That snapped Vic back to the moment and away from Blayne’s skate-wearing schedule.
“How did you hear?”
“I heard it from Ronnie Lee who heard it from Sissy Mae who heard it from—”
“Okay,” Vic cut in, quickly regretting asking her the simple question.
“You know, my mom was hunted, too,” she whispered.
“Oh Blayne. I’m sorry.”
She waved off his words. “It was a long time ago, and after a considerable amount of therapy, I’ve compartmentalized it quite nicely.”
“Okay.”
Blayne moved in a little closer, looked around, leaned down, and added, “Maybe I should cancel my wedding.”
“Well, if you don’t want to marry the guy, of course you should cancel your wedding. Don’t let family or peer pressure push you into a marriage you don’t want.”
Blayne snapped up straight, her hands resting on her hips. “Of course I want to marry Bo. Why wouldn’t I want to marry Bo? I love him!”
“Then why would you cancel your wedding?”
“Because of what happened to Livy’s father.”
Vic stared at Blayne, but she didn’t say anything else.
“I understand you feeling empathy toward Livy, considering what happened to your mother, but I guess I’m unclear on what Damon Kowalski has to do with your wedding.”
“Who?”
Vic took another sip of coffee. Maybe he wasn’t alert enough for this conversation.
“Livy’s father? Damon Kowalski is Livy’s father.”
“Oh! Yeah, I didn’t know his name.”
“Uh-huh. So you want to cancel your giant, double wedding because of a man whose name you didn’t even know . . . because of your mom?”
“No. And I don’t want to cancel my wedding, but I’m wondering if I should.”
“Why would you be wondering that?”
“Because Livy’s my friend.”
“She is?”
“Yes!”
“Okay, okay. No need to get upset.” Although he wanted to use hysterical instead of upset. “I guess the way to look at this is . . . how would Livy react if you canceled the wedding for her? Do you think she’d be okay with it? Or do you think she’d throw another locker at you?”
Blayne, after thinking on that for a few seconds, admitted, “Locker.”
“Right. So you may not want to cancel your wedding if the only reason is because of Livy’s father.”
Blayne sat down beside Vic. “What about having her as our photographer?”
“What about it?”
“Do you think it will be too hard for her?”
Probably, but not for the reasons Blayne was thinking. And Vic briefly entertained the idea of using this opportunity to get Livy out of being a dreaded wedding photographer—emphasis on the “wedding” part—but then he realized Livy wouldn’t want him involving himself in her career.
No. Livy would have to shoot or not shoot Blayne’s wedding on her own. All Vic could really do was keep her from throwing lockers at poor Blayne’s head.
“Livy is one of the strongest and smartest women I know. And I think you need to let her take the lead on whether she can handle shooting your wedding or not. She’s brutally honest, so if she doesn’t think she can do it, she’ll tell you. And probably recommend someone great who can step in for her. What’s important is that you trust Livy to do what’s right. Because she will.”
Blayne gazed at Vic for what seemed an excessively long time until she slowly began to smile.
“What?” Vic asked. “What did I say?”
“Oh.” She shook her head. “Nothing.” Blayne stood. “You’re right. I need to trust Livy.” She skated a half circle around Vic. “Hey, are you coming to our derby bout tomorrow? It’s just a local bout to help raise money for the tristate teams.”
“I’m not really a sports—”
“Livy will be playing, of course. She’s one of our shortest blockers, but also one of our meanest.”
“She is? Oh. Yeah. Okay. Sure. I can come.”
Blayne’s grin was amazingly wide. “Yay!” She skated off, then skated right back, leaned down, and kissed Vic on the cheek. “Thanks for your advice.”
“Anytime.”
He watched her skate off again, unable to shake the feeling something weird had just happened.
Deciding not to worry about it, Vic ate the last honey bun and finished off his coffee. He was going to go for another walk when he realized that someone was sitting next to him.
Vic turned his head to see Dee-Ann beside him. She glared at him with her dead, soulless dog eyes.
“You got somethin’ to tell me, son?”
Livy was going through some pics she’d recently taken of the shifter girls’ gymnastics team. Although these girls could never get into the full-human sports now that testing had become so invasive, it looked as if the shifter-version sport was about to go worldwide like hockey. Which, when Livy thought about it, was much fairer to the full-humans.
When the full-humans destroyed a kneecap coming off the pommel horse, their careers usually ended. When a shifter did the same thing, it was usually not from the landing but because they’d vaulted themselves too far up and rammed their knee into a ceiling beam. Yet the shifters still managed to nail the landing and were healed within twenty-four hours. So . . . yeah. Not fair to the full-humans.
“Hey!”
Livy looked up from her pics and at Blayne. “Hey.”
“You’re coming to the bout tomorrow, right?”
“Am I?” Livy asked. It was decided that Livy would only come to derby bouts that impacted the championships. Last she’d heard, tomorrow’s bout was simply a fund-raising thing. Something casual between the teams that Livy’s competitive “win or die” nature tended to ruin.
“You’ve gotta come!”
“Well—”
“Great! I’ll tell the team you’ll be there!”
Livy let out a breath, wondering how she was not going to kill that girl at some point.
“She’s just so damn perky,” Livy muttered.
She returned to her work. She was annoyed because she knew she’d taken some pictures recently of the gymnastics team that she really wanted to use, but she couldn’t find them on the memory card she had. She spun her chair around and pulled her camera out of her bag. Livy turned it on and using the LCD monitor in the back of her Nikon, she viewed the first picture that came up. It was a black-and-white one of Vic that she’d taken in Massachusetts.
Smiling, she studied the image. It reminded her of how good she could be when she wasn’t thinking too much about it. When she was just letting the moment lead her rather than the million things going on in her head.
Livy placed her camera on her desk and hooked it up to her computer. She copied Vic’s pictures and enlarged them on her screen. With some miniscule tweaking, she thought at least one of the pics could possibly work for her upcoming show.
Livy dove into the work, forgetting everything around her as she toyed with the images, seeing what she could pull out of them.
She was so lost in her work, she didn’t realize that she wasn’t alone until she stopped and reached for the can of honey-roasted almonds she kept on her desk. When Livy found nothing but empty space, she looked up and found a bunch of her cousins standing around her office, passing her damn almonds around.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“We’re bored,” Jake filled in.
“That sounds like a you problem.”
“If you want us to play nice at your friend’s fancy house, you better give us a way to work off our excess energy.”
“Can’t you jog like most people?”
“No,” they all replied.
Livy sat back in her seat and looked over her cousins. She thought about seeing if there was some game they could go to in the Sports Center, but that wouldn’t be enough for them. And the additional liquor they’d have access to
just screamed “trouble.”
So Livy racked her brain for another option.
Reece Lee Reed pulled on a pair of basketball shorts and walked out of the bedroom, easing the door closed so that he didn’t wake up the bobcat asleep in his bed.
Yawning, he scratched his head and his belly while walking across the Kingston Arms hotel suite he’d been living in since he’d moved from Tennessee to Manhattan. A decision he still hadn’t regretted, although his mother did complain. Apparently her sons had deserted her. No mention of her only daughter, but Reece didn’t worry about that. He’d learned long ago to let his sister and mother fight it out between themselves. He had other things to do.
Like bobcats!
Chuckling, Reece glanced at his watch. It was already midafternoon, but he hadn’t gone to bed until late and then he hadn’t slept until morning. But it was his day off since he had a big job coming up on the weekend, so if he wanted to waste the day away with a very nice piece of feline ass, he could.
Lord, he loved his life.
Reece passed his couch, his eyes briefly straying to the big flat-screen TV on the other side of it, which was when Livy Kowalski suddenly popped up.
Reece screamed, jumping back.
“Hey,” Livy said calmly.
He hated when Livy did this. Curled up on his couch so he couldn’t see her until she leaped out at him like one of those undead killer children in those Japanese horror movies.
“Why are you here?” Reece asked.
“You made me a promise a few months ago. And today’s the day I need you to deliver.”
Reece made lots of promises to lots of people. He was good about keeping them, but he didn’t always remember them until someone reminded him. So he gazed at Livy, waiting for her to do just that.
She raised those pitch-black eyebrows of hers and tilted her head to the side.
Reece threw his hands in the air. “Oh Livy, come on!”
“You promised,” she coldly reminded him.
“Wasn’t I drunk that night?”
“Very drunk. But a promise is a promise. And I really need it.”
“You’re taking advantage of me.”
“It’s not my fault you can’t hold your liquor and I was the only thing between you and a couple of really pissed-off brother lions. Who told you to drink that tequila anyway?”
Reece shrugged. “I love tequila. It’s so dang tasty.”
“You promised,” she said again.
“Yeah, but—”
“Promised.”
“Livy, it’s just—”
“Promised.”
“I just—”
“Promised.”
“Yeah, but—”
“Promised.”
That was the thing with Olivia Kowalski. She forgot nothing and wasn’t afraid to call in a favor when necessary.
“Is there a reason I need to do this?” Reece asked, wondering why she wanted a favor now.
“Yeah.”
No. Livy wasn’t subtle. But she wasn’t really open, either. Emotion and information didn’t pour from her like it did from the other females in his life. If you asked her a pointed question, Livy would often answer with brutal honesty. But if you didn’t know the question to ask, she wasn’t about to help you.
“All right,” Reece finally agreed, wondering once again what had possessed him to become friendly with a dang honey badger. His mother had warned him. Warned him they were the meanest things on the planet. But he thought she was just being . . . herself. He had no idea there was validity to her statements. “Just let me take a quick shower and call the guys.”
Reece had barely taken two steps when his bedroom door opened and the Southern bobcat he’d met a few days ago smiled at him. She wore one of Reece’s Tennessee Titans T-shirts—something that annoyed Reece greatly because you just didn’t take a man’s Titans T-shirt—and leaned against the doorjamb, smiling. “Hey there, darlin’,” she purred.
Reece cringed at that sexy murmur and moved. Good thing, too, as the sound he found so sexy did nothing but set Livy off. Just as he bolted forward, Livy was already charging across his couch on all fours toward the bobcat. Livy wasn’t in her honey badger form, either, she was just on all fours. And yet she still moved like lightning. Before he could reach her, she was off the couch, fangs and claws unleashed. But he did manage—barely—to catch her around the waist, snatching her out of the air seconds before she could embed all those deadly natural weapons into the bobcat’s pretty face.
While Reece held on to a thrashing Livy, the bobcat had thankfully moved fast, as well, scrambling onto a side table and then onto the wall. She hung there now by her claws, hissing down at him and Livy.
“Darlin’,” Reece said to the bobcat over all the noise, “why don’t you let yourself out and, uh, I’ll call you later. Promise!”
Livy slammed her booted foot down onto the back of the wolf lying in front of her, raised her weapon, and screamed out, “By this paintball gun . . . I rule alllllll!”
Her cousins raised their weapons in mutual triumph, cheering at the complete and utter destruction of their opponents.
Grinning, Livy looked over at Reece and his Pack, who were still standing but also covered in red paint. And it was his packmates who were glaring at poor Reece for getting them into this. He seemed reluctant to turn around and face them. Not that she blamed him.
“What a good idea this was,” Reece’s brother Rory snarled at Reece. “I’m so glad I took off work to do this.”
“We got beaten by a bunch of mighty midgets,” one of the other Packmates grumbled.
“No,” Rory corrected. “We got beaten by a bunch of dang honey badgers.” Rory slapped the back of Reece’s head. “You put us up against goddamn honey badgers!”
Livy glanced back at her cousins and chuckled.
“Could you move your foot?” the wolf beneath her asked.
She did, and walked over to Reece and the others. “Don’t blame him,” she told Reece’s brother. “I made him bring me here.”
“He could have said no.”
“Then I would have ripped his pretty little face off for not keeping his promise to take me ‘and mine’—his words—‘paint ballin’ with his kin.’ Also his words.” Livy smiled, which made all the wolves scowl. Then she jerked forward and all of them jerked back.
“Well,” she said, walking over to her own “kin,” “this was fun. Thanks, guys.”
Livy winked at her cousins, then said, “Kowalskis, in honor of our hosts . . .”
Jake, as always, picked up on what Livy was suggesting. But the others instantly caught on as soon as Jake tipped his head back and began to howl.
Even with all the howling now going on, Livy could still hear the wolves behind her quite clearly.
“Good Lord! What are they doing?”
“Make them stop! Make them stop! It’s like hell on earth!”
“No wonder the felines complain when we do it . . .”
Livy let her cousins continue as her phone rang.
The ID said “unknown caller,” but she answered anyway.
“Hello?”
“It’s Vic.”
“Well, hi, Vic.”
And as soon as she said his name, her cousins instantly stopped howling.
Livy watched them carefully as Vic asked, “Are you coming back to the house soon?”
“Yeah. Everything okay?”
“Things are moving. Might be better if you’re home.”
Livy couldn’t help but smirk a bit. “You worried about little ol’ me, you big, strong, take-charge man, you?”
“Huh?”
Livy laughed. “Forget it. I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Good.”
Livy disconnected the call and wondered how she could be so into a guy who had no real grasp of good comedy.
“So that was Vic, huh?” Jake asked, her cousin suddenly close. “Calling to check up on you?”
“Yes. S
o?”
“Well, I heard from that weird kid, Kyle, that he found you two in bed together. Fully clothed and cuddling.”
“Awwww,” the rest of her cousins chimed in. “Cuddling!”
Livy thought about saying something, but instead she just went ahead and shot her cousin in the leg. When he screamed from the pain of the paintball ramming into him at close range and dropped to one knee, she shot him in the head and neck until he was on the floor and covered in red paint.
“God,” Jocelyn sneered with a sad shake of her head, “you’re being so weak, Jake. Get up and act like you’ve got some real honey badger balls!”
CHAPTER 22
Vic waited for Livy on the stoop. Her uncles had left for Florida earlier in the day. And her mother had left about an hour ago with several of her own family, the Yangs. Vic knew this because he had a contact in the hotel the Yangs were staying at, and he was keeping an eye on them. There was always a risk of what Vic liked to call “blowback.” And he was determined not to let any of that blowback hurt Livy. No matter what her family did or didn’t do.
A cab stopped in front of the house, and Vic smiled as soon as Livy stepped out.
“Hey,” he said when she slowly walked up the stairs.
“Hey.” She dropped her backpack by the door and sat down next to him.
“How did your day go?” Vic asked.
“It was all right. I left work early to hang with my cousins.”
“You can just leave your day job when you want to?”
“I hadn’t thought to ask anyone about leaving. I do it all the time. No one says anything as long as I make my photo shoots on time, especially the shoots with Novikov. And as long as I hit my deadlines . . . they leave me alone.”
“That’s pretty cool. Most day jobs are a lot less . . . flexible.”
“Are you trying to make me feel better about this job?”
“Yes.”
“Well . . . thank you.”
“You’re welcome.”
Livy rubbed her eyes, yawned.
“Tired?”
“Just a little. Beating the Smith Pack males in paintball can wear a girl out.”
“You played paintball with wolves? Livy . . . no.”
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