She wasn’t sure why that bummed her out so much.
* * *
Alex leaned against the wall outside the training classroom at the SWAT compound along with Max, Brooks, and two other members of the team, Hale Delaney and Zane Kendrick, when Remy jogged down the hallway. His hair was a mess, and he was tucking in his T-shirt as he ran.
“Am I late? Did Khaki start the training session yet?” Remy asked as he slid to a stop beside them.
“You’re good. Training is running late.” Alex jerked his head toward the door. “Khaki’s over in the admin building with Everly and Jayna, helping them figure out the seating arrangement for the engagement party.”
Remy frowned. “Cooper and Everly are going to have a seating chart for an engagement party. Seriously?”
Alex nodded as Remy combed his dark blond hair back with his fingers. He and the team’s armorer, Trevor McCall, tended to keep their hair a little longer than most of the other guys on the team, insisting women liked to run their fingers through it.
“I’m not even going to bother asking if you overslept or got stuck in traffic,” Brooks said in his deep voice. “She smells familiar. Who is she?”
Remy grinned as he got his hair under control. “Vivian O’Neil. She felt bad about not waiting for me to get finished with that drug surveillance thing and made it up to me last night.”
Alex shook his head. His nose told him that Remy had been with a woman last night, but unlike Brooks, she hadn’t smelled familiar to him at all. That was likely why Gage and Xander had wanted him to take part in another one of Khaki’s scent memorization exercises. She’d been putting a lot of effort into helping them identify different scents as well as hold on to those scents for long periods of time. Khaki’s amazing nose was a new asset to the team, and Gage wanted her to try to help develop the same ability in the rest of them. Alex wasn’t holding out much luck. His nose was okay but certainly nothing to write home about. And while Khaki’s training was helping, he doubted it would ever really get his sense of smell to significantly improve.
But Gage had decided this training was a priority, so they were doing it. And with their drug task force duties on temporary hold at the moment, now was a good time for it.
The tests conducted on the drugs taken off the dealers they’d caught the other night had confirmed the stuff was definitely fireball. Even better, after serving warrants on the three dealers’ residences, narcotics had recovered more than two hundred bags of the nasty stuff. Rodriguez was hoping they’d not only gotten the dangerous drug off the streets but had also arrested the people responsible for making it. Until the lawyers sorted this out though, they weren’t going to know for sure.
Beside Alex, Remy glanced at his watch. “Any idea why it’s taking Everly so long to come up with a simple seating chart? I mean, it’s just a party, right?”
“Yeah, but I heard Everly say that she wants her family spread out among the tables so they’re not all sitting around talking among themselves in French the whole night,” Max said.
“That might be difficult, considering Everly’s dad and brothers hate werewolves,” Brooks pointed out. “Or at least they did up until a couple months ago.”
Remy considered that. “I guess it’s more complicated than I thought. But that’s pretty much our extended werewolf pack in a nutshell—complicated.”
Alex snorted. That was one hell of an understatement. It was kind of crazy really. For a long time, the SWAT team had been a pack of alpha males, working hard, playing harder, sweating and bleeding for each other and the city of Dallas. There’d been the occasional girlfriend among the guys, but for reasons they’d only recently started to understand, none of those relationships had ever worked out.
Everything had changed a year ago when Gage had met Mackenzie Stone, a reporter who’d been close to exposing their werewolf secret to the world until she and Gage realized they were each other’s soul mates.
Up until then, few members of the Pack had even heard of the fairy-tale concept of The One, yet here was their alpha falling hard for a woman within a week of meeting her. Having a human know their secret had taken a little while to get used to, but it had turned out okay. Mac was seriously cool, and no one could begrudge Gage the happiness he’d found.
About the time everyone had gotten comfortable with the idea of having Mac around, Khaki Blake had joined the team and thrown them all for another loop. The new SWAT officer was also an alpha like the rest of them and as completely capable of kicking ass as any guy on the team. Alex and his teammates had been so psyched to find out female werewolves existed that they’d completely missed the part where Xander fell for Khaki.
A little while after that, their world had been flipped upside down again after Becker met Jayna Winston in the middle of a werewolf-on-werewolf firefight in a warehouse as she’d been pointing an automatic weapon at him and robbing the place. Considering that she and the rest of her pack of beta werewolves had been working as enforcers for the Albanian mob at the time, there should have been zero chance of a romance between her and Becker, but once a werewolf met The One for him, logic and reason got tossed out the window.
Maybe all those months of turmoil and insanity had taught Alex and the other guys on the team something, because when Cooper and Everly’s romance had blown up in the Pack’s face thanks to a frigging suicide bomber, it barely raised any eyebrows.
“Is it me, or does this whole marriage train seem to be moving fast?” Max asked.
Alex snorted. “You can say that again.”
All the werewolves in the Pack lucky enough to meet their soul mates had fallen fast, but none of them had moved to get married as quickly as Cooper and Everly. Gage and Mac had been together for ten months before tying the knot. Xander and Khaki weren’t even talking about it yet. Though to be honest, that could have been because they knew there was no way the DPD would let them stay on the SWAT team together if they found out they were in a relationship. And while Becker had moved in with Jayna and her beta pack within a couple of weeks of getting together, they didn’t seem interested in rushing anything.
But Cooper and Everly’s wedding plans were moving at warp speed. They’d met in June and were getting married in September—a month from now. Not that Alex didn’t think it was real between Cooper and Everly. It was just scary how fast it was going. He and the other guys had been in the SWAT pack for years, and none of them had even sniffed The One. Now women were falling into their laps faster than a werewolf could catch them.
“Speaking of moving fast,” Remy said, glancing at him. “What’s going on with Lacey? She still playing hard to get?”
Alex bit back a growl. He knew he was going to regret telling Remy about Lacey. As the rest of the guys all turned to regard him with intense interest, he wished now that he’d kept his mouth shut. He’d only mentioned her to Remy because he thought the team’s in-house Romeo might have a few thoughts on how to get the attractive vet to go out with him. Obviously, that had been a bad idea.
“Who’s Lacey?” Max asked, his blue eyes curious.
Damn. This was exactly why he hadn’t wanted to mention Lacey to anyone. Now his pack mates were going to jump to the conclusion that he met The One, and that wasn’t even close to the truth.
