She really couldn’t believe she’d so quickly agreed to go out with Grady or that she’d allowed him to distract her enough to slip away without making sure he went to the hospital. Tomorrow night she’d get to see if he’d had someone look at his wound or not.
For the rest of her shift, Sage went from looking forward to seeing Grady again to dreading it. And with no way of contacting him, it wasn’t as if she could call and cancel. Then there was the fact she’d given him her home address without knowing anything about him. At least being a cop she would know how to handle him if things got out of hand. But the big question was, who would handle her if she got out of hand with him and jumped his bones?
Chapter Two
“Ow. Would you take it easy?” Grady asked.
He sat at the kitchen table at his home that he shared with his parents, his brother and his brother’s mate. Katarina, who’d become mated to his brother Jase three months before, tended to Grady’s wound.
“Stop being such a baby,” Katarina said. “I thought all you cougar shifters were tough guys.”
“We are, but that freaking burns.”
“It needs to be disinfected with rubbing alcohol. I know it’ll be healed by tomorrow, but it’ll help to have it cleaned out.”
“Yeah, Grady, stop being a crybaby,” Jase said with a chuckle. He sat across from Grady as he watched his mate work.
“Bite me,” he said with a growl. “I still can’t believe Caleb managed to get the drop on me. But I guess he did me a favor.”
Jase gave him a confused look. “How can getting your skull almost cracked in two by a metal pipe do you a favor?”
Grady smiled. “I ended up with a date for tomorrow night.”
His brother snorted. “With who? An imaginary woman? Caleb must have hit you harder than I thought. You’re seeing things.”
“No, Sage was very much real. She’s the reason why Caleb stopped hitting me and took off.”
“He was afraid of a human woman? I’m assuming this Sage is human.”
“She is, and she’s a little more than just a human woman. She’s a cop. She saw Caleb with the metal pipe and turned on her flashing lights and siren.”
Katarina stopped poking at Grady’s head and leaned around to look at him. “You have a date with a police officer?”
“Yeah. I asked her out after I kissed her and she said yes.”
His brother’s mate whistled. “You kissed an on-duty cop? You’re lucky she didn’t try to arrest you.”
“I thought she might, but it was the best thing I could think of to distract her from calling an ambulance for me. She insisted I go to the hospital. I don’t think she would have taken no for an answer if I hadn’t laid one on her.”
“So you only kissed her and asked her out for that reason?”
“No. Sage is gorgeous. I would want to date her even if I hadn’t been trying to stop her from getting me to go to the hospital.”
Katarina went back to cleaning Grady’s head wound, and he sucked in a sharp breath. He had to be thankful his mother wasn’t at home. She would have been fussing over him too much. His parents had gone away for the week. They’d flown to the Gulf Islands, which was off the eastern coastline of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. They owned a cottage on their own tiny private island. It was big enough—and had enough trees for coverage—for them to shift to their cougar forms and go for runs. Grady figured his parents mostly went there to have some alone time without him and Jase hanging around.
“At least we now know Caleb is still in Anchorage,” Jase said, changing the subject.
“Yeah, but he got away,” he added. “And the male human he’d been talking to when I first spotted him was gone when I went back to see if I could pick up his trail. He must have had a car in that parking lot because I lost it there.”
Jase shook his head. “That’s too bad. It makes me wonder what Caleb was up to. It couldn’t be anything legal if he had that meeting in a dark parking lot in the middle of the night.”
Katarina gave Grady a tap on the shoulder. “All done. I have to agree with that, Jase. Who knows what he was up to, but it couldn’t have been anything good.”
“I was thinking he has to be running out of money,” Grady said. “The amount he had stashed in that apartment that he took before he went into deeper hiding won’t last him forever. And as far as Draven has been able to find out, Caleb still owns his house. There’s a lot of capital tied up in it. If it suddenly burns to the ground we’ll know what that meeting was about.”
“Actually,” Jase said with a nod, “that makes a lot of sense. That way Caleb won’t have to go through the hassle of having to sell it. He’d only have to collect the insurance money from it. That’s a quick way to turn it into cash.”
The more Grady thought about it, the more likely a scenario it could be. They’d have to watch Caleb’s house for anything suspicious taking place around it. And if Caleb did decide to do away with it like that, there was always a chance he’d risk returning there to take what he wanted from it beforehand.
Grady stood and walked over to the fridge, where he took out a bottle of beer. “I think I should tell Uncle Nate. As the leader of our family group, he could get others to watch Caleb’s house when we can’t.”
“Good idea.” Jase stood, then walked over to his mate and put his arm around her shoulders. “Now that your head is taken care of, Katarina and I are heading upstairs.”
He watched them walk out of the kitchen. He wouldn’t be seeing those two for the rest of the night. And with his room directly across from theirs, at times his damn sensitive cougar hearing allowed him to hear more than he wanted to. That was the only part that sucked about living with his family.
Grady went upstairs to his room. As he neared Katarina and Jase’s, the sound of feminine giggles came through the door. He continued into his bedroom and closed himself inside. He put the bottle on his bedside table and yanked his long-sleeved t-shirt over his head. The collar of it was stained with blood. Katarina had already put his winter jacket in the washer since it’d gotten the worst of it. Head wounds always bled like a bugger.
After putting his shirt in the dirty laundry hamper, Grady settled on the king-sized bed and turned on the large flat-screen LED television that hung on the wall across from it. He sipped his beer and a small smile played on his lips as he thought about Sage. He wondered if he asked nicely if she’d cuff him, then have her way with him.
Since Sage had worked the night shift, she slept until early afternoon the following day. Usually she would have slept longer, but having two days off and then going back into work on day shift, she had to get her sleeping times adjusted.
After she showered, she returned to her bedroom to get dressed. Seeing the almost overflowing dirty laundry basket, she could no longer put off doing the washing. Luckily enough, she had something to wear. She tugged on her last pair of clean jeans and a sweatshirt.
She lugged her laundry downstairs and put the first load in the washer in the main-floor laundry room. That’d been one of the big selling points for her when she’d put in an offer for the two-story semi almost a year ago.
That task done, Sage went to the kitchen and put the kettle on to make a pot of tea. She grabbed a muffin from the package she’d bought the day before and sat at the table to eat it while she waited for the water to boil.
Before going to bed she’d come to the conclusion it wouldn’t be a great idea to go out with Grady. She hadn’t been thinking when she’d agreed to see him in the first place, and she wasn’t looking for a steady boyfriend. Her work kept her too busy, especially now that she was striving to become a detective. As for having a short fling, she couldn’t separate her feelings enough to have one.