Jordan knelt down and very carefully guided Wes to his feet. She draped his arm around her and helped him towards her bedroom, supporting most of his weight herself. “Easy there …”She guided him carefully through the doorway and towards the bed. He sat down heavily, and she leaned him back against her pillows. Jordan removed his shoes, setting them beside the bed, glanced at his pants, and decided to leave them where they were.
Reaching for the blanket at the foot of her bed, she draped it over him gently. “Get some sleep,” she said. “I’ll be up late making sense of all of this. We’ll talk in the morning.”
As she started to move away, he grabbed her hand and stopped her. “Jordan?”
Against her better judgment, she let him hold her there, and she looked down at him, her eyes gazing into his. “What?”
“You’re amazing.”
“No, I’m not,” she said, easing her hand from his and gently laying it on his stomach. “You’re on drugs.”
“I mean it,” he said, “and what Alana was thinking about you isn’t true. You’re beautiful, and incredible, and you outshine her by a million miles and a thousand watts.”
Jordan couldn’t help but smile. Surprising herself, she leaned down and brushed a kiss against his forehead. “Sleep, okay? I’ll see you in the morning.”
This time when she moved away, he didn’t object. His eyes were closed, and his breathing was steady. She had only done a makeshift job of patching him up, and he would need to see someone, but he would be fine for the night. His sleep would restore him, helping to replenish his blood supply and clear his head.
Jordan walked to her bedroom door and looked back at him once more before closing it behind her. She went to the bathroom, stripped off, and got in the shower. His blood was all over her, and she needed to freshen up and invigorate herself before she got to work. She had a long night ahead of her trying to figure out who had attacked them and what their connection was to Alana. They were right in the middle of a murder investigation, and they didn’t know the beginning of the story yet.
She wouldn’t sleep tonight.
Chapter 14
Wes
Wes slept fitfully, but he must have fallen into a deeper sleep at some point during the night, because when he woke, he was surprised to see sun streaming in through the window. He blinked, the pain in his shoulder was the first sensation he was aware of, although considering a bullet was lodged there, he would have expected the pain to be much worse. His entire body felt stiff, and he moved it gingerly, trying to get into a more comfortable position without jarring his shoulder. He only halfway-registered that he was in Jordan’s bedroom.
But when he turned his head, that one fact became crystal clear in his mind, because her petite frame was stretched out beside him, on top of the covers, her head pillowed on her arm, sweetly asleep. Looking at her as she lay there, he would never imagine that she was the same woman who had fought with such strength the night before. She looked angelic. Peaceful. Her pixie cut was sticking up a bit, and her lips were slightly parted. Her legs were curled up tightly against her body, and the hand that wasn’t beneath her head, cushioning it, was spread out on top of the covers.
Even in her sleep, she was beautiful. His hurt shoulder was closest to her, which meant that moving his hand in her direction was painful. But he did it anyway, laying his hand over hers and brushing his thumb along her knuckles, softly.
She stirred, but didn’t wake. Her hand wrapped around his, holding on tightly.
He wondered when she had gone to sleep, vaguely remembering that she had said she was going to be doing some research on the case. She had probably stayed up late, and he should let her sleep for a few more hours. His eyes drifted to the clock beside the bed, and his heart stopped. Wes started to sit up without thinking, and pain jolted through him. He groaned, trapped between lying down and sitting up.
“What? What’s wrong?” Jordan was awake, and there was no groggy stage between sleep and waking for her. One minute she had been completely out, and the next she was wide awake, ready for action. “What are you doing?”
“It’s after 9:00 in the morning,” he said through gritted teeth. “I was supposed to be at work over two hours ago.”
“You have to be joking,” Jordan said, getting up off the bed and rounding to the side where she could stand in front of him. She carefully eased him back down onto the covers. “You are not going to work. Not today. Not tomorrow. Not next week.”
Wes didn’t protest as she laid him back down, his initial panic waning. But a heavy dread replaced the panic. “I know I can’t work,” he said, “but I didn’t even call in. I have to call my boss right now. My clients will be calling, looking for me.”
“And what are you going to tell him?” Jordan asked, picking his phone up from the table beside the bed and handing it to him. “I know you have to call him and give a plausible excuse for not showing up, but you need to be careful of what you say.”
“I’m going to tell him the truth,” Wes said. “That I was shot. I’ll tell him that I can’t go into details, but there’s no other way that he’s going to give me several weeks off without it costing me my job.”
Jordan didn’t look happy about his answer, but she nodded. “Just be careful.”
Wes opened his phone and saw that he had several missed calls, all from his boss. Dreading the conversation, he was about to have, he called his boss back.
“I’m sorry,” Wes said, when his boss answered, furious. “I know—I know. Listen, this is going to sound incredible, but it’s true. I was shot last night. I was too out of it to call and leave you a message then, and I’ve only just woken up.”
The conversation lasted several minutes. His boss was, understandably, astonished by his explanation and frustrated when Wes said that, for various reasons, he couldn’t go into detail. It was only his excellent long-term reputation at his workplace that got him off the hook, and his boss agreed to rearrange some things and give Wes time to recover without penalty.
When he hung up, Jordan was out in the living room again. Wes called to her, and she came walking back in, still in her clothes from the night before.
“Well?” Jordan asked, crossing her arms over her chest as she looked down at him. “How did it go?”
“He’s not happy,” Wes said, setting his phone down beside him. “He’ll go along with it, though. He wants a statement from a doctor.”
“He’ll have to wait for that,” Jordan said, perching on the edge of the bed and beginning to examine his dressing. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I’ve been shot.”
Jordan glanced up at his face, a hint of a smile. “People always love to use that line when they’ve been shot.”
“Do you spend a lot of time around people recovering from being shot?” Wes asked, wincing as she pulled his bandage back just enough to see beneath it.
“In my line of work? More than you’d think,” Jordan said. “You look okay under there. I mean, you’re not okay—you’ve been shot. And we do need to see a doctor. But you’re holding your own. How much of last night do you remember?”
Wes thought back, playing through the insane night in his head all over again. “All of it? I mean, I think all of it. I remember that I passed out at some point. So that part is missing. But otherwise—yeah, I’ve got all of it. Marched out at gunpoint, shot at, you’re a Kung Fu fighter, you carried me away on your back …I ended up here. Dress the wound. Tell me that you’re a superhero. Go to bed. Is that about it?”
Jordan sat back, but her hand stayed lightly on his chest. “I’m not a superhero, Wes.”
“You have super strength and super speed, and you can heal people,” he said. “I’m sorry, but that’s a superhero, by pretty much every definition. That’s literally Superman, but better. Well, you can’t fly, so I guess it’s Superman but different.”
There was a strange look on Jordan’s face that he didn’t understand. Her nose scrunched slightl
y, but then she turned away from him, standing up. “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”
“Okay,” Wes said, when she didn’t immediately continue. “And?”
“I’ll take your case.”
Wes blinked. “Okay, so I thought we were sort of past that bit.”
Jordan turned back towards him, her arms crossed over her chest. “No, I mean I’ll take your real case. See, you came to me as a transposed thought person. That’s a completely different case. It requires a completely different handling. But now—now we have an actual murder case. It’s not in the abstract anymore. We’ve seen these people. They’ve shot at you.”
“I’d like to point out that they didn’t just shoot at me,” he said, pointing at his injured shoulder. “This is a bullet wound.”
“Exactly,” Jordan said. “We’re fully invested in a murder case now, and we’re going to use your ability to hear people’s thoughts to figure out what the hell is going on.”
“And your superpowers.”
“About that,” Jordan said, walking back over to him. “So, that’s sort a secret.”
“Obviously,” Wes said, scoffing. “You can’t tell the public that you’re a superhero. The average person can’t handle that kind of information.”
Jordan smiled, shaking her head at him. “You are something else. Do you know that?”
With his good hand, Wes reached for hers, tugging her back onto the bed. “Is that why you were so worried about me reading your thoughts? Because I might find out?”
She nodded. “Yes. Mostly, yes.”
“Mostly?”
Jordan sighed, looking down at his hand, which still rested on her arm. “Wes, I can’t tell you everything. I just can’t. It’s not how things are done.”
He pouted his lips at her, mostly teasing her to put a smile back on her face. “But it would make me feel better.”
As intended, Jordan did smile. “We need to focus,” she said, dodging around his requests. “We’re officially on a murder case now. You’re injured. It’s possible that the people we saw last night know who we are and will try to take us out, now that we know who they are.”
“Do we know who they are?” Wes asked. “You know that the first one—the slight one. That was a woman. I’m sure of it after last night.”
Jordan nodded. “I’m sure of it, too. As for who they are … no. I don’t have names yet. But I did do sketches of them last night, so that we can remember clearly what they look like. I also did some hunting online to see if I could find anyone who has been recently arrested or otherwise gotten into trouble with the law who looks like either of the sketches. No such luck. I think our best bet is to look into Alana.”
Wes’s eyes widened. “Oh God. What does it say about me that I completely spaced the fact that they were after Alana?”
“I think it says that you’re not in love with her anymore,” Jordan said.
“I wonder if I ever really was,” Wes said, more to himself than to her. “How can you actually be in love with someone who you don’t know at all?”
Jordan shook her head. “I can’t answer that. But—I do know one thing about Alana. We need to get her under some sort of protection. We don’t know what will happen next. They could panic and take her out now, before they’re stopped. They could call off the whole thing and go underground. I don’t know. But we can’t take the risk.”
Wes nodded. “Yeah, but there’s one problem with that.”
“What?”
“Talking to Alana.”
Jordan rolled her eyes at him, standing up and walking over to pick up her own phone. “I work for a security and investigation agency,” she reminded him. “I can always call in someone to work with Alana directly. It’s probably not the best idea for you two to be spending a lot of time together. Hannah should be available.”
“Hannah?” Wes asked. “Just one person?”
Jordan lifted her eyes, arching an eyebrow at him. “I can tell by your tone of voice that your question really is, ‘just one woman?’”
“No,” Wes said, although he had been thinking that. “I just mean… one person. Well, yes. One woman. I mean, it’s not like every woman is like you. Can Hannah bodily carry someone away from a shooter?”
Jordan just stared at him, a blank expression on her face.
He waited a moment for her answer, and then it dawned on him. “Oh my God. All of you? It’s all of you at the agency? They’re all like you?”
“Yes.”
Wes couldn’t believe it. “Holy hell. I mean, wow. You’re an agency of superheroes?”
“We’re not superheroes,” Jordan said, pressing a few buttons on her phone and stepping out of the room as she made her call.
While she was gone, Wes stared up at the ceiling, trying to wrap his mind around it all. He was lying on Jordan’s bed with a gunshot wound in his shoulder, and she was a superhero. She could protest all she wanted, but in his book, a person who could do the sort of things that she could do was, hands down, a superhero. And it wasn’t just her. He had just assumed that she was working as an investigator in an agency of other investigators, keeping a low profile about her abilities.
But no. It was all of them. There were five of them there, if he remembered correctly. And they were all like Jordan.
It was amazing. There was so much in the world that he had no idea about. He hadn’t thought that he lived a sheltered life, but apparently while he was digging flower beds and building manmade lakes, there were other people running around saving the world.
Jordan walked back in. “Hannah is willing to meet up with us. She’s on her way over.” Moving to his side, she handed him some pills. “More pain relief. While we wait for Hannah, I need to take a shower and get ready. Then there’s something that I have to do, and you’re going to have to stay here. I know you don’t like that, but you physically can’t come with me.”
Wes didn’t like that idea at all, but he also knew that he was in no shape to be running around. “What are you going to go do?”
“It’s a secret,” Jordan said.
“A superhero secret?”
Jordan sighed, rolling her eyes up to the ceiling. “Yes. If you want to call it that …yes. It’s a superhero secret.”
“Okay,” Wes said, taking the glass of water that she picked up from beside the bed. “But just so you know, you can trust me with your secrets, Jordan.”
Chapter 15
Jordan
Trust him with your secrets.
The words kept playing over and over again in Jordan’s mind, as she drove out of Baton Rouge, going ten miles over the speed limit as she hurried towards her destination.
Wes wanted her to trust him with her secrets. If only he knew what a big deal it was that she had told him as much as she had. She had never talked to anyone outside of the Rockwell Clan about her abilities or her life as a dragon shifter. There were plenty of rumors around the Baton Rouge area that there was a group of people who had unknown powers. Those rumors even centered on the Rockwell’s, since that family always seemed to be in the middle of every suspicious happening in the area.
People knew, of course, that there was something different about the Rockwell Agency. They would be blind not to know. That’s why Wes had come to her in the first place—he had known to take inexplicable problems there.
But people didn’t know that the five agents who worked there shifted into their dragon forms just about every night, patrolling the city from the air. And that was the way it was supposed to be. If people started to know, then the unspoken agreement between the people of Baton Rouge, and the Rockwell Clan all began to fall apart.
But Ryan had told Abigail.
Granted, he hadn’t had much of a choice. The spirit possessing her had returned Abigail to consciousness while she was riding on Ryan’s back, as he flew through the air. He’d made a tough call, shifting into his dragon form to keep Abigail safe. Then he’d had to deal with her knowing about who he r
eally was. It had worked out because Abigail had fallen in love with Ryan, and she was a part of their clan now, as if she had always been there.
But that wasn’t likely to happen with Wes. The thought alone made her feel flushed and uncomfortable inside.
That was why she needed to go off on her own. It wasn’t going to be for long. But she needed to fly. Jordan flew almost every night. It was a way to keep her nerves settled and her head clear and focused. She had too much energy pent-up within her to not find a way to release it. Hannah would stay with Wes until she got back.
She exited the highway and drove ten minutes through some smaller back roads, heading towards a familiar spot within the bayou. Parking her car, she quickly got out, her bag over her shoulder, and headed into the trees. As was often the case in Louisiana in the mornings, there was a heavy cloud cover. It would shelter her from being seen. And her blue scales made it easier for her to fly during the daytime as well, even though she usually didn’t. She would be well hidden.
As soon she was deep enough within the bayou, she stopped and stripped off her clothes, shoving them into her bag and setting the bag at the base of a tree, where it would be safe. Naked and out in the open air, she stretched her arms up over her head, then jumped upward, shifting gracefully. Her strong blue wings unfurled, and she swept them through the air, lifting herself up. To avoid being spotted, she sped upward, not taking the time to enjoy the climb. Nose pointed upward, she took herself higher and higher, breaking through the cloud cover and then evening out above it.
It was a relief to feel the energy flowing through her body, expelled with each stroke of her wings through the air. Flying was like therapy to Jordan, and she rolled into it, tumbling over and over again in the air and flying on her back, as she stared up at the clear, blue sky above her.
It wasn’t just that she had missed a night of flying that made her so desperate to get away to soar on her own. Wes had her nerves all jumbled up in a way that she wasn’t used to. She had known plenty of gorgeous men, and she had even dated a number of them, although always causally. And she had known many kind, funny, intelligent men with good morals and good jobs and a purpose in the world.
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