Reece let out a rocky breath, trusting her.
Headlights cut through the kitchen, the sheriff having angled his SUV up the driveway. As Rachel made her way back to the front door and outside to greet him, Reece flipped on the kitchen lights then the ones in the living room, and then rushed into her bedroom to grab a long sweater to cover herself up.
When she met the sheriff outside, standing in the open entryway like she was, she saw that he was also carrying a shotgun.
“Evening, Reece!” he greeted her with a hearty, self-assured wave, before huddling in front of PO Clancy to bark at her about some brand-new mistake she’d made.
Reece wished the sheriff would learn to go easy on Rachel. The whole town knew how important it was to her to make detective, and Reece could see no reason why the plucky officer who’d always made sure to be the first to respond to any call around the Fist, emergency or otherwise, shouldn’t be promoted.
Rick called out to her, “Sweetheart, why don’t you go on inside and sit tight. We’re gone rustle the little bastard out of wherever he’s hiding. It’ll all be over soon.”
Reece hoped so. She certainly did. She also hoped that Troy would get her voice message, but what that might lead to… Reece couldn’t be entirely sure.
***
This was taking too damn long, thought Rick as he made his cautious way across the rear perimeter of Reece Gladstone’s property. The little cottage sat glowing in the distance, about eight hundred yards off, and considering that Rachel and he had worked their way around the edge of the property line twice over already, that rabid wolf should’ve charged at them by now.
He tapped his thick index finger against the trigger grip of his shotgun, thinking. Though he was firmly committed to hunting and killing the thing, he couldn’t deny that he definitely didn’t want to be out here all night, not when the only officer in his employ was Clancy. Rolling his eyes at the thought, he reminded himself he was damn lucky that the girl hadn’t gotten skittish and shot his head clean off from across the way by now.
Yeah, best to call it a night. Whatever Reece had seen through her kitchen window was long gone by now.
“Clancy!” he shouted and without so much as a second’s hesitation Rachel broke out into a beeline jog and met him where he stood.
“Yes, Sheriff?” she asked, breathless and eager, brown-nosing as it were.
“I haven’t seen a lick of movement out here, have you?”
“No, Sir, not a lick.”
He groaned, scowling at her. “You don’t suppose Reece’s eyes were playing tricks on her?”
“Can’t say for sure, Sheriff, but I didn’t see any paw tracks out front.”
If Rachel fancied herself an experienced animal tracker, Rick had to laugh, but this time he kept his laughter on the inside. Truth be told, he hadn’t seen any tracks either, for what it was worth.
“You go on inside and let Reece know we’ve done all we could. She ought to feel welcome to call the station if she has another sighting of the thing, but for now there ain’t much more we can do. ‘Cept, let her know I’m gonna fire off a few rounds just to scare the thing off in case it’s lurking in the wilderness beyond the property line. Can you manage all that for me, Clancy?”
“Of course, Sir,” she promised, staring up at him with those big eyes of hers that needed so much approval.
She’d make a hell of a wife. But as far as making detective…? Rick Abernathy just didn’t think so.
“Well, go on,” he encouraged her.
When he saw Rachel’s silhouette rounding the side of the cottage, he gave her a few more minutes as he glanced up at the starry night sky. He’d lived in the Fist his whole life. He’d marveled these stars time and again and could easily identify just about every constellation up there. His late wife had inspired him. She had been something of an expert in that department. Even had a telescope and a bunch of books on the subject. Christ, he missed her. His daughter, Whitney, looked just like her, but her personality was the polar opposite.
He shook his head at the fact, letting out a little chuckle, then cocked his shotgun and aimed the barrel up at the very sky his late wife used to love so much.
BANG.
Cocking the shotgun again, he aimed it up to the full moon without even looking and squeezed the tight trigger again.
BANG.
“Get the hell on out of these parts,” he told the rabid wolf under his breath, wherever it was.
BANG.
***
Just as the sheriff and PO Clancy were returning to the police station in the heart of Devil’s Fist, Reece plucked a whistling teakettle off the stove, flipped the burner off, and pouring piping hot water into a mug where a bag of lavender-chamomile tea swirled and floated around.
She hadn’t much appreciated how the sheriff had treated her after he’d fired off those shots into the night sky and returned to her cottage. His tone had been questioning. A little too questioning. She knew what she’d seen. She might not have been absolutely certain it was a wolf or a coyote or, heck, it could’ve been a bear, but she knew she’d seen something, and the dread in her gut had told her it was the very same animal that had taken Holly van Dyke’s life. Oh, but if Rick Abernathy hadn’t seen it with his own two eyes, then maybe it wasn’t really out there. Maybe Reece’s own womanly fears had caused her to hallucinate, as though she’d been caught in some kind of hysterical spell! As if!
As she started through the living room to get to her bedroom, fully resigned to the likelihood that she hadn’t a prayer of getting back to sleep and might as well use the long, night hours to chip away at her novel, there came a firm knock at her cottage door.
What had the sheriff forgotten? she wondered as she called out, “Coming!” and padded to the door, her mug of tea steaming in her hand.
When she opened the door, however, she didn’t find Rick or Rachel standing on the other side.
“You called.”
It was Troy. His giant, tattooed frame filled the doorway, as she stared up at him, momentarily speechless.
“My cell wasn’t on me,” he stated, emotionless, as his dark gaze bore all the way through her.
“I saw the rabid animal that killed Holly,” she managed to say. “It was right outside my window. The sheriff came. He couldn’t find it, though.”
He didn’t start on inside like he owned the place this time, which gave her pause, until she offered, “Would you like to come in?”
When his gaze fell, she realized that her long sweater had opened, revealing her satin, peach-colored sleep shirt and shorts.
“I would,” he told her, as he stepped inside.
Reece’s heart skipped a thrilled beat as she closed and locked the door.
As she joined him in the living room, it occurred to her that Troy Quinn might stay here, with her, for the rest of the night.
***
He could smell Troy’s obnoxious scent wafting off the werewolf’s pickup truck—pine, woodsy earth, musk with a soft edge of spices—as he stalked up against the rear bumper, creeping from one shadow to the next in his hunched, half-man half-wolf form.
Feeling his crinkled snout peel back into a growling snarl, he locked his bloodshot eyes on the front door where Troy had just disappeared into the cottage.
The three echoing shotgun shots had been what drew him here, what had compelled him to sprint from deep in the wilderness where he’d been hiding. He would’ve never thought to creep onto Reece Gladstone’s property otherwise. The very fact that Troy Quinn was now inside made the young woman suddenly interesting to him.
Troy had taken what was rightfully his. He’d been robbed. And if this young woman, Reece, mattered to Troy, then she would have to be the very thing he would steal from Troy, to balance the scales.
Reece Gladstone would be the next to die.
He couldn’t wait.
Chapter Seven
TROY
Troy shouldn’t have done it. It was a little ev
il of him, shifting into his wolf form and prowling around her front yards, darting fast as hell through the shadows beyond her window, scaring the crap out of her on absolute purpose. But it had been for her own good. It had been to protect her, to get himself inside her cottage where he could be certain she’d stay safe, to demonstrate that she needed to allow him and all of Quinn Security to provide her their services.
But, yes, it had been a dirty trick, and he might have felt bad about it if he wasn’t standing in the middle of her adorable, little living room with her.
She smelled like flowers, and even looked like one in that petal-soft, skimpy sleeping outfit.
“I wish the sheriff had caught the wolf,” she worried, wringing her delicate hands and looking a bit lost in her own home. “Rachel got here lickety-split, but I guess by then the thing had raced off. Troy, it was tremendous. I didn’t think wolves came that big.”
“With Yellowstone right there, you never know what you’re going to get,” he told her. She was right, though. Wolves didn’t come that big. Werewolves did, however, and Troy in his wolf form was one of the biggest. “The important thing is that you’re safe. I’m glad you called me. I didn’t think you would.”
She looked a bit shy about admitting, “I didn’t think I would either. But it really scared me.”
He could see that, even now.
“When you mentioned Quinn Security,” she went on, “I honestly didn’t see why a roaming wolf would be a reason to hire a bodyguard, but now I’ve got to say I’d rather have you here than not here.”
Troy felt his chest swell with excitement and he took a step towards her, not that it closed the gap between them. He was still standing on the far side of the living room with his back to the curtained windows that faced the rear acreage of her property, and Reece remained beside the armchair, her weight on one hip, her long leg bent, barefoot toes pointed.
“Being on a librarian’s salary, though…” she said, an edge of doubt rising in her soft tone.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“Don’t worry about what?” she questioned.
“Our fee,” he told her. “There won’t be one.”
Her green eyes widened behind those red-frame glasses of hers. “Why won’t there be one?”
He shrugged and offered, “Sliding scale rates, how’s that? Anyone on a librarian’s salary gets protective services from Quinn for free.” She smiled shyly and breathed the word thanks, but he was already warning, “Don’t tell anyone though.”
“Of course not.”
He meandered over to her bedroom doorway, which was open, glanced inside at her writing desk, and Reece used the pause in conversation to clean up the orange she’d left on the kitchen counter.
“So, how does this work?” she asked him as she rounded through the living room again and joined him right outside her bedroom.
Looking down into those green eyes of hers, he explained, “Ordinarily, I’d stay with a client twenty-four-seven, but in this instance, I don’t think you’re going to need me during daylight hours. So I’ll be with you from dusk until dawn.”
The slightest hint of an intrigued smile tugged at the corners of her mouth, as though she hadn’t missed the suggestive nature of those hours.
“Every night?”
“Every night,” he confirmed, “until the wolf is caught.”
A worried look clouded over her otherwise flirtatious expression as she glanced into the bedroom then across the living room. She wasn’t sure where she was going to put Troy, he figured. The cottage was small and the living room couch was barely long enough to fit a grown man comfortably.
“Oh,” she blurted as though she’d just realized something. She padded over to the couch and mentioned, “I think this is actually a pull-out. I’ve never used it, but if memory serves…”
Reece stacked the couch cushions on the coffee table, which she then thought to push aside. Troy didn’t let her struggle with it. He neared her and lifted the coffee table himself, set it out of the way, and pulled the squeaky folded mattress out of the couch.
“Do you think that’ll do?” she asked as she opened a linen closet and selected fresh sheets and a blanket.
“It’ll do, Reece.”
Using her name got her attention and she stared at him for a beat, a faint smile coming over her shy expression all over again.
As she made quick work of dressing the mattress with a fitted sheet, she asked, “What’s your place like?”
“Simple.”
She paused from tucking the sheet and blanket that she’d laid down under the foot of the mattress and waited for him to elaborate. When he didn’t, she continued with finishing up the bed and said, “All you guys live in those cabins over near Yellowstone, right?”
“That’s right,” he told her.
She sat on the pull-out bed she’d made and said, “That’s on the northwest end of the Fist. Quinn Security is there, too?”
“You ever go out that way?”
“Not if I can help it,” she blurted with a little laugh then a split second later, turned embarrassed at her own honesty. “Sorry, it’s just that particular stretch of Highland Highway has always given me the creeps. You know where it cuts straight through to Yellowstone with Damned Repair right there on the south—”
“And Quinn Security directly to the north on the other side of the highway,” he supplied, interested in why she would get creeped out crossing that particular stretch. “All the Quinn cabins are just north of that.”
“I didn’t mean to be insulting,” she winced.
“Don’t worry about it.”
“It’s really Damned Repair that… I don’t know how to explain it… It just seems dark.”
Like it’s a haven for werewolves? he thought but would never say out loud. That was the reason Reece felt nervous in that area and avoided it, wasn’t it? Because on some subconscious level, she could sense it.
“If I ever get a hankering to go to Yellowstone, I’ll take Berry Road all the way, even though it meanders its winding way north and probably takes an extra twenty minutes.” She slumped in a hunch and her big eyes floated shut as though she was suddenly being hit with a wave of exhaustion. Pulling her red-frame glasses from her face, she blinked her eyes open, yawned, and said, “I think I might have to go to sleep. You have everything you need?”
“This is more than enough.”
She popped up from the pull-out bed, pointed to the bathroom, and said, “Bathroom. Kitchen. Help yourself to some oranges if you like. Should I leave my door open?”
“Yes.”
The conviction in his reply gave her immediate pause and they stared at each other for a long moment.
“Unless you don’t want to,” he offered.
“What other kinds of protection jobs have you guys done here in the Fist?” she asked, seemingly leaping topics, but Troy could tell they were very much related. Who else had he protected as a bodyguard that left their bedroom door open for him?
“Quinn Security is more of a way for all us Quinns to keep busy,” he told her since there hadn’t been a wealth of cases.
Truth be told, Devil’s Fist didn’t have a ton of crime. Sheriff Abernathy liked to take credit for that fact, but it had really been Troy’s father, Xavier, who maintained law and order throughout the Fist. Troy and his brothers had opened Quinn Security after Xavier passed away a few years ago, as a hub for any matter that rose within the pack. The two years had also been a waiting period of sorts. Though the majority of the pack assumed Troy would inherit the throne, since he was the eldest Quinn, it wasn’t until he received “the dream” that his fate as the pack leader had been sealed. Xavier had come to him in that dream to tell him his duties. The very same night, Xavier visited all four of Troy’s brothers in their dreams as well, informing them of the same. And finally, his widowed wife, Nikita was visited last.
He wished his father would come to him again in his dreams. Troy would ask him about
Reece.
He wondered if Reece had had any dreams recently, and if she did, would she write them off as nonsense or heed them?
“You all served?” she asked, lingering in the doorway of her bedroom as Troy sat on the foot of the bed, facing her.
“Shane, Conor, and I did,” he told her. “Dean and Kaleb never served.”
“Huh,” she murmured. She was clearly tired but couldn’t seem to tear herself away. “Dean’s the youngest.”
“He is.”
She gave that some thought then commented, “I don’t remember him in high school.”
“He’s a bit older than you,” said Troy, not liking where this was suddenly going. Werewolves didn’t age, not in the way mortals did. Troy had looked thirty-five years old for the past sixty years. His youngest brother, Dean, looked an even thirty, which would make him a high school senior when Reece was a freshman.
“Is he, though?” she questioned. “Your whole family has lived in Devil’s Fist for awhile, I thought.”
She was about to put two and two together, and then connect it to three and four and five, so he told her, “You look about ready to drop.”
“Yeah, I should get to bed,” she agreed, and with that she slipped into her bedroom, leaving the door wide open.
***
The following morning, just as Reece was settling in behind the front desk of the Devil’s Fist library, Troy and all his brothers veered their pickup trucks off of Berry Road where it fed into the northern edge of Yellowstone National Park.
Their mother, Nikita, and paternal grandmother, Sasha, lived in a stone house that to Troy had always reminded him of a castle. It was teeming with lush, green moss on one side that had grown up against it from out of the earth, and vines of ivy twirled in so many tendrils up and across its siding that it seemed like mother nature had long-terms plans of pulling Nikita and Sasha back into her belly where they one day, like all werewolves who had lost their mates, were fated to return.
If it hadn’t been for Sasha’s age—her true age was older than the town itself, but even to mortal eyes she appeared to be a stately century old—the county’s zoning board would have driven them out of the little stone house and leveled it years ago since it was situated well beyond the National Park border.
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