Bleacke's Geek (Bleacke Shifters) (22 page)

Ken shook his head vigorously.

“Good. Ready to go?” she asked again.

“Um, yeah. Let me get my stuff together.”

She hadn’t even broken a sweat. The man who had been the bane of his existence since Ken was seven years old had literally just been thrown out of his office by the throat.

He started giggling, the sound rolling out of him in a near hysterical way. Unable to stand, he collapsed into his office chair as full blown belly laughs took over.

Amused, Dewi stood with her back against the office door, watching him until he finally got it out of his system. “You okay?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yeah. Sorry.” He shook his head. “You did what I’ve dreamed of doing for years.”

“Grabbing him by the balls?”

He laughed. “Well, throwing him out of my life.”

She rounded the desk and climbed into his lap. She wrapped her arms around him. “I love you,” she softly said. “I only want you to be happy. Asswipes like that, we don’t need in our life.”

“I couldn’t agree more.” He kissed her, and for a moment all thoughts of Dave being thrown out disappeared as his world shrank down to nothing but the taste and feel of her lips on his.

“Did I hear him call you ‘Cliffie’?” she asked when they came up for air.

His face reddened as he nodded.

She ran her fingers through his hair. “I like Ken better.”

“So do I.” Come to think of it, he really had grown to like Ken.

Especially since Dewi had been the one to dub him that.

* * * *

Later that night, following dinner and after she’d nearly fucked Ken into exhaustion, he decided to press the issue.

He laced his fingers through hers. “I want to talk,” he said.

He felt her body tense against his. “About what?” Even her tone sounded guarded.

“About your parents. About your whole family. About wolves and…everything.”

“That’s a pretty large discussion.”

He didn’t want to press her too hard, yet sensed if he didn’t press she might not talk about it at all.

He opted to try the path of least resistance. “Your dad was the pack Alpha?”

He sensed her relax a little. “Yeah,” she softly said. “He was a Prime. My mom’s father was the pack Alpha before him. He handed the pack over to Dad when he and Mom got married.”

“I thought you said someone had to fight for it?”

She shook her head. “No. Not if the Alpha is ready to step down. My mom was the youngest of their children. They didn’t have any sons. Her three older sisters didn’t marry Alphas. One married a human instead of a shifter. My grandfather didn’t want anyone else having the pack, so he handed it over to my dad.”

“Why did he want to step down?”

“Because my grandmother was killed in an accident three months before my mom and dad got married. Logging truck lost its load going around a curve on a mountain. She was driving the car behind it.”

He shuddered. “I’m sorry.”

She shrugged. “I never met either of them. He died a year or so after Peyton was born. Car accident. Went off the side of a mountain and into a river. They never found his body.”

“Yikes.”

“Nobody told me this, but I kind of felt it from others. A lot of people think maybe he killed himself. That he was just hanging on until he knew my parents had a Prime Alpha heir to take over the pack.”

“Oh.”

“He was nearly four hundred years old. I guess he’d had enough.”

Chapter Thirteen

Thursday afternoon when Dewi arrived to pick up Ken, he immediately sensed her tension.

“What’s going on?” he asked when she walked in his office door.

“I need to run you home. Badger and Beck are going to meet me over in Brandon. We found the guy’s cousin and I think he knows where Kendra is. Or at least he knows where her husband is.”

“Then let’s go to Brandon.” He grabbed his stuff.

“No. I don’t want to put you at risk.”

He arched an eyebrow at her. “We’re wasting time arguing. I’ll sit in the car, I promise. I’m not one of those ‘too stupid to live’ characters from a book or movie who can’t stay put and stay out of trouble.” He was already heading toward the office door with his things.

“No, seriously, I’ll take you home first—”

“Dewi,” he barked, “I’m
not
in a mood for this.” He regretted his tone and immediately softened it. “Look, my mom died because no one helped her. I’m not about to let someone else possibly die. You taking me home might be the difference between finding her alive or not.”

She pressed her lips together, thinking, then finally nodded. She leaned in for a kiss. “I’m sorry. You’re right.” She let out a sigh. “I’m overprotective. I can’t help it.”

He pulled her in for a better kiss, longer, sweeter. “I know. But like I said, let me have the battles I know I can win, okay?”

With afternoon traffic, they reached Brandon thirty minutes later. They found Badger and Beck parked in Badger’s truck in the shade at a public park three blocks from the guy’s trailer. The neighborhood was run-down and well past having seen better days. Beck had already scouted their target and discovered the guy was in fact home.

With Dewi following, they drove to the guy’s trailer and parked with Badger’s truck blocking the guy’s shitty old rusted Pontiac Sunbird so he couldn’t leave. The trailer looked ancient, the white paint turned grey by mildew in places, with a decided cant to one end. One of the windows had been repaired with cardboard duct-taped in place. A portion of a ratty, blue tarp on the roof flapped in the breeze on the other end. There wasn’t a yard to speak of, except for dirt, Spanish needles, and more than a few fire ant mounds.

Ken sat in Dewi’s car and watched as Beck quickly walked around the back side of the trailer while Dewi and Badger climbed the three rickety metal steps to knock on the front door.

A guy answered after the third knock. Dewi pushed the door in and Badger followed close behind. He watched as Beck circled around from the other end of the trailer and joined them inside.

Twenty minutes later, the three of them emerged, hurrying to their vehicles. As Dewi jumped into her car, she handed her iPhone and a piece of paper to Ken. “Can you pull that address up for me on the map?” He felt a tense, nervous aura surrounding her.

“Sure.” He started working on it as they drove off. “Did you find out anything?”

“Yeah. Fucker’s staying with another cousin in Plant City.” She nodded to the paper in his hand. “That’s where we’re going.”

With Badger and Beck closely following, Ken gave her directions to the address on the paper. “How do you know he won’t call the guy and warn him?”

She gave him a wolfish grin. “Because unless he can chew his way through duct tape, he’s not going anywhere anytime soon. I told him if he didn’t give us good info he could figure out how to get himself free. And if he gave us good info, one of us would come back and free him after we found Kendra safe and sound.”

“Did he know if she was okay?”

Her grin turned grim again. “She’s alive, last he knows. Whether or not she’s okay is debatable.”

Dewi didn’t volunteer any clarification, and he didn’t ask.

The old concrete-block house looked like it had been built maybe in the 1950’s and sat alone on the far side of a strawberry field, with I-4 as its backyard to the north. The house’s paint had either been worn or blasted off, leaving the mottled grey blocks exposed to the elements.

A few scrawny chickens pecked in the dirt and weeds in the yard near three apparently disabled cars around which high weeds had grown. A rusted-out Chevy pick-up sat parked near the front door. Due to a lack of weeds growing under it, Ken guessed it ran. Tattered white curtains, stained tan by nicotine fumes, blocked any view through the large window next to the front door. Towels, sheets, newspapers, and even aluminum foil were used to seal off the other visible windows.

She slid the car to a stop and shut it off, but left the keys in the ignition. “Lock the doors behind me.” As she stepped out, she drew a pistol from a holster under the long-sleeved shirt she wore over her tank top.

Badger and Beck hurried up to walk with her, their guns also drawn.

A hard, cold lump formed in the pit of Ken’s stomach as he reached over and locked the doors before sliding farther down in his seat. He felt helpless.

Badger and Beck circled around back while Dewi stood to the side of the front door and pounded on it. “Kendra Barrons. Open the door. Now.”

He noticed she didn’t identify herself, or try to claim she was a cop.

After she knocked again, Ken spotted movement in one of the smaller windows at the front of the house. He guessed from the size and placement that it was likely a bathroom window. Someone inside pulled at what looked like newspaper covering it, then they pressed their palm against the opaque glass.

Ken knocked on the inside of the windshield to get Dewi’s attention. She focused on him, a sharp look of warning in her eyes. But when she looked where he pointed and spotted the hand before it disappeared from the window, she let out a yell to Beck and Badger before kicking in the front door.

From the way it crumpled under her booted foot, he assumed it was due to her strength. She disappeared inside.

When he heard gunshots seconds later, he cringed, but felt Dewi was okay. He peeked up over the dashboard, relieved when he saw Beck emerge from the house moments later. In his arms he carried a young woman who looked like she’d had the crap beaten out of her. Her face bruised and swollen, she clung to Beck’s neck as he took her to Badger’s truck.

He didn’t miss the fact that her dirty, bare feet had been bound with yellow rope around the ankles, and her wrists looked bloody and abraded, like she had recently worked them free.

Ken started to move to get out, but Beck saw him. “No, stay there.”

Another volley of gunfire ripped through the air, but Beck didn’t duck. He got the truck door open and carefully laid her inside before closing the door and running for the house again.

A minute later, Beck, Badger, and Dewi emerged from the house. Dewi bypassed the door and walked around to the trunk. When he heard her knock on the deck lid, he knew what she meant. He leaned over her seat and found the trunk release latch.

She opened it, found what she was looking for, then slammed it shut again and headed back inside. After a minute, smoke began to billow from the front door. Dewi emerged, met his gaze, and nodded.

He unlocked the doors and got out, feeling shaky on his feet. “Is she okay?”

“She will be,” she said as she walked over to the truck, where Beck had untied the sobbing woman’s legs and Badger was trying to check her over for injuries.

Dewi reached past Badger and gently palmed the battered woman’s cheeks. The woman, whom he assumed was Kendra, immediately calmed. Her eyes grew wide, her face blank like when Badger had talked to the detective outside the pub.

“Your mother is coming to get you,” Dewi softly said. “You will go with her. After your husband beat you up, you ran away and called her.”

Kendra nodded. “I called her.”

“Events are fuzzy after that,” Dewi said, even as behind them pops and crackles grew in the fire.