Bite Me (Woodland Creek) Read Free Page A

booze was free, but Jake wasn’t about to take the risk and have a dead girl on his conscience.
    The look in his eyes seemed to convey how serious he was, because his little comrade nodded. “O-okay.”
    Jake nodded, satisfied. “Can you tell me what room she’s in?”
    The girl told him. She even pointed.
    As much as Jake didn’t want to be in the same building as Bobby, he needed to make sure she was all right.
    Jake left the lobby and climbed the stairs. He briefly stopped in front of her room, pretending to be annoyed over something, and then pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket.
    Nasty habit, but having a mild addiction gave him an excuse to carry a pack around with him, which also gave him an excuse to talk to people he was tailing and ask for lights, or let people he knew were fully addicted see him with his smokes so they would approach him.
    It also gave him a perfectly acceptable reason to stop in front of someone’s room and stand there long enough to get a smell of what could be inside.
    He opened his mouth and stuck one of his cigarettes inside. He really just needed the excuse to open his mouth.
    As a man who could shift into a diamondback rattlesnake, Jake did a lot of his scent searching with his tongue. His nose was fairly strong, even in his snake shape, but he thought his tongue worked better for that.
    Jake was the sort of guy who was too proud to be walking around with his mouth open. He hated the term mouth breather, and he would die before he let anyone call him that.
    Through the taste of the cigarette, he couldn’t smell any blood. The cigarette covered things to a certain extent, but blood was something major he could always smell regardless of what was in his mouth. The fact that it was so damned silent in there was a problem, however.
    Frowning, Jake pulled the cigarette out of his mouth and glared at it, like he was just remembering that he was in a smoke-free zone and it was somehow the cigarette’s fault. He leaned his hand against the handle of the door and tried to turn it while still looking at his smoke.
    It wouldn’t turn. It was locked.
    Not happy. This did not make him happy.
    Alice had always been good at hiding her scent. She knew some of the people she was either working for or stealing from would be shifters, and she knew how to hide her scent from those people.
    What she didn’t yet put together was that hiding her scent with ammonia didn’t guarantee jack shit. Ammonia still had a scent, and it was strong. Bobby was a Rottweiler shifter, not a bloodhound. He wasn’t trained or skilled in tracking, but he would smell the ammonia and know someone was hiding.
    Jake could sure as hell smell it right now. Even if he didn’t know she was in there, he would know someone was, someone who wanted to hide their scent, which meant that person was hiding from something or somebody.
    There was no way Bobby didn’t suspect she was in there.
    There was nothing he could do. The door was locked, and if either of those two Mercedes that were outside belonged to Bobby—and he suspected both of them did—then it meant he was also outnumbered. He needed to get out of here. He needed to get to the chief of police and tell him there were a couple of guys in his town who were bad news.
    Jake couldn’t just break down the door without making himself look like a complete psychopath or drawing the attention of all the wrong people, plus the staff.
    Alice was a smart girl. She had to know Bobby was in the building.
    He just had to hope she was going to stay put until he came back with the cops. Bobby hadn’t done anything illegal, yet, but if he knew the heat was on, that might force him to back off. At least, for now.
    Jake quickly and quietly hurried down the stairs. It looked like the girl behind the counter was about to say something to him, and he didn’t want her calling out to him, drawing attention, so he moved faster toward the door, not giving her any eye contact.
    He was