by Alisa Woods
He pulled back from the kiss to lower his mouth to her neck.
She moaned and tipped her head back.
“You have too many clothes on,” he whispered between wet nips at her skin.
“Yes,” she breathed.
He backed her toward the bed, slowly. They’d gone zero-to-sixty in less than five seconds—there was something about her obsession with shifters that was sending his wolf into overdrive—and he seriously hoped she was telling the truth about not being a virgin. Because he was suddenly dying to take her hard, slamming the flimsy motel bed against the wall and hearing her scream out his name.
If she liked wolves before, he aimed to make her a permanent fan.
He had her nearly to the bed—and her dress inched up past her waist—when voices suddenly exploded in his ear.
“Ten o’clock!”
“I see him!”
“What the fuck—”
“Jimmy, stay here. Murphy, Simpson, take the far flank. Ashton, you’re with me. Go, go, go!”
Noah yanked back from kissing Emily. Something was going down outside, and he was standing in the motel room, naked with a hard-on. Shit.
He abruptly left Emily teetering at the bedside and raced back to where his clothes lay in a heap on the musty carpet. As he hurriedly pulled them on, she was sputtering out something while wrapping her arms tightly around herself again.
“I have to go,” he said, roughly, yanking his shirt over his head. The shouts were growing louder and more frantic in his ear.
“I… did I… do something wrong?” She was shaking.
Fuck. He didn’t know if she was involved in this, whatever it was, or if she was just an innocent bystander, but he didn’t have time to explain.
“I just have to go.” He shoved on his shoes and raced to the door. Right before he reached it, he heard a series of pops that had to be gunfire. Shit! He flung it open, lurched outside, and remembered to turn on his mic. “What the hell’s going on?” he shouted over the growls and grunts coming through his earbud. He raced to the end of the balcony where he could to get a good look at his car and the van parked below. His pack had swarmed over a guy, taking him down hard against the pavement. One of them had shifted, but he was lying prone on the ground while the others held the perp down.
Noah pounded down the stairs and hauled ass toward the downed wolf.
No, no, no… its relatively slender body, short-cut brown fur… it had to be Jimmy.
Noah reached Jace’s side, where he was bent over Jimmy. Jace had been a medic in the Army, and he was already probing Jimmy’s wound, which was somewhere on his head—it was covered in blood. Noah couldn’t tell how bad it was, but he’d seen plenty of head wounds overseas, and they were bad news. Jimmy’s eyes were closed, his face slack.
“Jace?” Noah held back, chest tight, not wanting to get in Jace’s way.
His hands were all over Jimmy’s head, feeling through the mess of fur and blood. “I think he’s just knocked out,” he said quickly. “Bullet only grazed him. But I need to get him in the van and stitch him up fast. Head wounds bleed like crazy.”
Relief trickled through Noah. Jace wouldn’t give that kind of hope if it weren’t real. Noah and three others quickly lifted Jimmy and carried him back to the van. The rest stayed behind to cuff the asshole who shot him. Noah wanted to tear the man apart, but they needed him alive to figure out if he was acting alone. As they were climbing in the van, a movement caught Noah’s eye—the girl, Emily, was staring at them from atop the balcony. He thought her expression was filled with horror, but he couldn’t be sure from this distance. Then she quickly turned and fled.
He let her go. If she were involved, they could track her down. If not, there was no reason for her to become part of this. He climbed into the van with the rest of his pack, hoping like crazy Jace could keep Jimmy alive.
All Emily had wanted was one night.
One night with a shifter would have changed everything for her. She would have finally been able to put her past behind her and live her life again. She had tried with other men, but she could never get through a first date without having a panic attack. She knew, she just knew, it would be different with a wolf. Shifters were no ordinary men—they were all about pack and family and love—and she was certain she would be safe with one of them.
Only it had all gone wrong. And a shifter had been shot.
Emily dropped her head into her hands, gripping her hair and shaking her head. She’d been sitting at her desk and staring at her screen for an hour, trying to figure out how last night had gone from the most exciting night of her life to the most horrifying in an instant. It had also been the most electrifying and the most embarrassing… it was like all the things her life had never been, for better and worse, all wrapped up in a single, intense night at a dingy motel. Not even a whole night, as she had planned… just a few heart-stopping minutes.
Part of her was screaming that this was exactly why she didn’t date. Why she only went out to movies with her friend, Sophie, never walked anywhere alone, and spent most of her nights at home with a good book and her cat, Peabody. It was a boring life, but it was a safe life. Another part of her was certain she had lived more in that brief period of time with Noah Wilding than in all the rest of her so-called “life” combined.
She raised her head and stared at the WildLove program on her screen. She should’ve known that putting herself in the database would’ve unraveled everything like crazy. It was the only thing she’d ever done that was even slightly against the rules. She was WildLove’s lead programmer, for heaven’s sake. It was her job to make sure it ran 24/7 without a hiccup, not to use it to score a date. She had just spent so long watching all the hookups happen, day after day—all those women who were not her, meeting insanely hot, super protective, safe shifter men. Was it so wrong that she wanted a small bit of that life for herself? She knew everything there was to know about shifters, and she was certain even one night would have changed everything.
She sighed, pushed away from her desk, and went in search of coffee. It only took a minute to brew her favorite chai latte in the breakroom Keurig, then she was back at her desk, a steaming cup by her keyboard, and still at a loss as to what had happened. The only thing to do was to erase last night from her memory… and from the WildLove database.
Her fingers flew over the keyboard while her coffee cooled.
She’d spent the last year hoping she might stumble upon a shifter the old-fashioned way, in a coffee shop or on her bus ride into work, even though she knew the odds of that were long. Shifters kept to the shadows for a reason—it was dangerous for them out on the streets, where the stupid humans of the city didn’t understand how amazing they were. But she wasn’t the kind of girl who could go to a shifter bar and meet someone there—she wouldn’t make it two feet inside the door. That left her with coming into work every day and watching other people live her dream life. Putting herself in the WildLove database seemed like the perfect fix… but it wasn’t until she saw Noah Wilding’s profile pop up that she had actually gone through with it.
You’re not a stalker, she told herself, although she was sure it would look that way to anyone peering in on her all-too-boring life. She followed all the news about any shifters—Noah and the Wilding pack had just been in the news a lot, so she knew all about him. The fact that he was outed by the hate group. The fact that he had served in Afghanistan. The horrible fact that his father was the disgraced Colonel Wilding, the man in charge of those terrible experiments that had been performed on shifters and exposed by Grace Krepky, the new openly-shifter candidate for the House of Representatives. It was about time shifters had a representative in the government! Emily knew that for sure.
But it was the heartbreaking story about Noah being released from the experiments performed by his own father, going back overseas to serve his country in Afghanistan, only to come home again because his pack was being threatened that had captured her imaginatio
n. It was tragic and horrible and everything that made shifters and their packs brave and amazing. The magical bond they had tied them together stronger even than blood—and that was part of what she loved about them. Much more so than some of the humans she had encountered in her life, especially her supposed “family” who never protected her.
Not like she needed. Not when she needed it.
She pushed away those thoughts and brought up Noah’s profile. He was insanely hot, just like all the shifter men—dreamy brown eyes, broad shoulders with all those shifter muscles. It was no random swipe that had brought up “Emily Richards” on his WildLove app. It had been easy to force the algorithms to make her profile come up while he was online, as well as keep the other excessively gorgeous female choices from showing, but there was no way she could make him actually swipe right for her. In fact, she had been certain he wouldn’t. After all, she couldn’t even bring herself to do one of those super-sexy poses the women on WildLove all seemed to have—makeup that oozed sex appeal and clothes they were practically spilling out of. Emily figured she had no chance against that. She was doing good to quickly paste in a picture from the company picnic last summer and upload before she lost her nerve.
But then he did swipe right for her. And suddenly her life was on fire with potential.
Right away, Noah had messaged her, asking for her number on the secure chat line. After several small heart attacks, she had worked up the courage to reply. WildLove was a hookup app, but sometimes people set up coffee dates first, maybe in public settings if they were worried. But most human females were on the app precisely because they want a wild time, not a boyfriend. And the shifters were also there for only one thing… and it wasn’t to look for a mate. Most WildLovers went straight for a time and a place for the hookup. Noah was really sweet and funny in chat, but he quickly got down to business, and they had agreed to meet at that sleazy motel… and then the whole thing had turned into a disaster.
Even worse—if her boss found out, Emily would be fired in two seconds flat.
With her tech skills, she could make it all disappear—there would be no evidence of any hookup between “Emily Richards” and Noah Wilding. But then she realized, she couldn’t, not with how things went down. Her boss was sure to find out a shifter had been shot at a WildLove hookup. How could she not? Emily had fled the scene, but the police must’ve been called in and reports must’ve been made. She prayed the shifter who had been shot—the one Noah had run out to help—had survived. And there was something really strange about there being other shifters there that night, and even more weird that somehow they’d been attacked. But she figured the motel must have all kinds of shady dealings going on. She and Noah certainly weren’t the WildLovers hooking up last night.
But somewhere along the line, this shooting would get back to the agency and Emily’s boss. Someone would search the records, and it would be obvious that she was Emily Jones, the short girl with the long blonde hair and the serious character flaw of going after shifters who were totally out of her league. Erasing it would only make her look guilty of things she wasn’t guilty of… namely being involved in the shooting.
So, she couldn’t erase last night… but she could try to scour any evidence that pointed to her. She brought up the WildLove database, snagged a picture off another Internet dating site, and swapped it for her profile. The woman looked somewhat like her—same long blonde hair, same age and roundish kind of face—and the fake name could stay. She’d already been careful not to put any identifying features in her profile and used an untraceable account for the secure chat room.
If anyone went on WildLove now, there would be nothing to tie her, Emily Jones, to the Emily Richards that Noah had met the night before. And she doubted he would remember her well enough to realize the picture of the girl was any different from the person he actually met. The only thing that could trip her up was if someone went through the backups and change records and found the substitution. Or if someone had screencapped her profile before the change. Noah was her first and only WildLove hookup—she hadn’t even answered any of the other messages—so she was probably safe with that. Her fingers flew over the keyboard again, accessing all the backups and changing them so there was no trace of what she had done.
Emily picked up her mug—it was the one with Coffee is My Boyfriend emblazoned on it—and breathed in the creamy spice smell of her latte. Then she closed her eyes and breathed out all the anxieties that had wrapped her in a tight ball since she’d stumbled home from the disaster non-hookup last night. Over the sacred fumes of her coffee, she vowed never to be so stupid again. She’d had her one chance with a shifter, and that was that. She would go back to her normal, sane, boring life, and count herself lucky for it.
“Are you going to breathe that or drink it?” a raspy voice said from the door.
It made her jump, pop open her eyes, and spill coffee on her keyboard. Groaning, Emily quickly set the mug down and snatched up her wireless keyboard to shake the liquid off before it could sink in. Then she glared at the source of the voice—her boss, Marjorie Simmons, aging hipster and CEO of the Seattle Shifters Dating Agency.
“Geez, Marjorie,” Emily said, “give me a heart attack, why don’t you?”
“Girlfriend, you need a little heart action.” She smirked that little knowing smile she often had. Marjorie was a sex-obsessed old lady—okay probably only about sixty—one of those artsy Seattle types who knew all the best places to get coffee, hung out at all the poetry readings and art jams in the city, and knew absolutely everyone who was anyone. She was far more hip than Emily, and way too Zen to be the boss of a multi-million dollar company.
Plus Marjorie had more excitement in a single month than Emily had in her entire life—and definitely more sex. She was always off with a new boyfriend. The whole idea of WildLove had been her brainchild one day over coffee. Emily was working her way through college as a barista when Marjorie shared her sketched-out-on-a-napkin plan she had just come up with. Emily had simply said it wouldn’t be that hard, technology-wise, to implement and boom! Marjorie hired her on the spot as lead developer for the app.
Emily had almost graduated from the University of Washington with her computer science degree, and there were already a lot of dating apps out there, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch. Putting in security protocols for the chatroom had been a little tricky, but Marjorie agreed that protecting shifter anonymity was paramount. And funding had been no limit. Marjorie effortlessly brought in a ton of investment money from “a few of her friends.” As soon as it was live, WildLove just took off. The rise of the shifter-haters had made it even more popular, as shifters stopping going to the bars and started looking for safer ways to hookup. Plus shifters were out in the open now, buzzing up all the tabloids.
WildLove was just the right idea at the right time.
Stuff like that happened to Marjorie. And ever since Emily started working at Seattle Shifters, Marjorie had been trying to rub some of that magic pixie dust off on her—specifically, trying to hook Emily up with guys. Of course, dipping into WildLove as her personal dating playground was strictly off-limits, as it was for all employees. It was right there in the employee handbook. Emily had read it.
“My heart is just fine the way it is,” she lied a gigantic, monster-sized lie of ridiculousness. She hoped it didn’t show on her face.
“Sure it is, kid,” her boss said, her face wrinkling up with pity, although not too unkindly. “You’ve got a heart the size of Montana—don’t think I don’t know it, just because you keep it all wrapped up tight in those little sweaters you wear in the middle of July.”
Emily pulled her sweater tighter across her chest. “It gets chilly in here with the air conditioning.”
Marjorie just nodded. “Listen, sweetie, I’ve got some bad news. I’ve been keeping this from you because I know what a soft heart you have for our shifters. And I sure like that part about you, but I need your help with something now, s
o I need to tell you.”
Emily swiveled her chair to face Marjorie a little better. “Sure, Marge, you know I’ll do anything for you. And Seattle Shifters. You guys are my life.”
Marjorie gave her a sad look. “Damn shame that is, too. But never mind all that.” She sucked in a breath and let it out slow. “I’m afraid that a couple of our hookups have gone, well, very badly. You know about the hate groups in the news, right?”
Emily nodded, and her heart started jumping around like an electrocuted rabbit. Oh God, did Marjorie know? Already?
Marjorie continued, “There was a shifter shot last night. He wasn’t one of our customers, but the shooting was associated with a WildLove hookup.”
Oh God, here it comes. “That’s horrible,” Emily squeaked.
Marjorie scowled. “Damn right it is! These bastards… I don’t know where they get off targeting shifters when they should just look in the mirror and see where all the assholes in the world are. Motherfuckers!”
Emily managed not to wince. She’d gotten used to Marjorie’s colorful language over the last year. “Is the shifter all right?”
Marjorie’s anger quickly morphed into a smile. “Yes, sweetie, he is. You know how tough those sexy boys are.”
Emily nodded, relieved.
“Anyway,” her boss said, “this isn’t the first time.”
“It’s not?” Emily’s mind spun up fast. Wait… there were more attacks connected to WildLove? “Why haven’t I heard anything about this on the news?” Now that she thought about it, she’d been so panicked about being caught, she hadn’t even thought to watch the news last night.
“Well, as you probably know,” her boss said, “I have a few friends in the shifter community. We’ve been working together to make sure this thing stays quiet. Partly because we don’t want people to panic, and partly because we’ve been trying to find out who’s using WildLove to stalk shifters. I’ve been working with the River brothers—you’ve heard of them, right? They run that security firm, Riverwise.”