“I’m walking in there alone,” she informed him, her voice clipped. “You can watch or you can go home. Follow me and when you do go home, you’ll be returning without me.”
Slapping the e-pad on his thigh with enough force to draw an irritated growl from his throat, she stared back at him demandingly.
Chelsea knew how to talk to people, he knew that. More important, she knew how to get them talking, how to get information that even those she was talking to didn’t realize was pertinent.
Detectives tended to give Cullen only what they thought he wanted, just as he gave them.
But letting her go in there alone was grating on his instincts like nails over a chalkboard.
“Do you have any idea how much I’ll worry?” He tried to make her understand his need to make certain she wasn’t harmed.
Her anger eased, but the scent of resigned acceptance replaced it.
“Do you know I worried when you were in the field?” she asked him then, staring back at him as the soft scent of remembered fear reached his nostrils. “But I remained at the office, where you said you needed me. Now I’m telling you, you go in there with me and there’s not a chance in hell I’m going to get anyone to talk to me.”
In that moment he knew he’d lost this argument.
A grimace tightened his jaw further.
“Stop grinding your teeth,” she advised him with a little flip of her hand. “Before you crack a molar.”
Pushing the glasses back over her eyes, she left the vehicle, slammed the door behind her and jogged across the street.
Alone.
And he hated it.
CHAPTER 16
From Graeme’s Journal
The Recessed Primal Breed
The Primal, once active, will never rest, will never sleep, unless his mate is close enough to touch . . . Only then is she close enough to always protect.
Chelsea
tried to assure herself that she was handling the situation with Cullen the best way possible. After all, if they were going to have any peace in everyday life after the danger was over, then she needed to establish her independence early in the game.
Cullen had no idea how much she would have preferred to have him at her back as she jogged across the street and into the police department. Not to mention being enclosed in the elevator with several unknown men. But if she let herself think about the danger she was in, then the fear would creep in. A fear that would leave her in the shower shaking from the inside out again. So she didn’t let herself think about it, didn’t let herself consider it.
She did what she’d done so many other times as Cullen’s assistant and used her friendship with the officers and detectives she knew to get the information she needed.
And everyone was willing to talk to her once they realized she was there.
The detectives for the most part were friends of the family. A few she’d actually grown up with and been friends with most of her life.
The news that the only surviving assailant, Hector Morales, had been killed while in police custody shocked her when Cullen had told her about it. To get to Morales it had to have been an inside job. Someone at the department either had helped the murderer or committed the act themselves.
And she couldn’t imagine any of the detectives or officers she knew actually killing a prisoner. She suspected several were on Cerves’s payroll. That suspicion was even stronger after talking to them. She didn’t get the sense they were involved in killing the prisoner, though.
She’d been there over two hours, the sunglasses hanging from the front of her blouse rather than on top of her head. A few of the braver officers actually copped a look at her breasts. She could just imagine Cullen growling each time it happened.
Unfortunately there weren’t many details to be found on Morales’s death. It happened sometime after three in the morning. The guard on duty at the security cameras reported a technical problem when the screens filled with static, and when the cameras came back up minutes later, Morales was dead.
He’d had no visitors, made no calls, hadn’t had a cell mate and no one had seemed overtly interested in him other than their amazement that Chelsea had been the intended victim. Though he might have scuffled with a few of the officers at some point. Officers who didn’t appreciate the fact that Chelsea had been targeted.
“I don’t know what to say, Chelsea.” Dylan Rowe pushed his fingers through his short black hair, disgust glittering in his dark eyes.