Page 5 of Load Bearing
She thrust her hand out while Hunter was still drinking in her face. She had lively brown eyes above tanned cheekbones and a big kissable mouth curved into a friendly smile. A few curly brown strands of hair had escaped her hardhat. “You here to give me a quote for somesecurity?”
Did Hunter imagine the lilt to her last word? Security was not what he wanted to give her at the moment, and he stared at her hand a moment before he remembered to shake it.
She wasn’t a shifter. There was no telltale tingle to her proximity or to her touch, though Hunter did feel an undeniable shiver of pleasure with her hand in his for a regulation-length handshake.
He still hadn’t figured out how to make words, and she’d asked him a question.
“I understand you’ve had some thefts.”
Her face was incredibly expressive and Hunter had a hard time dragging his eyes off of it to avoid staring. There was a flash of annoyance, an amused twist to her mouth, and a roll of her eyes. He didn’t know what any of it meant.
“Theft and sabotage. A week ago, a compressor wentmissing. A crime of opportunity maybe. It was a good one. But two nights ago, someone put water in one of the generator tanks and totally ruined it. Ihada security camera up this week, just so you know that I’m not a complete idiot, but it didn’t catch anything except a stray dog, and my insurance company doesn’t want to cover the loss because they say I didn’t take appropriate measures. I’ll show you the scene of the crime. Mind your fancy shoes, there’s some mud.”
Hunter had forgotten he even had feet, following Trixie as she led him over the uneven ground.
The building was in a pit, the basement not yet buried, and access to the single finished floor was by two planks over a yawning gap through an unfinished wall. Trixie scampered over in front of him. They groaned and flexed alarmingly under Hunter’s weight.
“That’s the camera,” Trixie pointed out. It was a standard game camera, bolted to one of the interior columns. “Battery powered. There’s no wifi here, so everything was on the chip. It’s in a locked case to prevent tampering. Someone got up behind it and put duct tape over the lens. They must’ve known right where it was to come around the back out of view, and they would have had to jump the excavation because the camera was trained on the ramp.”
Hunter grunted, looking around the site. As a shifter, he was a little stronger and faster than a human. He could probably make the jump, but it wouldn’t be easy, even for him. “You’ve got the footage?”
“Yeah, I transferred it to my phone.” Trixie had to stand very close to him to share the screen and find the video. “It’s a motion sensor, and this is all it caught.”
The picture was grainy, clearly an infrared image. Trixie started the recording and Hunter forced himself tofocus on the phone she was holding and not her tantalizing proximity.
She smells good, his bear said in approval.
She smelled, if Hunter was honest, like sweat and hard work, with a little hint of flowers. It was intoxicating and if he’d been a bear, he would have rolled in it.
And rolling with her would be…amazing. Hunter longed to see if she was as strong as she looked. Would she be quiet and docile in bed? Or would she be aggressive and forceful about her desires?
Hunter swallowed and made himself pay attention to the screen she was holding. “Is that a wolf?” A long-legged canine loped down the drive and picked its way across the ramp, sniffing at the floor. The structure in the image was markedly less finished, with no exterior walls whatsoever aside from the basement, and Hunter found himself looking between the two curiously. They had made a lot of progress in just a few days.
“Probably just a dog,” Trixie said. “A lot of locals have half-wolf huskies as pets. Regulations are really lax out here and a lot of them run free. Either way, it doesn’t have thumbs, so it can’t be our thief.”
Hunter frowned at the time stamp as the canine moved out of the field of view and Trixie moved to the next video, which was a confused blur and then blackness. “And that’s where the tape was put over the lens. That morning, the generator failed.”
“Show me again,” Hunter growled. He thought belatedly that he should be gentler about it, but he was already working on a theory.
If Trixie was put off by his gruffness, she didn’t show it. She started to replay the duct tape footage.
“Thefirstone,” Hunter snapped, then regretted it immediately. “Please.”
The wolf-dog was certainly dog-like. It sniffed around like a dog would, wandering convincingly to the edge of the excavation before testing the ramp and then walking over it with almost theatrical hesitation.
It was exactly the kind of act a shifter might put on if it knew just where the camera was, and there was one quick, direct glance like it was making sure it was in view.
The first time he saw the footage, Hunter had a suspicion. The second time he was positive.
That wolf was definitely their man.
4
TRIXIE
Trixie didn’t need a man to pat her on the head and tell her she’d done a good job, so she was miffed with herself for wishing that the security professional would praise her for her camera placement and her foresight to lock it up, even if the footage had been ultimately unhelpful.
Was he so interested in the wolf because he was clearly from out of state and not accustomed to wildlife?
