On the Prowl by Kate Rudolph

7

Andre's growlturned into a snarl as a dark-haired woman with broad shoulders walked into the room. She looked at him standing in front of Em, his body protecting hers, and reached for something on her belt. He was ready to launch himself at her. Was she the one who was scaring Em? Why did she have a key to her room?

"It's okay, Darlene. He's a friend. Sort of," Em called from over his shoulders.

Andre wanted to look back at her and ask what that was supposed to mean. But between the protective instinct driving him, the lust coursing through his veins, and his need to solve the puzzle of what was trying to hurt her, he didn't have much energy left to parse that sentence.

Em tapped on his hip to move him to the side, and he found himself moving without even thinking about it. They needed to have a talk about who was calling the shots when it came to keeping her safe, but clearly Em didn't fear this woman and so Andre would follow her lead.

For now.

Em stepped between them and did the introductions, gesturing between them as if they were meeting at a party and not in her hotel room after some kind of creature had attacked. "Darlene, this is Andre. Andre, this is Darlene, my head of security."

"And you snuck him into your room why?" Darlene asked calmly. There wasn't an accusation in the question. If she was the head of security, it was her job to know who was around Em and what they were doing at all times. Of course, Darlene and her people hadn’t noticed Andre at all so far. So he seriously doubted her skills.

"He's a private investigator," Em explained with a smile.

Since when? But Andre was interested to see where she was taking this.

She continued as if she wasn't spewing lies. "I called him in because of the weird shit that's been happening the past couple days. I just wanted him to take a look."

"There's been more weird shit?" Darlene asked, arms crossing. Yeah, that body language wasn't good, and Andre didn't need to be a real private investigator to know it.

Em nodded her head towards the bed. "When we got in here, these were all torn up."

Darlene took a few steps into the room, and Andre wanted to stop her from getting any closer. He had a good whiff of her scent, clean and a bit fruity from whatever soap she was using, and it definitely didn't smell anything like the lack of scent that came from the sheets or the costume.

"You didn't see who came in?" Darlene asked, eyes raking over the destruction and expression growing darker by the moment.

"Did you?" He couldn't help himself from asking. She was supposed to be the one doing security.

Darlene glared at him. Well. He wasn't making a friend there. Somehow he would learn to live with that.

"I'll have housekeeping come up and take care of it and inform the rest of the team that we need to do more patrols," said Darlene with a decisive nod. "Is an hour enough time for you to look around? Em needs to be back in the convention center soon."

An hour was nothing. But Andre didn't know what he was looking for. He would probably need to pull out his phone and search for tips on how to be a private investigator on the Internet, but he wasn't about to tell Darlene that. "I can make it work," he promised.

She nodded, her tight expression loosening a bit when he didn't fight her. "I'll let you two investigate." And there was a heavy hint of suspicion in that word. Darlene left them alone in the room, the door clicking shut behind her.

"She thinks we’re fucking, doesn't she?" he asked Em. And his cock perked up at that thought.

She shrugged. "Probably."

Score one for the private investigator. Speaking of. "Why did you lie to her? I'm not a PI." For some reason, some people thought they were the same thing. Andre's job was to jump in front of bullets, not figure out why they were being fired.

Em threw her hands up in the air. "What was I supposed to do? She's my head of security. I don't want her to feel like shit because of supernatural crap that she could not possibly anticipate. Her job is to keep crazy fans and paparazzi away from me. It doesn't involve protecting me from werewolves."

Andre could see her point, and for the first time he had a bit of pity for the head of security. Maybe it wasn't her fault that he had gotten through. He wasn't a crazed fan and he certainly wasn't paparazzi. "Do you need to go back to the stage?"

Em shook her head. "I still have some free time before Melinda comes looking for me."

"Melinda?" He would probably need to make notes of all of these names. And that was something he was used to doing. He wasn't a PI, but he was a bodyguard, and keeping track of all of the people his client interacted with was just part of the job.

"She runs the show," said Em with an exasperated smile. "She's got schedules on top of schedules on top of schedules, and if we don't follow them, smoke comes out of her ears and she gets really angry and then she yells and I don't like it."

That startled a chuckle out of him. "I've had COs like that before."

They shared a smile, and this time it wasn't angry or heated or anything except a little bit of camaraderie. And that was scarier than anything else.

Andre tore his gaze away from her. "We don't have much time. Let me take a look around."

The hotel room was huge. There was the main bedroom with the king bed dominating the space. There was a bathroom that was bigger than the apartment he used to share with Owen. And a part of him was tempted to fill up the tub with hot water and just soak in it, it looked so comfortable.

There was a living room area with a large couch and a TV large enough that it would appear that he was on the 50-yard line of any football game he watched. And there was a kitchenette with a miniature fridge and a small stovetop and a microwave. It was more of an apartment than a hotel room.

Andre left the bed for last, stalking through the room and searching out anyplace that had the same lack of scent as the bed. There was a hint of it by the door, which had been mostly overpowered by his, Em's, and Darlene's scents. But the kitchen and living room both only smelled of Em. He got a hint in the bathroom but nothing more. It seemed the activity was mostly confined to the bedroom.

He studied the rips in the fabric. It didn't look like any knife had done it, everything was too jagged. He knew what his claws could do, and he would guess it would look something like this if he chose to destroy bedding.

Despite what he had seen in movies and on TV, Andre didn't have the ability to summon his claws when he was in his human form. He and his pack seemed to be gaining new abilities, but he hadn't yet gained that talent. He hoped one day he did. It would be really useful now. Because his only choice if he wanted to see if the claw marks matched what a wolf could do was to shift completely and try and make some of his own.

He considered it. But shifting and then shifting back would exhaust him, and it would show him something he was pretty sure he already knew. He knew what claw marks looked like. And it wasn't like he was trying to prove that they were exactly the same as him.

Something with claws was after Em, and it could get to her anywhere.

That was the point of attacking her room. No security could stop it.

At least that had been the case before he showed up. Now this clawed beast had a new foe, and it was going to wish it had never threatened Em after Andre was done with it.