Quinn Security

by Dee Bridgnorth

  God, she was sexy when she moved like that. It felt like his entire body was straining to fill her.

  He offered her his hands and she laced their fingers together, holding on for balance as she rocked back and forth.

  He groaned up at her quietly, “I want to feel you from the inside.”

  “Yeah?” she breathed in a sexy whisper.

  Releasing her hands, he took hold of her fleshy hips and effortlessly lifted her, as he angled himself up in-between her soft legs.

  With his arm muscles straining and flexing, he started lowering her down, but when the tip of his body pressed up into the wet, sheath of her core, she breathed, “Wait.”

  “What?” he asked.

  Elizabeth shifted onto her knees, coming fully off of him so that there would be no risk of penetration and sighed.

  “What is it?” he asked again, knowing full well they were in no danger of waking his brother and Rachel.

  “I just…” she began but couldn’t finish her point.

  “You just what?”

  He didn’t want to seem frustrated, but come on. Having second thoughts couldn’t have reared its thwarting head at a worse time.

  “I think I need more time.”

  Trying not to sound immensely disappointed, he said, “Okay.”

  She didn’t believe him. “Are you mad at me?”

  “Please don’t do that,” he said, trying and failing not to sound annoyed. “Don’t do the girl thing where you ask me if I’m mad so many times that I get mad.”

  If Elizabeth’s second thoughts hadn’t ruined the mood, his attitude certainly had.

  She slid off of him, pulling the bedsheet to her chest to cover up, and found her panties.

  “You don’t have to do that,” he told her and tried to pull her back down to the bed with him, but she urged him off.

  As she pulled her panties back on and found her tee shirt, fully covering up—she even grabbed her yoga pants from the floor and slid one leg in then the next, she said, “I could use some coffee.”

  It sounded like an excuse, but it was one he couldn’t argue with without sounding like a sexually frustrated teenager so he got dressed as well and met her in the kitchen.

  Elizabeth located the coffee grounds and filled the coffeemaker with water. When she pressed the button to brew, Dean having selected two mugs for them from the cabinet, she explained.

  “I feel like I have a lot to think about.”

  “Don’t do this,” he warned, knowing exactly what she was referring to.

  But his objection had come out too strong. She widened her eyes at him, strangely horrified, and asserted, “I have every right to think things through.”

  “You know what Troy told you.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “No,” he insisted. “I care about you.” He tried to pull her into his arms, but as she had on the pull-out bed, she urged him back and stood across from him with folded arms. “You almost got killed last night.”

  “I realize that,” she snapped. “I was there, remember?”

  “What more has to happen for you to understand that becoming mine is your only option?”

  She snorted a laugh and informed him, “I have more options than that.”

  “Do you?” he questioned.

  “If Rachel does, then so do I.”

  That stopped him dead in his tracks and for a stammering beat, he couldn’t get his response out properly.

  “Rachel?” he finally balked. “Rachel has nothing to do with this.”

  “She might not have anything directly to do with you and I, but she opened my eyes to a lot of things last night.”

  “She what?” he blurted out, so thrown he could barely see straight. “You guys were here for not even five minutes before Conor and I got back. What could she have possibly said to you?”

  “That I don’t have to make any rash decisions out of fear,” she told him frankly.

  “Hey, look—”

  “No, you look,” she cut in. “I’m not going to be pressured into doing anything I might not want to do.”

  “Rachel is…” He didn’t want to have to put things so bluntly, but he couldn’t see a way around it. “She’s not like you, okay? She isn’t marked. She’s not meant to be with Conor. She happens to be with Conor. It’s completely different.”

  “I don’t think so,” she firmly disagreed. “I think she’s a smart, reasonable woman who made a smart, reasonable choice for herself.”

  “She didn’t tell Conor no, you know,” he argued. “Eventually, she’ll want to become a werewolf.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  “I do, Elizabeth, because no one wants to age quickly while the love of their life remains basically as young as the day they met them. Yeah, you hadn’t thought of that, have you?” he challenged. “She’ll probably turn quicker than she realizes, but again, that’s neither here nor there because she was never destined to become Conor’s one true mate. You’re destined for me, Elizabeth, how many times do I have to tell you that?”

  “Well, that’s just it, isn’t it?” she hotly returned. “You seem to be telling me a lot, and I’m just supposed to take your word for it?”

  “I showed you that I’m a wolf,” he didn’t hesitate to remind her.

  “You did,” she allowed. “But that doesn’t mean it’s smart for me to blindly trust that I’m so-called destined to become your one true mate. For all I know, that’s an invention that your kind has been making for God only knows how long. Maybe that’s your trick for getting girls to become werewolves. I don’t know. All I know is that I’m not going to do something before I’ve thought it through.”

  “You would risk you own life?” he demanded.

  “You would pressure me to become something I don’t fully understand? Does that sound like love to you?”

  “Love is beside the point!”

  Elizabeth’s jaw dropped.

  Why had he said that? Of course, love was the point, it was the deepest point, the bottom line. And the fact of the matter was that Dean did love Elizabeth. He had probably loved her the entire time and only recently started to understand that it was the driving force in his life ever since he’d met her.

  “I didn’t mean that,” he tried to backpedal, but Elizabeth had already fiercely latched on to his mistaken statement.

  “I think you did.”

  “I just meant that…ugh,” he grunted, frustrated that he couldn’t articulate himself properly. “I just meant that it wouldn’t be unusual if you didn’t yet feel like you loved me. The bond is still there, whether you understand that it’s tying us or not. That’s all.”

  “Again, you’re speaking in these grand, abstract terms that I have no way of confirming are true or not. Dean, this conversation is over,” she informed him as she poured herself a mug of coffee and returned the pot to its burner. “I’m going to think things through and that’s final.”

  With that she returned to the living room where she began to fold up the bedding and returned the pull-out into the couch.

  He felt like she was making a huge mistake, and suddenly Shane’s strategy to turn Whitney into what she had always been destined to become didn’t seem like such an evil idea.

  ***

  At about the time Rachel and Conor joined Dean in the kitchen, filling their own mugs with coffee and vaguely registering the tension in the air that had coolly risen between him and Elizabeth, on the south side of the Fist, Sheriff Rick Abernathy carried his own steaming mug of coffee down into the basement of his mansion-sized cabin where the Quinn brothers had, the night prior, helped him carry the locked dog crate containing one very pissed off Eddie Friendly.

  The crate had been placed in the center of the concrete floor. At the bottom of the dusty, wooden staircase was a naked light bulb hanging from the ceiling. He pulled the chain switch, illuminating the basement, but not by much.

  Eddie was snarling at him in his wolf form, hunched and
seething from behind the thick bars of the dog crate.

  Rick had barely slept all night. With Dante Alighieri having taken up in the neighboring cabin where Whitney used to live, Rick had tossed and turned in anxious fear that somehow Dante would sense or intuit that his right-hand man had been captured.

  Luckily, the dark lord hadn’t suspected a thing, or if he had, he hadn’t ventured over to Rick’s cabin to mind-control him into committing more unthinkable acts.

  Maybe Eddie’s capture would be enough to lure Dante over.

  God, it seemed like Troy Quinn had a million options at his disposal. He could now use Eddie. But then again, he could’ve used Elizabeth Halsey or Angel Mercer, or even Rick himself. Why had Troy been sitting on his hands like this? Rick could have been freed by now. Troy kept insisting he was waiting for the full moon and though it was a viable excuse, Rick hardly liked it.

  “You should’ve gone quietly to jail,” he told Eddie, annoyed that he was stubbornly staying in his wolf form. “We both know you went against Dante when you opened fire on Dean’s cabin. What did you think you’d accomplish, huh? You think I’d drop the charges against you if Elizabeth was out of the picture? Come on, Eddie, you know better than that.”

  The wolf bared his fangs, growling in a low, menacing tone at Rick, his snout pressed into the thick bars.

  “Don’t worry,” he told him. “Dante doesn’t know where you are. He’s not going to come after you and even if he does, those bars will hold. He won’t be able to kill you so easily.”

  Eddie didn’t like the threat, but it still wasn’t enough to compel him to shift back into his human form.

  Rick sighed, took a sip of his coffee, and felt a strange twinge of empathy towards Friendly.

  “I didn’t want Dante to turn me,” Rick confided, though he had to figure it was abundantly obvious. If he’d have wanted Dante to turn him, he probably wouldn’t have been fighting the dark lord tooth and nail every goddamn step of the way. But that didn’t mean that Eddie had been serving Dante happily. “No one in their right mind would want to be turned into a werewolf against their will. Is it safe for me to assume that you hadn’t wanted it either?”

  To Rick’s surprise, the wolf stopped snarling at him and it seemed that Rick’s point had gotten through.

  “I’ve been losing more and more of myself,” he admitted, “and I’ve been hating it with each passing day. Neither of us asked for what we got, did we?” He let that hang in the air between them for a beat then added, “Both of us have been obeying him out of fear.”

  Rick sucked down gulp after gulp of his coffee.

  “I bet you didn’t know that Troy Quinn knows how to break the dark bonds, did you? I’ve seen it with my own two eyes, Eddie. We both know that Dante turned Angel Mercer, and I’m sure you’ve noticed Angel around the Fist, free as a bird and now married to Jack Quagmire.”

  Rick neared the dog crate, coming to look the wolf directly in its dark eyes.

  “Troy has promised me the same. That’s right. He’s going to free me. I’ll still be a werewolf. There’s no undoing that. But I won’t be eternally tied to Dante Alighieri. I’ll be free of him, whether the dark lord lives or dies. I’ll be free.” After a beat, he pushed his point through, making what he hoped would turn into an ironclad deal. “If you help us. If you go against Dante and work with Troy and me, I promise you Troy will free you as well. But you’ve got to talk to me, Eddie. You’ve got to shift back into your human form so we can work this out.”

  Chapter Fourteen

  ELIZABETH

  It wasn’t easy, but Elizabeth convinced Dean that she really would need to go to Jackson Hole to make progress on buying the burned down Devil’s Advocate building. At first, he made it about him, assuming the tension that had risen between them was her real reason for wanting to get out of town. Rachel had said too much. He had pushed too hard. It had been the perfect storm to churn up a fight. When she maintained that her reason for wanting to go to the county courthouse in Jackson Hole had nothing to do with their relationship and everything to do with her personal real estate goals, he then made it about Dante—how Elizabeth wouldn’t be safe if she went off on her own, how Dante would come after her, how Dean would have no way of protecting her, yada yada yada.

  Elizabeth pointed out that he was welcome to come. She wasn’t asserting that she wanted time and space away from Dean. She was simply insisting that she was going to live her life, Dean explained that there was too much going on with Quinn Security for him to leave town for the bulk of the day. She wasn’t sure how that catered to her as his body-guarded client, but that was just it, wasn’t it? Ever since their argument, in the days that had passed since she’d woken up on the pull-out bed next to him in Conor and Rachel’s house, her eyes had slowly opened to see who and how Dean Quinn really was.

  He was possessive, entitled, and seemed to think that because of some ancient superstition—as long as the so-called king told you a mortal human was meant to become yours—he owned Elizabeth. She would become a werewolf and his wife. She would allow him to protect her and make decisions for her—based on her safety, but that seemed like a smokescreen for what was really going on—and she would live the rest of her life, not on her own terms, but on her eternal mate’s.

  It seemed radically old fashioned and Elizabeth wasn’t having it.

  The irony, of course, was that had she been met with this type of antiquated, outdated, let-the-man-do-the-work-while-you-enjoy-the-high-life proposition back in Los Angeles, she would have jumped at the chance to essentially be the relaxed trophy wife of some wealthy—or in this case, hunky—man. If the relationship her father had with her mother had shown her anything, it was that men gave and women received, men worked so that their women didn’t have to. The protection her father had consistently provided her mother was purely financial, but in this day in age financial protection really was everything, wasn’t it? Hell, this idealized dream had been what Elizabeth had been secretly hoping for in the back of her mind when she let Dante Alighieri take her out on a simple date.

  But somewhere between growing itchy under those motel sheets and hiking through Yellowstone National Park, Elizabeth had accidentally found herself. She didn’t want to lounge poolside and spend her life mildly tipsy and mostly bored. Dean Quinn had shown her a different way, one that she had taken to with aplomb, one that felt empowering and inspiring, one that—if his behavior was any indication—Dean didn’t actually like.

  He didn’t like that she hadn’t blindly trusted him when it came to agreeing to become a werewolf. He didn’t like that she had talked to Rachel or that her mind had been opened to the possibility of being with Dean while not being a werewolf. And he really didn’t like that she had every intention of moving forward with the Devil’s Advocate development.

  The latter of which was certainly the most puzzling to her. If anything demonstrated her interest and commitment to staying in Devil’s Fist it was the fact that she was determined to buy the building and fix it up. From where she had been standing all week, it seemed that Dean wanted her to stay in the Fist but not for herself. He wanted her to stay for him.

  It wasn’t lost on her that he had once thought she was a spoiled, entitled brat. Well! That was exactly how Dean Quinn himself had been acting. Entitled! He’d been acting as though he was due Elizabeth Halsey! As if life should have handed her to him on a silver platter! And now that she wasn’t diving in headfirst to fulfill what he thought he deserved, he was being combative, confrontational, and at times downright threatening.

  Of course, he’d never threatened her directly or outright, but reminding her that she would never be safe unless she united him was just as bad as far as she was concerned. It was almost as though he was trying to brainwash her—be with me or else!—by trying to cloud her judgment with fear and promises of fatality. That was what the or else part implied, after all. Dean was trying to strong-arm her into letting him turn her so that Dante Alighieri coul
dn’t. It was ridiculous even by a child’s logic. If Elizabeth didn’t want to become a werewolf, then she didn’t want to become a werewolf, case closed!

  Granted, she wasn’t even sure if that was true. That was the real shame of the situation. She hadn’t actually made up her mind one way or the other about becoming a werewolf, about allowing Dean to turn her, about deciding to spend the rest of her life as his one true mate. All she wanted was time. She needed time to get to know him more so that she could figure it out. But though he had said he was willing to give her time, his every action and argument had contradicted it. He was pushing her to choose him, and it was because of his pushing that she felt more and more inclined to conclude that she should decide to remain human indefinitely.

  She felt like she could barely breathe, her last argument with Dean had pissed her off so badly. The real problem was that today of all days he wanted to eat his cake and have it, too. He wanted Elizabeth to stick by his side where she would be safe, but would he come with her to Jackson Hole? No, he wouldn’t. He needed to be at Quinn Security with his brothers. Why? Because his life was more important than hers. Was this what she had to look forward to if she chose him?

  It didn’t bode well, that was for damn sure.

  All week, she had been talking with her mother on the phone, which had been another source of immense frustration. Gretchen Halsey hadn’t been emotionally available to Elizabeth perhaps her entire life. According to Gretchen, if it couldn’t be fixed with a martini and a trip to the spa, then it couldn’t be fixed, but either way, Gretchen herself wouldn’t be able to do much. It had always been Father’s wallet that had come to Elizabeth’s rescue, hadn’t it?

  Well, not this time, Mother!

  Elizabeth had forced her mother to talk on the phone. At first, she had anchored the conversations in the mystery surrounding her father’s land, the massive acreage that neither of them had known about. This eventually segued into brief chats about Elizabeth’s plans in Devil’s Fist, but the real clincher that had compelled her mother to agree to fly out to Jackson Hole and visit Devil’s Fist had been because Elizabeth had finally shared with Gretchen that she had, in fact, sold the land.