Sitting down behind the bobcat’s computer, Toni willed herself not to comment on the background picture he had on his monitor of some hot car model. So typical.
“Your full name?” she asked.
“Bo Novikov.”
“Right.” She gave him a small smile. “I appreciated how you handled my brother yesterday, Mr. Novikov.”
“Call me Bo,” he ordered. “And does he ask everyone if he can sketch them naked?”
She gave a small chuckle while typing into the Web browser. “No. Only worthy specimens.”
“What happened to your arm?”
“Got hit by a truck saving a dog.”
“A dog dog or . . . family?”
Toni rolled her eyes. “A dog dog.”
“You risked your life to save a dog?”
“I already had this conversation with my parents—I’m not having it again!” she snapped.
“Okay, okay. No need to get snippy.”
“You haven’t seen me snippy,” she muttered as she forced herself to ignore the pain in her wounded shoulder so she could use both hands to type.
“So why are you here today?” Novikov asked her.
She went into the site for the shifter-run airline. She had full access because the owner loved Jackie’s music and because Toni worked with them so often she’d become friends with most of the staff. She didn’t use them for everything—they were unbelievably expensive—but they were great for last-minute arrangements to foreign countries when the entire family was going. So many jackals in one place was pretty much asking for trouble when full-humans were around.
“Hoping to get a job for the summer,” she replied without looking at him. “Looks like my family is staying here for the next few months.”
“What do you do for a living?”
Toni sighed. “Babysit.”
He grunted at her, and Toni glanced at him. His right leg was bouncing, his fingers were tapping the arms of his chair, and he was staring at the wall. He wasn’t bored or annoyed. He was anxious. She knew the signs.
“You know what?” she said, keeping her voice light. “I bet your info is in these files. I’ll dig it out, get your schedule all lined up, and you can go and skate or whatever it is you hockey players do to keep in shape. You just give me your fiancée’s info on this Post-it, and I’ll take it from there.”
“I better not.”
“It’s not even noon, Mr. Novikov. You get some practice in and I’ll handle everything else. Trust me. You’ll get there and she’ll be surprised and very happy. I’ll make it happen.”
He leaned back, studied her again. “Like I said, the name’s Bo. And why are you protecting that bobcat?”
“I’m not protecting the idiot. I’m protecting the genius.” She smiled, shrugged. “I guess that’s also what I do.”
“You sure?”
“You can’t get on a flight this wound up. You’ll startle the flight attendants . . . a lot of them are cats. You know how that’ll end.”
“Yeah. All right. All right.” He took the pen she held out for him and jotted some info on the paper. “You don’t have to get that tone. I’ll be at the training rink if you need—”
“I won’t need anything. Go. Now. Work out. Get your head together.”
“Yeah. Thanks.”
He got up, walked out, and Toni went back to work.
After a few seconds the wolf remarked, “Ya see? You wait long enough . . . the entertainment comes to you.”
CHAPTER SIX
Ulrich Van Holtz disconnected the call, the speaker phone shutting off, and looked over at the two females who had been sitting in his office with him for the last three hours while he was on the phone.
“They sounded . . . tense,” he remarked about the bosses of the organizations they all worked for.
Cella “Bare Knuckles” Malone, his hockey team’s head coach and lead contractor for the feline protection agency KZS, had her head resting on her crossed arms on his desk. It’s where her head had been the last half-hour of this meeting. “I don’t know what the fuck they’re expecting,” she complained. “They act like we’ve been sitting on our asses the last few months.”
“Maybe ’cause your ass has been gettin’ so large,” Dee-Ann, Ric’s mate, joked.
“My ass is perfect, canine. Don’t be bitter because you got that flat ass.”
“Can we have the ass discussion another time?” Ric asked, desperate to end the conversation mostly because talking about his mate’s ass made him horny. That quickly reminded him that he’d be leaving the country in a few hours. He didn’t want to go. He didn’t like being away from Dee-Ann for so long.
Unlike some mates, Ric and Dee-Ann didn’t spend unlimited time together. He had several businesses, including the Carnivores, an all-shifter hockey team that he owned and was also goalie and team captain; plus his work as one of the head chefs in the mid-Manhattan five-star and Michelin-starred Van Holtz Steak House; and one of the team leads for his Uncle Van’s shifter protection agency, The Group.
Dee-Ann, however, had one job as The Group’s top agent. For some it might not seem like she had much to do with her one job. But by God, the woman did that one job to the best of her ability. She actually was home less than Ric. One time she was gone for three days and no one knew where the hell she was. Just when he was beginning to panic, he found her sitting on their couch, watching TV, icing a broken collarbone that was in mid-healing, and enjoying warm cornbread and a tall glass of buttermilk. Ric didn’t ask her what she’d been up to. He’d quickly learned not to because she’d tell him. Everything. Down to the last blood-and-brain-covered detail. That was something Ric really didn’t need to hear. He soon came to the realization that the only thing he needed to know about the woman he loved was that whatever she did when she wasn’t with him was for the good of their kind.
Still, leaving all this on Dee’s and Cella’s powerful shoulders so that he could go to the Van Holtz family meeting in Germany was not something he really wanted to do.
And then after the meeting in Germany, Ric and his cousin—who, yes, he still called Uncle Van because of their age differences—would be heading out to the campgrounds in Montana for the last two weeks of the Van Holtz cooking summer camp. That meant Ric would be out of New York for at least a month.
“What have we got?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Nothing,” both women said in unison.
“And before you ask,” Cella went on, “Crush and Dez don’t have anything, either.” Crush, an enormous polar bear and Cella’s mate, and Desiree MacDermot-Llewellyn, full-human and mate to Mace Llewellyn, were detectives in the NYPD’s shifter-run division. They often worked with Dee and Cella on the more difficult cases, handling a lot of the research and managing any NYPD presence.
“Clearly we need to come up with something,” Ric remarked. “I can tell the powers-that-be want Whitlan, and they’re tired of waiting.”
Frankie Whitlan. A gangster and conman and one-time police snitch who used the NYPD to take down anyone who got in his way or cut into his business. At one point, Whitlan had disappeared, leading everyone to think he was dead. He wasn’t. Instead, he just remade himself again and returned with a business that catered to a certain type of full-human.
Very rich full-humans who enjoyed hunting shifters and stuffing them. Their trophies of lions and bears and wolves decorated their expensive hunting cabins or family homes like mooseheads.
It was something that Ric’s kind simply couldn’t and wouldn’t ignore, but Whitlan was very smart and very good at getting lost. When they’d finally closed in on him, he’d disappeared again and had yet to come up anywhere that their three groups—NYPD for local, The Group for nationwide, and KZS for international—had people searching.