Jared (River Pack Wolves 3) - New Adult Paranormal Romance (5 page)

That brought them all to a screeching mental stop.

“Jared, no—” Jace was shaking his head furiously.

“I will if I have to. I’d like to see you try to stop me, bro.” He softened his tone a little. “This is my thing to do, not any of yours. You have lives, ones I’d like to protect. I’m the one with nothing to lose here.”

Jaxson looked like he wanted to rip out Jared’s liver for speaking the truth out loud, but instead he shuffled over and laid a heavy hand on Jared’s shoulder. “I told you, no more of this lone wolf crap.”

Jared shook his head. “That doesn’t change anything. But
she
might—the daughter.”

Jaxson frowned. “What do you mean?”

“I want to get close to her.” At Piper’s raised eyebrows, he added, “Yeah, okay, she
is
a beautiful woman, and any man would want to get close to her that way. But that’s not what I mean.”

Her eyebrows stayed raised, and she added a smirk in Jace’s direction, but his brother was still shaking his head. “Is this really about
the girl?”

“Yes. And no. She may not realize it, but she’s in the same boat as the rest of us. Plus she has no pack, an asshole for a father, and no one she can depend on for help. I just want a chance to convince her of those facts.”

Jace’s eyebrows raised, but this time he was nodding. “So… exactly how do you propose to get close?”

“And what are you going to do once you’re there?” The suspicion was obvious in Jaxson’s voice.

But Jared would be a straight-shooter on this, just he was on everything else. He only lied when he had to. “I want to pose as her bodyguard. Spend time with her. She doesn’t know anything about the shifter world, and she
needs
to… if she’s going to have any chance of convincing her father to stop the bill.” He took a deep breath, not at all sure it would work. “If she can’t stop him, I will.”

Jace shook his head. “Jared, for God’s sake—”

“I’m not saying it’s going to work. But if I’m going to give it a try, I’ll need your help.”

“Olivia’s got a whole lot of materials to take to the press,” Jaxson offered. “There’s stuff in there implicating the Senator. We might be able to take him down that way.”

“I know what you’ve got, Jaxson. An envelope? That’s nothing—nowhere near enough to tie the Senator to the experiments. And you’ll just give him a heads up… and time to weasel out of it. He’s a politician. He’ll probably flip it to his advantage somehow. Can’t give him that chance. I need you to hold Olivia off, give me time to work on Grace.”

“Grace? Is that her name?” Piper asked, dashing a look to Jace. He frowned in return.

“Grace Elizabeth Dawn Krepky. That’s how she introduced herself.”

“Had quite a little chat, did you?” Piper’s eyes were shrewdly examining him, while at the same time, they held some kind of ill-defined humor. He wasn’t quite sure why she was having a laugh at his expense, but it didn’t bother him. Nothing did, not really. None of this was important. They could quibble over details, and he really could use their cooperation, but when it came down to it, only one thing mattered—stopping the Senator. If Jared was lucky, he’d find a way to save the Senator’s daughter along the way.

“She trusts me, I think,” Jared said to Piper.

“Why?” Jace asked. “I take it she doesn’t know you tried to kill her father.”

“She trusts me because I could have killed
her,
and I didn’t. Plus I have her secret now.” He still remembered her standing there, defenseless in the middle of the meadow, afraid of him but not running. Brave and innocent and beautiful. That was part of it, too—those things had stirred something inside him. Then she decided he was okay enough to come shake hands. It was a smart move, actually. Disarmed him completely and put him off his balance. Not that putting him off his balance was hard to do. Keeping tethered to reality was the hard part.

Besides, he promised he would see her again. He would hold up that much at least.

“Okay, how are we going to do this?” Jaxson asked. “Off the top of my head, I’m not seeing how you can get close enough to the Senator’s daughter to shout hello. Unless you’re planning on breaking and entering?”

“Garrison Allied does private security for the Senator’s estate.” This part Jared had already worked out on his own. “They owe us a couple favors. We tell them we have some intel that the daughter is messed up with the wrong kind of crowd. Say it involves one of our clients, and we’d like to put a bodyguard on her. Firstly, ensure her safety. Secondly, to get some intel for our client. We’ll say we’ve got credible evidence she’s under a specific threat as well, something that will convince the Senator that his daughter needs a bodyguard. That’s me. I work the daughter, trying to convince her to come to our side, to understand where her best interests lie in all this. Failing that, I get some inside knowledge on the Senator himself that might implicate him and take him down for good. Failing that, I’ll look for an opportunity to carry out my original mission.”

“Putting a bullet in his head.” Piper’s voice was flat. “There are still other options you haven’t considered, Jared. I can get into the Senator’s office as well.” Her counterintelligence experience had uncovered the Senator’s plans to begin with.

“All right, then.” He gave her a nod. “You work that angle, while I work mine.”

Jace was still shaking his head. “We’ve still got
several
options before you put that last one in play… as if that’s even an option.
Which it’s not.
Like Olivia going to the press. Or blackmail—I like that option.
A lot.
If you can’t get the daughter to come on board, then I say we put the pressure on to force her.”

Jared nodded, although he had no intention of letting his brothers blackmail Grace. She was an innocent in all of this—that much he was sure of. And he wasn’t going to let anyone ruin her life by outing her as a shifter. That was what he was trying to prevent—and if anyone was going to be sacrificed to the cause, it was going to be her asshole father. And Jared himself on death row. Grace would come out of this untouched if he had anything to do with it. He would fight his brothers to make that happen—because it was right, and they knew it, even if they were overly concerned about his life hanging in the balance.

“Lean on Garrison Allied to get me in,” Jared said. “Give me a week to work the daughter. After that, we’ll consider your other options.” Of course, what he really meant was that
they
could consider their options while
he
was considering the best angle to snipe the Senator.

“I’ll do what I can to find out if a week is enough time,” Piper put in. “I’m not sure what the Senator’s timetable is, but I think I can find out.”

Jared gave her a sharp nod, and he felt sure that she understood—there were really only two options in his mind.

Either he’d convince Grace to help them, or her father would have to die.

Grace’s small, red Fiat climbed the hill to the estate.

All things considered—including the fact that her life was going to implode within a week—the afternoon had gone well. The photo-op at the VA hospital couldn’t have been any more moving or perfectly pitched as PR. It was the best possible warm-up for next week’s launch of her father’s re-election campaign. Nolan did an outstanding job with the speech, per usual, and Kylie made sure all the right members of the press covered it—she even managed to include the veteran who was turned away. Grace hoped her ideas about new onboarding requirements for VA staff—lining them up with the best practices of top-rated hospitals—would gain some traction in the Senate. In truth, the administration could implement them right away, if they chose to—sometimes, it just took the right political pressure at the right time with the right photo-op to get the bureaucrats to do their job.

That was what Grace loved about her work—making real things happen for real people. This kind of change, if it went through, could affect so many people’s lives every day. During the photo-op itself, Grace’s father was his usual stately self, delivering Nolan’s speech as if the words had naturally come to him on the spot. Grace may not agree with her father about his new shifter legislation, but there was no denying he was an accomplished politician who could make things happen. After the photo-op, he had returned home, while she went back to the office to tie up loose ends and plan the calendar for the next day. Things would just get more frenetic the closer they got to the campaign launch.

The sun was sinking in the West, and its rosy hue turned the soaring pine trees surrounding her home into a mystical forest. As she pulled into the long winding driveway, she couldn’t help thinking about the sexy shifter she met last night—and wondering if he would be returning tonight.

God, she hoped so.

Whenever she thought of him, it was an instant fully-body turn on. She’d never felt anything like it, even with smart and sexy Nolan-the-speechwriter. She couldn’t tell if she was just desperate for sexual release or if the intense attraction was simply a natural response to the devastating sexiness of the man. Were all shifters that way? Or was it just him?

She parked her car in the vast garage where her father kept his showpiece vehicles. Her Fiat was plain-looking next to all the Jaguars, like a poor cousin who had come to visit, but she didn’t mind. Sometimes she felt like the one normalizing force in her father’s life—the thing that connected him to the real world where people didn’t live in mansions and drive fancy imports. Even though, truthfully, she did both of those things, too.

She strolled toward the front of the house and gave a smile to Richard, one of her father’s private security guards. Security was a constant presence around the estate, ever since she was a kid and her father was first elected to the Senate. To her knowledge, there hadn’t ever been a real threat to their safety, but her father had always said the price of being a public figure was the loss of a certain amount of privacy. The guards were always professional and practically invisible most of the time. She didn’t give them much thought, other than to politely acknowledge their presence. To do otherwise—to completely ignore them, as her father did—always felt a little wrong to her. They rotated a lot, so it wasn’t like she got to know them personally, but they were still human beings, doing their job—and doing it well, as far she could tell.

“Good evening, Ms. Krepky,” Richard said. He was a tall, broad-shouldered man, and he made her feel more secure just having him around.

She grinned. “All quiet on the Western front?”

“Everything’s secure,” he replied with a small smile. “I’ll leave it to you to decide the rest, Ma’am. Your father requested that you visit him in his office when you arrive.”

She frowned, but she knew better than to ask for more details, and just strode through the door Richard held open for her. The wide entryway was empty, not that she expected to see anyone. The house was lightly staffed these days, with just a housekeeper and cook as well as a gardener who only came on the weekends. Her heels clacked on the marble flooring, and she smoothed back her wayward hair as she wound through the halls to her father’s office.

One of Grace’s fondest memories was brushing her mother’s long hair at night, pretending she was Rapunzel and Grace was rescuing her from the castle by twisting it into a long braid. When the cancer struck, the first thing to go was her mother’s gorgeous brown locks. Grace felt like her world was shattering with each clump she found abandoned on the floor. The chemo treatments were useless, and the cancer took her mother quickly. That was ten years ago. At the time, Grace didn’t know if she would survive. But ever since, Grace had grown her hair out, long and straight and all the way to her waist, just like her mother’s, with only the occasional trim to keep it neat.

It reminded Grace of her mother every day, but it annoyed her father to no end. He had ideas about the proper, professional length of a woman’s hair, and Grace pretty much blew that out of the water. She tried to keep it under control in his presence, so she bound it up with a small band that she kept in her pocket just for that purpose. She was an expert by now, and in just a few seconds, it was restrained in a knot that tucked neatly at the nape of her neck.

She checked herself in the mirror outside her father’s office, and it looked decent enough.

She knocked on the thick wood-carved door, then entered without waiting for a response. Her forward momentum came to a screeching halt, hand frozen on the doorknob when she saw who was inside.

Jared.

She gaped—her father was standing next to the shifter, speaking in calm tones. A buzzing sound filled in Grace’s head, and a hundred thoughts ran through her mind, but they all settled down to one thing—
Jared was a spy for her father.

Her world was about to crash down around her ears.

She almost turned and fled—the only thing stopping her was the fact that her knees were locked, and her hand gripped the doorknob so hard, she wasn’t sure she could like go.

“Grace.” Her father beckoned her over. “I’m glad you’re here. I have something to discuss with you.”