Her Wild Hero

“Yeah, I understand why we have to do it,” Kendra admitted. “I just wish we didn’t. John has always been someone I looked up to. I have a hard time believing he’s behind any of this.”


“Me too,” Ivy said. “But the fact is, we rarely know people as well as we think we do. And sometimes the people we think we know the best are the ones who can surprise us the most.”

Ivy told her about the plan she and Landon had come up with to follow John, maybe even put a tracking device on his car, but Kendra wasn’t really listening. Instead, she was thinking about what Ivy had said about how the people we think we know the best can surprise us the most.

Maybe that was the case with Declan. Maybe she didn’t know him nearly as well as she thought she did, even after everything they’d gone through out in that jungle.





Chapter 15


Ivy couldn’t believe that she and Landon were actually conducting a surveillance operation on John. After all the red tape their boss had gone through to get them down to Costa Rica, then back out, it just seemed wrong. But Landon was right. If John was clean, that was great, but if he wasn’t, they needed to know. Because their lives were being put at risk every day in the normal course of their jobs. If John was working another agenda, —possibly with people on the Committee—then the risk they were facing was even greater. One way or the other, they had to know for sure. She’d always thought of John as one of the good guys, but there was simply too much at stake to have blind faith in anyone right now.

As soon as they got back home, she and Landon bugged both his office in DC and at the training complex, as well as his car. In addition, they’d also followed him every night after work since getting back from Costa Rica. They figured that if he was going to communicate with anyone about what happened in Central America, he’d do it right after they got back, as all the traitors scurried around trying to cover their butts. While she and Landon were watching John, Clayne and Danica were watching Dick.

John didn’t leave the training complex until nine, but unlike last night, this time, he didn’t go straight home. Instead, he headed toward DC. Ivy assumed he was going to the office in town, but he took the Crystal City exit, then pulled into a twenty-four-hour parking garage.

“Great,” she muttered as Landon parked along the curb a few hundred feet from the garage. “That connects to the shopping center. He could be going to any restaurant from there. Or the Metro.”

She and Landon had just started down the street when their boss walked out of the garage and headed down the sidewalk along Crystal Drive in the opposite direction. But instead of going into a restaurant like Ivy thought he might, he walked directly to the Water Park and sat on the edge of the fountain.

Ivy and Landon stopped outside the steak house on the opposite side of the street and pretended to look at the menu. She frowned as John pulled out his smartphone, then leaned forward with his elbows on his knees to read it.

“Okay, that’s not suspicious at all,” Landon said softly. “No one sits outside to check his messages in forty-degree weather. I don’t care how nice that fountain is.”

It was nice, but Ivy agreed with her husband. “It looks like a predesignated meeting place to me.”

She and Landon could only stare at the menu for so long before someone got suspicious, so after five minutes, they wandered to the next building. Ivy pretended to look at the dresses on the mannequins in the store window while Landon kept an eye on John. So far, no one had joined their boss.

“You think he made us?” Landon asked.

Ivy opened her mouth to reply when she caught a scent that made her head whip around. She sniffed the air, trying to pinpoint where the smell was coming from, then turned until she was pointing in the direction they’d just come from a few minutes ago. The wind was coming into her face from that direction, which explained how she’d picked up such a weak scent. Someone was watching them from upwind of their location.

Landon’s hand was already on the gun under his coat. “What is it?”

“I’m not sure,” she said. “A shifter, I think. But I’ve never smelled anything quite like it before.”

Landon glanced at John. Their boss was still sitting on the edge of the fountain engrossed in whatever he was looking at on his phone. “That may be who John’s here to meet.”

“If the shifter catches our scent, he might bolt,” Ivy said.

She and Landon quickly walked off the main street and ducked into an alley between a restaurant and the shopping center. They could still see the fountain from where they were, but between the nearby Dumpster and the swirling wind, she didn’t think the other shifter would be able to pick up their scent.

A few seconds later, a tall man in an overcoat walked slowly down the opposite side of Crystal Drive. He stopped at a few stores but didn’t go inside. Like he was window shopping—or checking for a tail.

“Is that the guy you smelled?” Landon asked.