Release Date : June 7th 2016
He's a
werewolf
She's his mate
Her family would kill to
keep them apart.
A wolf in
Landry Cooper's position doesn't really do the dating scene-there's simply no
time when he's taking out bad guys practically every day of the week. But when
he meets beautiful Everly Danu during a bank robbery, he's sure she's The One for him. The problem:
she has no idea what Cooper really is...until his secret is exposed and she
discovers the man she thought she knew is a monster in disguise.
Excerpts
It must be payday. Either that, or God hated him. As Cooper
strode across the bank’s lobby and got in line behind the twenty people already
there, he wasn’t
sure which.
He’d been so exhausted after work he hadn’t even bothered to
shower and change into civvies at the SWAT compound like he usually did.
Instead, he’d come
straight to the bank in his combat boots, dark blue military
cargo pants, and a matching T- shirt with the Dallas PD emblem and the word
“SWAT” on the left
side of the chest. He’d cleaned off the worst of the day’s
dirt, but he still felt grimy as hell. He couldn’t wait to get home and throw
everything in the wash so he
could grab something to eat and fall into bed.
He bit back a growl as the man at the front of the line
plunked down a cardboard box full of rolled coins on the counter and started
lining the different
denominations in front of the teller.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Cooper muttered.
A tall, slender woman with long, golden-brown hair gave him a
quick, understanding smile over her shoulder. He smiled back, but she’d already
turned around.
He waited, hoping she’d glance his way again, but she didn’t.
Giving it up, Cooper glanced at the other line, won-dering if
he should jump over there. Definitely not. It was even longer.He hated going to
the bank, but his
SWAT team-mate Jayden Brooks had finally paid off the bet
they’d made months ago about whether his squad leader and the newest member of
the team
would end up a couple. Instead of giving Cooper the hundred
bucks in cash like a normal person, Brooks had given him a frigging check. At
least he hadn’t
paid Cooper in pennies, or he would have been the one lining
up rolls of change for the teller to count. But it wasn’t Cooper’s fault that
he was more observant
than most of the other werewolves in the Pack. Brooks had
suggested the stupid bet. Cooper had simply agreed to it.
When Officer Khaki Blake had walked into the train-ing room
for the first time, every pair of eyes in the room immediately locked on her—
except for Cooper’s.
Oh, he’d noticed she was attractive, make no mistake about
that. But he’d been more interested in seeing how the rest of the SWAT team
reacted to the first
female alpha any of them had ever seen. While most of the guys
had checked her out with open curiosity, none of their hearts had pounded as
hard as his
squad leader’s— Corporal Xander Riggs. Cooper had immediately
pegged Khaki as The One for Xander, and vice versa.
Other members of the SWAT team were still on the fence about
whether they believed in The One, the mythical one-i n- a- billion soul mate
supposedly out
there for every werewolf. But the way Cooper saw it, denying
the truth was stupid. In the past ten months, three of the Pack’s members had
stumbled across
their mates in the most bizarre and unbelievable ways. A
werewolf would have to be an idiot not to see the women the guys had fallen in
love with were their
soul mates. It was obvious the moment you saw them together.
But just because Cooper accepted the concept of a werewolf
soul mate didn’t mean he automatically bought into the idea there were women in
the world for
him and the remaining thirteen single members of the Pack.
Cooper wasn’t jaded when it came to love, but he wasn’t naive either. He’d been
around the world
enough times to know that not all stories had happy endings.
The jerk cashing in his lifetime supply of pocket change
finally walked away from the counter, grumbling under his breath about the
teller miscounting his
nickels and dimes. Cooper leaned out and counted the number of
people ahead of him and reconsidered whether it was worth his time to wait.
Maybe he’d
deposit the check on the way to work tomorrow. But that would
mean getting up at least an hour earlier. He groaned at the thought. No way in
hell was he
getting up at four thirty, not after the day he’d had.
He and Brooks, along with their teammates, Carter Nelson, Remy
Boudreaux, and Alex Trevino had been working with explosive investigative teams
from the
ATF and FBI since before the sun had come up. Some nut job had
planted an IED in one of the parking garages of the Grand Prairie industrial
area last night
and killed a young Dallas PD officer moonlighting as a security
guard. None of the investigators believed Officer Pete Swanson had been the
target. He’d just
been unlucky enough to be doing a security sweep of the garage
when the bomb had gone off.
Instead, the feds thought the real target had been someone who
worked for a company based out of the industrial complex. There were several
defense firms
that used the garage, as well as a biomedical research company
and a consulting group that specialized in job outsourcing solutions. In other
words, lots of
people someone might want to blow up. Then again, it was also
possible the bomber had picked that particular location purely by chance with
no specific
target in mind. Now that was a thought to keep any cop up at
night.
But Cooper and the SWAT team hadn’t been invited to the party
to catch the guy. They’d been brought in to help with the long, painful process
of combing the
crime scene for every shred of evidence they could find to
help the FBI track down the bomber.
They’d spent the entire day on their hands and knees searching
the parking garage and surrounding area, as well as nearby rooftops, storm
drains, and
trees for pieces of the device. The FBI agent in charge was a
friend of Cooper’s and promised to call once they got all the pieces laid out so
he could help put
the IED back together. The SWAT team and the Dallas FBI field
office weren’t on the best of terms these days, and the feds would have a cow
if they knew he
was involved in the forensic part of the case. Between Xander
and Khaki apprehending bank robbers the FBI had been chasing, and his teammate
Eric
Becker unofficially going undercover to save the woman he
loved and taking down a group of Albanian mobsters, the feds weren’t too happy
with them. But
what the FBI didn’t know wouldn’t hurt them.
The two people ahead of Cooper got fed up with waiting and
walked away. He quickly stepped forward to fill in the gap and found himself
behind the attractive
woman who’d flashed him a smile earlier. He couldn’t help
noticing that she looked exceptionally good in a pair of jeans. Or that her
long, silky hair had the
most intriguing gold highlights when the sun coming through
the window caught them just right. She smelled so delicious he had to fight the
urge to bend his
neck and bury his nose against her skin. Damn, he must be more
tired than he thought. If he wasn’t careful, he’d be humping her leg next.
He opened his mouth to say something charming, but all that
came out was a yawn big enough to make his jaw crack. The woman in front of him
must have
heard it too, because she turned around.
“And I thought I’ve been waiting in line a long time,” she
said, giving him a smile so breathtaking it damn near made his heart stop. “You
look like you’re ready
to fall asleep on your feet.”
Cooper knew he should reply, but he was so mes-merized by her
perfect skin, clear green eyes, and soft lips that he couldn’t do anything but
stare. He felt like
a teenager in high school again.
“Um, yeah. Long day,” he finally managed.
What the hell was wrong with him? He’d never had a problem
talking to a beautiful woman before. But in his defense, he’d never been in the
presence of one
this gorgeous.
He gave himself a mental shake. Get your head in the game
before she thinks you’re a loser and turns around again.
“Catching bad guys, huh?” she asked.
“Something like that.” He gave her his best charming smile.
“Luckily, I’m off duty for the night.”
She laughed, and the sound was so beautiful it almost brought
him to his knees. Crap, he actually felt a little light-h eaded. He chalked it
up to being out in the
hot Texas sun all day. That could be hard on anyone, even a
werewolf.
She tilted her head to the side, regarding him with an amused
look. “Is that your way of saying you’re free for dinner?”
Could she read his mind? “Depends. Would you say yes if I
asked you out?”
Her lips curved. “I might. Although most guys tell me their
names before asking me out on a date.”
Cooper chuckled. He’d been attracted to her from the moment he
saw her, but after talking to her, he was even more mesmerized. He’d always
appreciated a
woman who was confident enough to hold up her end of a verbal
sparring match, and she seemed more than capable.
He held out his hand. “Landry Cooper at your service. Now that
you know my name, how about dinner?”
He might have imagined it, but when she slipped her smaller
hand into his much larger one, he could have sworn he felt a tingle pass
between them— and it
wasn’t because of static electricity.
“I’m Everly Danu,” she said. “And dinner sounds great.”
Everly. Even her name was beautiful.
Cooper opened his mouth to ask Everly if she wanted to grab
something that night—t he hell with going home and falling into bed—w hen
voices nearby
caught his attention. Thanks to his keen werewolf hearing, he
picked up every word.
“Are we still robbing the place with the cop here?” a
male voice whispered.
“We’re in too deep to back out now,” another deep voice
said softly. “We were going to kill the guard anyway. Just make sure to take
out the cop fast.”
Cooper snapped his head around, trying to figure out who’d
said that. He scanned the crowded bank, looking for anyone who stood out, and
immediately,
zeroed in on a man over by the entrance. Average height with
light brown hair, the guy was wearing mirrored sunglasses and a black
windbreaker. On his
own, the man wasn’t that remarkable, but the small radio
receiver in his ear sure as hell was. It wasn’t hard to miss the telltale bulge
under the man’s left arm
or the way he kept glancing at Cooper while keeping an eye on
the door.
Cooper swept the bank lobby with his gaze, looking for the
man’s accomplice. He found him sitting by the manager’s desk, pretending to
wait for the woman to
come back. Thanks to the identical sunglasses and the same
black windbreaker the guy was wearing, he was easy to spot.
Cooper quickly ID’d two other men— one positioned a few feet
away from the bank’s security guard, the other near the big row of windows that
looked out
onto the main road. This one had a soft- sided computer bag
big enough to hold several pistols—o r a small submachine gun— hanging from his
shoulder.
Both were wearing sunglasses and windbreakers.
The guy by the door checked his watch, then nodded at his
friend by the security guard. Cooper tensed. Shit, these assholes were really
going to hit the bank
with an armed cop standing right in the middle. Were they
suicidal or just plain stupid?
Cooper’s hand dropped to the Sig .40 on his belt.
“Landry?” Everly asked, her voice trembling a little. “Is something
wrong?”
He didn’t want to take his eyes off the four guys, but
Everly’s growing fear was so strong he could practically taste it on the air.
Finding it impossible to ignore,
he tore his gaze from the men and turned back to Everly. “I
don’t want to alarm you, but the bank is about to be robbed,” he said softly.
“I need you to stay
calm, okay?”
Outside
Samarra City, Iraq, 2009
Staff Sergeant Landry Cooper moved carefully through the rubble covering the
floor of the partially demolished building, inching his way closer to the
target. The maze of shattered brick and broken pieces of wood weren’t the
biggest reason he was moving slowly, though. That had more to do with the
hundred-degree temperature and the seventy-five-pound Kevlar bomb suit he was
wearing. He despised the army’s suit with a passion that few people outside the
Explosive Ordnance Disposal community could understand.
It wasn’t simply that it was hot and heavy. No, what he hated most about the
suit was the nearly complete sensory deprivation that came with wearing it.
Inside the claustrophobic helmet surrounded by a neck gusset designed to keep
your head from getting ripped off your body during an explosion, you couldn’t
hear much of anything, your line of sight was distorted by the thick, curved
face piece, and your peripheral vision was nonexistent. Having to make a
manual approach—better known in EOD circles as the long walk—on a suspected
improvised explosive device, or IED, was bad enough. Doing it when you had an
armor-plated pillow wrapped around your head?
That sucked.
But he didn’t have a choice. Local construction workers had come in this
morning and found a suspected IED half buried in the dirt between two buildings.
Cooper and his team had been able to use a robot to drop a small demolition
charge near the device, but his disposal charge, combined with a bang from the
IED, had caused part of the surrounding buildings to collapse, pissing off the
locals and making it impossible to get the robot back in to clear the area.
If there was one cardinal rule in EOD, it was that you never released an
incident location back to the good guys without being one hundred percent sure
all hazards had been cleared. That meant doing a manual approach in the bomb
suit to make sure there weren’t any explosive materials or secondary devices
around.
Cooper wasn’t too worried about walking up to the package he’d just blown in
place. While the relationship between the city’s Sunni population and ruling
Shiite government forces would never be described as anything other than tense,
lately things had been better. IED responses were way down, and they hadn’t
seen a secondary explosive device, typically planted to target police and other
first responders, in months.
Still, he played everything by the book, keeping the protected front of his
suit facing the spot where the IED had been, and using the building’s structure
for protection as much as possible. At the same time, he kept his head on a
swivel, looking for anything that seemed out of place.
“I’m about twenty feet from where we blew the IED,” he murmured over his suit’s
radio to his team members waiting in the safe area three hundred yards away,
and then remembered he was wasting his breath. The damn radio had stopped
working about a month ago, and a replacement wasn’t due for weeks. He was on
his own.
Sweat trickled down his nose as he stepped over a low wall and moved toward the
crater where the IED had been. He automatically lifted a hand to wipe the sweat
from his face and thumped against the plastic face piece.
“Shit, I hate this suit,” he muttered, forced to make due with wiggling his
nose.
He reached the edge of the shallow crater and looked down. Two feet deep and
six across, it looked like a big soup bowl. There were some rusty nails the
bomb maker had added for fun, but the IED itself was long gone. Even better,
his demo shot hadn’t exposed another one buried underneath.
Cooper pulled a sharpened fiberglass rod out of his pocket, then jumped into
the crater. If there was anything here, the blast from the disposal shot would
have uncovered it, but it didn’t hurt to check. Unfortunately, the heavy spine
protector in the suit that helped keep an EOD tech’s back from being crushed if
blown backward against something hard meant he had to squat down like a sumo
wrestler to stick the probe into the dirt. He ignored the sweat and aggravation
and made it work.
He’d moved almost all the way around the shot hole and was about to climb out
to walk around the rest of the area when his probe hit something hard. He
tensed, but then relaxed. He was still here, so it couldn’t be that bad.
Dropping to one knee, he used his hand to slowly uncover what he’d found. When
a horizontal, cylindrical pipe took shape, he assumed it was a water or sewer
line.
They weren’t exactly common in structures as old as this one, but it could have
been placed here to supply another building nearby. As he uncovered it, the
pipe began to get smaller on one end. His gut clenched as realization dawned on
him. He brushed off more dirt, revealing the nose of the 155-millimeter
artillery round, as well as the metal electrical conduit extending out of it
and running underground.
Fuck.
Cooper pushed himself to his feet and backpedaled toward the edge of the crater
as fast as he could. An artillery round didn’t usually have a conduit sticking
out the end. This one had been booby-trapped so the bomber could set it off
manually whenever he wanted. The conduit was there so the IED wouldn’t cut the
line if an EOD tech like him destroyed it. And with the conduit there, Cooper
couldn’t cut the line either.
This device was an EOD killer put there because somebody knew a bomb tech would
come down and look around before turning the site over to the local police.
His mind raced. A projectile this size carried fifteen pounds of high
explosive. When it went off, even a bomb suit as good as the one he had on was
unlikely to stop all the frag that came off it.
He reached the top of the crater and backed away as fast as he could. He would
have been able to run faster if he turned around, but the weakest part of a
bomb suit was the rear. If this thing went off when his back was to it, he’d
have no chance.
Time slowed as a thousand thoughts zipped through his head. How he seriously
didn’t want to die. How maybe the bomber on the other end of that firing line
might have needed to go take a piss, and the 155 wouldn’t go off. How his
parents and brothers were going to be crushed when they found out. How he
should have gone to the prom with that cute girl in his math class back in high
school. How one of the junior members on his team was going to be forced to
step up and take over his job. How the new unit lieutenant was going to have to
write a condolence letter on his first fucking day on the job.
Cooper pushed those thoughts away, yanking his hands inside the arms of the
suit to keep them from getting ripped off in the blast as he focused his
attention on moving backward as fast as he could.
Just get twenty feet away. Then you might have a chance.
He didn’t make it ten.
The blast threw him backward before his head even registered the flash of the
projectile exploding. Luckily, he was so close that the wave took out the brick
wall behind him before he could smash into it. But that luck ran out, and he
slammed into the one behind it.
He felt a sharp stab in his back, then nothing from the middle of his chest
down. The suit’s spine support had broken—and so had his back.
He hit the ground hard, tumbling like a kid’s toy until he came to a sudden
stop against a pile of bricks. He felt pain—lots of it—at least from the chest
up. He wasn’t sure how he was able to, but he lifted his head enough to look
down, and saw long, jagged fragments from the 155 sticking out of him like he
was a damn pincushion.
Cooper let his head drop to the ground and swore long and hard. He was so
fucked.
A detached part of his mind noticed that pieces of the building were burning
around him. That was interesting, considering how little flammable material was
in the area. The flames weren’t too bad, but the smoke would probably choke him
to death sooner or later. Not that he was likely to live long enough for that
to happen. The frag had penetrated the bomb suit. He’d bleed out fast enough. He’d
just be too numb to feel it.
Then someone was at his side, roughly prying up his face, telling him to hold
on. That’s when he realized his ears weren’t working right. He could barely
hear the person speaking. No shock there. The blast had blown out his eardrums.
He opened his eyes, expecting to see one of his junior teammates, and was
shocked when he saw that it was Jim Wainwright, a fellow senior team leader and
the best friend he’d ever had. Cooper hadn’t even known another team had
arrived.
“Get the hell out of here!” Cooper shouted. Or at least he tried to. The words
came out as nothing but a gurgling whisper. “Jim, you know this is stupid.
There could be another device down here.”
Jim didn’t answer, but simply shoved his arms under the bomb suit, as if he
thought he could pick up Cooper and carry him out of here. He didn’t bother to
tell his friend how stupid that was. Besides all the frag sticking out of his
body, making the task of picking him up akin to hugging a porcupine, Cooper and
the bomb suit he wore weighed nearly three hundred pounds combined.
There was no way in hell Jim could pick him up.
“Go!” he ordered again. “You know I’m done anyway.”
Jim ignored him. Tears running down his face, he tried grabbing the heavy-duty
rescue strap at the suit’s shoulder and dragged him across the rubble.
“Shit!” Cooper wailed in agony, white-hot fire shooting through his neck and
shoulders. “Just fucking leave me alone and let me die!”
Jim disregarded that request too, grunting like a crazy man as he dragged
Cooper over, around, and through the obstacles that separated them from the
dilapidated building’s exit. Cooper was stunned his friend could actually move
him at all. He’d heard of soldiers doing some insane shit in battle to save a
buddy, but this had to be the craziest. Too bad he was already a goner. Cooper
only hoped Jim would get a medal out of it. Then, at least, one good thing
would come out of this day.
Cooper didn’t get much time to think about what the award write-up would sound
like because the pain climbing up his neck like a wave of water drowned him
until everything went black.
If you want download
the first six chapters of To
Love a Wolf
click here>>
Available for
Pre-Order Now:
SWAT
(Special Wolf Alpha Team) Series:
Hungry Like the Wolf, Book 1
Wolf Trouble, Book 2
In the Company of Wolves, Book 3
