Chapter 17
Chapter seventeen
Warrick
Iwoke up with a cat on my feet and my woman in my arms. Lucy had her back against my chest, my arm across her ribs.
Every breath she took pulled jasmine and cedar and me through the room.
My scent had soaked into her skin, her hair, the shirt she’d stolen off the bedroom floor sometime around three a.m.
The mark on her throat had darkened overnight. A shallow crescent, purple at the edges. The shape of my teeth.
We did that. She asked us to do that. He was insufferably pleased with himself.
I’m aware. I was there.
She asked!
Lucy stirred and rolled over. Her eyes opened, and for a moment, I was terrified I’d see a look of regret on her face. Instead, her face went soft. She found the mark at her throat with her fingertips and traced it. Smiled.
“Morning, gorgeous.”
Her smile widened. “Morning to you.” She stretched, arching her back, and my shirt rode up past her hip. I lost about three seconds of higher brain function and found them again only because the tiger was making suggestions that would have kept us in bed until next week.
Not now.
Why not now? She’s right there. She smells like us.
Because it’s six in the morning and she’s been awake for ten seconds.
What’s that got to do with anything?
Lucy caught whatever was happening on my face. “What’s he saying?”
“Nothing useful.”
“Liar.”
“He weighs in on everything. It’s exhausting.”
She propped herself up on one elbow. “So what’s his take on this morning?”
“He’s in favor.”
“Of what?”
“Of anything involving you. He’s not a details cat.”
She laughed, and Felony, who had been standing on my feet, chose this moment to voice her complaint that she hadn’t been fed yet.
Lucy sat up, swung her legs off the bed, and scooped Felony off my feet.
The cat went boneless in her arms. I made coffee while Lucy dealt with her.
She murmured the same stream of nonsense she used at the shelter.
“Yes, you’re starving. You’re wasting away. Someone should call the authorities.”
Felony meowed through the entire performance.
Lucy picked up the mug I’d poured. Took one sip. Set it down.
“What did you do to this coffee?”
“I made it.”
“You brutalized it is what you did. There’s a ratio. It’s on the bag.”
I shrugged. “I’m not really a ‘read instructions’ kind of guy.”
“You should start. My mouth is filing a grievance.” She poured it out and started over, moving through my kitchen like she owned it. She passed me a new cup, and I took a sip.
Her coffee is better than ours.
It’s not a competition.
It is. We lost.
“See?” Lucy said. “That’s coffee.”
“Mine was coffee.”
“Yours was a war crime.”
I heard a car on the gravel.
Nobody drove up to this cabin by accident. The track didn’t appear on any map, buried in a state forest off a county road that barely registered on GPS. In five years, uninvited visitors totaled three lost hikers and a very confused Jehovah’s Witness.
“Stay inside,” I told Lucy.
She raised an eyebrow. “Is that the polite ask or the command?”
“The ask. The command comes with more eye contact and less clothing.”
Her eyes went half-lidded. “Is that a promise or a warning?”
“Depends on how the morning goes.”
She turned back to her coffee like she hadn’t just short-circuited my nervous system, and I went out to the porch before I did something that would make Scott wait in his car for a very long time.
Scott’s sedan parked behind my SUV. He got out with a file under his arm and gas station coffee in his hand.
“You’re a hard man to find sometimes, Warrick.
You could just answer your damn phone once in a while.
Save me from driving up here to track you down every time you drop off the grid.
I need an update on the Alcott case.” He paused on the top step.
His chin lifted a fraction, reading the air the way any tiger would. “You’ve got someone here.”
“Yeah.”
His eyebrows went up. “A human someone.”
“Her name’s Lucy.”
“Lucy? As in Lucy Lewis? Our target’s ex?”
I nodded.
“Well, fuck me. You sure do know how to get into a mess, don’t you?”
“There’s no mess, Scott. It’s simple. We’re together, end of story.”
He looked at me like I’d told him I was taking up watercolor.
“No mess? Are you fucking delusional? Not only does this complicate the case we’re building against Coleman, but she’s human, Warrick.
Human. The old-born will never accept her.
Fuck, the earth-born won’t accept her either.
Any chance you had of leading the ambush after Davan retires has just gone up in smoke. ”
Scott always did like to call the group of us tigers an ambush.
“I never wanted to lead it.”
“No? Maybe not. But Davan’s been grooming you to take over for years. There’s no one else he’ll step aside for, and he’s getting too old to hold us together.”
The front door swung open, and Lucy stuck her head around it. “All safe to come out?”
Scott turned. Whatever he’d been about to say died. He looked at Lucy—bare feet, my shirt at mid-thigh, the dark crescent on her throat that might as well have been a neon sign, and his chin lifted again, pulling in her scent.
My tiger went from settled to territorial so fast my hands changed before I could stop them. The nails darkened, thickened, pushed a quarter inch past where they should have been. I shoved them back. But the thing driving them was screaming.
He’s looking at her. He’s looking at her LEGS.
Every muscle in my body had locked. The bond was less than twelve hours old, and my tiger was treating Scott’s line of sight like a border incursion.
I knew it was irrational. I knew Scott had zero interest in Lucy beyond professional curiosity.
I also knew that if he didn’t look somewhere else in the next three seconds, I was going to have a problem I couldn’t think my way out of.
Scott read it instantly. His eyes dropped to the porch boards. Chin level. Hands visible, open, loose. The body language of a tiger who understood exactly how close he was to something ugly.
Good, my tiger said. He understands now.
I exhaled. Unclenched my hands, finger by finger.
“Lucy, this is Scott. My business partner.”
Scott knew better than to extend his hand. I wouldn’t allow him to touch her.
“Nice to finally meet the woman who’s been keeping Warrick from answering his phone.”
“To be fair, he doesn’t seem like a big phone guy in general.”
“He’s not. But he used to at least pretend.
” Scott’s mouth curved into something warm and easy.
The version of himself he wore like a jacket, charming, likable, the guy you’d want to grab a beer with.
It wasn’t fake, exactly. It was just the surface Scott, the one he’d perfected for clients and cops and anyone who needed managing. “So. You work at the shelter?”
“I do.”
“Must be a good shelter. Warrick hates cats, and somehow, he’s ended up smelling like them.”
“I don’t hate cats.”
“You told me once that cats were just tigers who’d given up.”
Lucy looked at me. “You said that?”
“It was taken out of context.”
“What context makes that better?”
“I was being bitten by one at the time.”
Lucy turned back to Scott. “For the record, cats are just tigers who were smart enough to figure out they could get fed without having to chase anything.”
Scott laughed and glanced at me. “I like her.”
My tiger did not appreciate this statement. I told him to shut up.
“Coffee?” Lucy asked. “I just made a fresh pot. Warrick’s batch had to be put down.”
“Humanely?”
“There was nothing humane about it.”
She went inside. Scott watched her go, then turned to me. The easy grin was gone.
“She’s sharp,” he said. Flat. An observation, not a compliment.
“Yeah.”
“And she knows?”
“She knows everything.”
“Oh, this keeps on getting better and better.”
Inside, Lucy had found a skillet and was making eggs. Felony was at her feet, meowing. Scott sat at the table. His phone buzzed. He glanced at the screen, killed it without answering.
Both our heads turned at the sound of another engine on the gravel. Not one, two, close together, the second heavier. A truck.
Scott’s eyes narrowed. “You expecting more company?”
“No. Stay inside. Both of you.”
I went back to the porch. Two vehicles winding up the track through the trees. The first was a dark green Jeep I recognized immediately. The second was Davan’s truck. I watched them navigate my secluded, unmapped, deliberately hard-to-find track.
“I should start charging admission,” I muttered.
Davan got out first. Then Kess. She was tall, nearly my height, which put her a full head above most human women. Lean, hard, no wasted space on her. Dark hair cut short enough that it couldn’t be grabbed, high cheekbones, brown eyes that sized you up in one glance.
Davan climbed the porch steps. He looked tired. “It’s done,” he said. “All of it. Nothing that ties back to you or us.”
“And you drove up here to tell me that in person?”
“I drove up here because I told you we needed to talk. And because I want to meet the woman you nearly exposed us for.”
Kess stopped at the bottom of the steps, one boot on the first tread. “And I’m here because I spent last night dragging dead men into a cargo van, Warrick. Twelve of them. In the rain. So yeah, I figured I should meet the human who’s got you thinking with your dick instead of your head.”
I was considering telling them both to leave when the cabin door opened, and Lucy stepped out.
I’d told her to stay inside. I’d specifically told her to stay inside. One instruction. One. And she’d lasted approximately four minutes before deciding it didn’t apply to her. My tiger wasn’t even surprised.
Mate doesn’t listen. We knew this. It’s going to make life fun.
Lucy smiled and met Davan’s eyes. “Hi. Come in. There’s plenty of eggs if you’re hungry.”
Davan smiled. It took twenty years off his face and made you understand why people followed him.