Shelly Laurenston: Wolf with Benefits

Unless . . .

Slowly Toni looked over at Oriana.

The younger female lowered her cell phone, gave one of her annoying smirks. “Oh. That’s right,” the brat said carefully. “I forgot I have a message for you from Mom.”

“Really? You forgot?”

“Don’t make this into a big deal,” her sister warned, sounding bored. “You know how Mom is.”

“Mom’s not really the issue here at the moment.”

“Look, it’s not my job to get messages back and forth between you and our mother.”

“If that’s true, then I guess you won’t be needing this.”

Toni snatched Oriana’s cell phone from her hand and threw it down the hall and into the wall. She took great satisfaction at the sound of something on the device breaking from the impact.

“Now go fetch, bitch!” Toni screamed at her sister.

“You are such a ridiculous child!” Oriana screamed back.

“And you’re a spoiled twat!”

Ric quickly stepped between them, facing Toni. “My car can take you to your mother.”

Panting, her fangs burrowing into her bottom lip as they grew from her gums, Toni nodded. “Fine.”

“Great. Great.” He turned and took Oriana’s arm, Zia still asleep on his shoulder. Fights between her siblings never really bothered her or her twin. “Let’s go get what’s left of your phone and I’ll call my driver.”

He led Oriana down the hall, giving Toni a few seconds to calm down.

“Wow,” the bobcat muttered from his desk. “Your sister’s right. Your legs really are skinny.”

Toni briefly thought about swiping all the cat’s crap off his desk, but that wasn’t something she’d do to anyone who wasn’t one of her siblings. But that was the beauty of being one of the Jean-Louis Parker clan . . . sometimes you didn’t have to do anything at all, because there was a sibling there to take care of it for you.

“It must be hard,” Kyle mused to the bobcat. “One of the superior cats. Revered and adored throughout history as far back as the ancient Egyptians. And yet here you sit. At a desk. A common drone. Taking orders from lowly canines and bears. Do your ancestors call to you from the great beyond, hissing their disappointment to you? Do they cry out in despair at where you’ve ended up despite such a lofty bloodline? Or does your hatred spring from the feline misery of always being alone? Skulking along, wishing you had a mate or a pack or pride to call your own? But all you have is you . . . and your pathetic job as a drone? Does it break your feline heart to be so . . . average? So common? So . . . human ?”

Toni cringed, which helped her not laugh.

And although she’d normally stop one of her brother’s ego-destroying rants long before he got to the “so human” part, this time, with this particular bobcat . . . she just couldn’t. Yet what she could do was get her baby brother out of here before he had to witness a bobcat male sobbing softly into his Starbucks coffee and egg salad sandwich lunch.

Because that’s what was coming. Her brother might have the hands of a true artist, but his brain . . . his brain was like that of a sadistic psychiatrist who liked to see if he could force his patients to gouge out their own eyes during therapy appointments.

Lifting Denny into her arms, Toni grabbed Kyle’s hand and pulled him out of the office. She’d wait for her sister and Ric down the hall.

“You going to yell at me?” Kyle asked her once they were away from the office and the bobcat’s sniffling was the only thing that could be heard by their keen jackal ears.

She smiled at her brother.

Sure. They were typical black-backed jackals, which meant they fought amongst themselves whenever the mood struck them, but they were also family. And one messed with a jackal family at one’s own risk.

“Nah, little bro.” She winked at him. “Not this time.”

Ricky’s brother Rory Lee sat at his big office desk and looked back and forth between Ricky and Reece. “He’s useless to me,” Rory told him. “Useless! I can’t use him for that job tonight.”

Ricky Lee knew as soon as he saw Reece’s wounds that he would end up having this conversation with their eldest brother, Rory. It was something to be expected. Rory Lee Reed was the oldest and the most uptight of the three of them but Rory had always felt it was his role to take care of them—even when they didn’t need it.

Now, true, one could make an argument that Reece Reed always needed someone to take care of him because he seemed to stupidly stumble into deadly situations. But the truth was, their youngest brother knew exactly what he was doing and enjoyed every minute of it. And Rory enjoyed acting put-upon.

And what did Ricky enjoy? Well, as it turned out, Ricky enjoyed watching Rory get all upset while Reece willingly walked into stupid situations to get his ass kicked. It entertained him. Like NASCAR and good American beer.

Reece said something and Rory looked at Ricky. “What did he say?”

“You didn’t understand that?”

“With his jaw wired and his throat still recovering from that nicked artery? No.”

“I could.”

“Ricky,” his brother growled, “you’re irritating me.”

“Reece says he can do the job fine.”

“How? His jaw is wired shut! Because you didn’t keep him out of trouble like I told you to!”

“I’m not my brother’s keep—”

“Shut up!” Rory put his elbows on his desk and dug his hands under his baseball cap and into his hair. He scratched his scalp and made lots of snarling noises.

Poor guy. He took all this so seriously. The minutiae of it, anyway. Ricky and Reece only took their cases seriously. They cared about the clients, wanted to make sure they were as safe as possible. That was their job after all. Protection specialists. That’s what their business cards said. Honestly, the Reed boys couldn’t have a job more perfectly fitted for their natures. When their Packmate, Bobby Ray Smith, had been discharged from the Navy, he and his best friend, Mace Llewellyn, started this protection agency. Their older Tennessee Packmates and kin were none too happy about the idea but Ricky, Rory, and Reece all felt that it was getting a bit crowded in Smithtown, Tennessee, so they’d taken Bobby Ray up on his offer to start fresh in New York. It had been a good decision for all of them.

Llewellyn Security was doing really well, their business growing every day. Though most of their clients were shifters, they happily took on full-humans. Heck, money was money. And the more money they made from the full-humans and the richer shifters, the more they could help out those shifters who didn’t have the money to pay but desperately needed their help. The one thing Ricky truly loved about his kind, no matter the breed or species, was their willingness to protect each other. Sure, lions might fight wolves, wild dogs might fight hyenas, and bears might slap around everybody, but when their kind faced real danger from the outside world, from the full-humans or the full-human governments, they all worked together. It was just understood that all Pack, Pride, or Clan issues took a backseat to the survival of shifters worldwide.

Yet while the bigger shifter-run organizations like The Group or KZS handled big scale situations that might involve one or more governments, it was the smaller companies like theirs that handled individual cases. Because the less full-humans saw any evidence of the existence of shifters—the less full-humans had to die in tragic “accidents.”

Mace Llewellyn walked by Rory’s office. He was staring down at some paperwork and barely glanced at them, grunting out a, “Hey,” before walking on. It would have been meaningless if Reece hadn’t gurgled a return greeting at him.