Passion's Prey: The Shadow Shifters (17 page)

At the same time, he didn’t want Bas even entertaining thoughts of touching Caprise. Bas was a womanizer, there was no kind way to put that, and it wasn’t all just reputation as Rome had endured. It was the cold honest truth. If ever there was a shifter who abhorred even the thought of being tied to one woman for any length of time, it would be Sebastian Perry. Just one more concrete reason why Bas’s ogling of Caprise needed to be checked—immediately.

She kept walking right into the dark canyon. A breeze blew by and for the first time, X realized she could actually be chilly. So instead of speaking again he closed the distance quickly, pulling her arm so she’d have no choice but to stop walking and turning her to face him. With his other hand he thrust the shirt at her, an air of déjà vu surfacing. “Put it on,” he said forcefully.

Of course since it was Caprise he was speaking to she rolled her eyes before yanking the shirt from his grasp. Another man might have had the decency to turn away while she dressed. But X had never claimed to be like any other man. He watched, with great interest, as her arms stretched upward to slip the impossibly large sweatshirt over her breasts.

“Better now?” he asked when he was certain he could speak without his voice cracking like some punk-ass little boy.

Why the sight of her naked never ceased to arouse him, X had no clue. He’d seen this body a couple of times already. He’d touched her, fucked her, he should be so over it. And yet here he was, standing in the middle of some damn healing canyon after they’d killed three shifters, with a hard-on that was quickly growing painful.

“You’re an ass!” was her heated retort.

X chuckled because for one scary-ass moment he thought she might actually cry. Her bottom lip had quivered when she turned back to face him and her forehead looked a little furrowed. And she was a female—whom he’d discovered were prone to emotional fits after battle. But he should have known better.

She was in his face in about two seconds, her bony finger poking—with a little discomfort—into his bare chest.

“You do not fight for me! I can handle my own. And I had that cat. I would have taken him down without your help,” she yelled.

After she’d finished and gulped in air for a breath, X grabbed the wrist of the offending finger and pulled. For good measure he grabbed her other wrist and looked her right in the eye.

“I interrupted because I didn’t want him to roll over and kill you,” he told her.

“I had him!”

X nodded in agreement. “You did.” She’d also had a good portion of his self-control as he’d watched both cats tumble over that butte falling about ten feet to the ground. “But I’m not used to watching females take a fall like that. And I’m definitely not used to seeing you in that position.”

“I can fight in any form,” she told him, yanking at her arms for him to let go. “I can take care of myself, whether it’s from a cat or a … I … I mean…” Her voice trailed off.

Then she did look away, her head down, wrists still trapped by his.

“I know you’re a fighter, Caprise. But that’s not what this is about, is it?”

“No,” she said, her head snapping back around at him. “It’s about you not trusting me enough to handle myself.” She huffed.

Okay, X could accept that. Nothing would stop him from taking down a kill. That’s how jaguars operated. And despite her earlier denial, Caprise was a jaguar. And if he wasn’t mistaken—which he really didn’t believe he was this time—Caprise was about to have some type of breakdown. X still prayed for no appearances by tears, but pulled her close to his chest, kissing the top of her head.

“You did good out there. Even though I told you to stay behind me.”

“I don’t have to stand behind you or any man.”

X waited a long moment, giving her a minute to catch her breath, to clear her mind, which he knew was whirling right about now.

“You want to tell me about the man you did stand behind? The one who hurt you so bad you’re throwing stones at me every chance you get.”

She remained still. X admitted to himself that he could have been wrong. This could have been about something totally different. But no, he wasn’t. From what he did know about females there were only two things that could get them this worked up—family and/or a man. And since Nick was the doting older brother who had been trying his damndest not to even yell at Caprise, X was betting on the latter.

“Why should I tell you anything?” she asked quietly.

“You don’t have to,” he told her even though right at this very moment he wanted her to tell him more than anything else in this world. “But it might help.” Again, hypocrisy almost choked him. But X had good reasons for keeping his trap shut about his past—good goddamn reasons.

“And Caprise, I have to be straight with you about this. I’m going to find out sooner or later. You could save us both some time by just telling me who the guy was that was stupid enough to fuck with you.”

Her head shot up at his words. “And what are you going to do? Go shoot him with your big gun? Or show him your teeth and scare him until he pees in his pants?”

She had a sarcastic tone, most of the time. Now was no different, but it kind of made X want to laugh. Was this how she pictured him? The man that handled things with violence. If so, she wasn’t exactly wrong. His plan was to find the bastard and snap his neck—okay, no, he wasn’t going to snap the guy’s neck, but he was going to make sure he’d never mess with Caprise again.

“I’m going to handle the situation, that’s all you need to know.”

She took a deep breath. “Well, all you need to know is there was a man and now there isn’t. It’s been over for a really long time.”

“But judging from his texts to you, he’s not on board with that decision.”

“That’s not him,” she said, and the scent of her lie almost suffocated X.

That alone made him just a little edgier, if that were possible. “Then who is it?”

She shrugged. “Wrong number.”

“Wrong answer, Caprise,” was his response.

*   *   *

“So what did Hernandez have to say after your overnight ultimatum wore off?” Bas asked several hours later when they were in his office.

X and Caprise still hadn’t said more than two words to each other. But he had received an email from his office with the information on the phone number trace he’d done before leaving DC. The results weren’t good, but at least they gave X a place to start looking for Caprise’s stalker. Unfortunately, it would circle him right back to Athena’s.

“He wrote down some dates—I guess for when meetings occurred—and some amounts that he knew were exchanged. I’m going to take all the info back to DC and work on it from there.” That wasn’t all that Hernandez had told him, but it was all he planned to tell Bas for now.

“Intel from Comastaz came in just before you arrived,” Bas said.

He sat back on the chocolate-brown couch that was across the room from his desk. After the early morning they’d all had, coming back to the room to get some food and some rest had been first and foremost. And instead of the cat X had seen a while ago, he was definitely looking at the man now. He wore cream-colored linen pants and a matching shirt; his shoes were some type of loafer, something X would never try to squeeze his feet into. But on Bas it looked right, as if these things were made for this man. Whatever, X shook his head and took a seat in a chair across from him.

“What’s going on there? You thought it might be a leak or something,” he said, recalling their conversation from a few weeks ago about the government-owned lab in Sedona.

“It’s not good. We were able to get a shifter inside, sent him in as a rep from a waste management company. He found some interesting emails on one of the computers.”

“The joys of technology,” X replied grimly. Bas wasn’t looking like his normally suave self; in fact, X noted the guy’s brow was just a bit furrowed, his eyes a little shielded.

“Well, that technology has confirmed one of our greatest fears. I’m telling you this before I tell the other FLs because I know you’ll report directly to Rome the minute you return to DC.”

X sat up, resting his elbows on his knees. “Give it to me,” he told Bas.

“Somebody’s asking questions about another species. There was talk of some photos and containment. They don’t sound like they have specifics, just a hunch. But it’s the government, you know where they can go with a hunch.”

X let out the breath he’d unwittingly been holding. “I know what the government doesn’t do with important hunches and tips. But this, they’ll run with this until the end of time.”

“You’re right,” Bas said. “Just like they’re still secretly looking for UFOs.”

“Great, now we’re in the category with UFOs. Fucking perfect. Rome’s not going to like this. Do we know who received the emails, who the sender was, all that?”

“I’ve got a written report in my office.”

“On a secure USB, I hope,” X said.

Bas nodded. “All our computers are secure. You should know—you installed most of them.”

“Right. But we’ve got to start being real careful about what we say and to whom. Last month at the raid on Rome’s place there was a Rogue found on the property. Baxter thinks he came in with the landscape group earlier that week. And then there was the Rogue that was working at the firm with Rome and Nick. They’re everywhere now.”

“Yeah, I know. But they’re masking their scent. We’ve got to figure out how they’re doing it.”

X agreed. “As for the chick at the firm, we think she may have been sleeping with a human. If that’s the case he would have carried her scent and she would have been virtually scent-free.”

“Damn genetics,” Bas swore. “There’s still a lot we don’t know about our kind. Like I was thinking the other day, what if one of us was to get a human pregnant. What would that be like?”

For a moment X was quiet. Actually, he was stunned because
pregnant
and
human
were not generally words that went together in Bas’s vocabulary. For all that he was a womanizer he usually stuck to shifters because he figured they were safer for whatever reasons he may have had. This was different, and the look he was giving X was even stranger.

“You got somebody knocked up?” X asked, trying to keep this conversation as light as possible.

Bas shook his head. “No, nothing like that. I was just thinking. You know with thousands of us here in the United States and spreading out across the country, it’s entirely possible that one of us would hook up with a human and a pregnancy could occur.”

X shrugged. “I don’t know. Nick’s mate is pregnant now and that’s strange enough. We’re all kind of just waiting to see what’s going to happen. I mean, shifter births are fairly common now or else we wouldn’t be here. But none of us has ever witnessed any.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what’s going on in my head,” Bas said rubbing a hand over his face. “So anyway, you and Caprise—where’s that going?”

“Nowhere” was X’s instant reply. “What I mean is there’s no mating or joining on the horizon.”

“You sure about that?” Bas asked skeptically.

“Come on, man, you know me.”

Bas nodded. “I do.”

“You and I are kind of alike. Commitment’s not on our agenda,” he replied, watching Bas carefully.

“Right. It’s not on my agenda. But you’re pretty damn protective of her.”

“She’s a female, Bas. And she’s Nick’s sister.”

“And she’s what to you?”

X stood. “She’s Nick’s sister and she’s a shifter. Damn right I’m going to protect her. As a matter of fact I’m going to go see what she’s doing and let her know we’ll be flying out in the morning.”

But as X opened the door Jewel was on the other side. The smile she gave X wavered as he figured he was probably scowling at her instead.

“Sorry, I was just leaving,” he told her.

“What is it, Jewel?” Bas asked.

When she spoke her voice was decidedly feminine and very serious. “There’s an urgent call for you from a Roman Reynolds.”

Chapter 17

Washington, DC

Kalina Reynolds was no longer a detective for the Metropolitan Police Department. She was no longer a candidate for employment with the Drug Enforcement Agency. What she was—and most would be absolutely amazed at her transformation—was the First Female of the Stateside Shifter Assembly. She was part woman and part jaguar, and she was absolutely gorgeous in her four-and-a-half-inch-heeled cobalt-blue Jimmy Choo pumps and white sleeveless V-neck Victoria Beckham mini dress.

Never in her life had Kalina imagined she’d be wearing such clothes, walking in these shoes and heading into the DEA satellite office in DC. It almost felt like déjà vu, since about three months ago she’d done this very thing—different clothes, of course. Still, she looked damn good, felt spectacular, and let her cat purr just slightly as she knocked on the door of Agent Dorian Wilson’s office.

It took only seconds for him to beckon her in, and she moved with the slow, sleekness of a cat. Her lips spread into a friendly smile, while her hazel eyes found his glare and locked into place. Gentleman that he was, Dorian stood, extending a hand across the desk toward her immediately. Kalina accepted his hand graciously while surreptitiously glancing around his office.

The space consisted of a cluttered desk, a high-backed faux-leather chair for him, two hard need-to-be-reupholstered chairs for guests, a file cabinet that looked to be on its last leg of life, and no windows. Four walls surrounded the closet-like space, effectively boxing its occupants in for the duration they stayed. Kalina felt claustrophobic already.

“Nice to see you again, Kalina,” Dorian said as she let her hand slide from his grasp.

He had a nice, firm handshake and was dressed in dark brown slacks and a beige dress shirt. He’d forgone the tie but from the haphazard way the top button of his shirt was undone she knew it was most likely somewhere in this office. Probably beneath the suit jacket that hung on the back of the door Jax had just closed. Her guard with his six-plus-foot, 285-pound body looked like he was being stuffed in this Cracker Jack box of an office. But he wasn’t leaving Kalina’s side, not for one instant.