Cole: Black Bear Outlaws #3 (Mating Fever) Read Free

almost unbearable levels. I held the phone to my ear and jiggled the old latch on the window. I was desperate for some fresh air, but when I cranked the metal fitting the entire mechanism came off in my hand.
    “Shit,” I muttered. And there wasn’t time to fix it either.
    “Excuse me?” the woman on the line asked.
    I gritted my teeth, not having realized she was still there. I’d been waiting for her boss to pick up. “Sorry. Just some technical difficulty on this end. Will Brex be available soon? This is important.”
    “Everyone thinks their call is important, Mr. Doucet,” the woman said, her tone cold and uncaring. “If you’d prefer, I can leave a message and have him call you back.”
    “No, thank you,” I spit out, tightening my grip around the phone. “I’ll wait. Can you please let him know I’m on the line?”
    “I have already informed him he has a call waiting,” she said, now sounding bored.
    “Tell him it’s Cole Doucet,” I ordered. “If he brushes you off after that, I’ll leave a message and let you get on with annoying the rest of your boss’s colleagues.”
    The receptionist didn’t hide her heavy sigh before she clicked a button, leaving me in silence. Christ. Had she hung up on me after all? A second later, music from the nineteen-fifties bubble-gum-pop era filled the line. I pulled the phone away from my ear, stared at it for a second, then hit speaker and set the offending object on the dresser. It was nice to know she hadn’t hung up on me, but to be subjected to that...no. I suppressed a small shudder and turned my attention to the window.
    With one small push, the window creaked as it opened. A light breeze floated in, giving me the tiniest reprieve from the oppressive heat.
    The music cut out abruptly, and a gruff voice came over the line. “Doucet? Where’s the fire?”
    I grinned at the sound of Brex’s jolly tone as I took the phone off speaker and pressed it once again to my ear. “Hey, man. I thought it was going to take an act of Congress just to talk to you. That secretary is more like a fortress than a first line of defense when it comes to getting a message through.”
    He chuckled. “She might need a raise. How long have you been holding?”
    I let out a snort of mock irritation. “Not terribly long this time, but I have left you three fucking messages.”
    “Three messages?” His tone had gone from jovial to dangerous. Brex Holt was a man of his word. Loyal to a fault. But he was also a man who didn’t tolerate inept employees or excuses. “Ros! Get in here.”
    “What?” the receptionist said loud enough even I could hear her.
    “Hold on,” Brex said. “I’m putting you on mute.”
    Sure enough the line went dead and I resumed my packing while I waited for the L.A.-based private investigator to return to the line. Amberly had hired Brex to look into her case the day after her first attack, and he’d been the one to refer her to Black Bear Outlaws when he’d learned she was headed to Bayou Basin. The police were supposedly working on the case, but with her out of town, chances were high they’d put the investigation on ice. Without an active threat, they weren’t going to be motivated to do much.
    “All right. I’m back,” Brex barked into the phone. “You shouldn’t be having any more issues getting through to me. Ros and I have come to an understanding. I swear to God, that woman drives me completely insane.”
    “That woman?” I asked, suppressing a laugh. “Sounds like she’s more than just an administrative assistant.”
    “Might be,” he said, the gruffness in his tone turning once again to humor. “But don’t tell her that. She already thinks she runs the place.”
    At least that was one good thing about heading to the west coast—seeing Brex again. It’d been six years since he’d left Bayou Basin and the Doucet family business to start a new life. The business had nearly put him in jail more times than he could count.