this or not?”
“We’re not doing anything. Go back to the car, Eleanor.”
“Unless you’re planning on carrying me out of here kicking and screaming, I’m helping you,” Eleanor said.
He growled in frustration and Eleanor’s eyes widened. “Did you just growl?”
“Yes.” He stalked toward the stairwell door and Eleanor trailed after him.
“That is so cool. Growl again, would you?”
“No.” He opened the door and checked the stairs before climbing them two at a time, Eleanor right behind him.
He sniffed the air at the first floor landing before taking the next set of stairs. At the second floor landing, Eleanor, puffing lightly, said, “Man, I gotta increase my cardio if I’m going to get into the spy business.”
“We are not spies and you’re not getting into the business,” he said. It would be a cold day in hell before he let Eleanor do anything remotely dangerous.
“This Xander guy knows what you look like, right?” Eleanor said.
“Yes,” Wes said.
“Maybe I should go first in case we run into him on the stairs. He won’t recognize me, and I can distract him while you tackle him.”
“No,” he said. “Stay behind me. And why would I tackle him?”
“Aren’t you going to do a citizen’s arrest or something?”
“No. I’m going to find out what apartment he lives in so I can give the information to the police who will then arrest him.”
“But I should still go first because if he sees you, he’s gonna run, right? And you’ll never catch him, not when you’re -”
He glared at her. “I might be older than you, but I’m not quite ready for the goddamn nursing home yet.”
“Whoa,” she held her hands up, “somebody’s projecting. I wasn’t gonna say you were old. I was gonna say when you’re a lion shifter and he’s a cheetah shifter. Daisy told me about how he outran you at the restaurant because cheetah shifters are super fast.”
His lion grumbled like a small cub, pissed off that Eleanor knew he had failed at his job earlier. “How close are you and Daisy?”
“We’re friends,” Eleanor said. “Why?”
He climbed the third set of stairs. He stopped abruptly on the last step and tried not to groan when Eleanor bumped into him and her tits pressed against his back. Was she trying to kill him?
He sniffed the air again and moved to the landing, smelling in the direction of the fourth set of stairs before turning and reaching for the door to the third floor. He opened it and eased his head out to glance up and down the hallway before inhaling.
He stepped into the hallway and Eleanor crowded up behind him. “How do you know he’s on this floor?” she whispered.
“I can smell cheetah in the hallway,” he said.
“But do you know it’s his scent?” she said. “There could be other cheetahs living in the building, right?”
“Yes, but the scent is fresh, and he just went up the stairway so it’s likely him.”
“Right. Good point.” She looked up and down the hall, studying the doors that lined it. “Which apartment is his?”
“I don’t know.” He walked down the hallway, inhaling deeply as Eleanor trailed after him.
“Can’t you tell by the scent?” she said.
“It’s fading here,” he said as he stopped halfway down the hall, “which means he probably went into one of the apartments past this point, but I can’t tell specifically which apartment he might have -”
They both froze when an apartment door at the end of the hallway opened.
Shit. The hallway was well lit and straight with no convenient corners to hide around. If it was Xander coming out of the apartment, they were too far from the stairwell door to get there before Xander saw him. And if he saw him, they were fucked. His only chance to find this guy and he’d fucking blown it. Cooper was gonna kill him.
As the person started to step out of the apartment, Eleanor grabbed his arm and whipped him around to face her. He had a few seconds to see the combination of fear and excitement on her face before she gripped his head and pulled it down toward her. Her lips pressed against his and at the first feel of their softness, his shock turned to pure lust.
He forgot he was on the job, forgot that Xander might recognize him and run. He pushed Eleanor up against the wall. She made a soft oof when her head smacked against the wall. He swallowed the sound before sliding one hand into her silky hair and holding her head still. He licked the seam of her lips, growling “open” when they didn’t part.
She opened her mouth. He angled his lips over hers and slid his tongue into her mouth. His free hand gripped her ass and he pulled her up snug against his erection. He purred to her as he pushed his thigh between her smooth ones.
He nipped at her bottom lip and purred again in encouragement when Eleanor ground her pussy against his thigh. Her arousal was thick and intoxicating and he wanted to breathe in the scent of it for the rest of his life.
He rubbed his thigh against her crotch, smiling when she moaned and clutched at the front of his jacket. He kissed her neck and then marked her, two hard swipes of his stubble across her soft skin.
She gasped, and he eased the sting by licking and kissing the red marks before licking his way to her ear. He sucked on the lobe and chuckled when she whimpered and rocked harder against his thigh.
“Does that feel good, little butterfly?” he breathed into her ear.
“Yes,” she moaned.
“It’s not enough though, is it? Your greedy pussy wants my dick.”
Her cheek heated up against his, but she nodded. He let go of her ass to stroke her hip and then traced his fingers over her ribcage toward those perfect tits. “First, you’re going to show me how pretty your tits are, then I’ll give you my cock.”
“Excuse me!”
The woman’s pissed off voice made them both jerk in surprise. Wes pulled away from Eleanor. He was hellishly aware of the way the front of his jeans were tented as he stared at the slender
elderly woman standing next to the elevator.
He could tell by her scent that she was a tiger shifter. He guessed her age to be somewhere around ninety. She stared at them in disgust before she pointed her cane at Wes. “In my day, lion shifter, a woman didn’t take kindly to being mauled in a public space. You’re lucky I’m not calling the police on you with the way you had your tongue shoved down that young lady’s throat.”
“Oh, uh, I wanted him to, um, do that,” Eleanor said.
She was trying to be helpful, but Wes groaned when the tiger shifter turned her rheumy gaze to Eleanor. “Well, ain’t that sweet. Do you normally do your whoring around in apartment hallways with a man twice your age, then?”
“No, ma’am,” Eleanor said gravely. “I usually do my whoring in private like the good Lord intended.”
The old tiger shifter’s mouth twitched, and a look of amusement crossed her face. She thumped her way past them, stopping briefly to whack Wes on the shin with her cane. “This is a nice building and I intend to keep it that way. Keep it in your pants when you’re in the hallway. You hear me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Wes said.
He waited until she’d gone into her apartment before staring at Eleanor. “Why did you kiss me?”
Her face turned bright red. She straightened her shirt and smoothed down her hair. “Why do you think? To keep Xander from seeing you and running. Was it him coming out of the apartment?”
He had no fucking idea if it’d been Xander or not. He’d been too consumed by her, by her taste and her scent and the sound of her moaning. His dick was hardening again, and he muttered a curse under his breath before looking away from her.
“I don’t know.”
“What? How do you not know?”
“How do you not know?” he said.
“Maybe because I was a little distracted by your tongue in my mouth,” she said.
“You were the one who kissed me,” he said.
The redness in her face was spreading down her throat and into her chest. She cleared her throat. “Well, I know it was a guy and I think it was Xander, but I’m not sure. He went out that exit,” she pointed to the exit at the far end of the hallway, “but I didn’t get a good look at his face. Looked like his body size, but it was a different jacket.”
“Fuck,” Wes said.
“He could have changed his jacket,” she said.
“Maybe.” He rubbed at the back of his neck.
“What do we do now?”
He scanned the hallway. “Set up a stakeout outside of the building again until I know for certain he’s here.”
“Or,” Eleanor said, “we could break into the apartment and see if there’s anything in it that points to it being his place.”
“That’s illegal, Eleanor.”
“Oh please,” Eleanor walked down the hallway to the last apartment, “like you’ve never done anything illegal before.”
She tried the doorknob as he joined her. “Locked. You’ll have to pick it open.”
“I am not breaking and entering,” Wes said. He tried not to stare at her swollen mouth, tried not to remember how it had sounded when she moaned, or how close he’d been to touching her tits.
Fuck, he needed to get his head in the goddamn game.
“We’ll be like two minutes, tops,” Eleanor said. “All we need to do is look for pictures or identification and then we can leave. If it isn’t his place, we keep doing the stakeout. But if it is… we call the police and bada bing, bada boom, you got your man.”
She raised her hand in a high-five, dropping it after a few seconds when Wes didn’t smack it. “C’mon, Wes. You know I’m right.”
“Do you want to go to jail, Eleanor? Because that’s what will happen if we get caught.”
“We’re not going to get caught. Two minutes, that’s all we need.”
He sighed. She made a good point and if he had to sit for another few hours in the car with Eleanor after knowing how her lips tasted, he’d go fucking crazy. Eleanor made a soft squeal of delight when he pulled a small leather pouch from the inside pocket of his jacket and opened it. It held a tension wrench and a hook pick and Eleanor clapped her hands quietly.
“I knew you’d picked a lock before.”
He scowled at her before crouching and staring at the lock. It was a simple enough lock, a type he’d picked hundreds of times before. Of course, he hadn’t had Eleanor crouched beside him, her firm thigh brushing his, the intoxicating scent of her lust still lingering on her.
His hands shaking, he inserted the tension wrench into the lock and then used the hook pick to try and lift the pins inside the lock one by one. He muttered another curse, sweat sliding down his back when it didn’t work.
He tried again and failed a second time, glaring at Eleanor when she said, “You’re not very good at this.”
“You’re not helping, Eleanor,” he said.
When he failed a third time, his lion made a low roar of anger. He was embarrassed by Wes’s ineptitude.
You’re not the only one who’s fucking embarrassed, Wes snarled at him.
“Here, give it to me,” Eleanor said. She plucked the wrench and the hook from his hand and elbowed him out of the way. He watched in utter disbelief as she slid the wrench in and then the hook and a few seconds later, the lock clicked open.
She handed him the tools with a look of triumph.
“How do you know how to pick a lock?” Wes said.
“It’s called the internet, Wes,” Eleanor said.
They stood and she used the hem of her t-shirt to cover her hand before opening the door. They stepped inside the apartment and Wes closed the door.
“Hello?” Eleanor called. “Anyone home? It’s your local Pampered Chef representative calling. Can I interest you in a deluxe cooking blender with a dual-sided cleaning brush, strainer bag, and boil-over guard?”
She shrugged when Wes stared at her. “I used to be a Pampered Chef representative. Hey, believe me when I say don’t ever get sucked into an MLM. They will try and bleed you dry.”
“Helloooo?” she called again. “Anyone home?”
When there was no reply, she glanced at him. “Where do we look first?”
“You stay right here,” he said. “I’ll look – Eleanor!”
She’d already walked down the short hall and disappeared. He followed her down the hall. It opened up into a small living room connected to a tiny kitchen.
“Well, it doesn’t look like a crazy stalker’s apartment,” Eleanor said.
“How would a crazy stalker’s apartment look?” Wes said.
Eleanor waved her hand in the direction of one of the walls. “Pictures of poor Anna covering the wall with stuff written like, ‘she will be mine’ and ‘I love her’ written in his blood or something.”
“You watch too much television.”
“Or this isn’t his apartment,” Eleanor said. She headed toward the kitchen as Wes stopped at the small desk tucked against the wall in the living room. There was a laptop and a tablet sitting on it and he ran his finger over the tablet screen.
Expecting the lock screen, he blinked in surprise when the tablet flickered into life and showed the main screen. He glanced at Eleanor – she was standing in front of the fridge and staring at a couple of mini polaroids stuck to it – and then opened the message app.
Like most iPad’s, the message app was connected to a cell phone and he read the conversation that was open in the message app. If this was Xander, he had left to pick up someone with the nickname “BooBunny” from their job.
“Wes?”
“Yeah?”
“This is Xander’s place. He’s in these pictures.”
“Okay, good.” He started toward Eleanor, frowning at how pale she was. “What’s wrong?”
“I know this girl.”
“What? What girl?”
“The girl in the photos with him.” Eleanor pointed with a shaking hand to the polaroids. “I know her. Her name i
s Tabitha and she -”
“Works as a housekeeper for David Landon. Fuck.” He stared at the pictures. They were selfie shots of Tabitha and Xander. Someone had used a glitter pen to write “BooBunny” under Tabitha’s face and “BooBear” under Xander’s.
“I read his phone messages on his iPad,” Wes said. “He’s on his way to pick up Tabitha from work right now.”
Eleanor gripped his arm, her fingers icy cold. “Doesn’t Daisy tutor Anna on Thursday nights?”
“Yes.” Wes yanked his cell phone from his pocket.
“Who are you calling?” Eleanor said.
“Cooper.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Cooper snatched his keys from the side table and ran out of the house. His lion was snarling and growling, its obvious fear heightening Cooper’s fear. He yanked open the truck door and slid behind the wheel, jamming his key into the ignition.
He reached to put the truck in gear. His hands were shaking and the adrenaline rushing through him made him jittery and sick to his stomach. He sat back and took a few deep breaths.
Our mate is in danger, his lion growled.
“I know. I fucking know,” Cooper said. “But we can’t save our mate if we get in a fucking car accident. Give me two fucking minutes.”
His lion growled in anger but retreated. Cooper blew his breath out in a harsh rush before trying Daisy’s cell number again. Like before, there was no answer and his fear cranked up another notch. His cell phone buzzed, and hope blossomed in his chest only to die quickly when he glanced at the screen. He answered it on speaker as he backed out of the driveway.
“Hey.”
“Wes called and told me what he found. Where are you?” Grayson’s voice was worried.
“On my way to Landon’s place.”
“Cooper, don’t -”
“She is my mate, Grayson!” He could hear the panic in his voice.
“I know, buddy. It’ll be okay. Did you try Daisy’s number?”
“Yeah. She’s not answering.”
“She might turn it to silent while she’s tutoring.”
“Maybe.” He took a left off his street.
“Listen, I’m on my way, but Ryan and I are across the fucking city. It’ll take us at least an hour to get there with traffic. Wes said he called the police and they’re sending a unit to Landon’s place. If Xander is there, don’t go into the house. Wait for the police and -”