by A. C. Arthur
He chuckled. “Come on, your wine is getting warm.”
Then he hung up. Yes, the insanely arrogant and undeniably sexy man hung up on her. She sighed, exasperation clouding her better judgment, her feet taking her to La Selva even though she knew in her heart she did not want to go there. She did not want to have dinner with this man. Because it might not end there.
Those words lingered in her mind, the “might not” blaring as if on full blast. If he touched her again, if he kissed her, if he made her feel like every part of her body was on fire and he was the only thing that could cure the incessant burn, she would be absolutely lost and totally fucked … in more ways than one!
* * *
She walked with her head held high, chin up, confidence like a silk draping over her curvaceous body. Upon first glance there was no doubt that this was a woman who could take care of her business, who could give as good as she got. The loose fit of her cream-colored slacks gave way to the sway of her hips while the bright orange of her blouse cast an alluring glow to her honey-toned skin. Her lips were full, inviting, and her eyes, they were once again green, her hair red.
Ezra frowned.
This was not the real her. This was the façade. This was Jewel Jenner.
And he shouldn’t give a damn.
All day long he’d thought about Jacques basically telling him to back off, to leave Jewel Jenner alone, and yet he’d found one reason after another to ignore the shifter. It was happening again, he knew it, felt it churning inside of him like a debilitating hunger. An appetite he hadn’t experienced in a long time. That should have been enough of a warning, it should have reinforced everything that Jacques had said to him earlier, but it hadn’t. Because Ezra was still here, watching her walk toward him, wanting to clear this room and put her up on one of the tables to devour instead of whatever was on the menu.
“One glass of wine and then I have some other things to tend to this evening,” she stated as she approached the table and reached for the chair across from him.
Once again, pushing all doubt aside, Ezra was on his feet instantly, moving to stand right beside her, pulling the chair out for her instead. As she sat, he stayed close, pushing the chair up to the table, then leaning forward to whisper into her ear. “Another trip outside the resort?” he asked.
She stiffened only marginally, before turning to hang her bag on the back of the chair. Looking over her shoulder at him she replied with a cool smile, “Wouldn’t you like to know?”
Ezra only smiled in return and took his own seat across from her. She immediately picked up her glass to take a sip, then she nodded to him with a lift of one elegantly arched eyebrow.
“So you know how to pick a good wine,” she conceded.
“Bas has assembled a great wine bar here,” he replied. “In addition, there are a lot of things I know how to do well, Jewel. Would you like to find out which ones in particular?”
He thought she might stiffen again at his words considering she’d made herself perfectly clear about this physical attraction between them. She surprised him by basically acting as if he’d mentioned something as trivial as the weather.
“Is that what this dinner is about? You presenting all your attributes and me figuring out if I want to personally experience any of them?”
Damn, he liked her. He especially liked this glimpse of spunk she was showing tonight. First, in making him wait and now in tossing his innuendo back in his face, all while remaining the most attractive woman in this room.
“This dinner is about getting to know Jewel Jenner,” he replied and then waited for her reaction. Ezra was employing all his senses, zeroing in on the minute, such as the blink of her eyes, to the more overt, like the shift of her hands from where they’d rested on the table, to now lying in her lap, out of view.
“I’m not interested in a relationship with you,” she said solemnly. Every part of her body was seemingly in sync with that announcement, all except her scent.
She couldn’t mask the aroma of her true emotions and desire. Combined they were like a warm musk wafting through his nostrils, filling his body and stroking his cat with anticipation. Her eyes held his gaze, having only slightly given away the arousal he knew simmered just beneath the surface of her cool exterior.
“The wine is nice,” she continued. “So we can share in small talk while I finish my glass. But then I must go.”
She must run again. Ezra knew this was what she wasn’t saying, what she would never admit, but there was no doubt in his mind that this was her plan. There was no real explanation for how he knew. Instinct, intuition, an unfathomable link to a female he hadn’t known long, the remnants of a past act that he suspected he would never truly be rid of. Whatever the cause, the facts were what they were in his mind and he had no intention of letting her go, not without trying to help her first.
“I’m glad you are enjoying the wine,” he stated slowly, watching as her lips touched the glass once more, trying like hell to ignore the lengthening of his dick as he imagined those lips wrapped around his thickness.
“And if you’re not inclined to let me get to know Jewel Jenner, how about I spend some time with Dawn Montgomery?”
She went completely still, her eyes widening. But she remained silent.
Ezra, on the other hand, had fully planned to go deeper into the name he’d found on a flash drive that one of the three men that had been talking in the computer department at Comastaz earlier in the day had dropped. He’d been eavesdropping on their conversation, having been alerted by the fact that two military men and one laboratory worker were having private meetings in another department completely. The mention of prototypes had also piqued his interest. So after they’d left, leaving behind a heavy stench of deceit, it had been only natural that he turn around in his chair. And that’s when he saw it, as if it had been left there for his personal use. Imagine his surprise when he’d opened the file marked DAWN MONTGOMERY and it had contained several pictures of the woman he knew was sitting directly across from him. The woman he’d been introduced to as Jewel Jenner.
Unfortunately, there was another plan in play, one that Ezra was going to find even harder to believe than all of today’s events combined.
Before he could speak their table was flanked by four uniformed officers. A quick gaze at the badges said they were Sedona Police and by the sudden paleness of Jewel’s face, he figured out pretty quickly that something was about to go down, something he wasn’t going to like one bit.
“Can I help you, officers?” he asked in his most cordial tone, his cat already awake and ready to react.
“Dawn Montgomery?” one of them asked Jewel.
She looked up at him, her green eyes wide, fear seeping in heavy rivulets from her every pore.
When she didn’t respond, another officer continued by taking cuffs from his belt and pulling out the chair where she sat back. “Dawn Montgomery, you are under arrest.”
Ezra’s cat growled, a low rumble in his chest. “What the hell is going on here?” he questioned, figuring the officers wouldn’t answer him, but hoping at least one of them had an ounce of sense.
He was wrong.
They totally ignored him. The one reading Jewel her rights stopped after he had her cuffed and pushed her in front of him. Ezra took a step toward them only to have one happy-go-lucky officer put a hand on his chest, yelling, “Pipe down, Romeo, and finish your wine. You’ll be dining alone tonight.”
Ezra’s fists clenched, his muscles bunching as the cat threatened to break free, to push past this pissant of a law enforcement officer and knock the others out of his fucking way so he could get to Jewel, or Dawn, or who-the-hell-ever. All he knew was that he had to stop what was happening from happening or his cat was going to go buck wild in this desert town.
A hand to his shoulder stopped the madness from breaking out in the middle of the restaurant—or stopped more madness from breaking out, he should note.
“Stop,” Bas said f
rom behind. “Don’t antagonize them. We’ll take care of it.”
“What the fuck do you mean we’ll take care of it? They’re arresting her, goddammit!” he roared at the FL.
“I can see that. The question is why?” Bas replied calmly, more calmly than Ezra thought he could feel in the next couple of years after scenting her fear and watching her face crumple as they read her her rights.
* * *
“So she’s a thief?” Jacques asked, surprise clear on his face.
Ezra’s growl was loud, the step he took toward Jacques stopped by Bas’s arm extending outward to land in the center of his chest.
“There has to be more to the story,” Bas added, his calm and collected demeanor doing absolutely nothing to soothe Ezra’s anger.
His cat paced restlessly, his entire body tense with the need to shift, to fight, to defend. His temples throbbed with the facts that had been presented. The ones he’d uncovered earlier today using that flash drive he’d found, combined with the ones Bas’s mate, Priya, had just divulged.
She sat behind Bas’s desk, her arms planted on the rich mahogany, iPad open in front of her. Priya Drake had been a reporter before joining forces with the shifters just a few short months ago. She was an attractive African-American female, professional and polite with an edge of street knowledge. She’d been blackmailed into trying to reveal the shifters and their true identities. Under Bas’s command Eli and Nivea Cannon, a shifter guard, had been sent to rescue Priya’s brother, thus ending the threat of blackmail. Bas’s smooth playboy skills, or most likely the intensity of the Shadow Shifter mating, had sealed the deal on Priya’s silence, so that now she worked to preserve the public image of Rome, his law firm, and anyone else connected to him, and covertly, the shifters. For that, Ezra figured he should be grateful. The fact that she was a human still made him edgy around her, his trust not a foregone conclusion like Bas’s and apparently Rome’s.
Tonight, she’d come with more information on Jewel, information that Ezra needed to know, but hated hearing just the same.
“The diamonds are reportedly worth four million dollars. Lawrence Crowe, then an active captain in the U.S. Marines, reported them missing three years ago, two weeks prior to Jewel’s arrival at Perryville,” Priya stated, continuing with the revelations they’d been sharing in the thirty minutes since Jewel’s arrest.
“Crowe suspected her from the very beginning, giving the police her name and her father’s name. Police never found either of them,” Priya continued, her fingers tapping lightly over the keyboard, the six-carat pink diamond engagement ring sparkling on her left hand.
“She’s not a thief,” Ezra said through clenched teeth. “There’s got to be more to this story.”
Jacques made a sound that seemed to indicate that he did not agree. The shifter definitely had attitude. From the moment he’d arrived in Bas’s office and was told that Jewel had been arrested he’d been standing close to the door, leaning against the wall with his arms folded over his chest, his long dreadlocks pulled back from a face fixed in a perpetual frown.
Ezra couldn’t quite read what Jacques’s emotions were, his senses were so full of Jewel’s scent. The look on her face, the pounding of her heart that he’d heard clearly over all the action that had been going on in the restaurant. He didn’t have time to wonder what the hell was going through Jacques’s mind, as long as it didn’t involve Jewel outside of the present circumstances. After his conversation with Jacques this morning he’d thought maybe, just maybe, even though there had been no companheiro calor between the shifter and Jewel, that there were some feelings there, some attraction. Ezra wasn’t going to like it if there was. He wouldn’t like it, not one goddamn bit.
“I agree,” Bas said, pinning Ezra with a gaze that said he knew exactly what he was thinking and he wanted him to shut it down, pronto.
Ezra didn’t flinch. And he didn’t stop thinking of all the ways he could cause Jacques pain if the other shifter even considered touching Jewel in any way.
“You knew when she came here, didn’t you?” Jacques asked Bas, a chill hovering in the air as his words settled.
It was Bas’s turn not to flinch. Hell, the FL didn’t even blink before replying, “Yes.”
Priya sat back in her chair, looking at her mate questioningly but not saying a word.
“You let her stay here at Perryville because you knew she was on the run.” Ezra stared at the man wearing dress slacks and a crisp white dress shirt sans tie, since he’d already been in his room about to settle down for the night when he heard that police officers were on the premises. Bas was an ambitious businessman and a cautious leader. He would have checked under every rock to find out any- and everything about someone before allowing them as close to him and their kind as he had Jewel.
“Fuck!” Jacques exclaimed.
Ezra didn’t spare the shifter another glance, but kept his focus on Bas, asking, “Why?”
“She was afraid and she needed refuge. I couldn’t send her away and not feel the guilt of what might have happened to her if I did,” Bas explained. “And I didn’t know about the switched identity until the next year when Crowe began working at Comastaz. The article in the local paper mentioned the robbery and the woman he was still looking for. I saw Jewel reading the article in the office. She was visibly shaken and I wondered why.”
“Then you connected the dots and decided not to confront her?” Priya asked. “Because to protect her you had to make her believe her identity was safe.”
“That type of fear doesn’t surround a female that simply wanted to steal millions of dollars in jewels from a man,” Bas stated.
Ezra pounded a fist against the desk, his strength sending a crack through the mahogany. “No, it doesn’t,” he spoke, murder clear in his eyes.
Bas had looked down at his desk, then back up to the shifter, his lips drawing tightly. Priya closed her laptop and stood.
“You can’t let Crowe get ahold of her. If you’re thinking what I’m thinking she’s in even more danger now even though she’s with the police.” She spoke quietly to Bas, but there was a sense of urgency in her tone, then a look of empathy as she turned to Ezra. “And if you don’t go get her he’s going to tear this entire resort down.”
Ezra didn’t bother to argue that point. In fact, he’d already decided to go and get Jewel or Dawn or whatever her real name was. He didn’t give a damn. The files on that flash drive had only held pictures of her, not who or what she was to Crowe or anything about what the bastard had done to her. Finding out that his suspicions about her were correct and that Crowe had most likely abused her in some way had him so angry the vertebrae in his back were already cracking with the urge to shift. He was halfway to the door when Bas’s voice stopped him.
“Priya will call the commissioner to see if bail’s been set. In the meantime, the three of us will head to the police station. We’ll bring her back here and then decide what to do with her,” Bas directed.
Ezra reached for the door handle, knowing what he was about to say and do was going to be out of line, knowing he could possibly lose his job for the blatant insubordination. He didn’t really give a damn about either circumstance. “I’m going to that jail and getting her out whether it’s with money or by force.”
He’d already opened the door and walked through it without looking back, before he heard the footsteps behind him.
* * *
The ride to the Sedona Police Department was a tensely quiet one, with Jacques behind the wheel, Bas in the front passenger seat, and Ezra in the back.
It hadn’t escaped Ezra’s thoughts that this was a foul situation, one which he probably should not have been so immersed in. And yet he was. His chest heaved with each breath because the stench of her pain was so embedded in his senses. His fists clenched at the thought, his mind filling with a familiar darkness and memories that brought back his own fears, his own period of helplessness.
Acacia had taken something f
rom both him and Eli. She’d opened their minds to so many things sexual and intimate. While Ezra’s emotions hadn’t gone as far as Eli’s, he could admit that he was in heavy-duty lust with the tribe princess, so much so that he’d gone willingly with his brother each night, eager for the opportunity to be with her one more time. When he’d learned of her betrayal, of the sick and cruel way in which she’d used them, he’d been angry and embarrassed, and still aroused by her.
The night that came into clear focus was not their first time with her. He and Eli had hurried through the day, finishing each new task the tribe leader, Teodoro, was trying to teach them. The idea was for them, Topètenia warriors, to learn the new ways of fighting that the tribes that had defected from the Gungi had developed. There weren’t many leaders that had openly accepted them and their thoughts on reuniting the tribes. In fact, Ezra had the impression that Teodoro thought it was all a game. The leader taught them about his tigers, about how they stalked their prey, how they pounced without warning, how they fought to the death, but then he laughed each time Eli and Ezra had attempted to combat them. He hadn’t believed they’d ever be any match for his tribe. But he’d been wrong.
On this night Acacia had Ezra and Eli undress. She was always naked when they arrived, much to the twins’ excitement. Ezra had been hard instantly, almost unable to wait until he could sink inside her seemingly always wet and waiting pussy. Only this time they’d watched. Three other couples had appeared and Acacia had Ezra and Eli walk around watching them, critiquing them until Eli had wanted to vomit and Ezra had simply wanted to wring her neck for the intense torture she’d put them through. As an aroused shifter, watching other shifters find release while holding back is not a pretty sight and Acacia, like her father, had laughed at the end of the session when Eli had complained. Ezra had remained silent—he’d watched, and he’d learned. Each night they were together he’d taken in more, experienced more, stored away more emotions than he’d ever thought to feel in his lifetime.
Tonight, sitting in the backseat of this truck, he felt similar to how he’d felt each night he’d gone back to their hut and lay down to sleep. As if he’d thought he was walking into one situation and was completely surprised by what it had truly turned out to be. If he had known what he knew now, he would have never gone into Acacia’s hut. He would have never allowed her to destroy a part of his soul, and a part of his brother’s.