Chapter 5

Cooper was in a really good mood as he headed for another session with Delacroix, and not even the sight of Detective Coletti coming out of the doctor’s professional building could change that.

“I didn’t know you were spending time on Dr. Delacroix’s couch.” Cooper grinned. He just couldn’t resist prodding the hard ass detective. “Maybe we can arrange group therapy sessions and save the department a few bucks?”

Coletti’s faced darkened, but he didn’t respond as he brushed past Cooper and stomped off toward the parking.

“See you later, Vince,” Cooper called. “I’ll ask the doc about those joint sessions, see if there’s a discount or something.”

Coletti scowled as he climbed into his department-issued, unmarked vehicle. The guy looked like he was about to crack his teeth he was grinding them so hard. Cooper wouldn’t have been surprised if the man flipped him the bird.

Resisting the urge to return the favor, Cooper smiled and waved. The detective squealed out of the parking lot so fast there were skid marks on the pavement. Cooper chuckled. It might be juvenile, but pissing off Coletti was fun as hell.

Okay, while sticking it to Coletti had been fun, that wasn’t the only reason he was in such a good mood this morning. That had everything to do with Everly.

As she’d promised, last night had been the best date of his life. Everly was simply the most beautiful, interesting, mesmerizing woman he’d ever spent time with. It was no exaggeration to say he could have sat in that restaurant with her all night. Their conversation had flowed so effortlessly, whether they were talking about her family or the other guys on his team. He couldn’t help but notice that while she’d talked a lot about her dad and brothers, she never mentioned her mom. He assumed she was out of the picture now, and Everly would bring her up when she was ready. Beyond that, Cooper couldn’t remember a single time when they’d hit one of the awkward moments that typically comes up on a first date. It was like they’d been together for years.

Then there was the sexual chemistry thing going on between them. He’d been turned on almost the entire night—so had Everly. It had been damn difficult to control himself, especially when the scent of her arousal hit him like a runaway Mack truck. It had just about made him shift right there in Chambre Française. Control issues like that hadn’t hit him in years, not since he’d first started going through the change after leaving Iraq. But there was something about Everly that drove him crazy.

It was even worse when they went back to her apartment. Watching her ass wiggle under that little black dress and her bare thighs flash in front of him while she climbed the stairs had been heavenly torture. He hadn’t planned on kissing her the moment they walked inside, but the feel of her mouth on his, not to mention the sexy pressure of her amazing body against his hard-on had almost been the end of him. He’d come seriously close to ripping off her dress right there in the middle of the living room. And something told him Everly would have been more than willing to let him.

But he’d gotten control of himself, refusing to let a moment of temporary insanity force him into rushing this thing with Everly. It was too good to risk blowing it. So, he’d kissed her good night, then forced himself to walk out the door. His werewolf side—the part of him that only lived in the moment and never worried about consequences—had howled at him the whole way.

It was impossible not to see that there was something magical between him and Everly, no matter how much he told himself not to go there yet. Maybe he should take a page from his inner werewolf and stop overthinking things so much.

When he walked into Delacroix’s outer office, he noticed that the office assistant who’d been there the day before wasn’t at her desk. He heard sounds coming from the doctor’s office, so he headed that way.

Delacroix was at her desk looking at something on her laptop. She was so intent on whatever it was that she didn’t hear him come in. Cooper started to clear his throat, but caught himself when he realized Delacroix was watching the video of the bank robbery. It was the first time he’d seen the video, and even though Becker had blurred the images, it was hard to miss the fact that Cooper had picked up a two-hundred-pound man and thrown him at least ten feet. No wonder Coletti wanted a shrink to evaluate him. The IA detective must have thought he was on some kind of rage trip.

Delacroix’s eyes locked on the screen as she watched that part of the video over and over again. It was kind of scary, like she knew exactly what she was looking at. Could she possibly have a clue about what she was really seeing?

Cooper cleared his throat as he moved over to the chair, trying to make it look as if he’d just walked in. Delacroix didn’t jump like he expected. She merely looked at him, then slowly reached out to turn off her video player.

“Officer Cooper, I didn’t hear you come in.”

She regarded him calmly, even though she had to know he’d seen what she was watching. “Your assistant wasn’t outside,” he said. “I hope you don’t mind that I just walked in?”

She glanced at her watch. “Not at all. You’re right on time. Have a seat.”

“I ran into Detective Coletti from Internal Affairs on the way in,” Cooper said as he sat down. “Can I assume he wasn’t here for personal reasons?”

She eyed him with that same neutral expression, and for a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to answer his question. Maybe even tell him that her conversation with Coletti was none of his business.

“Detective Coletti was interested in knowing if I’d reached a conclusion concerning your fitness for duty. And before you bother to ask, I told him I hadn’t. That we’d only met one time.”

Cooper tried to get a read on whether the doctor was lying by listening for an increase in heart rate, a change in breathing pattern, or tenseness in the body. But it was no use. He’d been around laptops that exhibited more outward signs of emotions than Delacroix.

“I’m guessing he was hoping for a little more than that out of you,” Cooper said. “He seemed pretty pissed when he shoved past me.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

Cooper sincerely doubted that. Something told him Delacroix missed very little.

He sat back and rested his ankle on his knee. “Okay Doc, what’s the topic of conversation today? You going to grill me more on how my cop instincts told me the bank was about to get robbed?”

She opened a brown folder on her desk and scanned her notes. “Why don’t we talk about the real reason Detective Coletti stopped by to see me?”

The question definitely caught Cooper off guard, and it took him a moment to get his head back in the game. “Okay, I’ll bite. Why did Coletti stop by?”

“Because, after watching that video a few times, Detective Coletti seems concerned about your apparent willingness to resort to physical violence when dealing with suspects versus using your department-issued weapon. He specifically asked me to evaluate that aspect of your behavior.”

Cooper tried not to laugh, but he couldn’t help it. “Coletti is upset that I roughed up a couple suspects? Would he feel better if I’d just shot them all?”

Her lips curved into what could only be called a smirk. “Possibly. But I’m not concerned about Coletti’s opinions on your use of force. I’m far more interested in what was going through your head during those moments. I was looking at the video hoping I could pick up some kind of body language cues, but the tape is too fuzzy. Why don’t you tell me what you were thinking just before you threw that man through the window? Were you angry?”

Cooper waited for his normal defense mechanism to kick in, the one that invariably led to him saying something suitably snarky and witty. But his internal smart ass seemed to be sleeping at the moment. Maybe because Cooper realized Delacroix was simply asking the same question he’d been asking himself since the night of the robbery.

He thought back to what had happened right before he’d tossed that guy through the window. He and the other werewolves in his pack weren’t mindless animals, but much of what they did on the job was a matter of muscle memory and instinct. Thinking too much about what to do and how to do it in a crisis usually got cops killed.

He forced himself to dig deep into his memory bank, trying to recall what had been going through his head at the time, and was shocked to realize Delacroix had been right—he had been angry. But it hadn’t been the typical anger that normally came when someone shot at him. No, what he’d been feeling then had been werewolf rage—a seriously strong surge.

All werewolves dealt with a certain amount of rage. It came as a package deal with the fangs, claws, and muscles. Immediately after experiencing their change, every member of his pack had needed to go through a period where they’d fought for control over the animal rage inside them. For some, that fight had been tough. For others, it had been pure hell. Now that he and the other members of the Pack had learned about beta and omega werewolves, and how omegas spent a good portion of their lives trying to control that internal rage, Cooper realized there were some werewolves who would have to fight that battle for the rest of their lives.

It hadn’t been like that for Cooper. Sure, he’d felt the anger, the rage, and the pure adrenalin rush that always hit alpha werewolves really hard right after their change. But at the time, he’d been flat on his back and partially paralyzed, so all he could do was lie there and deal with it. By the time his back had healed, he’d gotten a pretty good handle on his inner werewolf. That was why he’d never had a problem handling a full wolf shift, something that had taken other members of the Pack years to master, and something many of them still couldn’t do.

“Well?” Delacroix prompted when he didn’t answer. “Were you angry?”

Cooper nodded, hoping he wasn’t screwing himself by admitting it. “Yeah, I guess. I hadn’t really thought about it too much, but I was.”

At least Delacroix didn’t start scribbling frantically in her notes. Instead, she regarded him thoughtfully. “Because the man shot at you?”

That wasn’t it. Hell, he’d been shot at so many times he barely noticed it anymore. But that probably wasn’t something he should tell a psychologist.

He could count on one hand the number of times he’d even come close to losing control like he had at the bank, and in every one of those times, one of his pack mates had been in danger. Except this time, none of his mates had been around. But Everly had.

Crap. Now that it’d finally dawned on him, he felt like an idiot. And more than a little scared. He’d started losing control because Everly—a woman he’d known for a grand total of ten minutes—had been in danger.

The idea that Everly might be anything other than The One for him was harder to support by the minute.

Of course, he couldn’t say any of that to Delacroix.

Yeah, Doc, I’d just met this woman standing in line a couple minutes before the robbery started, and knowing she was in danger pissed me off so much I threw a two- hundred-pound guy out a plate glass window. But it’s all good because she and I are destined to be together.

So instead, he went along with what he assumed Delacroix wanted to hear.

“I’m sure that was part of it. I can’t imagine many people like getting shot at. But the thing that really ticked me off was the way that guy was spraying his submachine gun around in that crowded bank. Like he didn’t care who he killed. Which is stupid, I know. They obviously didn’t care who they killed. I knew that the moment they shot the security guard in the back.”

She wrote a few words in her notes. Probably: He’s full of crap. “Anything else?”

“It also didn’t help that the jerk tried to hide behind a teenage girl,” Cooper added. “I’m not sure why, but that infuriated me. I couldn’t shoot, not without hitting the girl. So I grabbed him and tried to yank him away from her. I guess I threw him harder than I thought.”

Delacroix didn’t react to that admission one way or the other. She simply asked him about the guy he’d thumped against the wall, then the jackass who’d been holding Everly hostage with a gun to her head.

“I could see on the video that you and he were speaking to each other, but there was no sound. What was he saying to you?” Delacroix asked.

Cooper caught himself just before a growl slipped out. Just thinking about the man who’d threatened Everly made his gums and fingertips tingle. He wanted to drive straight down to the county jail right now and tear the guy apart.

“The guy wanted to use her as a hostage, a shield. He thought if he walked out of the bank with her in front of him, the police would let him get away. That I would let him get away. I told him that wasn’t going to happen.”

“You didn’t think the man would release her if you let him go?” Delacroix asked.

Cooper shook his head. “I knew I’d never see her alive again if I let them walk out that door.”

“So, you just rushed him without a weapon?”

It wasn’t like Cooper could tell her that he’d had all the weapons he needed, so he nodded. “It didn’t seem like I had much of a choice.”

Delacroix didn’t say anything for a while, content to sit there and scribble more notes on her pad. When she was done, she looked up and took off her reading glasses. “You seem a bit more relaxed today. More open.”

He shrugged, as surprised as she apparently was that he was saying any of this in the first place. All he could think was that being with Everly last night had put him in a chatty mood. If he kept up like this, people were going to think he and Becker had switched bodies.

Cooper gave her a smile. “Maybe I’m just in a good mood.”

“Mind if I ask what put you in such a good mood? Yesterday you were extremely upset about being suspended during the investigation and resented our mandatory sessions. What changed?”

He considered making up something, or simply refusing to answer. But he knew Delacroix would keep digging until she figured out what he was hiding. Besides, it wasn’t like he had anything to hide.

“I went out on a date last night.”

Delacroix set her glasses on the desk and sat back in her chair. “It must have been some date because you seem like a different person than you were yesterday.”

Cooper couldn’t help smiling. Maybe he was a different person today. It was one thing accepting the concept that theoretically, there was one perfect woman for you out there in the world. It was completely different once you actually met her—and he was pretty sure he had. There couldn’t be any other explanation for the way he’d been acting and feeling since meeting Everly. It was like anything was possible now.

“It was a pretty amazing date,” he admitted to Delacroix. “In fact, I think I may have stumbled over that rare, one-in-a-billion woman I’m meant to be with.”

* * *

Cooper was still smiling when he left Delacroix’s office. Mostly, because she’d implied it wouldn’t take many more sessions before they were done, and he could get back on the job. But also because talking about stuff—even if he had to hide the dangerous details of being a werewolf—was kind of cool. Since he’d joined the Pack almost four years ago, he’d somehow become the person everyone came to for guidance and advice, or to just plain vent. It felt nice to finally be able to talk to someone about what he was thinking or feeling. He never imagined he could talk to a total stranger about anything personal—like why the date last night with Everly had been so amazing from others he’d gone on—but he could, so he wasn’t going to overanalyze things.

He glanced at his watch as he walked to his Jeep and saw that it was barely noon. If he wasn’t suspended—well, technically he was on paid leave, but it was a suspension as far as he was concerned—he would have headed to the SWAT compound. He supposed he could go home and start on the new graphic novel he had. Hell, he might even want to clean up his place, just in case he wanted to bring Everly over. He should probably go grocery shopping, too. He lived off fast-food restaurants and delivery pizza most of the time. The only stuff he kept stocked in his place was beer, soda, and junk food.

He climbed into his Jeep, planning to hit the H-E-B store on the way home for some food Everly might like, but the mere thought of her had him reaching for his cell phone.

She answered on the second ring. “Hey, Landry! What’s up?”

Cooper grinned at the sound of her voice, imagining her standing in front of an artist’s easel, cell phone in one hand, a paint-smeared brush in the other, and a big smile on her face.

“Nothing much,” he admitted. “I just wanted to call and tell you I had a great time last night.”

She laughed, and he almost groaned at the sound. “Me, too. I haven’t been on a date that fun in…well…ever. I can’t wait to see you again.”

“Same here.”

“So, what are you up to today? Nothing dangerous, I hope.”

That’s when Cooper realized he’d never told Everly about the whole paid leave and fitness-for-duty evaluation. He wasn’t sure he wanted to tell her. He was kind of embarrassed about it. But it was stupid to hide it from her. It was bound to come up in conversation at some point, especially since he didn’t have a clue how long this suspension crap was going to last. The sessions with Delacroix might be going well, but Coletti could drag out his investigation as long as he wanted.

“Actually, I’m not doing too much of anything right now. Since I was involved in a shooting at the bank robbery, the department has me on paid leave until they finish the investigation. About the only thing I have on my calendar for the next couple days is my sessions with a department-appointed psychologist, and I just finished today’s. I kind of have a lot of free time on my hands right now.”

“That sounds like a pretty crappy way to treat a cop who saved so many people,” Everly said. “But their loss is my gain. You want to get together and do something?”

He could think of a thousand things he wanted to do with her. “I’d love to, but I didn’t mean you had to blow off work.”

She laughed. “Don’t be silly. I work for myself, which means I can take time off whenever I want. So if you want to get together and hang out, I’m game.”

“It’s hard to say no when you put it that way,” he said with a laugh.

“Good. Because my schedule is wide open this afternoon.”

“Do you have something special in mind you’d like to do?” He didn’t care what they did as long as he got to spend time with her.

“Surprise me.”

A thousand ideas popped into his head, but he got the sensation Everly wasn’t interested in the typical date stuff. She seemed like the kind of woman who would appreciate doing something a little different. He knew just the thing.

“I’ll pick you up in twenty minutes then. And wear something casual. Shorts and a T-shirt are fine. And tennis shoes. No flip-flops.” He had an ulterior motive for suggesting shorts. Anything to give him a chance to get another glimpse of those perfect legs. But she didn’t need to know that. “Oh, and bring a change of clothes so we can go out to dinner later.”

“What exactly are you planning?”

“You said to surprise you. See you in twenty.”

Grinning, he thumbed the red button on his phone then hit the speed dial for Becker. He needed his friend to get some gear ready if he was going to pull off what he had planned.

Forty minutes later he pulled his Jeep into the gated SWAT compound and parked in his usual spot.

“What are we doing here?” Everly asked as he led her toward the admin building.

She’d hounded him the entire drive over, trying everything to get him to tell her what they were going to do. But he’d resisted. He wanted the pleasure of seeing her eyes light up when she found out what he was up to.

“You’ll see soon enough,” he said, giving her hand a tug. “Come on. There’re some people I want you to meet.”

He held open the door of the admin building, his gaze caressing her long legs as she walked in ahead of him. Everly might be an artist, but it was obvious from the tone in her legs that she exercised a lot.

The first floor of the admin building was essentially a big open space with enough desks and chairs for the entire Pack, except for Gage. He had a private office. It was your typical bullpen setup, but he and the other guys had jazzed it up with posters, a TV, and a slick paint job.

Becker and Alex were leaning back against one of the desks, while Jayna swiveled in an office chair. All three looked up at their approach.

“Everly, you already met Becker and Alex,” Cooper said. “And this is Jayna Winston. For reasons none of us understand, she’s Becker’s girlfriend.”

Jayna laughed and got up to give Everly a hug. “Eric told me all about what happened in the bank. I’m glad you’re okay. But let me warn you now, you probably shouldn’t believe half the stuff Cooper tells you. These guys all make up stuff.”

“Only to make it more interesting.” Becker grinned.

Jayna gave him a look. “Uh-huh.”

Everly smiled. “So I probably shouldn’t have believed Landry when he told me that you were one of the people who helped shoot up his Jeep?”

Cooper had about half a second to cringe before Jayna burst out laughing. “Actually, that one you can believe. His Jeep wouldn’t have those holes in it if it wasn’t for me.”

“That’s okay,” Cooper said. “It looks better with the holes in it anyway.”

Everly didn’t look convinced, but her lips curved up at the corners all the same.

Becker pushed away from the desk. “You guys ready?”

“Ready for what exactly?” Everly asked. “Cooper wouldn’t tell me.”

“I told you—it’s a surprise.” He took her hand and fell into step beside Becker and Jayna. “Everyone else still out providing security for the warrant and search teams?”

“Yeah,” Becker said as they walked past the volley-ball courts and steered away from the shoot lanes toward the cluster of training houses in the rear of the compound. “The FBI, ATF, and the DPD are checking out every possible source of military grade explosives in the state. I don’t know exactly what they’re looking for, but anyone with a connection to military weaponry seems to be on their radar. They have us stretched so thin that Gage has us going out in teams of two and three. Xander even had to cover a warrant search this morning completely on his own. You need to get your ass off paid leave and get back here.”

Cooper shook his head. “I’m trying, man. I’m trying.”

Beside him, Everly eyed the single-story training building in the very back corner of the compound as they approached. The place had no doors or windows, and almost everything inside was cheap and replaceable. This was one of their facade houses, nothing but the shell of a building that they could set up to do any kind of training they needed. One day it might be set up to look like a meth lab, the next it could be reconfigured as a residential hostage scenario.

But today, the only thing he needed the building for was its sturdy flat roof and outside walls. He led Everly inside and up the steps to the roof. Becker and Jayna hung back to give him time to spring his surprise on Everly.

When they came out on the roof, her eyes widened as she took in the harnesses, ropes, and gloves. She turned to him. “Are you going to teach me how to rappel?”

At least she hadn’t freaked out and run screaming down the stairs.

“You told me to surprise you.” He hesitated, trying to figure out what she was thinking and failing miserably. “Want to try it?”

She walked over to the edge of the roof and cautiously looked down. There was a low parapet along the edge of the roof, but he followed her anyway, just to make sure she didn’t fall. She took hold of his hand, then peeked over the edge, blanching a little. After a moment, she took a step back and looked at him.

“I’ll give it a try,” she said. “But I have to warn you. I don’t do well with heights.”

“Don’t worry about it.” He smiled. “It’s completely normal to feel a little queasy when you look down. But trust me, after a while you won’t even remember how high you are.”

She peeked over the edge again. “If you say so. What do we do first?”

“Let me get you into a harness and set up the ropes. Then I’ll teach you everything you need to know.”

He led her over to a collection of straps, buckles, and rings on the rooftop, then had her stand in the middle of one. Kneeling down, he slowly began to get everything situated. The position made it damn hard to concentrate. It was impossible to miss the delectable scent coming off her body, or the way her cute little belly button kept making an appearance whenever she stretched and her T-shirt slid up. The urge to lean forward and kiss her toned stomach was hard to resist.

The temptation got even worse when he started positioning the leg straps around the top of each thigh.

“Would you like to do this part?” he asked, hoping she didn’t notice how turned on he was getting. “These two pieces need to snug up tight around your thighs.”

“You’d better do it,” she said, and he swore he saw a little smile tease her lips. “I wouldn’t want to mess up and do something wrong. Safety first and all that.”

“Safety first,” he agreed.

He placed the straps around the top of each thigh, carefully moving the material of her shorts around so he wouldn’t get it bunched up under the straps. He tried to stay professional whenever his hands came into contact with the bare skin of her legs or the cloth-covered junction between her thighs, but there was only so much he could do. To say that he was inside her personal space at the moment was an understatement.

But Everly didn’t seem to mind. She simply stood there patiently while he got each strap perfectly positioned and pulled tight. In fact, it was entirely possible that she enjoyed the process. Her heart was definitely beating faster, and the scent of arousal pouring off her just about made him drunk. When he brought the main waist strap around from her back and cinched it down in the front, it would have been so easy to pop open the button on her shorts. Just a little flick of his fingers, and he’d have an even better view of that sexy midriff.

He glanced at Everly to see her looking down at him with heavy, almost sleepy, eyes. Was she thinking the same thing he was?

Cooper firmly shoved those thoughts aside. Everly could get hurt out here if he didn’t focus on what the hell they were doing. He took a deep breath and stood, then checked her harness to make sure everything was cinched properly.

“Aren’t Jayna and Becker rappelling?” she asked as he handed her a pair of heavy leather gloves.

He shook his head as he went to work on his own harness. “They’ll come up after the first time you do it. They don’t want you to get distracted or feel rushed.”

Once they were both ready, Cooper spent some time showing her how the rappelling rope went through the carabiner, and how she could position the rope behind her to stop the rope from sliding through the ring, or hold her arm out to the side to let it slide through. Then he held one end of the rope and had her lean back while they were both still in the center of the rooftop, letting her learn to trust that the carabiner would keep her from sliding down the rope until she held her hand in the proper position. He knew Everly was nervous because he could hear her heart beating even faster than when she’d been aroused earlier. But she still paid attention to what he was saying, asking smart questions and responding properly when he gave her directions. Soon enough, she was so focused on the technical part of what they were doing that she relaxed.

He grinned. “You’re doing great. You ready to start?”

She smiled back and nodded. “Just stay close.”

“Always,” he told her.

Cooper attached the end of two ropes to the heavy metal rings mounted in the center of the roof then locked the ropes into their harnesses before slowly backing them toward the edge of the roof.

“Stand up straight and tall until you get to the edge of the roof,” he instructed. “Then let a little rope slide through the ring with each step.”

Beside him, Everly licked her lips and moved carefully to the edge of the roof until she was standing right on it. She glanced behind her at the ground fourteen feet below. “Okay, now what?”

“First, stop looking down. You can worry about the ground when you get there. Right now, I want you to keep your attention on me and what I’m saying.”

She obediently looked at him, and he was a little stunned at the blatant trust he saw in her eyes. “I can do that,” she said with a nod that made her ponytail bounce in the cutest way. “You’re kind of easy on the eyes.”

“Nice to know.” He chuckled. “Keep your arm in the stop position, then try to lean backward off the roof.”

She frowned, like she thought he was crazy, but then she did it. Her brow furrowed even more. “I can’t. The rope won’t let me.”

He smiled. “That’s exactly why I asked you to do it. I wanted to show you that you can’t fall if you put your right arm behind your back. Even if you slip going down the wall, just put your arm behind you, and you’ll stop. Make sense?”

“Yup. Arm out to slide down. Arm back to stop.”

“Okay. Now for the hardest part. To get the angle necessary for the rope to slide through the ring properly, you have to let out enough of it to stand out almost perpendicular from the wall. That can be scary the first time because you really have to commit, and it will feel like you’re hanging in space.”

Everly started to look at the ground, then snapped her eyes back to him. “Can you show me what you mean?”

“Sure thing. Just watch what I do.” He slowly let the rope slide through the ring a little bit at a time, keeping his legs locked until he was leaning straight out from the edge of the roof like a gargoyle. Then he looked at her. “Your turn. Just take your time, and remember that I’m right here to talk you through it.”

Everly kept her eyes on him and tipped back like she’d been rappelling for years. She didn’t bend her knees like a lot of first-timers did, instinctively trying to hug the wall so she wouldn’t hang out in space. She didn’t even look down that much.

“That was easy enough,” she said. But while she might look calm, her heart was still racing. “What’s next?”

He gave her an appraising look. “Are you sure you’ve never done this before? Because you’re a natural.”

She laughed and shook her head. “No! Are you crazy? I’m an artist, not a daredevil. If you weren’t right beside me, I wouldn’t be doing it now.”

Cooper liked the hidden implication in those words. Unable to resist, he leaned close and kissed her. Everly kissed him back. Damn, who knew that rappelling could be so sexy?

“Okay, we’re past the hard part,” he said as he pulled away to give her space to work. “Now we just hop down the wall, letting out a little rope each time. Ready?”

She nodded, then took a deep breath and pushed away from the wall with her feet. She swung out and down about two feet, touching lightly against the wall beside him.

“Perfect.” He grinned. “Let’s do it again.”

And just like that, Everly was rappelling down the wall. By the time her feet hit the ground, she was giggling like a kid. Clearly, she’d enjoyed herself.

“Can we do it again?” she asked excitedly.

“We can. But don’t get careless.” He unhooked her from the rope. “And don’t forget what I taught you.”

She nodded and turned to run back inside and up the steps to the roof. Cooper followed, finding Everly properly hooked in by the time he caught up. But she still patiently waited while he checked her gear, then strapped in himself. Jayna and Becker set up two more ropes, and within a few minutes, all four of them were bounding down the wall and covering a lot more distance with each hop.

But after the fourth time, Everly grew bored with the one-story building. “Can we do something higher?”

He jerked his head at the two-story facade next door. “How about that one?”

She considered that, then turned and pointed at the three-floor structure he and the rest of the Pack used for most of their rappelling and freestyle climbing work. “How about that one instead?”

He lifted a brow. “You sure? That one is a lot higher.”

“I’m sure.” She smiled. “If you promise to go down right beside me.”

Like he’d be anywhere else? “Becker and I’ll get the ropes untied from upstairs and meet you and Jayna on the other roof.”

She and Jayna were off like a shot for the climbing tower, laughing all the way there.

Becker chuckled as he started coiling up the ropes on the ground. “I think you’ve created a monster.”

Cooper let his gaze follow Everly until she disappeared inside the three-story building. “Yeah, I think maybe I have.”

When Becker didn’t say anything, Cooper turned to see his best friend smiling at him. “It didn’t take long for you to figure it out, huh?”

Cooper didn’t have to ask what Becker was talking about. “No, it didn’t. I think I knew it when I woke up this morning.” He grinned. “But don’t worry. Your record of pegging Jayna as The One for you in under thirty seconds is still safe.”

“Hurry up!” Jayna shouted from the roof of the climbing tower. “Why are you two just standing around down there?”

Cooper motioned toward the building with his head. “Come on. We’d better get up there before they decide to rappel using their shoelaces.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon rappelling down the climbing tower. And even though it was hot as hell out, Cooper couldn’t remember ever having more fun. The best part of the day was when he and Everly went down the tower together, her in the traditional style while he used the Australian technique, where he went down the building facing forward. That meant he and Everly got to look into each other’s eyes all the way down. Except for when they stopped halfway so they could kiss. Then he let his eyes close for a while because he was in heaven. Damn, he could have done that all day.

Around five o’clock, Alex came out with some bottles of water and Gatorade. “I figured none of you would think about dehydration, so I decided I better do it for you.”

Cooper winced when he saw Everly down a whole bottle of water, then a Gatorade. He should have brought something along for them to drink. Werewolves got dehydrated like everyone else, but it took a lot longer than a few hours out in the Texas sun. Everly, on the other hand, had to be exhausted after all the trips up the stairs and down the walls. Besides, it was getting late. They needed to go back to his place and clean up before they went out to dinner.

They were heading over to his Jeep when Alex stuck his head out of the admin building. “Just in case I don’t see you before Sunday, make sure you’re at the church before noon.”

Cooper nodded. Crap, he’d almost forgotten about the wedding. Gage and Mac were getting married in two days. Maybe he’d better write it down on a piece of paper and stick it to his fridge. Between getting put on leave and meeting Everly, he hadn’t even thought about the upcoming nuptials.

He glanced at Everly as he started the engine. “I know it’s short notice, but my boss is getting married on Sunday, and I was thinking maybe you’d like to come to the wedding with me?”

She put the cap back on the nearly empty bottle of Gatorade. “You sure they won’t mind if I show up at this late date? I don’t want to mess up seating charts and meal counts—stuff like that.”

He chuckled. “Between all the people Gage and Mac know, there are probably going to be two hundred people at the reception. Trust me, you don’t have to worry about upsetting any seating charts or menu plans—there aren’t any. It’s one of those the-more-the-merrier things.”

Everly smiled. “Well, in that case, I’d love to come with you. Do you think we can bring Mia? She’d hate to miss out on a chance to meet all the single guys on the SWAT team.”

That was fine with him. Who knew? Maybe Mia would turn out to be The One for someone in his pack.