“You look so modest,” Bobbi said to Pixie. “So demure. So…law-abiding. It’s freaking me out.”
Pixie, true to her promise, was wearing an ankle-length cotton dress and a headscarf. She’d taken off all off her makeup and taken out all of her facial piercings.
“I know, right? I kind of like this. Usually I dress like a total ho-bag, but now I’m a stealth ho-bag.”
Bobbi was dressed in similar attire. Turak was a relatively modernized country, so they wouldn’t be forced to wear a burqa, but they still had to dress modestly, which was actually helpful in the current circumstances. Their outfits would disguise them and allow them to blend in with the general populace.
The El-Debar family lived in the city of El-Shahar, center of the civil war. They’d been dropped off several miles outside of town, and a jeep was waiting for them.
They had fake passports and identification papers. And they had the address where Jax and Heath were staying.
“Can you believe that they tried to stick us with a babysitting job?” Bobbi asked Pixie.
“Seriously.”
“I mean, I can still smell that little cheetah shifter,” Bobbi grumbled. Then she froze. “I can still smell him. I really can. I shouldn’t still be able to smell him. His scent should have dissipated long ago.”
Bobbi’s suitcase started moving, and then began unzipping from the inside.
“No,” Bobbi said.
“Noooo,” Pixie said.
“Ta daah!” Prince Reginald stood up, triumphantly.
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” Bobbi clutched at her chest, hyperventilating. “No. This can’t be happening.”
She had a very specific itinerary in mind when she’d commissioned the plane to take them to Turak.
Show up on the doorstep of Jax’s hotel room, punch him in the face hard enough to make him bleed, bounce a lamp off her brother’s head, then go talk to the El-Debar family and get the information that Kenneth needed.
Her plans did not, in any way, involve babysitting an eight year old Cheetah prince stowaway in the middle of a war zone.
“How did you get here?” Pixie demanded.
He climbed out of the suitcase. “I followed you to your house, and then I followed you to the airport.”
“But how? Who took you there?”
“Nobody. I am a cheetah. We’re the fastest land mammal on the face of the Earth. I can accelerate from zero to sixty miles an hour in under three seconds,” Reginald said smugly.
“He’s right,” Bobbi said to Pixie. “I remember that from grade school. Damn it.”
“In fact, I frequently had to slow down so I wouldn’t get ahead of you. You drive like my grandmother,” he continued.
“She does, doesn’t she?” Pixie rolled her eyes.
“Hey! Don’t encourage him.” Bobbi glared at her. Then she turned back to Reginald. “I don’t understand how nobody realized you were missing.”
“Easy. Right after you left I locked myself in my room and told everyone not to come in. They have to obey me; I’m the prince. Then I climbed out the window and jumped from ledge to ledge until I was close to the ground, and then I followed you.”
Bobbi fixed a dangerous scowl on her face. “Well, we do not have to obey you. We can, in fact, spank your butt and send you to bed without supper. Keep that in mind. Now, do you understand that you have snuck your way into an incredibly dangerous war zone?”
“Of course!” Reginald was practically dancing with delight. “I heard you talking about it. That is why I came with you. This will be much more exciting than Disneyworld. I can help you with your investigation. I will be a detective.”
Bobbi turned to Pixie. “Okay, we are screwed. We’re stuck with him. The plane will not be back for a week, we have no other way to get him safely out of the country. We’re going to have to let Jax and Heath do all the investigating, and we’re stuck on babysitting duty after all. They win, and I hate them for it.”
She grabbed her satellite phone and walked a short distance away. Praying that the satellite signal would cooperate, she called Tyler to update him.
“My God.” Tyler was appalled. “I can’t believe it. If Reginald’s parents find out…”
“We’re all in huge trouble, and so are the bodyguards, and the nanny, for that matter. We need to keep this quiet. The plane will come to pick us all up in a week; we just need to keep Reggie safe, and keep this on the q-t, until then. Unless you can think of any way to get Reginald out of here sooner.”
“In the middle of a war? No. We have to stick with the plan. Kenneth is going to kill me when he gets back,” Tyler groaned.
“We’ll have adjoining graves. We are all so dead,” Bobbi agreed. She glanced back at Pixie and Reginald. Pixie was pretending to pull a quarter from behind Reginald’s ear.
She walked back over to them. “We’re stuck here for the week,” she said. They tossed their suitcases into the jeep and climbed in. Bobbi restrained her natural impulse to let loose a stream of curses;
“I can’t believe that Jax and Heath won,” Pixie grumbled as they drove into town.
An idea started to formulate in Bobbi’s mind.
“Or did they? We do know where they’re staying,” Bobbi said. She glanced speculatively at Reginald.
“Are you thinking what I think you’re thinking?” Pixie asked.
“Probably.”
Bobbi turned to Reginald. “You are now officially recruited to Team Shifter. I have part one of your assignment,” she informed him.
* * *
“And I thought Playa Linda was hot,” Heath said, mopping the sweat from his forehead with a handkerchief.
They were sitting by the window of their hotel room. The warm breeze drifting inside did little to cool the thick, hot air.
“This is nothing. Try coming here in the summer,” Jax said. “I was in the region a year ago rescuing an oil pipeline worker who’d been kidnapped by a local tribe, and it was like walking through an oven. It’s even worse when you shift; then it’s like wearing a fur coat in an oven.”
The two of them were planning on travelling to meet the El-Debar family in the morning. If everything went as planned, they’d have the information that they needed, and the El-Debar family would fly out of the country with them next week.
They were staying in a half-empty hotel on the edge of town, a scarred concrete building with boarded up windows.
The electricity at the hotel was sporadic, and the water that trickled from the tap was rusty. Fortunately, they were next to an ancient mosque, and so far the two warring factions had respected the venerable religious building and kept the gunfire to a minimum in their neighborhood.
“I’d love to see the look on my sister’s face right now,” Heath said.
“Yeah, me too,” Jax grinned. Then his smile faded a little bit. “I’d like to see it from here. On a satellite TV. I have a feeling we’re not going to like it too much seeing her in person when we land on U.S. soil.”
“Nope,” Heath agreed solemnly.
It was worth it, Jax thought. The assignment was dangerous in every possible way, and even more dangerous for a woman in a country like Turak, where women were viewed as second-class citizens. Yeah, Bobbi was going to be furious at him, but she’d just have to deal with it.
There was a sharp rapping on the door. Heath and Jax glanced at each other with raised eyebrows.
They weren’t expecting anyone.
The two men rose to their feet.
Could anyone be aware of their mission here? They weren’t violating any laws, but at the moment, travel was restricted for foreigners. One of the regimes vying for control of the country was sympathetic to Americans; the other was decidedly hostile.
Whatever the case, anyone who attempted to take on Jax and Heath would be making a very big mistake. Jax was a werewolf shifter and a former sheriff’s deputy who’d worked in private security for the last year. Heath was a bear shifter who’d worked as an En
forcer for the National Shifter’s Council for several years, including a six month undercover stint in a federal prison.
“Got it,” Heath said, and he walked over and yanked open the door.
Prince Reginald stood there, grinning from ear to ear, carrying a small bag slung over his shoulder.
“Hello,” he said.
Heath pushed past him and ran down the hallway. He could see Bobbi running out the front door. By the time he made it to the front door, all he saw was the cloud of dust kicked up by the car racing away from them down the street…and Pixie’s hand sticking out of the passenger side window, with her middle finger extended.
Cursing furiously, Heath ran back up the stairs.
The prince turned to look at him questioningly.
“Which one of you is Heath, and which one of you is Jax?” he demanded.
“I’m Heath. He’s Jax. We’re so screwed,” Heath groaned, burying his face in his hands.
The prince lashed out with his foot so quickly that even Heath, with his lightning quick reflexes, didn’t have time to stop him; he landed a painful kick to Heath’s shin.
Then the prince leaped on to the table and smacked Jax upside the head, hard, with his bag. The small bag was surprisingly heavy.
“What the hell?” Jax shouted, raising his hand.
“Ah, ah, ah,” the Prince chided, shaking his index finger at them. “You can not hit me. I am a prince, and I will tell my parents, and then it will not go well for you. That was from Pixie and Bobbi, by the way. Also I am supposed to bite you, but I will do that later, when you least expect it. Probably while you are sleeping. Also, Pixie says that anything that I steal from you, I get to keep, after I give her half. Now, I want you to read me a story.” He reached in to his small bag and pulled out a stack of books.
“Let’s see, which one shall I have you read me first?”
Chapter Eight
“Yep, perfect house for a recluse,” Chloe muttered to herself as she parked her car in front of her grandmother’s sprawling old Italianate mansion. The dilapidated house was tucked away deep in the woods, at the end of a half mile long, winding driveway. Apparently Sophronia’s distaste for human contact extended to handymen. The pale blue paint on the exterior of the house was blistered and peeling. Bald patches were scattered like mange on the roof.
The house looked on the verge of being swallowed up by a jungle of shoulder high weeds and rosebushes run wild. Weeds thrust through random spots in the asphalt driveway, which was forked with cracks like lightning bolts. It was a shame; the house had clearly been beautiful once.
Chloe had an odd feeling when she climbed out of her car, a trill of alarm that ran through her.
It’s all right, she told herself, I’m just creeped out because this house looks like a horror movie setting.
She walked up the steps and saw that the front door was ajar. Was that normal for her grandmother? She’d never been here before, so she had no way of knowing. Nervously, she reached into her purse and pulled out her cell phone.
No bars. No service. She was far from any cell phone tower.
“Grandmother?” she yelled from the doorway.
She was greeted by silence. The cawing of birds in the trees lent a horror-movie feeling to the whole eerie scene.
Well, she thought uneasily, as she stepped inside the front entryway, the advantage of being a panther shifter is that I can usually hold my own.
Unless…
The smells swirling through the air all hit her at once. She stopped where she stood, standing perfectly still.
With each breath that she drew in came the coppery tang of blood, and the thick, heavy smell of lion. There were wolves in the house. She might be able to take on one wolf, but multiple wolves? A wolf pack could bring her down and rip her throat out.
Down the entry hallway that led to a massive foyer, she saw paintings had been pulled from the walls and lay in shreds and splinters on the floor. A wooden table had been overturned and the hallway rug had been wrinkled back. From deep inside the house, she heard growls, growing closer.
Heart pounding in her chest, she turned and ran from the house, the wolves in hot pursuit. She could hear them thudding through the house, and their roars tore through the air.
Should she try to run for it? They could probably outrun her – odds were she’d trip over something before she’d made it a quarter mile.
Outside the house, her heart skipped a beat when she saw a massive panther flanked by a Kodiak bear running straight towards her - and then she scented that the panther was Kenneth, and the bear seemed to be with him. Kenneth’s limo was parked next to her car.
She skidded to a stop, and quickly shifted to panther form.
She turned back to the house, and saw three massive gray wolves in the foyer, staring at her and Kenneth and the bear. Apparently they decided that taking on the three of them would be more trouble than it was worth, because they turned and raced back into the house. A minute later, she saw them running out the back door, and into the woods.
Chloe glanced over at Kenneth to see what he’d do next. He crouched low, with an angry growl rumbling from his chest, his tail lashing the air furiously, but he didn’t pursue. The bear, tall as a tree, let out a threatening bellow that split the air, and the lions ran faster, vanishing over the horizon.
She couldn’t help but notice how beautiful Kenneth was in panther form, eyes glowing a luminous blue, his massive muscles rippling beneath his glossy black fur. When his lips curled back they revealed fangs as white as ivory, and she suppressed a small shudder; she wouldn’t want to be on Kenneth’s bad side.
Focus, she scolded herself. Chloe shifted back, grabbing her sweater from the ground and pulling it over her now-naked body. Fortunately, it was a big, thick sweater that hung down to her mid-thigh; she hugged it around herself, shivering.
Kenneth and the bear also shifted back; Kenneth picked up his shirt from the ground and tied it around his waist like a loincloth, and the bear followed suit. Neither of them seemed to feel the cold, or maybe they thought it wasn’t manly to shiver.
“What the hell?” Chloe demanded. “What are you doing here? I mean, thank you for rescuing me, but why are you here?”
“I followed you from your house.”
“Why?”
“I had a feeling that I should.”
Well, his feeling had obviously been accurate – unless he was somehow behind all this. She didn’t want to believe that of him.
She glanced at the house. “I need to see if my grandmother is in there,” she said. “She didn’t answer me when I called to her, and I smelled blood.”
Kenneth nodded. “I could smell it too, from outside. We’ll search the house. Stay behind me.”
She followed him and the bear shifter inside, catching glimpses of Kenneth’s bare butt as they walked down the halls. It was a magnificent gluteus maximus, round, firm, perfectly sculpted. His legs were thick as tree trunks and well muscled, the legs of a man who spent many hours at the gym every week.
She tore her mind away from his perfect body. Her grandmother’s house had just been broken into and her grandmother was apparently missing; what was wrong with her, checking out Kenneth’s butt at a time like this? Kenneth somehow brought out her inner pervert; she couldn’t stop thinking about sex when she was around him, no matter how inappropriate the timing.
“Grandmother?” she called out. There was no answer; she’d had a feeling there wouldn’t be.
She saw Kenneth looking around and knew that he was thinking the same thing that she was thinking: this is the house of a crazy person.
Thick dust coated most of the surfaces. Paintings were piled up haphazardly on tabletops, sheets were draped over furniture. All the mirrors in the house, bizarrely, had sheets taped over them with blue duct tape.
There were foot prints in the dust, some of them small, most likely her grandmother’s, and then larger ones, possibly from the wolf shifters.
They raced through the house, through dozens of rooms, calling Sophronia’s name, but she was nowhere to be found. Chloe struggled to keep up with Kenneth, stumbling over rugs and bumping into furniture. Kenneth kept glancing back to make sure she was still with him.
The furniture smelled moldy and everywhere they ran, clouds of dust flew up from their feet and floated in the sunbeams that shot through the windows.
They ended up in the kitchen, where a great pool of blood, already drying, spread out across the tile floor. Chloe stared at it, judging its size, trying to decide if somebody could survive the loss of that much blood. Flies buzzed around the pool and skated on the surface of the thick red pond.
“Is that her blood? She told me to meet her here at noon. Where is she? The lion shifters didn’t take her, we would have seen her with them when they ran out the back.”
“There’s a lot we don’t know about your grandmother,” Kenneth said. “I need to tell you some things I found out yesterday. My grandfather didn’t leave your grandmother for another woman. After things ended between him and your grandmother, he waited five years before marrying again.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Chloe protested. “If he didn’t break off his engagement for a woman, why would he break it off?”
“Very little about this makes sense,” Kenneth said. “And it’s all the more reason for you to come work for me. Help me catalogue the artwork. There’s some mystery revolving around those specific pieces that were stolen, something that might help us figure out what happened all those years ago. Did you know that your grandmother repeatedly tried to break into my grandfather’s house after they broke things off? Did you know she ended up going to jail for it, and losing her job at the university?”
“Why would my grandmother lie to my mother about all that?”
“Well…”Kenneth said delicately, glancing around the kitchen. A teetering mountain of dirty, moldy dishes piled in the sink, thick gray dust coating the counters like fur…”Your grandmother clearly had some…issues.”
“She was normal before she met your grandfather. Everyone says so. You know, forget it, I don’t have time to argue about this. Damn it, I can’t even call the police from here because my cell phone doesn’t work,” Chloe said, frustrated.
His Purrfect Mate Page 6