She let her fingers trace around the wolf head tattoo on the left side of his chest. “But it seems like I don’t have any control over it at all when I’m excited or aroused.”
He chuckled. “I seem to remember you having pretty good control over it when you were giving me a blow job. Trust me, I noticed.”
She scraped her nails—completely human now—across his tattooed chest and told him to shush. “That’s only because I was completely focused on you at the time and not thinking about anything else.”
“Which I appreciate,” he said. “But I should also point out that you pretty much just proved my point. When you get past the emotions and the excitement, you have it in you to control your abilities. You simply have to learn to focus. It’ll come with time. And we have lots of that.”
* * *
“What made you go through your change?” Khaki asked.
Xander lazily ran his fingers up and down her arm. “I was working narcotics in Kansas City when it happened,” he said. “When I first transferred into the unit in late 2003, it was full of really good people. Unfortunately, most of them rotated out a few years later, and the people coming in… Well, they weren’t really the same caliber. We went from a unit of cops who would do anything for each other to individuals looking out only for themselves. They started with skimming drugs and money, and it just went downhill from there. Sleeping with the female CIs and junkies, taking bribes, even selling the crap we confiscated from the dealers.”
“Why didn’t you transfer out?”
He hesitated. It still hurt to think about how bad things had gotten in such a short period of time.
“I thought about it,” he admitted. “But I was young and naive enough to think I could fix the situation if I stayed. Instead, all I did was watch the unit fall apart from the inside out.”
“What about your partner?” Khaki asked.
He grimaced, glad she couldn’t see his face. “He was a senior detective with lots of commendations and one hell of a reputation for getting the job done the right way. The guy was my frigging hero.”
Xander stopped and swallowed hard, then cleared his voice. All this had been years ago. Time should have made the pain fade, but it hadn’t.
“I expected him to step up and do something about the crap going on, but instead he started taking money to look the other way and spent more time sleeping with junkies than working.”
“And you still thought you could fix the situation on your own?”
Xander sighed. “No. I knew I was in over my head by then. But by the time I finally decided to transfer out, the unit was in the middle of a big undercover operation and my supervisor asked me to hold off the transfer request until it was over. I agreed, thinking that another week or so wouldn’t matter.”
“Is that when it happened?”
He gently curled the end of her long, silky hair around his finger. “Yeah. We had two new gangs that had been trying to take over the city’s drug trade. The plan was to take them both down at the same time. The idea was to use their greed and distrust of each other against them, making them rush into buying our drugs rather than letting the other gangs get them first. It would have been hard to pull off if everyone had had their heads screwed on straight, but with the cops we had, it was a disaster waiting to happen. We didn’t find out until later, but the gangs knew exactly what we were planning. And rather than run, they decided to send a message to the entire KCPD by killing all of us.”
Khaki inhaled sharply. “Oh God.”
“I’d never been in anything remotely like what happened that night. It was a frigging bloodbath.”
Xander didn’t even know he’d shifted until he felt Khaki’s hand on his arm. He glanced down to see that his claws were completely extended and his fingers were flexing. As if he was trying to rip out someone’s throat.
“You don’t have to say anything else,” Khaki whispered, taking his hand in hers.
He forced his claws to retract, then took a deep breath. “My partner—the guy I practically used to worship—turned tail and ran. Some drug dealer shot him in the back before he could get ten feet. I got hit five times as I tried to drag him to safety, but it was too late. He died in my arms. I should have died too, but I didn’t. That’s when I changed. Gage found me a few weeks later. I was confused about what was happening to me, pissed off at the idea of being a cop, and ready for a career change, but then he told me he was building a team that would be tighter than any other law enforcement unit in existence, and I jumped at the offer to join SWAT. I wanted to work with people who put their teammates first and remembered why the hell they were doing this job in the first place.”
Khaki’s eyes filled with tears. “I guess I understand now why you were so adamant at first about not getting involved with me.”
Xander gently wiped a tear from her cheek. “What do you mean?”
“I think that part of you was worried that if you let yourself get involved with me, you’d be doing the same thing all those other cops in Kansas City did—putting your own interests before the good of the team.”
His first instinct was to deny that his past had anything to do with how he’d treated her, but then he stopped and thought about it. “Maybe,” he finally said. “But all I ever wanted was to do right by you.”
Khaki put her head back on his chest and snuggled close. “Don’t ever worry about that. You definitely did. It may not have been the way the rules say it should be done, but for us, it’s the right thing.”
He smiled and pressed a kiss to her hair. “I know that now. Forgive me for being a slow learner?”
She scratched her nails across his abs, making him jump. “Of course. You’re a guy—I expect it.”
