“Lunch?” Dwayne yelled as I ran to my car.
“Yep. I’ll call you.”
***
The office was a disaster—like someone had ransacked it, but I realized as Junior paced the room it was him. He was knocking everything off the tables and walls. He was alarmingly animated and unconsciously destructive. For my own safety, I pressed myself against the door and waited.
“Listen to me, Essie,” Junior pleaded. “You have got to bang my brother. Just bang the living hell out of him.”
“I’m sorry. What did you just say?” The sheriff’s office, which wasn’t large to start with, had just gotten smaller. It felt as if the walls were closing in and I was going to get squished like a bug. Was he for real? Was there anyone in Hung who didn’t want me to bang Hank? Well, I knew of three people who certainly didn’t want me to bang him…
“It’s been a year since he got laaaahhhhhhh, I mean, um…Hang Man is my baby brother’s favorite—you know, ahhh game and I’m going to suggest making it a professional Olympic sport and, ah…” Junior paled considerably and inched his huge body toward the exit, making it very obvious that the potential bangee had entered the room.
“Junior, I can handle my own affairs,” Hank ground out. “If you’d like to live to see tomorrow, I’d suggest you take the rest of the day off.”
“Outstanding suggestion, bro,” Junior agreed shakily as he slunk out of the office. “Should I straighten up in here?”
“No. I’ll take care of it.” Hank groaned as he took in the mess Junior had made.
I closed my eyes for a brief moment before I really looked at Hank. If Junior was telling the truth, Hank hadn’t gotten laid in a year. That made no sense whatsoever and Junior was famous for stretching the truth, so I decided to wrestle with that another time—as in never. However, my lady bits and my inner wolf danced with joy. Stop. Not here to bang the sheriff. Here to work. Period. I was a big girl and I could work with him. I was beyond impressed with his attention to detail in the reports and he had some theories I hadn’t considered. He was a colleague and I was a professional. Nothing more. Nothing less. Plastering a pleasant smile on my face I opened my eyes and… Mother humpin’ cowballs… I quickly grabbed the back of a chair so I would continue to appear as if I could stand on my own feet.
He wore a shirt I had given him. A lightweight green Henley that matched his eyes perfectly. Not only was he color-coordinated, he was mouthwatering. His muscles strained against the fabric and begged to be licked. Wait. What? I mentally smacked the tar out of my inner wolf and prayed to all the angels and saints for strength. There would be no licking today.
“The files were very thorough,” I choked out as I breezed past him into his office. Blindly sitting on the first thing my butt could find, I realized I was perched on a pile of old newspapers. Nice.
“You comfortable?” he asked with a smirk.
“Extremely, thank you.” I’d be damned if I was going to let on that I hadn’t meant to slap my rear end down on a large stack of paper. “Newspapers are good for posture and lower back,” I mumbled and then bit down on my tongue before I spewed out more inane crap. Why did I let him affect me this way? I was over him. Done. Over and done.
Liar, liar, pants on fire.
“So, thoughts?” He settled in behind his desk and waited.
“About?” I asked politely, hoping desperately I’d not uttered any of my incriminating inner monologue aloud.
“The case?” He grinned and raised an eyebrow.
His words were like an ice cold shower. Thank God. The case. I could handle talking business. I was good at that. It was everything else I had problems with.
“The files are good, but why is there very little about the humans running the agency?”
He paused and gave me a smile that resembled a grimace. “They’re not local. Three human males came in from New York and we’re having a hell of a time tracing them.”
“Have you put them in the WTF database?”
“Yep. They’re drawing blanks too.”
“Interesting and not good,” I said as I pulled out the thinnest file and scanned it. “The bodies haven’t been found and the scent trails disappeared. I find that very difficult to believe. How much of a time lapse was there before the searches started?”
“The first victim was three days,” he said tightly and ran his hand through his hair in frustration. “After that it was immediate once we learned they were missing.”
“And you found nothing?”
“Isn’t that obvious, Miss Hotshot?” he snapped. “This is driving me crazier than you sitting across the desk from me. These are my people and I’m supposed to protect them. I can’t even find them,” he bellowed. His concern for our missing Pack members and his fury at being unable to locate them filled the room.
I was simply being professional, but felt like a jerk. Again, I was reminded that I was on a case with huge conflicts of interest. Maintaining distance and objectivity were going to be difficult—knowing the missing women was hard enough. Working with the person who my inner wolf was convinced was her true mate was pure hell.
Wolves could mate with whomever they wanted. Some lasted and some didn’t. We had long lives and overactive sex drives. If you didn’t find your true mate, a fairy tale I tended to not believe, you often had several relationships during a lifetime.