“Depends on who you ask.”
“Anyone who thinks you’re horrible is a goddamned moron.”
“That’s…sweet, David. But now you’re painted with the same brush. You were out of it, you could have walked away once you dropped Caro for booking the other night. You should have. But you stuck with me, and now…now…”
She buried her face in her hands and swallowed a sob.
“Hey. Hey.” His hands settled around her waist and he squeezed gently. “Everybody knows it’s all bullshit. Everybody. Annette, I am not worried about me at all, okay? Not my job or anything else—independent contractor, remember?”
“You can still get arrested. And charged. And indicted.”
“Don’t care.”
“Well, that’s insane,” she said bluntly. “You should care.”
“I don’t regret sticking you. With you, sticking with you, God, sorry.” Smoooooooth!
She giggled a little. “If you’re trying to cheer me up, do better.”
I could hardly do worse. “We’ll find who’s responsible and bounce them into a cage face-first and you’ll be exonerated.”
“We’ll be exonerated,” she corrected with a sniff.
“Sure, but I don’t actually give a ripe shit about public opinion.”
She snorted into her palms. “It’s not just the false accusations. It’s all the cubs who’ve been hurt over this. And the ones who will be hurt unless we figure this out. Alone. While hiding. In a closet.”
“Be fair, we also cowered in the NICU and hung out in a grain silo.”
“Point,” she conceded, and shifted in his grasp. “And one of the worst parts of all this is that I’m finding you a gigantic distraction. My primary focus should be Caro and Dev, my secondary keeping Oz safe in Accounting, and…and everything else should be a distant third. Or fourth. Or not on the list at all. But that’s not what’s happening and I can’t… Um. David?”
Too late, he realized he’d been scenting the back of her neck and nuzzling her ear. “Sorry! Sorry.” He tried to take a step back, only to bump up against shelves. “Dammit!”
“Shhhh.”
“Sorry.” God, you’re an idiot. Get your shit together, for the love of… Oh dear God, what is she doing?
Wriggling in his arms, that’s what. Twisting and turning while they shuffled back and forth and bumped into things, and then she was facing him and her breasts were pressed up against his chest
oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God oh God…
and she whispered, “This is what I was talking about.”
…oh God oh God oh God… “Sorry, what?”
“I see I’ll have to make you be quiet, you noisy thing,” and then her lips were brushing his, and her clever, clever tongue was slipping past his teeth and he did his very best not to die.
It lasted for an eternity. Or ten seconds. He was never sure, after. All he could think of was her hot, soft mouth, the feel of her lush curves, her scent, the coarse glory of her hair, her low whimper as he pressed against her and wished they were anywhere anywhere anywhere but a closet that smelled like soap and stress.
After an age (or ten seconds), she pulled back. “Sorry,” she murmured into his mouth. “Very inappropriate.”
“Whuh?”
“I know you’re not interested in me like that. I just…You smell wonderful, like linen and cloves and something else that’s just you. I’m sorry.”
“You’re wrong,” he managed, trying very hard not to gasp or unhook her bra.
“No, I’m quite certain. Linen and cloves. And a bit of pepper from your aftershave.”
“No, I mean… Don’t be sorry. You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“It’s nice of you to let me off the hook. Also, if no one has heard us by now, they never will. I think this might happen a lot around here.”
“Huh?”
“People making out in closets. Ready?”
And with that, Annette wriggled
(JESUS CHRIST)
until she was again facing the door, and then she opened said door and stepped out. He was right on her heels; if she got too far ahead, he’d have had his nose on the tiles to follow her backtrail if he could’ve done it with any subtlety.
Luck was with them again; nobody noticed them. Or didn’t give a shit about a panting, disheveled couple who had hidden in a closet to avoid being arrested and then made out for some reason. Annette was probably on to something: this did happen all the time. But even if not, it was all good.
“So you gotta know what I’m thinking,” he said, his pulse rate finally coming down as he walked them back the way they came, through the Stable section of the hospital. The safer way—not that most Shifters would admit it.
“I do, huh?”
Well, some of what he was thinking. He needed to ponder the dichotomy of Never, obviously and I know you’re not interested in me like that, as well as the instant, endless kiss. He foresaw much, much pondering, especially later when he was alone in his bed. He’d ponder until he was shaking and sweaty, but now wasn’t the time, more was the fucking pity.
Oh, you poor idiot, his dead mother mourned.
“David? Your thinking on this?”
“We gotta talk to the investigator your hospital friends told us about. Is there an address on the card Sharon gave you?”
“She didn’t give me the investigator’s business card.”
“Fuck.”
“She gave me his business card plus files on all the missing kids. I stuffed them down the back of my pants when Taryn grabbed us.”
David perked up. “Fuck!” Come to think of it, he had thought her ass felt a little flat in the closet, but he’d been too distracted by her scent and hair and voice and skin and scent to notice.
“You’re cute when you’re tousled and swearing.”
Absurdly, this made him puff up with pleased pride.
Out of your league, his dead mom reminded him. And worse: you’ll be her end. And if she gives you cubs? You’ll be their end, too. As you were mine, son. As you were mine.
He didn’t know what was more irritating: still hearing her voice, or knowing she was right.
Chapter 26
“What do you mean, the bodies are gone?”
“The. Corpses. Ain’t. There. No. More.”
“Stop that,” Annette scolded. “I know it’s been a stressful day, but take it easy on the double negatives.”
Normally at this time of the evening, she’d be plugging in a new alarm clock, padding around in her sushi slippers, and thinking about making another pan of brownies while Pat nagged her about whatever he had decided to nag her about that evening.
Not knocking on a stranger’s door while discussing vanishing corpses with someone who thought the dead bodies were of less import than settling an argument with Dev.
“Look, just tell me I’m right so I can tell that insufferable monster—”
Faintly: “Hey!”
“—that he must never question me on anything pop culture-related ever again.”
She sighed. “Yes, Pat, technically Jon Snow is ‘boning his auntie’ in Game of Thrones. Why are you discussing inappropriate adult books riddled with incest, treachery, torture, and mass murder with a minor?”
“We’re not. We’re discussing the show riddled with incest, treachery, torture, and mass murder. And it’s because we’re really, really bored.”
“It’s only been three hours!”
“Fine. I’ll drop one of the ‘really’s.’”
Annette made a deliberate effort to loosen her grip on the phone. It was a burner, because David kept a box of them in his trunk for some reason. (And oh, they were going to have a chat about that later, thank you very much.)
She’d called the landline in Pat’s studio to check on her charges and ha
d been informed that Caro had apparently gone through three of Pat’s sketch pads and Dev had found Annette’s old Kindle. He was plowing his way through her online bookshelf, which was 75 percent cookbooks, 5 percent literature-themed cookbooks (current favorites were The Little House Cookbook and Roald Dahl’s Revolting Recipes…ironically, given the topic under discussion, she found A Feast of Ice and Fire to be only so-so), and 20 percent work-related (Stir It Up; The Lost Art of Listening).
Oh, and sometime in the last three hours, someone had come to the main house and spirited away three dead warwolves.
“Do I even want to know how you know this?”
“You do not.”
“Good God. Tell me.”
“Dev, um, might have wanted to stretch his legs a bit.”
She held her tongue. She had no moral high ground here. It wasn’t Pat’s job to keep Dev Devoss out of harm’s way. It was hers.
“He wanted some room to shift and stretch, and then he could hear cars pulling out. So he scampered up the hill—”
Faintly: “Werefoxes don’t scamper! I ran. Like a predatory badass!”
“—and saw guys with sinister black cars right out of central casting clichés loading the last corpse and pulling out, because we’re living in a caper movie now I guess?”
“Do you feel safe?” she asked simply. “Should we move you? I can be there in forty minutes.”
“No way. To the second part, I mean. They never came near the studio. And you know it would’ve taken them hours to break in, assuming they even could. We’re only in danger of acute boredom brought on by acute boredom because we’re so acutely bored.”
“Okay. We’re following some new leads and won’t be back tonight, which is why I called.”
“Please tell me you’re at least getting some nookie from Auberon out of all this.”
“Um…”
“Awesome!”
“Shut up.” Did kissing = nookie? She’d have to do some research. “Keep this number. David and I both shut off our cells so we’ll be checking in.”
“Thanks for the update, stay safe, and I might wring Dev’s neck but not a jury in the world, right?”
“Try it, jackal boy!”
She cut Pat off before he could shout a rebuttal. “Pat. I’m in your debt.”
“Bullshit. It’s been the other way around for years. You just pretend otherwise to save my pride.”
Proof (if any were needed at this point) it had been a long day/week: Pat’s kind words made her want to sob. “I appreciate this more than I can say.”
“You’d be a horrible person if you didn’t,” he replied cheerfully, and hung up.
“Sounds like business as usual.”
“Except for the disappearing corpses, yes.” She put the phone away and turned to David. “Why are we here?”
“Here” was the lobby of the Genesee apartment complex in Bloomington, home of the Mall of America, the Minnesota Zoo, and at least one of David’s friends. It was a standard housing setup, with neutral cream-colored walls and inoffensive gray carpet. They were buzzed up in short order, and not long after, David was introducing her to a charming couple who seemed as delighted to see David as they were surprised.
“Where have you been?”
“Work junk. Jenn, Jim, this is my colleague, Annette.”
“Hi!” Jenn exclaimed, shaking Annette’s hand in an impressively strong grip. Ow. It’s like shaking hands with one of those old-fashioned laundry wringers. “Sorry about the alliteration. I’ve been trying to get Jim to change his name for ten years. It’s just too cute, right?”
How am I supposed to answer that?
“Annette, this is Jenn and Jim Griffith. We kind of grew up together.”
“I think you can drop the ‘kind of,’” Jenn said, smiling at them both. She was tall, with a face full of freckles and short red hair that sprang from her skull in all directions, as if each hair follicle was out for itself. Her husband was six inches shorter and twenty pounds heavier, with light-brown skin, long lashes (why were those always wasted on men?), and the most melting Godiva-dark eyes Annette had ever seen. “It was the rare week when you weren’t over at one of our houses for dinner at least twice.”
They’re Stables, like Brian. What the hell happened to David when he was a kid? Easy: one or both of his parents died. And in the resulting chaos, his neighbors opened their homes to him, found out his secret, and loved him despite his other nature. Or because of it. Which is nothing I anticipated.
In fact, she was a little ashamed at how easily she’d dismissed the man for the two years he’d been on the periphery as an IPA investigator. Nobody knew anything about him? Well, nobody bothered to ask. He kept to himself? Again: nobody reached out. In less than a day she’d discovered his intelligence, sense of humor, and sweet-tooth-fueled candy fetish.
This is odd. Two years of nothing, and suddenly…everything? Maybe it’s not entirely on me. Maybe David chose to open himself up a little. And if he has, what does that mean for us?
Idiot: there is no us. David did not equivocate. It didn’t happen, it will never happen, stop trying to make it happen. Remember?
Too well.
And what were you thinking, glomming onto him with your lips? Poor guy will never consent to being stuffed into a closet with you again. Not without a rape whistle.
She made a determined effort to stop beating herself up and had to smile when she saw Jenn go straight to the kitchen and pour David a cup of coffee as her husband went for the maple syrup.
“Would you like some, Annette?”
“No, thank you, Jenn.”
“Something else? Water? Milk?”
“I’d love some milk. Oh God, I can’t watch.” She really couldn’t; David had put so much syrup into his coffee it was now indistinguishable from the syrup in color, smell, and texture.
“Back off, Garsea. Do I weigh in on your nutritional habits?”
“Frequently.”
“You had a plate of raw fish for supper.” To the Griffiths: “Not sushi. Not sashimi. Literally just a big dinner plate with a football-size pile of salmon that she wolfed down with two ginger beers.”
“Three ginger beers. May I put this in your fridge?” She held up the doggy bag—horrible name—which held her third helping of crème brûlée, perfect for a snack at 3:00 a.m. Or five minutes from now.
“Yes, of course. Wow, and I thought David could put away the chow. Is that because you’re like him? You’re”—Jenn’s voice trailed off as her husband gave her what he probably thought was a subtle elbow to the side—“a great big lover of fish?” she finished weakly.
“Uh…”
“It’s fine, Annette,” David said, sipping and closing his eyes in bliss. You could almost see the waves of syrupy contentment coming off him. “They know all about my nature.”
“So you turn into a bear?” Jenn coughed and tried to sound nonchalant, which was tough given that she was leaning so far forward she was practically looming over Annette, a good trick since she was two inches shorter. “I mean…if that’s your thing. Which is none of my business. No one’s business, really. It’s a private thing. If it even is a thing. Um. We have fish sticks? If you’re still hungry?”
“I’m fine.” She despised fish sticks. She also wasn’t sure how she felt about being so casually outed. Well, she could have denied it. David had simply handed her the chance to…not deny it. Which, she had to admit, was a novel sensation. “And I don’t turn into a bear. Neither does David. We just—” She cut herself off and took a gulp of milk. Mmmm…whole milk. “It’s complicated.”
“I can imagine.” Jim paused. “Actually, I can’t. I’m sitting here trying to imagine it, and I can’t make it happen in my brain.”
“Don’t hurt yourself, hon.” Jenn snickered.
David cleared
his throat. “Listen, guys, I’m sorry to just drop in like this—”
“Are you kidding?”
“It’s been ages. How long can you stay? A week? A month?”
“—but Annette and I need a place to crash for the night.”
Jim’s face lit up. “Is this for one of your cases? Are bad guys after you?”
“Yep to both.”
“We’re actually in a great deal of danger,” Annette added.
“Really?” he replied, enthralled.
“Oh yes.” She had to smile at his enthusiasm. “We’ve stumbled across a huge conspiracy, and at least four people have been killed in fewer than ninety-six hours. There’s no telling how high the body count will go, or if we’ll even survive.”
“That’s so cool!”
“Jeez, Jim.” Now Jenn was throwing elbows. “It’s not cool if it’s real life. Our friend’s in danger. And so’s his friend.”
“Our friend can take on any number of assholes without ruffling his fur,” Jim retorted. “And Annette probably could, too. Right, Annette?”
“Well.” She shrugged modestly. “Maybe not any number of assholes. And we’re not friends.”
“No?”
“No.” From David. “Definitely not.”
Ow.
So it was settled. The sleeping arrangements, at least; God knew nothing else was. They’d spend the night, and not long after Annette finished all the milk, she found herself lying down in the Griffiths’ spare room, in a borrowed nightgown, while Jim had made up the hide-a-bed for David, also in the spare room. David had eschewed the offer of pajamas and went to bed in his black boxer briefs, and Annette definitely didn’t sneak appreciative peeks.
“There are extra blankets in the closet if you get chilly,” Jenn said.
“No, thank you. I like it a little chilly.”
“She keeps her house at fifty degrees,” David added, sounding not unlike a third-grade tattletale.
“I do not!”
“I’ve been in your house, Annette. I know the truth.”
“Well, the next time you’re in my house, you’ll see that you had it wrong. So you’d better come over. Soon!”
Bears Behaving Badly Page 18