The Bucklin Wolves Next Generation: Return Read Free

wheels she’d seen her life flash before her eyes—and it looked like a math textbook.
    But his driving wasn’t the scariest part. Jacko was the head of Blue Moon Security, a private firm that had done more tours of Afghanistan and Iraq than any other firm in the world. Now they were under exclusive contract with Sokolov Enterprises. Jacko wasn’t the biggest man, but he was solidly built. His head was shaved, a look that just accentuated the hard lines of his chiseled face. He had more scars on his face and body than Frankenstein’s monster. He’d seen action in his life and he’d lived to tell about it.
    However, the thing that bothered her the most was his eyes. If Ms. Wilson was a sociopath, then Jacko was a psychopath. There was a great intelligence in his eyes. She didn’t detect murder or insanity in there. He was hungry, there was no doubt about it, but the intelligence in his brown eyes only made the cruelness in them that much scarier. This was a man who was cruel and he knew it… and he was in control of it. This was the stuff that nightmares were made of.
    And then there was Maribel. Somehow an overweight Hispanic girl from south Texas had ended up with this cast of characters at the behest of her vampire boss, smack dab in the middle of a town populated exclusively by werewolves. If only her parents knew what she was doing on this business trip, they’d move back to Mexico and take their chances with the cartel over this insanity.
    But it was Maribel’s job. Numbers were easy for her, humans were not. The entire ride up from Dallas with Ms. Wilson and Jacko had been torture. It wasn’t like they had a lot of human feelings to talk about, but they’d still felt the need to drone on and ask her personal questions. Of course to Maribel a question as innocuous as “What’s your favorite restaurant?” was too intrusive. But if they’d asked her the statistical probability of gaining weight while eating out one night a week and then asked her to calculate the probability for time if they added a day, she would have readily hashed it all out for them. Numbers had rules, humans didn’t. Maribel wanted to stick with the rules.
    “Maribel?” Ms. Wilson asked with authority in her voice.
    “Yes, Ms. Wilson?” she said, then hopped out of the back seat and pulled her satchel out just before the car door slammed shut.
    As Maribel joined Ms. Wilson, she caught a look at Jacko over the top of the luxury sedan. He had his hands in his pockets as he chewed on a toothpick and let his eyes wander around the street they were standing on. She knew he was casing the area, preparing for a band of ninjas to leap off a rooftop or whatever it was security guys thought about. Was he flexing his muscles or did he just always look like that? Why did his veins pop like caterpillars crawling under his skin? Even his musculature was unsettling.
    “Is Mr. Sokolov out of his damn mind?” Ms. Wilson asked as she shook her head. “This town is half-abandoned and it smells like wolf shit. How can we expect to build anything out of this place?”
    “To be fair,” Maribel said, knowing instantly that she should just keep her mouth shut and agree, “Sojourn, Louisiana was in much worse shape than this place when we looked at it two years ago, and the city’s annual income has already risen an astounding forty-two point five percent while the population has grown by thirty-eight percent.”
    “Just let me have this, honey,” Ms. Wilson said, glaring at Maribel over her black-rimmed glasses. Somehow the glasses made her look even sexier. “I know we’re miracle workers. We’re going to turn this place around. But that doesn’t change the fact that I think it’s a shithole, just like every other town we’ve gone to. Why can’t he build a casino on the Vegas strip?”
    “He has a sixty-seven percent chance of failing in his first year. Oh, wait. He’s not established in that sector. The chance goes up to seventy-three