Free Damnation: Reckless Desires (Blue Moon Saloon Book 1) by Anna Lowe Page B

door, and locked everything for the night. Checked them twice before going back to the bar to finish up there.
    And on it went, the two of them dancing around the silence that hung between them. They were champs at awkward avoidance by now. Why not keep it up?
    When the phone rang, they both jumped and stared. Eventually, Simon picked it up.
    “Hello?” he barked.
    “Simon?” came the voice at the end of the line.
    Not a rogue. A familiar voice. “Kyle?”
    “Listen, can you come out and help?” The urgency in Kyle’s voice made him stand straighter. Kyle Williams, wolf shifter and Arizona state cop. Twin Moon pack’s inside man in local law enforcement.
    “What’s up?”
    Jessica cocked her head, listening.
    “You got that she-wolf with you?” Kyle asked.
    Every nerve in his body went on red alert. Jess had heard, too; he saw her hands go white around the mop handle.
    “Simon!” Kyle half-shouted.
    “Yes,” he admitted, locking eyes with Jess. If they could trust anyone, they could trust Kyle.
    “Good. Bring her. We need every nose we can get.”



Chapter Eleven

    “Which one is Kyle?” Jess asked, sliding out of Simon’s car, still thinking about everything Simon had said.
    Please. Just sit. Listen…
    I never knew how to explain…
    Second son is second best…
    What hell had he been living in all these years?
    “Tall guy, spiky hair. Cop uniform.” Simon pointed to a handful of people huddled in the headlights of a vehicle in the state park lot, but his shoulders still had that uncharacteristic slump.
    Stupid. I was so fucking stupid…
    God, how long had he been beating himself up over what he’d had to do?
    She stopped dead in her tracks and looked up, sniffing. Was that smoke in the air?
    Her nostrils flared. Definitely smoke. But with the breeze blowing from behind her, it was hard to ascertain how near or how far the fire was. How big.
    She shuddered and rubbed her hands over her arms.
    Simon noticed, too; he tilted his chin up to sniff. But his eyes were intent on the people ahead. “Come on. Kyle wouldn’t have called if it wasn’t important.”
    “Cop?” she asked nervously. There were good cops, and there were bad cops. “Why does he need us? Why does he need me?”
    Simon put a hand on her shoulder, and damn it, her wolf calmed right down. The beast had been sniffing and yowling for him on the twenty-minute drive out of town. She glanced up and cursed the three-quarter full moon for the tenth time that evening. No wonder her wolf was so close to the surface tonight. And it would only get worse in the coming days as the moon grew fuller.
    “He’s one of us,” Simon whispered.
    A shifter? She didn’t dare ask. Didn’t need to once they’d gotten close enough for her to clearly identify the one shifter by his telltale scent. No human would ever pick up on it, but a fellow wolf sure could. Kyle was tall, with spiky hair, just as Simon had said, and his brow was furrowed in deep rows. He nodded at her and Simon in a quiet greeting.
    “The child was last seen in Sunrise Campground five hours ago,” a uniformed woman said.
    Jessica’s mind exploded with alarms. A child? Lost?
    That’s when she heard the sobbing coming from the right. A woman was hunched at a picnic table, surrounded by two or three others trying to console her. “My baby! Oh my God! Laurel!” She rocked back and forth, crying into her hands.
    The police went on with their brief, the very picture of cool and calm. Their brows were furrowed, though, their jaws tense.
    “Which means,” the female officer said, “the girl could be anywhere within this radius.” She drew a red circle on a map spread on the hood of a car.
    “We’ve got state police searching this quadrant.” Kyle’s hand waved over the map. “And a couple of National Guard volunteers over here.”
    “Oh God, oh God…” the mother wailed in the background. The sound tore the edges of Jessica’s heart.
    “Under no circumstances are you