Page 54 of Brandon’s Mate

“Maybe if you had some twenty-first-century skills, the long con wouldn’t take you so long.”

Kitty heard Brandon growl. “Nobody asked you to—”

She put a hand on his arm. “Could we not have a second brawl before breakfast?”

Colt and Remy’s heads went up simultaneously.

“Is somebody making breakfast?”

Three pairs of eyes fastened on Kitty.

Seriously?

She glared at them. “Again? Really? Why do you insist on thinking that the minute I leave home, my vagina becomes some kind of magic Martha Stewart machine? You know I don’t cook.”

Colton winced. “I really wish you’d stop talking about your veejay. Or at least call it something else.”

Brandon sighed loudly, put down his grocery bags, and started getting out pots and pans. “You all are a pain in my ass. I’ll cook.”

Kitty started unpacking grocery bags, handing Brandon the bacon and eggs and finding a good place to stash her snack cakes where certain owls and leopards wouldn’t eat them all. “What would you like me to call it?” she asked sweetly. “The sacred core of my being?”

Brandon started breaking eggs into a bowl, muttering something under his breath about Bali.

“Your Sausage Box?” Colt suggested. “Hidden Lotus of Ecstasy? Red Hot Love Canal?”

Kitty paused in the act of putting the milk in the fridge. “Excuse me? Wasn’t Love Canal a nuclear disaster?”

“Of course not,” Colt said.

Remy frowned. “Um. I think it was a toxic waste dump.” He looked up, saw Kitty’s expression, and became very busy at his keyboard.

Kitty turned to Brandon, who was laying out bacon on the griddle and clearly trying to pretend he was all alone in the kitchen.

“I need to stab them now,” she informed him.

“Try not to hit anything vital,” he said. “Much as it pains me to admit it, I probably need their skills.”

“You do,” Remy said. “I’ve already learned things.”

Brandon stopped, turning around. “What?”

“Keep cooking while I talk,” Remy said. “Do you want me to pass out from hunger?”

Brandon went back to the breakfast, but Kitty could see the tension in his shoulders. She took over the bacon while he poured the eggs into a frying pan. Laying out bacon strips didn’t count as cooking.

“Okay,” Remy began. “We’re coming at this from a few different angles, assuming that Nick found out something about the panthers that they don’t want known, even by their associates, the Talons.”

He leaned back in his chair. “Colt’s working on the easy stuff, like looking at the businesses they’ve already taken over in Farville—who actually bought them, where the money came from, and other juicy tidbits. If we need to, we can cross-check that with Nick’s accounts—bank, phone, email—and see if we can figure out where he went and who he talked to since he wound up here. And if any of them match the buyers of the businesses.”

That was the easy stuff?

Remy continued, “I’m working on the thumb drives. They’re encrypted with escalating layers of security. The first set of files was pretty easy to get into. It has background on that panther your informant told you about—Jax Darius. Kitty’s friend.” He winked at her.

Brandon growled.

“Before he came here, it seems that Jax spent a lot of time downstate, near Tennessee. In a tiny little town called Malone, which once had a substantial number of shifters living there, and no longer does. A lot of the businesses were bought out by a shell company, which Nick was tracing.”

“That sounds familiar,” Kitty murmured. It seemed that this was not the first town the panthers were trying to take over.