Dragon's Clutch (Sanmere Shifters Book 3)

form or another), making calls, and sending emails. The final insult had come half an hour before the session was due to wrap up. Valerie had commanded Brianne to go to her trailer, unlock it, and get the air temperature just right. Of course, she hadn’t specified what temperature the right temperature might be, opting instead to tell Brianne to use her brain when she questioned her on the subject. If Brianne did that, she would get in her car and drive off the set and never look back.
After she had made an educated guess and set the temperature to the number she thought was about right, she had to go back out to the coffee shop and get the coffee in a thermos this time. Brianne had done everything that was asked of her, and now she sat in Valerie’s trailer, waiting for her to return. She was sure something would be wrong. The coffee wouldn’t taste right or the trailer would be too hot or too cold. Knowing Valerie, it could well be all three of those things, despite the fact that two of them contradicted each other.
She heard Valerie’s heels clicking across the ground outside of the trailer and she braced herself for what she knew was about to come. The door opened and Valerie stepped inside and pushed the door shut behind her. She immediately rolled her eyes and moved to the thermostat.
“Honestly, Brianne, can you do anything right?” Valerie said in a long-suffering voice as she turned the heat down a couple of degrees.
“Yes,” Brianne said. “I can quit.”
She surprised herself as the words came out of her mouth, but she felt glad that she had said them. Valerie just laughed at her.
“No, you can’t,” she said. “And we both know why.”
She picked her coffee up and began reeling off a list of tasks that she needed to be completed like Brianne hadn’t even spoken. Brianne felt a shiver go through her at the implication behind Valerie’s words and almost subconsciously, she pulled her cell phone out of her pocket and began noting down everything Valerie was saying to her.
Valerie took a sip of her coffee and wrinkled her nose.
“This isn’t a skinny one, is it?” she said.
In another of her whims, Valerie, who had once thrown a cup of coffee over Brianne because she was so sure she hadn’t used full fat milk in it, had now decided she only drank skinny lattes.
“It most definitely is a skinny one,” Brianne said. “I watched the barista pour it myself to be sure it was right.”
“So you think I’m fat?” Valerie said.
“What? No,” Brianne replied. “I didn’t say that. I just know how you like your coffee. You can’t seriously be upset with me for that.”
That seemed to push Valerie over the edge and she began to rant and rave at Brianne. Brianne just stood there, her mouth hanging open in shock, watching the vein in Valerie’s head pulse and her face redden with anger. She barely heard the words; they just washed over her. She definitely had to quit and as soon as she could get a word in, she was going to tell Valerie she was serious about quitting, and if that meant she lost her protection from the bad guys of the supernatural world, then so be it.
She had to bite her lip to stop herself from smiling when she pictured herself telling Valerie she needed to calm down because the red shade of her face really didn’t suit her skin tone. She decided against actually saying it, but it sure would have been fun to watch Valerie wrestle with deciding between unleashing more of her temper or trying to make her face look normal again.
As Valerie yelled at Brianne, a knock came at the trailer door.
“What?” Valerie yelled, turning away from Brianne for a second and focusing on the door as though she could see through it and know who was out there.
The door opened and Brianne’s breath caught in her throat as Callin McKenzie stepped into the trailer. He was even more handsome in real life than he looked on the screen. His dark hair was pushed back from his face although one errant strand hung down over his forehead. Brianne found herself wanting to reach out and brush it back, but she obviously resisted the urge to actually do it. Callin’s dark eyes moved over her body and she felt her body tingling as they came to rest on her face. He gave her a sexy half-smile that made her stomach swirl.
Callin was every bit as ripped as he looked in the movies, and Brianne instantly knew the press reports that his body was enhanced at the editing stage in his movies were completely fake. Physically, he looked even better in real life than he did on screen, and Brianne saw that he was everything she had ever dreamed of in a man. She felt her mouth going dry as he continued to look at her.
Too much time had passed without either of them looking away from each other and Brianne was starting to feel self-conscious, but not enough to make her break the eye contact with Callin. His eyes seemed to hold hers in place, and although she told herself she had to be imagining it, she thought she could see something in Callin’s eyes, something that she knew was definitely present in her own eyes. Lust.
“Hi, I’m Callin McKenzie,” Callin said, smiling wider at Brianne, showing a row of perfect, straight white teeth.
Brianne managed to smile back, feeling herself blushing and pleased that her olive skin was dark enough to hide the color from her cheeks.
“Brianne Ellison,” she managed to say.
Her voice came out sounding normal and she was grateful for that much at least, because right then, she felt anything but normal. Her heart was racing, her palms were sweating, and her stomach spun like it used to when she was a little girl and she was