Frost Security: The Complete 5 Books Series

by Glenna Sinclair

  Still a little breathless from our contact, I blinked slowly as I hitched my purse higher on my shoulder. I gave him a little nod as he looked back at me. “Sure, sounds great.”

  “Going to be okay in here alone?”

  “Yeah, of course. I’m just going to get settled in, that’s all.”

  He nodded and headed out to the front door with his hand on the gun on his hip. The whole time he’d been at my house with Frank and Deputy Glick, he’d been armed. And during the ride up here he’d kept it within hand’s reach. Now, it looked like he’d be sleeping with it in his room, and have it holstered to him whenever he was walking the grounds.

  I didn’t know how I felt about it. I knew he needed to be armed because of the situation we were in, and I knew he was trained to carry a handgun. Maybe what it boiled down to was that I was in a situation that required me to have an armed guard. Before, I’d just been a client who’d hired Frost Security to help out my uncle with his legal problems. But somehow along the way, those problems had somehow metastasized into this amorphous blob of unseen threats and instigators. Weeks ago, it had just been a set-up by some random person. Now? It was the Denver Mafia, with bullets flying and people breaking into my home to try and silence us through intimidation.

  I went into the room he’d pointed out to me, the first on the left, and dropped my luggage and purse on the bed. It was a small room with a double bed, but the linen looked and smelled freshly laundered. A curtained window covered in blinds was cut into the wall over the head of the bed, and there was a closet off to one side, along with a chest of drawers and two nightstands. All in all, it was functional and nondescript.

  Out in the living room, the front door opened and closed, the screen door banging shut against the frame, as Matthew stepped out into the dark woods.

  God, I just wanted this to be over. I wanted my uncle out of prison, wanted my life somewhat back to normal.

  But, as I closed my eyes and took a slow, deep breath, I realized why I really wanted this over.

  Matthew Jones. Once this case was over, there wouldn’t be any protocol for him to worry about. A nice dinner together wouldn’t be a business meeting, or client relations. Instead, it would be just what it appeared to be: a nice dinner. A date.

  I stifled a yawn as I opened my eyes and began to pull my nightclothes out of my bag. It was getting late, and we had to leave early tomorrow morning if we wanted to be on time for that meeting with Sheriff Peak.

  Chapter Twenty-seven – Matthew

  The night was silent except for the rustling of a family of rabbits in the underbrush. Up here, even higher in altitude than Enchanted Rock, the air was as fresh as the day the world was made. Maybe fresher, considering what I’d heard about volcanic eruptions in Geology class.

  I did exactly what I told Rebecca I was going to do. I walked the perimeter. The reason why was completely different, though. It certainly wasn’t to check the security of the surrounding area. No, I needed to clear my head of a few things, a few feelings. Had to try and tamp down this feeling inside of me, this urging from my wolf to tear her clothes off and make her mine. When she’d been pressed against me in the hallway just moments before, I could feel it barking and howling in my veins, trying to force me to just take her, to do exactly what we both wanted.

  Now, as the cool air brushed over my hot, sweating skin, I knew I’d done the right thing. All those thoughts of passion, of what her skin would feel like pressed against mine, were back where they belonged. At least for the time being.

  I had more pressing concerns, anyway. Like who had been in Rebecca’s house, and how they’d gotten in so easily. She’d mentioned to me that, in retrospect, her front door was unlocked when she got home earlier tonight.

  If I’d known that, I never would have let her in the front door without sweeping the place for any threats.

  What was more worrying was that someone must have picked the lock and dropped the note in her house during the time it took for us to leave Joe’s Pizza and Pasta and get back to Enchanted Rock, attach a fake bandage to my arm, and eat dinner. And it was my fault they’d figured out her connection to Zeke, and where she lived. I must have leaned too hard on Reggie the Gap, scared him too badly, and caused him to react this way.

  But, if the timing was right, that meant they must have someone in the Rock that was working on the extortion racket, and God only knew what else. That was the only way they could have gathered the information and pulled off the break-in in such a short amount of time. Otherwise, Reggie would’ve had to find out what was going on and race into town, hot on our trail.

  I shook my head as I paced outside near the woodpile out back, trying to make sense of the whole situation. I still couldn’t believe I’d dropped the ball the way I had.

  Even worse, we hadn’t been able to smell anything at Rebecca’s house because of her overpowering fear that overlaid everything, covering every surface it touched.

  And now, standing at the back of the safe house cabin, I could hear her inside, quietly undressing and changing into her nightclothes.

  I almost groaned in need. Not just out of physical need, either. There was something in my relationship with her, with the way we connected on a deeper, more emotional level that I’d never experienced with another human being. Shifter or not, she seemed to have the key to me buried down inside her.

  I couldn’t help but think about how perfect a place like Enchanted Rock would be to raise a family. Me, the guy who jumped from bed to bed, thinking about a thing like that! But it would be perfect. She could be part of my pack, along with all the other guys and their mates, as we slowly built our own families together. I just knew she’d be the perfect mother, too, especially if she’d been patient enough to get through to Lacy or Mary.

  I ran a hand down my face, sighing again as I walked out from the cabin and into the woods. Who was I kidding, though? Before I went off and made all these crazy plans in my head, I still needed to tell her what I was, still needed to open up to her about my deepest, darkest secret. I was a wolf, after all, not any normal man. And if she couldn’t believe I was a shifter, or accept it, then all these ideas in my head didn’t matter for shit.

  But, most importantly, I needed to keep a vigilant eye on her. There might be men coming for her tonight or tomorrow as we tried to get to our meeting with Sheriff Peak. That meeting tomorrow was the most important thing about this case. If we didn’t make it to that, all we’d done would be for naught.

  Chapter Twenty-eight – Rebecca

  Matthew came back in through the front door after walking the grounds as I was poking around in the kitchen. The refrigerator was well stocked, the freezer full of plenty of food.

  “How’s the freezer look?” he asked.

  “Not too bad. Enough food here to keep an army fed for a month or two.”

  “Probably only a week,” he said. “You’d be surprised how much armies eat.”

  “What’s that old saying? An army fights on its stomach.”

  “Something like that, yeah.” He came over to the kitchen island and leaned against the counter. “Now that we’re kind of settled in, we should probably call it a night. We’ve got a long morning ahead of us tomorrow.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, my single word response gradually becoming a deep yawn. “I know. I’m just worried, that’s all.”

  “About the meeting tomorrow?”

  “Everything. I’m worried about everything. Is this going to be enough evidence to get Uncle Zeke out? Are these guys going to keep coming after me when it’s all said and done?”

  “Well,” he said, straightening up a little, “I guess we can break it down a little. I think they’re just trying to scare you, trying to keep you from turning over any kind of evidence you have. Your testimony doesn’t matter for much of anything, to be honest.”

  “It doesn’t?”

  “Nope. You haven’t personally witnessed anything except for Reggie coming out and shooting at us. And
, yeah, you could testify about that, but it’s not enough to make a dent in a criminal organization. Everything else? That’s just hearsay, and won’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny.”

  “So, even if I turn over the evidence and we get Zeke out, everything’s going to be fine? There’s nothing they could do to me that would stop the process?”

  “Right. Once we turn the evidence over, there’s no retracting it. It’s not like a witness testimony, it can’t lie or change its testimony.”

  “What about you? You were there, he spoke to you.”

  He pressed his lips together into a thin line. “Yeah. About that. I mean, I guess they could try and do something to me, but I wouldn’t ever flip like that.”

  “You’re sure? What if they tried to get to the people around you instead?”

  “Neither would any of the guys. They’d want me to keep going.”

  “What about…what about their significant others?” I asked, knowing full well what I meant. What about me? “The people in their lives?”

  He ran a hand down his face. “Worse comes to worst, guess I’d just leave the Rock,” he slowly said. “I mean, I like it here, but I don’t want to cause anyone any discomfort or pain by just being around. But if that’s what it takes to bring these guys down, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”

  “You’d just leave?” I asked, my eyes wide with shock. “Well, I’m coming with you, then,” I blurted out, surprising even myself.

  He laughed, clearly a little taken aback by my pronouncement.

  “No, it’s my fault you’d have to leave,” I continued before he could reply. “I’m the one who dragged you into this. Why shouldn’t I be the one to go with you?”

  “You’re serious,” he asked quietly, “aren’t you?”

  I nodded, realizing that I was. “Completely. I’m a good teacher, I can go anywhere I want and find work. And you’re a firefighter, you can do the same thing if you want to.”

  He chuckled. “You do realize you just promised to follow me anywhere in the country, right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

  He shook his head, still smiling. “Rebecca, you hardly know me.”

  “I don’t care if I hardly know you.” I looked away from him, down at the kitchen island’s counter top as I searched for the words hidden deep inside myself. I spoke without looking back up, my face red with preemptive embarrassment at what I was about to say to him. “There’s just something about you, Matthew. I don’t know what it is, but I feel drawn to you.”

  He didn’t say anything for a long moment, and my face just got redder as the silence stretched out further and further.

  “You’re really one of a kind,” he finally said, his voice nearly a whisper, “you know that?”

  I looked backed up at his smiling face, a little smile of my own spreading. “You know, in the short amount of time I’ve known you, I’ve begun to realize the same thing.”

  Our gazes stayed locked like that for a long, unbearable moment, his dark eyes burning like embers as we stood motionless, both controlling our urges. I wanted him to leap across the kitchen counter, to wrap me in his arms, to carry my back to the bedroom like a firefighter saving a maiden from the flames. If he’d done it right then, I would have gone completely willingly, too.

  He looked away first and my stomach dropped in disappointment.

  “Well,” he said, yawning for the first time, “I think we should both get some sleep. It’s nearly one, and we have to be up in just a few hours.”

  “You’re probably right,” I said, groaning a little inside as I pushed the thoughts from my head. “We do have a long day tomorrow.”

  But before we got to the next morning, we still had a long night ahead of us.

  Chapter Twenty-nine – Peter

  He was back in Iraq. Again.

  But this time, he could feel the beast inside himself. The beast inside him that wasn’t even supposed to exist. Something beyond what he knew any shifter was capable of.

  He moved across the building tops, powerful legs launching his nearly bipedal body twenty, sometimes thirty feet, through the air from rooftop to rooftop like some kind of superhero.

  But, as he caught the smell of human flesh below, of the human sweat and fear coming off them in waves, he knew he was no superhero. No, he was more a monster than anything else. Eight feet tall, a long wolf tail behind him. Like the wind, he ran on all fours over a wider rooftop, bounding over a fifteen-foot wide alley like it was no more than hopping over a crack in the sidewalk.

  He came to a halt across the street from his target, his claws digging in as he peered down into the building with eyesight like he’d never experienced, a stronger sense of smell than he’d ever imagined in even his wolf form.

  He’d tracked them by smell alone, his nose like a radar as he homed in on their bomb-making lair. The residual smell on the car bomb that had taken out an Iraqi checkpoint had pointed him right here. His prey was close, and he tightened his claws into the concrete edge of the building, the porous construction material crumbling beneath his strength.

  They were right there. The insurgents. No more than ten of them. Easy pickings.

  He could already taste their blood.

  The glass came down around him like razor sharp hail as he shattered it with his body. He huffed deeply, his wolfen nostrils flaring at the end of his long snout, the smell of cinnamon, turmeric, and ginger filling his senses as screams of horror erupted from the insurgent’s throats.

  Peter awoke, his brow damp, cold sweat trickling down his cheek and matting his hair to his scalp. “Shit,” he groaned as he glanced over at the alarm clock. Three o’clock, almost on the dot.

  The dreams had been coming more frequently. When they’d first begun, months ago just after Jake found Elise, the nighttime visions had been subtle as the fog coming in off the ocean. He’d awaken the next day, strange memories emerging from the haze as he’d eat breakfast or sip his coffee on the back deck. After a month or so, they began flashing into his mind like a flare grenade, invading his mind’s eye and his sense of smell. The smell of spices, the taste of the blood.

  He sat up in bed and took a deep, shuddering breath as he swung his legs out placed his bare feet on the cool hardwood. He stayed like that for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts.

  Recently, the dreams had become even more intense, forcing him awake. Like now. Always, it was the same. Memories of a time he couldn’t recall during his waking hours. Memories that were so real, he almost believed they were true.

  But could they have been? Could he have gone to that apartment he’d been seeing in his dream, dealt with those insurgents in that way?

  He shook his head. He’d never been to the apartment in his dream. And he certainly hadn’t been there in some hybrid man-wolf form, out of control with blood lust.

  A sudden image of blood and gore, limbs filled his head, though, and he shivered. He shook his head again, dispelling the pictures in his mind.

  No, he’d remember something like that. There was no doubt in his mind that he’d recall it. And, furthermore, he knew the man-wolf, the loup garou, or rougarou, wasn’t real. Not even shifters believed they existed. A shifter shifted between a man and a wolf, nothing more, nothing less. Peter’s own father had told him that, and he’d been the alpha of the Frost pack before they were all murdered. If he, a shifter steeped in the old lore about the shifter clans, packs, and powers, didn’t believe they existed, then that was as good as fact to Peter.

  So those dreams being a reality were impossible.

  He got up, pulled on a robe, and padded out into the kitchen to grab a glass of water. He stood there, drinking it, the memory of blood and cinnamon still in his nose and on his tongue. Peter drained the water glass before he bent down and opened up one of the cabinets, pulling out a bottle of scotch he kept for rainy days. The whiskey was for medicinal purposes, if anyone ever asked, and he poured himself three fingers in the bottom of his empty water g
lass, then headed out to the back patio.

  The sliding door hissed quietly as he slid it open, and suddenly he was out in nature, the cool air hitting where his open robe didn’t cover his chest and legs. He took a deep breath of the Colorado mountain air and tried to clear his thoughts. The clarity didn’t come, though, and he took a sip of the amber liquid in his glass, the medicinal drink burning the whole way down. He took another deep breath and let it fill his lungs.

  “Good thoughts in,” he muttered like a mantra, “bad thoughts out.” It was something he’d had to learn to do in order to deal with his anger at his family’s unjust killing. To deal with his anger and despair at losing Vanessa.

  But as he sat there sipping his whiskey, trying to push these phantom memories back into the hole they’d risen from, his eyes drifted out over the landscape of his property. His vision caressed the shallow rise of the valley floor, the spruce and aspens that dotted his little piece of the valley that Enchanted Rock called home. But, just as he followed the rise of the nearby mountain with loving care, his eyes stopped.

  A flash of blinking lights streaked across the sky, just across his field of vision, and seemed to hover over the north end of the valley. They weren’t perfectly stationary in the air, but they didn’t move erratically either. They just seemed to wobble back and forth. Red, green, and yellow against the starry sky.

  He swallowed a mouthful of scotch and set the glass down on his deck’s railing. He smirked a little. He knew exactly what it was, but any rube out there might think it was swamp gas or a UFO. He strained his ears with his supernatural hearing so he could pick up the sound of the rotating blades of what was clearly a helicopter.

  Peter’s smirk dropped, though, as he realized he couldn’t hear anything. Not at this distance. Back in the sandbox, he could always hear the Black Hawks when they were en route for extraction, almost from hundreds of miles away on a clear night like tonight.