His handshake was firm, his warm skin sending a little tingle through her. “Sawyer Bishop. And yes, although I can’t take too much credit since I didn’t get here in time to stop him from doing it the first time.”
“That’s okay,” Harley said, realizing she was probably grinning like an idiot and had absolutely no idea why. Sure, he was cute, but seriously? “You’re here now. That’s all that matters.”
Chapter 2
“Are we going to talk about what happened last night?”
Sawyer wondered when someone on his MI6 team was going to bring that up. The question seemed to bounce off the walls in the silent hotel conference room, and he turned away from the window he’d been gazing out for the past twenty minutes to look at his teammate, Elliott Lloyd. Between the breathtaking view from the tenth floor and thoughts of the beautiful female werewolf he’d run into at the club, he was a little distracted at the moment. It was all he could do to think about anything else since setting eyes on her.
“What’s to talk about?” he asked, trying to sound casual even though he was tense as hell. “We went up against a crew of human traffickers and got our arses handed to us.”
Stocky, with blond hair, the team’s medic/equipment specialist eyed Sawyer like he was crazy. His other two teammates, Rory Higgins and Erin Nichols, were doing the same. Afraid they’d see the nervousness on his face he was trying desperately to hide, he turned back to the window, forcing himself to concentrate on the scenery.
Sawyer had been to France more than a dozen times during his years in MI6, but he’d usually been rushing to get somewhere else—or getting shot at. On those occasions when he’d been fortunate enough to spend more than a few hours here, it was always in some safe house in the middle of nowhere. He’d never stayed at a hotel as nice as this one, that was for sure.
Straight across the Seine, the Eiffel Tower threw shadows in the late-morning sun, with the Arc de Triomphe a little to the north and the big glass pyramid of the Louvre a mile to the east. He couldn’t see it from where he was standing, but the Bastille district and the club they’d been at last night was somewhere in that direction, too. He couldn’t help wondering if he’d get a chance to see any of this beautiful city someday, or whether this was the best he could ever hope for.
“Don’t act like you didn’t see that woman get up and walk away after having a knife shoved halfway through her chest,” Elliott said in exasperation. “And that was after getting shot at least twice judging by the holes in her dress. She shouldn’t even be alive right now.”
Sawyer was trying to come up with a reasonable explanation for that, in between breathing a sigh of relief that his teammates had apparently missed his own gunshot wounds, when Erin Nichols, their weapons and tactics specialist, let out a short laugh.
“I don’t know why you’re so worried about the woman.” Fair with shoulder-length, curly, red hair, Erin was sitting in the same chair at the conference table she’d commandeered when they’d gotten there—the one with the best view of the door. Like she was worried someone was going to kick it in and attack them. “I’m more interested in knowing how the guy who stabbed her was able to disappear from her side one second and show up again fifty feet away. That shouldn’t be possible.”
Sawyer opened his mouth to answer but was interrupted by a loud snort. He turned around again, this time to see Rory Higgins, the team’s intel analyst and resident computer geek, shaking his head. A redhead like Erin, his light skin was even paler than usual. He looked plain wrung out.
“Maybe it isn’t possible, but we all saw it happen,” Rory said. “I think we need to accept last night was about something beyond the possible.”
Erin’s gray eyes narrowed suspiciously. “Like what?”
Rory glanced at each of them in turn before looking down at the floor. In that one second of eye contact, Sawyer saw a mountain of doubt and uncertainty. “I was thinking maybe something…I don’t know…supernatural?”
Sawyer was stunned Rory had gone there. Had he had a run-in with something strange he’d never told them about? If the room had been quiet before, now they were in that hearing-a-pin-drop category.
“Supernatural?” Erin stood, moving closer to where the rest of them were, an incredulous look on her face. “Please tell me you didn’t use that word with Weatherford and the other agents during the post-mission interview.”
Rory didn’t answer, but his sheepish expression said it all.
Sawyer sighed. Clarence Weatherford was their team’s section chief at MI6. Weatherford rarely left the comfort of his London-based office, and as far as Sawyer knew, the man hadn’t been in the field for almost four years. But after the report Sawyer sent in immediately following what happened at the club, saying they’d had a run-in with an American covert team and that something unexplainable had occurred, Weatherford had been on the first plane to Paris. Sawyer hadn’t revealed that three of the Americans were werewolves, but since he knew his teammates had gotten to the garage in time to see Harley get stabbed, he had to at least mention the guy who could disappear at will. When Weatherford had asked pointed questions, Sawyer had been honest about the guy with the freaky, black eyes and all the teeth, too. There was no way he could hide that he and Harley had put more than half a dozen bullets in the guy—there was blood everywhere—or that the thing had simply walked it off afterward. Not when there was a good chance his team might end up running into the creature again in the future.
“Don’t rag on him too hard,
