Mackenzie wasn’t one to care about age, and she would utterly annihilate the girl.

“As soon as Mackenzie deems her a good enough fighter,” he added, “she can start coming with us.”

“Mackenzie won’t deem her good enough for, what? Two years?”

“At least.”

River claimed the driver’s seat, Camilla shotgun and Jaclyn the middle. Gavin moved behind her, practically shoving Bronx out of the way to get there. Oh, no. That could mean only one thing...

I rolled down my window, stuck out my head and said, “Kat, change places with Gavin. Stat.”

“Already planned on it.” She trotted over, only to be grabbed by Frosty midway and carted back to the other car—but not before he flipped me off.

* * *

The fifteen-minute ride was both awesome and pure, unadulterated torture. Cole kept his arm wrapped around me, his fingers toying with the ends of my hair, but Gavin and Jaclyn snipped at each other the entire way.

“You gonna try to kill me again, sweetness?” Gavin began.

“Why don’t you save your breath?” she snapped. “You’ll need it to inflate your date later.”

“True. I will. Do you want to know what the sad thing is?” He didn’t give her a chance to respond. “She’ll still be better company than you.”

Jaclyn shook her fist at him. “If you don’t shut up, I’ll help you swallow your own teeth.”

“Even then, you’d still want me. Because that’s what all this animosity is about, isn’t it?” He wiggled his brows at her. “Why don’t you do us all a favor and admit it? After all, everyone already knows you’re going to end up throwing yourself at me. That’s the only way I’ll take you to bed.”

Her snort of derision echoed. “Me? Throw myself at you? Sugar, you couldn’t get laid in a whorehouse with a fistful of twenties.”

“I totally could. And when I sneak into your mom’s room later tonight, I’ll prove it.”

No. No mom insults. “Enough,” I said.

“Do you dream about all the ways I’ll satisfy you?” Gavin asked Jaclyn conversationally, ignoring me.

She bared her teeth at him in a fierce scowl. “The only way you would ever satisfy me in bed is if you left me in mine—alone!”

“Seriously. Enough!” River said with a lot more volume than I’d used. “I’m usually a big fan of sexual tension, but this is like an X-rated kindergarten class, with two little jerks crushing on each other, both too stupid to admit it out loud.”

Blessed silence.

Until Jaclyn said, “I do not have a crush on him. He refers to girls as candy. And guess what? This candy store is closed. Forever.”

Gavin yawned, then peered out the window, as if bored. “I’ve decided girls are like diseases. You happen to be Ebola. That causes vomiting, right?”

“And massive internal bleeding.” Jaclyn huffed and puffed, waiting for him to say something else, and despite everything, I was glad to see a little life to her.

“Silence is easy,” River said. “Try it.”

“If it were easy,” Camilla said, “it’d be your mom.”

“My mom is your mom.”

“So? I never liked her.”

“When we get back,” Cole whispered to me, “I want to take you on our second date.”

“How romantic of you,” I replied with a grin.

“Romantic...desperate to get you alone. Same thing.”

“And what are we going to do on this second date? It’ll be hard to top the near-death experience.”

He glowered at me. “You love premature joke-ulation, don’t you?”

“What can I say? It’s one of my many charms.”

“Well, tonight you’ll see one of mine.”

He’d basically just thrown a match inside me. Suddenly I burned and ached in the most delicious way. Had he just assured me that he would—that we would finally go all the way?

Concentrate! “You keep hinting about your plans for me. Tell me—”

“Nope. Too late,” he interjected a little evilly. “You’ll have to wait to find out what I meant. We’ve reached our destination.”

Dang it! He was right.

River parked in the east lot, out of view of the warehouse. We planned to start at the bottom of the apartment building and work our way to the top, knocking on every door we came across.

“We’ll take floors one and two,” Cole said to Gavin and me. To Jaclyn and River he said, “You’ll take floors three and four.”

“What about the rest of the gang?” I asked.

“They’ll be patrolling outside to make sure we aren’t ambushed.”

Or, in other words, keeping Kat out of the building and Frosty from going cray-cray on some poor, unsuspecting witness.

The building was a bit run-down, with paint peeling and threadbare carpet. There was also a musty smell in the air. Old dust, as if cleaning wasn’t always a priority.

The first floor proved unfruitful. On the second floor, however, we knocked on a door at the end of the hall, with a window overlooking the warehouse. An angry-looking man answered. He was a little shorter than me, his sandy-colored hair shaggy and unkempt. His eyes were bloodshot and his lips chapped. He wore a stained, wrinkled T-shirt that read Always Give 100% Unless You’re Giving Blood and pants way too tight for his bulky frame.