Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  She fully expected an answer. Conor tried not to stammer as he attempted to shift the dialogue. “Quinn Security has always had a vested interest in keeping the Fist safe especially when the sheriff falls short.”

  She narrowed her eyes on him and stated, “I’m not talking about Quinn Security. I’m talking about five brothers who I suspect have been going after Alighieri as a preemptive strike in order to perhaps prevent an ambush of either Dante against the town or Dante against themselves.”

  She let that hang in the air between them as Conor mentally scrambled to offer some degree of a truthful answer that would both satisfy her and help her drop it. But nothing was coming to immediate mind.

  He tried to ground her inquiry firmly in the territory of catching the guy, so he said, “What you really want is hard evidence that proves Dante murdered three people in the Fist.”

  “I won’t deny I want that,” she allowed. “I’d also like witness statements from individuals like Angel Mercer, but the Quinns have stood in my way from getting that. So you see, a hefty portion of the walls I’ve hit have been because of the Quinns, which is why I’m looking at you.”

  “And why you’ve invited me here,” he added, as he folded his arms.

  He didn’t appreciate being attacked, though Rachel was doing it in a subtle, professional manner, and he really didn’t like how the strength of her conviction and well-articulated argument happened to be turning him on.

  “If I can find the connection,” she pushed, “between you and your brothers and Alighieri, then I’ll be able to figure this thing out.”

  “You think we have something to do with Dante’s crimes?” he asked, offended.

  She stared at him for a long moment then corrected his accusation. “I think Dante Alighieri chose to come to the Fist and disturb the peace and commit crimes because the Quinns live here.” It felt like a punch to the gut, but Conor knew he was worried only because Rachel was right. “If y’all lived in Utah or Montana or somewhere in Canada then I don’t for one second think that Devil’s Fist would be under attack right now, and I want to know why.”

  “The only involvement we have with Dante stems from the fact that we, too, have suspected him of these crimes,” he maintained, but Rachel wasn’t buying it.

  She changed tactics. “I’ve shown you what I have. You told me that you have much more information than I ever could. Let’s hear it.”

  Damn, she was good.

  It made him grin.

  “What’s so funny?” she asked.

  “Nothing’s funny,” he assured her.

  “Then why are you smiling?”

  He couldn’t help but admit, “Because you’re one hell of an investigator and damn smart at interrogation. It’s crazy you haven’t made detective. You should be running that station.”

  “I won’t let you disarm me with compliments and I won’t be so easily distracted. I’m all ears, Mr. Quinn.”

  “Mr. Quinn?”

  “You’re stalling.”

  He was, but at least he’d stopped grinning. Rachel was looking mighty pleased with herself.

  “Conor,” she started up again when he didn’t immediately dive into sharing with her what he had claimed he knew. “I’m not angling to arrest any of you. My gut tells me you and your brothers aren’t offenders. I don’t believe you killed anyone and I honestly believe that you all mean to keep the Fist safe, just like I do. But you’re keeping secrets. Secrets that I need in order to prosecute Alighieri. Some might say that in that sense, y’all are impeding an investigation or, much worse, y’all are functioning as accessories after the fact.”

  “Whoa,” he said, pushing his chair away from hers and taking a worried lap around the living room. It felt like he was in a pressure cooker and it didn’t help that the apartment was hot and stifling. “We aren’t guilty of anything.”

  “How is Dante connected to y’all?” she dug. “Why has he gone after women who y’all have been trying to court? Reece and Lucy, hell my gut tells me Whitney was in Dante’s crosshairs as well, but she’s too damn good with a pistol to get attacked. All three of those women are either married or engaged to a Quinn. That’s no coincidence. What is your connection to Alighieri?”

  “He’s our uncle!” he blurted without thinking.

  As Conor raked his fingers through his light brown hair, knowing that he’d just come undone, Rachel stared at him for a long moment.

  “Uncle?” she asked.

  “Our father’s half-brother. They share a mother. Sasha Quinn, our maternal grandmother.”

  She fell silent and had a good, long think on that.

  “Y’all are related to a werewolf?” she questioned, but to Conor it sounded like she was really pondering the information.

  Next, Rachel rummaged through the papers on her desk and pulled out another report.

  “What’s that?”

  After taking a deep breath she said, “I had Kaleb’s blood sample sent off to the lab the night that Whitney and Courtney witnessed him shift from wolf to man.” Rachel locked eyes with him but Conor pressed his mouth into a line, refusing to address what her big, brown eyes were asking. “It came back human unlike Alighieri’s DNA.” She reiterated her point as if trying to reconcile the confusion. “Two eye witnesses saw your brother shift from wolf to man, and yet his DNA is not canine. How do you explain that?”

  “I don’t,” he said as he started for the door.

  “Conor!”

  He’d had enough of this witch-hunt. He threw the door open, but Rachel slid in and slapped the door shut, standing in front of him and looking up into his eyes.

  “You can’t run away from this.”

  “I’m not running away,” he lied.

  “Something dark has been happening to my town and the sheriff has given up. Now, I know you and your brothers haven’t. I agreed to your suggestion that we put our heads together and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “The truth!”

  “The truth? So that you can arrest me and cart me and my brothers off to jail?” he hotly returned.

  “There’s no law against being a werewolf that I know of, Conor!” she yelled. “I just want the truth from you so that I can finish this thing!”

  “The truth?” he repeated intensely. “The truth?!”

  “Yes! The truth!”

  He grabbed her—without thinking, he was pure reaction, pure emotion—one hand on her lower back the other at the nape of her mouth. Rachel gasped as he jerked her against the firm wall of his body, unable to control himself, and as he leaned in, he growled, “The truth is this!”

  He crushed his mouth over hers, locking in a hungry kiss. At first, Rachel felt as stiff as a board in his arms, but soon her lips were moving against his, their mouths kissing and brushing, tongues gently probing, as her body relaxed in his arms.

  She let out the softest moan as he deepened the kiss.

  Sweat broke out across his chest, his back, beads pearling up across his brow, but he didn’t let her go. He wasn’t done showing her his truth. There was nothing truer than how Conor felt about Rachel, how all he wanted to do was recreate the moment they’d shared downstairs in the souvenir shop, how she’d seeped into his every thought and it was starting to feel like she might soon become a part of him.

  Their kiss ebbed away into lightly brushing lips. He breathed in deeply, almost drinking in her scent, but Rachel pressed her slender palms against the firm wall of his chest and urged him back. He loosened his cradling embrace, but didn’t let her go, as he stared down into her big, brown eyes.

  “You’re all werewolves, aren’t you?” she breathed.

  “You never give up, do you?”

  As she lifted up onto her tiptoes, bringing her lips to his again, she whispered, “No, I never do.”

  Chapter Six

  RACHEL

  Rachel high-stepped it through tall grass beside Professor Gaylord Geer
III as the merciless Wyoming sun blazed down. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky to shield them from the day’s heat, but at least there was a stiff breeze coming off Yellowstone from the north.

  Of course, the sheriff—who had invited the professor to Devil’s Fist in hopes that the elderly man’s werewolf expertise would help inform their investigation of Alighieri and the strange goings-on around town—had thanked the good professor for his time and released him from his duties, but Rachel had caught Gaylord before he had a chance to leave town. So, here they were, trekking through the old Halsey land in the heat of a hot afternoon, the professor in search of evidence of werewolves and Rachel in search of answers that she presumed Gaylord might have.

  She’d barely slept last night and her restlessness hadn’t only been caused by the stifling heat of her airless bedroom. For endless hours, she’d tossed and turned, unable to get Conor Quinn out of her head.

  Their kiss.

  It had been good. Seriously good. But it had also been meant to distract her.

  Rachel felt vindicated and validated that her secretly building attraction towards Conor hadn’t been purely one sided. The way he’d taken strong hold of her, pulled her against him, and planted his lips on hers had been overwhelming and arousing. He felt the same as she did. He wanted her just as badly and he hadn’t been able to hold himself back. It had taken her by surprise. She’d felt an electric jolt of excitement shoot through her, off guard yet instantly thrilled.

  It had been as though he had told her everything he needed to within the movements and feel of that kiss. She’d been filled with butterflies and also a soothing sense of protection. She’d felt safe in his arms, even though she’d been leaning into him hard with her ambushing interrogation.

  Conor had tried to flee, but she’d stopped him. It complicated matters greatly in her mind. She could feel with every bone in her body that the kiss they’d shared had been real, and yet, she couldn’t escape the fact that he’d acted on the urge, the impulse, only when he’d had his back against a wall.

  Kissing Rachel had been a distraction. He had derailed her digging questions. He’d shut her down completely, had disarmed her with his sexy advances, and she’d fallen for it, hook, line, and sinker.

  It hadn’t been until he’d slipped out of her apartment moments later, having released her and bid her goodnight, that Rachel had realized his true motivation for having taken her in his arms. It had been an effort to avoid her onslaught of hard questions. And trying to reconcile that had kept her up almost all night.

  Conor had confirmed her strong suspicions that the Quinns were werewolves…

  …and she felt drawn to him despite that fact.

  Was she falling for a werewolf? Her feelings towards Conor had been building for months, maybe even years if she included all the time she’d spent ignoring or denying her interest in him. And now that they’d finally lowered their guards and crossed the line from professional to personal, she wasn’t sure what she was going to do about it.

  Not only was he a werewolf, but he was biologically related to the criminal she’d been hunting for months—Dante Alighieri. It was almost impossible to comprehend, which was why she was hoping to mine out even more information about werewolves and their culture from the good professor.

  Gaylord Geer III had to be at least eighty years old. He tended to dress in argyle socks and loafers, funny puffy pants that looked like eighteenth-century knickers, and sweater vests. Why was it that the elderly never really suffered in heat? Gaylord looked cool as a cucumber in his long-sleeved button down, his sweater vest, his brimmed hat that looked like one golfers wore out on the courses. Whereas Rachel was practically sweating to death in her police uniform in this heat.

  It was almost unbearable.

  “There’s some shade up ahead,” she pointed out, indicating the shady tree line that marked the forest on the far side of the field. “Professor?”

  “A wolf pack,” he began as though he hadn’t heard her, “would love an open field like this to surround a deer or antelope.” He swung his big, smiley face up and looked at her as if the prospect of wolves using this particular field to hunt thrilled him. “A pack of werewolves as well. They hunt just the same, you know.”

  “Wow,” she patronized him. “But seriously, though, how ‘bout we head on over to the tree line there. This heat is brutal.”

  “Very well, my dear Clancy,” he allowed, and they high stepped it even faster, coming into the forest.

  “I’d like to ask you a few things, Professor,” she began as they came to a standstill in the shade of a mighty oak tree. It towered over them and Rachel figured it had to be at least two hundred years old. That was what was so special about Devil’s Fist, all the undeveloped, untouched land. It wasn’t uncommon to come across trees that were older than the town itself. “Can you tell me a little about how the bloodlines work?” He didn’t immediately respond, so she clarified, “About werewolf relations?”

  “Families within the pack?” he asked.

  “I suppose so,” she allowed, feeling unsure of herself. “I guess what I’m asking is if bloodlines remain pure. I thought that werewolves chose human mates, turned them, and then bore children, which would imply that the bloodline of the offspring is not authentically one hundred percent werewolf. Is that correct?”

  “That is an aspect of it,” he assured her. “Of course, some fully born werewolves mate with other full werewolves and there’s no need to turn the other.”

  “I see.”

  “Was that your question?”

  Maybe it was the heat or the long walk or the possibility that Rachel was dehydrated and not thinking so clearly, but she was starting to think that what she was really trying to ask him about was what that process to turn a mortal was all about when the impetus of the effort had to do with a romantic relationship.

  Was she asking about herself?

  Was she suddenly wondering, based on one kiss with Conor, what it might be like to be turned by him?

  She had to remain productive. Conor had been enough of a distraction and she couldn’t afford to get sidetracked, not now at least, not when it was just Rachel and the professor and an open field. She might be looking forward to another steamy distraction with Conor, but until the moment arose, she’d be damned if she let herself fantasize.

  “I have reason to believe,” she started formulating her question, being sure to keep it squarely grounded in the investigation that the sheriff had forbid her to continue, “that the werewolf I’m after is a half-breed. I have eye witness accounts,” she went on, Lucy Cooper coming to mind and how the blonde spotted Dante on Eagle’s Pass a month back, “that describe him as a half-man, half-wolf creature. I also recently learned that he’s a bloodline relative to another werewolf in town.”

  Gaylord’s light eyes lit up with intrigue.

  “The werewolf I spoke with shall remain anonymous,” she maintained, and he looked a touch disappointed. “So I’m just trying to figure this thing out. How could a half-wolf who is older in age to a full-wolf be related?”

  “Very easily,” he assured her. “If a werewolf who is fully werewolf bears a child with a mortal who was never turned, it could result in such a half-breed, but those breeds are considered rejects. They’re abandoned if not killed by the pack. It’s survival of the fittest and a half-wolf would be considered deformed if not diseased.”

  Rachel thought good and hard about that. Conor had told her last night that Dante was his uncle, his Grandmother Sasha’s son. If what Gaylord was saying were true, it would mean that Dante’s father had been a mere mortal and Sasha had abandoned him after his birth, perhaps to spare him from being killed by the pack.

  A motive was starting to form in Rachel’s fast-working mind.

  Dante could very well resent the pack. Perhaps he’d come back to the Fist for revenge, to get even with those werewolves who had turned their back on him. After all, Dante hadn’t chosen to be born. He’d had no cont
rol over the fact that he was half man and half wolf. So he returns to the place where it all started and he starts turning the innocent residents, why?

  It suddenly hit her and she froze.

  Dante Alighieri was attempting to form his own pack.

  That’s why Dante was on one side of Rachel’s handwritten map of names and the Quinns on the other. He was building an army of his own werewolves. He was planning to attack the Quinns’ pack.

  She had it!

  She threw her arms around the professor and he gasped with glee though he didn’t understand what had come over her.

  “Thank you, Professor!” she exclaimed. “Thank you!”

  “For what, my dear Clancy?”

  “For everything! Now, let’s get the hell out of these woods.”

  Chapter Seven

  CONOR

  It had been a long, hot day. Night had finally fallen over the Fist, but it didn’t bring much relief from the heat that was trapped in the valley. Tensions were high among the Quinns knowing that somewhere out there Dante Alighieri lurked and the entire police department didn’t give a damn. They say careful what you wish for and this was certainly one of those times. Troy had never wanted the sheriff to pursue Dante, because he’d known the police would only get in his way of hunting the rogue werewolf. But reality had proved almost the opposite. Troy and all of his brothers had been able to use the sheriff’s each and every move to serve their own benefit. With the brigade of police officers out of the game, it seemed that Devil’s Fist would, sooner or later, turn into the true Wild West. Wyoming was known as the Cowboy State and as far as Conor could tell it was about to become that, for real, all over again.

  He had stuck close, but out of sight, to Rachel all day as she’d trekked through the old Halsey land with the werewolf expert that the sheriff had hired and tried to fire. For a man who boasted knowledge of werewolf tracking, Professor Gaylord Geer III had been remarkably unaware of his presence as Conor had stalked through the tall grass after them in his wolf form, keeping an eye out for danger on Rachel’s behalf in case the real devil of Devil’s Fist was near.