Page 10 of Deception

She’d been in Hope Springs for a week now, and she was still on edge. The constant deception, the sidelong looks she received — they made her shiver as much as the frigid temperatures in the high-altitude desert.

The place would have been pretty if… She stopped herself there. Itwasa pretty place. The landscape, at least. Hope Springs homestead backed onto a huge step of the Colorado Plateau, where millions of years of earth’s history showed in a rainbow of rock layers. A light dusting of snow was all the more brilliant against the reds, oranges, and browns of the exposed earth. But the haphazard collection of run-down trailer homes seemed to have been discarded rather than arranged as a community. It was hard to tell abandoned buildings from the occupied ones. Paint was peeling, mosquito netting sagging, and no one made an attempt to beautify the area. No flowers, no tidy porches, no cheerful colors.

When she’d first stepped foot on the place, she’d been tempted to turn around, head back to Arizona, and report that the Blue Bloods were defeated, once and for all. But there was an undercurrent to the scrappy little settlement of seventy-plus shifters. An unsettled feeling that made the back of her neck itch. Maybe the hatemongers were still at work here. Maybe the danger wasn’t in the past.

“Summer!”

She halted in her tracks. Of all the things that made her shiver in Utah, none beat the nasal tone of Gretchen’s voice. She turned and forced a neutral look over her face. “Hello.”

“Come on over, honey,” the fifty-something woman called.

Thehoneyrippled with some subtext she was afraid to read into, andcome on overwas a command. When Gretchen patted the crooked seat beside her, Summer’s instincts screamed at her to turn and run.

Gretchen Walker, née Whyte. Sister of Victor and Emmett Whyte — the men who’d taken the Blue Blood organization from a loose band of fist-shakers to a marauding gang of murderers. Victor and Emmett had been killed in attacks they’d staged on the Blue Moon Saloon, which served them right. But Gretchen…

Summer still wasn’t sure of the woman’s role in the rogue pack, but she didn’t have a good feeling about it.

“You settling in well?” Gretchen studied her with that piercing look, and her nostrils flared.

That was the hardest part of going undercover at Hope Springs. Wolf shifters like Gretchen were sensitive to the slightest change in facial expression, and they could sniff out a person’s emotions. Like fear. Like shame. Like disgust. Summer couldn’t let her guard down for a second.

The problem was, lies didn’t come naturally to her, and neither did deception. But hers was a life-or-death mission. The peaceful existence of countless shifters was at stake.

Plus, she could dounremarkableandemotionlesslike a champ. She’d had to for the awful months she’d been dragged along by the rogues. In fact, she’d unconsciously taken on that role for most of her life. No one noticed her moods. Hell, they rarely noticed her presence.

Drew noticed,her wolf murmured.He didn’t miss a thing.

She locked the thought away in the back of her mind. She couldn’t afford to let the hunky bear sneak into her thoughts now.

“Well, I’m still getting used to it all,” she said. The closer she stuck to the truth, the better her chances of going undetected. “Thanks for asking. How are you?”

She bit back a scowl, hoping Gretchen wouldn’t go into another tirade over the death of her brothers.

Gretchen sighed. “Good thing I have my boys. They keep me going.”

The “boys” were four hulking, dim-witted wolf shifters close to Summer’s age who’d been brought up on a gospel of hate. At first, she’d worried they might become the next generation of extremists. But without the strong leadership of a Victor or Emmett Whyte, Gretchen’s sons were lost, rudderless. The most they got up to was drinking, polishing their rifles, and taking potshots at any jackrabbit unlucky enough to bounce through their sights.

No, Gretchen’s sons weren’t the men Summer worried about. She worried about the Emmett Whyte look-alike coming toward her now.

Her inner wolf growled, and she forced herself not to bare her teeth.

“Hello, Mett. Care to join us?” Gretchen called.

The man went by Mett, but Summer knew who he really was. Emmett Junior — son of the Blue Blood leader she despised.

“Hiya, Aunt Gretchen.” The tobacco he chewed showed with every lazy syllable. When his eyes moved to Summer, they slid up and down her body in a slow, greedy path. “Hiya, Summer.”

“Hi,” she forced the word through gritted teeth.

“You doing good?” he asked, shifting the wad of tobacco from side to side.

She felt sick to her stomach, but she could hardly say that.

“Fine.”

“You thought about what I asked you before?”

Her fingers curled so tightly, her nails bit into her palms. Mett had come up to her soon after she’d arrived, asking her about his father’s death.

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