Wolf with Benefits by Shelly Laurenston

she’d been up to. He’d quickly learned not to because she’d tell him. Everything. Down to the last blood-and-brain-covered detail. That was something Ric really didn’t need to hear. He soon came to the realization that the only thing he needed to know about the woman he loved was that whatever she did when she wasn’t with him was for the good of their kind.
    Still, leaving all this on Dee’s and Cella’s powerful shoulders so that he could go to the Van Holtz family meeting in Germany was not something he really wanted to do.
    And then after the meeting in Germany, Ric and his cousin—who, yes, he still called Uncle Van because of their age differences—would be heading out to the campgrounds in Montana for the last two weeks of the Van Holtz cooking summer camp. That meant Ric would be out of New York for at least a month.
    “What have we got?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
    “Nothing,” both women said in unison.
    “And before you ask,” Cella went on, “Crush and Dez don’t have anything, either.” Crush, an enormous polar bear and Cella’s mate, and Desiree MacDermot-Llewellyn, full-human and mate to Mace Llewellyn, were detectives in the NYPD’s shifter-run division. They often worked with Dee and Cella on the more difficult cases, handling a lot of the research and managing any NYPD presence.
    “Clearly we need to come up with something,” Ric remarked. “I can tell the powers-that-be want Whitlan, and they’re tired of waiting.”
    Frankie Whitlan. A gangster and conman and one-time police snitch who used the NYPD to take down anyone who got in his way or cut into his business. At one point, Whitlan had disappeared, leading everyone to think he was dead. He wasn’t. Instead, he just remade himself again and returned with a business that catered to a certain type of full-human.
    Very rich full-humans who enjoyed hunting shifters and stuffing them. Their trophies of lions and bears and wolves decorated their expensive hunting cabins or family homes like mooseheads.
    It was something that Ric’s kind simply couldn’t and wouldn’t ignore, but Whitlan was very smart and very good at getting lost. When they’d finally closed in on him, he’d disappeared again and had yet to come up anywhere that their three groups—NYPD for local, The Group for nationwide, and KZS for international—had people searching.
    “I know we’ve talked to Whitlan’s past associates who are still on the outside,” Ric said. “But what about those inside?”
    “We haven’t done that yet,” Dee told him.
    “Then do it. Maybe if we’re lucky, it’ll give us something new.”
    “I’ll—” Cella began.
    Ric quickly cut her off. “No. Dee-Ann, work with Desiree and Crushek on getting together a list of names of anyone that was once a cellmate or prison buddy of Whitlan. Go back as far as you need to. Once you’re ready, bring in Cella.”
    “Why can’t I help now?”
    “Because I’d like for my team to at least have a shot at getting into this year’s championships.”
    “I’m working on it,” Cella snarled. “But you know it’s not been easy.”
    “You wanted to keep Novikov on,” Ric reminded her, speaking of his least favorite human being. “Even after what he did to Heller.”
    She shrugged and made excuses. “That was an accident. Heller got in Novikov’s way.”
    “You don’t really believe that, Cella.”
    “Accident!”
    And, as if summoned from the pits of hell Ric always accused him of originating from, Bo “The Marauder” Novikov stalked into Ric’s office. No knock. No request to come in. Just throwing the door open and barreling his way into the room of his team’s owner and captain, the way Ric imagined Novikov’s Mongolian ancestors barreled into China.
    Yet what horrified Ric was not that Novikov stood there with wet hair, a dozen roses, and a box of chocolates from the high-end chocolate store down the street under one arm, but that he held Toni under the