Fair Game

‘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 sinceI 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,’ A

‘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 A

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? A

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. A

‘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. A

‘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 A

‘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,’ A

‘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 Ihave 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 notworth 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. A

‘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.’ A

He raised his eyebrows.‘Oh? Whenwere you pla

‘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 thebracelet 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.

A

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.