The Werewolf Ranger (Moonbound Book 3) (4 page)

N
o one managed
to get through to his dick while he was asleep, and Rain woke with a hard-on. At least he’d managed to sleep at all, with her scent still all over him, but he was pretty decent at falling asleep on cue after ten years as a Ranger. He just wasn’t very good at making his erection go away.

Thank the gods for blankets.

He turned in his seat and looked around the cabin. Most of the group was asleep. At least they’d listened. That was one good sign. They were probably all exhausted, after nearly twenty-four solid hours of posturing and bickering and Mary Foster talking incoherently about her captivity.

Plus, eyewitness testimony was notoriously unreliable. Rain still wasn’t sure the information they’d managed to get out of her during her hypnotism session would prove to be anything like helpful.

He pulled out his phone. They should be landing soon.

“You know, there’s wi-fi on the plane,” a female voice broke into his internal moment.

Directly behind him was the Colorado wolf, holding up her laptop. Next to her, the attractive black woman from Los Angeles. Davis was her last name; that was all he could remember. And the skinny, perky brunette from Colorado was Gallagher. He thought she’d introduced herself at some point.

He needed to make a point to get to know their names. They would have to become a real team at some point, if they expected to get anything done.

Rain was frustrated with the whole setup. The team was half female, first of all, which meant that all the seven-seconds-between-sex-thoughts dudes on the trip would end up thinking with their collective dicks. Couldn’t be helped, especially not with wolves, who were largely instinctual, until trained. And as Rain’s own dick could attest, sometimes the training didn’t stick.

Additionally, there were far too many of them. Four would have been sufficient. He could’ve picked out the strongest, quickest-on-their-feet, least emotional enforcers in that alpha room in a heartbeat and made his own team. But no one had asked him.

This was an actual recipe for disaster. Not to mention the fact that the captain had fucked her second-in-command in earshot of the rest of the team. They were all screwed.

“You want to use my laptop?” Gallagher asked, passing the computer forward.

“I’m good. I just wanted to see what time it was.” Rain offered her a forced smile. “You’ve got wifi?”

“I was just checking up on our network back at home.” She put the laptop back on her extended tray table and her seat companion turned one shoulder up, putting her back to them.

“Your network?”

“Yeah, we run a tech company.” She offered her hand. “Maggie Gallagher.”

“We met before.” Rain shook and smiled. “Rainier Dubois.”

“Oh, right. At the slot machine.” A smirk crossed her lips. “I maybe had one too many.”

“You and me, both.” Rain nodded at the laptop. “If you have wifi, can you look something up for me?”

She perked and her fingers went right to the keyboard. “Sure, boss.”

Rain winced at the title. Did he really want to be the leader of this mission? He’d cross that bridge later, with Nora, when they could be alone. No sense in arguing in front of the team.

“The Vegas alpha gave me a list of the scenes they got from Mary Foster when they took her through her escape.” He dug around in his seat pocket for the folder he’d gotten from Carl. Apparently, with the connection over Marco, Carl Rivera felt much safer giving the information to Rain than to anyone connected to Cavanaugh.

There were too many tense relationships between the alphas, and Rain didn’t want anything to do with any of those politics. He just wanted to find the brothel bastard and rip his arms off and go back to North Carolina where everything was simple.

Not to mention the distance it would put between him and Nora.

Step one had to be the mission. Before he could think about Nora again, and before he could reach the safety of his base, he needed to complete this mission.

“I got one, too.” Maggie pulled out the same sheet of paper Rain was handing over and showed him. Same hand-written sentences. “From my alpha.”

“I think we’re going to have to start with this church.”

Maggie pointed to the sentence in the middle of the page with the words
two bell towers
. “That was my thought, too.” She made a few clicks and turned her laptop so he could see. “I already found it.”

On her screen was a Yelp page that read
Catedral de Guadalajara La Asuncion de Maria Santisima
. The picture showed two different pictures of a double-spire church with a dome in the middle. Exactly what Mary had described.

“How far is it from the airport?” he asked.

“Half an hour, if we’re lucky.”

“And if we’re not?”

“Who knows. The church is in the center of the city.” Maggie turned the computer back and made a couple of entries, then swiveled it back to him. “There’s the map view.”

Rain smiled. He should have more Maggie Gallaghers around. It was like having command central in the plane.

“And do we have transport…”

Before he could finish, Maggie made another click. “I booked a private car to pick us all up. It’ll take us as far as the church.”

“We can be on foot from there.” Rain nodded. He was starting to feel much more in control. Much more grounded. He liked that feeling.

Not like being around Nora, where he felt honed in on her like a beacon. This was more like…normal.

“Good work, Gallagher,” he said. “I can see why they wanted you on the mission. We need a whiz with a computer.”

“That would be me.” Her smile was sweet, but he knew that there was a daredevil lurking underneath it. No one parachuted off buildings and bridges unless they had gonads of steel.

“Any thoughts on where the next landmarks are?” Rain looked over the sheet that had been written during Mary’s hypnotism session. The directions were vague and almost laughable.

A building with frowning red eyebrows
and
the yellow dog
seemed impossible to spot. The dog would be dead, surely, and buildings didn’t have eyebrows. They had their work cut out from them.

“I’ve done some searching online. I can’t find anything.” Maggie’s cute smile turned upside down. “These directions… they’re not directions.”

“I know.” He mirrored her frown.

“It’s more like a scavenger hunt.”

Something clicked in Rain’s head.
Scavenger hunt
. Yes. That’s exactly what it was. A plan began to form and he smiled at Maggie. “I think I know what we have to do.”

T
he cathedral was
cavernous on the inside. And empty. Rain led the team into the middle of the nave and stopped. He and Nora had been studiously avoiding each other since the inconvenient bathroom sex, but he hadn’t stopped thinking about her for longer than a few minutes at a time.

She’d picked up a conversation with the guy from Miami at the end of the flight that had continued in the car and beyond. If she thought she was working up to getting another guy in her pants, she had another thing coming.

A million pounds of nope.

If Rain could keep it in his pants on the mission, then she could, too. Or keep her dress down. Even if he had to fuckin’ handcuff her legs together. No panties. Gods. He was gonna buy her some damned panties.

“Okay, people, here’s the plan.” Rain clapped his hands together and the sound echoed through the giant cathedral.

Everyone looked at him. Conversations stopped immediately.

“I thought Nora was in charge,” Miami said.

“Nora put him in charge,” Gallagher countered, her eyes narrowing at the obvious subversion of authority.

“Why does he get to be in charge?” This Miami guy just would not shut his pie hole.

Nora touched his arm to calm him and Rain took a step toward the jackass.

“You have a lot of experience leading missions into hostile territory, asshole?” He kept walking, and the group parted for him.

“
¿Cómo planea una misión en México cuando ni siquiera habla Espa
ñ
ol?
” Miami crossed his arms and stood his ground as Rain approached.

Rain smirked. “
También habló español.
”

“All right, boys. Everyone has a big dick, okay?” Nora stepped between them, hands outstretched toward each of their chests.

Rain kept walking until her hand was on him.

Her eyes rounded and she whipped her head around toward him.

That’s right
.
Don’t forget that magick, girl.
He wanted to remind her she wouldn’t feel that with Miami, but he just stood against her hand, relishing the feel of the magick curling around them, drawing them together.

“How about we cover the mission specs?” said the guy from Chicago. Rain couldn’t remember his name, but he was a big, dark-haired beefcake with a big fuckin’ nose that he needed to keep in his own business.

Damn.

He stepped back, breaking contact with Nora. He needed to get his head on straight before he started biting off heads or kicking asses.

They were a team. They really needed to be a solid team.

“So, we found the church,” said California girl. “Where do we go from here?”

“Maggie and I drew up some specs, based on the information we got from Mary Foster’s memories of her escape.” Rain passed out copies of the maps he’d picked up at the airport. He and Maggie had been drawing out routes in the car while Nora had been flirting her ass off in the car.

At least she hadn’t flirted her dress off.

Damn.

He shook his head. Needed to stop thinking about Nora and what was under her dress. They had a fucking job to do.

“We’re going to do a grid search, out from this location.” He held up his map of Guadalajara and pointed to the highlighted route. “I’ve mapped out the grids. We’ll go in pairs, and my phone number is on the top of the map.”

Maggie came to stand beside him. “I’ll stay here and keep working on the online searches.”

Rain nodded. “We think there’s some kind of visual marker to Mary’s memories, so be looking for anything, this first time, that looks like red eyes.”

The pairs formed without any encouragement. LA girl went with Seattle girl. Texas girl went with Kentucky guy. Tomás Rivera and Chicago Beefcake paired off. That left him with Maggie. And Nora with…
aw, hell no
.

“Hey, Miami,” Rain yelled after them. “Since you
hablo
the
Espanol
so well, how about you stay here with Maggie. I’ll go with Nora.”

Nora pursed her lips and crossed her arms. With her weight on one heel, she looked more like a petulant teenager than an alpha’s enforcer. But as long as Miami stayed the hell away from her panty-less ass, she could look however she wanted.

If he couldn’t fuck her, no one would.

N
ora stretched
her neck and rolled her shoulders. They’d been wandering up and down these crooked streets for hours and still nothing that remotely looked like red eyes or eyebrows or whatever the shit they were looking for. Her mind was elsewhere—mostly staring at Rain’s ass every time he got a stride or so ahead of her. Which was easy do. She’d been wearing heels all day and her feet were killing her.

His little show of making sure she didn’t go off with the hottie wolf from Miami was cute, but so far he hadn’t given in to having sex with her since they’d left, and she was feeling it bad.

Their magick crackled in the air between them, alluding to something more than she wanted. She should be avoiding him like the plague because of it, but Nora enjoyed a little chaos in her life. And, they were safe out here.

Her father couldn’t do anything to Rain. When they headed back, they’d part ways and nothing would ever escalate past what it was now.

It couldn’t. She wouldn’t let it.

But, damn. While they were out here in the middle of Mexico, thousands of miles away from the watchful eyes of her dad, she wanted to enjoy it.

She quickened her step and bumped her shoulder into Rain’s. Then slid her hand down his back and over the curve of his tight ass. Her inner wolf growled its appreciation. Nora’s body quivered with need.

The people on the streets had thinned with the oncoming sunset. They only passed a few people, maybe one every few minutes. They walked under a huge red awning and Nora spied a convenient alcove that would hide most of their bodies from passersby. It was better than nothing and she wasn’t waiting any longer.

Shoving hard, she redirected Rain into the nook and wrapped her arms around his neck, slanting her mouth over his before he could protest.

“Nor—” he growled into her mouth and pulled away. “We have a mission. We can’t do this.”

“There aren’t any fucking red eyebrows and I need to have sex with you right now. We’ve been tense and stand-offish all day and I’m done with it. Fuck me now, soldier.”

“Fucking princess! You can’t always get what you want.”

“If it was up to my father, I’d be sold to the highest bidder. So you can call me a fucking princess if you want, but fucking slave would be more correct terminology. Now shut up and just fuck
me!
” She undid his belt and yanked at his pants until they came undone.

Her eyes burned with unshed tears, but she didn’t have time for that or for his standards of behavior. Sex was her only release. It was the one time she could escape everything that haunted her—depression, fear, anxiety, anger. All of it.

He got the message loud and clear. No talking. Just fucking.

His mouth covered hers again and he tugged up the hem of her knit dress, then cupped her ass, squeezing and digging his fingers into her naked flesh. Her pussy clenched, anticipating being filled.

She pulled his dick free of his boxers and hopped, giving herself just enough momentum to get one leg and then the other up around his hips. Locking her ankles, she rocked against his hard-on, angling herself to take his length.

Rain’s cell phone fell out of his pants pocket onto the pavement, but neither one of them paused to check on it.

Nothing mattered except having each other now.

He pushed her against the brick wall and growled, thrusting hard and filling her with one fluid movement. Rain pulled back and then slid in again.

The sound of their fucking filled that space. People could probably see them, but she didn’t really care. This is what she needed.

“Fuck, Nora.” He moaned against her neck, his hot breath dampening the knit fabric stretched tightly across her skin.

“Yes, fuck Nora. Fuck me. Harder, Rain.” She needed that line to be crossed—the one where it hurt just enough to carry her away from everything chasing her. She rocked in rhythm with his thrusts and moaned, pressing her face into his shoulder. His scent filled her lungs and she clenched down hard on his cock.

Rain pulled out then drove in again, slowing down, then going harder and faster.

Sweat beaded on Nora’s forehead and her body vibrated, hungry with desire. “Please,” she begged. An orgasm coiled tightly, waiting for that perfect stroke to set her off like a rocket. Her fingers dug into his shoulders through the fabric of his shirt.

He slipped one hand between them and gave her exactly what she needed. Her body soared, spiraling through blissful space as she rode his cock.

If only staying with him was an option. She’d had a mate once, but she wasn’t strong enough to live through losing another. Just the fact that the Fates had sent her a second broke her heart. What were they thinking? Did they just enjoy sentencing good men to death?

Her father didn’t approve of her previous mate, and he certainly wouldn’t approve of Rain.

Rain drove hard again and Nora clamped down, pulling him as close as she could. Then he came inside her, filling her. She rested her head on his chest, listening to his heart race.

A car horn from the street drew her attention. It blared a second time, followed by Tomás’ voice, telling them to get their naked butts dressed.

“Fuck,” Rain growled, scraping his teeth along the length of her earlobe.

Nora unlocked her ankles and he let her sink from his waist until her feet her firmly planted on the pavement. She rearranged her dress and sighed. It didn’t bode well for her future sex life with him that they’d been caught…in public. But if he didn’t want her, she could move on.

Moving through pain was something Nora Cavanaugh was very good at.

R
ain swirled
in hazy orgasm fog and tried to process what was happening. The fucking magick that had decided to fuck with him whenever he was around Nora had finally won. He’d ignored her advances for hours, looking for a fucking building with eyebrows that he couldn’t find.

He wasn’t sure which pissed him off more—the fact that he was sucking ass at this mission and would potentially embarrass his alpha, or the fact that he wanted Nora more than he’d ever wanted another woman, and couldn’t have her.

Or the fact that he’d given in to fucking her. Or the fact that they’d just been caught by the rest of the team. Again.

Fuck.
This was not his week.

Rain tried to shake himself out of the heart-racing, magick-swirling gulf of release that threatened to drown him. There was a part of him, down deep, that just wanted to find a bed and take Nora there. Stay for days.

Nora was pulling up his pants for him and he rolled one shoulder, grabbing the material from her hands.

“What the hell, Rivera?” Rain didn’t look the Vegas wolf in the eyes. “You were supposed to call in when you found the building.”

“No one found it,” Tomás said.

Behind him, a green and white taxi waited, with at least one other wolf in it. Maggie Gallagher. Shit.

Maggie jumped out of the taxi with a big tablet in her hand. “I had to reverse-GPS your phone, which is why it took so long.” She stood next to Tomás.

Nora bent over and her long-sleeved, short-skirted dress rode up her ass. He could still smell her sex. He wanted to bury his face between those legs.

Fuck this magick. He could not think.

She passed him his cell phone. “We had sex, okay? Not a big deal.”

“Right,” Tomás’ voice was laced with sarcasm. “Except that you didn’t hear your phone, and we called you when all the teams got back and no one had found the building.”

“Well, we didn’t find it, either,” Nora said. “And we’ve been out here for a couple of hours.”

Tomás looked up. “I know. It’s dark already.”

Rain followed his eyes, past the tall buildings, and up to the sky. It was night. The sky was that rosy black color that cities had. Hot damn, he missed the woods of North Carolina, where life was simple and the sky was black at night.

“Wait,” Rain said, shaking himself out of his memories. Everyone came back?”

“Yes,” Maggie said. She looked at the tablet. “Maybe twenty minutes ago.”

“And no one found the building?”

“Nope. We figured you did.” Tomás stepped back to stand behind Maggie. Rain could see the disappointment in his eyes, and felt it deep. They didn’t respect him. They didn’t respect Nora. This mission was doomed.

“No such luck.” Nora crossed her arms. “We walked our whole grid and didn’t see it anywhere.”

Maggie glanced around the dark alley, and back toward the taxi cab. “We left everyone else at the cathedral, because we figured we could find you faster in a cab and we couldn’t fit everyone in.”

“Right.” Rain shoved his phone in his pocket. He took Nora’s arm and began walking out of the alley. “Well, we can all go back to the cathedral, then.”

Maggie shook her head. “They’re having Mass. So everyone’s waiting in the gardens. I need to text Dani and Hannah.”

Rain wasn’t sure who those people were. Damn. He was a bad fucking team leader. “We must’ve encountered an error in the grids, then.” He stepped onto the street, the rest of the team behind him.

“Or we didn’t go out far enough.” Maggie passed him the tablet. On the screen was a color-coded map. “I had a chance, while we were waiting, to sit down with the map and draw out a second set of grids.”

“Right.” Rain looked up at the sky one more time. “I think we should call it a night, though.”

“Agreed,” Nora said, a little too enthusiastically.

If she thought this meant they were going to fuck all night, she had another think coming. They were going to sleep. The whole team. And start fresh in the morning.

Maybe it was the tiredness from having been up for twenty-four hours straight and then only getting a couple hours of sleep. Maybe that was why he couldn’t think straight when Nora was around.

Either way, he needed the sleep, and so did she. So did everyone, really.

“You didn’t happen to find a hotel, did you?” Rain raised an eyebrow at Maggie.

She laughed and shook her head, taking the tablet back. “But it’ll take me two seconds.”

“It took me one.” Nora pointed across the street, over the top of the taxi. A big, ornate sign read
Hotel de Blanco
. True to its name, the walls were white, ornately decorated with gold filigree.

Rain shrugged. “I guess one hotel is as good as the next.”

Nora shot across the street, dodging traffic. “I’ll put it on Daddy’s credit card. No sense everyone taking a hit.”

He looked at Maggie and saw no resistance. “Don’t forget to text the rest of the group.”

“You got it, boss.”

Rain winced. He didn’t deserve that title. After waiting for a dip in the traffic, he jogged across the street to follow Nora into the hotel. Someone needed to make sure that each person had their own individual room. None of this sharing beds shit. Everyone needed to sleep. And sleep only.

“Hey, Rain,” Maggie called out.

He turned around to see Tomás paying the cabbie and Maggie with her arm in the air, signaling for him. “What?” he asked.

But something about the building behind her made him look up. The rounded shades on the window covers made the two windows look almost like eyes, and the tops of the shades were an old and faded red, swirled across onto the brick.

He waved Tomás and Maggie over, turned them around, and pointed at the building.

The building he’d just been fucking Nora against. The building with red eyebrows.