Phoenix Aflame (Alpha Phoenix Book 2)

by Isadora Montrose

* * *

  Grandpappy Bass didn’t even bother to wiggle his tail faster. He regarded Tasha’s lure with unblinking and hostile eyes. Out of nowhere a smaller bass lunged at the hook. Tasha gave a crow of triumph not unlike Quincy’s. She began to play the smaller fish. It was a good two- or three-pounder, and her line was up to the challenge. She gave the little fighter a bit more line. He darted down to the bottom of the stream and took off. She calmly reeled him back in.

  “Does your mom really expect fish for dinner?” she asked. “Be a shame to land him and have to stick him in the freezer.”

  “Dad is planning to barbecue those steaks in the fridge.”

  She flicked her wrist. The bass slipped off her barbless hook and vanished with a flick of his tail. Great-granddaddy continued his contemptuous surveillance.

  “You’re good.” Harrison clamped his rod with his knees and pulled her hat off so he could kiss her.

  She sighed a little and clutched at his arm with her free hand. He dropped her sun hat on the ground so he could pull her into his arms. Their sunglasses clicked. They both pulled away. Tasha’s mouth wobbled. He took his glasses off and tucked them into his breast pocket. She swallowed audibly and copied him. Only she didn’t have a breast pocket. She hung hers in the V of her buttoned shirt.

  “Maybe we should put these where they won’t get broken?” He set the rods against the trunk of an oak tree beside the creel and the net. And then he swept her back into his arms. Now that the bitterness of her fear was gone, she tasted even better than she had in the house. Sweeter. He tangled his tongue with hers until they were both breathing hard. When he lifted his head his boots were trampling his cap into the dirt.

  “We have to stop doing that,” she said breathlessly.

  “Uh uh. I like kissing you.”

  “We can’t just mess around like kids.” Her eyes with their fading yellow bruises were quite serious.

  “Why not? I’m single and so are you.”

  “Your parents would expect us to behave ourselves like – like grownups.”

  “We are.” Her reproaches were making a bubble of happiness rise in his chest. He pulled her back into his arms to show her just how grownup.

  “We have to stop,” she murmured against his chin sometime later. But even though he had lifted her off the ground to bring her face to his, she wasn’t struggling. She was leaning as hard as she could against his erection. Not grinding herself into him, but nestling close. As if her body were overruling her mind.

  “We could fish,” he allowed. He kissed her one more time and made sure she was steady on her feet when he put her down. “Maybe we are moving a little faster than you’re comfortable with.”

  “We hardly know each other,” she said. She looked around for her rod and began to fiddle with the fly.

  “So why does it feel as though we’ve known each other forever?” Why does it feel as though you’re mine?

  “I guess we have been getting acquainted when you are reading to the girls,” she conceded. She looked around for her sunglasses.

  He cleared his throat. “They’re down your shirt,” he said.

  She fished them out. The skin of her neck was mottled with arousal, and her cheeks were rosy. “Anyone could have come,” she pointed out.

  Harrison was sure that Grant and Reynolds were too wise to bring the girls after them. “Shall we fish?” he asked peaceably.

  They each caught three more of the dappled fish. And they let them all go. The granddaddy bass woke up from his nap, sneered at them, and swam away at a leisurely pace. Tasha tried to tempt him again, but his contempt made him invincible. He went downstream unharmed.

  Tasha couldn’t stop laughing. “I’ve never run into a fish like that. Cam is going to be wild when I tell him.”

  The stools were empty when they got back to the tank. There were no worms in the little white cottage cheese tub. The big blue bucket held an assortment of small fish. The girls had been busy. He was counting the wriggling fish when he realized that Tasha’s scent had changed.

  “Where have they gone?” Her voice was high-pitched with anxiety.

  He glanced at his watch. “My guess is the girls wanted a snack and they’re inside the cottage.”

  “Of course.” But she didn’t sound as if she believed it was likely. She was more worried than he had realized.

  He whistled loud and high. Grant answered immediately. His two-whistle call was interrogative. Harrison responded with a reassuring low note. “They’re in the cottage,” he said infusing certainty into his voice. “Let’s go put our stuff away.”

  “Do you guys have a whole set of signals?” she asked. Her heart rate had settled down and that stink of fear was dispersing.

  He nudged her waist. Just a reassuring touch to let his woman know she was safe. “Dozens,” he said. “Cell phones don’t work one hundred percent out here in the woods. Besides, back when we were boys, they were still the size of bricks. We wouldn’t have hauled them outside for a day’s adventuring, even if Mom and Dad had been willing to buy us some.”

  She relaxed and smiled again, although she looked a little sheepish, as though she was ashamed of her fears. Tasha obviously believed that someone had arranged that accident on Westford Road. It should be an easy matter to set her mind at ease. And his job.

  “Let’s stash these in the mudroom.” He opened the back door.

  Grant and Reynolds were sitting at the kitchen table with the girls. Plates of crackers and half-drunk glasses of milk dotted the old wooden table. Becky and Quincy were babbling loudly about their success. Even his phoenix ears weren’t quite able to tell which girl was which as they excitedly told Tasha about catching their minnows. Becky was losing her Georgia drawl and acquiring a Texas twang like Quincy’s.

  “We saw,” Tasha said. Her hands were damp. He went to the sink and washed his too.

  “Our bucket is so full we can’t fit any more fishes,” Becky announced. “Uncle Grant said.”

  “Uncle Grant is right,” Reynolds said.

  “We’re going to put them back in the tank to get bigger,” Quincy said importantly. “We’ll have to lift the bucket together, because it’s so heavy we can’t manage by ourselves.”

  “Was your fishing successful too?” Grant asked slyly.

  Tasha’s face turned a lovely sunset color. “We caught us a mess of bass, but we threw them all back because they were too small,” she lied. “We were really trying to catch us the great-granddaddy of all bass.” Harrison leaned back against the kitchen counter as his woman spun a funny story out of their mild exploits.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  “Did you hear that?” Shawn elbowed Dustin. Why couldn’t the bastard hush?

  “Hear what?” Dustin all but hollered. Sometimes Shawn despaired of his older brothers. How was it possible for shifters to be so deaf and blind? So all-fired know-it-all and so shit-assed dumb?

  “That singing.” Shawn made sure there was no sibilance in his voice to make it carry.

  “I don’t hear no singing,” Malik declared like he wanted a fight.

  Shawn pointed to the cameras mounted thirty feet up. They were cleverly disguised to look like growths on the trees. But he knew what they were and he wouldn’t have been at all surprised if they were also equipped with directional microphones. Whoever the fuck these D’Angelos were, their compound was a fucking fortress. And Malik and Dustin seemed determined to storm the castle walls and ring the doorbell.

  His brothers peered shortsightedly. “Fucking trees,” Malik said eloquently.

  His brother’s almost square face was still bruised from Mom’s punches. His greasy mullet wafted his stink to Shawn. They didn’t call wolverines skunk bears because they smelled sweet. Like all the weasel family they exuded a musky funk. Staying dirty was probably Malik’s idea of being inconspicuous. Like people wouldn’t remember a guy who stunk up their restaurant or gas station.

  What the hell had he done to deserve these two screw-ups?
The Willets had a good business with a great cover if only Mom would get over her hard-on for the Reynoldses. Who cared if Dean Willet was fucking avenged or not? They could get rich easy if only they would stop screwing up the business.

  First it had been sending Malik off to be a fucking steward on a cruise ship. And for what? What good did it do them when the Reynoldses died? No one had paid them a damned nickel for sabotaging that launch. And they had lost money while Malik was unable to drive truck. But Mom had insisted.

  And she was starting all over again with more craziness. He had arranged for Malik to take good Illinois cheese to Colorado. Product that you got paid for the second it was delivered. As a bonus, you got a bulletproof reason to be where your real business was. So what the fuck did you want to stuff hillbilly heroin in with the cheddar for?

  If Malik had been pulled over, the cops would’ve had him for sure. What the fuck did either of them think would happen when the K-9 unit got to sniffing their container? Malik thought that because he couldn’t smell the fucking OxyContin over the smell of his own stink, and the smell of the cheese, that the dogs would be just as confused. As if.

  For a wolverine, Malik couldn’t smell shit. And Dustin was worse. Neither of them could see further than their own snouts. And they couldn’t hear shit. That singing wasn’t very loud, but it fucking scared him to his toes. It made him want to stay on the far side of the D’Angelos’ fence.

  He was pretty sure that he was invisible, crouched here in the ditch. But that wasn’t much use with Malik and Dustin standing up and moaning loud enough to be heard in Florida. Loose fucking cannons. As always.

  “I say we should just go in and do the three of them,” Dustin suggested for at least the third time. “Get it fucking over with. I’m tired of all this screwing around.”

  Malik’s fist descended on Dustin’s filthy red cap like a sledgehammer. Shawn backed away. If his brothers were going to have one of their brawls, he was done. He had no time for this shit. But Dustin scuttled away rubbing his head.

  “Cameron Reynolds is a fucking bear,” Malik said low and mean. “And those fucking Texans probably have all the fucking guns in the world. There’s no way I’m going to try to take out three fucking people when we don’t know shit about the lay of the land.” He rounded on Shawn. “Couldn’t you fucking get Google maps?”

  Shawn didn’t even bother to defend himself. He had explained about eight ways to Sunday just how strange and how telling it was that Google Earth did not show a single photograph of the D’Angelo land. When even the most remote spots on earth had been photographed, to find a place in America that might as well have been a blank was not just fucking weird, it was lose-your-shit terrifying. These D’Angelos were powerful. No doubt General Fucking D’Angelo was too fucking important for just anyone to be able to figure out where and how he lived.

  Their best bet was to go back to San Angelo and lay a trap for Natasha Morrow Reynolds Sutcliffe and her brat. That’s who the client had paid them to off. Sooner or later, the bitch was going to get herself another car and take herself back home. Maybe that brother of hers would go with her and maybe he wouldn’t.

  The job was to take out the bitch and her spawn. It was not to try to be a hero. If his brothers hadn’t fucking worked out that there wasn’t no way in hell to make Mom happy, they never would.

  He had a bad feeling. Course he had had nothing but bad feelings for months. If only Mom and his brothers could understand what a good business they had and stop screwing around with it, they could get rich. It was a brilliant operation. You got paid for the trucking and for the other stuff. It was practically risk-free. If there ever was an investigation, and there never had been, the client would take the fall.

  They got paid in advance, with no way for anyone to tie the money to them. Practically no way for the cops to tie the clients to the accidents. The Willets could rake it in until the cows came home.

  But Colleen had to have her idiot revenge. As if anyone on the planet gave a flying fuck that her dickwad sperm contributor had been killed. And now here was Malik trying to make a bit of drug money on the side. As if those asswipes running the distribution weren’t going to screw them over the first chance they got.

  Shawn set off toward the pickup. He didn’t say anything. Not even when his new boots filled up with fucking ditch water. But if Dustin and Malik didn’t follow him, they were shit out of luck. He had arranged for them to have the perfect ride. And what had he gotten for his pains? A lot of grumbling and a bunch of punches to the gut.

  Malik didn’t like that first they had lifted a tag from long-term parking at the airport and then swapped it out for the one on some old lady’s ride that they found in the parking lot of the discount supermarket. He couldn’t see that once they had grandma’s fucking plate, they were gold.

  His brothers would happily have boosted the first truck they saw and put the old lady’s tag on that. But Shawn made Malik drive around on the back of his motorcycle in the dark until they found a used car lot. He had picked out the perfect pickup. It was beat up but it still had good tires. Best of all, it was parked smack dab in the middle of a small herd of equally battered pickups. Even if someone missed it, they would think they must’ve parked it someplace else.

  He had made his brothers help him carry the pickup over the other vehicles and out to the road before he had hotwired it. For once he hadn’t listened to their whining. What was the use of weightlifting if they couldn’t carry one small truck? The truck wasn’t that heavy. Couldn’t have been more than a couple of tons.

  Wolverines weren’t very big either in human or in animal. But they made up for it by being solid muscle. Anyone looking at the Willet brothers would think they were short tubs of lard. But let those dopes get in a fight with a wolverine, and they’d have their fucking asses wiped.

  So now they had an anonymous truck, with a bed where he could put his Harley. And it looked like every other Bubba’s truck. And were Malik and Dustin grateful? Nope. Now they fucking wanted to fight the fucking D’Angelos. Or him.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “How’s it going, Linc?” Harrison asked.

  For a heartbeat, there was only breathing on the line. “Harry?” Lincoln sounded surprised. As if Harrison never called him. But they had talked just last week.

  “Yup. How are you and Bev? And the baby?”

  “Fine. We’re all fine. Hardy’s sleeping through the night at last.”

  Harrison realized his brother – his best friend – was afraid to mention his wife and son to him. He had to do better. “That’s a great phase.”

  Should he reveal that it never lasted? The kid would have a growth spurt, or cut a tooth, or catch a cold and start waking mom and dad in the middle of the night again. He decided to let Lincoln and Beverly enjoy their interlude of peace.

  “Sleeping, it’s the new clubbing,” Linc said cheerfully. “I hear you took a whole two weeks’ leave. Think Special Forces will be able to manage without you?”

  “We’re none of us indispensable,” Harrison replied.

  “Say that again.” Linc’s twang was wry. “Not that I’m complaining. I’ve got a good business, and mostly I don’t have to stand up to my ass in alligators anymore.”

  “You miss it,” Harry said when their laughter died away.

  “Every day, Harry, every day. But all good things must end. And civilian life has its advantages. I get to sleep in a warm bed every night.”

  “That’s so. You heard from Pierce?” Harrison asked. He braced himself.

  “Yesterday. Diana is bored with being pregnant.” Linc chuckled like an old pro. “I feel for Pierce. He’s painted the nursery twice – Diana can’t make up her mind about the color.”

  That brought back memories. “Just before Harry Jr. was born, Stephanie ordered four sets of sheets for our bed. Took her an entire week to decide which ones to keep. And I swear, I couldn’t tell the damned difference. They were all beige. I hated them all equ
ally. After the baby came, she wanted to know why I had let her choose such butt-ugly bedding.”

  “I hope you apologized,” Lincoln said.

  “We had a fight,” Harrison admitted. “I was too ignorant to realize that arguing with a postpartum woman was just plain dumb. We slept on those damned sheets for years.”

  Harrison held his breath to the count of four to conceal the aching sadness conjured by the thought of that long ago fight. Boring or not, he and Steph had set those sheets alight enough times to make three more babies.

  “Pierce will have to figure it out for himself, Harry.” Linc interrupted his musing.

  “He’ll be fine. Listen, we’ve got us a bit of a situation here.”

  “In Grape Creek?” Linc asked. “I thought Mom and Dad had lined up a major celebration with you, Grant and Frankie, plus the Reynolds kids? Mom and Dad sure seem taken with that little girl. Quincy too. What’s her name? Renee?”

  “Rebecca. Natasha Reynolds is Tasha Sutcliffe now. Her little girl is Rebecca. Called Becky. Did Mom tell you that Tasha had a car accident on Thursday evening?”

  “Nope. Of course, these days when I call, Meemaw wants me to put Hardy on so she can listen to him babble. I don’t get much chance to chat. Is Tasha okay?”

  “Two black eyes. Quincy was in the car with her and so was Becky. They are both fine.”

  Lincoln’s indrawn breath was audible. “Jesus H.,” he said. “Christ, I’m sorry, Harry. How are you doing?”

  “I had a bad night,” he admitted.

  “Shift on a stick. Of course you did. So what’s the problem?”

  It didn’t take long to sketch out Thursday’s accident. Lincoln listened without comment until Harrison ground to a halt.

  “Herman Escobar was never the fastest bull in the herd, but he got the job done. Even if he was a Bison.” Linc meant only that Escobar had played ball for the rival high school. The Coal Lake Bison and the Grape Creek Angels had contested the regionals for years.

  “Dad thinks he’s a damn good sheriff. Voted for him. Escobar’s not a guy to jump to conclusions, but something struck him as off. But since Tasha didn’t risk her life, her daughter’s life and Quincy’s.” He couldn’t finish.