Rising Storm (Westin Force #2) - Julie Trettel Page 0,56
uncomfortable, and Baine especially would never let me live that down. Damn if I didn’t have the sexiest mate alive. Emma was free and all natural. She liked to experiment and try new things. We’d gotten a little crazy the night before. I was exhausted and felt a little guilty that she’d been pretty drunk for most of it. I was a full blooded male, and she was my mate. I hadn’t had it in me to deny her.
The thing with Emma was the alcohol hadn’t changed her. She may have been a little louder than usual, but her boldness and confidence was just all Emma. I loved that she had no problems asking for exactly what she wanted. She never played games with me. I always knew where I stood with her. That sort of simplicity was exactly what I needed.
She was exactly what I needed.
Only a few hours into the flight and I had made up my mind. The second I got home I was claiming her as mine. She needed me, and I needed her. It was time to step up and prove that to her. The rest we would fumble through together.
Just that thought gave me a sense of contentment. I relaxed and drifted off to sleep.
I awoke with a jolt when Silas smacked me over the head with a folder.
I shot up and looked around to find the team laughing. “Good morning sleeping beauty.”
“How long was I out?”
“About five hours,” Tarron informed me. “Wheels down in ninety minutes.”
“Shit.”
I forced myself to wake up, fully feeling the adrenaline finally starting to kick in. I opened the folder and started reading.
“Relax,” Taylor said. “He just handed them out. You haven’t missed anything yet.”
I gave her a smile of gratitude. At first, I thought having a female on the team was going to be weird, especially when she was mated to one of us. Despite my early reservations, Taylor had fit in flawlessly to the team like the missing link we hadn’t known was missing. She made us all stronger. Most of the time, she and I worked closely together, always the first two in the door. Unless Grant was working undercover with her, he was always at the rear.
He seemed to handle it all well though. He was confident in his mate and knew she could handle herself. He’d lost his shit a couple of times when she’d been injured, but always after the fight. Somehow, he managed to keep a cool head through the worst of it.
I never really understood how he managed that, but I kind of got it. I wanted nothing more than to get back home to Emma, but right now, I had a job to do. I knew myself well enough to know that from this moment forward, it was all about my team, my job. The second it was over, and we were back on this plane, that would all change. The job would be left behind, and my focus would be solely on getting back home to Emma. I could do this.
I read through the file Silas had passed out to us. They were usually customized by each person’s role on the team, but not this time. We all received the same exact generic file.
There was a large Verndari warehouse in Iceland that had been raided. Two of the artifacts missing were the ones we’d recently retrieved on missions. Three more were stolen that they were aware of. We were being granted full access to the place with an itemized sheet to verify nothing else was taken. It was like a shifter treasure trove.
“So really there’s no mission here?” I asked. “We’re just assisting with paperwork for the Verndari?”
“Not exactly,” Jacob Winthrop said as he rose to address us all. “We know they’ve gotten in and gotten away with at least five items stolen. We’ll have our own teams there that you may assist in verifying that nothing else is missing. What we can’t figure out is when and how they got in and retrieved the artifacts. We suspect they have a man on the inside, a Raglan sympathizer. I need your help to flush him out.”
“Tarron,” Silas barked. “You and T will take surveillance. Those videos had to have been tampered with at some time. Find it.”
“Badass, you up for this?”
“Always, anytime. Bring it.” Taylor winked at him.
“Painter, I’m giving you point on this. You’ll work with Winthrop and O’Connell. You up for that?”