“Cheese danish,” Pearson said cheerfully, holstering her piece as Garber became more and more under control.“You?”
“Fruit and yogurt,” Kylie said, just as cheerfully.“Nope—no eggs here.”
“By the way,” Gail said, hauling Garber through the door, “do you know that our friend Agent Chadwick has his recorder on?We have every threat you made in the last ten minuteson tape.And given what we know about your criminal activities, I think that shit’s going to court with you.I don’t think eggs are gonna taste so good in prison.You may want to go with Carlyle’s arsenic, right?”
Gideon laughed weakly as they went around the corner, and Carlyle did the same, leaning against Gideon with an easy familiarity.
That quickly the moment from the car was back, the intimacy, the yearning to explode.
But Gideon remembered the two wolves.Had Joey Carlyle fed his wolf enough human kindness for that wolf to win if they met each other skin to skin?
Harding and Talia arrived next, and they straightened up and “professionalized,” as Gideon thought of it, but as they ran through the procedure and the upshot and the paperwork they’d need to file, Gideon watched Joey prowling around that little love nest like a puzzled wild animal, sniffing at the corners and listening intently for the sounds of solace and reconciliation in the next room.
Not yet,Gideon thought.Not yet.But God, someday he’s going to offer his throat.What’re you gonna do then, Gid?
And the thought of the two of them in bed, feral, demanding, skin to skin, inside each other, flashed behind his eyes with passion and violence.
Take it.In a heartbeat.Even if he eats my liver for breakfast.
Oh.
Well, now he knew which wolf would win.
A Well-Fed Wolf
JOEY RESISTEDbeing overwatch as long as he could, and then Pearson broke her leg and he absolutely couldn’t avoid it.
The year had gone by fast after the dog-bite case (as they called it, to Crosby’s eternal discomfort).After four weeks, Crosby was back on the job, but this time with a coffee cup thatJoeyhad picked out, one of adorable puppies tumbling across the ceramic surface.
Crosby had given Joey a horrified grimace.“Really?I thought you liked me, sort of.”
“I love you, man,” Joey said, and hemeantit, and now heknewthat he meant it, which for him was a big deal.“Just remember that sometimes a puppy is a cute fluffy animal, and sometimes….”
“It’ll kill ya,” Crosby said, laughing a little in spite of himself.He gave a mock-salute with the mug.“Thanks, man.I’ll try not to shove it down the garbage disposal or something.”
Everybodylaughed then, and Gideon—oh God, after those delicious, fraught moments, ithadto be Gideon, at least in Joey’s head—winked at him before they started their morning debrief.
And after that first hurdle of learning to love his teammates like the family he’d always wanted but had never had, he seemed to takeallof it—the psychology classes, the electronics classes for surveillance, the communications classes—to heart.
He’d joined the military because it got him away from his father.He’d stayed there because he seemed to have skills compatible with survival there.
But that one dumb fuckup—as he’d thought of it then—that one refusal to bow to the power because the truth was power was corrupt, had brought him here.And here—here he didn’t merely survive.
Hethrived.
He was a respected member of an amazing team.A member who’d managed to avoid the ultimate responsibility of overwatch until two things happened.
The first was that Kylie, funny, voluptuous, va-va-va-voom Kylie, had gotten married and gone on a month-long honeymoon.It wasn’t that she didn’tdeservea honeymoon or didn’t have the leave coming, but goddammit, Harding still hadn’t been able to find anybody to replace her, and he’d been searching!Gideon and some guy named Blodgett, whom Harding consulted a lot, as well as Natalia, spent a lot of their time leafing through folders, trying to find the right fit.They’d actuallyfoundmore than one candidate, but unfortunately, by the timetheygot to the person, they’d either resigned in disgust with the entire law enforcement system, gotten promoted to a place where they could invoke change, or—and this had apparently happened more than once—they’d been killed, often by their own squad, for being insubordinate or “just not fitting in.”
And right when Harding got a line on somebody—undercover, yes, but Harding seemedreallyexcited about this agent’s potential—Gail Pearson had to go do the other thing that landed Joey on overwatch and break her goddamned leg.
The worst part was, he’d been there when it happened—it could have happened tohim.
The thing to remember about Gail was that she may havelookedlike the Swiss Miss Hot Chocolate girl—or, as Crosby called her, Elsa fromFrozen, which Joey understood now, but she was, in fact, fierce as a snow lynx, quick, ruthless, and unafraid to shed blood.
So partnering her and Joey was probably a bad idea.
But Kylie was out, Gideon was overwatch, and Harding and Natalia were needed to interview the zillionaire who had given his thug the kill order for a sweet older couple who owned a mom-and-pop business.Apparently the zillionaire didn’t like being told “no” when he asked them if he could purchase their bodega at half its value—go figure.While the zillionaire told Harding and Natalia that “I didn’t think Gregor would take me seriously,” Joey and Gail were chasing Gregor through a back alley while Crosby hauled ass around the block to cut the behemoth off from the other side.
