“So, what do y’all want?”

“Your help, Ms. Randal,” the suit said. “I want you to tell me what you know about Shifters.”

Carly blinked, transferring her gaze to the soldier, who remained on his feet. A black-butted pistol peeked from a holster at his hip.

“I don’t know anything about Shifters,” Carly answered the suit. She pointed at the soldier. “This guy was aiming at him. I bet he knows more than I do.”

The suit smiled. He wasn’t cold and slick, like so many businessmen in suits—Ethan’s friends, for example. He had soft eyes, hands that had never seen a manicure, hair growing out of a once-good cut.

“Would you like to know more about them?” Suit asked. “Perhaps for pay? What I’m trying to do, Ms. Randal—awkwardly—is offer you a job.”

“I already have a job.” Well, maybe. “What did you have in mind?”

“I want you to find out about Shifters. Talk to them, interact with them, see what makes them tick. And then you and I sit down and talk about it.”

“You mean spy on them?” Carly thought about Tiger, all shot up because of Ethan, Connor so young but promising to protect her, Liam and Sean—the hottie Irish brothers—trying to keep Tiger under control, Sean and Connor convincing her to come to the hospital with them, to see if she could help. “Seems kind of underhanded. What are you? CIA? FBI?”

The man in the suit chuckled. “No, I’m an anthropology professor. My name is Brennan, Lee Brennan. Here’s my card.” He plucked a pale rectangle from his briefcase and held it out to her. Sure enough, the card said he was Lee Brennan, PhD, associate professor of anthropology at the University of Texas, Austin.

“Why does an anthropology professor need a bodyguard?” she asked him.

Carly tried to hand the card back to Brennan, but he shook his head. “Keep it. My number and e-mail are there, along with the website for my project. Walker isn’t my bodyguard. He’s my friend, or at least, a former student. He keeps an eye out for good case studies for me and called me today after you left the hospital.”

Carly sank to the edge of a chair, still holding the card and the remote. “And you thought I’d be a good case study?”

“Not you. The man they had to chain to the hospital bed. What was his name?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been calling him Tiger, because I guess he’s a tiger.”

“And that is very unusual. The Feline types of Shifter tend more to lion, leopard, even jaguar. Tiger is rare. I don’t think we’ve even seen a tiger in the Texas Shiftertowns.”

“So you want me to make friends with him and then tell you all about him?” Carly asked. “That still seems pretty underhanded.”

“Be as honest with him as you want. The Shifters have heard of me and know about my project. I am interested in this tiger, and would love to view him and Shiftertown through a fresh pair of eyes. You’d be helping me out and earning a little money at the same time.”

“How much money, exactly?”

Brennan chuckled again. “That depends on my funding, and I’m always underfunded. But I do have money budgeted for a research assistant. If I use you as an outside consultant, you won’t have to enroll in the university, though there will be paperwork to sign before I can get you paid. There’s always paperwork. Everyone talks about the paperless society, but there’s no way a giant bureaucracy will ever achieve it. There’s always some form that has to be hand-signed, electronic signatures not accepted.”

Carly turned his card around in her fingers. “Can I think about it?”

Brennan creeped her out a little bit, no matter that he seemed friendly and legit. Maybe because he’d showed up out of the blue, at her house, knowing exactly where she lived, when she’d never met him before. Why hadn’t he called her, e-mailed her, approached her at the hospital? And who was this Walker guy, really?

“Take your time, Ms. Randal,” Brennan said. “My study is ongoing, and Shifters live far longer than we do.”

“Tell me something.” Carly fixed Walker with a steely look. “If I take this job, will Mr. Walker follow me around, armed to the teeth? Did you think an art gallery assistant was so dangerous that you had to bring a Glock or whatever that is into my house?”

“Walker’s my first name,” Walker said. He was the only one of the three of them who hadn’t sat down. “Captain Walker Danielson. Carrying a gun is part of my job.”

“What, like Walker, Texas Ranger?”

His hard-faced mask slipped, and he looked a little embarrassed, as though people tried to make that joke all the time. “Not quite.”

Carly assessed him again. He was kind of cute, in the I’m-a-hard-bitten-soldier kind of way, but she couldn’t forget how ready he’d been to shoot Tiger.

“Are you CIA, FBI, whatever alphabet agency?”

“Department of the Interior. Shifter Bureau.”

“Oh.” Carly had never heard of the Shifter Bureau, but she knew that Shifters were regulated. At least, articles and TV reports reassured the public of this all the time. Again, she realized how far Shifters had been off her radar—she’d given no thought to how they were regulated, or why, or who did it.

“And your job is what?” Carly asked Walker. “Intimidation?”

“I’m an officer in the Special Forces attachment to the Shifter Bureau South,” Walker answered, the red at his cheekbones vanishing. “I and my men are called in when there’s a problem, such as a Shifter going crazy in a hospital.”