Designated Alpha

by Crissy Smith

  “Well.” Mitch chuckled. “I don’t think I’ll divulge that. Secrets of the trade and all that.”

  “I’m surprised you didn’t say you’d have to kill us if you told us,” Piper teased.

  “Actually…” Mitch laughed. “I thought about it.”

  “How did you learn your computer skills?” Piper questioned. She didn’t think that was something he learned in the military as they would have guarded their records better.

  “Oh, I’ve picked up a few things here and there.”

  Jace snorted. “Mitch is actually a genius. One of the highest IQs in the military.

  Piper did a double-take at the big tattooed guy in the front seat.

  “Ah, shut up, man!” Mitch whined. He actually whined!

  Bobby snickered, and Piper couldn’t hold back her own mirth. They slumped toward one another as the laughter erupted from them.

  “Hey!” Mitch protested which sent them on a bigger fit.

  Wiping the tears out of her eyes, she tried to get a hold of herself. It took several attempts since every time she thought she was through, Bobby would giggle and she’d lose it again.

  When she finally was sure she was okay, she leaned up and patted Mitch’s shoulder. “I should have known. You’re one of those people that are too smart for their own good.”

  “You got that right,” Jace agreed.

  “Screw you all! Laughing at me.” Mitch crossed his arms over his chest but when he glanced back at them, he winked.

  “I think we’re close.” Jace leaned forward to stare out of the windshield. “What’s his street again?”

  Mitch pulled out his cell and pushed a few buttons. “He lives on Knight. There’s the supermarket he mentioned,” Mitch replied pointing. “It should be three streets down and on the right.”

  Now that they were almost to Cody’s house, fear shot through Piper’s body. When Bobby’s hand covered hers, she looked over and saw the same expression on his face. She needed to keep it together—if not for herself, for Bobby.

  She clasped her fingers around his. “It’s going to be all right. We’ll be safe,” she tried to assure him.

  Bobby nodded but his eyes kept darting from her to back outside the window.

  “Just for now, I think we should proceed with caution but be open to what Cody says,” Jace brought up.

  She didn’t want Jace to worry. For now she’d keep that just between Bobby and herself. Maybe things wouldn’t have to change. Hopefully any talk of being an Alpha would go away. “Sounds good to me,” she said sincerely.

  Mitch and Bobby agreed.

  The house that came into view was an older row house that was in need of a new paint job but had beautiful landscaping. The garage door was open, showing a large collection of tools and yard equipment.

  It was obvious that whoever owned that equipment had a talent. The grass and bushes, small trees and flower planters were arranged artfully. No wonder he didn’t have time to work on the outside of his house. It must have taken forever to accomplish what he had with all the blossoms.

  “Wow!” Piper exclaimed. While her and Jace’s backyard was full of gorgeous arrangements, it was nothing compared to this house.

  “Guess Cody has a green thumb,” Mitch added. “That’s not in his file.”

  Piper grinned. She wondered if that meant Mitch planned to find out if anything else had been left out in his secret dossiers.

  As they pulled into the driveway, a man stepped out from beside the house. He looked in his late thirties with dark, short hair. He was wearing a ratty pair of jean shorts and a black tank top. Muscles and tattoos wound down his shoulders to his wrists.

  Bobby gasped beside her. Piper was pretty sure the next word out of his mouth would be a repeat of her ‘wow’ from earlier. Instead he bit his bottom lip.

  Well, if Bobby was feeling well enough to check out the nice scenery, maybe this trip would be worth it.

  Jace waved as their SUV came to a stop. “Here we go,” he murmured. They climbed out of the car and headed straight toward Cody.

  Cody’s smile was welcoming as introductions were made. Bobby and Cody’s handshake lasted a little longer than everyone else’s but she didn’t think Jace or Mitch noticed.

  “Your landscaping is amazing,” Piper complimented.

  “Thank you.” Cody waved his hand toward a half complete flower bed. “I was trying to find something to do with my time when I wasn’t on a mission or in training. I started just looking at trees and bushes but over time, I’ve added as much as I can. I like being out in the sun. Plus San Diego is a perfect environment for some of these plants.”

  “It shows you’ve worked hard on them,” Bobby said quietly.

  A look passed between Cody and Bobby. The attraction between the two was clearly a two-way street. She glanced over at Jace and saw him eyeing Cody closely.

  “Come around the back,” Cody suggested. “I’ll show you some of my favorites and I have tea and soda on the deck.”

  Mitch moved first, drawing Cody into a conversation about old friends. Jace walked behind them. Since Piper and Bobby actually wanted to see the yard, they strolled behind.

  “Wait! Do you smell that?” Bobby pulled her to a stop.

  “What? Smell what?” The fragrance of the roses and freshly cut grass was nice but not anything to get excited about but maybe Bobby wasn’t used to his heightened senses yet. “You’ll get used to the enhanced scent.”

  “No.” Bobby shook his head. “Not that. I can smell someone, like with you, someone like us.”

  “Like us?” she squeaked. “You can pick up the aroma of a werewolf?”

  “Well sort of,” Bobby said then shrugged. “Can’t you?”

  “I don’t think so.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She still could only pick up the vegetation in the yard, the salty air, someone had a grill going and just a faint odor of oil. Nothing else. “No.”

  “Huh.” He frowned. “How did you know about me?”

  “When our fingers brushed. I felt the jolt. That’s how I’ve always been able to tell. There is sort of an electric current that I can pick up on. It’s only happened with people like us.”

  “Oh, I didn’t know that.”

  They stared at one another.

  “Maybe we need to make a list or something. About what’s different for us,” she suggested.

  “Yeah.”

  “But right now, can you tell if the other…shifter is close?”

  “I don’t think so. It’s kind of faded but a shifter has been on this property.”

  Piper glanced in the direction the guys had disappeared in. She wasn’t certain if she should be worried or not. But something in her gut told her that they needed to be very careful.

  “Okay, I’ll try to pull Jace off to the side and tell him. Keep your eyes, or nose, or whatever open. Let me know if you pick up anything else.”

  “I will,” he promised.

  She couldn’t help taking one quick look around as they started to walk toward the back—still nothing out of the ordinary to her. It was weird, though, that she detected people with the ability to change differently than Bobby did. She wondered how other shifters managed? There didn’t seem to be much similarity always.

  The night at the bar she had just assumed he had reacted to the touch the same as her. Damn, there was so much that they didn’t know.

  Hopefully Cody would be able to help. She was tired of being in the dark about her own abilities.

  Chapter Seven

  Jace was about to head back to the front of the house and find Piper and Bobby when they came through the gate. As they walked closely together, he noticed both of their shoulders were stiff with tension.

  Cody was telling Mitch about the house. He’d bought it as a fixer-upper and had completely remodeled the entire inside. Jace could really appreciate the workmanship. The porch and deck they were currently sitting on had also been one of Cody’s projects. Maybe Jace woul
d be able to get Cody to help with the additions Jace wanted in his own backyard. He seemed to understand how to merge privacy and beauty.

  He didn’t want to be rude and leave the conversation when Cody was going into detail about all his work but something was going on with Piper and Bobby and he wanted to know what. Just as he started to rise, though, Piper reached him and ran her hand over his shoulder. He relaxed back in his seat as the two joined them around the table. He hoped it wasn’t anything serious. He’d picked up on the attraction between Cody and Bobby. He didn’t care if either man was gay. Hell, ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ had been repealed because it in no way kept a soldier from serving his country effectively. But Bobby had a lot on his plate right then and Cody was a career military man. He didn’t want to see Bobby heartbroken and left behind when Cody eventually took off.

  Piper would surely catch him up later when they had privacy.

  “So I know you didn’t drive all this way to hear about my remodeling. You said on the phone you wanted to talk about something, in person?” he asked Mitch, but then looked at all the others.

  Mitch nodded to Jace.

  “We’ve come across a report that you gave. Something you saw in the jungle?” Jace said.

  Cody surprised him with a booming laugh. “Don’t tell me you came all this way for that? Hell, man, you could have given me shit on the phone!”

  “What do you mean?” Jace asked, confused by Cody’s reaction.

  “Look, man, I know it’s weird. I’m not even sure why I put it in my report. But I’ve gotten shit from everyone since it was leaked.”

  That was interesting. Jace hadn’t been aware anyone else had seen it. “We’re not here to give you a hard time,” Jace told him. “We’d actually like to know what you saw.”

  A dark gaze ran over his face. “Seriously?”

  Jace nodded.

  “Okay, sorry about that. I’ve just gotten a lot of ribbing from the other guys. I shouldn’t have said anything. At first I chalked it up to my imagination but the more I looked back at it, I just couldn’t let it go.”

  “I understand.”

  Cody twisted the top off his bottle of water. He took a long pull before sighing. “It’s like I said in my report. I was standing guard when I felt someone watching me. You know that sensation. That itch between your shoulder blades?”

  “Yeah.” Jace knew the feeling well.

  “So I tried to be discreet and find out who could see me. Every time I turned my head, though, I would just catch this movement out of the corner of my eye. It was weird but I knew I wasn’t alone.”

  Jace had been in the same situation plenty of times. But the jungle did have a way of messing with your head.

  “I knew I wasn’t imagining it, so I started to walk toward the trees. Since I wasn’t certain my eyes weren’t playing tricks on me, I didn’t call for any backup. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary but I couldn’t get over the sense that there was someone out there with me.”

  Cody’s hand flexed on the plastic water bottle, and Jace glanced at Mitch. The man was obviously bothered by what he’d seen. Jace had to believe it was because he had actually seen something crazy.

  “Then I finally caught a glimpse. It whirled quickly around and I caught the face of a man. Young, with a pale complexion, and wide, scared eyes. I called out and ran after him, but whoever it was took off and let me tell you, I’m fast but didn’t come close to catching him. But the ground was damp and I could see the light footprints, so I followed them.”

  Cody laughed a little then. “I left my post and, boy, would the captain have given me shit about that if he’d found out, but I know there was someone there.”

  Someone or something.

  “I kept going until I couldn’t follow the footprints anymore. That’s when I first saw the paw indentions on the dirt. And they were almost as big as my palm. I looked through the bushes and saw a wolf.”

  Cody stood and started to pace. “The eyes.” He nodded. “I knew it was the man I’d seen from the eyes. They were the same.”

  “Even with the distance from where you saw the man?” Jace asked.

  “The eyes were exactly the same,” Cody said with conviction.

  “Okay,” Jace said. “What happened then?”

  “The wolf took off. There shouldn’t have been that type of animal there in the jungle. But even if one had somehow been there, why wouldn’t it attack?”

  “And you never saw him again? Man or wolf?” Jace questioned.

  Cody pressed his lips into a tight line. Somehow Jace knew the next words out of his mouth would be a lie. He didn’t know how he was so sure, but he was.

  “Nah, never saw anything like that again.”

  Jace didn’t press. Maybe they needed to share some of their own information to get Cody to trust them further.

  “What if we told you that we believe you saw a man turn into a wolf,” Jace offered.

  Cody raised an eyebrow. “And why would you tell me that?”

  Piper laid her hand over Jace’s arm. “Because we’ve seen something similar.”

  Jace snapped his head to Piper. That wasn’t the story that they had agreed on. What did she know that Jace didn’t?

  “Really? Where?”

  Piper shook her head. “We’re not the only ones that have come to you and told you that we believe your story.”

  Jace jerked and stared back at Cody.

  Cody’s gaze had narrowed. The silence between them was tense. “No,” he finally admitted quietly.

  Piper turned to Jace. “One of them has been at the house.”

  “How did you know that?” Cody asked raising an eyebrow.

  “We just do,” she responded. “Can you tell us about him?”

  “I can’t. I swore,” Cody told her.

  Piper nodded. Her eyes met Jace’s.

  Jace felt dread sink in his stomach. “Can you set up a meet?”

  Cody was glancing among the group. “I can try.”

  * * * *

  Piper was nervous and uneasy as she paced the hotel room that they’d just checked into. Mitch and Bobby were sharing an adjoining room to theirs but currently the four of them were together trying to remain calm as they waited for Cody’s phone call.

  “I have a bad feeling about this,” Bobby murmured from his spot at the foot of one of the beds.

  “I think Jace and I should meet with this guy before we take either of you,” Mitch suggested.

  “I don’t like that.” Piper whirled to face him. “There is no telling what he will do.”

  “We’ll demand that we get together in a public place. After we get a name, Mitch can use his special skills and see what we can find out about him. Only after we’re completely sure that he poses no threat to either of you will we even think about introducing you,” Jace told her.

  “No, you can’t go alone. What if they take you or something? I won’t take the chance. I’ll go!” Piper demanded.

  “Absolutely not.” Jace stood and gripped her shoulders. “We don’t even know who this guy is. We don’t want him to know about Piper or Bobby until we find out if he’s a friend or not.”

  “Unless they want to turn you,” Piper snapped.

  “Baby.” Jace wrapped his arms around her waist and tugged her close. “Don’t forget that both Mitch and I were members of one of the most elite military teams in the world. We can handle ourselves.”

  Dropping her forehead to his chest, Piper clenched her eyes closed. What would she do if something happened to Jace? She wouldn’t be able to live with herself if he was hurt because of her.

  “Hey.” Jace cupped her face and lifted her chin. “We won’t take any unnecessary chances. We’ll cover our backs.”

  She clung to him, needing to feel his hard body against hers. Jace lowered his head and brushed his lips over hers.

  “Let’s head back to our room and give these two some privacy.”

  Piper couldn’t pull awa
y from Jace, even when she heard Mitch’s statement then the door closing. The feel of Jace’s hands over her hips was the only thing she cared about.

  “Let me love you,” Jace whispered against her mouth.

  Was there anyone in the world ever able to say no to a request that sweet? “Yes,” she murmured back.

  Still wrapped together, they slowly made their way toward one of the two beds in the room. Her thigh hit the side and she stopped pulling back slightly. Tugging at Jace’s shirt, she helped pull the garment over his head.

  They undressed each other leisurely, taking the time to linger over each new patch of skin revealed. By the time they were naked and Jace had pushed her onto the mattress, Piper was ready to beg him to take her.

  “I can’t let anything happen to you,” Jace told her while he skimmed his hands over her. “You’re my everything.”

  She arched as his fingers drifted down her stomach toward her pussy. Spreading her legs and lifting her hips, she encouraged his touch.

  “We’re a team, you and I,” he said quietly. “Partners and lovers.”

  “Yes,” she agreed. Why was he talking? Didn’t he know how badly she needed him? “Jace, please!”

  He slid his fingers between her folds—teasing, tormenting.

  “You have to let me protect you.”

  “Okay,” she vowed. “Whatever you want.”

  Crying out when he plunged his digits deep inside, she clawed at his back. “More, more!”

  Jace’s body covered hers as the tip of his cock replaced his slender fingers. She gripped his ass, digging her nails into his flesh.

  He thrust in, filling her with one powerful stroke. That was what she needed. Wrapping her legs around him, she held on tightly while he withdrew then pushed back in.

  Jace’s movements were slow and deep. Piper rubbed his lower back, meeting each drive of his hips.

  Like each time they’d made love, she felt the connection between the two of them through their body and mind. Of course, she didn’t know what he was thinking but there was a link that seemed to tighten around them.

  She reached for that feeling, wondering what would happen. Closing her eyes, she concentrated on the feel of Jace sliding in and out as she held him close.