Burt was staring at the table and running his hands through his hair, looking distraught.

  “Write everything down that happened—the robbery at the hotel, the kidnapping of the minor—in your own words.” Adam gave Burt a pen and paper and sat back against his chair. “Did you want anything to drink?”

  “A beer.”

  “Water? Soda?”

  Burt shook his head and stared at the paper. “If I confess, you’ll state that for the record so I’ll get less jail time?”

  “We’ll let the DA know you were cooperating with us.”

  Burt glanced at the evidence of the robberies and the sketches of him. “She drew them, didn’t she? Sierra Redding? I know that’s what she does for the cops. Yeah, she did them.”

  Then he began to write on the paper.

  Jerome folded his arms as he stood near Adam, watching Burt struggle for the words to put on the paper.

  When Burt had finally finished writing his confession, he pushed the papers at Adam.

  “You need to sign and date them,” Adam said, giving him today’s date and passing them back to him.

  Burt signed and dated them. Adam took the papers and read through them. “Okay, good.” He handed them to Jerome to read.

  He nodded. “This looks good.”

  “Are you sure you don’t have any idea where Phyllis went?” Adam asked.

  Burt shrugged. “Maybe she’s with the guy she has been seeing.”

  “A new guy?” Adam asked, hoping this could be an important new lead.

  “No, one of the original crew. If Dover finds out, he’ll kill ’em both. The guy goes by Vlad the Impaler, Victor Freemont. He likes to bite the women he’s seeing. I’ve seen the bite marks on Phyllis’s neck. And hell, it didn’t take her long to jump into bed with him as soon as Dover went to jail.”

  “Where is Victor?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve just seen them together whenever she was supposed to meet up with me over stuff. That’s all I have.”

  “All right, if that’s it, we’ll be seeing you.”

  Once they learned they couldn’t get anything more out of Burt, he was carted off to jail and Jerome said to Adam, “Man, how do you and Josh do it? My partner and I were talking about how the two of you could convince more suspects to confess than any other detectives on the force could without even threatening them with mayhem or bargaining with them to reduce their sentences.”

  “It’s all in the sweat, reading their body language, knowing when they’re going to fold.” Their scent too. And how beta they were. Burt was definitely a beta, and Adam was the alpha. So was Jerome, but he didn’t realize he was intimidating the hell out of Burt by just standing there. Burt might be afraid to go against Dover, or he might even feel some friendship and loyalty to him, but when his “alpha leader” wasn’t there to protect him, Adam and Jerome had become his alpha leaders.

  “You sure have them pegged. I could learn a thing or two from you in the art of interrogation. And here I thought I knew it all.” Jerome grabbed all the evidence to put back in the evidence room.

  Adam slapped him on the back and headed for the door. “Anytime you want a tip, I can give it to you.”

  “Thanks. Oh, and thanks for coming in last night. My partner wanted me to tell you that since he was the one on call.”

  “No problem. I know if either of you were working on a case, you would want to go in about it.”

  Jerome chuckled. “Hell, on my night off? My wife would give me the boot.”

  Adam knew him better than that. He and his partner would have gone in about their own cases if it meant they might get a break in them.

  Adam headed outside to Sierra’s car and got a call from the auto-body repair shop. It would cost him a couple of thousand dollars to repair the Hummer. Hell. Well, that was another charge that Burt would have to face. Adam pulled off his suitcoat and laid it neatly in the back seat of the car, then drove off.

  When Adam called ahead to tell Sierra he was on his way to pick her up for work, she said, “Well, it’s about time. Though I already did two eyewitness accounts. Tori took me.”

  “Ah, hell, honey.”

  Sierra chuckled. “She was happy to do it. We were having a blast unpacking boxes, and I just had to run out to a couple of crime scenes to do witness sketches. We’re getting lunch delivered. What kind of sandwich do you want?”

  “Okay, good. Do they have hot corned-beef sandwiches?”

  “Yes. We’ll get that for you.”

  After lunch, he and Sierra left Tori’s place to return to work. Sierra was busy on other cases that detectives needed her to do sketches for, and he was still trying to run down other leads he had to finish up. Then it was time to return home. “Dancing tonight at the wolf restaurant and club?”

  Sierra yawned and smiled at him. “How about tomorrow night? TGIF. No work the next day, just helping Tori unpack her boxes. I barely helped her at all before I had to start sketching perps per witness accounts.”

  He smiled back at Sierra. “I think we need to go to bed early tonight.”

  “No wolf run?”

  “No. Let’s do that Friday night too. We’ll be at the wolf club, and it’s near the pack leader’s ranch. We can just run afterward. Like you said, we don’t have to go to work the next day.”

  “Okay, so what do we do tonight?”

  “I can grill chicken for dinner. We have avocados, spinach, tomatoes for a salad, with roasted potatoes. And we can just watch something on TV and go to bed. We’ve been burning the candle at both ends, so we’ll need to get some sleep.”

  She smiled as he parked her car in the garage. “I imagine we’ll get to a bit more than that.”

  “Exactly. That’s why we need to retire early…so afterward we can still get some sleep.”

  She chuckled as they went into the house.

  “Oh, and about my car… It’s going to cost a couple thousand dollars.” He pulled chicken out of the fridge.

  “Oh, no. Can you afford it? I can help out if you can’t.” She got the potatoes out of his pantry.

  He smiled. “Yeah, Burt Barnes’s car insurance is covering it.”

  “Oh, good. So when will your Hummer be repaired?” She began peeling the potatoes, then wrapped them in foil for the grill.

  “Monday morning. That means, if you don’t mind, I’ll just be driving your car for a while longer. Or I can rent a car. The insurance will pay for it.”

  “No, that’s okay. As long as we’re going to work together and I just need to ride with whoever needs a witness sketch, or I’ll be at the office. And that way I’ll be protected.”

  “That’s true.”

  They had dinner while watching a movie, just chilling and enjoying themselves. Once the movie was done, they went to bed. It was only nine, but they weren’t going to sleep just yet!

  * * *

  Friday was a hectic day, and after doing sketches of four bodies in the morgue they needed to identify, Sierra was so ready to call it a day and just dance the night away at the wolf club. Adam was careful not to show her a lot of affection at the police bureau or it wouldn’t be professional, but when she had viewed the last body of the day and returned to the bureau, he gave her a hug and a kiss.

  She really didn’t think she’d ever get used to doing morgue sketches. But she was so glad Adam was there to give her a hug afterward and make her feel so much better.

  “Do you still want to go dancing tonight?” he asked as they got into her car and headed home.

  “Oh, yeah. Unless you don’t feel up to it.” Even though she wanted to go, she had to make sure he was feeling just as eager to go out. She could just envision dragging him onto the dance floor and him being tired and worn out and wishing they’d just stayed home. They were going to be busy all weekend too.

  “Yep, I’ve thought of nothing else all day.”

  She laughed. “Yeah, I bet.” She figured he would have been busy thinking about all the cases he had to work on, not about dancing with her tonight.

  “Truly. What better way to show the whole pack we’re together than to go to the restaurant and dance with you, have dinner with you, and show off we’re a couple.”

  She smiled. “Okay, gotcha.” She should have known that was why he wanted to go with her there. “Uh, you do know how to dance, right?”

  Chapter 21

  As soon as Adam and Sierra arrived at the Forest Club, she was surprised to see how busy it was. Of course that meant that the food was great, the music was riveting, and the patrons were a lot of fun. But they probably should have made a reservation first. “It’s packed,” she said, worried. They could probably dance a few dances, but getting a table wasn’t happening. Not tonight anyway.

  “I’ve got reservations.”

  She threw her arms around Adam and hugged and kissed him. “You are so my hero.”

  He laughed and kissed her, waving at another couple who had just arrived. “I learned my lesson when I came here on a Friday night a year ago with a date and there were no seats to be had. She was an out-of-state wolf, just passing through, and she was so disappointed. I took her to a steak restaurant instead, but I never saw her again after that. No great loss, but I never did that again.”

  Sierra hurried him inside. “I’m glad we weren’t the ones who were out of luck. I’ve never been here to dance. My brother kept raving about their steaks, so he bought his mate and me lunch there. I always wanted to go dancing here, but I had to call it quits with Richard first.”

  “I learned from a girl I dated when I was younger. She loved to dance. She was more like a sister to me than anything, but I was always glad I had learned.”

  “My brother and dad taught me.”

  They were shown to their seats and given menus and glasses of water. The place was full of wolves, some eating and drinking, others already dancing.

  As soon as Sierra and Adam had ordered their meals, she was taking him to the dance floor to prove to her that he liked to dance, just like she did.

  This was so nice, the decor woodsy as if they were in a forest, lights flashing over the dance floor, and a great band. And Adam was a dream to dance with.

  They moved across the floor in slow motion, glued to each other during the slow dances and shimmying to the fast ones.

  “This could be a mistake, you know,” Sierra said as she waltzed with him again, their bodies pressed intimately against each other’s.

  He glanced over at their table. “You mean because our meals were just delivered to our table?”

  She nipped at his chin. “No, because we’ll want to take this to somewhere a lot more secluded.”

  He smiled down at her and kissed her nose. “Now you’re talking.”

  They finished the dance and then headed to their table to eat. Though they saw their pack leader and his mate and several others they knew, everyone was just waving at them, smiling but not intruding. She was impressed. She wasn’t used to that because when she and Richard went somewhere to eat, there were no other wolves about, no pack, so she hadn’t realized how the pack would react to her dating Adam.

  Then she saw Ethan with Brad’s sister-in-law, Dorinda, waltzing on the dance floor.

  “Ethan’s here,” Sierra said, cutting into her New York strip steak.

  “Yeah. He’s gone out a couple of times with Dorinda. I don’t know if it means anything, or they’re just single and enjoying each other’s company.” Adam took a bite of his T-bone steak.

  “Not like us.”

  Adam took a deep breath and let it out. “I’m glad for that. I didn’t realize how stressful it was dating other women until I began dating you, and it’s been like night and day for me. We enjoy most of the same things, we work well together—”

  “Oh, I love how you are always telling me I can do something, like drawing sketches of deceased people. You’re always so positive with me when I don’t have a lot of confidence in something.”

  “You are for me too.”

  She raised a brow. “I’ve seen you work your cases. You always have everything completely under control.”

  “When I stepped out and did something not in my comfort zone—like taking your art class—you encouraged me the whole time.”

  She laughed. “That’s my job as an art teacher. There’s nothing worse than someone telling you that you can’t do something and you should just give it up. Try something else. That’s what’s so fun about art. If one kind isn’t your thing, some other kind could be. And like anything, practice makes it better. One of these days, you can even enter something you’ve created in a contest. Some art really stands out.”

  “Oh, mine stands out all right.”

  She chuckled. “You are one of my cutest students. Why do you think I started dating you?”

  “Damn, I knew signing up for your art classes was the thing to do.”

  “And when we’re not busy doing other stuff on the weekends, I can give you some private lessons.”

  “Oh, hell, yeah. Now I’m all for that.”

  After dinner, they danced until late, then drove over to the pack leaders’ ranch to run as wolves. They’d almost skipped it and gone home, they were so ready to just make love and call it a night. But they were so close by the ranch and running as wolves was a great way to finish a beautiful evening before they made love.

  As soon as they dropped their clothes at Brad’s house, Brad and Janice, Ethan and Dorinda all came to run with Sierra and Adam. Even though running as a couple was fun, so was playing with packmates. Then they went home to make love and Sierra was wishing they had the whole weekend off just to do this before the workweek started again and she began teaching art to the kids again too.

  * * *

  On Saturday, Adam and Sierra showed up a little later than they had planned to at Tori’s place. Josh and Brooke were already there. Tori was making mimosas for everyone. The coroner was there and so was their DEA agent, Ethan, and Josh’s brother, Maverick, all bachelor males hoping to court Tori.

  Adam had to laugh. He hadn’t expected a party.

  Maverick was busy flattening boxes when they walked inside. In that moment, it seemed like all time stood still. And then Adam realized why. Everyone had stopped talking and laughing and turned to see his and Sierra’s arrival. There wasn’t any denying how he felt about being with her and vice versa.

  They’d made a dent in unpacking boxes, but many were still stacked everywhere several high and several deep. By the time lunch rolled around, at least there was room to sit on the couch and the chairs and eat at the coffee table or dining table if anyone wanted to. Boxes were stacked next to the kitchen island too, and there were pots and pans and cutlery sitting all over the counter.

  The lunch boxes arrived and Adam realized Tori had gotten him his favorite—corned beef on rye. Once he and Sierra finished their sandwiches at the kitchen table, they began working on one of the boxes together.

  Tori opened boxes with them so she could hear what all had happened during the interrogation, since she’d been off work for the last two days. Even Josh had to hear the story. He might have retired from the police bureau, but he was still a detective at heart.

  Adam took a couple of swigs of his margarita—that was good—and cut open another box. “So what do I do with all this stuff?” He didn’t figure Tori would want him to take everything out of the box and pile it all up on the floor.

  Sierra was right beside him, pulling out towels and bathroom items. “In the linen closet.” She handed him the stack of towels and led him to the linen closet. The she carried the toilet paper and cleaning supplies into the bathroom. Once they were done, she said, “Okay, next box?”

  They worked on the boxes until they were all gone and most everything had been put away. Ethan and Maverick helped Tori hang pictures while everyone else was telling them which way to move the one, first over an inch, up two inches, over another inch.

  Everyone was laughing and having a good time. Then Adam realized how late it was getting—nearly dinnertime, and he had wanted to do something special for a date with Sierra. They hadn’t even discussed what they wanted to do yet.

  “Dinner’s on me,” Tori said. “Thanks for all the help you gave me. My house is livable now, and I can’t thank all of you enough. It would have taken me months to get all this done, what with my work commitments.”

  “We totally understand,” Brooke said, “and we were glad to help. And it was fun while we were doing it too.”

  Everyone agreed with her.

  Adam wrapped his arm around Sierra and looked down at her, silently asking her what she wanted to do about dinner. “Dessert is on you,” she said softly for Adam’s ears only.

  He raised a brow and smiled.

  She punched him lightly on the arm. “I meant at an ice cream parlor I love to go to. They have the best hot fudge sundaes.”

  He chuckled.

  “Yeah, I know what you were thinking.”

  “You can’t blame me for that.”

  She laughed. “I don’t. I want the same thing, but after my dessert—the ice cream sundae kind.”

  Chapter 22

  After having barbecued ribs delivered to Tori’s house and enjoying the camaraderie of the wolves that were there, they finished dinner and Adam and Sierra gave Tori a hug and thanked her for the meals.

  “I got a lot of work out of both of you, so I’m the one who needs to be thanking you,” Tori said.

  “No problem at all,” Adam said.

  Sierra smiled at Tori, glad to be her friend. “It was lots of fun. And we made fast work of it with everyone being here.”