by Moira Rogers
And if he kept touching her so intimately, she wouldn’t give a damn about their alpha’s instructions. “Colin?”
He kissed the spot beneath her ear. “You’re not a temptress.”
She shivered. “You only say that because I haven’t unbuttoned your pants yet.”
Warm laughter wrapped around her. “That’d make you a seductress, I think. Nothing evil about those.”
“In that case…” She slipped her arm around his neck and kissed him.
For a few seconds, he didn’t react. He barely seemed to breathe as her lips found his, but there was nothing still about him. He felt coiled, every muscle tensed, as if he could explode into movement with the next heartbeat.
But when he moved, it was just a little. His hand tightened on her hip and his head tilted, and he parted his lips and drew one of hers between them with a low groan.
Heat and strength. Both wrapped her in heady pleasure, with only the taste of him penetrating the sensual fog. Lorelei slid her hand up into his hair once again and tugged, smiled against his mouth when he growled and asserted dominance with a teasing brush of teeth.
He kissed like he didn’t want to stop, nipping and licking until the tingles that suffused her spread all the way to her toes. She pulled her mouth from his, dropping her face to his bare shoulder. “That could be damn distracting.”
“Mmm.” Colin curled his free hand around the back of her neck. “I’m not thinking about pancakes anymore, that’s for sure.”
She swallowed—hard. “A dangerous distraction.”
“Maybe.” He exhaled slowly and relaxed his fingers, smoothing them through her hair. “At least while we’re still here.”
Here, hidden in a sliver of a fantasy between tragedies. “Do you want to go to Christian’s warehouse this morning or wait until tonight?”
Regret hung so thick between them, she could almost taste it. “We should probably go as soon as we can,” Colin said. “The quicker we know…”
“Breakfast first.” She nodded to their rapidly cooling food. “Then we’ll go. We have a lot of ground to cover, but I know the way.”
If only she could say that about everything.
If there had only been one warehouse, Colin thought Lorelei would have held together. He couldn’t imagine the amount of courage it took her to cross the threshold the first time, but she showed no fear as she strode into the lair of her former enemy to find…
Nothing. Nothing there, and nothing at the second location, or the third. With each stop, her jaw clenched a little more. Her face paled, her eyes tightened. Frustration churned in Colin’s gut, battling his wolf’s deeper rage. They’d soothed and they’d petted, they’d coaxed the female into letting go of fear, and now it was back, redoubled.
And Colin couldn’t stop it. He ground his teeth as he pulled into the fourth parking lot—only two more, and he didn’t know what Lorelei would do if they found nothing at all—but as he reached for her shoulder, a flash of sunlight dragged his gaze to the rearview mirror.
A dark SUV rolled by, not slowing, and Colin watched until it disappeared around the corner before settling a hand on Lorelei’s arm. “You need a minute?”
She stared at the squat building, with its peeling siding and barred doors. It was small for a warehouse, but large enough to hold secrets—and danger. “We should have come here first,” she mumbled, opening the car door. “This is the one with the biggest freezer.”
He ignored the words and slid from the car, moving quickly enough to be waiting as she closed the passenger door. He couldn’t hear any traffic from the nearest streets, but he was glad he’d armed himself to the teeth before they’d started the search. He couldn’t tell if his increased tension—the feeling of being stalked—was subconscious recognition of some danger he hadn’t yet noticed or a reaction to Lorelei’s fear, but it was all he could do to keep a growl in check as he slid his hand to the small of her back.
“The side.” She led him around the corner of the building, where a large bush obscured a door with only a simple length of chain securing it. Lorelei grimaced, pulled it free with a yank and let it clatter to the patchy grass. “That hum—do you hear it? The electricity’s on.”
Inside was dim because the windows had been painted black. The paint had flaked off in spots, letting in eerie beams of sunlight that broke the darkness but did little to chase away the still, dead feeling in the air. The whole damn place was creepy as hell, and they’d barely set foot through the door.
Lorelei reached for a boxy metal light switch beside the door, but hesitated. “Should we leave it off?”
Whatever they had to face, shadows would only make it worse, whether they could see in the dark or not. “No, turn it on.”
She did, filling the cavernous space not only with light but with the low buzz of the fluorescent bulbs kicking to life. “Through the back.” She nodded to a doorway that had the actual door hanging from its hinges, with a streak of something that could have been either paint or blood across it.
A shiver of foreboding slithered up his spine again, and this time Colin couldn’t quite repress it. He slipped his hand around Lorelei’s and pulled her with him, unwilling to let her be more than a pace or two away from him when the air was thick with the promise of violence.
The back room was even more broken down, but Colin only had eyes for the giant silver door with its battered handle. An industrial meat locker, still humming along. Touching the door told him it continued to cool. “Let me look first,” he told her, curling his fingers around the rusting handle. “If I find anything…”
She slid her hand over his and pulled the handle with a creak. As the seal disengaged, something heavy thumped against the door, pushing it wide, and a plastic-wrapped bundle fell at their feet.
His body knew what to do, and it wasn’t instinct. It was habit, training, a life spent crouching next to dead bodies. A chill rolled through him, leaving him disconnected from the horror of death. He was looking at a puzzle now, and his hands didn’t shake as he tugged plastic away from a vaguely familiar face.
That wasn’t unusual, either. He was used to this moment, his mind shuffling through the mental inventory of all the twisted wolves he’d seen, the ones where he’d paused that extra moment more to fix their features in his memory because he’d known that someday he might find them wrapped in plastic—or be the one doing the wrapping.
This one he’d seen barely a month ago, when they’d come to Memphis so Jay could declare their sanctuary. He didn’t know the man’s name, but he recognized the sharp cheekbones and busted nose. “One of Christian’s men, I think.”
Instead of answering, Lorelei choked on a sob and clenched her hand around the freezer doorframe. “Colin.”
The swinging caught his eye—more plastic-sheathed bodies hanging from meat hooks inside the freezer. But there were others, maybe a dozen in all, stacked along the walls like firewood, because Christian fucking Peters had run out of space to neatly store them.
“I’ve got it. Just don’t look, all right?” Exhaling, he rose and slipped a pair of leather gloves from his pocket. Use had thinned the leather, leaving them supple enough for this task. After wiping away his fingerprints from the plastic he’d already touched, he pulled out his phone and snapped a picture of the first face.
Methodical. Quick. Lorelei’s fear battered at the wall of calm enveloping him, but he couldn’t soothe her until he had what he needed. Pictures of each face would be enough. If Lorelei couldn’t stand to look at them, Zack would, or Shane could use his computer and his connections.
Colin started with the ones on the hooks, nudging the plastic aside just enough to snap a picture. None of those faces were familiar, but two of the men stacked against the wall evoked the same nagging sense of recognition as the one who’d fallen at their feet. Men who’d followed Christian—but clearly not devotedly enough to have come with him on his fatal attack against Green Pines a month earlier.
Colin
was halfway through the bodies when he was confronted with a face that was more than vaguely familiar. Sharp features, a heavy brow, dark hair—this face was already on his phone. He’d gotten the report from a colleague in the Northeast, one who’d been hunting two brothers who liked to kill girls, wolves and human alike.
One of the brothers had tried to hurt Kaley, and she’d ripped out his throat for his trouble. The other had sworn vengeance before disappearing, a fact that had nearly fractured Zack’s already doubtful sanity.
He wouldn’t be looking for vengeance now. “Lorelei? Jonas is in here.”
“Let me see.” She stepped into the freezer for that, leaned over his shoulder and hissed out a breath. “He must have tried to disobey Christian.”
Colin snapped a picture. “Maybe this will help Zack get some damn closure.”
Lorelei made a soft noise that could have been agreement or denial and looked around. “There are so many. It must be everyone who was missing from the attack on the farm.”
“Maybe.” He couldn’t reach for her yet, not if he wanted to retain his detachment. “Let me take the rest of the pictures, and we can get out of here.”
She continued as if she hadn’t heard him. “They’re all dead. It isn’t them trying to hurt us.”
Shit. He hurried through the last few photos, tucked the phone in his pocket and stripped off his gloves. “No, it’s not them. That’s good news, honey.” Maybe.
“Is it? That means we’re right back where we started—with no goddamned clue what’s going on.”
“It means the whole city of Memphis isn’t about to descend on our farm like a landslide, at least.” Colin gripped her shoulders. “Look at me.”
“It could be anything. It could be—”
His calm fractured along with hers, and the wolf surged past his defenses in a roiling rush of power that swept over her, cutting short her words. Colin tugged her tight against him, urging her to bury her face in his neck as he whispered soothing words and wrapped her in all the comforting magic he could summon.
“Don’t,” she pleaded. “I have to hold it together until we get back.”
“Okay.” It was a struggle to pull away. The wolf was riled enough that he thought he could flow onto four paws in the space between heartbeats. Colin took a deep breath and eased her away from him. “We’re going to figure this out, I promise. It’s what Shane and I do. Fletcher too, when he’s not driving his pretty car around.”
Lorelei took a step, out of his grasp and out of the freezer. “I need to be with Mae and Kaley. Zack too, if he’ll let me.”
The stab of rejection hurt all the more because of that moment. That perfect fucking moment when he’d finally understood pack and alpha and why Jay wasn’t stooped under the thousands of mindless responsibilities. He got something far more precious in return, the trust and the peace of knowing you’d made a safe place, that you were the strength someone else needed.
Lorelei would rather take strength from Kaley and Zack—broken fucking Zack—and Shane’s warning came back with a newly imagined bitterness. I think they all really do love him, at least a little bit.
Colin masked his hurt and nodded. “We can swing by the condo and pack up. Nothing else here.”
“No, nothing else.” She stumbled down the hall, through the shattered door.
As much as he wanted to give her a moment, instinct wouldn’t allow it. Colin finished erasing any proof of their presences as best he could, and was just easing the meat locker shut when he heard angry male voices.
Then Lorelei shouted his name.
Adrenaline surged. He didn’t remember turning around, but he was lunging into the main room in the next moment, barely aware of the interlopers, all of his focus on getting to Lorelei.
Getting in front of Lorelei.
It left him facing off against four angry wolves, and the tallest spoke. “Whatever ideas you’re cooking up in your head, forget it. We don’t need you here.”
Colin wanted to edge away, to force Lorelei farther from the newcomers, but he couldn’t show any hint of retreat. He couldn’t, not with four-on-one odds and the men facing him bristling with aggression.
But not strength. The tallest one was also the strongest, an alpha wolf with enough magic to hold loyalty, but the others lacked that spark of dominance. If Colin had to, he was confident he could take out all of them. He relished the idea of a purely physical fight.
Except he wasn’t alone, and he couldn’t fight with Lorelei right behind him. Colin spread both arms, showing empty hands and making a wall between Lorelei and the other wolves. “We’re just passing through.”
“Just passing through, and happening to visit every place Christian Peters called his?”
The fact that they’d been tailed explained his unease, but not why he hadn’t noticed them. “You always follow strangers around town?”
“When they look like they might want to set up shop in my city? Hell, yes.”
Colin didn’t take his gaze from the leader as he addressed Lorelei. “Do you recognize any of them?”
“Maybe.” She eased closer. “They’re Madisons, I think. The family pack downtown?”
He could feel her against his back, smashing against his control. He’d never been cornered like this, facing an enemy he couldn’t simply fling himself against because he had to worry about what happened if one slipped past him.
“I’m an enforcer,” he said carefully, taking a step forward and praying Lorelei didn’t follow him. He needed room to maneuver, and a clear head. If he attacked now, with the need to protect boiling in his blood, he’d leave corpses on the ground where there could have been allies. “We’re headed out of town this afternoon. We just had to make sure Peters and his men were gone for good.”
The wolf in charge eyed him suspiciously, but he made no threatening moves. “He’s gone. Vanished weeks ago.”
This was a moment where a line could be drawn. If he’d been on his own, he might have announced their sanctuary, backed it with bluster and dominance and his fists, if necessary. Now was the time for caution. Diplomacy.
Jay’s strengths, but Colin tried. “Peters was a sadistic, murderous bastard, and got what comes to that type.” He inclined his head toward the room with its fridge and its bodies. “And it looks like he gave the same to a few of his followers before he vanished. That’s all we wanted to know. Now that we do, we’re gone.”
“You’d only know what became of him if you’d done it.” The man took a step forward, rounding Colin to look at Lorelei. “You were one of his. I remember you.”
Colin thought he heard the audible snap that accompanied the destruction of his self-control. Only in retrospect, because though time had slowed, he’d lost a few vital seconds. The rage-blanked ones that led to him having his hand around the leader’s throat, fingers digging in so tight the man was on his toes, wheezing, and Colin’s arm trembled with the effort it took not to close his hand and tear out the man’s windpipe.
“Colin.” Lorelei was clawing at his arm, her voice shaking. “Colin, no. Please don’t.”
Taking a deep breath didn’t help, not when it dragged her scent into his lungs, along with those of his enemies. “Back,” he snarled at the other three wolves. “Get back.”
They scrambled away—even Lorelei, before she covered her face with her hands and turned away.
Christ. Colin focused on relaxing his hand, on easing his grip, one finger at a time. The wolf stumbled, and Colin let him go, not pressing his advantage but not retreating either. “You don’t talk to her. You talk to me.” Almost the same words Jay had used to Christian’s men, but they sounded hollow from Colin. He’d probably scared her worse than they had.
The wolf didn’t speak again—hell, for all Colin knew, he couldn’t. He and his packmates went for the door, slamming the warped metal behind them with a clang that echoed through the empty warehouse.
The echoes faded into silence, a silence broken only by Lorelei’s
quiet sobs.
Colin started toward her then stopped, scrubbing his hand against his jeans. He could still feel the other wolf’s pulse throbbing underneath his hand, the frantic, terrified rhythm. He could have shoved them all off with nothing but words and power, but the bastard had taken a step toward Lorelei, and Colin had reacted like a killer.
Her crying tore at his heart. “Lorelei?”
She shook her head. “We should go. Can we go?”
They’d done all they could here, and even if they hadn’t, his answer would have been the same. “Yeah. We can go.”
Chapter Seven
Five minutes after climbing out of Fletcher’s car and watching Colin drive away, Lorelei was still standing outside the diner, her hands clenched into fists. She weighed the possibility of having to face people inside versus the indignity of climbing up the fire escape.
Walking through the front door barely won.
Caught between lunch and dinner, the diner was mostly deserted. A few older residents of Clover glanced up from coffee or newspapers when the bells above the door chimed, but most turned their attention to their meals as she headed for the long counter at the back of the restaurant.
Eden’s father, Austin, smiled at her approach and tossed a towel over his shoulder. “Lorelei, sweetheart. Can I get you something to eat? Some pie?”
He took such care with them, all the time, walking the fine line between solicitous courtesy and smothering pressure. Lorelei smiled through her tension and cleared her throat. “I need to see Zack. Is he here?”
“Upstairs.” Austin waved her around the counter. “Follow the hammering sound. Last I looked, he was building something for Mae and Kaley.”
The narrow stairwell with its close walls almost blocked out the sound of woodwork. When she reached the top, she traced the noise to a door at the end of the hall. She knocked, but pushed open the door without waiting for an answer.