Chapter 5

Khaki couldn’t pull out of the SWAT compound and head home to her new apartment fast enough. There was a bubble bath and a spy novel with her name on it. She could really go for a beer too, but she hadn’t picked up any when she went grocery shopping the other day, and she didn’t have the energy to stop for some.

God, what a crappy day.

She sighed. Okay, maybe it hadn’t been all bad. On the upside, she’d picked up the team’s room clearance techniques faster than she thought she would. Regardless of that hiccup when it came to doing it in the dark, she’d earned big points with every guy on the squad except Xander. She knew because they’d told her so over lunch. She’d appreciated their support, more than they would probably ever know, but when Cooper told her to just keep doing what she’d been doing and they had her back, she’d just about lost it. She’d actually had to go to the ladies room to “freshen up” so they wouldn’t see the tears in her eyes.

Khaki hadn’t felt that kind of support in a really long time, and she hadn’t realized how much she’d missed it.

She only wished she’d impressed her squad leader as much. No matter how hard she worked, or how well she did something, it was never good enough for him. Worse, there’d been times over the past few days when it seemed like he couldn’t even stand to be in the same room with her. It was like he thought she had cooties. Or smelled funny.

Khaki stopped at a light, tapping the steering wheel of her new Mini Cooper in time to the music on the radio and thinking about the other problem she had with Xander—one that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her.

Regardless of how hard she tried to fight it, she’d developed a weird werewolf obsession with her squad leader.

She’d been attracted to Xander the moment she laid eyes on him. She liked the way he looked and loved the way he smelled. But since that first meeting, her attraction had turned into something that could only be described as obsessive. And since she’d never felt this way about any other man, she could only assume the source of the problem was her inner werewolf.

Hence, werewolf obsession.

She hadn’t slept through the night since arriving in Dallas despite falling into bed exhausted at the end of every long day. But no matter how tired she’d been, she’d fantasized about her hunky squad leader instead of sleeping. And she’d had some vivid fantasies.

A car’s horn jolted her attention back to the traffic light. Crap. How long had the light been green? She punched the gas, and her Mini surged forward with a squawk of rubber.

A big SUV zipped past her in the fast lane, a woman old enough to be her grandmother behind the wheel. Khaki barely noticed, her thoughts on Xander again.

Having these thoughts about her squad leader was stupid, especially considering her previous experience with workplace romance. Why was she so attracted to him anyway? All the guys on the team were gorgeous, so why was he the only one she was drawn to?

Being near him made her heart beat so fast, it felt like she was running a race. And when he had put his hand on her back during the training exercise today, it had felt like electricity coursing through her body.

But the thing she was having the hardest time dealing with was his scent. He didn’t just smell nice, or yummy, or even delicious. He smelled intoxicating. When they were working close together, especially in tight spaces, breathing in his scent had her thinking some really crazy stuff. Like how much she wanted to throw him down and jump him like a wild animal. More than once she’d felt her hands trembling as they’d itched to reach out and touch him.

It was scary how bad she had it for him—and frustrating to know he obviously couldn’t stand her.

Khaki turned into the parking lot to her apartment complex. As crazy and frustrating as her obsession with Xander was, she could control it. It would take willpower, but she had willpower to spare.

What had her most worried was what had happened in the House of Doors today when Xander had turned off the lights. Because she didn’t think that any amount of willpower was going to be able to help her deal with her inability to shift.

Over the three days she’d been with SWAT, she’d seen every member of her squad shift to some degree. And they were able to do it like it was nothing. She’d seen claws popping out and retracting like they were controlled with a switch. Max had gotten in a tussle with Alex over something stupid, and she’d watched in fascination as his jaw had actually widened to make room for a scary number of really long teeth. There’d even been scruff starting to grow in along his jawline as he and Alex faced off against each other.

She’d thought he might go all the way until he turned into a real honest-to-goodness wolf with four paws and a tail. Becker had implied that some of the guys could do that. But before that could happen, Xander had stepped in and slammed Max against a concrete wall so hard it had cracked some of the blocks. Max’s claws and fangs had immediately retracted, and Xander had let him go, as if it was no big deal.

She’d seen enough to know that this shifting thing was really important. She also knew she was screwed because she couldn’t do it.

She’d successfully covered up that fact since she’d arrived, using her smaller size, natural speed, and greater agility to make up for what the others could do when they shifted. But when those lights had gone out, her speed and agility hadn’t helped her one bit. She’d looked around and seen all the glowing eyes and known she was in trouble. They could all see while she couldn’t. She could make out basic shapes and outlines, but she sure as hell didn’t have enough clarity to move like she’d been before the lights had gone off.

She’d tried to force her eyes to change so she could see in the dark like them, but she just got a headache. None of the guys had ever met a female werewolf before. What if it turned out that female werewolves couldn’t shift like the males did? She didn’t give a crap about the claws and the fangs. She didn’t need those to be a good SWAT officer. But what if she could never see in the dark like they did?

With her heart beating like mad, she’d wanted to stop the training, to admit it was something she couldn’t do. But her pride wouldn’t let her. So instead, she’d used the only talents she seemed to have developed—she’d closed her eyes and used her nose and intuition to figure out where walls, doors, obstacles, and targets were. Even though she’d moved slower than before, it had worked. Until she’d shot Becker in the head with orange paint.

The memory made her cringe.

Khaki knew she could use her nose to navigate, given time. But she wasn’t going to be able to fool Xander and the other guys forever.

She was still thinking about how horrible that moment was going to be when she pulled into her assigned space in front of her apartment and saw Jeremy standing there holding a bouquet of roses.

Khaki stomped on the brakes and got out of the car, slamming the door behind her. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Her stomach churned. She’d moved halfway across the country to get away from this jackass and he’d followed her?

Jeremy held out the roses but didn’t answer. Was he crazy? Were roses the in thing this season to buy a woman after you’d harassed her to the breaking point?

“I don’t want your damn flowers,” she said. “I want to know what you’re doing here.”

His jaw tightened, and she half expected him to toss the flowers on the ground and grab her instead. But he didn’t.

“I came to say I’m sorry,” he said slowly, as if the words were a steel wire attached to his testicles that tightened as he spoke.

“Yeah?” She folded her arms and glared at him. “Well, you should have saved your money because I’m not interested.”

The muscle near the side of his eye jumped like it always did when he was trying to control his temper. There had been a time when she would have backed down from a fight with him, but not anymore.

“Khaki, please. Don’t give up on us.”

“Us?” She snorted. “There is no us. There never was. There was just you. I was simply the woman you thought looked good standing at your side. And when you decided I wasn’t playing my part like I was supposed to, you made it your mission to destroy my life.”

Jeremy’s upper lip curled, but instead of lashing out, he gave her a cool smile. “Khaki, sweetheart, that can all be behind us. Come home with me. I’ll take you back and we can act like this never happened.”

Take her back? Khaki’s vision blurred as anger swept through her. Who the hell did this jerk think he was?

“I’m not going anywhere with you!” She knew she was shouting, but she didn’t care. Jeremy had chased her out of her home in Washington. He wouldn’t chase her from this one. “My life is here now and it doesn’t include you.”

He glanced down at her uniform and sneered. “Your life is here? In SWAT? Please. What the hell made someone think you would ever be qualified to do that kind of work?”

She opened her mouth to tell him that he didn’t have a clue what she could and couldn’t do because he’d never taken the time to find out, but Jeremy’s harsh laugh cut her off.

“Oh, let me guess,” he said. “The big knuckle-dragger Carpenter saw you with at the diner is SWAT, isn’t he? Where did you meet him? Did he put you on the team so he’d have you nearby whenever he needed to knock off a piece? What’d you have to do to get the job, send him naked pictures of yourself, or was there phone sex involved too?”

Khaki thought she’d been angry before, but that was nothing compared to how furious she was now. Her whole body was practically vibrating with rage. Before she knew it, she’d ripped the flowers out of his hand and shoved him backward—hard. He had no idea how badly she wanted to tear him to shreds. Her fingers flexed as she imagined how good it would feel to dig her nails into him. Her teeth ached at the thought of sinking into that scrawny throat of his. If he hadn’t been too cheap to buy a vase to go with those dumb-ass flowers, she could have beat him with it.

Maybe it was because she had something worth protecting now, or maybe it was that she simply didn’t want to get Jeremy’s blood all over the sidewalk in front of her apartment, but either way, she resisted the urge to do any of those things.

“You need to get the hell out of here,” she growled. Really growled. “Or that little takedown move I showed you back at the station in Lakefront will seem like a love pat compared to what I’ll do to you now.”

For a minute, Jeremy looked like he might test her. But then his true cowardly nature took over and he backed away.

“I don’t know what I ever saw in you, you crazy bitch,” he ground out. “But trust me, you’re going to be sorry you let me get away.”

Khaki suppressed another growl. “More likely I’ll be sorry I didn’t kick your ass when I had the chance,” she muttered as he got in his rental car and drove off with a squeal of rubber.

“Did he hurt you?”

The woman’s voice was soft behind her. Khaki took a moment to gather herself before turning around to see her neighbor Emma Sutton with a concerned look on her face. The redhead was clutching the strap of her shoulder bag so tightly her knuckles were white.

“No,” Khaki said. “He never touched me.”

Emma eyed her skeptically. “If he didn’t touch you, why are your fingers bleeding?”

Khaki looked down to see drops of bright-red blood dripping off the tips of every finger. It looked like a demented manicurist had gone after her cuticles with a razor blade. What the hell?

“Did that son of a bitch smash your fingers in his car door?” Emma grabbed Khaki’s hands before she could stop her, trying to see how bad her injuries were. “Screw him. I’m calling the cops.”

Khaki fought the urge to yank her hands out of Emma’s grip, knowing that if she did, it would only alarm the woman even more. But she didn’t want her neighbor getting a good look at her fingers. She had no idea what was going on, but she was afraid it had to do with being a werewolf, and she didn’t want Emma to see something she shouldn’t. But Emma let go first, and only so she could dig in her purse for something—most likely her cell phone.

“You don’t need to call the cops,” Khaki said. “I am one, remember?”

Emma shook her head as she pulled out her phone. “I’m not letting that jerk get away with doing something like that. If you don’t press charges, I will.”

Khaki appreciated Emma’s resolve, but she was too freaked out to deal with this right now. She wanted to get inside and take a closer look at her hands, but she had to deal with her neighbor first.

“Emma, it’s nothing. Really.” She forced herself to give the woman a smile. “The thorns on the roses stuck me when I grabbed them out of his hands.”

Emma didn’t look so sure, but she stopped dialing.

Khaki held up her hands. “See, they’re not even bleeding anymore. Just some scratches.”

Well, they were still bleeding some, but not as profusely.

Emma looked closer, then frowned. After a moment, she lowered the phone. “Okay, maybe it’s not as bad as I thought. But you should still tell somebody. You can’t let that guy get away with showing up here and yelling at you like that. Who was he anyway, your ex?”

“Yeah.” Khaki breathed a sigh of relief. Thank God her new neighbor wasn’t going to push the issue. “I’ll call my boss as soon as I get into my apartment, okay?”

Emma nodded. “Okay. But you have to promise that you’ll call me after you talk to him. I want to know you’re all right.”

“I will.”

Khaki hurried up to her apartment and immediately ran into the kitchen to wash the blood off her fingers. Once the worst of the mess was gone, she stared at her fingernails, hoping to see…well, something that would explain what happened in the parking lot. But there wasn’t any sign of werewolf claws peeking out from under her regular nails. Beyond a thin line of blood under her nail tips and around the cuticles, there wasn’t much of anything to see at all.

She pulled a paper towel off the roll and dried her hands. Just because she didn’t have claws now didn’t mean they hadn’t come out during her argument with Jeremy. It was the only thing that explained why her fingers had been bloody.

Had Jeremy seen them? She’d been so focused on the thought of hitting her ex with a flower vase that she hadn’t noticed what he’d been looking at. But the more she thought about that, the less likely it seemed. If he’d seen claws coming out of her fingers, he would have said something. Subtlety wasn’t his strong suit.

So she was safe there, but it still left her with an even more pressing question. Why had her claws come out, and why wasn’t she in control of them?

She held up her hands and stared at them, silently willing her claws to pop out. But not a damn thing happened. Her hands stared back at her, as if saying, What do you think you are, a werewolf or something?

Khaki clenched her fingers, then flipped them down and open—like Wolverine did in the movies.

Still nothing. She felt stupid.

Khaki sighed. She shouldn’t be surprised her claws didn’t work right. Why would they? She couldn’t control her eyes in the dark, so why should her claws be any different?

Khaki pulled out her ponytail holder and ran her fingers through her hair as she walked through the living room and into her bedroom. She needed to talk to someone about what the heck was going on with her. If the issues she had with today’s training hadn’t convinced her, what just happened had. If she didn’t get a handle on this werewolf thing quick, she would end up getting booted off the SWAT team. Worse, she might accidentally reveal herself to someone like Jeremy.

But who should she talk to? She sat on the bed and unlaced her boots as she considered that. She could call Cooper or Becker. She’d hung out with them the most. But she dismissed the idea just as quickly. Becker wasn’t much more experienced at this werewolf thing than she was, and Cooper struck her as the kind of guy who simply was a werewolf without thinking too much about it. Neither one would be able to teach her what she needed to know. Plus, she wasn’t sure if they’d keep her secret from the rest of the Pack. She didn’t want everyone knowing she was a deficient werewolf.

Who could she trust? She went through the list of names of the other guys in her squad as she took off her uniform and pulled on jeans and a tank top. Although she might trust them to have her back in a shoot-out, she wasn’t sure she could confide in any of them. In fact, the only person she felt comfortable enough to talk to was Mac, and she wasn’t even in the Pack—not technically, anyway.

Khaki grabbed her cell and called Mac before she could change her mind. Mac answered on the second ring.

“Hey, what’s up?”

“Not much.” Khaki winced at the lie. But she couldn’t very well spill everything on the phone. “I could use some advice about something though. Would it be okay if I came over to your place?”

* * *

“I didn’t mean to chase you out, Sergeant Dixon,” Khaki said as Mac shooed her big, tall fiancé toward the door.

“Don’t worry about it,” Mac said, glancing over her shoulder at Khaki. “He was already heading out to the store to pick up more pita chips for me anyway.”

Outside in the hallway, Dixon turned to give Mac an amused look, his dark eyes twinkling. “You have four bags in the pantry.”

Mac went up on her toes to give him a quick kiss on the lips. “But you can never have enough pita chips. And you know how much I love them.”

Giving him a grin, she made a shooing motion with her hand again, then closed the door and turned to Khaki.

“What can I get you to drink?” she asked as she walked into the kitchen. “We have water, iced tea, soda, or beer.”

“Iced tea is fine,” Khaki said, then added, “You really don’t need to go to any trouble, you know.”

Mac smiled at her again. “It’s no trouble. Grab a seat on the couch. I’ll be right in.”

Khaki took a seat and looked around. Though small, the apartment was nice. While it was definitely decorated with a woman’s touch, Dixon’s presence was obvious in some of the framed pictures on the wall and the automatic weapons coffee-table books.

“So, what’s going on?” Mac set two glasses of iced tea on a pair of coasters, along with a bowl of pita chips, then sat cross-legged on the other side of the sectional couch. “Are the guys in the Pack being jerks? If so, tell me who, and I’ll set them straight.”

Khaki almost laughed at the image of Mac laying into Xander while the squad leader stood there nodding politely. But having someone fight her battles wasn’t the reason she was here.

“It’s not the guys,” she said. “They’ve been great.”

Mac’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Right. So if everything’s so wonderful, why are you here looking for advice?”

Khaki picked up her glass and sipped her iced tea. Now that she was here, she wasn’t quite sure what to say. On the other end of the sectional, Mac was waiting patiently.

Here goes nothing.

“I’m hoping you can give me a few tips about…how to be a werewolf,” she said.

Mac raised an eyebrow. “O-kay. Maybe I’m missing something here. You’re already a werewolf. Right?”

“Yeah, but…”

Khaki hesitated. Maybe she’d better start at the beginning. So in between pita chips, she told Mac about what had happened that night she’d gotten shot behind the Grace Park apartment complex, about how quickly she’d healed, and about all the crazy things she’d been able to do afterward, admitting that she didn’t even know she was a werewolf until she’d seen the guys on the team shift. With as few embarrassing details as possible, Khaki then went on to describe the problem she’d had in the House of Doors and what happened with her ex-boyfriend tonight.

“Your ex is here in Dallas?” Mac asked.

Khaki nodded. “I guess Sergeant Dixon told you about him, huh?”

Mac shook her head. “Not very much, though I’m glad to hear you dumped him. Gage just mentioned that you’d been in a relationship with another cop and that it didn’t end well.”

Understatement there. It was nice to talk to a woman who listened to her without judging or trying to fix things, like men always seemed to do. She wanted to tell Mac about Jeremy, but right now, she needed to get her inner werewolf under control.

“Back to the werewolf thing,” she said. “I’ve seen the guys do it often enough to know that I should have claws and fangs and be able to see in the dark, but I can’t do any of those things.”

Mac’s eyes widened. “Wait a minute. Are you saying you’ve never shifted at all? No claws, no fangs, no night vision, no…fur?”

Khaki shook her head. Although to be honest, she wasn’t too upset about not sprouting fur. She had no interest in excess body hair.

“Never,” she admitted. “My nose works really well, and I’m faster and stronger than any woman I’ve ever seen, but I just figured that maybe female werewolves couldn’t do what their male counterparts could. Then I started arguing with my jerk of an ex-boyfriend and…” She held up her hands and wiggled her fingers. “My fingers started bleeding. I think my claws came out without me even knowing it. Can that really happen?”

“All the time.”

“Really?”

Mac nodded. “You’ve been around the guys long enough to know that they shift when they get pissed, excited, or hyped up, right? Trust me, most of them don’t even realize it’s happening either.”

“But it’s never happened to me before.”

“It did tonight.” Mac smiled. “You’re pretty new to this whole werewolf thing. Maybe you just had to get angry enough to let the shift happen.”

Khaki supposed that made sense. She’d definitely been angry with Jeremy. But while some of the guys shifted a little when they got mad, they could do it when they weren’t angry, too.

“But how do I control it?” she asked Mac. “How do I get the parts of the werewolf that I want while keeping the other parts hidden? And how do I keep it from coming out at the wrong time?”

Mac shrugged. “I can’t help you with that. Gage has told me about what it’s like when he’s shifting, and I’ve seen him do it a lot. But we’ve never gotten into the how-to part of it. You’re going to need to talk to one of the guys, preferably one who’s been a werewolf for a while. Gage, maybe?”

Khaki shook her head, embarrassed at the thought. “There’s no way I can tell him that I don’t know the first thing about being a werewolf. It’s why he hired me. I don’t want him thinking I’m incompetent.” She gave Mac a stern look. “You can’t tell him either.”

Mac held up her hand. “I won’t, I promise. But you need to talk to someone, sooner rather than later.”

Khaki took another sip of iced tea as she ran down the list of guys on her squad again. Other than Cooper, Trevor was the only other werewolf with a lot of experience. While she definitely got along with him, she wasn’t sure he’d be very good at teaching her how to be a werewolf. There were several experienced werewolves on Mike’s team, but she didn’t know any of them well enough to ask.

“Have you ever considered asking Xander?”

Khaki almost choked on her iced tea.

“I’m serious,” Mac said. “I know he can be a bit brusque sometimes, but he’s a really good guy. He’s your squad leader and you can trust him to keep anything you tell him in confidence. If you ask, I know he’d help you.”

Khaki wasn’t too sure of that. She opened her mouth to tell Mac there was no way in hell she’d ask her squad leader for help, but the words wouldn’t come out. Maybe it was her inner werewolf trying to tell her something. Or maybe it was because she knew she had nothing to lose—Xander couldn’t possibly think any less of her than he already did.