Page 14 of The Dragon's Dream Mate (Savage Shifters Special Ops 3)

“I did,” Jared said. “She looks just like you,” he noted, smiling at her. “She was holding an infant that couldn’t have been more than a couple months old. There was also a young child, perhaps two, sitting on the bed next to her with his head in her lap. She was singing to them.”

“When she was younger, I would always sing to her to help her go to sleep,” Rainey said. “She’s just as much my baby as she is my sister’s.”

“While the backyard guard was trying to chase down Damian to give him some love, I managed to look at his stash. He had three beer cans, some girly magazines, and two rifles,” Jared said.

Damian flashed Jared the middle finger, good-naturedly.

I asked Damian whether he was able to purr.

He shrugged and said, arrogantly, “Only if someone strokes me the right way.”

We laughed and then got back to the business at hand.

I said, “It looks like these guys are just hired goons. They are the street thugs that will work for the highest bidder, no questions asked, and no loyalties to anyone. They also don’t have morals regarding what they have been hired to do.”

Damian and Jared agreed with my assessment. “They have no dog in this fight, so if the getting gets rough, they will either run or give up. I’m guessing that they will just run,” Damian said.

Gage said, “We need to nab one of them. They have to know when and where they are taking the kids. That might lead us to some people higher up on the food chain.”

Jared said that he saw food wrappers and water bottles in the room, so the guards were at least giving the kids food and water. There were a couple of baby bottles lying around, but there was no way to tell whether the baby was getting formula, regular milk, or just plain water.

That put all of us on edge. We might have hard exteriors, but all of us have a soft spot for people and animals who cannot defend themselves against jerks who are trying to hurt them. The idea of a baby being hungry and abused hit us like a ton of bricks.

Gage decided that he would take the night watch to make sure no one tried to move the kids out in the middle of the night. We would make a plan to rescue the kids in the morning.

Rainey wanted to hit them now, but we decided that a strategic plan would be better.

Gage reassured her, “This time tomorrow, we will have your niece back. I promise.”

She nodded. She didn’t like waiting, and I can’t say that I blamed her, but she was willing to do whatever Gage told her to. She trusted him.

Gage went outside so he could change into his bear form. Even with the mirage, he was a huge animal, a very large chow chow.

Although I knew I should be thinking about different possible scenarios in my brain and writing them down, I couldn’t focus.

My thoughts were constantly on Rainey. She said that Simone was as much hers as her sister’s. Simone was almost, but not quite, old enough to be a product of Rainey and me making love that night.

My mind started entertaining a million what-ifs. What if I hadn’t gone off to fight Cedric’s war? What if I had come back to her when the war was over? What if I had told her what I was doing, and we had stayed together during my military career?

I had to remind myself that what-ifs were never productive. They never solved any problems. They only drove a person crazy.

Hoping the hot water would wash Rainey out of my brain, I took a long shower. Yet, all I could do was picture her curvy, naked body standing in front of me, soaped up, as I ran my hands up and down her soft skin, touching her everywhere.

Instead of exorcising her from my thoughts, the shower only made them more intense. I looked down at my cock standing at full attention as if to persuade me to go to her, hold her, and make love to her.

We both needed our sleep. Tomorrow was going to be a big day, and we both would need to have our wits about us.

Yet I wanted her. I needed her. I ached to slip into her room and hold her so close to me that I wouldn’t be able to tell where one of us ended and the other began.

I shouldn’t. Continuing to make love to her was only making promises that I wasn’t sure I could keep. The only promise I would be able to give her was a few hours tonight.

7

Rainey

Iworked very hard to keep my composure during the briefing. Usually, I do a great job of compartmentalizing, which is something that every military person, medical care professional, cop, teacher, and another member of society who has the opportunity to see the many ways that people can hurt each other, has to learn to do.

However, my weakness has always been kids. They, and animals, are the most vulnerable because they don’t understand evil, and they don’t know why people, who are supposed to protect them, choose to hurt them instead. And unfortunately, they aren’t able to fight back.

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