“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 how incredibly hard it was to look away from her bare, smooth thighs displayed against my dark leather upholstery.
Had she packed nothing else?
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 was not going 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 even more obliged 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.
She had to 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 a great way to remind me that you’re still mad. So, bonus points for that. But isn’t this crime scene actually on the way to 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 you really justify 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?”
My fists clenched so hard around the steering wheel that it creaked. “No.” It was because she’d railroaded me into hiring her, which had started our working relationship off on the wrong foot. But I couldn’t admit that without sounding petty and unprofessional. “Are you using humor as a self-defense mechanism, or do you have no verbal filter?”
“Why? You have a problem with me kicking the elephant in the car?”
“Kicking the… Are you speaking in riddles?”
She laughed, and the comfortable quality of that sound caught me off guard. “You know, the elephant in the room? Only we’re in a car.” She rolled her eyes at my blank look. “It means we’re both avoiding a subject that makes us uncomfortable.”
“I know what it means, but your rephrase was less than helpful.”
Her laughter said she didn’t believe me.
“And I’m not uncomfortable.”
“You are so uncomfortable. But I can’t decide if that’s because you didn’t like the kiss or because you did.”
“It’s not… I don’t…” I was uncomfortable because we’d made a big mistake, and officially, I wanted to forget it ever happened.
Unofficially, I wanted to replay the moment over, and over, and over.
“Why don’t we talk about something else,” I suggested. “Anything else.”
“No problem. Let’s revisit the issue of the murder house and how I’m going with you to investigate.”
“You’re not going.”
“Seriously, Jace, who would be better at training me than you?”
“Flattery? You’ve struck a new low.” But the daredevil look in her eyes told me that was only the beginning.
Abby laid one hand over her heart in mock horror. “This is because I kissed you!”
I swerved onto the shoulder of the road and stomped on the brake. When I turned to scowl at her, those big brown eyes were staring at me expectantly, but it was the anxious beating of her heart that convinced me. She wasn’t just being a pain in the ass—this really meant something to her.
I exhaled slowly. “If I let you come, will you please stop kicking that poor elephant?”
Her triumphant smile could have lit up the Dark Ages. “What elephant?”
“Are you sure this is the place?” Abby held her phone up to compare the image on her screen with the one visible through the windshield: the last house on a street that dead-ended in front of a small wooded patch of land. “This house is the wrong color. Either you or the sicko crime scene junkies have made a mistake.” She turned to me with a wicked smile. “My money’s on you.”
“O ye of no faith at all. That is the wrong house. The one we’re here for is on the other side of those woods.” I chuckled at her sheepish expression. “We can’t park in front of the scene of a vicious, mysterious mauling and not expect neighbors—or sicko crime scene junkies—to be curious, can we?” I lifted one brow at her, ridiculously pleased to have struck her speechless, even momentarily. “Guess you’re not quite ready to replace me as Alpha yet, huh?”
She pulled her hair into a poofy ponytail, avoiding my gaze. “I wasn’t trying to… I’m just trying to help.”
“I know. Grab that box behind your seat.” I got out of the Pathfinder and circled it to open the back hatch, then dug through the junk for a few specific items. When I returned to the front of the car, Abby was staring at the small box in her lap.
“This is an ammo box.” She held it up, and sunlight glared across the print.
“Yes.”
“It’s empty.”
“It’s just for show. Set it on the dashboard.”
Abby frowned, but complied, and when she got out of the car, I draped a used paper shooting target over the arm of her chair. I dropped a receipt for the ammo and a trip to a gun range on the center console, then wedged a rolled-up hunting magazine into the space where my windshield met the dashboard.
“We’re hunters?” Her brows rose.
“That’s the idea. We’re here to hunt for the beast who killed that poor man on the other side of the woods.” Which was close to the truth.
“Clever.”
“I have my moments.” I eyed her white down jacket, the only one she’d brought from the dorms. “Are you warm enough?”
“Yup.” Abby grinned. “I run hot.”
Was that a double entendre? Or was she just pointing out the obvious—that a shifter’s metabolism kept us both slim and warm?