Prince Charming Doesn’t Live Here

by Christine Warren

  Really, that was the entire issue, boiled down to its thick and flavorful essence. It had been more than twenty-four hours since she’d run down the steps of the Addison house and offered the driver of her town car an extra fifty bucks if he got her back to New York in one piece in less than forty-five minutes. He’d done it, too, even though she thought her spleen might still be somewhere back on one of those ridiculous curves in the Merritt Parkway. And she had done that because of Mac Callahan. Because he was the first man she’d ever met who made her forget her name, rank, and serial number.

  Danice would not have called herself a blushing virgin type. Hell, she wasn’t sure she even could blush anymore, and she hadn’t been a virgin since a rather forgettable experience in her freshman dorm room at Fordham. She might not have had time for what she’d call a real relationship in the last, oh, seven or eight years, but that didn’t mean she had denied herself the pleasure of some occasional male companionship.

  Why should she? Danice liked men. She liked them a lot. They might not always be the brightest bulbs in the universe, but they entertained her with their inexplicable arrogance and endearing bumbling. She liked the way they viewed things in such linear, black-and-white terms, so that you could always tell what they were thinking. And she liked the way they would occasionally surprise you by actually noticing something you’d been waving in front of their noses for a week or two. She liked the way they couldn’t seem to stifle that caveman-ish protective instinct they all had, yet somehow didn’t think there was anything wrong with indulging in some of the most ridiculously dangerous behaviors on earth, just for the adrenaline rush.

  Men were awesome.

  But before Mac Callahan, they’d also been completely forgettable. In Danice’s world, men had functioned a lot like handbags. They had their uses, and occasionally a girl could feel totally lost without one, but in general the important question was whether one would hold your cell phone and lipstick, and whether or not it clashed with your shoes.

  Somehow, when Mac Callahan had been staring at her, how he looked with her shoes had been the last thing on her mind. She’d been too preoccupied thinking about hands and lips and shoulders and thighs and—

  Damn. There she went again.

  Danice was a grown woman, for God’s sake. She ought to have more control of her hormones than this. She ought to be able to put Mac Callahan completely out of her mind, and instead she sat here mooning after him like a teenage groupie over the latest Hollywood heartthrob. It downright embarrassed her.

  “Enough,” she growled at herself, picking up her pen and forcing her attention back to her work. She’d read approximately one sentence farther from where she’d left off to answer Corinne’s call when the phone rang again.

  While she was tempted to answer with a curt, No, Ava, I am not going to be there tonight, her common sense prevented her. Knowing her luck—especially over the last few days—the one time she didn’t answer the phone in a polite, professional manner would be the one time she found herself talking to an insulted client.

  Despite her maudlin thoughts of a few minutes ago, Danice had no intention of losing her job.

  “Danice Carter,” she answered.

  “Hello, Danice Carter. This is Mac Callahan,” a voice rumbled in her ear, and for a moment she thought her mind might be playing tricks on her.

  “I beg your pardon?” she stammered.

  “Mac Callahan,” he repeated, sounding more amused than insulted. Of course, in her short experience with him, Mac always sounded amused. “We met yesterday in Connecticut. At the Addison home.”

  The last thing Danice had required was a reminder of who he was or where they had met. She could still feel that long, lean body pressing hers down into the mattress.

  And therein lay the root of her problems.

  Or perhaps the root of all evil. She hadn’t decided on that yet.

  “I remember, Mr. Callahan,” she managed, though she had to fight to keep her voice even. Trust me, I couldn’t forget you if I tried, she thought. And I have tried. “I’m just surprised. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you. Certainly not so soon.”

  “I just couldn’t stay away,” he teased, but he continued before she could voice a protest. Or her astonishment. “And I think I might have some information that’s pertinent to Rosemary Addison’s current whereabouts.”

  “You do?” That was enough to quiet the fluttering in Danice’s belly, at least temporarily. She grabbed a legal pad from her drawer and flipped to a blank sheet. “What have you heard?”

  He paused. “It’s not really information I’m comfortable sharing over the phone. I’d like you to meet me somewhere, so I can tell you in person.”

  Danice felt her eyes narrow. “You want to meet with me,” she repeated, her voice laced with the suspicion she couldn’t stifle. “I’m fairly certain that’s not necessary, Mr. Callahan.”

  “Mac,” he corrected. “And since I’m the one with the information, I think I get to decide whether or not meeting in person to discuss it is necessary. Don’t you?”

  “Not really.”

  “Believe me, Danice, I’m not playing a game here. This really is something you need to hear face-to-face.”

  He sounded sincere enough, but the way he said her name, the way his voice seemed to caress the syllables, made her wary.

  “Look, Mr. Callahan, I tried to make it clear to you yesterday morning that I’m not interested in anything more than a professional relationship with you—”

  “Whoa, slow down there, Lance,” he interrupted, his voice firming, “before you actually manage to insult me. This is not an excuse to try to talk you into bed. Believe me, I’ll get to that at some point. But at the moment, I’m being straight with you. I have information that pertains to your missing client, and it’s not something I’m going to discuss unless you’re sitting in front of me. That’s not a come-on; it’s the straight truth.”

  Still, she hesitated. His tone said he meant business, but when he threw in the part about trying to talk her into bed, he jumbled the whole thing up again and she ended up as wary as she’d been before he tried to “reassure” her.

  “Mr. Callahan—”

  “Mac. And I’m not going to argue with you. I have info I think you want. If you do, you’ll meet me at the Court house in half an hour.”

  And he hung up on her.

  Danice stared at the receiver in her hand for a long moment before replacing it in the cradle. What should she do now? Should she believe him? And if so, which part should she believe? The one about having information on Rosemary, or the one that confirmed he intended to try to seduce her? Maybe both were true.

  She weighed the situation in her mind. On the one hand, he’d sounded perfectly sincere about Rosemary—she blocked his possible sincerity on the other matter from her mind for the moment. On the other, he’d asked her to meet him at the Court house, which was a bar only a few blocks from her office, and a bar wasn’t the most professional rendezvous point he could have arranged. Of course, it was a bar frequented mainly by lawyers, clerks, and judges, so she supposed it counted more as her territory than as his. That could signal an effort on his part to make her more comfortable with the situation. Then again—

  Danice halted her whirl pool of thoughts before they spiraled out of control. She could sit here and debate with herself all night. In the end, the essential truths remained the same: Mac Callahan had information she needed, and if she wanted it now, the only way to get it would be to meet him as he’d requested.

  Cursing aloud, she stuffed her paperwork into her briefcase, grabbed her purse, and headed for the door. Better to move fast. Before she could change her mind.

  Eight

  Mac was betting she’d show. Of course, he’d lost bets before, so what that really meant eluded him. The reality was, he hoped she’d show.

  Hoped hard.

  The past twenty-four hours had flown by, but not in the most pleasant of ways. Mac was
the first to admit that he could be a bit bulldoggish when he was after a certain piece of information, and he’d proven that today. He’d accomplished a lot of digging since last night, and wouldn’t you know it but he’d come out of the exercise covered in dirt.

  The kind liberally laced with fertilizer.

  He sat in a booth at the back of the Court house bar, the kind where no one could sneak up on him from behind, but that still afforded him a clear view of the front door and all the people coming and going through it. He didn’t expect to see more than an occasional Other pass through, and so far he’d been right about that. He just hoped his luck would hold out for a while longer.

  His head turned the minute she came in, as did more than a few others, he noticed. He could hardly blame the men for looking. In her garnet-colored suit and sleek, shoulder-length hairstyle, she looked cool and elegant and sexy as hell. Mac would be astounded if he’d been the only one to notice. On the positive side, though, she didn’t acknowledge any of the looks pointed her way. She simply scanned the room with her direct brown gaze until it locked on him. Then she made her way toward him with an unhurried focus.

  “It feels like a cliché to say this, but you’d better have something good, Callahan.”

  Mac watched her slide onto the bench opposite him and read the mix of emotions on her face with an amused eye. “Rough day, Counselor?”

  She growled at him.

  He chuckled around the mouth of his beer bottle. “Order yourself a drink. You look like you could use it.”

  “Unlike some people I could mention, I’m working at the moment, and I don’t drink while I’m working.”

  “You have to clock out at some point, sweetheart. Either that or you’ll lose your mind.”

  “Too late,” she muttered under her breath as he held up a hand to their waitress.

  “Wine? Beer? Or you heading straight for the hard stuff?”

  Danice managed a small smile for the waitress. “I’ll take a glass of red. Whatever’s open.” Her expression when she looked back at him did not feature a smile. “There. I’m having a drink. We’re having drinks. So why don’t you go ahead and tell me what’s so blasted sensitive that you can’t discuss it over the phone?”

  Mac sighed. Her attitude didn’t surprise him, but it did disappoint him. At least a little. He knew she had to feel the spark between them; people in Antarctic research stations had to feel it. But he couldn’t figure out why she’d want to fight it so hard. He didn’t want to fight it. If it hadn’t been for those pesky public decency laws enacted by the humans, he’d have not fought it right here on this bar table. Danice, however, looked ready to go twelve rounds. Without gloves.

  “Wait for your drink.”

  She stared at him.

  “If it was sensitive enough to keep off the phone, I’m not going to have the waitress overhearing half of it while she drops off your wine. Wait for your drink.”

  She made a sound a bit like a duck being strangled.

  “Why don’t you tell me about your day, dear?”

  He thought he might have seen a bit of smoke puff out one ear.

  “Why would you have us meet in a bar if you didn’t want to be overheard?” She enunciated each word with extreme care, as if the choice were between that and barking them out alongside the bullets she was probably imagining putting into his chest. “In case you hadn’t noticed, we’re not exactly alone here.”

  “A crowd is the very best place to be alone, Danice. I’d think an intelligent woman like you would know that.”

  The waitress slid Danice’s wineglass onto the table and placed another bottle of beer in front of Mac. She also offered him a wink that made him think his cocktail napkin might turn out to have more than the name of the bar printed on it. He thanked her for the beer and ignored the wink, though he couldn’t help but notice that Danice glared at the woman’s back as she walked away.

  That promised to turn his evening right around.

  “All right, she’s gone.” Danice raised the glass to her lips and glared at him over the rim. “Now spill.”

  Mac drained his original beer and set the bottle aside, stalling for time. When he reached for the fresh one, Danice whisked it away to her side of the table and held on to it firmly.

  “I said, spill.”

  Oh, but where to start? Mac considered.

  “I told you I’d been hired to locate Rosemary Addison for a client,” he began.

  Danice nodded. “Right. But you wouldn’t tell me why. Or the name of the client.”

  “The first was because all I knew about why boiled down to a vague reference to an inheritance or a gift that the client wished to give her,” he admitted. “And the second…well, the second was because I don’t actually know the name of the client.”

  He watched her eyes widen, then narrow suspiciously.

  “You’re telling me that you accepted a client and took on a case without knowing who that client is? I’m supposed to believe that?”

  “It’s the truth. And it’s not out of the realm of my experience, or the experience of a lot of investigators. We often take on cases precisely because the client wants the kind of discretion and anonymity they can’t be assured of receiving from the authorities.” He shrugged. “It doesn’t happen every day, but it does happen. So I didn’t really think that much of it.”

  “But you’re thinking of it now?” she guessed.

  “You might say that.”

  And now came the hard part.

  Mac shifted in his seat and watched Danice carefully. He always found it difficult to tell with humans. How they’d react, and all. Some of them just shrugged, as if the news hadn’t come as such a big surprise, while others refused to believe it. They walked away after referring him to Bellevue and ordering him to stay away from them on pain of police intervention. And some got really excited about the whole thing. Way too creepily excited. He didn’t think Danice would react the latter way, but he debated flipping a coin between the other two possibilities.

  Of course, the only way to know for sure was to just tell her.

  He flattened his palms on the table and captured her gaze with his. He needed her to know he was sincere. Even if she laughed in his face and ran out of the bar screaming for a straitjacket, he wanted her to see that he meant what he was about to tell her.

  “Danice,” he finally began, choosing his words with caution. “First of all, you need to know…that there are…things out there…that aren’t exactly…human.”

  She stared at him, her expression blank, and Mac realized after several seconds that he was holding his breath. But he still didn’t let it out. Not until she blinked and said, “Yeah, so?”

  He bit back a groan. Trust her not to make this easy for him. “I’m not talking about cats and dogs and carrier pigeons. I’m talking about the bogeyman. Vampires and werewolves and werecats. Oh, my.”

  She took a sip of her wine and shrugged, sliding his beer back toward him. “I know.”

  She knew?

  Mac stared at her, at her gorgeous, expressionless face, at her nonchalant posture, at her hand, steady as a rock on the stem of her glass.

  She knew.

  He shook his head, trying to clear away the odd buzzing in his ears. “What do you mean, you know?”

  “I mean, you’re not telling me anything of which I was not already aware. Trust me, I know about The Others.”

  This time Mac turned to his drink, not because he was thirsty, but because he needed an excuse for not speaking while he tried to reacquaint himself with the laws of the universe. Which way was up, again?

  His bottle clanked as he half set, half dropped it back onto the table. “And how, exactly, did you come to know all about The Others?”

  “That’s really none of your business,” she informed him, then pursed her lips and glanced over his shoulder. “But if you must know, I’ll just say that a couple of my friends introduced me to the concept last year.”

  �
��Introduced you to the concept. What, did they give you a PowerPoint presentation?”

  She stared at him.

  He stared back. Damned if he’d let himself be intimidated by this woman. Intimidation and sex did not mix, and he still hadn’t given up on the idea of sex. Not by a long shot.

  Her gaze shifted away from his again. “Regina and Missy ended up meeting Others with whom they developed close personal relationships. Since they’re also among my closest friends, it wasn’t as if they could keep it secret from me.”

  That time, she didn’t just surprise him; she nearly stopped his heart. Some things were just too strange to be counted as coincidence.

  “Regina and Missy,” he repeated. “Are you talking about Regina Vidâme and Missy Winters?”

  Her eyes widened. “You know them?”

  He snorted. “The wives of the former and current heads of the Council of Others? Yeah, I might have heard their names mentioned somewhere.”

  It might not be polite of him to savor the fact that now she looked like the one who’d been taken aback, but Mac didn’t care. It tasted sweet.

  “Does that mean that you’re…” She frowned. “Well, you can’t be a vampire. I saw you standing in direct sunlight, and while I know it doesn’t make vampires burst into flames like in the movies, I also know that they try to avoid it.” She studied him in a way he found both arousing and disconcerting. And a little bit unsettling. “Does that mean you’re some kind of shapeshifter? Because, honestly, I wouldn’t have pegged you as the type.”

  Mac couldn’t resist. “Oh? And what’s the type?”

  “Well, you know. All, Me alpha. You Jane.”

  “I think you’ve been spending too much time around Graham Winters and the silverback Clan.”

  “You mean they’re not all like that?”

  “How would you like it if I asked if all humans liked to start wars for entertainment?”

  That made her wince. “Point taken. But you still haven’t answered my question.”

  “What was it?”

  She made a face. “If you’re not a vampire or a”—she searched for the correct term—“a Lupine, then what are you?”