Kid? The woman had a child, but she was hanging out and getting drunk at house parties and torturing him with her butt on his cock?

Thinking about all the shitty parents he had been forced to deal with over the years as a cop, Crush hissed, “You have a child?”

She nodded and while someone kept talking on the other end of her phone, she whispered, “Have to get home. Still breastfeeding.” Then, when Crush thought his head might explode, she silently laughed and mouthed, “Just kidding.”

Holy hell, who was this woman?

“All right. All right. I’ll get Smith on it. You know she loves morning jobs. I know she doesn’t work for you, but think of it as outsourcing. We both know she can do the damn job. Besides, she has to realize that not everything can be the close-up kill.” Not knowing what she was talking about, Crush was relieved when she winked at him. Good. She was kidding. Because it would be really hard to arrest a naked woman sitting in his lap. “Okay. Good. I’ll take care of it.”

She disconnected the call and tossed the phone back on her jeans. “I’ve gotta go.”

“Yes. You need to get home to your child.”

“Yeah. Her, too.” She shrugged. “She’s pretty self-sufficient. She can almost reach the stove.”

Unable to take any more, Crush pushed her off his lap. Not as hard as he’d like—damn his morals—but at least he got her off him and he could move away from her.

Grabbing his clothes, Crush stalked to the door.

“Don’t you want my number?” she asked him. “Maybe the next time we could get drunk and then actually have sex. If you’re worried about the kid, I can put a little brandy in her milk bottle and she’ll be out like a light.”

Crush began to speak, but realized he would only say something completely inappropriate and mean, something he simply couldn’t bring himself to do. So instead he stormed out, slamming the door behind him.

Tragically, however, Desiree MacDermott stood there in her hallway, her green eyes growing wide as her gaze moved down the length of his naked body while he lollygagged in the middle of her hallway.

His fellow detective finally looked up into his face. “Hi, uh ... Crushek. How’s it going?”

“Fine. Thank you for inviting me to your party.”

“Anytime.”

“Okay.” They stood in the hallway another second, then Crush said, “ ’Bye.”

“ ’Bye.”

And, with as much dignity as he could muster at six in the morning while naked in a coworker’s house, and still sporting a hangover and a semi hard-on—because even degenerates could be sexy as hell in the morning—Crush headed to his truck and absolute freedom.

Marcella “Bare Knuckles” Malone—She-tiger, feline nationprotection contractor for KZS, pro hockey player for the championship shifter team the Carnivores, and the Malone family’s bare-knuckles fighting champion—heard the bedroom door open again, but she simply couldn’t stop her hysterical, wheezing laughter. No one could! Why? Because that had been the best!

“Cella?”

She heard MacDermot, but Cella couldn’t answer her. She was too busy laughing and trying to figure out who that guy was. It wasn’t every day Cella got to meet guys who looked like biker gang meth dealers, but had the moral fortitude of Martin Luther. All that indignant outrage over her untended daughter while sporting long, white polar bear hair that reached past his shoulders, a perpetual scowl, a scar on his neck, and pitch-black eyes that probably terrified lots of people. Of course, if all that didn’t scare someone, she was pretty sure that what had to be about six feet and nine inches and about three hundred pounds or so of hard muscle probably did the trick. Man, had that body been like a thousand levels of perfect or what?

Yet even though the guy was really scary looking, Cella just found all that intimidating scowling and raging anger so cute. Like teddy bear cute. Plus, he was so damn uptight! She didn’t know bears could be so uptight. Unless they were startled into a rage, bears were usually the most laid-back of all shifters, except lion males. Although Cella felt there was a huge difference between laid-back and just plain lazy.

Even worse for that poor bear was how all that uptightness brought out Cella’s worst feline qualities. Honestly, the more uptight the bear became, the more she playfully swatted at him. She couldn’t help herself. He was just so cute in his moral outrage!

“Cella!” MacDermot demanded, also now laughing. “What the hell did you do to the poor guy? I’ve never seen him look like that before. He was about to blow a vein in that big bear head of his!”

It was more than she could take. Cella rolled off the bed, hitting the floor, which miraculously made her hangover go far, far away.

CHAPTER TWO

Crush was dreaming about breaking through thick ice, pounding on it with his front legs, the seal under the ice giving him the flipper. Little bastard. But then the seal tapped at the ice. Once. Twice. Okay, so now he was taunting him?

“Crushek!”

Crush opened his eyes, looked around. Shit.

He turned the truck’s ignition key to get enough power to roll down the window. “MacDermot.”

She scowled and at first he thought she was angry. Then he realized she was just making fun of him. “Crushek,” she said, imitating his voice, then laughed, and rested her arms on the sill. “How long have we known each other, Crushek?”

“I don’t know.” He thought a minute. “Since the Evans case?”