He regarded her thoughtfully. “You don’t have to push yourself so hard, you know. I don’t expect you to learn everything in a week. This job is demanding. You and Braden need to set aside some downtime when you can.”
“We will.” She smiled. “In fact, we hung out together this weekend.”
“That’s good. Do anything fun?”
Dreya hoped she didn’t blush too much as thoughts of exactly what she and Braden had done this weekend popped into her head. Yeah, she didn’t see herself telling John that other than going to visit Braden’s parents, they’d hung around his place naked for most of it, or that they’d only left the bed to make love in some other part of on the apartment, like the floor, the kitchen table, and the shower.
“Nothing special,” she said. “We just hung out and stuff, talking and getting to know each other.”
John smiled. “Sounds pretty special to me. In my experience, the partners who make the best teammates are the ones who are friends outside of work, too. If you’re going to trust each other, it starts with spending time together, bonding and understanding what makes the other person tick.”
Dreya had to fight to keep from laughing. After this past weekend, she could say with a certainty that she had a very good idea what made Braden tick, and they definitely had one heck of a bond. Especially in bed.
Not that making out was the only thing they’d done. They’d spent hours talking, too. She told him about how she’d built up her jewelry business and what she was going to do with it now that she was going to be working for the DCO, while he’d told her about what it was like being a cop in a family of cops. Despite coming from different worlds and the opposite side of the law, they had more in common than she’d expected.
For reasons she still didn’t completely understand, she trusted Braden more than she’d ever trusted anyone in her life, even more than Rory. She never dreamed she could feel so close to any man, much less one who’d been trying to put her behind bars for years. She didn’t want to push things too fast, but she was seriously starting to fall for her partner, and she got the feeling he was falling for her, too.
To think it had all started with John recruiting her into the DCO at the exact moment Braden arrested her. How was that for coincidence?
Unless it hadn’t been a coincidence.
This wasn’t the first time she’d wondered that over the past week. She hadn’t given it much credence, though, mostly because it seemed ridiculous that anyone could manipulate events to the degree necessary to get her and Braden together.
But this was the DCO she was talking about here, and if she’d learned one thing, it was that the supersecret organization didn’t leave very much up to chance.
“Can I ask you a question?” she asked.
John smiled, leaning against the table. “Of course. What’s on your mind?”
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“Find you?”
She nodded. “Lucy said the DCO spends a lot of time and energy looking for shifters who might fit in here. But in my case, it had to be more than just the fact that Braden arrested me for stealing a porcelain dog.”
John chuckled. “I was wondering when you’d get around to asking me that. No, getting arrested wasn’t the thing that put you on our radar, although it did accelerate my timetable about when to bring you in. In reality, I’ve been keeping an eye on you for a couple of months now.”
She frowned. If John had been watching her for a couple of months, that meant… “You’ve known I was a shifter since I broke into Thomas Thorn’s home, haven’t you?”
“Yes,” John admitted. “A team from the DCO was brought in to help with the burglary case. They confirmed you were a shifter and, in the course of the investigation, figured out who you were.”
More pieces of the puzzle slowly started falling into place. “The woman who came to my apartment—the one I gave the diamond and the black box to—she works for you, doesn’t she?”
“She does. Her name is Ivy Halliwell. She’s been worried about you and will be very happy to hear I was finally able to bring you in to the DCO.”
Dreya thought back to that day and the woman’s scent, which had seemed unusual but so tantalizingly familiar at the time. Now she knew why. “Ivy…she’s the one Kendra told me about—the superhero, right?”
John laughed. “I doubt she’d agree about the superhero part, but yes, Ivy is like you…in more ways than one. I think you two will get along well.”
Dreya liked the idea of meeting the woman who had saved her life. Because that’s what Ivy had done by getting Thorn off her trail.
“It seems like you and the DCO went to a lot of work to convince Thorn that the person who broke into his house was dead,” she remarked. “Why go to so much effort to help me?”
John’s brow rose. “You don’t think you’re worth it?”
Dreya snorted. “Of course,Ithink so. But there was no reason why you should. At that point, you didn’t know anything about me beyond the fact that I was a shifter and a thief.”
He considered that. “Well, I could tell you that I was intrigued by the fact that you’d never been caught and seemed to be stealing more for the fun of it than the money. Or I could say that Ivy liked you the moment she saw you and didn’t want to see you get hurt any more than I did. But while all of those things are true, we also had a somewhat selfish reason for helping you.”
