QUINN SECURITY
D E E B RI D G N O R TH
Copyright © 2018
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
Table of Contents
TROY
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
KALEB
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
SHANE
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
CONOR
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
DEAN
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
TROY
Chapter One
TROY
The library smelled of musty books, which Troy had come to associate with the shy brunette seated behind the front desk.
As he lurked in an aisle, having heaved the entrance door open and strolled inside, unnoticed by the bookish librarian who hadn’t lifted her green eyes, he glanced down at the DVD in his large hand.
He couldn’t have been more out of place, that was for damn sure. But in all the years since he first began to see Reece Gladstone with a fresh pair of eyes, he’d never let the awkward feelings he got every time he set foot in here deter him from crossing the path of the pretty twenty-seven year old.
The library was quiet at this hour, due to close its doors for the evening in twenty, thirty minutes. Maybe he should’ve swung his towering 6’4” frame in a bit later when it would’ve been guaranteed dead. As it was, there were a few sets of respectful parents whispering to their children to hustle up and pick out a bedtime storybook in the kids’ section. Lingering near the newspaper rack was an elderly couple that Troy knew by face but not name. And the padding footsteps of what he identified as college-aged students tapped lightly down the aisles on either side of his.
He definitely didn’t belong here.
Troy was a mountain of a man, and not just because of his impressive height. Heavily tatted, with the darkest brown hair this side of Devil’s Fist, he looked like walking steel and had an attitude to match. It was in his eyes, those dark, inky pools that appeared devoid of color unless he was staring up at the broad, Wyoming sky in daytime. He looked like a man come home from war, scarred and healed badly, muscles constantly tensed, his gait hard and heavy. If he should be anywhere right now, it would be pounding pints in Libations on the other side of Trout Street, and not cautiously lurking, heart thumping and eyes locked on the girl behind the counter with red-framed glasses slipping down her button nose.
He hadn’t even watched the damn DVD. But checking out an actual book would’ve garnered far too much suspicion. Troy Quinn wasn’t much for reading.
Waiting a few more moments while one of the college kids checked out a tall stack of research books, stealing Reece’s attention from whatever personal project she was working on discretely on her laptop beneath the counter, Troy eyed the DVD in his large hand, turning the jacket over to skim through the documentary’s description so he’d have something conversational to say about it as soon as he strolled up to the front desk.
It was a flick about the First World War, and after trying and giving up on absorbing the contents of its jacket blurb, he decided he already knew everything there was to know about that particular war. He’d served in it. Served in many with a few of his brothers, dating all the way back to the Mexican-American War, though in that particular one he and all the military-trained Quinn boys had fought on the “wrong side,” them being against American colonization and imperialism and all.
Reece was free, having slinked back down onto her chair in a secretive hunch, fingers now clacking away on her laptop keyboard.
Troy had a growing fondness for her softened, feminine, shy manner. She looked like a flower—beautiful and delicate—one a beast ought not to handle. He never had. But he wanted to. Even her thin cardigan sweater, pale pink nail polish, and modest gold chain around her slender neck added to her delicacy.
When she lifted those green eyes of hers from behind her red-framed glasses, having sensed him nearing, Troy felt his throat clamp just a touch with thrill.
He cleared it as she stood, taking the DVD to scan it back into the system, but she beat him to the conversational punch.
“How’d you like it?”
He studied her, perhaps a beat too long, drinking in those petal lips of hers that quirked a
s she lifted her eyes to him. Curtly, he replied, “It was okay.”
“Just okay?” she questioned with a little smile. Being the brick wall that he was, and more interested in sharing her space and having her attention—Troy was a man of subtext and connection, not small talk and surface matters—he said nothing. That slight smile of hers faded, but she dodged the fresh awkwardness of this encounter by making slow work of setting the DVD on a rolling cart where other returned books and DVDs were waiting to be shelved. “There are others in the series that might be more than just okay by your standards. One on the Second World War. Another about the Armenian genocide, but you have to have a real thick skin to watch it.”
She scrunched her button nose, unintentionally causing her red-framed glasses to slip a tad. Pushing them up with a slender finger, her expression turned pained and she added, “I couldn’t get through that one. Too heartbreaking.”
“War’s heartbreaking,” he agreed, but his tone had barked out a bit too harshly. Their conversation lulled back down into the brutal territory of awkwardness, probably more so for Reece than Troy, but he made a solid effort to save her from it, asking, “What’s that you’ve been working on?”
“Huh?”
He flicked his eyes down to her folded laptop.
“You noticed that?”
“Hard to miss.” It wouldn’t have been had he not been studying her from the aisle, this evening as well as all the others he’d checked out or returned DVDs he hadn’t bothered to watch.
“Shoot,” she huffed, doing a little mental math on the situation. “That means Mrs. Yeats might’ve caught me as well…”
Mrs. Yeats was the head librarian who no one around these parts seemed to like except for her husband, but the poor man had died years ago.
“It’s a book,” she offered once she’d scanned the area for old Mrs. Yeats. “A novel. Work of fiction. I try not to dive in while I’m here, but when you get a good idea, it’s best to let it flow.”
“Maybe I can read it when you’re done,” he found himself suggesting. Troy hadn’t read a damn thing in his life outside of an AK-47 manual, but this time he knew he would. Any chance to get inside that pretty head of hers. Get to know her a touch better. From afar.
She smiled bashfully, her cheeks warming with color. “I don’t expect I’ll finish it any time soon.”
“I’m patient.”
They locked eyes.
Subtext.
He could feel it.
Stammering a bit, she asked in a froggy voice, “Would you like me to show where those other DVDs are? You might like the one about the Mexican-American War.”
He might. It had been a real bloodbath when he’d fought in that one. So, he might.
“Next time,” he told her. “I got to push off.”
“Oh? Plans?”
She sounded just eager enough that Troy knew if he mentioned the bar or Angel’s Food, which was the quaint diner up the street, she might just stroll in later. But he didn’t want that. Couldn’t allow it. If he cared about her at all, he’d have to keep his distance. These little library visits were dangerous enough.
So he repeated, “Next time, I’ll check out that one on the Second World War.”
She eased a little, shoulders rounding with a hint of disappointment as relief washed over her. That’s what he liked about her. He could read those mixed emotions of hers every time they bubbled up.
As he turned for the door, she breathed, “Have a nice night,” and without looking back, he waved his hand in acknowledgement.
Outside, the warm, Wyoming air breezed through Devil’s Fist as Troy started for his pickup truck, which he’d parked at the corner of Trout and Main. The moon overhead was bright and full in the cloudless sky, his real reason for having to shuffle off. Not that he struggled to control himself these days. Hell, it had been half a century since the urges had snuck up on him in a way that he had no choice but to dart out of the Fist, submerge himself into the grisly terrain of Yellowstone, and let nature take its brutal course. But that didn’t mean a Younger wouldn’t have that problem. Best to keep out of town and stay available, Troy being the head of the pack and all.
He’d prowled the earth for well over a century, though he didn’t look a day over thirty-five. But he’d never, in all those years, met a woman like Reece Gladstone. Something in him, deep down, had livened the day she was born, not that he’d made the connection right then and there. It wasn’t until she’d matured into a woman in her early twenties that he’d done the math on it, traced it back, pinpointed her arrival into this world as the very day his heart had woken up. He’d never thought twice about her when she was just a tyke bumbling around Devil’s Fist, whether it was skirting in-between her mother’s legs in the supermarket or soaring down Berry Street on her dusky tricycle. But when she reached that age, the one where she knew what her body looked like and was mature enough to know what to do with it, having returned to the Fist from college, he’d seen her with new eyes.
She might have known what to do with it, but she hadn’t acted on it. Not once. He would’ve been able to smell it if she had. Local boys tried often, sidling up to her in Libations and hootin’ and hollering at her from their pickups when she swayed her slender self down Main Street, a stack of books in her folded arms, her eyes down, tender and shy, but Troy hadn’t let them act on it either. He liked knowing such innocence still existed in the world, even in a rural town as small as Devil’s Fist, Wyoming. No one was going to take that from her. No one. Not even Troy Quinn.
He should’ve asked his father about her when Xavier was still alive. As the head of the pack, Xavier had developed the gift of foresight. He’d had the ability to smell a mate from a mile off. He’d guided and urged countless werewolves towards their one true mate, helping them to bond those destined unions in discrete courtships so that the pack, as large as it was here in the Fist, would never be discovered by the mortals in town. Now that he was gone from this earth, it was supposed to be Troy’s job to take the reins and do just that. But he couldn’t see a damn thing. He hadn’t acquired the gift and wouldn’t until he bonded with his own one true mate. A catch-22, if ever there was one.
He couldn’t tell, up down or sideways, if Reece Gladstone was meant for him. And until he could, he sure as shit had no plans of taking her innocence, even though the notion had been overpowering his thoughts since the day she’d come home from school, oozing with feminine sensuality that she’d kept muted and bottled up beneath a cardigan sweater and those goofy red glasses of hers.
With the windows rolled down, Troy sailed down Main Street, heading west in the direction of Yellowstone that was some eight miles off. He passed the bar, a handful of little shops, the police station on the other side of the street as he drove across Abernathy Way. Angel’s Food diner was at the corner of Bison Road, but he flew right on past it, the only truck on a street with no traffic lights.
Just as the heart of the Fist was falling away in his rearview mirror, dusk thickening into a dark night and helping the full moon to pop in the twinkling sky, his ears pricked at the dusty sound of a lone wolf howling in the distance. A sharp tingle broke out across his heavily tattooed skin, like hot needles. The wolf cry, which was growing and held an edge of anguish, was coming from the direction of Damned Repair, the automotive repair shop that he happened to be heading towards anyway.
He stepped on the gas and tried to put Reece Gladstone out of his mind.
Chapter Two
REECE
Angling her laptop open discretely and sneaking her eyes down to read the last few sentences she’d managed had only been a ploy to prevent herself from watching Troy Quinn walk out of the library. She’d caught it, though. Spying him. Watching that heavy-footed gait of his slow stroll that she’d become accustomed to spotting a mile off. Her gaze had a way of following him every time he set foot in the library, but she’d been getting better and better at wrangling in her curiosity about him.
; She, for the third or fourth time since Troy had left, tried again to reread the last sentence of the romance novel she was crafting, but she couldn’t quite connect with the material or remember the point she’d been working towards making, thoughts of the military-trained bodyguard now completely dominating her mind.
At least she’d gotten her galloping heart rate back down to a steady, dependable trot. Had her voice sounded shady? Had her conversational banter flowed? Or had he sensed she was crumbling from the inside out like a cave blasted with dynamite as he’d stood in front of her on the other side of the front desk?
Come to think of it, Reece couldn’t even recall what she’d said specifically. The long pauses stuck out in her mind, but had that been Reece’s doing? Or his?
Like all the times before she’d encountered him in this library, all the slow, confused recoveries she’d navigated after he’d exited the building, Reece was faced with the daunting and undeniable presence of her complicated feelings towards Troy. On the surface, as well as underneath it all, she was afraid of him. Was afraid the right word for it? Maybe not. Maybe she was intimidated, but that word seemed too vague to describe the reaction he tended to get out of her. A few minutes with Troy Quinn and it felt like fire was surging through her veins. Rushes of lightheadedness washed over her. Her hands would tremble, go limp.
She could still remember the first time she saw him, that sunny, spring afternoon the week after she’d graduated from the University of Wyoming. She’d been strolling along Main Street and wondering just what in the heck she was going to do with her life now. She’d checked out a number of books from the library, her favorite place in all of Devil’s Fist, and it hadn’t yet dawned on her that if the library was the only place she ever really wanted to be, she might as well see if Mrs. Yeats was hiring. The street had been breezy with crisp gusts of wind, lifting her spirits. The day had been so clear, in fact, that she could see the Tetons in the distance, their blue mountains scrapping the cloudless sky in the far west. Maybe she could stay in Devil’s Fist, she remembered thinking. If she could move out from her parents’ house, find a little place of her own, feel truly independent and adult, maybe this tiny, Wyoming town wouldn’t feel quite so small. She’d certainly have enough breathing room, something she rarely felt on the crowded campus she’d just returned from.
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