by Alyse Zaftig
“Which side of the mess are you on?” he asked, already bored with the prospect of rehashing the drama. “The gold car or the blue car?”
“What difference does that make? I won’t ask you any leading questions. I’m just gathering facts so that I can investigate further.”
“Gold. Or. Blue?” He leaned in a bit more with each word he enunciated.
Her eyes widened momentarily and her cheeks flushed becomingly. She blinked, stared for what seemed like a minute, and then scowled.
Too late. She’d already shown her hand of cards. She was intrigued by him, perhaps almost as much as he was intrigued by her. She might have thought him inscrutable, but goddesses weren’t meant to be understood.
“Blue,” she said, sighing.
“Hmm.” He nodded and righted his posture. “Do you suppose I’ll answer your questions neutrally and truthfully knowing that that your client is a man I despise?”
She closed her eyes and put her head back. “Shit.”
“Yes. Indeed.” Andreas despised both drivers, truth be told, but he didn’t see why she needed to know that yet.
“I understand that every witness account has some bias,” she said.
“And?”
“And I want you to tell me what you saw anyway. You let me worry about the bias.”
“Are you that desperate?”
“I’m that thorough.”
“I see.” He twined her silky hair around his finger again and, righting her head, she watched him curiously out of the sides of her eyes. “You should let it down.”
“What?”
“Your hair, sweet Mary.” He tickled the ends along her jaw and over her parted lips. “Like you do when you go out dancing.”
“Dance?” She let out a strained titter that made her breasts bounce enticingly. “I don’t dance.”
“But you do.” Reluctantly, he pulled his gaze up from her chest. “I saw you. You were at Elton’s some weeks ago, and the jukebox was loud, and I believe you were drunk.” He let the hair fall down into her cleavage and somehow suppressed the urge to brush it away. “You had your hair down and it flew around you. You were dancing wild and recklessly, and smiling. Laughing.”
“I…”
“Hmm?” He passed the pad of his index finger over her lips and tilted his head.
She was looking down at his hand and holding her breath.
“Is that as wild as you get, sweet Mary?”
“That is none of your concern.”
“Then what will you give me for my answers? If you wish to be so thorough, what do I get in exchange? I’m not obligated to be a good citizen when the citizens in this town aren’t good to me. They can all go fuck themselves.”
“And me too, right?”
No, he wanted her to be fucking him. She’d be so delicious riding atop him, breasts unbound and pressed against his mouth as his fingers notched into the meat of her fine ass.
His trespassing spy was so lovely, and smelled so wet.
“Just tell me what you want, Mr. Toft,” she said with more than a little exasperation.
“For a start, you can call me Andreas.”
“Does that get me one answer?”
He swirled the pad of his middle finger over her chin, just beneath the bow of her lip.
He loved touching her. He didn’t want to stop touching her, and that wasn’t so unusual for their kind. Their people touched casually simply to satiate tactile urges and for social connection, but he wanted more than that from her. He wanted her body pressed to his. He wanted her hands moving, gripping, urging. Her mouth whispering, licking, biting.
He pulled his hand away and let out a breath. “That earns you one answer.”
“I’m not sure if I really want to know the answer, but…what will earn me more?”
“More… Hmm,” he purred and leaned in close yet again. “I’ll tell you when the time comes.”
“Can I use my recorder?”
He shrugged. He didn’t see any reason why she couldn’t, though if her questioning went on too long, he imagined that she wouldn’t want to.
Gasps of pleasure probably didn’t make for very good case evidence.
Chapter 3
While Mary rooted through her tote bag in search of her digital recorder, her notepad, and a pen, Andreas lounged brazenly on the old, faded settee. He looked like some kind of overindulged duke with his feet bare, wearing clothes that were probably more expensive than her tablet computer. She hadn’t noticed what he was wearing at first because she’d been too busy trying to shake the mental fuzz caused by the anesthetic. She may not have been able to see the exact brands of his clothes, but the cuts of his fitted button-up shirt and his dark slacks were very fine. Either he knew how to dress himself or he knew how to find people to dress him. No matter which way, he made a pretty picture. More viscount than Viking.
“So…” She tucked her skirt under her knees and slowly stood with her interview tools. “Is this where you live?”
He closed his eyes and put his head back. “Is that a question you’d like to trade for?”
“No!” Gotta be careful with this guy. “I’m just making chitchat. Polite conversation.”
“Ask what you like, but the cost will be the same whether you’re asking for business or for pleasure.”
“Pleasure has nothing to do with anything.”
“Are you sure about that?” He crooked up one dark brow, somehow managing to fix his face in an expression that managed to be even more ducal. That he didn’t have the entire town at his feet begging to be in his service—or in his bed—could only be due to his masterful antisocialism.
She let out a breath that sounded far too wistful for her liking. “Quite positive. If you don’t mind, I’ll withdraw the question, and we can move on to the interview.”
“You haven’t asked what the cost of the first question is.”
If she wasn’t careful, he’d eventually wear her down and she likely wouldn’t even notice. He was so good—so suave with that silken voice and knavish smile. The rumors were true. He was odd, all right, but she’d never heard he was sexy as sin, too.
He was at the bar? How’d I miss him?
He was right that she’d been there. She’d been hoping he’d lay off of the game he was obviously playing and answer her questions anyway, even if hostilely. She could work with hostile. She wasn’t the most masterful game player, however.
“How does this game work?” she asked. “Does the cost for each question escalate depending on how complex you judge it to be, or does each question have equal weight?”
“The first.”
Damn.
She drummed her fingers atop her thighs and ground her teeth for a few beats. She always found a way to do her job, and she wasn’t going to get deterred, not even by a gorgeous nightmare like Andreas Toft.
She let her breath out in a sputter and patted down her hair on the sides of her head. “Okay. Well. I suppose I’d better decide if asking a series of short, simple questions would hurt me more than fewer, complex ones.”
“I imagine you’ll pay equally in the end.”
“And not even in a way I can expense back at the office,” she muttered.
“You can certainly try to receive reimbursement. However, I can’t promise you’ll get the results you want.” He opened his dark-as-onyx eyes then and she had to close hers, or else be hypnotized or something. “Or perhaps you will. Who am I to guess?”
This is going to go so badly.
And yet, there she was, still standing there. She opened her eyes and could see the door. She could probably get there quickly enough to open it and shout outside before he could pull her back. There was no line in her employment contract stating that she had to go to such extents to conduct a fact-finding interview.
But, she couldn’t go. The man held her in thrall for reasons that had nothing to do with professional curiosity about a fender bender.
She took a seat on t
he end of the settee near his feet and set the recorder beside his leg. As she tapped the end of her pen against her thigh, she studied him. Pondered his off-ness.
He seemed to thrum, even when he was being still. His energy, or perhaps something about hers, was out of balance. She hadn’t had breakfast, though, and could have possibly been misreading what her psychic senses were telling her.
She cleared her throat and pushed down the plunger of her pen. “So, first question. What did you see on the day of June twenty-third?”
He clucked his tongue and shook his head. “I believe you know perfectly well I won’t answer that in the way you’d like, so perhaps you should be more specific. I’ll give you a second chance, free of charge.”
“Thank you for your generosity.” She fidgeted the pen and licked her lips.
He moaned quietly. “Are you quite certain you wouldn’t like me to taste you?”
“Behave,” she muttered, knowing damn well he wouldn’t. She needed him to believe she thought him capable of doing so, though; otherwise, the man would probably be far too cocksure for his own good. “Okay, let’s try this. What were you doing at the time of the accident you witnessed on June twenty-third?”
He stared at her for a few seconds, working his jaw side to side and tilting his head as if he were trying to get the flavor of the question—perhaps trying to pare it down to its elements and give only the most naked response. He took a breath and twined his fingers behind his head. “I was crossing the street.”
“In which direction?”
“The cost of that query will be…hmm.” He tapped his chin and rolled his bottom lip between his teeth. “Eye for an eye, I think. I’ll ask you a question in return.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine, but I’ll refuse the question if I don’t like it.”
“No.” He grinned. “You won’t. I’ll almost certainly follow up with a question you’ll like even less, so I suggest you answer the first-tier questions.”
“Fine. Ask your question.”
“Tell me your middle names.”
She shook her head. “You’re asking for multiple pieces of information at once. If you won’t allow me to do that, neither will I let you. I’ll give you one name for each response.”
“How many are there?”
“Do you want to pay for that question?”
He chuckled. “Fair enough. I do believe I enjoy sparring with you, sweet Mary.”
The nickname knocked her off-kilter in such a way that she could conceive of no satisfying retort.
Why does he call me that?
The only other person who’d ever called her sweet had been her father, but he’d been easy to be sweet to. He’d been so kind and always had a smile for her. Most of their kind weren’t so nice.
She tried to force the flare of grief away on a long exhalation and shook her head to clear the thought of him. Nothing useful would come from more tears.
“I’m glad you find this exchange entertaining,” she said after she’d gotten her wits about her, at least somewhat. “The first of my middle names is Charlotte.”
“The goddess Mary Charlotte. Lovely.” He closed his eyes. “I was going north.”
“North.” She jotted down a note and withdrew from her tote bag a photocopied drawing of the area around the accident scene. “Okay. You were going north. Did you cross in front of the blue car, or behind it? I’m trying to visualize which view you had.”
“Next name?”
She sighed, and muttered, “Hilda.”
He cocked a brow.
She had a similar sentiment about that name. Some distant aunt on her mother’s side had been called Hilda, and that was all Mary knew about her.
“I crossed behind the blue,” he said.
“Approximately how far from the rear bumper of the blue car did you cross?”
“Next name?”
“Shawn.” Her father’s name. Her mother had buried the name after the others because she’d thought it too masculine, but it had ended up being Mary’s favorite.
“I’d estimate around thirty feet.”
“You like to cut things close, don’t you?”
He canted his head and raised one corner of his exquisite lips. “Would you like me to answer that?”
She actually had to think about it. She was curious, but not that curious. In the scheme of things, thirty feet may not have been all that close if the vehicles were both moving as slowly as the drivers had claimed. The speed limit on the street was only twenty-five miles per hour.
“No,” she said. “Don’t answer that. I can always follow up later if I think the information is actually important.”
He pouted teasingly.
She rolled her eyes. Even his pout was sexy.
“Next,” she said. “When you were crossing, were you looking at the vehicles or at the place you were crossing to?”
“Next name?”
“Sorry. Fresh out.”
“Hmm. So you’re Mary Charlotte Hilda Shawn Nissen. That’s certainly a mouthful.”
“That sounds approximately like what my kindergarten teacher said when she was teaching me to spell all that stuff in the middle.” She shrugged and tapped her pen some more. “I always figured that I could dump a couple or all three when I got married. If I get married. That’d be the easiest way to do a name change.”
She didn’t know why she’d volunteered that information. He hadn’t paid up, and they were playing a game of tit-for-tat. She should have waited for him to ask.
“My question, then, is which would you drop?”
“I haven’t decided, really, but I’ve considered dropping the Mary and keeping the Charlotte and the Shawn.”
“An interesting strategy.”
“Like I said, I haven’t decided. So.” She looked up at him. “Your response?”
“I was looking at the cars.”
“Why?”
“Why would you keep Shawn and not Mary?”
“Shawn was my father.”
“Oh.” He said the word so quietly that she almost missed the whisper of it beneath the sound of a plane passing overhead. There seemed to be something like reverence in the whisper.
He swallowed. “I was watching the cars because I recognized the driver of the blue when he passed and we…have a history.”
“What sort of history?”
“Where do you live?”
She furrowed her brow. He was so blunt and the question seemed incredibly personal, but she didn’t think she’d come to any harm by responding. Like he said—he could have asked her something even worse in exchange. “Near the airfield.”
“Hmm.” He nodded slowly and drew in another of those long-suffering breaths. “Your Mr. Blue used to antagonize me when I was a child. Briefly, we attended the same private school. His family has…new money.” He said the word “new” as if it had a funk about it. Normally, she would have found that to be disgustingly pretentious, but she actually shared some of his hostility about the client. She didn’t have to like her clients. She usually didn’t, in fact, but she’d always been able to affect a mostly neutral attitude toward them so she could be fair while doing her job.
“I see,” she said. Mr. Blue—actually, Bill Jordan—was a grade-A schmuck who liked throwing money around to get his way. He was a pushy jerk, and she wanted the case resolved so she wouldn’t have to hear that strident voice of his ever again. But she had to be fair. If he was at fault, she wasn’t going to cushion her notes to insinuate otherwise.
I hate this kind of law practice.
“How fast do you think the cars were going?” she asked.
“Do you live alone?”
She set down her pen and fidgeted with the corner of her notepad page. “Yes.”
“I can only speculate on whether or not the vehicles were traveling at the approximate rate of the speed-limit. I’m not a machine, sweet Mary.”
“Of course not. A guess is fine.”
“Well, t
hen. Blue was racing to make the light, and gold had just made a right on red and was a bit over the line because there was a bicyclist in the lane.”
“Okay, so Mr. Jordan was probably going a bit over the speed limit and the gold car was probably right at it.”
“That would be my guess.”
“In your opinion, did Mr. Jordan have sufficient time and space to steer around the other car?”
“Why do you live alone?”
“Because I appreciate the quiet, and don’t like to share.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Which part?”
“The sharing part.”
“Do I seem like such a giving person?”
“You’re a witch of a certain sort. We don’t isolate ourselves, do we? We need community to thrive.”
“Don’t you isolate?”
“Irrelevant.”
“Quite relevant. You’ve just accused me of being an aberration to our kind, and yet your magic doesn’t seem quite right for a Fallon Viking, and people rarely ever see you in public.”
“Let’s get back on topic, shall we?”
“So, you can dish it, but you can’t take it, huh?”
He closed his eyes. “Hmm. To answer your question, yes, I do believe Mr. Jordan had sufficient time and space to steer around Mr. Darrow. It was ten in the morning. Most people were at work, and the streets were fairly empty.”
“I see.” She traced the line of the street on the map and pictured the movements of the vehicles. The front left bumper of Mr. Jordan’s car had collided with the front left bumper of Mr. Darrow’s. Equal distribution of damage, and no clear indication of blame. If Mr. Jordan had been inattentive at the wheel and could have avoided Mr. Darrow, he may not have had much of a case. With Mr. Darrow swerving out of the way of the bicyclist, who he probably hadn’t been able to see until he’d made the legal turn, he had a fair reason to have been near the line. Based on the damage, he couldn’t have even been that far over the line when they’d crashed. His story held water.
She picked up her pen so she could tap the end some more. The fidgeting helped her order her thoughts. Her mother had tried to break her of the habit as a child, but her father had interceded. Our kind fidgets. You know that, he’d said.