A SEAL in Wolf’s Clothing (8 page)

Knowing how expensive homes on the coast were, and as large and new as this one looked, she figured it had to have cost a fortune. Why would anyone allow perfect strangers to stay here? “Whose place is this?”

“You don’t need to know.” He drove into the driveway of the whitewashed Cape Cod house. What shocked her next was that he pulled a garage door opener out of his pocket and punched the button. The garage door opened and he drove inside, then quickly closed the door again.

“I made arrangements to use it when I located Hunter and thought I was rescuing the two of you. It’s a safe house of sorts. While no one knows where we are, it’s safe.”

“What if the guys were part of your secret society? Wouldn’t they know where your safe houses are?” She shoved the car door open.

“No. This place isn’t on the list of safe houses. It’s strictly a friend of a friend of a friend’s.”

She eyed the oversized two-car garage: neat and orderly, but obviously in use as evidenced by the tools hanging on a wall, all neatly organized on pegboard. She was certain the owners would be unhappy if she and Finn messed the place up. On the other hand, they probably had maid service and gardeners, if they could afford a place this fancy on the coast.

“Now that we found the bug, do you think Imposter Joe was the assassin?” she asked, as she followed Finn across the garage, carrying her bag while he carried his duffel bag and her rifle.

“No.”

She joined him at the door leading out of the garage to what she assumed was the house. “How can you be so sure?”

“He wanted you.”

Her lips parted, and then she laughed. “Right.”

“Yeah, he did.” Finn sounded a little more disgruntled than she would expect him to be. “If he’d been a real assassin, he would have attempted to kill the both of us. No. This guy was someone else. As soon as I can get one of our men to check out the other Joe, we’ll try to uncover just
who
this other guy really was.” He opened the door, which revealed a sparkling tiled kitchen.

Everything was sunny yellow, from the floor tiles to the walls. The table and cabinets were all in a honey-oak wood, and the countertop had gold and yellow streaks running through the faux marble. A bay window offered a panoramic view of the ocean, and she paused to take a look at the pines rising far above the house from way down below and the frothy waves hitting the sandy beach and striking boulders scattered along the shore. Her scenic view was different—the beach smaller, the trees framing the house even more, which she preferred because it gave more of a woodsy feel—but she liked the bay window.

“He did lie about who he was. Then the other Joe ended up dead. I just don’t see how the imposter could have been the good guy,” she continued, wanting to explore the beach, to look for seashells, to feel the sand between her toes.

She watched with fascination the way the water swirled in little eddies at the edge, pulling the sand out and tossing it back inland again, exposing precious seashell treasures in its wake.

Finn glanced over his shoulder at her. “What I want to know is how he got the bug into your pants without you knowing about it.”

She felt her face heat up all over again. “I was distracted.”

“Oh?”

She couldn’t believe Finn didn’t realize that
he
had been the perfect distraction.

“Yeah. Some naked guy had just taken a shower in
my
bathroom. And Imposter Joe,
I
believed
, was my protection. He sort of swept his hand over my back pocket, and I thought it was a gesture aimed at reassuring me.”

Finn snorted. “The guy palmed your butt, and you don’t think he’s interested in you?”

“Right! He stuffs a bug in my pocket, and that shows how much he’s intrigued with me?”

“If he didn’t care for you, or if this was strictly a job, you would never have felt his hand on your ass.”

She took a deep breath, trying to settle the way her stomach had tightened over Finn’s irritation with her and what Imposter Joe had done. She would have argued with Finn further, but she suspected he would probably know better about matters like that. And that made her feel even more uncomfortable about Imposter Joe.

She glanced at the sunny living room off the kitchen, with its large picture windows letting in light and the walls covered in paintings of sunny daffodils, fields of sunflowers, drifts of daylilies, and the rising sun. The tile floor was yellow, too, continuing the yellow theme from the kitchen and dining area. She wondered if the bedrooms were all yellow also.

“Looks like someone didn’t like the gloom of Oregon weather and tried to preserve the sun indoors.”

“Probably someone from California.”

She raised her eyes to the ceiling as if asking for divine intervention, and then headed for the deck door. “
I
lived in California, and I wouldn’t decorate my place here in Oregon like it was one giant sunflower.”

He smiled a little and then disappeared.

She glanced back, wondering what had happened to him. When he reappeared, she realized what he was up to. Checking out the place. Making sure they were alone.
Alone.
She’d hoped to find a mate in the next two weeks, and what had happened instead? She had been swept into a dangerous situation that Hunter and his team had been involved in, and now she was stuck alone with one of his teammates. One who was not on her list as an acceptable mate for her or any other she-wolf. Not in the line of work he was in, and as far as she knew, he wasn’t on the mate mart.

“So where are you from originally?” she asked. She noted a very large doggy door for a wolf next to the regular door, and then she walked out onto the deck, leaving the door wide open.

The air was wet and heavy. She hadn’t thought she’d ever get used to living next to the ocean after having lived in the redwoods for so long. She wasn’t good at adapting to new locations, but she was beginning to really like coastal life.

She walked back into the kitchen as Finn hauled in the ice chest and set it on the floor next to the fridge. Her rifle was already lying on the kitchen counter, and she figured later she would put it under the bed where she would sleep.

She opened the fridge and peered inside.
Empty
. Except for a few condiments. “Great. No food. Guess they cleaned it out before we arrived.”

“My associate must not have had time to get here with the food,” Finn said, pulling out the remainder of the baked chicken, potato salad, bottled water, and milk she’d brought with them in the ice chest. “We should have picked up something at the market. But I didn’t want to get too much stuff in case we had to leave again. And I didn’t want to chance him picking up our trail.

“I had intended to stay at your cabin and just watch you there in the event someone turned up to bother you. But with the gunfire we’d heard, a dead body, and a man who claimed to be another…” Finn shrugged. “Time for a change of plans. As to your question, I’m from southern California. I used to belong to a gray wolf pack that still lives down there.”

“No siblings?”

He put a chicken thigh and leg in a microwave dish and heated them for a couple of minutes. When the microwave dinged, he offered her a piece of chicken.

“Thanks, but I had enough chicken to eat in the car.”

“No siblings,” he said, glancing out the window at the view and taking a bite of the chicken. “Hmm, good stuff.”

“Thanks. It’s all in the lemon and pepper spice I used.” She tucked a curl of hair behind her ear and asked, “Do you ever wish you had any siblings?”

He grabbed a bottle of water, twisted off the cap, and took a swig. “Nope. Look at the difficulty it causes.” He motioned to Meara with the bottled water. “With no family, I don’t have any worries about anyone targeting someone close to me.”

“Ah. So you’re a loner wolf.”

“Yep. It’s perfect for the kind of work I do.”

That was just the way she’d had him pegged. She wasn’t all that surprised. Hunter had never mentioned that Finn was looking for a mate, although her brother probably wouldn’t have said anything to her about it anyway. Even though she hadn’t meant to feel anything one way or another about it, a hint of disappointment formed at the edge of her awareness, until she watched Finn dish a huge amount of potato salad onto a plate.

He scarfed down the salad, then refilled the plate. She couldn’t help but smile. The only one she knew who had that much of an appetite and loved her potato salad as much was Hunter.

Finn looked up at her, saw her smiling at the way he was eating her cooking, and grinned. “I didn’t think you’d catch me getting seconds. Hunter didn’t tell me you were this good of a cook.”

“I doubt he would. He just eats second and third helpings, which clues me in.” She pointed at the potato salad. “That’s an old German family recipe passed down through the generations with a few minor changes.”

“I have some German roots, too, but no one ever cooked anything that tasted this good.” He finished his second plateful and eyed the container of potato salad. Looking reluctant, he finally replaced the lid and set the salad in the fridge.

“You could have more,” she said.

“I will,” he promised. “A little later.”

She glanced out the window. “So what do we do now? The place is furnished, but there’s no food. Are we just supposed to hole up here for a few days? What if the guy who died was the assassin? We wouldn’t need to hide any more.” She quickly backtracked. “But then the guy who killed him could be even worse trouble.”

Finn nodded. “If someone else is pulling the strings, he most likely will still want the job done right. When the word gets out that the assassin is dead and we’re alive, what do you think will happen?” He finished his chicken, washed his hands, and then punched in a number on his phone.

“Cheery thought. Aren’t you supposed to be reassuring me instead of trying to frighten me out of my wits? I’m a civilian, if you recall. And not trained for all this deep-cover work.”

He gave her a small smile and shook his head as if he didn’t think she scared that easily. She didn’t. But she was surprised he wasn’t trying to whitewash the trouble they could be in. Or maybe he was smiling about her comment concerning the deep-cover work.

“When Hunter and I hooked up for missions this past year, you always wanted to know what was going on,” Finn finally remarked. “In fact you insisted on it.”

“I did. I was speaking tongue-in-cheek about wanting reassurance. I want to know the truth.”

He frowned, undoubtedly not reaching his party, and then punched in another number.

She expected him to leave her alone, to take his call in private—for all this superspy stuff—but instead he remained in the kitchen with her. Watching her? Worried about her? She was ready to ask him more about what was going on when he lifted his head. The person he was calling must have answered the phone.

“Hi, it’s me. I’ve got a situation. A man named Joe Matheson was found dead near Hunter’s place,” Finn said into his phone.

“
My
place,” Meara cut in.

“Yeah,” Finn said to the person on the phone, as he glanced Meara’s way but didn’t comment on what she’d said. “So I’m sending you the picture in an email. ID says he’s a news reporter. Did you get anything on the other man I sent the picture of?”

The other Joe? When did Finn take a picture of him? Finn had been naked, wearing only a towel, for part of the time when Imposter Joe was in the room. She frowned at Finn.

His gaze locked onto hers, and he frowned back. “All right. Keep trying to track down anything you can on either of the men. We’re holed up in a safe house for now. Get back with me when you can.” He repocketed his phone.

“It’s not Hunter’s house. It’s mine,” Meara reiterated to Finn. Hunter might interfere in a lot of things in her life, but when he’d moved into Tessa’s home, he’d given up the rights to owning their uncle’s house. It was now
all
Meara’s. Initially, she hadn’t wanted to move to the Oregon coast, but she’d made the cabin her home, and she really enjoyed having her own place without any of Hunter’s bossiness.

“My contact doesn’t need to know that the house is now yours. Only that the dead body was in the vicinity of your brother’s home. It shows intent to follow through with some master plan to hit all of us.”

“Why? Why would anyone be doing this? What was going on with your last mission?”

“It’s classified. We should be safe here.”

She gave him a ladylike sound of annoyance. “Yeah but since I’m involved now, too—through no fault of my own,
I
might
add
—I should know what’s going on.”

He shook his head, and that was the end of the discussion.

But not quite. “When did you take a picture of Imposter Joe? I saw you take one of the dead man with your camera. But you were wearing only a towel and, for some time, not even that when you saw my pretend renter.”

Finn hesitated to say but acted as if he’d come to a turning point in their relationship, moving beyond him being the protector and her the protected. He finally said, “I bugged your place and had placed cameras in various locations in the cabin.”

Her mouth dropped open. Then she snapped it shut, glowered at him, and said, “In my bedroom and bathroom, too?”

“No. I hadn’t gotten that far when you arrived, and then Joe came calling.”

“When were you going to let me in on that secret?”

“I didn’t think I’d need to since we’d have to leave your place anyway. Besides, it was only for your protection.” He turned to open a cabinet and found food, canned and boxed. Tons of it. “Looks like we’re not going to starve.”

She was still thinking about what he’d seen on his camera while she had been talking to Imposter Joe—the way she had slipped him the note, all that she’d said to the guy and what he’d said back, and all the while Finn had been watching and listening—when Finn pulled out a package of marshmallows, a box of graham crackers, and chocolate bars.

“Want some s’mores?”

Her irritation instantly dissolving, she eyed the ingredients with a sudden wistful craving. “S’mores?”