Page 13 of Romeo

And one very particular tiger.

* * *

“Are you kidding me?”Brent demanded. “You were caught?”

Ashley tried not to fidget. She was twenty-eight. She shouldn’t feel like a kid in the principal’s office.

“The tigers are fast.”

Brent glared at her in silence.

She was in the temporary headquarters kitchen, which was doubling as an office. Brent was furious, and she knew he had every right to be.

“So that’s your excuse? They’re fast?”

Resisting the urge to shrug, she said, “The security team sensed me.”

“Then you fucked up somehow,” Buck said.

Damn, she hated him. Such a suck-up.

“I don’t see you volunteering to infiltrate the ambush, so shut up.”

He took a step toward her, his eyes flashing. Brent put his hand up and the big man froze, then took a step back.

“How will you fix this?” Brent asked.

She wished she had an answer. She couldn’t show herself around Whisper Creek or any of the ambush construction company’s sites because either tiger who’d grabbed her might recognize her, and no matter that she wanted to help Brent take out the tigers, she didn’t want to face that one man again.

There was something compelling about him, and she didn’t like that one bit.

She couldn’t like it. Because letting her guard down around a shifter was a bad idea all around.

“I’ll figure it out. I just need some time to rethink the situation,” she said after unsuccessfully trying to stop thinking about the sexy tiger.

How could one man consume her thoughts when they hadn’t even had a proper introduction or conversation? Not that she wanted to do that, of course. She’d come to Northern Ohio to perform a job, period. The last thing she needed to do was complicate things by spending more time thinking about him.

If only she’d been able to really get a good look at him, but it had been so dark. The moonlight had offered her some light and her eyes had adjusted to the darkness well, so she knew what he looked like for the most part.

Argh!Stop thinking about him.

“You seem distracted,” Brent said, eyeing her suspiciously.

“I nearly got captured tonight,” she said. “And you wouldn’t come to rescue me, so yeah, I’m a little shaken by things.” She cleared her throat. “Give me a few hours. I want to rest for a bit and then devise a new plan.”

“Fine,” Brent said. “It’s late anyway. I’ll see you at sunrise.”

She nodded and walked away.

Once she was at the rental house, she took a hot shower, washing away the chemical masking agent and trying not to think about Sexy.

But she couldn’t.

Her heart ached, a near constant thrum against her chest, and she was having a difficult time keeping her thoughts on her mission.

Holy hell, she was in trouble.

She needed to get out of Ohio ASAP, or she was liable to do something stupid.

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