Page 589 of Love Bites

His words were like an ice cold shower. Thank God. The case. I could handle talking business. I was good at that. It was everything else I had problems with.

“The files are good, but why is there very little about the humans running the agency?”

He paused and gave me a smile that resembled a grimace. “They’re not local. Three human males came in from New York and we’re having a hell of a time tracing them.”

“Have you put them in the WTF database?”

“Yep. They’re drawing blanks too.”

“Interesting and not good,” I said as I pulled out the thinnest file and scanned it. “The bodies haven’t been found and the scent trails disappeared. I find that very difficult to believe. How much of a time lapse was there before the searches started?”

“The first victim was three days,” he said tightly and ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “After that it was immediate once we learned they were missing.”

“And you found nothing?”

“Isn’t that obvious, Miss Hotshot?” he snapped. “This is driving me crazier than you sitting across the desk from me. These are my people and I’m supposed to protect them. I can’t even find them,” he bellowed. His concern for our missing Pack members and his fury at being unable to locate them filled the room.

I was simply being professional, but felt like a jerk. Again, I was reminded that I was on a case with huge conflicts of interest. Maintaining distance and objectivity were going to be difficult—knowing the missing women was hard enough. Working with the person who my inner wolf was convinced was her true mate was pure hell.

Wolves could mate with whomever they wanted. Some lasted and some didn’t. We had long lives and overactive sex drives. If you didn’t find your true mate,a fairy tale I tended to not believe, you often had several relationships during a lifetime.

True mates belonged together…supposedly. If they had crossed paths, even as children, they would never be happy with someone else. Which proved my theory that Hank wasn’t my true mate. If he had been, he couldn’t have cheated on me. It was a virtual, medical and erectile impossibility for a male Were to cheat on his true mate. Junior was full of crap. There was no way in hell Hank the Tank wasn’t getting some. He was the most over-sexed Were I knew…not that I knew about any other Weres sex lives. I’d only ever been with the smug buttknuckle who was staring at me. I was pathetic. I just needed to get back out there. It was beside the point that I hadn’t dated or even shown a modicum of interest in anyone since I’d left him…but I’d been busy. Extremely busy. Becoming a killing machine for WTF had been a ton of work and then I…

“Look,” Hank said, thankfully cutting my ridiculous thought process short. “I don’t want you here because it’s not safe. As much as I want to take you over my knee and spank the hell out of you for leaving, I don’t think I could go on if something happened to you. So you will report your every move to me or I will be on you so fast it will hurt. Do you understand?”

“Do you understand that I’ve done things far more dangerous than this?” I shot back, ignoring the fact that the spanking thing was kind of a turn-on.

“Considering we don’t know what we’re dealing with that’s a bold and risky statement to make.” He crossed over to me and obliterated my personal space. Short of straddling the newspapers in a miniskirt to back off of them I was stuck. I hated being wrong, but I was smart enough to admit when I was. Cocky got you killed. I had no plans to die anytime in the near future.

“Fine,” I said and tried to push him away to little avail. “That was stupid and arrogant. I will go into this carefully and I will take as few risks as possible. As far as constant communication…I’ll do my best, but you have to let me do my job.”

“What exactly do you plan on doing?” he demanded. The thick muscles in his neck were taut and I knew it was taking everything he had not to run my Wolfy ass out of town.

“I plan to fly by the seat of my pants,” I explained logically as his jaw clenched along with his fists. “Since we don’t know who or what we’re dealing with yet, I can’t give you solids. However, I do promise if it looks dangerous I won’t go in without backup.”

“I call bullshit.”

“What?”

“You’ve gone into situations four times in the last year without backup. The last time you were almost killed.”

“Do I look dead to you?” I hissed. He had some nerve. I’d done all that because lives were at stake. Twice it had been children’s lives.

“You were lucky—and luck runs out.”

“I beg to differ, butthole.”Damn it, butthole made me sound like an incompetent child. I should have said asshole…“Luck had nothing to do with it. I’m skilled and I made all of those sons of bitches hurt bad. And how in the hell do you know all this?” I barked.

“Essie, I am always aware of what belongs to me.”

“Well, as lovely as that is,” I sneered, “I don’t belong to you. I belong to me and me alone. You need to move before I introduce your nuts to my fist. I’d use my knee on your man bits, but I’m wearing a miniskirt and I refuse to flash my goodies at you. I did my research and wore something model-y because that’s how I roll. Plus, I’m more apt to get the gig if I flash some leg and tit. So move. Now.”

Hank yanked me to my feet and flush against his hard body. “You will wear a wire.”

Gritting my teeth and forbidding myself to rub all over him like a cat in heat, I nodded curtly.

“I will wear a wire.”

“Lift your shirt and unbutton that scrap of material you call a skirt,” he instructed.

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