Fair Game (10 page)

Anna followed Charles out of the hotel, trying to figure out what had happened with him and why so she could decide how to proceed.

Charles led the way out of the hotel and turned in the direction of the condo where they were staying. Charles, the Aspen Creek Pack, and the pack’s corporation had condos all over the place. The one in Boston belonged to the corporation. It made travel more discreet, no hotel charges, no strangers coming in to clean every day.

“Wait a minute,” she said.

Charles turned back. The expression on his face was exactly the same as the one he’d had when they left their house yesterday, heading for the airport so he could fly them to Seattle, where they had caught the commercial flight. But he felt so different.

When Charles had chosen to frighten all those poor people at the airport so she’d win her bet, she’d thought she’d detected mischief in his eyes. But it had been so long since he’d laughed—or teased her with his sneaky sense of humor—that she’d been afraid to hope. After all, they
had
been patting him
down pretty thoroughly, something that could have ticked him off enough to growl, and the timing
could
have been accidental.

And even the meeting…it had been necessary, if the feds were to believe she was the one with the information, for him to feed it to her. And the best way to do that was for him to open the bond between them. Bran didn’t want the feds scared of werewolves, and Charles, especially the past few months, was really scary.

If he were just doing it for business’s sake, he would have closed their link down when they left the hotel, but he hadn’t. And he’d touched her.

Bran, it seemed, had indeed found a cure—or at least a bandage—for his son.

“What?” Charles asked. Evidently she’d been staring at him too long. He reached up and tucked a flyaway piece of her hair behind her ear.

She wanted to grab his hand and hold it to her, wanted to climb into his arms and feel them close around her. But she was afraid if she drew his attention to it, he’d close her off again. So she kept her hands to herself and bounced up and down on the balls of her feet a couple of times instead. She needed to keep him off his game, keep him thinking about other things—and she had just the thing to do it with.

“Let’s go exploring.” She pulled the city map she’d taken from the hotel’s lobby this morning out of her pocket and opened it up.

“I know Boston,” said Charles, with a slightly pained look around to see if anyone had noticed the map. It was bright orange and highly unlikely to evade even the most casual glance.

“But I don’t,” she told him, enjoying the expression on his face. Being mated to a wolf two hundred years her elder meant that she seldom got to see him disconcerted. “And since
I
want to do the exploring…”
He would take her to interesting places, she knew. Tomorrow that would be good, and doubtless she’d enjoy it more than anything she found herself. But today she wanted to be more…spontaneous.

“If you run around with that bright orange map in your hand,” Charles told her, “everyone will think you’re a tourist.”

“When was the last time you were a tourist?” she asked archly.

He just looked at her. Charles, she had to agree, was not tourist material.

“Right,” Anna told him. “Buck up. You might even enjoy it.”

“You might as well have ‘hapless victim’ tattooed across your forehead,” he muttered.

She grabbed his hand and pulled him across the street to King’s Chapel and the oldest graveyard in Boston—according to her map.

TWO HOURS LATER
, she was vying for food in the North Market building of Faneuil Hall Marketplace with what felt like four hundred tourist groups while Charles waited nearby with his back against the wall. The three feet of empty space around him was probably the only space open in the whole place—but that was Charles; people just didn’t crowd him. Smart people.

Since most of the tourists in front of the booth where she’d chosen to grab lunch came all the way to Anna’s waist, she was pretty sure she was in no danger, but you couldn’t tell it by the focused attention her mate aimed at the children.

If you can’t tell that I’m looking at something on you that is precisely on level with the little ones’ heads
—his voice in her head had a rough purr—
then you need your eyes checked.

Her jaw dropped. Was he flirting with her? Anna turned her head to meet his gaze, which dropped immediately to her rear end. She jerked her head back before he saw her smirk—or her red cheeks. He
had been
checking out the crowd. She’d
seen him do it, seen him take a good long look at each of the kids.

But Charles certainly wasn’t lying to her, either, so all the rest had been automatic, but checking her out had been on purpose. She smiled and felt her wolf relax into the rightness of flirting with her mate.

She had plenty of time for her cheeks to cool. It took a while before she managed to order food—mostly because she took pity on an overwhelmed teacher who seemed to be in charge of a million kids all by herself. Anna escaped at last with a pair of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of water and let Charles escort her outside the building to hunt for someplace to sit and eat.

“We could have gone into a real restaurant,” Charles said, taking a bottle of water she handed him. “Or waited for the starving hordes to disperse before joining the fray.” He sounded serious, as always, but she knew better, knew because their bond conveyed his amusement.

“They were all of seven years old. I was confident that I was unlikely to end up on their plate when there were hot dogs and ice cream to be had.”

“If they weren’t predatory, you shouldn’t have had to manhandle them,” he said, making tracks toward an unoccupied seating area. Anna saw at least one other person start for the same place, then notice Charles and turn away, but at least he didn’t look panicked.

“They couldn’t see over the counter to the food,” she told him. “We had a deal. They didn’t bite me and I’d lift them up so they could see.” She’d expected them to be shyer, but they’d really seemed to have had fun. Maybe they’d been too young to be worried about strangers. The teacher had been too busy lifting up her half of the class to worry about Anna. Apparently the mothers who were supposed to be helping had wandered off to the ladies’ room.

“All of the children?”

“Half. One at a time. It’s
not like they weighed very much. And I had help.”

“Hmm.” Charles raised an eyebrow. “There was some pretty intense jockeying for position considering that the prize was hot dogs and sandwiches and not priceless art treasures. I saw you elbow that woman.”

“She cut in front of a seven-year-old little boy,” Anna told him indignantly. “Who
does
that?”

“Ladies wearing four thousand dollars in diamonds, apparently.” He cleared the table of the remains of someone else’s meal and tossed it in a nearby trash can.

“
I
don’t cut in front of children and I
have
four thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds.” She plopped on a narrow bench and put her food on the minuscule table, hoping it wouldn’t wobble and dump everything on the ground.

“Do you?” Charles asked mildly, taking a seat on the other side. The one-person benches, unlike the table, looked sturdy enough and didn’t creak beneath his weight, though she saw him rock a little to make sure it would hold. “Except for your ring, you don’t wear them. And the ring is not worth four thousand.”

“That one necklace, right? Wearing it wouldn’t make me cut in front of some poor, hungry kid.” He was playing with her, he was, teasing her because she was afraid to wear the jewelry his father had given her when they were married. Her wolf wanted to wiggle in joy and go hunt something to celebrate. Anna took a bite of sandwich. “Though maybe I’d have to put on the bracelet, too.”

“No,” he said. “Just the bracelet would do. But you don’t wear them.”

Her necklace was covered in at least twice the number of diamonds and several larger stones. She absorbed the idea of the bracelet itself being worth more than four thousand dollars, and was doubly grateful that she hadn’t worn
them. She tended to play with anything hanging around her neck—what if she broke the necklace?

“There’s a time and place for stuff like that.” Anna tried not to show him how appalled she was at the value of the jewelry. She preferred to downplay the material changes in her life since she’d met and mated with Charles. They weren’t the important changes—if occasionally she found them more difficult than the real ways her life had altered. “When you’re going shopping isn’t a good time for jewels, especially if that makes you think that pushing around little kids is okay.”

He raised his eyebrows. “Oh? When
were
you planning on wearing your diamonds?” Charles sounded amused. He knew that she was planning on never wearing them now that she knew what they were worth.

“Maybe if we were meeting the Queen of England.” She thought about it for a moment. “Or if I really needed to outshine someone I didn’t like.” She took a few more bites of a sandwich that needed a little something…onion or radish, maybe. Something with a bite.

She really couldn’t imagine a situation dire enough to risk wearing something like that set, especially not if the
bracelet
was worth four thousand dollars. What if the clasp gave way?

“Ah. That would be never?” It didn’t seem to bother him one way or the other.

Anna thought about it seriously. “Maybe if I needed to intimidate someone—like if my brother decided to remarry and my dad told me he didn’t like her so I had to fly to Chicago and drive her off. I would even cut
her
in line for a hot dog while I was wearing them. But she wouldn’t be seven, either.”

Charles smiled. It wasn’t a laugh or a grin. But it wasn’t his you’re-going-to-die-before-you-breathe-your-next-gulp-of-air smile, either, which was as close to a real smile as she’d seen on his face for a while.

She gave a contented sigh and tapped the toe of her boot against the leg of his suit. They’d have been more comfortable in casual clothes, but then they’d have had to go change. And she was afraid that going back to the condo would give him an excuse to shut down again.

“It’s all right,” he said. “We can go change and do some more touristy stuff.”

He was reading her through their bond. Hiding the warm fuzzies
that
gave her behind a distrustful look, Anna took a bite of her sandwich and then said, “Okay. But only if you’ll agree to do this with me.” She took her now-bedraggled map out of her pocket and tapped a finger on an advertisement.

Charles looked, heaved a long sigh. “I should have known we wouldn’t get out of here without doing the imitation trolley car cemetery tour complete with costumed ghouls.”

“
Not
in my territory,” snarled someone behind her.

As it seemed an unlikely response to Charles’s pseudo-reluctant agreement, Anna initially assumed it was directed at someone else. But Charles tilted his head and lowered his eyelids, the muscles tightening subtly in his shoulders, so Anna turned around in her seat to see who had spoken.

In rows along the outdoor marketplace were dozens of dark green wagons, resembling nothing so much as the covered wagons in her father’s beloved old Western movies. The wagons served as kiosks where people sold T-shirts, purses, or other small portable goods. Standing on the top of the one nearest them was a young-looking black man, fine-boned and slight, watching them—watching Charles, anyway—with yellow eyes as the strings of beading supplies hanging from hooks all over the wagon swayed unsteadily.

From photos, she recognized him as Isaac Owens, the Alpha of the Olde Towne Pack—Boston being the Olde Towne, complete with the final
E
s. He wasn’t in the habit of running around on the tops of unlikely perches or he’d
have been in the local paper a lot more than he already was.

“You’re attracting attention,” said Charles in a conversational tone designed not to carry to human ears. Isaac, being a werewolf, would hear him just fine despite being a dozen yards away. “Do you really want that?”

“I’m out. They know who I am.” Projecting his voice to anyone who cared to listen—and people were starting to pause what they were doing to listen—Isaac raised his chin aggressively. “What about you?”

Charles shrugged. “In, out, it doesn’t matter.” He leaned forward and lowered his voice. “No more does your declaration. You lost control of the situation that brings me here when you chose not to report the deaths in your territory. You have no say over what I do or don’t do.”

“We didn’t kill anyone,” Isaac declared, and pointed at Charles. “And you will have to go through me to take any of my pack.”

Isaac was new, Anna remembered. New at his job, new at being a wolf—and, like her, he’d been a college student when he’d been Changed. Normally it would have been years before he was Alpha, no matter how much potential dominance he had. But the Olde Towne Pack had lost its Alpha last year in a freak sailing accident and Isaac, who had been second, had stepped in to do the job.
His
second was an old wolf who probably didn’t know anything at all about this stunt.