His Burning Heart: Real Men of Wildridge Read online

  His Burning Heart

  Real Men of Wildridge

  Celia Kyle

  Marina Maddix

  Contents

  Blurb

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  About the Authors

  Blurb

  When opposites attract, worlds collide...

  She wants him to chant 'ohm'. He just wants her to scream his name...

  As a card-carrying tight-ass, Dyrk Fortis is a dragon shifter who likes things just so in his life. Not that he has much of one, considering he's married to his job as a specialist at Wildridge Security. So, why can't he stop thinking about the firm's curvy, free-spirited receptionist, Tessa Sinclair, and her strangely enchanting—and frustrating—bohemian ways?

  For Tessa, life is one big magic carpet ride full of wonder and adventure. Her passion for spirituality and all things metaphysical lead her to help others, including poor Dyrk. If he'd just loosen up a bit, maybe he'd have more luck solving his latest case. Blocked chakras are no joke, and she's certain that one yoga session would do the trick.

  Despite his misgivings, Dyrk discovers Tessa's techniques actually seem to work when he blows open a case in a way none of them expected. The only trouble is that the case in question might just get the entire Wildridge team blown up! Can the star-crossed lovers survive long enough to find their own happily ever after?

  His Burning Heart is the thrilling conclusion to the Real Men of Wildridge series!

  Chapter One

  What a glorious morning! The birds were singing, the sky was a faultless blue, and even the handful of high, puffy clouds looked so perfect they might have been painted by a master. Just another blissful day in Los Angeles, as far as Tessa Sinclair was concerned.

  She could have stayed outside all day, just watching the birds and planes’ vapor trails slash across the sky, but a quick glance at her watch reminded her she was two minutes away from being late for her job as the receptionist at Wildridge Security. Not that time really held much meaning for her. If anything, it was a floppy, bendy concept rather than a hard-and-fast, rigid rule, as most people seemed to think.

  The way Tessa saw it, life was entirely too short to fixate on something like being early or late. Everyone else seemed to be in such a dang hurry to live their lives, when she preferred to stop and smell the roses…and lilacs and jasmine and whatever else caught her fancy. Sometimes she even held full-on conversations with them, if the moment was right.

  Luckily, no one had planted flowers in the parking lot, so she managed to push through the outer doors of Wildridge at the exact stroke of eight. No one could complain about that, yet she still felt Dyrk Fortis’s glare heating her skin as she set her voluminous purse on her desk.

  As far as Dyrk was concerned, if a person wasn’t ten minutes early, they were late. To say he was wound tightly would be a gross understatement, but despite her desire for her co-workers to like her, Tessa had no intention of allowing his sour expression to dampen her mood.

  Fine, maybe it knocked her down a half-notch, but that was it. Nothing he said or did would ruin her delicious state of mind. Mostly. As zen as she was, she was still human and wanted to be accepted.

  Sadly, Dyrk clearly didn’t subscribe to her point of view on…well, just about anything. They were polar opposites in almost every way. Every sigh, each eye roll, spoke of exactly what he thought of her and her ideas. He considered her to be just another flighty, ditzy, hippie human with her head in the clouds. While he wasn’t entirely wrong, there certainly was more to Tessa than what a tight-ass like Dyrk could see. Hopefully one day he would see that for himself. In the meantime, she would wait him out.

  Everything in its own time, she often said. Though she sure wished it would happen already.

  Honestly, Tessa thought she’d be a wonderful influence on Dyrk. He was so tightly wound he might explode. If she could just talk him into a little light meditation or maybe a yoga session, he’d see the light and understand. Maybe not the meaning of life, but at least the value of relaxing a bit. As the one of the smartest people she’d ever met, he spouted lots of jargon and played up his Type A-intensity, but Tessa knew there was a big, loving heart inside that broad chest of his, just waiting to grow. The least she could do was practice patience with him.

  It didn’t hurt that he was quite nice to look at…

  Ignoring his pointed look, Tessa sat at her desk and smiled at its ordered chaos. No one else at Wildridge could possibly find anything on her desk, but she knew exactly where everything lived. Sometimes it took a minute to find, but that was life. No biggie.

  The door to the offices opened and Grandma Alice strolled through, holding a big cardboard box in her arms. Tessa hurried to help her grandmother, but when she caught sight of the squirming kittens inside, crawling all over each other and mewing adorably, she squealed.

  “Good morning,” Grandma Alice said with a chuckle.

  “I thought you didn’t have any kittens in stock right now,” Tessa said as she lifted a grey and white tuxedo from the box and snuggled it under her chin.

  “I don’t. Or didn’t. Found these guys on my doorstep this morning and I thought I’d offer them up to my favorite security team before I put them up for sale.”

  “Someone just left a box of cats at your door?” Elektra Mico—soon to be Elektra Magna—said as she looked over Tessa’s shoulder, keeping a respectful distance from the kittens. Even Dyrk stood to get a better look.

  Grandma Alice sighed heavily as she set the box on the floor. “I wish I could say it was the first time.”

  Before she’d even finished speaking, each and every kitten in the box scampered over the edge and darted off in different directions. Three bolted directly toward Dyrk, climbing his legs like they were tree trunks.

  “Dammit!” he groused, trying to gently shake them off, but their razor-sharp claws held like Velcro.

  Naturally, they thought he was playing, climbing higher and higher until he probably thought they were trying to neuter him. At that point, he tried brushing them away, but they just batted back at his hand. Tessa, Grandma Alice, and Elektra couldn’t help but laugh at the ridiculous sight of straitlaced Dyrk trying to dislodge a trio of frisky kitties from his expensive suit trousers.

  “A little help, please!” he called out, drawing their boss from his office.

  Charlie Volant and Grandma Alice had recently come out as a couple, though Tessa had suspected all along. When he rushed over to kiss Grandma Alice’s cheek, even before noticing the kittens, Tessa’s heart nearly exploded from sheer happiness. If anyone deserved to find love, it was Grandma Alice. And Charlie, for that matter.

  It took them a few minutes, but they finally managed to wrangle the tiny, squirmy kittens back into the box, working together like a well-oiled machine. Once they were all contained, Charlie turned to the rest of the team.

  “One minute,” he called before brushing a quick goodbye kiss on Grandma Alice’s cheek and heading for the conference room.

  Tessa gave her grandmother a wave as she went to gather up what she needed for the meeting. Laptop, not a notepad, she reminded herself. Actually, she would have preferred simply remembering what happened in the meeting, but for whatever reason, Charlie had insisted she take real-time notes. No biggie.

  Everyone else had filtered down the hall to the conference room by the time Tessa was ready, but Dyrk’s irritated mumbles stoppe
d her.

  “Freaking cat hair,” he moaned, trying to brush the fur from his slacks. “How the hell do such tiny creatures shed so damn much?”

  When he grabbed his trusty lint roller, she smiled and moved to join the rest of the team, but the look of panic in his eyes stopped her again. He’d run the thing along one half of one thigh and then pulled the strip of sticky paper off the roller—only to find it was the last one! Pure, unadulterated panic flooded his handsome face.

  For the first time since she’d started working there, Dyrk rushed up to her with a pleading expression. “Do you have a lint roller?”

  He sounded desperate, and she could understand why. For Tessa, kitten fur all over her clothes brought smiles, but not so much for Dyrk. She didn’t have to understand his discomfort to honor it.

  “Um, I’m not sure,” she said, knowing full well she’d never owned a lint roller in her life. But she didn’t want to let him down, especially when he’d come to her for help for a change.

  Dropping back into her chair, she rifled through the mess of paperwork, files, and sticky notes that littered her desk. She wanted to put on a good show, after all, despite Dyrk’s growing impatience. He probably hated that her desk was such a free-for-all, considering how neat and tidy his was. Finally, she turned a worried look on him.

  “I’m really sorry, but I can’t find one.”

  Instead of growing irritated, Dyrk simply seemed panicked. Could he possibly be that upset about some cat hair? It wasn’t her place to question the why of his anxiety, just to do her best to alleviate it.

  “Wait!” she cried as he started to move away. She pulled a roll of strapping tape from a desk drawer, wound a gob of it around her hand, and began patting down his legs with it.

  Wherever she saw kitten hair, her hand followed. From his ankle, all the way up his ridiculously cut thigh, she patted him down, only vaguely wondering why he stiffened at her touch. But she was too focused on her task to worry about that, though the firmness of his well-defined muscles certainly didn’t escape her notice. Tingles started zipping through her system as her movements smoothed out and slowed down so she could feel every ridge, every ripple.

  “That’s enough!” he finally burst out, turning around and rushing toward the conference room.

  Tessa watched him walk away, more than a little disappointed, before gathering up her laptop and mumbling under her breath. “Not for me.”

  * * *

  Dyrk’s cheeks burned faintly as his crisp, uniform strides carried him to the conference room. He knew Tessa meant well, but the tension that had erupted between his legs had hit him out of nowhere when she touched him. He certainly didn’t need a sexual harassment suit brought against him. Thankfully, the rest of the team were embroiled in a conversation about the ongoing, collaborative investigation with the Shifter Bureau of Investigation, so they didn’t notice how flustered he was when he entered the room.

  To cover for his lateness—if you weren’t early, you were late—he adopted his usual habits. The same stiff nod at Charlie, straightening his tie until it was just so, sitting in his usual seat. He practically did it on autopilot, even though nothing felt normal at the moment.

  He wasn’t used to having his personal space invaded, much less by that beautiful ball of sunshine Charlie had hired as the receptionist. Dyrk had taken one look at her and just knew he would have deal with a long string of forgotten messages and mis-scheduled appointments until she decided to bail so she could go to Burning Man.

  To his eternal surprise, she’d proven him wrong, at least so far. Her messages might have been overly wordy and circuitous, but he always got them. Not once had someone shown up for an appointment he wasn’t aware of. And despite her consistent tardiness, she was a hard worker and seemed all too eager to please the rest of the team.

  The image of her warm hand running up his leg popped into his head unbidden—and unwelcome.

  “Dyrk?”

  He jumped at the sound of his name, snapping him out of his trance. The entire Wildridge team sat around the table watching him with curiosity.

  “Huh? What?” he stammered.

  “Got kittens on the brain?” Thrett Lacerta asked with a mischievous wink.

  Elektra nudged Thrett with her elbow. “Give him a minute for the caffeine to kick in. He’s been burning the candle at both ends lately.”

  “Lately?” Elektra’s mate, Grizz said pointedly. He’d often told Dyrk he needed to take a vacation, or at the very least, a day off.

  “We were just giving updates on the investigation,” Ragan DeFever explained helpfully. As the firm’s newest specialist, Ragan still had that new-job excitement.

  “You know,” Thrett added, “the one where you were assigned to the joint task force with the SBI to figure out what’s up with these crazy-dangerous shifters and then got pulled off it before you even started?”

  Dyrk’s teeth felt like they might be ground to dust as he clenched his jaw. He’d been so honored when Charlie had selected him to join the task force, only to have the rug pulled out from under him with one silly call from Wyntir Ignis. The firm’s personal security specialist was on vacation Down Under with her new mate, Stark Bradford, when her boyfriend had some trouble using one of his credit cards. Naturally, Charlie had made it Dyrk’s only priority to figure out what happened.

  As if he didn’t know instantly. A too-rich-for-his-own-good Hollywood leading man had blown through is money and was too embarrassed to admit it to his new lady. Seemed pretty obvious to him, but Charlie was the cautious sort. It didn’t do any good to argue with him, even when he was wrong.

  “I asked for an update on Mr. Bradford’s financial issues,” his boss said tersely. “I’d hate for his and Wyntir’s vacation to be ruined because all of his credit cards have been canceled.”

  Dyrk thought it was tricky to focus on some celebrity’s money problems when they were in the middle of investigating a prisoner experimentation program. One that churned stunningly powerful shifters out of the Los Angeles prison system. These shifters could do things like stun dragons—or worse.

  But he kept that thought to himself.

  “Unfortunately, I don’t have much of an update to give. I haven’t been able to access Stark’s financial accounts.”

  “Can’t you just call Wyntir?” Ragan asked.

  “As it turns out, the middle of the Tasman Sea doesn’t have terrific cell phone reception,” he answered coolly. “They were boarding a yacht for a cruise around Tasmania when she called me. I have no idea how long she’s going to be out either.”

  “Jealous,” Elektra muttered.

  Dyrk shrugged. “My first choice of vacation spots would be Glastonbury, England.”

  Tessa gasped softly. “Me too!”

  Dyrk felt a wave of warm tingles run through his body at the sound of her voice. He hadn’t even noticed her come in, but he suddenly remembered that thick, rusty brown hair so close to him, and the faint scent of patchouli and kombucha. He blinked in surprise at her admission.

  “You’re a fan of the King Arthur legend too?”

  “Not in the slightest,” she said. “I have no interest in the colonizing traditions of the British patriarchy, but I would kill to go the Glastonbury performing arts festival!”

  And there it was.

  “Anyway…” he said, using every ounce of self-control he possessed to not roll his eyes. “I’m stalled.”

  As much as he hoped Charlie would let him off the hook and put him back on the task force, Dyrk knew it was a long shot. And he was right.

  “What information do you need?”

  “Not information, but permission. To access his accounts, I need verbal verification from him, at the very least. He might have hired us, but I can’t just pop open his vaults and snoop around. I don’t think there’s a celebrity on the planet who’d trust anyone that much.”

  “Isn’t that what financial managers do?” Tessa asked quietly, pausing her tip-tap typing f
or a moment to smile up at him. Charlie spoke up before Dyrk could decide whether he should return the smile.

  “Yes, you mentioned a financial manager in one of your reports,” Charlie said.

  “Xavier Manchester,” he said with a nod. “I’ve called several times. Seems he’s also on vacation.”

  Elektra leaned forward, smelling a clue. “Seriously? That can’t be a coincidence.”

  “Relax,” Dyrk said. “Assuming Stark Bradford is his biggest client—or his only client—it makes sense he’d take his vacation at the same time. It’s not like Stark’s going to be doing anything with his money right now except spending it.”

  “So, your hands are tied.” Charlie stroked his chin, deep in thought.

  “Legally speaking.”

  “What about illegally speaking?” Ragan asked with a wickedly quirked eyebrow. “We could try to hack his accounts.”

  While Dyrk’s specialty was anything to do with banking or money, Ragan’s was cybersecurity.

  “Hack our own client?” Grizz asked with a frown.

  “It’s only a problem if he presses charges,” Ragan said with wide eyes. “Do we think he’d mind, under the circumstances?”

  “From the worry in Wyntir’s voice, I’d say he would want us do whatever it takes to figure this out before they hit port again. Good idea, Ragan. Charlie, what do you think?”

  Charlie thought hard for a long moment before nodding. “I agree. Ragan, Dyrk, you two work together and see what you can find out.”

  Chapter Two

  Dyrk twirled a pen in his fingers as he sat across from Ragan’s desk with his own laptop and work materials unpacked nearby. He peered up at what looked like an old sci-fi movie poster hanging on the cubicle wall behind his fellow agent.