“Hey, what’s up?”
“Not much.” Khaki winced at the lie. But she couldn’t very well spill everything on the phone. “I could use some advice about something though. Would it be okay if I came over to your place?”
* * *
“I didn’t mean to chase you out, Sergeant Dixon,” Khaki said as Mac shooed her big, tall fiancé toward the door.
“Don’t worry about it,” Mac said, glancing over her shoulder at Khaki. “He was already heading out to the store to pick up more pita chips for me anyway.”
Outside in the hallway, Dixon turned to give Mac an amused look, his dark eyes twinkling. “You have four bags in the pantry.”
Mac went up on her toes to give him a quick kiss on the lips. “But you can never have enough pita chips. And you know how much I love them.”
Giving him a grin, she made a shooing motion with her hand again, then closed the door and turned to Khaki.
“What can I get you to drink?” she asked as she walked into the kitchen. “We have water, iced tea, soda, or beer.”
“Iced tea is fine,” Khaki said, then added, “You really don’t need to go to any trouble, you know.”
Mac smiled at her again. “It’s no trouble. Grab a seat on the couch. I’ll be right in.”
Khaki took a seat and looked around. Though small, the apartment was nice. While it was definitely decorated with a woman’s touch, Dixon’s presence was obvious in some of the framed pictures on the wall and the automatic weapons coffee-table books.
“So, what’s going on?” Mac set two glasses of iced tea on a pair of coasters, along with a bowl of pita chips, then sat cross-legged on the other side of the sectional couch. “Are the guys in the Pack being jerks? If so, tell me who, and I’ll set them straight.”
Khaki almost laughed at the image of Mac laying into Xander while the squad leader stood there nodding politely. But having someone fight her battles wasn’t the reason she was here.
“It’s not the guys,” she said. “They’ve been great.”
Mac’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Right. So if everything’s so wonderful, why are you here looking for advice?”
Khaki picked up her glass and sipped her iced tea. Now that she was here, she wasn’t quite sure what to say. On the other end of the sectional, Mac was waiting patiently.
Heregoesnothing.
“I’m hoping you can give me a few tips about…how to be a werewolf,” she said.
Mac raised an eyebrow. “O-kay. Maybe I’m missing something here. You’re already a werewolf. Right?”
“Yeah, but…”
Khaki hesitated. Maybe she’d better start at the beginning. So in between pita chips, she told Mac about what had happened that night she’d gotten shot behind the Grace Park apartment complex, about how quickly she’d healed, and about all the crazy things she’d been able to do afterward, admitting that she didn’t even know she was a werewolf until she’d seen the guys on the team shift. With as few embarrassing details as possible, Khaki then went on to describe the problem she’d had in the House of Doors and what happened with her ex-boyfriend tonight.
“Your ex is here in Dallas?” Mac asked.
Khaki nodded. “I guess Sergeant Dixon told you about him, huh?”
Mac shook her head. “Not very much, though I’m glad to hear you dumped him. Gage just mentioned that you’d been in a relationship with another cop and that it didn’t end well.”
Understatementthere. It was nice to talk to a woman who listened to her without judging or trying to fix things, like men always seemed to do. She wanted to tell Mac about Jeremy, but right now, she needed to get her inner werewolf under control.
“Back to the werewolf thing,” she said. “I’ve seen the guys do it often enough to know that I should have claws and fangs and be able to see in the dark, but I can’t do any of those things.”
Mac’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you’ve never shifted at all? No claws, no fangs, no night vision, no…fur?”
Khaki shook her head. Although to be honest, she wasn’t too upset about not sprouting fur. She had no interest in excess body hair.
“Never,” she admitted. “My nose works really well, and I’m faster and stronger than any woman I’ve ever seen, but I just figured that maybe female werewolves couldn’t do what their male counterparts could. Then I started arguing with my jerk of an ex-boyfriend and…” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “My fingers started bleeding. I think my claws came out without me even knowing it. Can that really happen?”
