Tangling with the Tiger: Lone Pine Pride, Book 5 (10 page)

Chapter Fifteen

It was after midnight when Grace left the planning sessions and set off to find her two proposed companions. Kelly was probably asleep—he’d never been a late-nighter unless it was for a booty-call—but he’d just have to wake his ass up.

Grace trotted down the hill away from the Alpha’s mansion, half expecting Dominec to jump out at her.

Nothing. No rustlings on rooftops, suspicious shadows or stray scents on the breeze. Didn’t it figure that the one time she actually
wanted
to see him, he wasn’t stalking her.

They hadn’t spoken since the kiss, but that wouldn’t be awkward. It had been an aberration. She was more worried about Kelly being a douche about things than Dominec. If there was one thing the tiger could do, it was bury his feelings.

Kelly’s bungalow was dark and quiet as she approached—no surprise there since he was trying out this new leaf as a one-woman man. It wasn’t the first time she’d knocked on his door at almost one in the morning, but it was the first time she was doing it without even the slightest hope that she might be walking back out again with a smile on her face and her body pleasantly sated.

Nope. Tonight was all business. If Kelly was capable of such a thing.

Within seconds of her knock, she heard covers rustle and footsteps padding to the door. He’d always been a light sleeper. Not that she’d made a habit of sticking around until he fell asleep. But the few times she had, he’d always roused the second she tried to sneak out.

He opened the door shirtless, a pair of cotton pajama pants clinging to his hipbones—and okay, yes, the man made that look
good
, but that didn’t mean she wanted to spend the rest of her life in his pocket.

“Grace?” he said, surprise and pleasure and sleepy confusion all mixing in his tone.

And she realized she really should have figured out exactly what she was going to say to him
before
she knocked and got distracted by the six-pack.

“The Alpha’s sending me on a mission,” she blurted.

Kelly’s face lit up like Christmas morning. “Did you come to tell me so I wouldn’t worry? Grace, thank you. This means so much to me—”

“That isn’t why I’m here,” she interrupted before he could start planning their mating ceremony. “It’s a diplomatic mission—which, as you know, is not exactly my forte. Which is why Patch recommended you come too. We would leave tomorrow morning and be gone about a week, if all goes well.”

His expression sobered, the sleep clearing from his sharp green eyes. “Where would we be going?”

“Black Lake. In Canada. To negotiate with the wolves.”

“I don’t know that pack.”

“Apparently Hugo does. He and Moira both spent some time up in Canada and it sounds like Black Lake is kind of like the Godfather up there. You want the northern shifters to fall in line, you go kiss the ring.”

“Hugo isn’t going with you?”

“Seems he wore out his welcome last time he was up there. It would be you, me and Dominec—though I haven’t had a chance to talk to him yet.”

Kelly nodded and seemed to realize they were still standing on his front step. A shiver rippled across his muscular pecs. “Sorry. Come in.”

“I can’t stay.” She shoved her hands in her pockets, only moving as far as the doorway as Kelly stepped back into the warmth of his bungalow and reached for a shirt. “Still a lot to do before we go. But I need to know if you’re in.”

“What exactly are we negotiating?” His golden chest disappeared beneath the soft gray cotton of his shirt.

“We want to bring all the shifters into an alliance to launch a coordinated strike against the Organization, bring them down for good and come together as a group so we have one voice if we’re outed to the humans. Black Lake controls the north and apparently they keep tabs on all the southern shifter groups too and could help us locate prides and packs that are secretive about their whereabouts. We need them to come onboard.”

Kelly rubbed his fist in a circular motion over his sternum. “Christ. No pressure.”

“If you can’t do it, tell me now so I can dig up another diplomat.”

“Of course, I’ll do it.”

“Good. We leave at ten from the main garage. Pack light. We’ll be hiking in the last forty clicks.” She turned to go.

“Grace.” She stopped when he called after her, listening as his footsteps approached, but not turning. “Are these wolves dangerous?”

She did turn then, eyes narrowed. “Why are you asking me that? And it had better be because you’re scared and not because you’re trying to be the man and protect me. There will be no undermining me, understand? I am the boss, you take your orders from me, and if you even think about treating me like the little woman, I will knock your fangs out of your mouth. This is for the
pride
. I wouldn’t be bringing you along as my freaking
boyfriend
. I’m bringing you because you’ll be good at this. Probably better than me. But if you can’t keep your feelings for me out of it, then you better fucking go tell Patch to pick someone else. Are we clear?”

His jaw was tight, emerald eyes glittering with irritation, but he gave a curt nod. “Crystal.”

“Good. See you tomorrow.”

She charged down the path away from his bungalow, fast and furious. Their chances of success were far better with him than without him. She kept reminding herself of that as she stalked away.

She hadn’t gone far when a thump behind her had her spinning, hands raised defensively.

“Damn it, Dominec!”

She dropped her hands, glowering at him as he closed the distance between them. No doubt he’d been lurking on rooftops again.

“Did you hear all of that?” She jerked a chin back toward Kelly’s bungalow, out of sight beyond a bend in the path.

Dominec nodded. “Ten o’clock?”

She supposed there were some benefits to his being a creepy stalker. At least she didn’t have to repeat everything. “Yeah. Ten.”

“I don’t know these Black Lake wolves either. And I’m no diplomat.”

When she didn’t elaborate on his role, he continued.

“Is this an attempt to keep me away from what’s happening here? Or am I evidence of Organization atrocities?”

“Both,” she said, unflinching.

He didn’t react beyond a casual nod. “Anything I can help you do to get ready to go?”

She shook her head, more surprised than she wanted to admit that he’d offered to help. “I’m just going to see Mateo. Then I’m going to try to catch some sleep. You should do the same. Tomorrow will be a long one.”

He turned toward Mateo’s bunker. “I’ll go with you.” When she didn’t immediately move to join him, he looked back at her with an arched brow. “What?”

She found herself wondering if he’d always been able to lift one brow, like she could, or if it had been a side effect of the scarring that had damaged the left side of his face. “Why do you want to come with me?”

He shrugged. “I like Mateo. He doesn’t scare so easy.”

She wasn’t surprised that was how Dominec measured whether or not to like someone—but she was a little taken aback by the description of Mateo. She’d never pictured the mild-mannered computer nerd as particularly brave.

“Okay.” If Dominec wanted to come along, she didn’t have reason to deny him. And she kind of liked having him there, stepping in her shadow.

Chapter Sixteen

Dominec liked Mateo; he hadn’t lied about that. The kid had once invited him to a Superheroes of Marvel marathon that had lasted three days. It had been sort of…fun. Mateo was utterly unfazed by his scars and a genuinely good person in ways Dominec hadn’t been even before the Organization got their hands on him.

He liked Mateo. But that had nothing to do with why he wanted to accompany Grace to the bunker.

He just wanted to be near her.

He’d been near her all day, though she’d only seemed to notice him the once. He’d had a lot of time to think, perched on the slanted roof of the infirmary, and he didn’t think it was a coincidence that he’d always felt calmest on the rooftop of her office. After the kiss last night, he felt like something had realigned inside his mind, making things that previously seemed impossible seem obvious and necessary. Even before he’d been aware of her as a woman, some part of him had been soothed by her presence. When she was close, somehow it was easier to keep his thoughts together if they started to fragment. He barely lost any time at all to the blank glassy places in his mind.

She moved at his side, long legs eating up the ground with aggressive grace. He’d never thought of her as a particularly beautiful woman before. She never wore makeup and her hair was kept short for convenience rather than style. But her muscles were smooth and strong, her gaze direct, and her lips full when she pursed them in irritation every time he tested her temper.

She was a woman who would be described as powerful before beautiful—and he wouldn’t have her any other way.

“Stop checking out my ass.”

“I wasn’t.”

He had been. She shot him a look that said she knew it.

It was a world-class ass. An ass he would follow to the ends of the earth. Or to Canada, which amounted to about the same thing.

His thoughts had tried to fracture when he heard her tell Kelly they were going to Canada, only coming back into focus when he heard his own name and realized he would be going with her.

He hadn’t been back in Canada in years. Wouldn’t have wanted to go, even if it hadn’t been a risk.

He should probably tell her about the open warrants in his name north of the border, but they weren’t going to Quebec. No one knew him in Saskatchewan. No one was looking for him there.

And if this was what it would take for all the shifters to unite against the Organization, then he’d face down his demons in Canada a dozen times over. This was what he’d been waiting for. War. A chance to get them
all
.

With Grace.

If Kelly hadn’t been coming with them, it would have been perfect. He didn’t like the way the lion looked at her. The way she said the word
boyfriend
when she was telling him off. It had been extremely satisfying to hear her put him in his place, but there was obviously still something there, something she hadn’t entirely shut down yet. Dominec had always hated waiting, but for her he would bide his time. His instincts screamed that if he pushed her, he would send her running. He needed to let her come to him. But that didn’t mean he had to like other men circling around her.

“So you and Kelly, huh?” he grumbled.

“Don’t start. I already told you that isn’t anything.”

“Does he know that?”

She didn’t dignify that with a response. Jumping onto the front step of the bunker’s main entrance, she leaned on the buzzer.

“Yeah?” Mateo’s voice came through the intercom. He didn’t sound remotely groggy even though it was the middle of the night—but then Mateo had never been the kind of guy to bother with normal sleep schedules.

“It’s Grace.”

The door clicked and buzzed and she shoved it open. Dominec followed on her heels, admiring the view as he trailed her up the stairs to Mateo’s sprawling office on the second floor.

“Stop ogling, you perv,” Grace snapped.

Dominec did stop ogling, but only because they’d arrived at Mateo’s office and there were so many other things to see.

If possible, the place was even messier than the last time Dominec had been here. Mateo’s sister was alive, but that clearly hadn’t motivated him to clean or shower. A ragged couch in the corner was covered with a nest of twisted blankets. His current T-shirt—
And then Buffy staked Edward
—had obviously been slept in more than once. Pizza boxes and Styrofoam containers with takeout from the dining hall had been shoved under one of the desks in the corner until no more could be crammed in. The constant electrical hum of the room seemed more frantic—or maybe that was Mateo.

He rose from his rolling chair, jolting to his feet with an energy drink can in one hand when they entered. “What is it? What did the Three Rocks lions say?”

“When was the last time you left this bunker?” Grace countered.

Mateo frowned, clearly having trouble remembering. “Monday? What day is today?”

“Mateo…”

“You didn’t come here to fuss about my work habits. What happened?”

Grace’s jaw worked for a moment, but she gave in. Dominec tuned out as she began to explain—the Texas lions, their mission to Black Lake. He wandered over to check out one of the many computers around the room, this one scanning through video footage so rapidly his eyes couldn’t track the progress. It was oddly hypnotic, watching the computer work. He didn’t know how long he stood there, staring at the screen, before he felt someone approach at his side and realized the rest of the room had fallen silent.

Mateo and Grace flanked him, watching the screen race through surveillance feeds.

“Rachel didn’t know where Cari ended up,” Mateo explained. “Only that she was headed toward New Mexico with some coyote shifter. So I hacked into the NSA’s facial recognition software,” he said, like another man might say
I sent an email
. “This is Taos for the month after she escaped. I already struck out on Albuquerque and Santa Fe.”

“What happens if the NSA figures out you’ve borrowed their system?” Grace asked.

“Unlikely. I cloned the deputy director’s log-in. As far as the computers can tell, I’m authorized out the ass and based in D.C.”

“You can do that, but you can’t track down every shifter in America?”

Mateo shrugged. “The NSA is tracking every day citizens who aren’t even aware they’re being monitored. Shifters are trying to hide. Big difference.” His eyes went distant and sharp. “But I might be able to use that. All shifters use the same tech to fuck with satellites, right? If I could find a way to locate all those specific dead zones, we’d have a list of packs…and a maybe few super secret government facilities we shouldn’t know exist.” He moved to take his chair again rolling toward the nearest bank of screens.

“You can do that?” Grace asked eagerly.

“Uh.” Mateo looked up then. “Maybe. Teaching a computer to look for something that isn’t there requires some coding backflips. It’ll take me a little while.”

The computer in front of him beeped and three sets of coordinates appeared on the screen.

“This, however, is already done.”

“Only three?” Grace asked, clearly disappointed.

Dominec crossed to where the two of them huddled over the screen, trying to figure out what he’d missed when he’d zoned out in front of the NSA-clone computer.

“Hey, it’s a good thing,” Mateo said in response to Grace’s disappointment. “The Organization only knows the location of three prides. We should throw a party.”

“You’re sure these are all of them?”

“Every coordinate listed in the dossier files. They could have another database entirely filled with coordinates for all the packs and prides. But if they do, it wasn’t on any of the hard drives Adrian smuggled out or at any of the cells we’ve raided so far. Their computer system isn’t exactly logical. For all we know they have a giant room somewhere where they write all this shit out by hand and dance around naked throwing darts to figure out who to target next.”

Grace grimaced, her gaze locked on the screen as she bent over Mateo’s shoulder. “Can you figure out which three these are? Where do those coordinates point?”

Mateo tapped a few keystrokes into a computer. “The first one is West Texas—that’ll be Three Rocks. Second one looks like Colorado. West of Fort Collins.”

“Clear River,” Grace muttered. “Wolf pack. And the third?”

More tapping. “Shit. I thought those numbers were familiar. It’s us.”

Grace cursed.

Mateo’s fingers flew over the keys and data flashed across the screen. “Tied to an incidence log for a nomadic lion named Luther. How did I miss this?”

“He isn’t pride,” Grace said, reading over his shoulder. “
Intercepted en route to Montana group.
They caught him when he was on his way here, but he never made it. There are thousands of files and you wouldn’t have known to search for the specifics of one lion who never actually got to Lone Pine.”

“I don’t like that reference to the Montana group,” Mateo muttered. “Doesn’t sound like they’ve just discovered a new stockpile of shifters. Sounds like they’re mentioning a big group they already knew about—and
shit
, this file is from three years ago. They’ve known about us for years.”

“All the more reason to go after them now, before they decide to raid the stockpile.” Grace straightened and Mateo leaned back from his desk as she did. Dominec faded back, instinctively drifting toward the shadows as he watched, though he didn’t fool himself that either of the other two had forgotten he was there.

“Get with Adrian while we’re gone,” Grace said to Mateo. “And those Three Rocks lions too. See if you can figure out a secure way of getting in touch with their contacts at other prides and packs.”

“When I’m not cracking the satellite dead-zone code. No problem.”

Grace grimaced. “And try to remember to sleep. And maybe consider showering. I hear it’s nice.”

The leopard snorted. “Yeah. I tend to forget things like that.”

“I’m going to tell Adrian to keep an eye on you while I’m gone. If you aren’t sleeping, I’m authorizing him to tranq you once a day. And if you don’t start taking care of yourself, I’m going to send Hugo to kidnap you and throw you into the lake—even if it’s starting to freeze over.”

“Great idea. Give your tech genius hypothermia so he loses his fingers and can’t type.”

“Shower once in a while and you won’t have to worry about thawing out your fingers.” She eyed the impressive tower of cardboard wedged beneath the far desk. “If I send someone to clean in here, will you let them in?”

“Supervised? Sure. But anyone who sneaks in here when I’m not around is on their own against the security measures.”

Dominec’s ears pricked up and he straightened, fascinated by the mention of booby-traps, but Grace just groaned. “I don’t want to know.” She eyed the many busy screens around the room. “There’s no one you can delegate to? You have a whole team of people downstairs.”

“Half of whom haven’t been cleared by your security guys to see the Organization shit and none of whom I trust not to miss the significance of some tiny detail. And this is too important to miss anything.”

Grace sighed. “You always did suck at delegating. Just try not to give yourself a heart attack before you’re thirty. We can’t replace you.”

“You got it, boss.” Mateo gave her a sloppy salute, his dark hair flopping boyishly over his forehead.

With one last reminder for him to stop working himself to death, Grace headed out, Dominec trailing in her wake.

She waited until they were at the bottom of the stairs before shooting him a look over her shoulder. “I thought you were never going to shut up in there,” she said dryly. “Mateo and I could barely get a word in edgewise.”

Dominec caught the edge of the front door when she flung it open, holding it for both of them. The night had turned cold and she shivered, shoving her hands in her pockets. “I’m never ready for winter,” she muttered irritably.

Dominec had started stashing jackets around the pride today, but he didn’t have any close to Mateo’s bunker, so he said nothing, shivering himself as he fell into step beside her. She let him have his silence for about thirty seconds before she spoke.

“For someone who was so eager to see Mateo, you didn’t have much to say to him.”

He redirected the conversation, unwilling to fess up to his real reasons for going with her. “You worry about him.”

She shrugged. A sort of
can you blame me
shift of her shoulders. “He’s always had an obsessive personality. Whether it’s marathoning TV shows or beating video games or hacking the freaking NSA, he’s never known how to quit. But he usually isn’t so stressed. That stuff when he thought his sister was dead wrecked him, and I think it still haunts him.” She shook her head. “No one else can do what he does and we just pile stuff on top of him because it needs doing, but he doesn’t know how to say no. Too damn sweet for his own good.”

“So you threaten him with tranquilizers and hypothermia.”

“Hey, if it works, that’s all that matters.”

He eyed her as they walked. “You’re going to be an unusual mother.”

She snorted. “I’m never having kids.” The words were flat. Uncompromising. She stopped on the path and he realized they were halfway up the hill to the Alpha’s mansion. “Go get some sleep, Dominec. Long day tomorrow.”

“And you? Are you going to sleep?”

“Just as soon as I tell Roman we have confirmation that the Organization knows about Lone Pine.” She started up the hill again, calling over her shoulder, “See you at ten.”

He watched her go, wondering if anyone had ever threatened to tranquilize her to get her to take it easy. She didn’t know the meaning of quit any more than Mateo did.

Maybe that was why he liked them so much.