Just when she was starting to feel like she wouldn’t be able to bear another second of this, that she’d soon be swallowed by the dark void of unconsciousness, the attack subsided, her airways opened up, her vision cleared, and she realized that she’d curled up into Kaleb’s arms.
Calm now, she loosened the death grip she’d used to clutch him and stared up into his dark eyes as he looked down at her.
“Maybe this isn’t about Leeanne or my parents,” she breathed. “Maybe this is happening because of what I saw out on Eagle’s Pass that day. Maybe Leeanne just got in the way. Maybe the wolf-man is back in Devil’s Fist.”
“Whatever the reason,” he assured her with conviction in his tone. “I’m not going to let you out of my sight.”
***
The same night, at about the time Lucy was climbing into bed in the guest bedroom, having brushed her teeth with one of Kaleb’s brand-new toothbrushes—God, he was a playboy, his cabin fully stocked with all the odds and ends an impromptu female overnight guest might ever need—on the other side of the Fist, Jack Quagmire stepped inside the house he’d been staying in, following Angel all the way into her kitchen where she opened the refrigerator, grabbed a 16-oz steak wrapped in cellophane, and slapped it on the counter.
Jack watched as she placed a pan on one of the burners, amped up the temperature, and unwrapped the meat before setting it in the sizzling hot pan to broil.
Had she really leaned over the diner counter like that, flirting with the sheriff? Really?
She hadn’t been acting strange since leaving Lucy Cooper’s apartment. In fact, she’d been acting more normal than ever, as though life could and would go on like nothing had happened.
But something had happened. She’d flirted her perky ass off with one of his best friends in all of Devil’s Fist, and it hadn’t ended inside that tiny apartment above the diner.
If anything, now that Jack was thinking about it, her flirtation with Rick had only increased as soon as they’d gotten up there to discover the bloodstain cleaned off the floor, a rag with a few sponges floating in a bucket of pink bleach nearby. Rick probably would’ve tried to climb out on that ledge if it hadn’t been for Angel intervening her voluptuous body in-between the sheriff and the open window the way she had after she pulled him back into the apartment.
Rick wasn’t an idiot and neither was Jack. It had been obvious that Lucy had returned to clean up, disregarding the police tape that was meant to bar anyone from trespassing. Unlike Jack, however, Rick hadn’t been capable of smelling Kaleb’s distinct scent in the air along with Lucy’s. Jack’s werewolf senses had been heightened, and he wouldn’t be surprised if Angel’s had as well. That’s how he’d been able to be so confident that Lucy hadn’t been alone and hadn’t been in the company of Rick’s daughter who was supposed to be comforting her on the south side of town.
Angel flipped the steak in the pan, having seared one side to a golden brown, and asked, “You’re not going to want one, are you? Because I’m hungry enough to eat the whole thing, right ‘bout now.”
“I’m fine,” he grumbled, turning away to sit on one of the stools at the half-wall counter that separated the kitchen from the living room.
He felt her eyes on him and glanced over, finding a sympathetic look on her pretty face.
“You’re jealous,” she said intuitively.
“What makes you say that?” he countered, attempting to deflect the obvious.
She offered him a sweet, subtle smile that to his eye looked a little condescending, like a mother who found her child son overly emotional and maybe a tad silly.
“Come on, you think I can’t tell?”
What, was she going to make Jack say it? That, yes, he was jealous and hadn’t much appreciated her laying it on so thick with the sheriff? He’d like to know why the inclination to do so had come over her, but truth be told, Jack was afraid to confront her on that aspect. What if the feeling had been genuine? Rick Abernathy was a good-looking man, a silver fox of sorts. Sure, he could stand to lose a few pounds, and he wasn’t the tallest man in the Fist, but he was a powerful one. He owned this town and the residents knew and respected it. Maybe that was a quality that Angel tended to look for in an eligible man. A quality that Jack, technically, did not possess.
Angel plated her steak, selected a fork and steak knife from the utensil drawer, then, after setting the greasy pan in the sink and turning the burner off, joined him on the other side of the counter.
“Rick is suspicious of me,” she said easily before popping a perfectly cut hunk of meat into her lipstick-painted mouth. That much, he knew, but she had his full attention, he’d give her that much. “Ever since y’all found me way on out in those woods, he’s cast a skeptical, suspicious eye on me. And it’s not just that, Jack, I can feel the doubt pouring out of him when he looks at me. He doubts that I don’t remember how I came to be so disoriented. Heck, he doubts that I don’t remember what happened that night. He knows I lured Reece out to Dante’s cave on the old Halsey land.”
When she made her latter complaint, she pitched her eyebrows up to her blonde, styled hairline as though Jack hadn’t done all that he could in that regard. They both knew that Dante had had a sick, otherworldly hold on her. She’d since explained to him that the only reason she’d obliged Dante’s maniacal demand was to extricate herself from his dark hold. At the time, she’d fully believed it was the only way for her to be with Jack, to be free of Dante, and even though she’d done it, even though at the time she’d hoped and trusted that if she did as Dante demanded, the rogue werewolf really would release her, both Angel and Jack feared, to this day, that the werewolf’s dark hold hadn’t disappeared, but only loosened, and could one day tighten up around her throat all over again.
“If you think Rick hasn’t been angling for a way to arrest me, you’re naïve,” she told him, point-blank.
“That’s what he came into the diner to ask you about,” he allowed, willing to hear her out since her logic and reason was making sense. She was a reasonable woman. That’s one of the things he loved most about her. “But you weren’t there.”
“I was,” she insisted. “I never left.”
“He couldn’t find you,” said Jack. “I couldn’t see you in the kitchen either.”
“So what?” she shot back. She took a moment to calm herself, concentrating on slicing the steak up into bite-sized portions. “That’s my point, I guess,” she told him in an even, unemotional tone. “He has a lot to be suspicious about. But I’m telling you right now, Jack, I’m begging you to believe me when I say, I did not kill Leanne Whitaker!”
He believed her. The conviction in her voice was raw with truthful emotion.
Angel wasn’t pulling the wool over his eyes. She was pleading the truth. And all doubt vanished from his mind.
“So you flirted with him?” he questioned.
Angel screwed her face up a touch as she smiled. He knew the expression. It was meant to imply that of course she had flirted with the sheriff to shift his attention from suspicion of her to sexual interest in her.
And now that Jack was thinking about it, it was brilliant and had worked like a charm.
“You planning on keeping it up?”
“Maybe,” she said after she’d chewed and swallowed a bit. “Darn, I overcooked this.”
“Angel!”
“Don’t you bark at me!” she shot back. “Rick charged after me that night, he ran after me when I slipped out of the back of the diner. Jack, he shot me when I was a wolf, for Christ’s sake.”
“All he knows is that he shot a wolf,” he reminded her.
“And thank God for that! It was a close call. Too close of a call. What if he’d seen me shift?”
Jack hadn’t allowed himself to go there. If the sheriff had seen her shift, it would’ve confirmed in his eyes all of the rumors that had spread through town like wildfire. Right now, the only saving grace they were working with was the fact that Rick was a highly skeptical man and
generally refused to believe the “hysterical” word of women, which was all he’d really been working with—female accounts of the wolf-man. It had been damn lucky that Rick hadn’t seen Angel shift into her wolf form. And Jack didn’t want to have to rely on luck. It was too risky.
“Rick has two dead young women now. First it was Holly van Dyke, and now it’s Leeanne Whitaker. He knows they were both attacked by wolves. He’s put two and two together and since I’m the only ‘wolf’ he’s seen, he thinks it’s me, but thank God he doesn’t know it. But he also suspects that I had something to do with Reece Gladstone’s unlawful imprisonment. The walls are closing in here, Jack. What’s Troy doing about it? What are any of the Quinns doing about it? I’ll tell you what. Nothing. And if I have to flirt my ass off with the sheriff to get him to drop his investigation of me, then so be it.”
“Flirting with him isn’t going to get him to drop his interest in you,” he pointed out. “Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“Oh, you know what I mean.”
“I do,” he allowed. “But I don’t like it. Rick’s an ambitious man and he also thinks very highly of himself. Lord, you think I was persistent? If you light that fire inside of Rick Abernathy, he will carry that torch until his dying breath, and worse, Angel, he’s going to do something about it.”
“So I’ll date him.”
“You’ll what?” he blurted, astonished at her nonchalant candor.
She popped another hunk of meat into her pretty mouth and challenged him, “I said, I’ll date him.” After staring him down fiercely—he knew exactly what she was doing, lighting a fire under his ass to force Troy and all of the Quinns to start acting like Angel being in Rick’s crosshairs was a serious problem they would need to immediately fix—Angel asked him unflinchingly, “What’re you going to do about it?”
***
The next morning, Lucy showered and dressed in the clothes Whitney had provided her. She had a spare, freshly laundered diner uniform in her locker at Angel’s Food, so after slipping her bare feet into her Keds in the foyer of Kaleb’s cabin, they stepped out into the cool morning air just as dawn cracked over the horizon to the east.
She’d slept well. Very well, though getting over the initial hump of excitement as soon as she’d tucked herself into bed hadn’t been easy. Knowing that Kaleb was down the hallway, settling into his own bed, had filled her with a thrill strong enough to induce at least an hour of insomnia.
As she’d tossed and turned during that hot hour of restlessness, she’d tried and failed not to wonder if he was shirtless in his bed. Was he wearing boxers or boxer-briefs? Or was he fully nude under the covers? She had to admit, the man looked good without his shirt on, that was for damn sure. But every time Lucy indulged in the memory of his firm chest and chiseled abs, she also remembered how many women had ridden that particular ride. There Lucy had been, fantasizing about whether Kaleb Quinn was a boxer or briefs man, and nearly three-quarters of the females around the Fist already knew. It put a bitter taste in her mouth. And she refused to be one of them.
Putting him out of her mind had been no easy task until sleep took full hold of her, but as soon as she’d woken at the sound of her cell phone alarm, she became consumed all over again by titillating thoughts of the playboy.
She hadn’t taken her anti-anxiety medication the entire time she’d been in his care. For Lucy, that was huge. It counted for a lot. More than a lot. And as they made their way out to his pickup truck, she couldn’t help but note that fact in the “pros” column she’d been mentally building all morning.
“I think I should take my car,” she mentioned as they came to the vehicles.
“You don’t need it,” he told her.
“But what if I want to go for a jog with Whitney after work?” she asked, fearing the loss of her options and independence.
“You already told Whitney you’re going to get a drink with her at Libations after your shift,” he reminded her.
Mind like a steel trap, that one.
“Still,” she maintained.
But Kaleb wasn’t having it.
He came right up to her, took firm hold of her arm in a way that gently exerted his strength—he wasn’t quite overpowering her, but she sensed he would if she resisted, and for some reason she mentally added his assertion to the pros column, it was, after all, hot—and steered her around to the passenger’s side of his pickup truck where he opened the door for her and urged her to climb in.
As they drove into the heart of Devil’s Fist, he assured her that it was a normal response to resist having a bodyguard at all times. Most clients wrestled with the awkward, cumbersome fact of it. But everyone eventually got used to it, and Lucy would as well.
When they reached the diner, he pulled up and parked along the curb on the opposite side of the street and opened her door for her before she’d even gotten her seatbelt off.
“I think we can both expect,” he mentioned after she’d climbed out, “that Rick’s going to stop in at some point to confront you about last night since I’d promised him I’d bring you to the station and we skipped that part.”
“Darn,” she complained. She’d more or less forgotten about that. And she definitely didn’t want to have to add the sheriff to her growing list of stresses.
“I’ll be right there,” he assured her. “I’ll intercept him if he tries anything.”
“My being there was purely innocent,” she said.
“I know, but it could also look like you were covering your tracks and disposing of evidence last night, if the sheriff wants to see it that way.”
In an instant, Lucy was filled with fury and conviction. She realized that going to Kaleb’s cabin had been an act of defeat. The whole reason she’d snuck off from Whitney’s had been so that she could keep her home. That’s why she’d been compelled to clean it. She wasn’t going to lose another home to murder. She wasn’t going to be driven away. She had every intention of fighting for what she loved. Her apartment. The life she’d built for herself. Her freedom.
“I don’t need you to protect me,” she asserted. “If Rick wants to talk to me, I’ll tell him what I did and why I did it.”
“Lucy, you definitely need me to protect you.”
“I’m going to stay in my apartment,” she told him, appalled at herself that she could’ve forgotten something so vital just because Kaleb had looked good with his shirt off. She should’ve never fled her home and jumped through the window with him. She should’ve stood her ground, faced the sheriff, and fought for what was hers. Mistakes were made, but she wasn’t about to make the same mistake twice. “You can stay with me if you want, or not. But I’m not going to give up my place. Period.”
Surprisingly, after Kaleb studied her for a long moment, he said, “Okay.”
“Okay,” she said firmly before letting out a little, rocky breath of relief that he hadn’t fought her one bit. “Good.”
When she turned to cross the street, Kaleb was right beside her. He held her arm, preventing her from walking out across Main Street until a few cars drove lazily by, and together they made their way across.
As he opened the glass entrance door of the diner open for her, the protective, gentleman she’d come to know over the past twenty-four hours was suddenly replaced by the shameless playboy this town had come to revere and gossip about.
He shot her a sideways grin and teased, “Navy-blue boxer-briefs.”
“Excuse me?”
“Oh sorry, I thought you might have tried to imagine what I’d worn to bed last night.”
Oh Lord!
She couldn’t help but let out a little laugh, a touch horrified that he’d pegged her so well.
As he kept at her heels, rounding towards the far end of the diner counter, he elaborated with a thick air of flirtation, “Yeah, I like to sleep on top of the covers, windows open so the cool night air can lick over my chiseled body.”
“Oh please,” she laughed, shaking her head.
“See you later!” she blurted. “I gotta get changed now!”
She ducked into the kitchen just in time to hide her blushing cheeks.
After changing into her blue buttoned-down dress uniform and pulling her long, blonde hair into a high ponytail—she was feeling uncomfortably warm and hoped to high heaven that it was the heat in the kitchen and not the image of himself that Kaleb had painted for her—she padded out into the diner with a steaming pot of coffee in her hand to start making the rounds in her section, filling mugs and taking orders.
Kaleb wasn’t alone, she noticed.
He’d taken up in his usual spot in one of the red, vinyl booths near the windows that faced Main Street, and a curvy woman with sandy blonde hair was standing over him in the aisle, her back to Lucy. The half-hearted grin on Kaleb’s face, to Lucy’s eye, seemed uncomfortable, and it took her a second to recognize who the woman was.
Courtney Harrington.
The girl was young, perky, and always got what she wanted. At twenty-six, she was still every bit the sorority sister she’d been in college, and as far as Lucy was concerned the girl had never quite made it out of those privileged college years, mentally speaking. She was dressed in a pink mini-skirt and tight tee, garments she’d bought at a deep discount since she both worked and shopped at Acorn Fashion and Accessories with her friend, Pamela, who, unfortunately, had also slept with Kaleb. Some time back Lucy had definitely witnessed Pamela, dressed head-to-toe in boutique clothing that accentuated her feminine curves, confront the second eldest Quinn at a shrill volume right here in the diner even worse than the late waitress, Leeanne, had.
The smile that had spread across her face and hadn’t left her thanks to Kaleb’s shameless and out-of-the-blue flirtation with her drooped and she felt her expression grow long and hurt.
It didn’t take a rocket scientist to see their exchange for what it was.
It was worse than shameless flirtation.
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