His Burning Heart: Real Men of Wildridge Read online

  “I know you think I’m grasping at straws, but I swear I’m not talking out of my ass, Charlie. It’s hard to explain, but something clicked inside me last night, and I’m not going to give up unless you directly order me to. I know all of this is part of something much, much bigger. I just don’t know how. Yet.”

  Charlie gave him a pitying look as Dyrk ran a hand through his hair and sighed.

  “I dunno, maybe it was the meditation or the yoga. Or even the damn crystals. Whatever it was, Tessa’s techniques unlocked something inside of me and I can’t—I won’t—let this go.”

  Charlie’s eyes had narrowed again, but not out of anger this time. He cocked his head to one side and set his mug down with a thunk.

  “Crystals?”

  * * *

  Tessa’s thoughts spiraled out of control as she sat at her desk and put her purse away. For the first time in ages, something was off-kilter in her natural balance. Like someone had added a weight to one side of her soul and it made her stumble. Of course, this was all wrapped up inside her mind, and not a single living soul could have looked at Tessa and noticed anything out of the ordinary. From the exterior, she looked just as blissed out and chill as ever. But on the inside? That was a different story.

  First of all, she was dead tired, and it was for a very strange reason, at least by her standards. She had barely slept last night. Though, to be fair, the reason for her tossing and turning was not wholly unpleasant. She’d had no fewer than three separate sexy dreams, none of which had resulted in…satisfaction. But they were still enjoyable, mostly because all three of them involved Dyrk.

  This was how Tessa knew they had connected on a more spiritual level. Even though he had run her out of his apartment in a hurry, the deed had been done. A connection had been established. Tessa had felt it in his kiss.

  She still reeled from that damn kiss. She couldn’t stop imagining different scenarios that could have played out if he had been chill enough to allow her to stay longer. Tessa pictured him stripping off his shirt, letting her run her fingertips up and down his sides, his strong chest, his biceps…

  Ugh, she was almost drooling at her desk. She wanted him so badly, and she couldn’t help but wonder what was going on behind the closed door of Charlie’s office. She could hear him in there, but dang if she could make out what they were talking about. She kept glancing at the door as though she had x-ray vision or something.

  And there it was again—the vision of climbing on top of Dyrk in her dream, straddling him and wrapping her arms around him as they kissed passionately. Her body burning with desire as they touched one another, connecting on a deeper level than either of them anticipated. Her delicious thoughts were interrupted when her office phone buzzed loudly.

  “Tessa, would you mind coming in here?” Charlie said and then clicked off before she could reply.

  Uh oh. What if fraternizing with one of the specialists was against the rules? As the receptionist, she was expected to keep things friendly but formal. Kissing Dyrk on his sofa last night certainly was friendly, but it didn’t count as formal. Maybe she’d crossed a line from which she would never return, and now Charlie knew.

  Her nerves were on edge, so she took a few seconds to center herself with a few deep breaths before hurrying into Charlie’s office. She tried not to look worried, but she’d never been very good at hiding her feelings.

  Charlie sat at his desk with his hands steepled in front of him. Dyrk stood off to the side, leaning against the wall and looking as sexy as ever.

  “Good morning,” Charlie welcomed her.

  “Morning. What’s up?”

  “Crystals,” he answered. “I need you to tell me about those crystals you used on Dyrk.”

  Relieved she wasn’t in trouble, her shoulders relaxed a little and she smiled. “Gladly! I personally hand-selected each one of my crystals for their unique healing and clarifying properties. I go through a lot of internal work to decide on which stone I should add to my collection. As you probably know, it’s very important to make sure your crystals present a united front because if they have disagreeable attributes? I mean, I probably don’t have to explain to you guys how detrimental that could be.”

  “Sure,” Charlie said, but she wasn’t certain if he was being sincere or just placating her. “Do you have them with you?”

  “Of course, I do!” She jumped up and ran to her desk to retrieve the little bag of stones. When she returned, she carefully emptied the contents of the bag onto Charlie’s desk.

  To her surprise and elation, Charlie’s eyes lit up as he looked them over. He seemed especially intrigued by the little blue ones. He picked every single one out of the pile and set them aside.

  “Tell me, Tessa. Where did you find these blue ones?”

  “From a website I’ve used in the past. I purchased those when I started working here, actually.”

  Charlie frowned. “Why?”

  She shrugged, a little embarrassed at her own gullibility. Of course, she liked to think of it as her trusting nature, but whatever. “The site said they’re good for dragons.”

  Charlie stared at her for a moment—a long, oddly silent moment—like he was thinking something over. Then he seemed to come back to himself and nodded curtly.

  Without a word, he stood and walked out of the office, leaving Tessa and Dyrk to exchange dubious glances before following him. He walked directly to Thrett’s desk.

  “Morning, Charlie,” Thrett said with a broad smile. “What can I do for you?”

  “Do me a favor and pull the security footage from Stark’s house the day Wyntir saw Xavier Manchester.”

  “Sure. Let me just track it down.”

  As Thrett navigated his many security footage files and narrowed it down to the exact one Charlie wanted, Tessa and Dyrk sidled up behind him to watch over his shoulder with Charlie. Finally, he found the file and opened it to fill the entire screen.

  The angle was from above Stark’s front door, looking out onto the driveway. A tall older man entered the frame, but they could only see his back. Tessa didn’t really know who this Xavier guy was or why they wanted to see him, but it looked like a lost cause. As the man climbed into his fancy car, he paused and turned back to face the house for a moment. Then he drove off.

  “Zoom in,” Charlie said, his icy voice sending chills down Tessa’s spine.

  Thrett scrolled back until the man was looking at the camera again and then enlarged the image until Xavier’s face filled the screen. Oddly, he seemed to be smiling directly into the camera. His expression gave her the willies and she shuddered in response.

  She wasn’t the only one, either. Charlie flat out blanched like he’d seen a ghost. He leaned in until his nose was practically smashed against the screen and examined the image.

  “A little older,” he muttered to himself, “a bit fuller. But that’s him.”

  He straightened but his frame was as stiff as steel. Something was troubling him a great deal.

  “We’re in trouble,” he said so quietly they all stopped breathing to hear him. “Big trouble.”

  “What’s the problem?” Grizz asked, joining the little group, with Elektra hot on his heels.

  Charlie ignored the question and turned to Dyrk. “I owe you an apology.”

  “You do?”

  “You were right.”

  “I was?”

  Charlie nodded gravely. “The cases are absolutely connected, just like you insisted. And now we know who has been funding the experiments on shifter inmates. Even better, we know how he’s been funding them.”

  Elektra leaned in to get a better look at Xavier’s smirking face. “Who the hell is this asshole anyway?”

  Charlie’s words gave Tessa goosebumps. “A dead man.”

  Dyrk startled them all by letting out a very un-Dyrk-like whoop. “Yes! Did you hear that?” he asked, turning to Tessa. “And you helped me figure it out with those damn pebbles!”

  Without warning, he pul
led her into his arms and planted a deeply passionate kiss on her. The rest of the world evaporated as she snaked her arms around his neck and gave back as good as she got. Someone cleared their throat pointedly, and Dyrk finally released Tessa, though her knees felt like they might buckle out from under her. She pressed her fingers to her lips and couldn’t stop herself from grinning like a madwoman, even as Elektra smirked at them.

  “So, this is a thing now?” she asked.

  Dyrk’s gaze never wavered from Tessa’s. “You bet your ass it is!”

  Chapter Six

  A short time later, the entire Wildridge team, except for Wyntir, had convened in the conference room. Charlie stood at the head of the table with Tessa next to him ready to take notes. She had a feeling she’d be typing out a monologue this time, though.

  Dyrk took the seat next to her, giving her hand a quick squeeze. Heat rolled off him, no doubt from his excitement at being proven right about his theory that all of these recent cases were connected. But his high spirits were affecting her in a less than professional way.

  There was no other way to describe it, but Tessa was hot and bothered. She was restless in her own skin, which was so out of character for a girl who was usually so in tune with her body. But Dyrk was a disturbance in the force, for sure. He made her feel things she had never experienced before and likely never would again. Tessa clutched her bag of crystals and readied herself to type.

  “This is a long story, but it’s an important one,” he began. “It starts quite a long time ago, back when I was still a youth myself.”

  “So, the Jurassic Era?” Thrett teased.

  Charlie took it in stride as everyone chuckled. “Dangerous thing to make fun of a dragon’s age. Anyway, I was young, still in school to become a protector, and I had two very close friends in my class.”

  Tessa waited with bated breath for the reveal. She loved a good story.

  “These two friends were Klent Ellwood—you might know him as The Gunslinger—and the man you know as Xavier Manchester. Of course, that’s not the name I knew him by, but that man’s been dead for a very long time, so we might as well call him by the name he chose. The three of us were virtually inseparable. We had similar aspirations, and we were all inspired by the same sense of justice and curiosity. That eventually led us to make plans to start our own agency together.”

  Charlie paused for effect. No one said a thing, which was just what he wanted. Tension. He was one hell of a storyteller, even in professional settings. Tessa admired that about him.

  “We’d been close friends since we were fledglings, learning about this big, wide world together. Some of it was true, a lot of it not, especially when we were young. One particular legend claimed that a special kind of space dust could enhance a dragon’s powers. Fledglings ate it up, and why not? It was fanciful enough to be intriguing but realistic enough to possibly be true.”

  “As all the best legends are,” Ragan murmured.

  “Exactly. All during our youth, we took great pleasure in hashing out the rumor that a meteorite bearing such dust had crashed to Earth somewhere in the desert between LA and Las Vegas. Countless dragons had searched for it, but it was never found. Naturally, being teenage dragons and overly confident in our abilities, we decided we couldn’t just sit around waiting for someone else to find that goldmine of unlimited power.”

  “You went looking for it,” Tessa breathed, so engrossed in the story she’d completely given up taking notes.

  “We did. How could we not? No obstacle was too great for the likes of us. There was so much to hope for and very little to be afraid of, or so we thought. One quiet weekend we had nothing of note to do. Nothing on our agenda. No overdue work, no test to study for. Just a blank, empty weekend filled with hours to spare. When Xavier suggested we go out on a reconnaissance mission into the desert to hunt for that meteorite, we jumped at the chance.”

  “Even though there was zero evidence suggesting its existence?” Grizz asked dubiously.

  “Oh, like you’ve never gone looking for treasure,” Ragan teased.

  Grizz shrugged. “Maybe as a kid.”

  “Keep in mind this was long before the distraction of smartphones and social media or whatever it is you kids do these days,” Charlie broke in. “We had time and energy to spare. We searched every cracked inch of that desert. It took us two full days of flying a grid search to cover it all.”

  “Two days?” Tessa gasped.

  Charlie gave her a smirk. “Like I said, we had energy to spare back then.”

  “Impressive,” Dyrk murmured.

  “We were about to give up when Xavier finally spotted the damn thing—a blackish-blue lump half-buried in the sand. Klent and I were farther away so he landed ahead of us and then did something we never expected.” He shook his head.

  The room had turned deathly quiet. Only Dyrk had what it took to whisper, “What?”

  “He unleashed the full force of his dragon fire on it.”

  Tessa gasped, not even sure what dragon fire looked like in person, but it sounded dramatic.

  “The resulting explosion knocked Klent and me thousands of feet away from the site. We never even had a chance to react. We simply were blown away. Literally.”

  “Were you hurt?” Tessa asked, worried about Charlie, even though he’d clearly survived.

  Charlie let out a soft huff. “Well, we woke up in the school hospital wing three weeks later, if that’s any clue. I’ll spare you the details of our injuries but suffice to say it took months for us to regain all of our strength and powers. It didn’t help our recovery to learn that no one ever found even a piece of Xavier. Not surprising, perhaps, considering the force of the explosion. Everyone assumed he’d been vaporized.”

  “Which he clearly wasn’t,” Ragan said.

  “I’m getting there, son,” Charlie replied. “Now, where was I? Oh, right. A couple of weeks after we were finally released from the hospital, Klent and I admitted to each other that we felt…different. Inside. It wasn’t an artifact from our injuries. We could tell that much. It didn’t take long to figure out that the blast had imbued us with special powers.”

  “You mean like that bubble thing you did to rescue Grizz and me?” Elektra asked.

  Charlie nodded. “Among others. But we decided then and there to keep our newfound abilities secret. We would tell no one, and we would only ever use them under dire circumstances. The last thing we wanted was to become lab specimens.”

  Tessa couldn’t imagine how terrified young Charlie and young Klent must have been. Not only did they lose their best friend, but they were almost killed themselves. And then to find out they might be looked at as freaks? Her heart hurt for them both.

  “As you can imagine, we were recovering from more than just physical pain. We were dealing with what we assumed was the death of our best friend. I struggled, but Klent took it much worse. He withdrew into himself and eventually became a bit of a loner. He’s never lost his sense of duty, but he also refused to let anyone get too close to him for fear of having to give up another friend.”

  “Charlie, are you sure that was your old friend on the security footage?” Thrett asked. “I mean, a lot of years have passed…”

  “Without a shred of doubt,” Charlie answered firmly.

  Tessa looked around the table and couldn’t understand why everyone looked so grim. “Wait, isn’t this good news? Your friend is still alive!”

  Charlie gave her a soft, sad smile. “I’m afraid my friend died those many years ago, only to be replaced by someone who decidedly is not my friend. If he survived and never came back to us, something must have gone dreadfully wrong out there in the desert.”

  * * *

  Dyrk didn’t like the sound of that, and nobody else in the room seemed very keen either. For several long, uncomfortable moments, everyone chewed on Charlie’s story and the possible implications. Instinctively, Dyrk reached for Tessa under the table. Apparently she’d been reaching for
him at the same moment because their hands met in the middle. That filled him with a sense of security he’d never shared with a woman before.

  So emboldened, he took a bracing breath and spoke in a clear, authoritative voice. “Okay, so we know who were looking for. Now we just need to bring him in.”

  “Easier said than done,” Thrett said, reminding him of how Xavier had essentially vanished himself from the face of the planet.

  “Have you had any luck tracking him so far?” Grizz asked Dyrk. “It sounds like he’s had a lot of time and money on his hands to work on disappearing. I can tell you from experience, that can go a hell of a long way, but it’s not a foolproof advantage.”

  “Here’s what we know so far,” Dyrk’s gaze panned around the room at them all. “With the amount of money he fleeced from Stark Bradford, he’s doing a lot more than just hiding. It’s safe to assume he’s using Stark’s money to fund those prison experiments, if that’s what’s really going on here like we think.”

  “Agreed,” Charlie nodded. “It doesn’t fit the profile of someone who just wants to disappear.”

  “But why?” Tessa asked, making every head in the room turn to her.

  “He’s an evil old dickwad with a lot of money?” Elektra suggested, shrugging her shoulders. “That’s usually all you need in this town.”

  “But he was in the perfect position to just be regular evil,” Tessa pointed out, which Dyrk found adorable but also very true. “He could have moved to Iceland and lived quietly on Stark’s money forever. Right? Why go through all the trouble of experimenting on convicts?”

  “We don’t have a clue, but we need to find out,” Dyrk said.

  “Could be about making more money,” Elektra suggested. “Prisoners are an almost invisible population. It’d be easy for him to get away with that and turn an insane profit with whatever he does with the data he’s farming.”