Santa Soldier Bear - Meg Ripley Page 0,56
neatly pressed. He looked familiar, but Gabe couldn’t quite place him.
Gabe wasn’t one to hide, though he knew there was a chance the two strangers were after him. He’d made plenty of enemies by the time he’d left the Delta Force. You couldn’t fight terrorism or carry out the most dangerous missions on the planet without pissing a few people off here and there. For all he knew, these two men were either seeking revenge for his former work or trying to prevent him from ever getting to his first day on the new job. He checked the pistol tucked into the back of his waistband and opened the door.
The first man grinned as he stuck out his hand. “Gabe Vinson, I’m Garrison Stokes from the D.C. unit. This is Hudson Taylor. May we come in?”
Gabe shook their hands and opened the door wider, laughing a little at himself for thinking they could be anything other than the Special Ops Shifter Force members sent to meet him. He was just too eager for action, and the idea of languishing in a hotel room hadn’t appealed to him the way it did to most people. “Of course. It’s nice to meet you. Vance told me a lot about you.”
“All shitty things, I’m sure,” Garrison joked. He took a seat in one of the chairs near the window, his large body folding into it. “You’re the first one to get here. We’re still working on the rest of the recruits, but we didn’t want to wait to get started. I take it you know what you’re in for?”
“The general idea, at least. Shifters have problems that can’t always be solved by the human authorities or even our own conclaves, and that’s when we step in.” Gabe remained standing, eager to move, but glad that things were getting started.
“Pretty much,” Hudson agreed. “There’s no real limit to the types of missions we run, either. We’ve protected important people, settled arguments within clans or among them, and even hashed some things out between conclaves themselves. I have to say that when we started the D.C. unit with Drake, I didn’t think we’d be that busy. The next thing I knew, we were flying all over the country.”
“And now there will be one more part of the country that’s taken care of,” Gabe added. He didn’t know this city or its people, but he liked the idea of protecting them. “That all sounds good to me. What do we do first?”
“First, we find a place to use for headquarters. We can’t do much of anything unless there’s a building to work out of. Hudson here is in charge of all our communications equipment, and we’ll need a place to put it.”
Now Gabe knew why the blonde man looked familiar. “You’re not Hudson Taylor of Taylor Communications, are you?” He’d heard a lot about the telecom corporation in the news and all the massive efforts its wealthy owner was making to ensure connectivity throughout the entire world. He was rumored to be an absolute genius when it came to the latest innovations in the tech industry.
“For better or worse,” Hudson said with a smile. “I’m excited to show you everything we’ve already established with the other units. I’ll be sure to have everything set up so we can have remote meetings among all the units if necessary.”
“Great. So we’ll need space for meetings. What else are we looking for in a headquarters building?”
“It’s always tricky finding just the right place. We want something big enough to house not only a meeting space, but enough living quarters for everyone involved. Some of the team members might choose to stay in their own housing, but I think it’s important that we have enough space in case anything disastrous should happen. In Dallas, we managed to find a place that had been some sort of showroom. There was a lot of empty space that I could convert and use the way we needed to. Something like that would be ideal.”
“And I imagine it needs to blend in with the surroundings,” Gabe added.
Hudson nodded. “Absolutely. There will be four of you, so we know we need at least that many apartments within the HQ building. The new comm officer will need to work closely with Hudson, and our med sergeant can do all the exams since Drake can’t be here. That just leaves Amar and Jude. We don’t have any information about your immediate families yet, though.”
Gabe understood what they