Outfoxed by Love (Kodiak Point Book 2) (10 page)

Sleep eluded Boris and not because he lay upon the floor of a closet. He’d slept in worse spots.
Cushy carpet sure beat hard-packed dirt any day.

Slumber didn’t
pass him by because he worried about an incursion by Gene—
bring it
—or because he feared a recurrence of the nightmare. Lie. His fear he might harm her in his sleep might have played a small part. No guy liked waking up choking the woman he’d just bedded, especially when the sex was amazing.

Nope,
the real reason he couldn’t slip into repose was because Jan rested less than a dozen feet from him. Only nine if he measured by his own clodhoppers. It would take but the barest moment for him to slip back into that warm bed with her. A bed that smelled of Jan and sex. Wonderful sex. Awesome sex. Fucking amazing, goddamn-it-all-he-wanted-it-again sex.

He clenched his fists
, lest he punch something else of hers and she demand he replace her wardrobe. He still couldn’t believe the balls of her, telling him after he’d almost throttled her to death that he’d have to patch and paint her room.

Did she not grasp the severity of what he’d almost done?

Why did she not show any fear?
Handcuff me indeed.
She’d meant it as a safety measure, but all he could think of was how he’d love to have his body at her tender, and passionate, mercy.

I am a sick bastard.
Sick and stupid and way too emotionally involved with Jan despite his vow to not get close.

So much for keeping his distance.
If he’d thought her hard to resist before, how the fuck would he cope now he knew what a vixen she was in bed?

Turned out she was also just as
snuggly on the floor.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” he growled as she crawled into the closet and draped herself atop him
, her silky body still naked.

“
Cuddling. It’s a thing people do.”

Other people.
Not him. “I don’t cuddle.”

As if she listened.
She snuggled her face into the T-shirt covering his chest. “You are now.”

“You need to get some sleep.”

“I will if you stop talking.”

“In your bed.”

“I’m fine where I am.”

He couldn’t help the rumbling growl. “You are frustrating me.”

“Welcome to the club. Although mine has more to do with the sexual kind. Care to fix it?” She wiggled against him, and his already semi-erect cock expanded to press against her body in a way she couldn’t miss.

“I thought I told you to leave me alone.”

“You said a lot of things. Most of it I didn’t pay attention to. Given you were determined to beat yourself up, I thought about letting you stew in your misery.”

“But?”
Because he could tell she was holding back.

She giggled. Seriously, she fucking giggled before she said, “But I hear misery loves company. So here I am.”

“Your cuteness isn’t going to work,” he growled. What a lie. Already his tension was easing. Well, the stress kind at least. The tension below his belt? Yeah, that wasn’t leaving until he either slapped it silly or gave her what she wanted.

“Aha, you do think I’m cute.” She sounded inordinately pleased.

“As if you didn’t know that. Cuteness won’t save you, though, if I accidentally fall asleep and have one of my nightmares again.”

“So we don’t sleep. I can think of better things to do.”

Again, she wiggled, and he couldn’t help the groan that slipped from him.

“Why must you make this so hard?”

“Well, it wouldn’t be any fun if it was soft.”

It took him a half second to grasp her dirty innuendo.
Jan. Talking dirty. To him.

A surge of lust went through him, which wasn’t surprising
. It was the laughter shaking his frame that really shocked him the most. He chuckled, and it seemed the sound stunned her because she went still before joining him.

When their mirth ended, she cupped his face, her hands soft and her gaze gentle. “You know, that’s probably the first time I’ve heard you laugh since you came back.”

“Not quite the first, but I’ve not found much to amuse me these past few years.”

“How did it feel?”

He frowned, but before he could ask what she meant, she elucidated. “How did it feel to just let go?”

The question
stumped him for a moment because the answer was unexpected.
It felt good.
Which couldn’t be right.

A cold beer after a hard day felt good going down.
A good night’s sleep, without the nightmares—courtesy of sleeping pills he didn’t like—felt good because he woke refreshed. Sex, with Jan, felt fucking great. And laughing with his fox because she was just being herself and spending time with him? It felt good. More than that, it felt natural. Normal. Wonderful.

And when was the last time he could claim that?

Before he could tell her, a subtle creak from above caught his attention. Possibly the townhouse settling. Or a mouse scampering. Or any number of normal things.

What wasn’t normal was the curl of smoke
that seeped from the crack where the trap door to the attic was shut, but not sealed air-tight.

“Fire.”

She wrinkled her brow. “How is that a feeling?”

He answered her as he wrapped an arm around her waist and sat, dragging her with him. “Someone just lit a fire in your attic.”

“I think you mean a little lower.”

What a dirty
-minded vixen. Any other time he would have appreciated it. “No, your attic, as in up there.” He pointed.

“What?” Her wide eyes glanced at the ceiling, where the thin miasma of smoke was starting to spread.

She scrambled to her feet and screeched. Again, not a maidenly cry of distress, but of rage. “Oh you’ve got to be kidding. First, my truck gets written off because some fiends shot at it, and now someone has set fire to my townhouse! When I get my hands on the culprit, I’m going to tie him to a stretching rack and skin him alive.”

It might have been a more effective threat if she’d not hollered it while naked with her hands planted on her hips. As it was, Boris found it more arousing than threatening. But
Jan appearing gorgeous or not, he couldn’t allow himself to get distracted, not with the smoke thickening.

“Get dressed, quickly. We need to leave before this fire spreads too far.”

As she rapidly donned some garments and filled a bag, the crackle of the flames became evident and the fire alarm outside her bedroom in the hall began its ear piercing shriek.

Boris
had called the fire department on his cell phone while she readied herself. In the distance, he could already hear the shrill sirens.

As Jan skipped down the stairs, Boris on her heels, she tossed hi
m a glance over her shoulder. “We need to make sure everyone is getting out.”

“I’ll handle it once we get outside and you
’ve scampered to safety.”

She
opened her mouth, probably to argue, but before she could utter a word, the big bay window in her living room suddenly shattered, and something went whizzing by his head.

What the fuck?

“Did someone just shoot at us?” Jan asked.

Someone sure had.
“Get down,” he ordered.

An unnecessary command given she’d already dropped to the ground and slithered to the
broken window, which let in cold blasts of air. The appearance of a pistol in her hand no longer had the capacity to surprise him. His fox had many layers to her, each more fascinating than the last.

Of course, he didn’t heed his own advice
about ducking and the next shot sliced across the skin of his bicep. It stung, but it pissed him off more than anything.

You want to play with ammo and fire? Then let’s play.

Jan and their unseen assailant weren’t the only ones with a gun. He pulled his out of his coat pocket, which still lay on the floor where he’d dropped it when he’d followed Jan back into her house. But before he used it, he placed it on the floor beside him as he ducked down to put on his boots. Bare feet and ice did not go well together. He did, however, leave them loosely laced so he could kick them off quickly if he needed to shift.

“Stay here and stay down,” he told her as he put his hand on the knob to the front door.

Ducked below the picture window frame, she turned her head to look at him. “What do you think you’re doing?” she hissed. “If you go out there, you’ll be making yourself into a giant target.”

Her point?
“How else am I supposed to catch the asshole taking potshots?” And get her out of her burning house safely?

“We could wait until help arrives. It will probably scare him off.”

Women and their logic. He snorted and opened the door, holding in a grunt of pain as a bullet hit him in the thigh. Lucky for him, the shooter had shitty aim. Less lucky for him, he’d probably hear an earful about not listening from Jan when she noticed.

Out on the street, there wasn’t a creature stirring—except for a moose. Gun in one hand, and limping, Boris ducked behind a porch support, which offered scant shielding but made him into a smaller target. Peering around the edge, he couldn’t see a thing in the gloom. But he was only a few feet from Jan’s neighbor. He dove out of hiding and jammed his finger on the doorbell, making it go off in a shrill series of ding-dongs.

A crack sounded, but no new flare of pain accompanied it, so he did his best to make himself less of a target behind the neighbor’s porch post and took a moment to listen before again diving out and hitting the next doorbell. He needn’t have bothered, the door flung open as soon as he began, and a bedraggled older couple, in their nightclothes—and her wearing a cap over her curlers—came rushing out.

Before he could tell them to take cover, the one fire truck in town arrived and pandemonium ensued. The good news was, if you discounted his bullet wound, no one got hurt, the bad news? The roof on the townhouse units collapsed
, and someone got to the gunman before him.

Even more disturbing.
The body they found wasn’t Gene. As a matter of fact, the guy who’d taken potshots at them wasn’t anyone they knew.

However,
before he could mull over what this meant, Jan caught the scent or sight of his bleeding leg, and all hell broke loose.

A few moments before Jan got violent with a stubborn moose…

Gene cuffed the idiot
with the gun, sending him flying just as he was about to take another cowardly shot.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
Gene snarled.

The seal pup,
a young man in his twenties, who should have never left the ocean, didn’t raise a hand to defend himself but remained lying on his back. Cowardly bunch the seals, soft not just in appearance but character.

As far as
Gene was concerned, the only good seal was one basted in herbs and slow roasted over a campfire. Not the sentient kind of course, unless they were real annoying. Those ones tasted better sushi-style raw. Nothing like slicing off a blubbery chunk from a belligerent bull to get him and his buddies waddling back to the ocean they came from. Encroach on his territory indeed. This polar bear didn’t like to share.

“I was just following orders,” whined
the seal, whom Gene recognized because he’d seen him around back at the main camp. A camp that kept moving and which he’d not returned to in a while not liking the direction things were going.

“Whose orders?”
Gene growled. Certainly not his. He’d opted to work alone in his quest to torment those who’d left him behind.

“
He
told me to.”

He
, as in the scary dude who’d found Gene in the cesspool overseas he’d called home for a while after he escaped the insurgents prison. Damaged in mind, spirit, and body, Gene had wallowed a while in liquor and misery, until
He
gave him purpose again and set him on his path to vengeance.

A vengeance he thought they’d agreed upon.
Apparently not.
We’ll be having words about that.

This wasn’t the first time Gene had to step in and cull some anxious recruits who overstepped their bounds. He’d taken out from afar another who’d almost spilled his guts to Reid when captured.

And now, this pup thought to disrupt his carefully cultivated plot.

“This town is mine,” Gene rumbled as he grasped the pup’s collar and hauled him to his feet.

“You’re taking too long. He needs the towns catering to shifters, like Kodiak Point and the rest, to fold sooner.”

“Why?” What had happened to make him want to speed up their timeframe? That wasn’t part of the plan. In order to fully take over the clan, Gene needed to weaken the current alpha.
To cultivate an atmosphere of uncertainty and fear. Then, when Reid and his merry band were taken out, Gene could step in and take over.

At least that was his plan.
It seemed his freaky benefactor was stirring more than one pot. Not for long.

“Does it matter why he wants this town
?” asked the belligerent pup. “He just does. And I do as I’m told. So should you if you know what’s good for you. He’s not going to be happy when he finds out you stopped me from fulfilling my orders.”

“Lucky for me, he won’t be finding out.” Gene tossed the irritating seal over the lip of the roof they stood on.
Extreme, but effective. He leaned over the edge to see the little fucker had absorbed some of the fall with his fat. The stubborn bugger rolled to his knees with a grunt. He couldn’t have the annoying bastard tattle telling, so Gene put a bullet in him.

Dead men couldn’t talk. And dead men couldn’t ruin his plans for vengeance.

Because Gene wasn’t done playing with Boris yet.