Free Unleashed by Crystal Jordan Page B

I can only control so much, and in the end, there was always someone I answered to, always someone yanking on my leash and calling the shots. I controlled myself and my part of an operation, everything else was out of my hands.”
    Seizing on the chance to talk about something besides himself, he faced Kienan. “And you were okay with that?”
    â€œI didn’t have a choice. That was what I did.” The wolf shrugged. “It’s who I am. Who I was. ”
    â€œThen who are you now?”
    Kienan sighed, shook his head. “I’m trying to find that out. I didn’t . . . I don’t know how to be anything else.”
    â€œGood luck figuring it out.”
    â€œThanks.” A rueful smile flickered on and off his lean face.
    Quill wanted to know more. Perhaps it was sheer feline curiosity, but he’d never met a man who affected him this way, who intrigued him for reasons that had nothing to do with business. So he asked again, “How long are you going to be here?”
    That gray gaze grew shuttered. If he was difficult to read normally, it was impossible now. “Here in Tail? Not long. Here in town? Like I said before, I’m not sure. I hadn’t planned beyond stopping to see my cousin.”
    Quill cocked his head. “While you’re in New Chicago, why don’t you let me show you the town?”
    â€œI’d like that.”
    Well, this was a first. A lover he actually wanted to spend time around, who wanted to spend time around him. With Gea, that street went only one way. Which was how Quill liked it, of course. Kienan was just a temporary distraction until he left. Nothing was any different than it usually was. Quill would get back to his business and his solitary life soon enough. He would end it when he decided it was over, as he did with all his affairs.
    Â 
    Gea shrugged out of her pack as she jogged up the stairs to her flat. Lorelei had had one of her jades deliver the bag the day after she’d left it in Kienan’s room. Nothing had been missing from the bag, though there had been a note from the wolf requesting that she contact him. She’d ignore that, as well as the two vidmessages Quill had left for her. A week later, and her willpower was still holding. Barely, but it was holding. She took one day at a time.
    Flashing her ident card at the panel beside the door, she let herself in and dropped her bag on her desk. Her home was also her office. She was on the second floor of a downtown skyrise, a few blocks from the old piers that jutted out over Lake Michigan. The rear of the flat held her bedroom and kitchen, and the front room served as her workspace, with a large antique wood desk that was the only thing her father had ever given her.
    After a trip to the wash closet and then the kitchen to get a bite to eat, she sat behind the desk and pulled her bag toward her, digging out her vidcam. She interfaced it with her home system and downlinked the vidpics she’d taken for one of her clients. A cheating spouse, which was her bread and butter. Another case closed. Her client should be satisfied, if not entirely pleased to be proved correct about his wife’s dalliances. But that was how her business went. Not all news was good news, but being right offered its own vindication.
    She sat back in her kleather chair, tapping her fingers against the desktop. Her newest case was the one troubling her, namely, the information she wasn’t given. A bit of digging in the last week had confirmed that Breck had owned the Gutenberg that went missing. The bible had been scheduled to go on auction for charity just before Tam disappeared. The auction had been canceled suddenly, and rumors had gone around that it was because the Gutenberg was stolen. However, her client had never reported it to the police nor had he filed an insurance claim.
    While the vidpics downlinked, she accessed her messages from her palmtop. She grinned at the first