Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  She closed the door behind them and, taking Angel’s hand, Jack led them clear into the living room where he sensed, according to his heightened sense of smell, that Kaleb wasn’t around.

  “We need your help,” he told Lucy as she joined them.

  A look of grave concern washed over Lucy’s otherwise angelic face and she said, “I’ll do what I can.”

  “It’s about Angel. Her safety. No one seems to care that she’s still tied to Dante. No one but me, anyway.”

  “Have you spoken to Troy about—”

  “He’s not doing anything!” Jack insisted before taking a few concerted breaths to cool off his rising temper. He didn’t mean to come off crazed and hotheaded but that’s how he felt and it was getting harder and harder to hide. “You have gifts. Gifts that not even Troy will possess even if he does one day come into his full powers. Is there any way you could investigate a way for us to be together?” he asked as he clutched Angel’s warm hand and glanced lovingly at her. “There has to be a way.”

  Lucy stared at him for a long while and the longer she kept her eyes on him the deeper his heart sunk into what was starting to feel like despair.

  Finally, she said, “Let me see.”

  She neared Angel and took both of the older woman’s hands in hers. Then she closed her eyes and even though Angel hadn’t been instructed to do the same, she shut her eyes as well.

  Jack watched.

  And watched.

  And hoped that by the time he and Angel walked out of here, they’d be united for all of eternity.

  ***

  Christ, Larry Hardcastle was a bonehead. He’d welcomed Shane into his unkempt shack as if on a dare, convinced that the military-trained bodyguard would be satisfied of Larry’s innocence if his stepdaughter, Delilah Dane, wasn’t inside. But Shane had discovered firearms. A lot of them. And his werewolf senses told him that one of them had been fired recently. The scent of gunpowder rolled off of it so strongly that it hadn’t taken much effort to locate the handgun under one of the couch cushions.

  “This is Wyoming,” Larry balked. “Who doesn’t own a gun or two?”

  Hunting rifles? Yes. A shotgun or two? Of course. A .38 magnum? Well, not so much.

  But Shane didn’t push it. Arguing with the dirtbag would get him nowhere. Instead, he decided to brand Larry’s distinct scent into the forefront of his mind and keep a watchful eye on the man, who he was still pretty damn sure had been keeping a sly, spying eye on Shane.

  “Don’t leave town,” Shane warned as he slapped the screen door of the dilapidated shack open and stepped out into the dry heat of the dusty plains.

  “You ain’t the law!” Larry yelled, anger rising in his chest. “You can’t tell me what to do!”

  All bark and no bite, thought Shane. The man hadn’t raised his voice one iota when Shane had stalked through the wall-to-wall trash piles that comprised his sorry excuse for a home. Now that Shane was leaving, however, Larry was able to exercise a little muscle, muscle he wouldn’t dare use.

  Or so Shane thought.

  “Just what in the hell?!” Larry swore, flying into a state of outrage so fast that Shane barely had time to register the third vehicle out front, the girl lurking in a crouch just beneath the shack window.

  Larry had turned on his heel, and as Shane whipped around to follow him with his eyes, he sensed more than saw a wild mane of red hair where the girl had been. She was already bolting for the parked Jeep, as Larry tore out of his shack with a baseball bat in his grimy hand.

  Larry charged at Whitney, the baseball bat raised over his head, as she scrambled to her Jeep, but he was too fast and she’d slipped on the dusty earth, plopping right onto her bottom.

  Shane sprinted to her rescue. He had half a mind to shift into his wolf-form, but enough residents had caught on to the fact of werewolves in the Fist, and the last thing any of the Quinns could afford would be for a loudmouth, drunken fool to slam through town, insisting he’d seen a shifter with his own two eyes.

  Fast as all hell in his human form, Shane caught the baseball bat on Larry’s downswing, as Whitney shielded her head in a defensive huddle on the ground.

  Furious to be thwarted, Larry spat at her through his teeth, “You’ve got some damn nerve! You think I don’t know who you are! Get the hell off my property!”

  Larry took a swinging kick at Whitney, but Shane effectively blocked his boot before it could make contact with the girl who was scrambling away and taking cover on the driver’s side of her Jeep. She popped the door open and climbed inside, as Shane wrestled Larry into submission.

  Christ, the guy smelled like week-old onions rotting in the sun, but it wasn’t hard to get him into a choke-hold, yank him to his feet, and drag him towards the shack.

  By the time Shane kicked the screen door open, jerking and dragging Larry inside, he’d cut off the blood flow to his head long enough to put him to limp sleep.

  The couch seemed as good a place as any, so Shane dumped Larry there, limbs loose and flopped over the side.

  As soon as Shane heard the distinct growl of an engine fire up, followed by tires spitting dirt and gravel against the side of the shack, he ran outside to find Whitney reversing her Jeep around. As she braked hard and threw the gear shifter into drive, Shane yelled, “Oh no you don’t!”

  But she was already peeling off down the long and windy driveway, tires kicking up clouds of dust that nearly blinded him.

  He ran to his pickup truck, jumped in, and peeled out after her, all the while feeling a strange mix of intrigue and extreme annoyance that she was far more stubborn than he could’ve ever imagined.

  Hadn’t he told her to stay out of it? Let him handle it? That it was too dangerous for Whitney to tag along, much less lead the charge in trying to track down Delilah Dane?

  He used a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel as he gained on her. He needed to cut her off at the pass before she could turn off the long driveway and onto the highway that would take her all the way back into the heart of the Fist.

  What was her obsession with Delilah anyway? He couldn’t wrap his mind around it. It wasn’t like he knew everything about Whitney, quite the opposite in fact. And he surely didn’t know every last thing about Delilah. The girl was an enigma wrapped in an unsolvable riddle, and Shane was pretty sure that eighty percent of what she’d told him had been a lie if not a severely twisted form of the truth. But still. He’d never gotten any indication from either of them that they held any degree of a friendship. So what was motivating Whitney to latch onto this?

  Shane was right up on her bumper now, so close that he could see her terrified eyes glance up at him in her rearview mirror. He jerked the wheel, hit the gas, and swung the length of his pickup right in front of her Jeep so hard and fast that she had to slam onto the brakes not to head-on collide with the flank of his truck and T-bone him something fierce.

  As he jumped out of his idling truck, all he could figure was that if he had secrets with Delilah Dane, maybe Whitney did as well. But the current secret that was posing detriment to Shane’s reputation, if not his freedom, was that someone had taken a picture of him and the exotic beauty—a photo that, if it wound up in the wrong hands, could look mighty suspicious, if not implicate him in some kind of crime, should Delilah be hurt somewhere out there, or worse. Was Whitney wrestling with a similar threat?

  “Out!” he barked as he jerked the driver’s side door of her Jeep open before she could think to throw her vehicle in reverse and escape.

  He didn’t like intimidating women and he certainly didn’t like overpowering them, but with this particular one, he knew doing both would be required.

  As he reached for her, fully prepared to pull her out of the Jeep, she punched him hard.

  That was no lady punch. She’d slammed her fist into his freakin’ throat and he choked for air, but recovered quickly, snatched the key out of the ignition, and took a step back to catch his breath.

  “What the hel
l!” he yelled, feeling surprisingly intimidated himself as she lunged out of the Jeep at him, ready to strike again.

  She wound up to throw another mean punch, but he caught her by the wrist and her green eyes flared with the kind of rage he’d only seen in hand-to-hand combat on the battlefield.

  She wasted absolutely no time, taking a left-handed swing at him that was loose and sloppy. He caught her by that wrist as well, and knew exactly what would be coming at him next—her sharp knee to his groin—so he twisted, lifting his knee to thigh-block her attacking effort.

  “Stop!”

  “Let go of me!” she screamed, wriggling like a noodle to free her wrists.

  But Shane wasn’t having it. In a single, fluid, snapping motion, he lifted one of her arms as he turned her. He had her in a bearhug now, holding her from behind and keeping his nose clear of the back of her head, which—now that he’d gotten a taste of her fighting style—he anticipated she’d use to break his nose if she could.

  “Get off of me!” she yelled, furiously.

  As he lowered down, bringing her to the ground, he firmly promised, “Not if you hit me. Are you going to hit me?”

  “Get off!”

  “Are you going to hit me?” he asked, holding her tight as hell from behind as they sat on the dusty road. “Are you?”

  She was practically out of breath but the way she was jerking her shoulders told him that she’d yet to realize there would be no way to get out of this unless Shane decided to release her himself.

  “Are you?” he repeated, and she let out a breathy huff, her shoulders relaxing. It was dawning on her that she was no match.

  Of all the ways Shane had fantasized about holding her again, getting close to her warm body, this had not been one of them.

  Soon she loosened and slumped in his arms. Her voice was mousy and defeated as she told him, “I won’t hit you. Let me go.”

  “How do I know you won’t take another swing at me?”

  She sighed and informed him, “You cut off all the damn circulation in my wrists. I can’t feel my hands.”

  “Numb weapons,” he supplied.

  “I won’t. Just let me go.”

  Cautiously, he tested her word by loosening his grip around her wrists, but it wasn’t enough to let her go. She didn’t try anything. She didn’t even try to jerk her wrists free. He trusted her, so he finally let her go, but was reluctant to pull his arms away. He could get away with holding her for a few more seconds.

  “You followed me?” he questioned, even though the answer was beyond obvious. Of course she had.

  As she made slow work of getting to her feet, Shane stood as well. She faced him, looking up at him with those big, green eyes of hers and asked, “Who was that guy?”

  “Don’t follow me,” he barked.

  “Who was he?” she pressed, stubborn as all hell.

  “You mean to tell me you don’t know him?” he asked. “He sure as hell knows who you are.”

  “Is he one of Delilah’s… men?” she asked.

  Shane knew she had meant to say something more specific like Johns or customers. Apparently, Delilah’s alternative means of earning cash was not as much of a secret as she probably would’ve liked.

  “No,” he told her. “He’s not one of her men.”

  “Then who is he? And why are you here?”

  “I told you I don’t want you involved in this. It’s too dangerous. What if I hadn’t been here? Larry would’ve cracked your windshield if not your head!”

  “If you hadn’t been here, Shane,” she shot right back with an edge of irritation in her otherwise melodic voice, “then neither would I. I didn’t even know the guy existed until I followed you here.”

  She seemed to be running out of fire and gas, all tuckered out now that the adrenaline that had flooded her veins was drying up. She looked about ready to collapse, but, perhaps determined to muster up a secondwind, she planted her fists on her hips and pitched those dainty eyebrows of hers clear up to her auburn hairline.

  “Well?” she demanded. “Who is he?”

  “Larry Hardcastle,” said Shane. “Her stepfather. Happy?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him and he could almost see the gears turning in her fast-working mind. “How would you even know to come here?” she asked. “How did you know where Delilah lives?”

  “It’s a small town,” he offered.

  “It’s not that small, Shane. Not everyone knows that Delilah lives above Devil’s Advocate, and clearly not everyone knows she has a stepfather who lives out on the plains. I didn’t.”

  “I need you to stay out of this,” he maintained firmly, but the trouble was, as much as he’d like to deposit her in her Jeep and send her on her way, he knew she wouldn’t give up so easily. There would be no safe way to part ways with her and it frustrated the living hell out of him. “I’m handling it.”

  “Who was Delilah to you?” she interrogated, but before he could supply an answer, her green eyes widened with stark knowing and she accused, “Oh hell, Shane! You’re one of Delilah’s men?” She paced away as though she wouldn’t be able to stand the sight of him a second longer then turned fast on her heel, cut her angry green eyes at him, and said, “You are, aren’t you?”

  “I knew her personally,” he allowed.

  “Knew her?” she blurted. “Past tense?” She was getting herself worked up all over again. “Is she dead? Shane! Is she dead?”

  “No!” he barked then admitted, “I don’t know.”

  “But that’s why you said knew like that, using the past tense, because you think she’s dead!”

  “No, I said knew because we’d fallen out of touch more or less. I don’t know her anymore, that’s all.”

  She didn’t look convinced.

  “Look,” he began leveling with her, “Delilah was involved in some stuff. I have the same bad feeling about her disappearance as you do.”

  Her furious expression softened. “Then don’t exclude me.”

  He let out a sigh. It wasn’t going to be easy to resist those big eyes of hers, and Lord knew he’d rather be around Whitney than not. But not like this. It was too dangerous. He hadn’t a clue as to the full extent of Delilah’s ad-hoc prostitution nor the presumably questionable characters she’d gotten herself tangled up with. She’d indicated she’d used drugs in the past, which brought into the picture a whole host of dangerous types she might have been associating with. Shane needed Whitney as far away from this thing as humanly possible, so he turned the tables on her.

  “Why do you care?” he asked, and though it had sounded a bit crass the way he’d phrased it, the look in her eyes told him she knew where he was coming from. “Everyone else in town has shrugged their shoulders, untroubled, when I’ve asked them if they’ve seen her. Like her being out of sight for a day is nothing to worry about. But not you. Why?”

  Whitney held her head high and reminded him, “I’m my father’s daughter—”

  “I doubt your father give two hoots about Delilah Dane.”

  “I shot a wolf before it could attack Lucy,” she barreled right on. “I saw with my own eyes that the wolf was no wolf. It turned right into Pamela Davenport. I shot your freakin’ brother to save Lucy’s life again. I care because I care, Shane, and I shouldn’t have to explain myself to you. But if you really must know, we both live in a town where people go missing. Look at Angel Mercer. What the hell happened to her out in those woods? And Reece Gladstone was abducted, too. No one’s talking about it or questioning these things. But I know what’s going on. Werewolves are taking over this town. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that something dark might have happened to Delilah. Is she going to show up in the woods some place with no memory of how she got there? Is she going to resurface in town, appearing normal, but really she’s been turned into a werewolf herself? I’ve got to find her and that’s that.”

  Shane felt a sudden burst of affection for her. Her conviction was pure-hearted
and admirable. Unlike his own quest to find Delilah, she wasn’t trying to cover her own ass or intercept impending allegations that would incriminate her.

  He dared to take a bold step towards her. Her green eyes flashed with a glimmer of wonder at what he was doing. He took another step and as he did, he couldn’t suppress the grin that was threatening to give him away.

  He told her, for the second time, “That’s the warrior in you.”

  “Maybe,” she breathed as he closed the gap between them. But when he reached for her hips, craving the feel of her warm body against his, she caught his hands and stepped away. “You were paying Delilah for… for…” She couldn’t get the words out until the third try. “For sex?”

  “No.” He stared down into her skeptical, questioning eyes for a long moment. “I wasn’t paying her for sex.”

  Those same skeptical eyes narrowed and she asked, “Then what?”

  “We had a friendship of sorts.”

  “Delilah wasn’t friends with men,” she pointed out.

  “That might be true,” he allowed, “and she certainly didn’t want to be my friend, but that’s what we were. I never touched her. I only helped her, and the last time she came to me, I refused her, and here we are. That’s why I’m invested in finding her.”

  “Motivated by guilt?”

  “Something like that,” he agreed.

  He hoped that would be enough. He wasn’t going to tell her about the incriminating picture, how his deepest fear was that Delilah was already dead out there, how he had a sixth sense that if she was, whoever did it would try to pin her murder on him. Whitney didn’t need to know all that, because she was right. She was her father’s daughter, and the last thing he needed was for Sheriff Rick Abernathy to ask more questions than he already was. Living life as a Quinn under Rick’s microscope was cumbersome enough.

  “I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he went on. “I doubt this is about werewolves.”

  She screwed her face up with an air of dark humor and retorted, “Of course you’d say that. You’re one of them.”

  “Really, Whitney. I don’t think it’s about our kind or the one rogue werewolf who’s been doing the real damage throughout Devil’s Fist.”