Once An Alpha (The S Files: Paranormal Investigation Agency – Book 1) Read Online Free PDF Page A

wouldn’t have let you fall,” he continued, leaning in close and pulling me further away from where I’d slipped and almost met my demise. I could smell him, all aftershave and masculine sweat, and my heart skipped a beat as I inhaled his scent.
    In that moment I had a stark realization. This man would never let me fall. Except maybe to fall in love with him. God dammit, why did he have to be so sexy? Not wanting to face the reality of what my mind and nether regions were screaming at me, I pushed him away and then stomped off in a huff. “Come on. We still haven’t found the second blaze.”
    “Yes, sir,” he said with a mock salute.
    An hour later, we arrived at the campsite where the hikers had set up their tent to stay in the night that they had disappeared. It was surrounded by police tape just in case any intrepid mountaineers got curious and decided to poke around the scene, and we slipped it over our heads and looked around. It appeared to be relatively undisturbed.
    “So what do you think happened?” I asked, noticing the remnants of a small campfire in front of the tent. “Think they wandered off and got lost? Or maybe a bear attacked them?”
    Lyndon shrugged as he unzipped the tent and bent down to look inside. This time it was me perving on his tightly-muscled ass, and my cheeks flushed. I could be such a hypocrite sometimes.
    “I doubt it,” he finally replied, emerging from the tent and standing up straight. “Only black bears live in this area, and they avoid humans. Not like grizzlies. But like I said, the grizzly bear doesn’t live in Colorado, as far as I know anyway. And as for them getting lost…I don’t know. They were experienced hikers. Not exactly prone to wandering off and getting lost.”
    “Anything in the tent?”
    “Yeah,” he replied. “Clothes, backpacks, shoes, a small GPS tablet and also two cell phones. Whatever happened to them, it happened fast.”
    “Hmm.” I turned to the side and glanced around again, trying to spot anything else in the near vicinity that hadn’t already been observed and photographed by the Bakewell Springs police.
    Lyndon tilted his head to the side and sniffed the air for a moment, and I stared. He looked just like a sniffer dog trying to catch a scent.
    “What the hell are you doing, Lyndon?”
    He obviously hadn’t realized I’d been watching him, and he looked over at me, a startled expression crisscrossing his handsome features. “Oh. Nothing. Just…err, just taking in the mountain air. It’s nice.”
    It was the first time I’d seen or heard Lyndon being caught off his usually-smooth guard since the day he’d asked me to dinner outside that lecture theatre all those years ago, and I raised an eyebrow quizzically.
    “Um, yeah, it’s nice. But we should focus.”
    We canvassed the area around the campsite and came up with nothing until I spotted something on a nearby tree trunk. “Hey, Lyndon, take a look at this. Look like dried blood to you?”
    He crouched down and squinted thoughtfully at where I was pointing. There were no police markers around it, and there’d been nothing in their report about finding a possible blood spatter.
    “Hard to tell. Could just be tree sap. Take a sample and we’ll send it back to the labs in DC,” he replied.
    I slid on some latex gloves and then removed a plastic evidence bag from my backpack, being as careful as possible not to contaminate the potential sample. After swabbing the bark with a large cotton tip, I sealed it in a jar and then slipped the jar into the evidence bag. Hopefully, this would be our first lead.
    A chilly wind suddenly whipped through my wild curls, and I involuntarily shuddered as I surveyed the scene. There was something so ominous about knowing we were standing right where two people had inexplicably vanished as they tried to sleep. I couldn’t even imagine something like that happening to me; being so frightened and feeling so alone, knowing no one in civilization