by Ivy Sinclair
“What state? I just told you that I think that I’m going to die. I would rather have experiences that are pleasurable than those that are going to be painful. You happen to be in front of me and available. Besides, after what happened last night, I thought that was what you would want.”
On one hand, Eric could completely understand her logic and get behind it. He wanted to stop there. He didn’t want there to be a ‘but.’ But there was. “You heard the doctors talking about how your emotions are swinging to extremes right now. You’re going through a transition. There’s going to be a lot of things that you feel and think are real. I do not want to take advantage of that.”
Nina pulled away from him and brushed his hands away. “Are you kidding me? First you’re hot, and now you’re cold. Last night, you couldn’t keep your hands off of me, and tonight, you’re completely rejecting me.”
“I’m not rejecting you. I am trying to be the good guy here,” Eric said.
“Let’s be honest, Eric. You’re never the good guy,” she said in a sarcastic snarl.
Eric went from zero to pissed in five seconds flat. He had to control every emotion that was rolling through him. If he didn’t, the conversation would quickly devolve into some kind of playground taunting that was beneath both of them. “Look, let’s get your stuff. Let’s strategize a game plan, and then if you still want to do what we were just doing, I’ll be all for it.”
“Thanks, but no thanks. I don’t do pity fucks.” Nina turned around and crossed her arms over her chest.
Eric closed his eyes and counted to ten. The doors opened, and he was relieved to step out.
The rest of the way to Nina’s apartment, they didn’t say anything. Eric checked his phone. His inbox had blown up with emails from his leadership team at Carmichael Industries as well as several members of the soon to be formed board. Everyone wanted to know what he was going to do. His financial analysts were saying that it would be the biggest mistake in the entire world if he went forward with the IPO. It seemed if he did that, he’d fall flat on his face. Everything that he worked for and thought he wanted was disappearing before his eyes.
He flopped onto her couch and motioned for her to do what she needed to do. She stood there with a look of chagrin.
“So are you going to tell me where you knew her from?” Nina asked finally. “She went after me because of you. She went after me because she thought there was something between us. Clearly, she’s not up to date on current events.”
“There was something between us, you and me, last night,” Eric said. He wasn’t willing to admit yet that how he felt went beyond sex. Not with how angry she was at him. It wasn’t the time or the place to be confessing any kind of feelings, even if he wanted to do that. His panther was pacing in his mind, driving him crazy.
“Can you just once, just once, give me a straight answer?” Nina finally said in a frustrated tone. “Every time we talk, it has to be like some kind of verbal sparring match. I just want to know what the hell is going on. Why me? Why now?”
Eric didn’t want to make her any angrier. He needed her to remain calm, otherwise he knew they ran the risk of Dr. Clarkson’s miracle drug wearing off too quickly. “Yes, if Jillian believed there was something between us, it would make sense why she went after you. She and I had a thing when I was in prep school.”
“Okay, so when did you run into her again? Did she go all Fatal Attraction on you or something?”
How did he explain this? “Something happened one night our senior year. Me, Kyle, and Tony were there. Jillian and two of her friends were there. We messed around with some stuff we shouldn’t have, and some bad shit happened.”
“What kind of shit are we talking about?”
“I need something to drink if we are going to get into that conversation,” Eric said. He still wasn’t dealing well with the memories of what happened that night. It might help to talk about them, but he wasn’t comfortable doing that with Kyle or Tony. They were too close to it. With what Nina did for a living, there was a good chance that she would have an open mind and listen to him. But he wasn’t ready to talk. Not yet.
“Okay, there’s just some things that I need, and then we can go,” Nina said. Her sudden reversal in letting it go and agreeing with him at all was odd. He figured it had to do with the emotional roller coaster she was on. He understood the emotions of a transition. He’d gone through it fairly recently with his younger brother, Alex.
“I need to make a couple of phone calls. I’ll be over here in the kitchen if you need anything. Just do whatever you need to do,” Eric said. He knew that Nina would probably appreciate the space.
“Fine,” Nina said.
Eric hadn’t taken much time since the murder charge came out to talk to his family. Thinking about Alex reminded him of that. He looked at his phone and saw that Thea had sent him several text messages. He knew that he was going to need to talk to her at some point. He figured now was as good a time as any.
He hit the call button, and Thea answered almost instantaneously. “I have been trying to get a hold of you for days,” she said without any other preamble.
“I know. I have been busy,” he said. He had a grudging affection for Thea. Even though they were stepsiblings, he and Thea had had developed an understanding over the years. She didn’t put up with any of his bullshit, and, in return, he was nicer to her than he was to most people. He figured it was a pretty fair exchange.
“What happened? What is going on? Do I need to come home?”
Eric appreciated the offer. Thea lived half time in Greyelf and half time in Copper City, now that she had married the sheriff of Greyelf. That was a point of contention in their family that they continued to go round and round about. Whether he liked it or not, he was related by marriage to the Greyelf Grizzly Clan. He and Lukas Kasper did not get along at all. That was why he let Kyle do most of the talking in any of those interactions. There was one good thing he could see about not being the alpha; he didn’t have to deal with any other alphas. He had to mark that in the ‘pro’ column.
“Absolutely not. Everything here is chaotic, and we’re not quite sure what’s going on yet, but we’re taking care of it,” Eric said. He certainly hoped he sounded more confident than he was. So far, they kept thinking they were in control, and it kept turning out that Jillian was at least one step ahead of them every step of the way.
“I can be on a plane and be there in five hours,” she said.
“That’s what you get for marrying a backwoods country sheriff. You have to fly coach.” Eric chuckled, trying to lighten the mood.
“I’m worried about you,” Thea said. He could hear it in her voice.
“I appreciate that. I do. But I’d be more concerned about something happening to you or Alex if you came back here. So just stay away. How’s he doing?”
“He’s worried about you too. I know he wants to talk to you, but he’s in town right now.”
“It’s okay. I’ll call him in a few days.”
There was a short pause. “Billy wants to talk to you.”
“I don’t want to talk to him,” Eric said. He didn’t even have the words out before he heard a gruff voice on the other end of the phone.
“So did you do it?” Billy asked. Billy had been in law enforcement for over a decade. He was a far better policeman than Eric would ever give him credit for, and he made Thea happy. That meant that Eric was willing to tolerate him.
“I reserve my right to be silent,” Eric said.
“I talked to the police chief there. He said you look guilty as hell,” Billy said. “I think that they’re going to hold your arraignment in less than a week. They work fast there in Copper City. They clearly think their case is pretty solid. I think you’re being targeted.”
“Of course, I’m being targeted. Of course, this is happening now,” Eric said. “I can’t get into the details. I’m not surprised that they’re moving quickly. Look, I appreciate the heads up.”
/> “Please tell me you at least have a good attorney. Considering you’re loaded, I’m expecting the best money can buy.”
Eric smirked, even though he knew Billy couldn’t see him. “It’s Maggie O’Hara.”
There was a low whistle on the other end of the phone. “You’ve got to be shitting me. Since when did she switch sides?”
“Since it turns out she’s Tony’s mate,” Eric said sarcastically.
“It is a brand new world out there,” Billy said. Eric could see him practically shaking his head.
For all of his gruff, Billy was a good guy. The guy could hold his own in a shifter fight, and he had gone after what he wanted when he met Thea and realized she was his mate. He treated Thea and his baby brother well. Really, that was all Eric had ever wanted for his family. Too bad it came in the form of someone who was blood bound to Lukas Kasper. That was a big ‘con’ in the Billy Miller category.
“I’ve gotta go,” Eric said. He realized it felt like it had been a long time since Nina had disappeared into her bedroom to get her things. How long did it take to throw some clothes and a computer in a bag? He sniffed the air.
“Fuck,” he said. He disconnected the call without another word and shoved it into his pocket. He burst across the room and pushed open the partially closed bedroom door. Nina was not in the room. He did a quick scan of the bathroom. She was gone. He saw that the window was open that led out onto her fire escape. She had totally conned him.
Eric sprinted out of her apartment and down the stairs. He burst through the front doors of her building. Frantically, he looked around. He did not see her anywhere. Forcing himself to be calm, he had to give himself a mental pat on the back. Nina’s propensity to run away from him had caused him to do something he normally wouldn’t do to stay ahead of her. It had been his ‘just in case’ plan. He was using it far sooner than expected, though.
He put in a call. “Samuel, I need you to tell me where Nina Rodriguez is using the geolocation tracker I put in her phone.”
“You got it, boss.”
That was one nice thing about dealing with employees. They just did what they were asked without any question, unlike everyone else in his life.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Nina felt rather proud of herself. It had been almost too easy to ditch Eric. He thought he had everything under control. He thought he had her under control. If he believed that, he had no idea who he was dealing with. There was no way she was going to a safe house with him. She didn’t have time for that. She needed to find this woman and drag her back to Dr. Clarkson to discern if there was a way to reverse the transition. That was Nina’s singular focus.
She had told them that she could save herself, and that was exactly what she was going to do. The Urban Dwellers didn’t know anything. If there was anything that she had figured out from the conversation with Tony, it was that they were clueless.
She had hoped to get a little bit more information from Eric about who this Jillian was to him, but she had a copy of the file she had put together after digging into the woman’s background. She figured she could start there. If Jillian was in the city, and she had come to town looking to make some nuisance of herself, but she didn’t want anybody to know her real name, she would need an ID. Nina knew exactly who to go to for fake IDs.
She hailed a taxi as soon as she was a couple of blocks away from her apartment. She knew the alleys behind her building better than anyone; she had lived in the same apartment ever since moving to Copper City ten years ago. She knew that Eric would try to come after her, so she did some zigzagging of her path to make sure that there was no way that he could track her scent. She had learned a thing or two dating a shifter. She got into the taxi and gave the driver the address.
Nina could feel the adrenaline in her body starting to settle. She thought about the doctors’ words about not getting too excited. In a way, she was doing the exact opposite of that. She had catapulted out of her window and shimmied across the narrow catwalk. She was still surprised that Tony didn’t hear the creak of the fire escape as she made her way down the ladder, but she had been as quick as a cat. That was a crude attempt at humor in her mind. She wasn’t going to be a cat; she was going to be a snake.
That thought spun her off her metal axis again. She was not meant to be a shifter. Her world did not include that word inrelation to herself. She leaned her head back against the headrest and just tried to find a semblance of some kind of Zen. She had to stay calm.
She knew that she had thrown Eric off in the elevator. If he thought that she wanted him again, she knew he would loosen up his guard. That wasn’t exactly what he had done, though. Nina may not have been able to make a relationship work with Eric, but she had been with him long enough to understand how he operated. It was just a matter of playing to his ego.
The part that was confusing to her, though, was that he had been the one to push her away. She wasn’t planning to take it any further than a little bit of groping. At least, that was what she told herself. It had been a hell of a kiss. She gave herself the excuse that she was feeling off her game. She had thought that Eric would enthusiastically give in. She never expected that he would be the one to come back and say no. He had almost sounded mature in his logic. That was not a side of Eric that she was used to or expecting to see.
The fact that he planned to stick to her side was also aggravating. He kept walking through the streets and acting as if everything was fine. Where Nina needed to go, an Urban Dweller would not be welcome. If she was going to do her job and find this bitch shifter, she was going to have to deal with people that didn’t want to have anything to do with the Urban Dwellers.
That was a thing that the Urban Dwellers failed to acknowledge with their grand plans for Copper City. Even as they build a community up, there were still people who felt like outcasts. People who don’t fit in. People who found ways to maneuver around the official system. So where Lukas Kasper was trying to unite all of the clans, and the Urban Dwellers were proclaiming themselves as the new clanless clan of the future, there were still those who operated in a completely freelance capacity with no allegiances at all. They made money from all sides, because it didn’t pay well enough for them to be affiliated to just one.
Those were the kind of people that Nina had cultivated relationships with over the last decade. Human or shifter, it didn’t matter. Her network was what her clients paid for when she worked their cases. The man that she was going to see would not be a man who appreciated her showing up with Eric, of all people, on her arm.
The taxi pulled up outside of an unassuming building. Nina asked the driver to wait. She wouldn’t be there long. She looked at the building and smiled to herself. The storefront made it appear to be an ordinary dry cleaning business. And yet, it was more than that. She went inside.
At the counter was a woman filing her nails that Nina had spoken to at least a dozen times in the last several years. She appeared to be just a few years younger than Nina, but it was obvious that life hadn’t treated her kindly.
When Nina uncovered this source for information, she had been amazed at the amount of business, legal and illegal, that went in and out of Copper City Clean-n-Press.
The dry-cleaning service not only catered to the rich and wealthy around Copper City, but they also did a lot of business with large corporations around the city, dry-cleaning uniforms, bed linens, tapestries and other items. It meant that this particular crew had eyes and ears everywhere. They were a great source of information when she was looking into blackmail cases. It was amazing how much people talked about when they were just around ‘the help.’ It was stupid, really, how arrogant they were, but it meant that Nina always managed to scoop up a tidbit or two.
The woman at the counter barely looked up from her nail file. “Picking up or dropping off?” she asked.
Nina pulled out her wallet. Inside, there were several tiny tickets with numbers on them. She handed one of the tickets to the woman. “Hopef
ully, I’m not too early,” Nina said.
It was a dance that was a bit silly. The woman knew who she was. Nina had been there many times. Nina also paid well for the information when it panned out, and yet every single time, she still had to go through the same vetting process.
The woman looked at her with a considering look on her face. Her eyes traveled up and down Nina’s still form. “You look different today.”
Those simple words rocked Nina’s world. She wondered if at some point she was going to start growing scales, and then she remembered Tony’s warning. She had taken a big risk by being out in public by herself. But she figured she would do what she needed to do, and if it all worked out, it wouldn’t matter anyways. She would be free in one way or another. Either she would be able to go on with her life as a human or she might be dead.
It wasn’t that Nina was afraid to die. Maybe that was part of the reason that people thought she was just a little bit crazy. She was very matter-of-fact about the fact that life was temporary, and sometimes that meant that you did not continue on and make it out through the day. That didn’t mean that she didn’t have a strong survivalist sense, though. She wasn’t going to be helpless about the whole thing, but it was more like she was a realist. She had never expected to be caught somewhere in between being human and not being human. Was it something that was that obvious to other people?
“I got a new haircut,” she said. She had taken too long to answer the question, but the woman didn’t seem to notice. She walked over to the sorting conveyor rack and hit a button. The clothes went round and round and round. Finally, there was a hanger that appeared with nothing but a small bag hanging on it. She took the bag off the hanger and handed it to Nina.
“Bill me,” Nina said. “You have my information.”
The woman nodded. “Have a nice day,” she said. She went back to her nail file. Nina had been dismissed.