Want a sandwich?”Mac shook her head. “I’m going to have dinner with Gage when he gets home.” Who said anything about dinner? This was more like an appetizer. That was another perk that came with being a werewolf. She could eat whatever she wanted and not have to worry about extra calories ending up where they shouldn’t. Khaki set everything on the counter. “I asked Xander flat-out when I went over to his place last night. He insisted he liked me just fine, but I knew he was lying. I could tell he was really uncomfortable around me. He was tense and on edge the whole time. Which is nothing new. He’s like that all the time around me. I think he finds me irritating and a nuisance.” Mac gave her a dubious look. “If you say so. But either way, you’d better be careful. If being with Gage has taught me anything, it’s that werewolves are extremely affected by certain pheromones. If you go walking around lusting over Xander, he’s going to pick up on it— and so is every other guy on the team. Then things will get really complicated. I learned that the hard way. Those guys can pick up on arousal like it’s barbecue and they aren’t shy about letting you know it.” Khaki groaned as she grabbed a plate from the cabinet. “Oh, God. I never thought about that.”“Yeah. And it gets worse.” Mac shook her head. “If I’m even slightly aroused and Gage picks up on it, he gets crazy horny— like he-can’t-control-it horny. What do you think is going to happen to if all the guys on the team pick up on the fact that the one and only female werewolf on the team is aroused? You’ll find yourself getting chased by fifteen out-of-control, horny werewolves going crazy with lust. And while there are some women who might find that entertaining, something tells me you wouldn’t.” Khaki set the plate on the counter with a thud. “Oh, crap. What the hell am I going to do?”Mac offered her a small smile. “Take a lot of baths?
So what did you and Landon do this afternoon?” Minka asked, her soft voice dragging him back to the present.Angelo looked up to see that Minka had already polished off two fajitas. Damn, the girl could eat. “Landon gave me a tour of the DCO complex. I did some target shooting and blew up a few things. He even let me play with the expensive surveillance toys. I swear, it felt more like a recruiting pitch to get me to work there than anything.”Minka’s eyes flashed green, her full lips curving slightly. Damn, why the hell had he said it like that? Now she probably thought he was going to come work for the DCO. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t, not after just reenlisting for another five years. The army wasn’t the kind of job where you could walk into the boss’s office and say, “I quit.”Thinking it would be a good idea to steer the conversation back to safer ground, he reached for another fajita and asked Minka a question instead. “What do you think you’ll work on next with Ivy and Tanner? You going to practice with the claws for a while or move on to something else?”Angelo felt a little crappy about changing the subject, but if Minka noticed, she didn’t seem to mind. And it wasn’t like he had to fake interest in what she was saying. Anything that involved Minka was important to him. Besides, he didn’t know much about shifters or hybrids, so the whole thing was pretty damn fascinating.“What do you visualize when you see the beast in your mind?” he asked.“Before today, I thought of it as a giant, blurry monster. But after learning that the beast is a cat, that’s how I picture it now.” She smiled. “Not a little house cat, of course. They aren’t scary enough. More like a big cat that roams the mountains.” “Makes sense,” he said. Minka set the other half of her fourth fajita on her plate and gave him a curious look. “Would you mind if I ask you a personal question?”His mouth twitched as he prepared another fajita. He wasn’t used to Minka being so reserved. She usually said whatever was on her mind, regardless of whether it was personal or not.“Go ahead,” he said.“The first time we met, I had claws, fangs, glowing red eyes, and I tried to kill you. Since then, I’ve spent most of the time telling you about an imaginary creature that lives inside my head and makes me act like a monster. How are you so calm about that? Most people would have run away already.”Angelo chuckled. Not exactly the personal question he’d expected, but then again Minka rarely did the expected.“Well, my mom was full-blooded Cherokee, and I grew up around all kinds of Indian folktales and legends. My dad was in the army, and whenever he was deployed, Mom would take my sisters and me back to the reservation where she grew up in Oklahoma. I’d stay up half the night listening to the old men tell stories about shape-shifters, animal spirits, skin-walkers, and trickster spirits.” He grinned. “I’m not saying I necessarily believed in all that stuff back then, but after meeting Ivy, Tanner, and the other shifters at the DCO, it just didn’t faze me that much.” Minka looked at him with wide eyes. “You’re a real American Indian? Like in the movies? With horses and everything?”He laughed again. The expression of wonder on her face was adorable. “First, I’m only half-Indian. My dad is Mexican, so there’s that. And second, Native Americans are almost nothing like you see in the movies. We don’t all live in tepees and ride horses. In fact, I don’t even own a horse.” Minka was a little disappointed about the no-horse thing, but she was fascinated with what it was like growing up on an Indian reservation and being surrounded by all those legends. She immediately asked him to tell her some Indian stories. It had been a long time since he’d thought about them, but to make her happy, he dug through his head and tried to remember every tale he’d heard as a kid.