LITMIR.BIZ

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judgment until she better understood the players in this new mission.

      She took a seat across from her aide at the table in the small meeting room with gray wallpapered walls, the secluded area to which they’d been shown after arriving at the Royal Canadian Mounted Police’s northwest Vancouver facility. Her cover dog, Lupe, a canine who resembled a mix between a wolf and a husky, lay beside her.

      She glanced at Rainey. “Do you think it’s more fun than working with shapeshifters?”

      Rainey looked momentarily shocked, a rare occurrence for the outgoing and chatty young woman. “Hardly. But I’m going to get to work with both Mounties and shapeshifters. Amazing!” She paused, and her smile morphed into a frown as two men in white shirts and blue pants walked into the room. “Although I’d hoped that we’d get to work with Mounties in their gorgeous dress uniforms and tall hats,” she added under her breath.

      Selena and Rainey rose to meet the men, smoothing down the camo uniforms of Alpha Force, the highly covert US military unit to which they belonged. Selena’s light brown hair and Rainey’s darker brunette locks were both pulled back tightly into clips.

      “Good morning,” said the first man to enter. He appeared middle-aged and had short white hair. Walking around the oval wooden table to where Selena and Rainey now stood, he held out a veined, long-fingered hand. “I’m Anthony Creay, deputy commissioner of the RCMP’s general policing services.”

      Then he was the head of the group who’d contacted Alpha Force, Selena reasoned. “Hello, sir,” she said, shaking his hand. She introduced both Rainey and herself. Then she let her gaze drift to the other man.

      “Sergeant Major Owen Dewirter,” he said, proffering his hand for a shake, too. “Also with general policing services.”

      And most likely the man with whom they’d be working over the next few weeks, Selena figured. The other guy was his superior officer and probably just wanted to make sure things got started well.

      “Which one of you is the shapeshifter?” Owen asked. The sergeant major had a distinctively handsome face, with brilliant blue eyes beneath strong brows that matched his short, wavy black hair. His nose was aquiline, his chin broad with just a hint of a beard shadow.

      Yet judging by his unreadable expression, Selena had the impression that he wasn’t overly fond of shifters. Did he even believe in them? That wasn’t clear, at least not yet.

      “That would be me,” she said in as mild a tone as she could muster, considering her initial bout of irritation. She could be wrong. She didn’t know the guy, let alone how RCMP members thought or acted. He might be attempting to impress his superior officer by remaining emotionless.

      “How fascinating!” Anthony did indeed appear fascinated. He stood behind a chair at the opposite side of the table, his eyes wide, his mouth slightly open. “I’m pleased that you’re here to give us a close-up demonstration.”

      “Yes. About that.” Rainey drew their attention as she sat down again. Her movement caused Lupe, who’d stood up as the humans did, to sit as well. “We’ve discussed that and are not sure about the best way to handle it. You see, we need a bit of privacy. Actually, Lieutenant Jennay needs a bit of privacy,” she amended. “I’m her aide, and I’ll be with her, but a shift requires that someone, er—”

      “I’ll be nude,” Selena interjected. She remained standing for now, her arms crossed. “That’s why I have a female aide. We use a special proprietary elixir, and we will make some available to the shifters you have recruited into the new RCMP team that we’re to train. When the rest of our Alpha Force team arrives tomorrow or the next day, they’ll include a male shifter or two. They may be more amenable to being observed by men when they change. But although you can definitely see me once I’ve shifted, you unfortunately can’t watch me shift.” She found herself looking straight into Owen Dewirter’s still-unreadable gaze. “Too uncomfortable for me. And I don’t like to feel uncomfortable.”

      “I see.” The words were drawn out slowly by Anthony Creay as he sank down into a chair across from the two women. And clearly, to Selena, the point was that he could not see. Not everything. “Nude? I didn’t consider that—but I believe that observing a shift was part of our understanding. So we would be sure of the genuineness of the help we’re getting.” As he scowled, his fleshy lower lip protruded.

      Owen took a seat beside him, then exchanged glances with his superior officer. When he turned back to Selena, he had a decided frown on his face, too. “We need to work something out here,” he said. “We have to watch the process to be sure you’re a real shifter and not just trying to put something over on us.”

      His pronunciation of the word out—with an almost long O sound—emphasized that he was Canadian. But his accent wasn’t the only difference between them. He wanted her to get nude in front of him for her demo shift? Not gonna happen. Even though he was one great-looking guy. The thought of him observing her body as she stripped sent waves of heat through Selena that made her feel as if this meeting was on the hottest summer day in the US South instead of a cool evening in the Canadian West.

      Was this whole thing primed to be a fiasco? Selena hoped not. She and Rainey were here representing Alpha Force and, since they had been in the western United States and were therefore the closest of those in their unit who had been selected to help the RCMP form their own similar unit, they’d been ordered to Vancouver to give a small and limited demonstration.

      Limited being the key word.

      Even Lupe must have sensed the tension in the room since she stood beside Selena and whined. Selena reached out and hugged the wolf-dog closer to her.

      “Here’s the thing,” she said to the men in as reasonable a tone as she could muster. “Let me introduce you first to my cover dog. Lupe, this is Deputy Commissioner Creay and Sergeant Major Dewirter.” She scratched Lupe behind the ears in a manner that caused the dog to turn her head toward the two men, not that Lupe, a genuine canine, could understand her words. “Gentlemen, this is the canine who looks a whole lot like me when I’m shifted. The way I figured we’d do this demonstration is for Rainey and me to go into another room. You can keep Lupe with you and lock the door to the room. With Rainey’s help, I’ll shift. Then when you unlock the door there’ll be Rainey inside with a canine who looks a whole lot like Lupe. Voilà! That’ll be me, shifted. There’ll be no other person in the room. With doors locked and all, there’s no way we’d be able to do this without it being the real thing.” The very suggestion that they’d try to pull a scam on representatives of a national police department that had requested their help really peeved Selena.

      “But we understood we could see the actual shift take place.” Creay’s tone was icy.

      Selena glanced toward Rainey, who looked uneasy and bewildered. Well, she needn’t be. Selena was in charge here, at least for now.

      “I understand your wish to see the process, gentlemen,” she said. “Maybe you’d have been able to if you hadn’t requested Alpha Force’s presence so urgently. You said you needed at least our initial representation within one day. We were the closest team members available. So here we are.”

      “I recognize that,” Creay retorted. “But we don’t have any extra time, either, to wait—or to deal with a situation where things aren’t as represented to us.”

      “Are you accusing us of lying?” Selena hated to be confrontational, but their attitude was forcing her into it.

      “We’re not accusing you of anything.” Owen’s voice sounded placating, but his expression remained unreadable. “We just want to ensure we’ve got what we were promised by the US military.”

      Selena wanted to make good on that promise, too, for the sake of Alpha Force. She took a deep breath, then said, “Look, we want to cooperate with you—but certain things are nonnegotiable. If you don’t feel you can trust us, if you think we’ll play some kind of hoodwinking, magical game even when you can watch to make sure the room stays

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