by Holley Trent
She closed her eyes and dragged her lips across his, gently, feeling him more than kissing him.
“You scare me, Patrick. I guess I should have expected that. You were in trouble the day I met you, and you still are. I can’t keep you safe. And you…jumble up my thoughts. I feel like I can’t make heads or tails of anything lately.”
Now he did wrap his arms around her, and rested his chin atop her hair, nuzzling it. “Oh, is that all? Fuck, woman.”
She pressed her cheek against his chest and sighed.
“Keeping me safe isn’t your job, sweetheart. I don’t have plans to do anything stupid. I’ve got a good head on my shoulders. I hate politics, but if there’s a way I can smooth some things out for those Were-cats…”
“I understand.”
“And here you are, driving to DC to probably do something really fuckin’ dangerous, huh?”
“That’s part of my job.”
“Look at you. This little thing with only a gun and an attitude, and you’re worried about me.”
She laughed against his chest, and when she stopped, they held onto that embrace for a moment, saying nothing.
Finally, she peeled back a bit, and looked up to say, “I don’t want to get hurt, Patrick. Not again. It’s too hard to put those walls back up once they crumble down.”
Somehow, he knew she wasn’t talking about the kind of hurt that came from bullet holes and knife pricks.
“And are they down? Those walls?”
“There’s a crack in the foundation and it’s spreading rapidly. The building will likely be condemned soon.”
“Nice metaphor. I can’t promise I’ll never hurt you, sweetheart. I know you’ve been through some shit. All I can tell you is I’ll always show you your worth—the way you are, and not the way other people think you should be.”
“I think you’re a little bit nuts, Patrick.”
He grinned. “No, I’m not nuts. It’s like I said before. I’m not the kind of man who takes the easy way out. I’m going to work for this, because I think you’re worth it. That’s my promise.”
She smiled, too. “I’m worth it, huh?”
“You’re like a goddamned phoenix, woman. You walked through fire, and probably died a bit inside, but here you are. Better and badder, right?”
She rolled her eyes. “Arguable.”
“Do you like me, shrew?”
She pulled her bottom lip between her teeth and worried at it while her eyes smiled. She shrugged. “Maybe.”
“Maybe! What do I have to do to get a yes?”
“Don’t know. Maybe letting me and the girls tag along with you to your little full moon hootenanny next month will sway me in that direction.”
“You want me to wait a whole month for a date?”
She rolled her eyes and thrust her empty wine glass out to him. “No, we can have a date next week. Tell me we can come help deal with the Cats, and I’ll make sure every little mountain lion in heat in that clearing knows you’re taken.”
He had a sudden urge to bite her neck and wrestle her down to the floor, but somehow he managed to resist.
“You realize you’re offering to commit to a dirty cat, right?” he asked as she backed out.
“Yeah. I’ve never had a cat. I think you’ll be fun.” She winked, gave him a mock salute, and disappeared into the hall, the sound of her high-heeled boots clacking against the old wood.
He stabbed the power button on his computer and straightened the stack of invoices on his desk. He grinned again. He didn’t know which of them was the one who needed taming. Maybe both. Maybe neither. Maybe wild was just fine.
It damn sure felt like it.
The End
FRAMING FELIPE
After six weeks working a grueling undercover job, the last thing Sarah Miller wants is to jump headfirst into another assignment. She doesn’t have a choice. Business is booming at Shrew & Company, and besides the boss lady herself, Sarah’s the only woman equipped to handle the latest Were-bear drama. When she gets to the mountains—ready to go in with guns blazing—Dana reassigns her. The circus is in town, and their most famous acrobat has gone missing.
Except…he hasn’t.
Felipe Castillo is on the run, and the thing that’s giving him chase is scaring Dana, too. It’s now Sarah’s job to coax the slippery Spaniard out of hiding and get him someplace safe…assuming they can keep their clothes on. Felipe may not speak English well, but the way his body moves needs no translation.
Sarah’s not interested in commitment, especially not with a man who cheats death for a living, but something about the acrobat has her enthralled. Perhaps it’s because he seems to have just as many secrets as her. Maybe even more.
A NOTE ABOUT FRAMING FELIPE
Framing Felipe builds exponentially on the world building set up in The Problem with Paddy. You’ll see lots of creature groups introduced. To distinguish shapeshifters from their natural animal counterparts, shapeshifter group names are stylized with capitalization.
So, you can safely assume that if you read Cat, Bear, or Wolf (rather than cat, bear, and wolf) I’m referring to a shapeshifter in context of their “racial” group. If the animal name is in lowercase, I’m referring to a shapeshifter in its animal form OR a plain old animal (sometimes, a cat is just a cat!).
Oh! By the way, some shapeshifter groups have multiple names. You’ll see the Cats referred to as the Were-cats, Were-catamounts, and Were-mountain lions depending on context and who’s speaking.
Really, this sounds more complicated than it is. The learning curve to the Shrew world is pretty short. ;)
I hope you enjoy this installment of the Shrew saga.
-Holley Trent
CHAPTER ONE
The slam made Sarah Miller’s sleep-drunk body leap for cover.
Or try to, anyway.
The Suburban’s seatbelt kept her ass firmly fixed to the leather seat. Her jerk had done nothing productive beyond driving her too-tight ponytail against the headrest, and giving the seatbelt strap an outlet to bruise her naked collarbone.
“Shit.”
Unclenching her fists, she blinked until her eyes cleared—until her surroundings presented in sharp focus.
Now grounded in the present and her safety assured, her heart rate slowed.
The last time she’d had such a disorienting awakening, she’d opened her eyes to find a gun barrel leveled at her face. But, she wasn’t in that place anymore. She was in as safe a place as she could be. Her boss, Dana, had stopped for gas and now stood just outside Sarah’s door next to the pump. It must have been Dana’s loud exit that jostled the exhausted investigator from her much-needed nap.
With a sigh, Sarah massaged her sore neck and settled as low on the seat as she could, deciding to try sleep once more. She rested her head against the window base and let her eyelids droop.
Sleep deprivation wasn’t an unusual occurrence in her world. As a young Marine deployed overseas, she’d go days without sleeping…not that anyone could sleep through explosions shaking the ground and bullets constantly whirring past their ears. Rest became a sort of catch-as-catch-can luxury. Her schedule hadn’t been much more conducive to rest in the next job she’d held, either.
She’d travelled from town to town for weeks on end, delivering the same motivational speech—the same rehearsed spiel—to schoolchildren, women’s clubs, and morning news show hosts.
She told them all about her leadership.
Her bravery.
Her patriotism.
Lies, mostly. For the most part, she’d done what she had to do. Bravery had nothing to do with it. In a way, her role—pulling that trigger, and setting up traps—was her calling. In her estimation, she didn’t have any choice but to be a soldier.
She’d gone into the Marines because she had something to prove. That a slight, weak woman—the daughter of a delivery truck driver and hairdresser—could be something no one expected. A superhero, she’d imagined. That’d be
en her schoolgirl fantasy. She’d wanted to save the world—at least a little corner of it—and maybe go to college under the GI Bill. She hadn’t managed to do either. Coming home on a stretcher instead of on her own two feet had put a damper in her hustle. Her priorities had changed.
Straddling the sharp blade between consciousness and delicious sleep, she was once more ripped free of Sandman’s embrace when a rough gargling sound pulled her stare toward her left. She growled out a small grumble of annoyance and ground her teeth.
This wasn’t the first time Shrew & Company’s receptionist and some-time bartender, Tamara, had jostled Sarah from sleep. They always seemed to get picked to bunk together on these away missions.
Tam snoozed with her chin tipped forward to her chest and her jaw dangling open, rasping with each exhale.
Sarah grinned.
That was as sweet as Tam came. Awake, she barked orders into phones like a tiny blonde dictator or could otherwise be found slaking her exceedingly high levels of frustration into the punching bag hanging in the office’s back corridor.
And it wasn’t just Sarah and Tam sleeping through the trip to the mountains. Sarah leaned to the right, and caught sight of Astrid in the front passenger seat via the side mirror. Astrid’s posture was erect and her head held high, but her slackened jaw gave away what her eyes, shielded by her favorite mirrored sunglasses, could not.
“Two down…one to go.” Sarah turned her torso as far left as she could manage and peered back into the SUV’s cramped third row.
The crown of Maria’s head rested atop the bench back so her elegant features faced the ceiling. Her chest rose and fell in a slow cadence, and her lips moved soundlessly in her sleep. That was Maria in a nutshell: always having an answer for everything, even in her sleep.
Sarah rested her head against the window once more.
It’d been a rough few weeks for them all, but at least the other four had been in each other’s company. Sarah had been undercover for the past month and a half with no one’s counsel but her own. She hadn’t had much choice. She had to go deep.
Although she’d been pegged as being “Entirely Antisocial” by that one doctor who’d signed off on her SHREW Study participation, the truth was, she liked her girls.
Needed them. They pushed her toward even keel—away from mania.
In the past two years, they’d become her unofficial support group and psychosis litmus test. They kept each other sane. Down-to-Earth. Civil.
More or less.
Sarah had been told enough in recent months that she needed to chill out—to bring her energy level down a bit—so she was making a concerted effort. Unwinding was tough, though, given her job and her harried schedule. Sometimes, being on the go seemed easier than staying still. Easier than resting.
She blew out a cleansing breath and closed her eyes.
A knock on the window very near her ear made her bolt upright once more. She mouthed to Dana at the gas pump, “What the fuck?”
Although Dana was scowling into the Suburban, there was no way she could see Sarah though the window’s dark tint.
Dana crooked her index finger at the window, beckoning Sarah.
Sarah, grumbling wordlessly, stabbed her seatbelt release. Before her feet could alight on the ground, Dana said in her usual well-modulated alto, “We’ve got a problem.”
“So what else is new?” Sarah quipped, her voice sounding thick and rough. She cleared her throat.
Problems weren’t unusual in their world. In fact, they were the norm. Expected. There were always problems. People disappeared, the Shrews went out to find them. People needed protection; the Shrews were hired to guard them. People needed a plan—the Shrews gave them two plans.
But, something about the tone of Dana’s voice—which rarely changed from its usual calm, flat, delivery—set Sarah on edge. No one else would have recognized it, but Sarah had worked with her boss enough over the past two years that she could hear that tiny shift in modulation. Besides, this was her friend. What kind of friend would she be if she couldn’t read her moods?
Dana was using her panic voice. It was the one she used when she felt personally threatened, which was rare indeed. There wasn’t much that could put fear in Dana’s gut. Fear, for her, was something she transmogrified and filtered into more productive things—into action. But Sarah knew that unmistakable quaver. It was the voice Dana used when her Were-mountain lion lover, Patrick, headed into The Smokies each month to shapeshift. It was the voice she used when one of the girls visited Doc and came back with a questionable physical report. It was the voice she used on the rare occasion when she didn’t have a plan.
Sarah pulled in a long inhale and softly shut the Suburban’s door. She eased away from the vehicle with Dana following in her wake.
In the convenience store, the duo made a beeline for the ladies room without discussion. As there was only one stall, Dana locked the outer door and leaned against it.
“What happened?” Sarah asked, folding her arms over her chest. “Is it Patrick?”
Dana’s intense stare would probably have rendered any other woman into jelly—made them look away—but Sarah knew Dana wasn’t trying to be intimidating. At least at that particular moment. All the Shrews had their quirks and oddities. They coped with their physical mutations in different ways. The mental ones, too. One of Dana’s side effects from the Shrew experiment was enhanced vision, so sometimes when she stared, it was simply because she was seeing more than the naked eye should have been capable of. She fixated on things just like her Were-cat Patrick did.
Sarah waited until she was done.
“No, it’s not Patrick,” Dana said finally, pushing off the door and striding toward the sink. She turned the cold water on full blast and splashed it onto her face.
“I don’t believe you.” Sarah pressed her back against the wall near the sink, waiting for her friend and mentor’s rebuttal.
Dana turned off the tap and raised one dark eyebrow at her. “Are you calling me a liar?”
“I don’t have a death wish, boss lady. I think you’re broadcasting again. I read it off you.”
Dana’s reaching hand, halfway between the sink and paper towel dispenser, stilled. “What else?”
“Nothing. I guess you’ve been practicing.”
Dana blew out a ragged breath, and her hand continued its journey to the machine. She cranked the handle up and down several times, then tore off a strip of scratchy paper towel. Before pressing it against her misty face, she cleared her throat. “Patrick’s been helping me.”
“Ah.”
Made sense that Patrick would be her tutor, since it was because of him Dana had learned she was the sort of psychic who projected thoughts to people around her. Even for a woman who’d always been so masterful at keeping her emotions bottled up, there was a huge learning curve to erecting the new walls she needed to keep her thoughts personal.
Dana patted her face dry and tossed the paper toward the overflowing trashcan. “It’s not Patrick. Not exactly, although I worry he may be affected.”
“We’re heading there now, so…”
Dana shook her head and sauntered toward the door. She wrapped her fingers around the handle and paused for a moment with her other hand poised over the lock. “Look, I didn’t want to say anything around the other ladies because they can’t compartmentalize the same way you do. They shoot without asking questions, and I need someone discreet.”
“Okay…”
Dana unlocked the door and pulled it open.
They stepped out of the restroom and walked past the waiting queue of women that had clustered in the hallway in only a few minutes.
Sarah followed Dana to the coffee counter and accepted a paperboard cup when her boss handed it to her. Sarah filled hers with cappuccino from the dispenser machine and waited while Dana pressed a lid onto her cup.
When Dana spoke again, while guiding Sarah to the potato chip aisle by the elbow, her voice was a whisper
. “I wanted us to work as a team on this Were-bear problem since the Cats can’t take care of themselves, but there’s other stuff going on in the mountains that may be a new problem for us. I’ve never been contacted this way before. I don’t know how the man got my personal cell phone number, but he seemed to understand far too well what we do.”
She picked up a large bag of mixed nuts and some pretzels.
“He sounded very frightened, and had a hard time articulating what was going on. English wasn’t his first language, so I don’t quite understand all he said. The gist was that his twin is missing and he’s worried his brother is courting trouble.”
“Why?” Sarah picked up a packet of caramels, and followed Dana to the cash register.
“The missing man—Felipe—he and his brother have been circus performers since they were six. They’re orphans. Parents died in Spain when they were toddlers, supposedly. They got bounced around for a while from one family member to another and ended up with some elderly aunt. A man offered to take them off her hands and teach them a trade, so the aunt let them go.” Dana pointed at the chocolate aisle as they eased up in line. “Get something for the sleeping beauties. They’ll probably need it when we wake them in an hour.”
Sarah nodded and retreated to the candy, scooping up several bags of peanut M&Ms. When she returned, it was Dana’s turn at the register.
Sarah plopped her items down on the counter.
Dana leaned in close to whisper, “Felipe and his brother are this circus troupe’s headline act. Acrobats. I did a bit of research. Found some press mentions and couple of photos. They do some really dangerous stunts, and are well-known in the biz for them.”
“So why would he run?”
Dana held up a finger, bidding Sarah to wait, and swiped her credit card through the machine. The clerk handed her a bag and the two women stepped through the automated doors into the parking lot. Dana continued, “That’s what the twin was unclear about. I couldn’t discern anything psychically. What I do know is the twin thinks if Felipe doesn’t return, the guy who adopted them—the one who runs the circus—he’s going to hurt people. Make them suffer for Felipe. He’s doing something dirty and the twin warned me if it got out, it would be bad for people like Patrick.”