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Glad to finally be home, even if it was after dark and this apartment in downtown Spartanburg was only home for while, Tess peeled out of the business suit she’d worn to face her SCIS chief. That had been the low point of her day and it had gone downhill from there. He didn’t blow his stack often, but losing a potential Black River pack member had pushed him over the edge.

One more day until Friday, the official end of a normal workweek.

Not for her.

Friday used to mean something special, but these days it was just the start of her work weekend.

She tossed her suit on top of her ruined black dress from the night of the bombing.

Could the drycleaner get the smell of smoke out of the material? It wasn’t as though she dressed up much, but she’d worn that dress to please her father who had asked her to join him Monday night at a fundraiser in Charlotte, North Carolina.

He’d been so happy she was attending, until she called to cancel a minute before she went tearing out to meet up with her SCIS team.

Stepping into a hot shower, she started soaping her body, thinking about Colin. Had he actually survived? Was he a pawn in some game being orchestrated by unknown players or just as guilty as Brantley thought?

Where was Colin tonight?

She brushed her nipples with the washrag and hissed at the sensitive buds. Her body had felt odd for days. Like it had a mind of its own and wanted something.

What? A man?

Well, duh. She hadn’t been with anyone in ...

Trying to calculate how long was too depressing. This crazy, over-sensitive state was Colin’s fault.

Had to be.

It had started the minute he’d touched her wrist. That was all. It wasn’t as if the man had stroked between her legs.

Oh, crap. Just thinking about that sent heat pooling down there. She locked her legs together and stood in the rush of water, thinking about changing it to a cold blast. Damn her traitorous hormones because they were begging for a better way to be wet and hot ... with a wet and hot man.

Not Colin. How could she be reacting to him this way? He was a shifter, not exactly dating material in her little world.

And even if she were willing to go there, he wasn’t around and the chances of her ever seeing him again were slim to none.

This was just her twisted heart trying to confuse that shifter with Cole because of what Collin had said right before he was put in the transport. Those last words had raised the hair on her neck as well as a memory she’d fought years to get past. She kept those moments shoved down deep, out of her daily life.

But Colin’s voice had sounded so much like Cole’s in that one moment. Everything she’d loved about Cole had come rushing back at her in a tidal wave of emotion.

Shaking her head, she scoffed at her weakness. She was only worked up by the ghost of sex past. She missed the touch of the man she’d given her heart to. The one who had stomped on it when he disappeared.  

Hadn’t she sworn to never let Cole Cavanaugh take another day from her after all that he’d destroyed?

Blaming Colin for stirring up these emotions was unfair. Words were just words. Beyond that, the shifter had only touched her wrist.

And stroked his thumb across her skin.

And made her feel as if she were being pulled to him, inside him. She’d struggled to leave his side every time she’d been in his room.

Had he somehow ... infected her with a shifter cootie?

She slapped her forehead, laughing at the silly thought. “Good grief, Tess, you moron. It isn’t like he can turn you into a werewolf or a sex nymph with one touch,” she muttered. “I just need someone to scratch an itch. Isn’t that what a man would say?”

But she didn’t want that.

She wanted more than just great sex. She wanted to look into a man’s eyes and see her happiness reflected.

More than a quickie with a stranger.

Irritated for a lot of reasons, unwanted arousal being just one, she scrubbed her aching breasts then finished washing with brisk efficiency. Lingering could end with her satisfying herself, but to be honest, she hadn’t been very happy dealing with her love life single-handed.

Stepping out, she dried quickly.  

Blast it. Even the towel brushing over her skin bothered her. She might just have to take matters into her own hands tonight after all.

Too many days working with no playtime demanded a price.

Evidently it was her sanity.

She pulled on silk boxers and a thin knit top that would cause the least abrasion, then smoothed lotion on her skin on the way to her bed. Even her king-size bed was a perpetual workspace covered in paperwork.

If not for her laptop, the other half of the bed would be empty.

Sitting down with her legs crossed, she opened an email and had started scanning it when her skin pricked with an innate awareness that she was not alone.

The freaky energy in her body revved up.

She couldn’t say how, but she knew for sure someone was inside her apartment.

Her building had top security and she lived on the seventh floor. Who could make it past the front doorman and a key-carded elevator?

She covertly checked around the room.

Her walk-in closet was open to view. No one there.

She’d just been in the bathroom. No one there.

Her gaze moved to the door leading to her living room and kitchen. Hadn’t she left that open all the way? It was almost closed now.

Next to that doorway, the alarm panel display still showed as ready to arm. She hadn’t set it yet, but she normally didn’t until she was ready for sleep.

But wouldn’t she have heard the normal ding if the door had opened?

That did nothing to instill confidence in her or quiet the fast beating of her heart.

Having spent many years alone, she wasn’t rattled easily, but dammit, this was bugging her.

She had to think. No fast movements.

Picking up the closest work papers as if she planned to read them, she casually reached to her left where a writing pen sat next to her Glock 17 on the nightstand.

In one move, she snatched up the loaded 9mm and dropped the papers to wrap both hands around the grip.

She ordered in a loud voice, “Show yourself or I’ll shoot through the door.” Not really. She’d never risk the bullet going through a wall to hit an innocent.

When no one admitted to being inside, she started feeling like a fool, but she was going to clear the rooms herself, then call security to ask if any nonresident had traveled to her floor in the last half hour.

Before she could make a move, the door to the living room opened slowly, as if given a little shove.

Her heart tried to climb up into her throat. Was she ready to shoot someone? Oh, she’d trained and could nail a headshot at twenty-five yards, but she had never faced actually shooting a real person.

There was a first time for everything. If she saw a weapon, she was shooting.

Hands raised, a man stepped into view.

It can’t be.

Cole.

Her eyes rushed up and down, taking in every bit of him. All of it was far bigger than it had been in college. As a cross-country runner, he’d been sexy as they came back then, but the man standing in front of her had a beefed-up body and a dangerous edge about him.

One part remained the same.

That searing blue gaze. The last time she recalled seeing those eyes and that face up close, he’d been leaning over her as he drove deep inside ...

Damn. That was not the visual she needed in the middle of this moment.

Her mind raced with questions. Her heart jumped into panic gear, beating as fast as the wings of a hummingbird on crack.

What the hell was he doing here?

For that matter, where had he disappeared to all those years ago? He’d been hot as the devil back then, but he was off the charts now.

“Hello, Tess.” He lowered his arms slowly and crossed those drool-worthy forearms.

His voice had deepened. In fact, it sounded like Colin.

Now she was projecting Colin’s attributes onto Cole, but if she put the two side by side, they’d match up in size.

Cole took his time reviewing her during the silence then said, “Long time no see.”

She needed to slap herself. Drool worthy?

No. This man had vanished without a word, then just showed up now? Had broken into her apartment? He wanted to chat as if nothing had transpired between them?

Anger shoved aside the ball of hurt growing in her chest at seeing him again.

Anger she could manage much better than the emotions crashing around inside her.

“What are you doing here?” she asked, glad to hear the brusque professionalism drown out her quaking heart.

“I just want to talk.”  He took another step forward. “I’m not armed.”

“Stop right there.” She raised the gun a notch higher. “Armed or not, you can’t just break into my apartment after being gone sev-en years and expect me to offer you coffee.”

“I don’t expect anything. But I do need to talk to you.”

She quickly sorted through her options and came up with holding the gun on him while she called security.  

She couldn’t do that. They would call the police.

Even if she wanted to suffer the potential news that would leak out, which would be inevitable since her father was a US senator, Cole wouldn’t be willing to answer questions if she had him arrested.

Those years of wondering what had happened tipped in favor of allowing him to stay.

She kept the gun pointed at his chest. “So talk.”

“Your arms are going to get tired.”

When she said nothing, he shrugged. “You have a leak in your SCIS division. Someone is undermining everything you do.”

Not what she expected him to say. “How can you possibly know anything about what I do or my agency?”

His eyes finally dropped away, but before they did, she saw a flood of disappointment. Why?

When he looked back up, he said, “Because I just spent three days in your facility and barely survived your jackals trying to kill me.”

Blood rushed from her head.

He was saying ... no, that ... the room spun. Her arms felt heavy, dropping.

“Tess?” He stepped toward her.

She snapped the gun back into place fast and shook off the dizzy wave. “What the hell are you saying?”

“I didn’t want to tell you this way, baby.”

“Don’t you fucking call me baby!” Tears sprang from her eyes, but she could see just fine to hit center of body mass four yards away. She tried to swallow and coughed, choking on what she couldn’t believe.

Her voice came out broken. “You can’t be ... you aren’t ... Colin.”

“Colin is a cover name.”

“Don’t play with me, Cole. You know what I’m saying.”

He moved his jaw around as if trying to form words. “I am a wolf shifter, but I’m not with the Black River pack. I’m hunting them.”

A wolf shifter. Her heart had tried to tell her, but her mind hadn’t gotten on board. In fact, her mind still wasn’t accepting it. “I don’t believe you, Cole. Get out.”

He jerked as if from a phantom slap.

She didn’t care. He’d destroyed her once and was doing it all over again.

“Tess, please. I want to explain what happened.”

“Why? To convince me not to turn you over to the police, or if you want to maintain you’re a shifter, maybe SCIS security?”

“If you don’t believe what I have to tell you, then I’ll understand whatever action you choose to take.”

Why was he being so damn nice?

She bent her legs so she could prop her arms on her knees.

He lifted an eyebrow, reminding her he’d said the gun would get heavy.

That pissed her off all over again. She gave him an evil smile. “If I empty out a few rounds, the gun will feel lighter.”

His face fell.

Oh, he didn’t find that amusing?

He muttered, “You were nicer when I was burned half to death.”

He could only know that if ... he was actually the person who had called himself Colin.

No wonder she kept mixing together Cole and Colin, but the strange feeling she’d been having was not natural. Like that weird energy stirring up havoc in her chest. What was causing that to get stronger?

She asked, “Are you really a ... shifter?”

“Yes, but it’s not like I’ve turned into a zombie or something like that.”

She didn’t say anything that could be construed as agreeing with him. “Did you do anything to me when you touched me yesterday?”

Frowning with disbelief, he said,  “Like what? I’d never harm you.”

Colin’s voice kept echoing in her head. He’d also said he wouldn’t harm her, but both men were the same, and Colin had not tried to hurt her.

Was she really going to tell Cole her sexual appetite had quadrupled since his touch? Only if she were an idiot. “Never mind. I just wanted to know if you passed along anything.”

Now he looked insulted. “Like a germ or a disease? No. Human diseases can’t touch us. Anything you might have gotten came from a human.”

“I didn’t say I had anything.”

“Good.” That one word had been full of relief.

“I don’t understand any of this, Cole.”

He nodded. “Hear me out. I couldn’t tell you any of this when you held me captive.”

She flinched at that, because he said it as if she’d put him a cage, which she’d never do.

Not true.

Oh, wait. She had agreed to send him to a hole in the ground. Flinching internally, she held quiet so he could explain.

“I was inside the food bank building the night of the bombing. I work for a national security agency—”

She interrupted. “Which one?”

“I can’t tell you. There are a lot of things I’m not supposed to be telling you, but I’m going to share as much as I can and trust that you still have the same core of integrity you had back when I first met you.”

“I can’t promise I won’t share what you say if I think it needs to be passed along for national security.”

“I knew that coming in here and I’m willing to take my chances. I trust you, even though you may never trust me again.”

How did he do that?

One minute she was ready to fill him full of holes and the next he was saying he would give her information that could come back on him.

Her silence must have convinced him to continue. “I wasn’t supposed to enter the building. We’d been told Jugo Loco was being distributed out of that building. My team was there to observe and place a tracking device on the Black River pack’s truck, then one of our people would have sent information through channels that would reach SCIS.”

“Why would your people do that?”

“Because we don’t make the law enforcement collars.”

Tess took a mental step back at the law enforcement term.

Cole went on. “We work similarly to military covert operations. We go in, perform a mission or gather intel, and leave with no one knowing we were there.”

“You screwed that up,” she said in a flat voice.

“I did,” he admitted.

She’d meant his team, but Cole seemed to be taking all the blame. “Why were you in the warehouse?”

“When the truck arrived and entered the building, an elderly homeless woman ducked inside before the overhead door closed. I knew if shifters were there, they would definitely scent a human. The Black River pack would kill her for sport.”

Tess thought back over the bombing scene. “The woman you were lying on top of when we found you unconscious.”

“Probably.”

“She wasn’t burned.”

“Good.” There was that one word, which said nothing and a lot at the same time. “Our people have taken care of her.”

Tess hadn’t heard anything about the woman being moved from the hospital. She would be looking into that tomorrow to find out who had taken her and why Tess had not been informed.

Had Brantley known? Probably. She’d finally hit her limit with him and spent all day doing her own internal investigations. They’d exposed how he’d been working behind her back while professing his trust and support of her.

As soon as she got through that damned meeting next week, things were going to change at SCIS, starting with Brantley.

This had been the longest Thursday of her life.

She gave Cole a nod. “Go on.”

“Our intel came from a snitch called Sonic. When I got inside the building, there were no shifters, just a mild residue of at least one having been there. I saw the woman hiding near the truck parked inside and gave a hand sign to stay quiet. I’m not sure she understood anything much that was going on. We know now that someone offered her food and shelter to slip inside. That’s all she knew. I found Sonic with his hands taped to a steering wheel and a bomb strapped around his ankles. The best we can figure, someone had to be watching via camera and triggered the timer remotely, leaving me ten seconds to get out.”

Goosebumps pebbled over her skin at hearing Cole walk through the pre-explosion scene. The attorney in her noted that he did so with the dispassionate analytical ability of a professional, even though he’d been in the middle of the explosion.

And he’d been burned. Badly.

Her stupid heart clenched.

He said, “A note with the Black River icon had been pinned to Sonic’s shirt. I believe the entire scene had been set up for m ... someone in my organization.”

She’d read his lips. He’d been about to say the bomb had been set for him. Now her heart was off to the races. She could have lost Cole a second time, but would she have known it was him even after a complete forensics workup?

Maintaining her calm voice, she asked, “So someone died in that bombing?”

“No. Sonic was already dead. His throat had been slit.”

She shifted the gun in her grip, but she wasn’t ready to put it down.

Could she use it on him?

No. She wasn’t stupid enough to believe she could, and her finger would go nowhere near the trigger. But it was a barrier. A divide between what they were and what they had to be now. She needed it.

“What else did you find?”

“Jugo Loco. That and the note on Sonic confirmed our intel, which indicated that was one of the Black River pack distribution points.”

Speaking of intelligence, he’d just shared something no one at SCIS knew. “Are you sure you found Jugo Loco in there?”

“Yes. I used a test strip, but it burned in the fire so it’s only my word at this point. Not admissible evidence.”

“You’re right, if I believe you. Why would I?”

He shifted his legs in place. Regardless of how he stood, he was imposing, standing above her like a towering force.

Cole said, “This is definitely something I’m not supposed to share, but I want you to believe me. The three anonymous tips SCIS has received over the last nine weeks are a result of my team discovering fingers of the Jugo Loco distribution network.” He rattled off the exact dates, locations and times SCIS had received, plus additional information that convinced her he might just be telling the truth.

She recalled that information coming through their intelligence network.

Still, that wasn’t as big a deal as staring at the man she had once loved who was now a wolf shifter.

She deserved to indulge in a serious breakdown as soon as she could fit it into her schedule.

Cole angled his head, studying her in a way that made her think he’d climbed inside of her screwed-up head and caught some of that.

To cover the secret crazy she had going on, she gave him a surly, “What now?”

“I can tell by the surprise on your face that you know I’m telling the truth.”

She forced a blank expression into place. “I’m not confirming or denying anything.”

“Tess, I’m trying to get you to realize that I work with the good guys who have been helping you.”

“Again, no way to prove it and I have no reason to trust what you say.”  Okay, that was just tired, bitchy noise.

He raked a hand over his short hair.

She jerked the gun up.

“Whoa,” he said, hands back up. “Would you please put that thing down?”

“No.”  One question had churned over and over until she couldn’t keep it in any longer. She might never get a better chance to ask it. “Did you know you were a ... uh ... ”

“Shifter,” he filled in.

“Right. A shifter. Did you know when we were ... together?”

“No.”

She wanted to believe him. “When did you find out?”

“The last night I saw you. Remember how I said I needed to go for a run?”

“As if I could forget the last time I saw you?” The pain rushed through her chest again. He’d made love to her and whispered, “Mine.” She thought she’d found heaven.

She’d waited and waited while he was gone.

Then she’d gone out looking. Worrying, she’d called around. When she went to the police, they took her seriously until they checked with the school. The administrative office at their college informed her Cole had contacted them to say he was joining the military.

Tess had called them liars. Not her best moment.

The school representative calmly explained that he answered all the security questions on file correctly and asked that no one contact him.

She’d turned into a zombie. Empty inside.

Cole had vanished.

She’d spent days crying and walking the empty apartment.

“I’m so sorry, Tess.”

Sucking it up, she said, “Just finish. What happened that night?”

His eyes darkened with sadness. “It’s hard to explain, but something inside drove me to go to the woods for my run. I didn’t know why I felt the need to run at night. I’d never run after dark in the woods because of the chance of hitting a hole. I ran like someone was chasing me, but I was alone. At the time, I really don’t think I even realized what was happening to me, and I eventually lost consciousness. When I came to, I had two men standing over me. I thought they were going to kill me. I was shaking, making weird noises and unable to defend myself.”

She swallowed hard, imagining the threat he’d felt.

“They took me to a man in charge of a special unit of shifters he trained specifically for aiding the military. He has, well, let’s just call them unusual abilities. He knew what I was and said it was not normal for me to be shifting at nineteen.”

“Wait a minute. I’ve studied shifters extensively. They’re raised knowing they’re shifters. Many shift anywhere from right after birth to somewhere during the first year.”

“I’m not like them.”

“Why? What’s different about you?”

“I’m trying to tell you as much as I can, but let’s just say that my kind needs to have their animal called up.”

This was the first she’d ever heard of that and she was considered an authority. “I don’t understand.”

“Basically, my wolf was ready to make an appearance and my body wasn’t prepared for it. Unlike other shifters who are known to the public, no one had ever told me I was anything other than human, so I had no background for understanding what was happening.”

The academic side of her that had spent years studying their species wanted to know it all. “What did you do?”

“Nothing on my part. Like I said, my superior called up my wolf.”

“You’re serious about that,” she stated in disbelief.

“Yes.”

She couldn’t wrap her head around it. “Are you saying this man can just do ... whatever...” she sputtered. “And make someone a shifter?”

He chuckled at her outburst and her heart curled around the sound. That was the sound of Cole, the man she’d thought she’d be spending her life with forever.

“My boss can’t make anyone a shifter if the animal is not already part of his or her being. He can only order the animal to the surface. If he was standing here and told me to shift, I couldn’t deny him. He’s that powerful.”

“He’s an alpha. I know about them.”

“It’s a bit bigger than just being under an alpha.”

Good grief. Cole was saying things that skewed everything she knew about shifters. She mused out loud, “You’re special.”

“I think of us as just ... different.”

She bent her arms to prop her elbows against her stomach. This damn gun was getting heavier by the second.

“You got any coffee, Tess?”

“Huh?”

“Coffee? I’ve had almost no sleep in the last two days. I’d like a cup.”

“Are you mental?” she asked, dead serious.

“No. Think about it. I could have waited until you went to sleep and pinned you down to make you listen.” 

Her mind went to the image of him draped over her, holding her to the bed and ...

She shook that ridiculous thought off. Man, was she tired.

Cole wasn’t through. “Put the gun down.”

“No.”

“I need to tell you something and you’re not going to like it.”