Go Fetch ! (19 page)

“Not according to my mother.”
Conall
was deep into his third helping of waffles and bacon—the man could really pack it away— when her friends showed up. They all tried to squeeze into the booth, but with
Conall
on one side that was just not happening. So Ben and Craig pulled chairs to the side and Miki made Kenny and Amy sit next to her. There was no way she was letting Amy anywhere near
Conall
.

“So?” Her friends exchanged glances and immediately she began to worry. “What?”

“I’ll tell her.” Amy looked at her. “Now don’t freak out, but we found a password-protected folder in
Leucrotta’s
computer. It had your information in it.”

“What do you mean? What information?”

“Everything. Social Security number, bank accounts, gym membership.”

Kenny Liu leaned forward. “Plus a detailed list of your daily activities the last five or six months. And by the way, you live a really boring life.”

“We did a trace and it seems like he hired a PI. Someone local to you.” Ben added.

Conall
pushed his nearly empty plate away and leaned back in the booth. He wasn’t saying anything, just calmly listening to her friends.

“We also found a folder for Angelina.” Craig muttered softly. “It had the same kind of info.”

She should have been freaking out. She should have been screaming her head off and seeing all possible disastrous scenarios that could occur. And although part of her brain was working on contingency plans should things get out of hand, she didn’t feel the need to start any kind of global panic. She knew that
Conall
and the Pack would do what they could to protect her and Angelina. She also knew she was too mean to take crap from anybody. And she liked the fact that she was finally starting to enjoy that part of herself. It’s what made her who she was.

Miki nodded. “Okay. Thanks.”

“That’s it? ‘Okay. Thanks.’ That’s all we’re getting?” Amy looked at her. “You’re not freaking out, which tells me you’re not surprised.”

“I’m not surprised. But that’s all I can really tell you.”

“Bullshit.”

“I’m not going to argue about this with you, Amy. So let it
fuckin
’ go.”

“What else do you need us to do?” Kenny Liu cut in before Amy could start ranting.

For the first time since her friends arrived,
Conall
spoke. “Nothing. Don’t do anything. And clean up your tracks. They should never know that you were there.”

“They? Whose they?” Craig was all over that. He was the king of paranoia. But she knew she couldn’t tell him the truth. It wasn’t her truth to tell. So she lied.

“Mafia.”

Conall’s
head snapped around and stared at her. She gave the smallest eyebrow raise.

“Mafia?” Amy turned her body in the booth so that she could stare Miki in the face. “
The
Mafia? You expect us to buy that the Mafia is out to get you?”

Conall
leaned forward, his most innocent expression on that dangerously misleading face. “Hey. That’s not something we’d lie about.”

Miki looked at Amy. She had to. If she stared at
Conall
a second longer, she was going to start giggling hysterically.

He looked back at Craig. “And if they find out you were there, we’ll find your body in the back of a Cadillac with your tongue cut out.”

Miki bit the inside of her cheek and kicked
Conall
under the table.

She watched the range of emotions pass over her friends’ faces. Ben had stopped listening. He was bored. Kenny Liu appeared truly concerned. Craig looked like he was about to pass out from the panic. And Amy restlessly tapped her fingers against the Formica table and glared.

“You must be insane if you expect us to buy that load of shit.”

“There’s a lot about me you guys just don’t know.”

“You’re lying, Kendrick. You
and
Conan the Barbarian.”

Miki and
Conall
looked innocently at each other then back at her friends. She shook her head sadly. “It hurts me that you think I’m lying.”

Conall
sighed. “It hurts us both.” She would have really lost it then if she and
Conall
weren’t busy kicking each other under the table.

***

“The Mafia? Was that the best you could do?” They’d started laughing as soon as Amy and the rest of them had left. Ten minutes later and they were still laughing. “Dude, I was desperate. I needed something and Amy wasn’t backing off. I know her.”

“Fine. Whatever.”
Conall
grabbed her hand. “Let’s go back to the hotel and fuck some more.”

“Actually, I have another idea.”

Why didn’t he like the sound of that? “A
better
idea?”

“Probably not.” She held up a small slip of paper. “But an idea just the same.”

“What’s that?”

“
Leucrotta’s
address. Let’s do a drive-by.”

“Shooting?” He wouldn’t put it past her.

“No, you nut case. Let’s go check him out.”

“No way, baby. Something happens to you, Zach will have my ass because Sara will have his.”

He looked down into that adorable face of hers. “And I might miss you a little myself.”

“Gee. Thanks.” Miki smirked at him. “Look. We can do this one of two ways. We can go there now. Together. Check it out for our amusement. Or you can find yourself passed out in a pool of your own vomit in the bathroom while I risk life and limb going there by myself.”

Conall
stared down at her. “You’d drug me again?”

“Sure. I’d only have to wrap it in bacon.”

Conall
wanted to be insulted, but she was just so damn cute. “I can’t afford to have you traipsing that tight ass of yours around a Clan den.”

“And I have no desire to get too close. I have no guns. No knives. No hand grenades. I’m defenseless. But we need to check out the enemy. We need to find out who these people are. I don’t believe in spending my life hiding or running.”

He believed that. He saw why Sara was friends with Miki. She was as tough as any wolf he knew. Miki just found a different way to survive. But still, he didn’t want her to get hurt. “I don’t know,
Mik
.”

She smiled at him and he felt his cock rear its ugly head. “Please,
Conall
… baby. For me.”

He laughed again. “You’re
fuckin
’ shameless.”

She took the car keys out of his jean pocket. “Come on, baby.” She jangled the keys at him. “Come on. Let’s go for a ride.”

“I swear to God, woman. You make one crack about hanging my head out the window…” She frowned and he could tell she’d been all set to do just that. “Damn.”

***

She wondered how long they would play twenty questions as she led him to
Leucrotta’s
house. She’d memorized every street map of Seattle and the surrounding areas. Didn’t take much. She only had to examine a map once to know every detail.

“Where did you learn to shoot?” Again with more questions. Why was he so interested? They’d already gone through these types of questions just the other night, but then he was still trying to get into her pants. Now that he was in, she wasn’t quite sure why he was still so curious.

Are booty calls supposed to be this chatty?

“The Marines.”

“You were in the Marines?”

He didn’t have to sound so shocked. “No.”

“Did you date a Marine?”

“No.” He seemed relieved by that answer, which confused her even more.

“Was your father a Marine?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t know the man.”

“Really?”

“He tried to contact me once after high school. But I told him to go to hell. I really had no desire to meet a man that at twenty-six dated a sixteen-year-old girl, got her pregnant, and then dumped her.” And it was a good thing she didn’t meet her father then. She was nineteen, in college, with full access to the biotech labs. Between that and her association with Craig and the rest of them, she would have hurt the man. As it was she remembered a late night of hiding one of her creations in what was now Craig’s personal lab. Had to. The military wanted to get their hands on it. Of course, Sara and Angelina still thought she was delusional when she said Black Ops would be coming for her one day.

“I can understand that. Did your mother love him?”

“Tragically, yes.”

He was surprisingly silent on that point and apparently decided to let it go. “Angelina dated a Marine?”

Miki rolled her eyes. “Nope. They’re on the List.”

“What List?”

“You know, it’s right in your face. You just refuse to see.”

Conall
stopped at a red light and looked at her. Then he grinned. A big, beautiful grin. “Your mother was a Marine.”

“And finally my Cro-Magnon man enters the Twenty-First Century where women are in the military.”

“
Your
Cro-Magnon man?”

She stared out the window so that she didn’t have to see his Viking grin. She wasn’t going to start liking him. Not really liking him. A passing “I don’t hate you enough to kill you” association was fine and dandy. But liking him like she liked Sara or Amy or Angelina or even Craig was out of the question.

The light changed and he moved forward. “Okay. So I missed it. The obvious. So she taught you to hunt?”

“No. I learned to hunt from my grandmother. Her father was a tracker and moon shiner. My mother taught me how to shoot. Every Marine’s a rifleman,
ya
know.” She shrugged. “By the time I was twelve, I’d skin my own kills.”

“That’s lovely.”

Miki nodded, ignoring his sarcasm. “I’d cut off the pelts. Strip the flesh. Freeze it. We’d have deer meat for weeks.” She looked at him. “And sometimes I’d make little hats from their heads.”

Conall
pulled over on a quiet suburban street. “Okay. This conversation’s ending now.” He shuddered. “Freaky woman.” He glanced around. “We’re getting near. I can smell them.”

“We’re not going to get any closer?”

“No way.” He shut off the car and handed her the keys. “If I’m not back in twenty minutes, leave and don’t go back to the hotel. Understand me?”

“Yes, my liege.”

He glared at her. “Smart ass.”

“What are you going to do?”

He shrugged. “Stay downwind.”

Then he was out of the car and disappearing down the street. Miki put her feet up on the dashboard and waited.

***

Conall
dumped his clothes behind an empty house with a For Sale sign in the front, shifted, and trotted the rest of the way to
Leucrotta’s
house. He knew as soon as he hit their street. The smell was almost overpowering. It took him a bit to discover the disgusting scent was coming from the pasty white secretions on almost every tree and home that he passed.
When these guys mark their territory, they
really
mark their territory
. He soon realized that almost every house on the street belonged to this Clan.

The street was pretty deserted and
Conall
assumed that the majority of members were at their day jobs. He slipped into a backyard and tracked his way to one of the houses where he actually heard activity. There was a high fence, but he found a tear in the wood that he could look through. It was a good-sized property with a pool and seemed like any other normal high-priced suburban home. And yet he was witness to one of the most disturbing things he’d ever seen.

Four females—
they were females right
?—were in a full-on fistfight. Blood was drawn. And he could hear bones breaking. The other females, about fourteen of them, watched impassively. But even more freakish was the vicious brawl going on between the children. Not just a shoving match or putting little Johnny’s head in the toilet, but teeth and claws used to cause permanent harm.

He thought about growing up as wolf pup. He remembered wrestling with Zach. One time, when they were no more than six, Zach accidentally knocked him down a flight of stairs and the poor kid cried for hours until
Conall
could walk again and remember his first name.

But what
Conall
was watching now was a brutal display of pure, unadulterated aggression. These were definitely not people to fuck with lightly. Then the wind shifted. The fighting stopped. The aggression stopped. And all attention focused on him at the fence. He took several steps back, spun around, and took off. It was time to call on his Pack.

***

Miki got tired of waiting in the SUV, so she sat on the stoop instead. She couldn’t stop thinking about the previous night. So that’s what Sara and Angie meant about getting your world rocked. No wonder people were obsessed with sex. Now she was obsessed with sex. Sex with
Conall
.