His Purrfect Mate (3 page)

Playa Linda, California

While Kenneth prepared for the ball in New York City, two of his employees in Playa Linda were in the most decrepit neighborhood in the city, pursuing a different agenda.

Bobbi
Simpson, a coyote shifter who worked for Shifters, Inc., was dressed to vanish into the darkness.   Black t-shirt, black jeans, boots, no makeup, hair pulled back in a pony-tail.  When necessary, she could easily don a five thousand dollar evening gown, pile her hair up into an elegant updo, and accessorize right down to the jewelry, heels, and hair ornaments.  Tonight, however, she wore her preferred outfit, the clothing she put on when she was ready to kick ass and then turn tail and run without taking any names.

Her best friend Pixie was dressed the only way she ever dressed: cheap faux black leather jacket, multiple facial piercings, flat-ironed hair a shocking shade of pink which faded at the end to tips of blue, combat boots, black holey leggings, t-shirt with a highly incongruous picture of a
cartoon kitten on it.

The two of them stood in
front of a grimy, graffiti-splattered apartment building in the waterfront district of Playa Linda. 

Bobbi tipped her head back and sniffed the air.
“Do you smell that? It smells like…betrayal.” She could also smell vomit, urine, beer, and the sour reek of garbage piled up in a dumpster next to a biker bar called the Hogtie, right next to the apartment building. But mostly betrayal.

Pixie nodded vigorously. “I seriously can’t wait to see how this one plays out. When will that dumbass wolf learn he can’t outsmart us?  You should hit him really hard. And while you’re hitting him, I’ll steal his wallet.”

“Why would you bother stealing my boyfriend’s wallet?  It’
s not like he carries any cash with him.  I swear, you need to go to a twelve-step group for pickpockets.”

“Practice,” Pixie said. “Although it’s true, he’s way too easy.”

The sun was low on the horizon, but the fall air was still warm and humid, trapping the neighborhood’s pungent aromas in a haze of pollution and stink.

“Let’s go get this over with,” Bobbi said, exasperated. The two of them circled around the back of the building, jimmied the door’s lock, and dashed up the stairwell
, which smelled a lot like the alley they’d just left. 

“Phew,” Bobbi said. “Has anyone here ever heard of a toilet? Welcome to the 21
st
century, for God’s sakes.”

On each floor, Bobbi stopped, open
ed the doorway to the stairwell, stuck her head into the hallway, partially shifted to enhance all of her senses, and sniffed. She could scent her fated mate easily, even with all the sour odors of bodily waste clogging her nostrils.

Finally on the fourth floor, she smelled what she was seeking. 

Pixie followed her down the hallway,  and, when Bobbi paused and pointed at a doorway, she reached inside her leather jacket to pull out her bag of lock picks.  They were inside in seconds.

The apartment was dark and dingy
, and the paint on the wall was peeling off in sheets.   Jax Mackenzie, the aforementioned dumbass wolf shifter, sat next to Bobbi’s brother Heath on a faded green couch, watching a flickering black and white TV with rabbit ears.  

Both of them were big, broad-shouldered men, although Heath at six five was several inches taller than
Jax.  Jax had thick, glossy black hair and cheekbones that hinted at Native American heritage.  Heath had curly brown hair and caramel brown eyes.  A broken, reset nose and a scar slashing through one eyebrow hinted at Heath’s upbringing on the streets.

They both glanced up as Bobbi and Pixie burst into the room.
  Jax had a resigned expression on his face. “I scented you in the hallway,” Jax said. “I guess I should have known that you’d find us.”

“Yes, idiot, you should have.” Bobbi’s breath came out in an exasperated
hiss.  Jax was her fated mate, and they’d agreed that they would get married if they could make it a year together without killing each other.  Jax’s odds that evening weren’t good.

She knew what was going on. 
Jax trying to protect her and treat her like a fragile china doll. She understood why he would do that, but she had also made it very clear when they started dating; she wasn’t a hide on the sidelines kind of girl, and he would have to live with that.

She could always tell when
Jax was lying to her…and something had clearly been up earlier that day when he’d told her that Tyler wanted her to head out to an elegant hotel called The Gilded Swan to guard an Eastern European princess.

All the signs were there, the mumbling,
the way he spoke too fast and avoided her eyes…

That night, s
he’d pretended to head out to the address that he’d given her, but then she’d turned around and circled back to lay low near their apartment so she and Pixie could follow him.

And here they were, not at a fancy uptown hotel, but in a stinking slum that clung to the edge of Playa Linda’s coastline.

“I told you we couldn’t fool her,” Heath chided Jax in exasperation.

“I know. She’s too smart for us,”
Jax said dolefully.

The TV turned
staticy, and Heath crossed the room and wiggled the rabbit ears, looking annoyed.

“We’re both too smart for you,” Pixie
added.. Pixie hated to feel left out.

“
Damn straight,” Bobbi said irritably, feeling slightly mollified by his concession. “So what the hell is the real assignment?”

“The real assignment is what we said it was.
We just lied about the address.  There have been numerous assassination attempts on this young woman’s life, because she rejected the marriage proposal of a sheikh.   Her family is trying to figure out a safe place to hide her. We have word that the people who are trying to assassinate her are in Playa Linda.  Staying in a luxury hotel is too obvious; we decided that for tonight, we would hide her out in a place that nobody would ever think to look for her.”

“I’m not leaving
.” Bobbi folded her arms across her chest and speared Jax with a glare.

Despite her anger, her body did that thing it always did when she was near
Jax. It pulsed with desire. She felt her nipples hardening, and she couldn’t help but let her eyes rove admiringly over his incredibly body.
Mine, all mine
.  The broad shoulders, the curving biceps, the flat, hard stomach…all hers.

“Fine,” he
shrugged said wearily. “I give.  You win. She’s in there.” He nodded his head at a closed door. “Why don’t you girls go hang out with her, and your brother and I will hang out here? We’ll make coffee later.  We have a crew coming in to relieve us at 7 a.m.  She doesn’t speak any English, I’m afraid.”

“All right,” Bobbi
said. Something was bothering her, but she wasn’t sure what.

She and Pixie opened the door and walked into the next room. A pretty girl with wavy dark hair, wear
ing a t-shirt and jeans, sat on an old sagging bed, listening to music on her headphones and typing on a tablet computer.  She waved at them when they walked in, then went back to her computer.

Pixie and Bobbi sat on the other side of the bed in silence for a few minutes.

“Of course, you’re not technically cleared for bodyguard duty,” Bobbi said to Pixie.

“Oh, don’t start.  Tyler’s been teaching me
Krav Maga. And I fight dirty.  And I always have your back.”

“Really?
What’s it like wrestling on a mat with him?” Bobbi grinned wickedly.  Tyler and Pixie had been attracted to each other since they first met, but they were taking their sweet time acting on it.

“None of your beeswax.”
Pixie looked flustered. “Let’s get back to that whole bodyguard thing. You know you can’t get rid of me; I’m not going to let you have all the fun.”

“
You’re supposed to be our expert on breaking and entering. On picking pockets.  I feel badly, bringing you along on assignments where there’s potential danger.”

“Well, actually, I usually just find a way to tag along, so it’s not really your fault. Besides, I know the drill. If shit goes down, I dive behind the
bed, you shift and rip their throats out.”

“Jeez! Language! We’re sitting in a room with a princess!”

“Oh, whatevs, she has her headphones on. Besides…she doesn’t look like a princess.” Pixie cast a doubtful look over at the young woman.

Bobbi glanced over at her, and caught a glimpse of
the computer screen, and suddenly it hit her like a thunderbolt. She knew what had been troubling her ever since she and Pixie broke into the apartment.

“Those sons of b
itches!” she hissed, jumping to her feet.

* * *

Jax and Heath ran for thirty blocks without stopping.  As soon as Pixie and Bobbi had shut the door to the bedroom, they’d shifted, slunk quietly out of the apartment, and run for it as soon as they hit the sidewalk.  As they ran, Heath’s jaws were firmly clamped on a bag of clothing for them to change into.

Finally,
they came to a halt. They were out of the warehouse district and in a residential neighborhood, at Dominick’s house. The two of them trotted behind a hedge in his front yard, and shifted back in to human form.  They pulled their clothes on, glancing behind them to make sure that Bobbi wasn’t in hot pursuit. 

So far, they seemed to have pulled off their ruse.

“My sister is seriously going to kill us,” Heath said.

“I know
how to distract her when she’s mad,” Jax said smugly.

“Hey. This is my sister we’re talking about
,” Heath said, looking appalled.  “I don’t actually want to picture whatever it is you’re talking about.”

“Adopted sister.
And you know this is for the best,” Jax said. 

“Yeah, you say that now,” Heath muttered.
“When we get back, even in my bear form – my sister is seriously capable of putting the hurt on me.”

“Quit your whining
and take it like a bear,” Jax said, as Dominick stepped out onto the porch, car keys dangling from his hand.  He shut and locked the front door of his small wooden bungalow house.

“Are you ready?” he asked them.

“I was born ready,” Jax said.

“Cliché, dude,” Heath said.

“Dude is cliché.  Do people actually talk like that in Arizona?” Jax glanced over his shoulder one final time to make sure that Bobbi wasn’t following them.

“Do you think that she’s figured it out yet?” Heath asked, ignoring
Jax’s jab, as they climbed into Dominick’s car.

“Oh, yeah.
  Figured it out, plotting her revenge…Dominick, drive fast.”

“Really?
Scared of a girl? Who’s the pussy here?” Dominick snorted in contempt, as he headed for their destination, a private airstrip an hour outside of Playa Linda.

Jax
and Heath were getting ready to head out to their real assignment, the one they’d been so desperate to prevent Bobbi from learning about.

It was a special assignment for Kenneth.  Over the past few months, there had been break-ins at several of Kenneth’s homes in Europe. At two of his homes, in Italy and in France, art had been stolen. The break-ins had been particularly brutal; one of his employees, beaten savagely in the atta
ck, was in a coma.

None of the artwork had turned up in any of the usual places; nobody was trying to fence it, there wasn’t even a whisper about it on the international black market.  It wasn’t even particularly valuable artwork, certainly not enough to warrant the risk of breaking into Kenneth’s houses to steal it. 
The thieves had left behind original Van Goghs, Monets and Picassos.  They’d bypassed all of Kenneth’s security systems, overwhelmed his staff and vanished into the night.  The crew that had stolen the artwork had clearly been top notch professionals.

The only thing they’d taken from each house was a limestone statue of ancient Sumerian provenance, believed to have originated circa 3000 B.C.
  And oddly, in one house, they’d removed one large Sumerian statue, but left behind a smaller one.  

While investigating the ca
se, Kenneth had found out that the El-Debars, a family of antique dealers in Turak, had approached his family on at least half a dozen occasions over the years, asking about the statues.  The country of Turak was located in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where the ancient region of Sumer, birthplace of civilization, had once been.

However, the El-Debars weren’t affiliated with any museums, and all of Kenneth’s background investigations seemed to indicate that they were honest, scrupulous folk who were unlikely to have been behind the art thefts at his homes.

Regardless, it was the closest thing to a lead they had, so Kenneth had commissioned a private jet to take them to Turak.

Unfortunately,
Turak was in the middle of a civil war, and it was highly dangerous to travel to that region.  Jax was willing to risk Bobbi’s wrath rather than see her travel through a war zone.