Free Trouble Bruin by Rebekah Blue Page A

that she barely noticed her stomach lurching at the change in altitude.
    She could probably persuade Dr. Atkins that she didn’t know his plans…because she didn’t. Not in detail. And she desperately needed to. Would she be given the access she’d need? Would she be capable of decoding the dense jargon if she was? Professor Stanhope tended to assume that everyone else was just as brilliant as he was, so most of his documents took a PhD and six months of study to decipher. She didn’t have that kind of time.
    And that was her bigger problem. Judging by the speed with which Art had gone from tossing feral wolves around to being unable to support his own weight, she didn’t have much time at all. Maybe not enough. He might already be past the point where Starweed was enough to save him.
    She forced down her worries. She couldn’t think like that.
    Professor Stanhope was absorbed in his papers. Dr. Atkins was involved in some kind of loud, flamboyant conference call, and was studiously not looking at Charlie. She glanced across at the burly man sitting beside her. She wondered if she was supposed to confide in him, weep on his shoulder about everything she’d learned about Dr. Atkins’ megalomaniac streak so the CEO could shout “Aha!” and reveal that he’d been listening all along. If so, they should have picked a potential confidant who did a better impression of a human being.
    She nudged him with her elbow. “You can relax, you know,” she said. “I’m reasonably unlikely to leap out of the window.”
    He didn’t even spare her a glance, just kept staring straight ahead. “I’m here for your own protection, ma’am.”
    “Well,” she conceded, “I can be kind of a klutz. I guess it’s always possible I might fall out.”
    He unfolded his arms and refolded them the other way. The size of his biceps and his broad barrel chest made it an awkward maneuver. Was that the twitch of a smile at the corner of his mouth?
    She sighed. “Come on,” she said. “In the last few days I’ve crashed a plane, been attacked by werewolves and completely messed up my moisturizer regimen. You’re my first contact with civilization. At least make a little small-talk.”
    And to her surprise, he did. His name was Gary, he was an ex-cop, and he made the world’s best eggplant parm, though he’d never had any luck growing his own. Too many garden pests.
    Charlie was explaining that slugs and snails were total party animals and could easily be trapped in a glass of beer, when the sprawling, shiny, glass-and-chrome Dynamic Earth facility came into view. The buildings spun beneath them as the helicopter circled, and Charlie had the sensation of a gravitational vortex sucking her down.
    They landed with the gentlest of bumps, the chopper’s skids kissing the ground. It was certainly a stark contrast to the last landing she’d made. And yet, when she unbuckled her seatbelt and climbed out, feeling the familiar asphalt beneath the soles of her shoes, their textbook-perfect landing at a corporate facility felt a great deal more dangerous than her headlong crash into lawless shifter territory.
    Gary escorted her into the building, despite the fact that she knew the way, and she signed in at the front desk. A guy who could have been Gary’s clone waved a metal-detector rod over her to check for any weapons. It beeped when it passed over the underwire in her bra. The guard opened his mouth, but Charlie skewered him with a look that said, without a word being spoken, that he would not believe how rough the last few days had been, and how happy she’d be to share the pain. Gary gave the other guy the nod, and he waved them through.
    The first step on her journey, to her profound relief, was a shower room. The staff here worked with all sorts of chemicals and radioactive materials, so the facility was set up with decontamination showers, isolation rooms for staff exposed to contagious pathogens – even a decompression chamber.