by Lauren Esker
"Hey!" Peri protested. "You mean I don't get to see Flagstaff at all?"
"It was your idea," Thiessen pointed out.
"Which we're swallowing hook, line, and sinker, from the sound of things," Caine muttered, speaking up for the first time.
"You don't like the plan," Noah said. "Yes, we've got that."
"Yes, call me crazy for thinking we're making a mistake following a plan that was cooked up by a twenty-year-old civilian who didn't even know about shifters until a week ago."
Noah's entire body seemed to bristle as he rose from the bed. "If you've got a problem with Peri, you want to talk about that?"
"My problem is that I'm the only one in this room who has my head fully in the game. Half the team aren't even field agents—" His withering gaze swept over Peri and Trish. "—and most of the others are too busy thinking about getting laid to concentrate on work."
"Fucking what now?" Delgado demanded.
Thiessen stood up too. "You're out of line, Azarias. Settle down."
Caine rose abruptly and left the room, leaving silence in his wake. Peri reached up to take Noah's hand. Still looking angry, he sat down beside her.
"I'll go talk to him," Thiessen said quietly. He followed Caine out the door.
"What is his problem?" Trish wanted to know.
"Azarias Caine is the very definition of 'does not work well with others.'" Delgado opened another pizza box and handed a piece up to Trish. "I think Thiessen is the only person in the office who actually gets along with him. But he's a good agent. You can depend on him to hold up his end. And you know," she added, "I don't think he's entirely wrong. This plan is risky. There are a lot of ways it could go sideways in a hurry. Having more manpower is going to help, but we'll still need to be very careful."
"This Caine guy ... he's a normal shifter, right?" Peri asked, picking a stray bit of mushroom off the bedcovers next to her knee and flicking it into the wastebasket. "I mean, he's not anything else, is he?"
"What else would he be?" Trish asked.
"Uh ..." Peri felt suddenly self-conscious with everyone in the room looking at her. "There's no such thing as vampires, right?"
Delgado burst into laughter. "I'm sorry," she gasped, raising the sunglasses to the top of her head to wipe at her eyes, or rather at her eye; the human one watered, but the other one didn't. Instead a third eyelid slid halfway across it. "I'm sorry, it's just—a vampire. I am never going to forget this. I'm telling Thiessen. I'm telling everyone."
"Hey, c'mon! It's a valid question! A week ago, I didn't even know about shifters."
Noah squeezed Peri's hand. "It is a valid question. He gives off the regular shifter vibe, for whatever that's worth."
"However, I feel compelled to point out," Delgado said, wiping her hands on a napkin, "that no one knows what he turns into. Thiessen might. I sure don't. And he does have an ability to come and go that's downright eerie. Realistically, I think he probably shifts into something small, a bird or some such thing, but we've had a couple of cases where suspects reported seeing something big and dark, so I don't know. There are reasons why most people in the office don't like working with him, even aside from his winning personality—things tend to get a little weird when Caine is involved in a case."
Trish grinned. "Maybe he's a vulture. Big, dark, and a bird. And slightly on the creepy side."
"It's been suggested," Delgado said. "In fact, there was a betting pool in the office for awhile, but Costa found out and squashed it."
"So what is out there other than you guys?" Peri asked eagerly. "Maybe vampires aren't a thing, but are there ghosts? Dragons? Does Atlantis exist? What else are you SCB folks covering up? I'm a consultant now, you can tell me—"
Noah cut her off with a fast, pizza-flavored kiss. "I hope I'm not going to be on your bad side forever if I tell you there aren't any of those things. At least, if there are, my department doesn't deal with them."
"I'm not going to say none of that is real," Trish said slowly. "I've heard some pretty weird stories from older people about things they've seen and experienced out in the desert. The line between myth and fact, between belief and reality can be a really fuzzy one."
Delgado nodded. "Some of my family's lived here since Mexico ran the place—old Mexican-American Catholic family—and I know people who claim to have personally experienced miracles, so who am I to say they didn't? I will say, though, that I haven't seen any of those things you were talking about myself. But I haven't seen everything that's out there. I'm going to hope I don't have to worry about dragons and Atlanteans, but if a dragon turns up in our office to report a stolen hoard, I guess all I can do is give him a form to file out and get some people on the case."
Noah laughed. The tension in the room had begun to ease. By the time the pizza party broke up, the awkwardness had been smoothed over and everyone was getting along. Still, Peri was relieved when Trish and Delgado left and she and Noah were finally alone.
"Sorry about that thing with Caine," Noah said.
"It's not your fault."
"It is and it isn't. I keep thinking you wouldn't even be here if not for me—"
She had to laugh at this. Noah gave her a look that was almost hurt. Peri patted the bed beside her. "Dude, don't you remember I started all of this? If anything, I got you into it."
Noah smiled and stretched out beside her on the bed. "I guess that's true. Still, I'm the trained federal agent. It's my job to protect you, not yours to put yourself in danger for us."
"I don't mind," Peri said, turning serious. "I like the feeling that I'm helping for a change." She ran her fingers lightly across the tight dark curls peppering the edge of his hairline.
They lay beside each other on the bed, facing one another, kissing as the mood took them. Noah was quiet, and Peri could tell he was trying to work himself up to something serious. Finally he asked, "Have you been in touch with your dad at all since ... all of that?"
Peri shook her head. She'd gone years without seeing or having contact with her parents. Being disowned by her father as an adult shouldn't have hurt so much more than all the years they hadn't spoken. "I guess I'll just see if he contacts me, and if not ... I don't know. I'll figure it out later. Do you know if they've found Julius yet?"
"There are teams sweeping the area. They haven't turned up anything yet." Noah stroked her hair, tugging lightly at her scalp as he ran his fingers through the colorful strands. "You're in a hotel full of SCB agents. We'll keep you safe."
"I know." She closed her eyes briefly, opened them again to see Noah gazing at her with worry in his soft brown eyes. "I'm gonna be okay." Eventually. "What about you? How are you holding up?"
"Me?" He looked surprised.
"You've been shot several times, attacked by a giant bear, almost blown up, possibly exposed to a plague ..."
"I'm a professional. I eat danger for breakfast."
"Mmmm. Danger."
They kissed a bit more, and Noah said, "You want the truth? I'm actually surprised how well I'm handling it. This is the first time I've been in the field in years, and—I keep feeling like a more experienced agent would've done better, but—"
"Noah, you've been doing as much as anyone could've done. Talk about jumping in at the deep end of the pool."
"At least I haven't heard anyone say lately that the only reason I have this job is because my dad hired me."
"That must be so weird. I can't even imagine working for my dad. I'd go nuts."
"It's not that bad. I don't report directly to him, for one thing. But there are times when I wish I'd done something different with my life, made a reputation for myself outside the agency rather than just being the legendary Curtis Easton's son."
"Didn't you say you almost became a lawyer?"
His conflicted gaze returned to her. "Yeah, but I couldn't disappoint Dad. The agency is everything to him. It would've broken his heart if his only son hadn't wanted to be involved with the project that consumed his entire
life."
Peri stroked her thumb across the corner of his generous mouth. "But it's not his life. It's yours. You have to live for yourself, too."
"Yeah, I know that. But it wasn't like I had a burning ambition to go into law, either. I just thought it looked challenging and interesting. And I figured being a field agent would be challenging too, so I graduated from Yale and went through SCB training, and ..."
He trailed off, a troubled look clouding his face.
"Did something bad happen?" Peri asked gently.
"Not ... not like you're thinking. I don't know."
His gaze was still a million miles away. She kissed him lightly. "Do you want to talk about it?"
"There's not a whole lot to talk about. I just wasn't good at being a field agent. I know this sounds weird, coming from a guy who turns into a tiger, but I'm not that great at fighting."
"Noah, I've seen you fight. I don't think you're bad at it at all."
A slight smile curved the corner of his mouth, crinkling under her thumb. "That's different. I can fight like hell if I have something worth fighting for. It's not that I can't do it. I'm just not used to it. I'd never been in a fight in my life before joining the SCB. Then I got out in the field, and I ... well ..."
She wasn't planning to prompt him when he trailed off this time; she could see how hard it was for him. But Noah continued, after taking a minute to collect himself.
"I choked. That's basically it. I got out in the field and I choked. The first time, it wasn't even a hard situation—just breaking up a fight between a couple of moose shifters from a Canadian biker gang who started going at it in a parking lot outside the ... are you laughing?"
"I'm sorry," she managed to get out. "So sorry. Please go on. Canadian biker moose," she squeaked into her pillow.
His smile was more genuine now. "Okay, I admit our lives are pretty weird. But, yeah, I'd never been in a real fistfight before. When they started swinging at me, I froze up and got pasted in the face by a three-hundred-pound biker."
"Who turns into a moose." To her relief, she managed to get it out with a straight face.
"Yeah. Dude was strong. Broke my jaw and my nose in three places. My partner had to haul him off me."
Her urge to laugh faded away. "Jeez, Noah. I'm sorry."
"It's okay. You've seen how fast we heal. Even broken bones set in hours instead of weeks. But the next time was worse. It was the first time I had to point my gun at someone and I completely froze. The perp was a pretty bad guy, a bear shifter who'd been killing hikers because he'd staked out this big patch of mountains in Montana and thought they were trespassing on his territory. But he wasn't threatening me. He was just trying to escape. And I couldn't pull the trigger. I just couldn't. So he got away, and we ended up having to do a manhunt across half of rural Montana. Before we could catch him, he killed a rancher and then got shot by the rancher's wife, who mistook him for an actual bear."
"Oh, Noah," she murmured.
"Thanks for not saying that it wasn't my fault," he said, with an unhappy ghost of a smile. "The thing is, I know it's not my fault. Everybody said so at the time. The odds of me stopping a fleeing bear by shooting at it with a small-caliber handgun were pretty small. And he wasn't paying the slightest attention to me yelling at him that he was under arrest. But what if it had been a gunman threatening a hostage, or someone about to kill my partner? People kept telling me that it was all right, if the situation had been different I'd have acted in time. But I don't think so. Because looking at that bear in the sights of my gun, I had the exact same feeling I got outside the biker bar that time. My brain just stopped working. I couldn't think. I don't know if that's what being a coward feels like—"
"If there's one thing I know, it's that you're no coward. You were just a kid who'd led a sheltered life, in a situation he wasn't prepared for."
"Yeah, but that's no excuse. I wasn't a kid, is the thing. I was young, but I was also a trained agent with a gun and a badge. My superiors trusted me to do my job. Instead I kept freezing up, putting not just my life on the line but the lives of my partner and the civilians I was trying to protect. So I went to the chief and asked for a transfer to a desk job."
"And you've worked in the PR department ever since," she murmured.
"Created it, mostly. Before that, we just kinda muddled through with whoever could be tapped to be a spokesperson for the bureau and come up with a convincing story to sell to the media. It turned out to be fun, and I feel like I'm helping the SCB by doing what I'm good at—talking to people and making up cover stories to help the field agents do their work."
Lying, in other words. But she wasn't going to say that. Lord knew she'd spent more than enough of her life doing her own version of it.
"I bet you never thought you'd be weaponizing it eventually. Or helping me weaponize it, rather, against the Valeria."
"I never thought about how powerful propaganda can actually be. Information changes the world, Peri."
"Mostly I just hope in this case it'll help us find the Valeria." She laughed suddenly. "Of course, while we're waiting, we get to watch the agonizing spectacle of Trish and Agent Delgado conducting the world's most awkward flirtation."
Noah grinned. "Want to place a bet on whether or not a hookup is going to occur by the time we leave Flagstaff?"
"If this keeps up, they might not have a choice, because I'm going to have to lock them in a closet until they kiss."
He gave a snort of laughter and pushed her down onto the bed, where he nipped at her lips with light kisses. "Look at you. Less than a week in a relationship and you're trying to matchmake the world."
"You know," she said between kisses, "we're supposed to be sleeping. Big day tomorrow and all that."
"Is sleeping what you want to do?"
"Hell no. I mean, look at the size of this bed." She stretched out her arm. "This bed is way better than the bunk beds last night. For certain activities, I mean."
"You seemed to be enjoying 'certain activities' on the bunk beds quite a lot."
"I'll enjoy them even more when I'm not worried about falling on the floor." Peri couldn't help laughing. "So far we've had sex in the woods, furtive sex on a too-small bed at my parents' house, not-so-furtive sex on a too-small bed at your place, and then furtive sex again in an even smaller bed at a top-secret government facility. I'm starting to wonder what normal sex in a normal bed is like."
"One way to find out." He nuzzled at her neck.
"Mmmmm." Peri got into the necking for a minute or two before catching a whiff of her own armpit. "Uh, as much as I'm looking forward to this, I'm sure I'll enjoy it more after a shower. I feel like the only thing I do in this heat is sweat."
"I hope you weren't planning on showering alone."
His tone was playfully flirty, but she didn't feel like responding in kind. "Actually, it'd probably be easier to do it alone. It's not the world's simplest thing for me."
"Huh?"
"Figure it out, Easton."
His face changed as the light dawned. "Ah. You have to take the leg off."
"Right."
"It doesn't bother me to see you without the leg, Peri. I thought you knew that."
"That's not the problem. It's just awkward." She sat up and swung her legs off the bed. "I mean, think about it. Imagine standing one-legged in a slippery tub. Not exactly the world's safest activity."
Noah was looking at her with puzzlement. "What did you do at home?"
"I have—well, had a plastic chair in the shower. I also had a crutch for walking around with my leg off, which I stupidly forgot to bring." In fairness, the last time she'd been in her apartment, she hadn't exactly been thinking at her best.
"You've been taking showers ever since we've been traveling together. How do you do it?"
"Sitting down in the tub. Fun times."
She got up and went into the bathroom. Noah followed.
"Noah, what part of 'I want to do this in privacy' don't you u
nderstand?"
"If you really want me to leave, I'll leave, but I don't see any reason why I can't make it easier for you."
"Say what?" Peri asked, slightly muffled as she was stripping out of her T-shirt. Emerging from her inside-out T-shirt, she found him stripping at speed. "Agent Easton, are you volunteering to be a human crutch?"
"I prefer 'assistive standing aid,'" he said, pulling his T-shirt off. The injuries from the fight were almost entirely healed; nothing was left now but slightly paler marks on his skin.
Peri sat on the edge of the tub and started taking off her leg. "You know," she said, "I think I will take you up on that. Just don't let me fall."
"Never," he promised.
Peri held out a hand, and Noah pulled her up. He steadied her while she stripped out of her jeans and underwear, then reached over to turn on the shower. When the water was running scalding hot, just the way she liked it, she gave him a nod and he lifted her into the tub.
They soaped each other with the bar of hotel soap under the cascading water. Noah kept hold of Peri with an arm around her wet, slippery torso, and with the bar of soap in his other hand, he soaped up her nipples—rubbing them with the soap until they were firm little points.
Peri breathed deep and retaliated by stealing the soap and soaping his inner thighs. He was fully erect, and every time she needed to turn around, their wet bodies glided against each other in a constant tender teasing that made her tingle all over.
In between sudsing, there were slow kisses, tasting the water droplets on each other's lips. The idea of showering with someone had never occurred to her. Why had she never realized how much fun this would be? Wet, slippery fun. She still wasn't entirely confident that he wasn't going to lose his grip, and if he slipped, they'd both go down in the tub; she was braced for it. But she'd underestimated how strong he was. Her comparatively slight weight seemed to be no problem for him at all.
"Do my hair," she suggested, holding up the tiny bottle of hotel shampoo.
He hesitated. "You need to tell me how much."
She squeezed some of the bottle into his hand, and he massaged it into her hair. The cool touch on her warm scalp made her shiver deliciously.