The really scary part of this whole deal was that someone had figured out he’d be a good partner for Dreya long before he or Dreya had even considered it. To pull off the task force thing, someone with a lot of horsepower in the DCO would have had to start working on the transfer the first day he got here.
He wasn’t too sure what he thought about the whole long-term thing, though. Then again, based on his understanding of the deal Dreya had made with the DCO, she only had to play along for two more days, and then she was free to leave. Knowing Dreya like he did, it was hard to imagine her hanging around her beyond that.
He almost laughed as the irony of those words struck him.Knowing Dreya like he did?Who the heck was he kidding? He’d just watched the woman sprout claws and fangs. From this point forward, he was going to have to admit he didn’t know her as well as he’d thought.
“You knew about this, right?” Mick asked.
“No, not really. Though I’m not surprised to hear it coming from you first. They tend to be big about that need-to-know crap around here, and apparently, there’s a lot I don’t need to know.”
Like the fact that the woman he’d helped get undressed last night had fangs and claws. Then again, knowing she came with her own weapons wouldn’t have kept him from helping her…or enjoying it.
“But it’s a good gig, right? Working with Homeland,” Mick said. “I mean, it has to be cool working with Dreya Clark. She’s pretty damn hot.”
She was definitely that. Not that he was going to admit it to his partner, who seemed to be going through a high school juvenile phase at the moment.
“Dreya is a thief, Mick,” he pointed out.
Mick chuckled. “Yeah, but she’s a hot thief. So, what kind of stuff do they have you two doing?”
Braden started to answer, then stopped. What the hell could he say? That he was helping a woman with claws and fangs run through an aerial obstacle course while wearing a blindfold? Yeah, that didn’t exactly roll off the tongue smoothly, did it?
“It’s complicated,” he finally said, and that was the God’s honest truth.
“Oh shit, what the hell was I thinking? Of course, you can’t tell me what you doing. It’s classified, right?”
Braden opened his mouth to tell his partner that it wasn’t like that at all and that he seriously needed to cut out watching all those spy flicks, but Mick didn’t give him a chance to get the words out.
“Don’t say anything else. Just telling me something is classified is probably classified in and of itself.”
Braden was still trying to wrap his head around that logic when Mick started talking again.
“I won’t keep you; I know you’re busy as hell. But tell me one thing. Is Dreya as awesome up close as she was in that video we saw?”
Braden grinned, thinking of the way she’d gone through the aerial obstacle course, then climbed that wall, not to mention the epic slide down.Awesomewas pretty much an understatement when it came to Dreya.
“Mick, if I told you the truth, you’d call me a flat-out liar. I can promise you what we saw that night was just scratching the surface of how amazing she is. The more I learn about her, the more impressed I am.”
“I knew it,” Mick said. “She might be a thief, but that doesn’t mean she’s not special.”
Special? Yeah, that was definitely a much better word for Dreya.
“Hey,” Braden said before he hung up. “Stop by my place and pick up my mail every few days, would you?”
He stood there on the sidewalk, wondering how Mick would have reacted if he’d been the one to see Dreya sprout claws and climb a wall. Something told him that his normally calm, cool, and collected partner would have lost his mind. Now, Tommy, on the other hand, wouldn’t even have batted an eye. He probably would have laughed and cracked a joke about being careful she didn’t poke out an eye with those things.
Braden shook his head and started walking again. Now that the initial shock of seeing Dreya sprout claws and fangs was starting to wear off, he reevaluated the last few days. All the things he’d seen made so much more sense. She was fast, agile, strong, and could obviously handle a lot more punishment than an ordinary person. It was like she was some kind of superhero. If the DCO weren’t trying to recruit her, he’d think she was some kind of government science project.
He cringed. Any more thoughts like that, and he was going to have to apologize to Mick for those comments he’d made about his partner watching too much TV. Dreya might be amazing, but she wasn’t a science project. You couldn’t create people like her in a test tube.
Then another thought struck him. The DCO had known how special Dreya was long before they’d ever shown up in his interrogation room. They hadn’t simply been training and evaluating her. They’d been putting her in situations where she’d have to expose what she could do, not for their benefit but for his.
They hadn’t only been recruiting Dreya; they’d been recruiting him at the same time.
Shit.
Who the hell were these people? And how could they possibly know him so well?
Because they had him pegged to a T. He wasn’t turned off by Dreya’s animalistic qualities. If anything, he was fascinated by them. And as far as Dreya herself, he was pretty damn intrigued with her, too.
