Page 1018 of One More Kiss
Chapter5
Shocked,I spun around so my back was to the shifter.
That’s when I realized what he was doing—getting ready to shift into his coyote form. Heaving a sigh of relief, I peeked over my shoulder.
Connor’s back was turned to me, too, and I drank in the sight of his muscular form. Right up until the moment he unbuttoned his jeans.
He’s pretty, Harlowe, but that doesn’t mean you can gawk, I reprimanded myself.
Still, the more time I spent with him, the more I realized how well we worked together.
A flash of power sparked against my back, and I turned to find a coyote grinning up at me. Oddly enough, Connor managed to have the same smile in both his human and coyote forms. All that was missing right now was his dimple.
“I’ll wait here,” I told him, almost feeling silly for talking out loud to a coyote. But shifters retained their human minds in their animal forms, right?
Huh. I don’t actually know.
Well, if he didn’t return in half an hour or so, I would go looking for him.
As he wriggled into the brushy undergrowth, I climbed back into the SUV and pulled out my laptop to begin writing up a report for Benedict Abercrombie. It was my least favorite part of my job, so I thought I might as well get what we knew so far down before the details got hazy.
Less than fifteen minutes later, he was back, shifting into his human form and pulling his jeans on again.
He left his shirt off, and I had to fight to keep my eyes from drifting down to his toned abs.
“There’s an old barn in a clearing a few hundred feet back,” he told me. “And I found a path we can use to get to it.”
Great. Tromping through the wilderness. My least favorite activity.
“Did you see anyone there?” I asked as I saved my half-finished report and closed the laptop.
“No, but I heard voices. And that same scent from earlier is all over the barn. And there are three shipping containers stacked outside.”
“Of course there are.” I rolled my eyes. “I guess we’d better go check it out, then.”
“One other thing,” Connor added as I locked the SUV and dropped my keys into my jeans pocket. “I could smell tea leaves. The scent was coming from inside the barn.”
The path Connor led me to had been used recently, and a glimmer of the magic I had sensed at the truck stop hung in the air.
There was something else, too, a hint of another aura.
One that I had encountered before—if only I could remember when and where.
As we rounded a curve in the trail, I caught a glimpse of the barn, the dark wooden slats of its walls beginning to succumb to rot, cracking and pulling apart from one another. I ducked back, gesturing to Connor that we should make a wide berth around the building to the back side. He nodded and led the way.
On one side of the barn, the three shipping containers were lined up, two stacked and the third pushed up against them. They were a dull red, with the shadow outline of a former company’s name stenciled on the sides and then scraped off. I couldn't smell the tea, but even after only one day, I trusted Connor’s nose.
At the back of the building, the remains of a hayloft had tumbled in on itself, leaving the upper section open to the elements—and allowing us to hear voices drifting out from inside.
“I can cut half this blend with the jasmine,” a feminine voice said. “And the other half with roses. But we’ll need to hurry. If the weather changes, we could lose it all.”
So someone had stolen the tea and was planning to—what? Blend it and sell it on the black market?
Asshats.
This might be the only tea shipment currently available in Texas, and whoever this was thought she could make a profit off it—probably at prices average people couldn’t afford.
Not that most of us could afford tea these days, anyway.
