“No, Abby has wedding jitters, manifesting as a crush on both me and my job. But if I let her act on those, she’ll regret it later and hate me for the rest of her life. Because I derailed her future.”
“That’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever said.” She hit me square in the face with a couch pillow.
I snatched the pillow and smacked her in the shoulder with it. “I’m an Alpha, you know!”
Kaci shrugged with an evil little smile. “If you treat me like a child, I’ll act like one. So will Abby.”
“When are you going to put this thing out to pasture?” Abby slid into the passenger seat of my Pathfinder, wearing another skirt evidently chosen entirely because of how inappropriate it was, both for the season and for a drive alone with her Alpha. And possibly because of howincrediblyhard it was to look away from her bare, smooth thighs displayed against my dark leather upholstery.
Had she packednothingelse?
I twisted my key in the ignition and made myself focus on the gas gauge as the engine rumbled to life. “What are you talking about? This vehicle is in its prime.”
“You’re living in the sad, sad past,” she said, and the previous night’s conversation with Kaci came back to haunt me. “It’s time to join the rest of us in the here and now, and you better hurry up, because in six months, I’ll be good and mired in my inevitable future.”
The flat note running through her typically upbeat chatter betrayed the cheerful facade she’d been putting forth all day. As if nothing had happened between us in the woods. But every time I met her gaze, I found it a little harder to look away. We might not be talking about what had happened, but neither of us had forgotten.
“So, how far are we from the murder house?” Abby flipped the visor down and used the mirror to apply pink-tinted lip balm while I backed out of the airport short term parking spot. With the scent of strawberries came a twelve-hour-old memory of what that lip balm tasted like smeared across my own mouth.
My hands clenched around the steering wheel.Focus, Jace.
“It doesn’t matter how far we are from the scene of the crime.” I wasnotgoing to call it “the murder house.” “Because you’re not going. I’m dropping you at the lodge when I pick up Teo and Chase.”
Abby dropped the lip balm into her purse and flipped the visor back up. “I can help. You should take me.”
“FYI, becoming an enforcer makes you evenmoreobliged to follow orders, not less.” Especially since she’d been sworn in that very morning, in the presence of five other Alphas. Everything was official.
I was stuck with her, and that was like staring at a bag of candy I would never, ever be allowed to taste.
“I’m just trying to help. Why hire me, if you’re not going to use me?”
Take me. Use me.
Shehadto be doing that on purpose.
“You know damn well why I hired you.” I’d had no choice. “And you can’t go to the crime scene, because you haven’t even started training yet.You, rookie enforcer, are going to spend most of your holiday break sweating through drills with Lucas and Isaac at the lodge.”
Abby twisted in her bucket seat to face me, her full lips pressed together. “Okay, I get that I have work to do and dues to pay, and putting me under the supervision of my own brothers is agreatway to remind me that you’re still mad. So, bonus points for that. But isn’t this crime scene actuallyon the wayto the lodge? I mean, we’re practically going to pass right by it.”
I glanced at her as I changed lanes and found her typing furiously on her phone, shielding the screen from the glare of the sun with her own body. “How did you know that?”
“I have the internet and a functional understanding of my map app.” She held her phone out to show me that she’d already plotted our route to the crime scene. And that it was, at a glance, almost directly on the way to the lodge.
“But where’d you get the address? They don’t release stuff like that.”
“The police and the news stations don’t, but sicko crime scene junkies who run voyeuristic blogs do.”
“Well, aren’t you…” Exhausting. “…resourceful.”
“Thanks. And since we’re in a hurry to get this thing shut down before the killer exposes the existence of shifters to all of humanity, can youreallyjustify delaying the investigation just to take me back to the lodge?”
“Nice try.” Even if she had a valid point.
“Come on; you know I’m right. What’s the harm in stopping on the way home to scope things out? The killer isn’t there anymore, right? So, it’s not like I’d be in danger or anything. And you just admitted I’m resourceful. I might actually be useful if you give me a chance.”
“No.”
Abby scowled, and I caught the reckless gleam in her eyes too late to do anything about it. “This is because I kissed you, isn’t it?”
