Page 63 of Covert Affections (Shadow Agents/PSI-Ops #5)

Chapter Forty-Eight

Jesse

Five days later…

The morning sun beat down on Jesse's bare shoulders as he worked on mending the split-rail fence that marked the boundary between Charley's rescue and property that had belonged to The Flock.

There hadn’t been any rain since the storms that had blown through five nights ago. Jesse’s work boots were covered in dust, as were the bottoms of his jeans. He didn’t mind. It meant he was staying busy, and busy was good.

Busy kept his mind off Lindy.

He’d been posing as a ranch hand at the rescue for nearly a week.

Charley hadn’t said much to him when he’d wandered in two days after the job fair, no doubt looking worse for wear.

He never mentioned where he’d been—fighting hybrid coyotes, claiming her best friend, and then getting shot in the ass by a nervous sheriff’s deputy.

All of that would mean disclosing who and what he was to her.

For now, it was better that she thought of him as nothing more than the drifter she’d hired on to help around the rescue.

He’d been trying to locate the hybrids the last five days.

He’d used his tech skills looking for any reports or signs of them.

He’d even taken a chance and hacked The Corporation’s servers, trying to find anything he could about where they were and what they might be doing.

He couldn’t find much, but he did find signs they were being monitored and backed by someone high up in the organization.

When darkness fell, he’d shift forms and head out, attempting to catch their scent and track them. They’d long since abandoned their campsite in the mountains and were doing a good job eluding him.

The sooner he found them and killed them, the sooner he could get on the road and put distance between himself and the area.

He’d been avoiding working on this stretch of fence for days because of its proximity to PSI, which was still crawling all over the wellness center property.

The last thing he wanted was to have a run-in with any of them.

If they caught his scent and realized he was a shifter, they might dig deeper into him, and that would be bad.

Best-case scenario was they’d expose him as working for The Corporation, kill him, or take him in for interrogation before throwing him in a dark hole to live out the rest of his days.

Bleak?

Yes, but far better than having The Corporation show for him.

At least PSI had rules and regulations in place for dealing with the enemy.

The Corporation did whatever the fuck they wanted.

And they’d not stop with Jesse. They’d dig into everything he’d been doing since his arrival in town.

They’d go after Charley, and they’d go after Lindy.

Jesse’s muscles burned with each swing of the posthole digger. He knew he was pushing too hard, and the lack of sleep he’d gotten over the past few days was an issue. He didn’t care. The physical labor helped keep his mind off her—off his mate.

Staying away from Lindy was the hardest thing he’d ever done in all his years. It made the time he spent being tortured by Efren and Peters look like a walk in the park.

He lowered his head, trying to keep thoughts of her away, and back to the corners of his mind.

To the area he’d been pushing so much shit for the last week that it was amazing there was any room left there.

So far it housed everything he’d seen in his dreams—everything to do with his past, and everything to do with Anatole, Samuel, Benat, Nick and the others.

And then there was Lindy. She consumed his thoughts.

His body ached to touch her, to be near her.

Part of him knew he was taking the coward’s approach by not telling her the truth, not letting her know they’d mated.

Yet he told himself time and time again it was for her protection.

That distance equaled safety for her. That if he spent his days keeping an eye out for the hybrids, who were proving to be far more elusive than they’d been before, he was doing his part in keeping the crosshairs off his wife.

His mate.

Another piece of him was scared shitless that they already knew about Lindy and had eyes on her too. That he was leaving her vulnerable. That one of the hybrids might cross paths with her and catch Jesse’s claim on her.

With a long sigh, Jesse gave into the urge to go to his phone, which was on the tailgate of his truck.

He removed his gloves, pushed them into his back jean pocket and lifted his phone.

He tapped the custom-coded icon that had no label, just a red square.

The app opened. Jesse had crossed a line, but he’d spent decades—hell a lifetime—doing far worse.

Still, he was invading her privacy.

Watching her remotely.

He was watching the animal rescue remotely too so it wasn’t as if it was reserved only for Lindy, though, Jesse didn’t have any cameras inside Charley’s house. The same couldn’t be said for Lindy’s home.

The top half of the screen was split into multiple camera feeds: the front of Lindy’s house, the sides and the back.

The lower half of the screen had more camera feeds showing, these of the interior of her home: her living room, her kitchen, her bedroom, the upstairs area.

All of the cameras were tiny and hidden so well only a trained security expert would locate them.

They gave him something close to a full view of her environment.

The motion sensor he’d installed pinged him when there was movement.

He swiped left on the screen and monitored feeds came up of the exterior of the bar.

While he had a three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view of the outside of the bar, he had nothing in the way of one on the inside.

It wasn’t for lack of him trying. Each and every time Jesse had tried to stealthily install a camera on the inside of the bar, a brown-haired waitress, he’d since learned was named Waverly, appeared.

He was starting to think Waverly was tracking him. How else did the woman seem to show up at the exact second Jesse was trying to place a camera inside the bar. She always approached with a smile and more than often a beer for him. One he hadn’t even ordered.

Jesse had even tried gaining access to the bar during the off hours—when no one should have been there.

Waverly had pulled into the parking lot and nearly seen him.

He’d rushed into the same tall grassy area he’d watched Lindy from the night of the hybrid attack.

Either Waverly had the best timing in the world, or there was something more to the waitress.

Jesse swiped one more time on the screen to confirm the tracker he had on his wife’s vehicle was still working.

It was. He’d gotten an alert about movement early this morning and he’d watched Lindy getting up and leaving the house.

She’d driven to a car wash and had been there far longer than Jesse felt comfortable with.

He’d considered going there himself to check on her.

Instead, he’d put a call into the sheriff’s department, reporting a bogus sighting of a mountain lion in town—near the car wash—and requested they send someone over right away to check it out.

As much as he didn’t want to think about Robert being near his wife, he was better than nothing.

Better than what Jesse was providing. Jesse had stared at his phone with bated breath until the red dot on the map began to move.

It went to the grocery store next and he’d suffered through mending fences while compulsively checking the app for location updates on Lindy.

“I am a total piece of shit,” he said, torn between feeling at ease that Lindy was safe for the moment and the knowledge of how he’d come by that information.

He’d turned into a full-fledged walking list of trigger warnings.

The same things she sought out in her romance books, which were safe there—non-threatening.

The reality of it all was vastly different.

He was her worst nightmare come to life.

Stalker.

Voyeur.

Obsessive.

The kind of sick fuck who needed a restraining order and a shit ton of therapy.

Hell, he was worse than the men in her books.

He was keeping a massive truth from her.

More than one. She still had no clue he was Fluffy, and she thought their time together—their claiming—was nothing more than a dream.

He’d taken her when her succubus had been riding her so high that later, when she woke, she didn’t realize it all truly happened.

And how had he handled it all? He’d cut and run with his tail between his legs.

Hiding from the truth and from her. All he needed now was a mask or a biker helmet and he’d be a living, breathing morally gray asshole with a tragic backstory, desperate for a woman he couldn’t have.

Fuck. I’m a cliché. Great. Like this week hasn’t been shitty enough.

His inner beast made itself known, grumbling within him in what he could only call agreement.

Wonderful. The cat even thinks I’m pathetic.

His cat side was past the point of aggravation with being separated from its mate, but it seemed to understand the danger that going to her posed.

Jesse stood for a second, his hand going to the spot on his upper chest where she’d scratched him open during sex.

It had healed over quickly, but he couldn’t help but think about the moment of claiming.

At how perfect it had all felt and seemed.

And how now, days later, the entire ordeal was starting to feel like a dream.

Like it never really happened.

He had to wonder if more time passed would he start to question if the mating happened at all?

Would he forget it like his past? Would he have broken dreams that felt real, showing him things he struggled to recall, things that if they were true, changed everything?

His thoughts went quickly to Samuel and the dreams he’d had after claiming Lindy.

They had been so vivid and visceral that he questioned his sanity.

Even more troubling was the fact that each time he dared to close his eyes for even a couple of hours, he’d dream more about the past, about a life that had Samuel as his closest friend—as family.

And when Jesse wasn’t dreaming of that, he was dreaming of the lab incident and the children he’d helped to escape.

He was running on fumes, trying to be in multiple places at one time, and avoiding sleep in hopes of preventing the dreams from coming.

But being awake left his mind far too much time to dwell on Lindy.

On how much he ached for her. He wanted to know what made her laugh, what made her cry, and what it was like to have her look at him and know who he was to her.

For her to understand he wasn’t a stranger—he was her mate.

Never did he think he’d take a wife, let alone do so to a woman he barely knew.

He glanced upward at the rising sun, knowing he was lying to himself.

He knew her. Hell, if he was right, and he didn’t doubt for a second that he was, he’d known her for twenty-seven years.

Fate had put him before her when she’d needed him most—to protect her when she was little and again when she was in her late teens behind the grocery store.

But why had it put her in his path now?

Was it to mock him? To give him a taste of what might have been had he not been with The Corporation?

Fate could go fuck itself.

Jesse yanked the digger from the hole with more force than necessary, sending dirt flying.

He had no right to be angry. He was the one who stayed shifted in cat form when he’d realized she’d thought their time together had been nothing more than a dream.

And he was the one who'd run off, leaving her alone.

But what choice did he have?

The hybrids were out there, hurting innocent women, and his employer would come for him eventually. If he dared go to Lindy, they’d find her and do unthinkable things to her. He couldn't ignore that, even if every cell in his body screamed at him to go back to Lindy.

“You planning to bury a body in that hole you’re digging or just your feelings, Kitty-Scat?”

Jesse stiffened, but didn’t turn to face Bill, wondering how it was the man had gotten so close to him without notice. The slightest of breezes came from behind Jesse, bringing with it the stink he’d come to know as Bill and something, or rather someone, else.

Anger bristled within as Jesse glanced over his shoulder, his gaze finding Robert, who was standing next to Bill, wearing his work uniform. Did the man own another outfit? Was he always working? What the hell had Lindy seen in him?

“Back for another round?” asked Jesse, his mouth burning with the need to let his shifter teeth out.

Robert’s gaze was even, making it clear to Jesse that he wasn’t about to take the bait.

Pity.

Jesse could use a good fight.