Page 63 of License to Kill

“No return policy.”

“Jake.”

“No return policy,” he repeated, pouring himself a cup and slurping.

Months clean of coffee hadn’t eliminated my desire to steal Jake’s and drink it. “A fight is really what you want, isn’t it?”

His smile grew wider. “Yes, it is.”

What an asshole. “So help me, when I win, you will never touch a single drop of coffee as long as I live.”

That plan would backfire; I liked coffee, and I missed it, but I’d stopped drinking it because it reminded me of Jake. If he insisted on being underfoot, I could have coffee again. It would only take a few sips to send me straight into orbit.

“When I win, I’m going to be keeping you so busy in our bedroom I won’t have time for coffee.”

I thought about that for a few moments. Then I thought about it some more. How did I lose in that situation? Was it possible to lose? I frowned. My body definitely approved of his idea, my common sense wanted to take a vacation, and my traitorous heart wanted him to continue making offers to maximize the benefits of going along with his flow. “You’re saying that to get me to lose, aren’t you?”

He took another slurp of coffee. “And it didn’t even take you very long to figure it out. I will use every dirty trick in the book to win this fight.”

I’d learned early on, one of Jake’s favorite dirty tricks was to use my handcuffs against me. I almost regretted my utter lack of handcuffs, zip ties, or anything else that could be used to add a little zing to an already heated bedroom session. On second thought, if he tried to add any zing in my current state, he might give me a heart attack.

There were worse ways to go.

I controlled my breathing until I could speak without my voice wavering. “When I win, you get to break the news to your parents you’re leaving them while I listen on speakerphone. You, however, will tell them you found some hussy in an alley, and that she offered you the good stuff. By the good stuff, I mean sex, drugs, and other illegal things. You will go for a record-making rap sheet in one alley incident. You will give them explicit details about your law-breaking exploits.”

Jake choked on a laugh. “You don’t have to win to get me to do that. We’ll get you a wig, I’ll drag you off into the nearest alley, I’ll get you to give me a few kisses, so when I tell them, I won’t be lying at all. As for the drugs and other illegal activities, I’ll figure something out, although they won’t precisely be illegal—just naughty enough my mother won’t be able to tell if I’m lying or not.”

I raised a brow and considered the coffee pot. A little coffee couldn’t hurt, could it? “I am not a hussy.”

“You’re my hussy. Does that count?”

“No.”

“It should.”

“You’re still on probation, and there shall be no bedroom adventures until you’re off probation.”

Jake sighed. “I’m doing my best here. I want to make this right.”

Nobody could make any part of my ruined life right. The best I could hope for was surviving, and I had one reason alone to keep doing that, and I meant to dance on my ma’s grave once every year or so to remind myself why I needed to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

One question rose above all the others: could Jake truly bring me into his pack?

No, that wasn’t the most important question.

Would his pack actually accept me?

The fox in me needed their acceptance. She needed a family to call her own.

I feared we’d break should we be rejected yet again.

Jake prowled close, sipping at his coffee and staring down his nose at me. “When I win, you’ll promise me you’ll submit to have your medical leave ended and agree to therapy and go through full evaluations to rejoin the FBI as a special agent. The department is up for negotiation, but you lived and breathed CARD your entire adult life, and I want you to have that future you desired. We’ll have to transfer out of the area for that, which is fine by me. Any pack I join will need to take both of us or I’ll reject the transfer. But you deserve better. You have to at least start working towards becoming a special agent again.”

I tensed, and I narrowed my eyes. The first bad case in CARD would do me in unless a therapist could work miracles, and I doubted anyone could make a shattered glass into anything other than sharp, broken shards that might be melted down to become something else. Rather than tell him that, I countered with, “When I win, you will willingly volunteer to work as a desk jockey for a period of a year. Every night, you will come home and tell me what a wonderful day at work you had. Then you will go cry into your glass of water, as you will also give up alcohol in addition to coffee.”

While Jake wasn’t an alcoholic, he liked his liquor after a bad shift, and the restriction would hammer home what I’d endured for so long.

According to his glare, Jake had caught onto my intentions. “When I win, we might both lose our jobs because we’ll be too busy in our bedroom to go to work.”