Rick shoved a pulled pork slider into his mouth, never minding that grease was plopping out of its backend and staining his tan-colored Sheriff’s uniform that he probably could’ve got away with not wearing today.
With a mouthful of food, he smiled and said, “The woman’s a hundred. Lord knows I ain’t the biggest fan of the Quinns, but credit’s got to be given where credit is due.”
Well, that was rich, thought Rachel, who fully believed that Rick owed her far more credit than he’d ever given her in all the years she’d been serving this quaint town on the police force. She made a sturdy effort not to roll her eyes and frown at him, and instead fixed her mind on her own investigation to anchor her rage back into her goals.
She might have applied—for the third time—for her detective’s badge, but this time she wasn’t about to sit around and hope he’d permit her promotion. This time she was determined to take it, and her strategy was to investigate the strange occurrences that had been unfolding around the Fist on her own personal time. Once she knew, with facts and evidence, just what in the hell was going on around here, she would be able to tie it all to the elusive Dante Alighieri. At this juncture, she didn’t know why and she didn’t know how, but her gut was telling her that he was responsible. Her gut had also been telling her that all five Quinn brothers were linked to the recent slew of crimes that had taken place in Devil’s Fist, as well.
She’d get to the bottom of it, all on her own. Then she’d make detective with the support of the whole town. Hell, she might even have a street named after her just like the sheriff did, and Rick Abernathy could blow it out his ass if he didn’t like it.
So, she smiled, big and pretty, for the man and told him, “You must be darn proud of your Whitney for having slain the were-thing Pamela Davenport up in Yellowstone the way she did. You teach her to fire that gun of hers?”
“Yes, indeed,” he said proudly.
“And she nailed that other wolf right here on Main Street, too,” Rachel went on complimenting.
As the sheriff began bragging about his Whitney and everything he’d taught her about firearms and defending herself over the years, Rachel tuned him out without much effort and turned her attention to the Quinns, who were standing in a cluster up the crowded street.
It looked like Kaleb had shuffled off somewhere. She only saw Troy, Shane, Conor, and Dean, and as she spied them, Troy broke away from his brothers, joined his newlywed wife, Reece, and disappeared towards Bison Road, leaving the three youngest Quinns.
Rachel suspected they were werewolves. Had to be. But suspicion would get her nowhere. She had to prove they were.
Knowing that the youngest Quinn, Dean, had been shot by a silver-plated bullet had thrown her off their collective scent. After the Gladstone unlawful imprisonment, when Rachel had gotten all the lab reports back from Jackson Hole and had learned that the bullets in Dante Alighieri’s firearms were all silver-plated, she’d assumed that Dean couldn’t have been a werewolf. The silver bullet would’ve killed him. And then there was Kaleb. Rachel knew for a fact that the bullets in Whitney’s gun were also made of silver. When Whitney had pulled the trigger, she’d been aiming at a wolf, but it ended up being Kaleb Quinn who was lying dead on the pavement.
Rachel wished to high heaven she’d seen it with her own eyes, the transformation from wolf to man. If she had, she wouldn’t have to rely on Whitney and Courtney Harrington’s jumbled accounts. If the girls were right, and Rachel strongly trusted that they were, then Kaleb was a werewolf, one who might be immune to silver, just like his brother.
Honest to God, Rachel didn’t want to rely on anyone or anything except for stone cold evidence. She’d sampled the bloodstain on Main Street and would have to wait patiently for the lab in Jackson Hole to get back to her.
All she could really think in this moment was that she was on to something, something that even the sheriff didn’t know about. Rachel had convinced Whitney to keep mum about what she’d seen that night, but Rachel knew that sooner or later, Whitney would tell her father, and there would be a real race against the clock to investigate.
Of course, the sheriff hadn’t entirely abandoned his own suspicions of werewolves in the Fist. He’d even organized to have a werewolf expert swing on into the Fist from Jackson Hole, which could be interesting.
Rachel was hit with a sudden twinge of shame.
It had everything to do with Conor Quinn.
She’d let a flicker of interest in him light up her heart and it had nearly cost her.
She’d promised herself she’d never let a moment of girlish intrigue distract her ever again, but as she watched the Quinns, she couldn’t keep her eyes from locking on Conor.
There was just something about him.
If Kaleb was a werewolf, then so too were all of the Quinns, Conor included…
And yet, she couldn’t tear her spying gaze away from him.
Conor Quinn had a way of sucking her right in.
But before she could stare at him much longer, the brothers disbursed from one another into the crowd, and Rachel was left with a dark feeling of intrigue that the sheriff’s longwinded, anecdotal bragging couldn’t pull her out of.
***
Shane found Whitney perusing a canopy booth that was displaying decorative horseshoes and other equestrian tchotchkes after he’d walked nearly the length of Main Street, eyeing the various display booths.
He slowed up and watched her as people meandered their way through. He didn’t love the feeling that had slammed into his chest at the sight of her, the dark swell of lust, the strong urge to contain her, protect her, or at least level with her about what she’d seen out here on Main Street the other night.
Troy hadn’t given the order or any directive whatsoever. It irked Shane’s soldier heart. He was designed to stay in line, obey, execute missions to a T. A soldier without a mission was like idle hands for the devil to play with, which was why he’d felt the compulsion to study her.
She was a little, pint-sized thing, all curves and gall he happened to like. Whitney wasn’t easily controlled, not by her father, who she was still in the habit of rebelling against—though in Shane’s estimation, she was much too old to still be wrapped up in that effort—and not by anyone else in town. Strong-willed with a touch of entitlement and rare, flickering and somewhat contradicting moments of being daddy’s little girl, Whitney Abernathy conducted herself like a challenge. One Shane might like to try to conquer. But it wasn’t his place, and this certainly wasn’t the time.
Whitney must have felt his dark eyes on her, because she lifted her emerald green gaze from the decorative horseshoe paperweight she’d been considering and locked her sights right on Shane.
Then her eyes narrowed into glaring slits and her pretty lips flattened into a hard, disapproving line.
She set the paperweight down on its display table and marched right over to him. For a second, Shane thought she might take a running swing at him, but instead she came right up under him, holding her head high to essentially stare him down even though he was now towering over her, and asserted with all the fire of her hot-tempered personality, “Are you following me?”
“No,” he lied, trying not to enjoy how cute she looked when she was angry.
He’d never been on the receiving end of this side of her, and truth be told, he couldn’t say he minded it.
She narrowed her green eyes into an even tighter glare and informed him, “We had a drink and a laugh or two, but that’s where this ends, Quinn.”
“Oh?” he responded unemotionally.
She screwed her mouth up with what looked like flabbergast, which wasn’t the worst look for her, then warned, “I know what you are. You stay the hell away from me. I mean it.”
Before he could challenge her and dismantle whatever conclusions she’d formed about him and his brothers, Whitney turned on her heel, tossed her big, red mane of hair over her shoulder with such gusto that it hit him in the face—wafts of a
flowery scent filled his nose and he felt his mouth tug into a crack of a grin—and stomped off into the crowd.
Shane followed her with his eyes just long enough to understand that she was making a beeline for her father and PO Rachel Clancy, who looked far from amused by whatever the sheriff was boring her with.
Whitney Abernathy was going to be trouble.
And Shane didn’t want to have to sit on his hands until Troy knew just what in the hell he was going to do about it.
Chapter Two
WHITNEY
After checking in with her daddy, Whitney skirted briskly through the crowd of residents and past the police barricade where Angel’s Food sat on the corner. The diner was all locked up so she paid it no mind and found her Jeep parked on the far side of Bison Road, sandwiched tightly between a pickup truck and a sedan.
She cursed.
Her Jeep was damn near wedged in, bumper to bumper on both its front and back ends.
She climbed in with a grunt and a huff, then started the tedious task of wiggling her vehicle out, inching forward, cutting the wheel some, and reversing with a tap on the gas. Over and over again until she knew she’d be able to clear the sedan without denting its fender.
She had a lot on her mind, a lot weighing on her.
She wasn’t sure if she felt betrayed, but she was definitely confused.
She’d gone over it a hundred times in her mind since it had happened.
The dark night on Main Street. She’d been in the bar, in the ladies’ room, as a matter of fact. When she’d emerged, she’d caught fast sight of a wolf through the large, picture windows that lined the street. The animal had been charging the street and Whitney had torn through the bar and spilled out onto the sidewalk just in time to shout a warning at Lucy.
It had all happened so fast.
Whitney had barely been able to process the fact that her best friend was out there with some man. She’d been too concerned with yelling wolf! and a second later, Whitney had fired the shot that had been meant to save Lucy Cooper’s life.
It had.
And it had taken Kaleb Quinn’s in the process.
But Kaleb had been at the birthday parade just now, alive and well.
It was clear as day to her what he was. A werewolf. Just like Pamela.
What didn’t make a lick of sense to Whitney was that, unlike the day out on Rocky Road Trail in Yellowstone when she’d shot and killed Pamela to save Lucy’s life, preventing the were-woman from attacking her good friend, and Lucy had thanked her profusely, this time, with Kaleb Quinn Lucy hadn’t. Instead, she’d dropped to her knees and held the wolf-man who had moments prior been charging down the street to attack her.
It made Whitney’s head spin, trying to sort it all out, and she hadn’t even yet dared to consider how her closest friend in the world had lit up like the summer sun then vanished before her very eyes right along with Kaleb on the street that night.
All she knew was that there were a lot of secrets in this town, and her best friend had been keeping one of the biggest ones from her. For how many days, weeks? Or had it been years? Had Lucy Cooper been harboring mind-bending secrets from Whitney for as long as they’d known each other in the Fist?
Whitney felt her jaw tighten, mouth pressing into a hard, hurt line. She felt a sting of tears coming, but she refused to let the emotion surface. Instead, she sniffled hard, pulling her emotional moisture back into her brain, and fixed her eyes on the brilliant sun, orange and blazing, as it sank in the sky towards the Tetons in the far west.
It was a sight for sore eyes and she’d never gotten sick of watching the summer sun turn into a ball of orange fire as it set the sky with changing colors so exquisite there were no names yet for those unique hues. God’s colors, she thought with a sad smile.
Crap, she missed her friend. It had only been a few days, but Lucy had been avoiding her, having chosen to hole up in some cabin out west with Kaleb Quinn.
Whitney realized, as she pulled her Jeep into the dusty parking area in front of the corral stables on the northeast nook of Yellowstone, that she felt like she was in high school all over again. She knew, guided by intuition and a smidgen of logic, that Lucy had been dodging her text messages and calls because she was the sheriff’s daughter. She was the narc, it felt like, excluded because of paternal relation, as if she’d rush off to Daddy and tell him every last detail of what her friends were up to. She’d never done that one damn day of all her years in high school. She’d demonstrated her loyalty to her friends, never breathing a word to Rick about the pot or the under the panties action that her friends had been up to. And she hadn’t breathed a word to Daddy about what she’d seen out on Main Street the other night, again demonstrating ironclad loyalty. And look where it had gotten her!
Whitney would’ve done well to toss her riding clothes in her Jeep, but she hadn’t been thinking clearly for days. Luckily, when she reached the stables where her trusty stallion, Buttons, was snorting and whinnying at the sight of her, she discovered she’d tucked an old pair of riding boots below a set of horseshoe shelves just inside the door. She could hike her dress up her thighs and make the situation work.
Buttons was a boisterous horse with luscious, black hair and a distinguishing diamond of white marking his regal forehead. A number of years back, when Yellowstone had acquired him from a private owner over in Montana, the stallion had refused to be ridden. He was some kind of wild thing, never having been tamed, which was his previous owner’s main complaint. The more experienced corrals at the stables had tried and failed to get Buttons to submit, and with their every failure, Whitney had felt more and more determined to try her hand. She’d felt a kinship with the headstrong stallion. Whitney, after all, was a wild thing herself. She hadn’t rushed the process or forced Buttons into submission. Instead, she’d won him over with pats and carrots, long conversations and an apple or two here and there. With time, he’d warmed to her. And when she sensed he was ready, she took him on out from the stables, no harness, no bit in his mouth, no saddle. She talked him into trusting her enough to climb on up on his massive, muscular back, gripping his long mane of raven black hair since she hadn’t fixed a leather harness on him.
She’d rode him barebacked that day, Whitney trusting the horse wouldn’t throw her and Buttons trusting that his rider wouldn’t stifle his wild spirit.
It was a match made in heaven. Whitney fell right in love and Buttons soon regarded her with the kind of affection and loyalty that only a damaged, rescued animal could.
As she offered the stallion a few greeting strokes and urged him out from his stall, having pulled on her riding boots and fit an equestrian helmet on her head, the notion of true love came to mind. The dynamic she’d earned with Buttons, crazy as it might sound, was something she was looking for in a man. The right man. She was a wild thing just like this horse, she thought to herself as she fastened a saddle on his sturdy back, and she’d never submit to a man who was forcing her to give up the untamable essence of who she really was. It would take time to trust. And she would never expect a man to bend his own spirit to her will, either.
Too bad she’d only ever found the purity of this kind of trusting love with a horse.
Shane Quinn came to mind. He was known as a dark horse around town, and for good reason. He was a wild thing, though closed-off and reclusive. He put off an air of danger that happened to intrigue her. Maybe too much danger…
“Hey, there, Whitney!”
Whitney had just walked Buttons out of the stables and the setting sun, stark in its rich, orange light, was cutting into her eyes so she had to squint to see which of the other corrals had greeted her.
It was Delilah Dane.
“Oh, hey there yourself,” she returned with a friendly smile.
“You give me two shakes and I’ll join you,” Delilah offered. “Just need to get Snowball saddled up.”
Whitney hadn’t planned on company, but she figured it would do her some good, s
o she nodded, agreeing to wait for the girl to bring one of the white mares on out.
Delilah Dane was as sultry as a summer day was long. Tall with toned, long limbs and curves in all the right places that seemed to defy nature, or what had become of it in this fast food era of time, the girl had dark, pin-straight hair and exotic eyes that alluded to her watered-down, Native American roots. But her skin tone was as pale as an Irishman’s. The contrast lent itself to allure, which was how she’d landed a position at the stables in the first place. Delilah hadn’t known the first thing about tending to horses or riding them two years ago when she’d first gotten hired.
Delilah was something of a mystery, herself. From what Whitney had been able to glean, she’d moved around a lot before settling in Devil’s Fist, darting from city to city throughout Montana, both Dakotas, Colorado, and finally the good ol’ Cowboy State of Wyoming. She’d been trying to escape her past, or shed it, but had lugged it instead to each new state she fled to. Talk about wild things, Delilah probably took the cake in that department. She didn’t believe in jobs or paying bills, and had gotten by with the help of strange men. No one ‘round these parts talked about it, not unless Delilah pulled the same methods down at Libations bar. Rumor had it the girl would go home with you, so long as you left a fat stack of bills for her on the nightstand before you left.
Whitney didn’t like knowing that, but not because she was moralistic or judgmental about that type of thing. She just wished men would keep their mouths shut about it. Whitney only knew about the girl’s habit because Delilah had gone to bed with a few men who kissed and told, and one of the things they told was how Delilah had mentioned she’d done similar “but much worse” in the cities she’d come from.
Well, it was her own damn business, that’s what Whitney thought.
Of course, it became the business of the corral manager a few times over when Delilah had taken off, disappearing for long stretches and missing a number of her shifts at Yellowstone. Still, she’d always resurfaced, picked up where she left off, and did her best to live a clean life…
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