“She wanted a separation, not me.”
“You cheated on her?”
“No, she wanted us to date other people.”
“And now she’s calling about anniversaries and wanting you to come back? Looks like dating didn’t go like she thought it would.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, and I was genuinely interested now. There was no threat to Shelby and her guy, and me talking to another woman made it less suspicious when I would have to keep following them on a nearly empty sidewalk.
Miranda gave me a look that made me feel younger, or maybe just naïve. “Your wife either thought you would be bad at dating and come crawling home, or she had someone in mind to date and it hasn’t worked out.”
I frowned and couldn’t keep up the undercover persona, because what she was saying made sense and I didn’t want it to make sense. I couldn’t tell her that Reggie wanted the separation because of my job, because I was a pre-law student who didn’t have a job yet. “That’s not why she wanted the separation.”
“If you say so, and that look on your face says there is no way you’re thirty.”
Shelby and her boyfriend wrapped themselves around each other and started kissing even more passionately; maybe that’s why she was wearing the neutral lipstick? Miranda looked at them, too; maybe she’d noticed me looking even through the sunglasses. “We all start out that way, and then it changes,” she said.
“They seem like they’re in love,” I said.
“They’re standing in front of a jewelry store that’s known for helping college students get nice wedding sets at discount prices, so they think they are,” she said.
The boyfriend got the door of the shop and escorted Shelby inside. They were still holding hands. I didn’t like that I couldn’t see them anymore, but I didn’t expect her to dive out the back to escape me either. In fact, it was going to get awkward fast if I didn’t have more people helping me tail them.
Of course, right now I had the perfect reason to follow them. “Maybe I should try for some jewelry instead of flowers, then,” I said.
“Or maybe she should be buying you apology gifts,” Miranda said.
“I don’t believe she owes me anything.”
“Is the flirting the act, or is the vulnerability the lure when the confident flirt fails?”
“You’re lovely, Miranda, and if you were my wife, I’d remember to buy you flowers, but I think I’m going to go with jewelry before I actually do something that I need to apologize for to my own wife.”
“You’re big and boyish and yummy, Havoc.”
I smiled. “And you’re beautiful and insightful, and it would be a pleasure to take you to bed, but . . .”
“But you’re going to go buy jewelry for your wife?”
“I am.”
“If you want to go back to her, then stop flirting so damn well, before someone takes you up on it,” she said, and went up on her tiptoes to touch the side of my face. I wanted to rub my face into it like a cat scent-marking. The urge was so strong that I put my hand over hers, trapping it against my skin, so that I wouldn’t follow through on what felt too intimate to do with a stranger. Miranda took the hand over hers pressing her against my face as the more intimate gesture, which I guess outside my head it was; she was right, I should really stop flirting before something happened that I couldn’t take back.
Miranda let herself collapse against me still on her tiptoes, so that I put my arm around her waist to keep her steady. The flowers were pressed between us, her other arm around my neck. The flowers saved us from being pressed completely together, and I was grateful for the space because my body reacted instantly to her in my arms. I couldn’t control the reaction, but I could keep her from feeling it and my gun if I was careful.
She leaned her face upward for a kiss. I couldn’t blame her for expecting one. I wasn’t going to do it, but then I felt the warmth at my back; my Guardian Angel was trying to get my attention. There was a brush of invisible wings on my right side, up the sidewalk from where we’d come. I looked in that direction and saw an early-twenties-aged white male over six feet tall, but shorter than me so under six-three. Short dark hair, cut and styled in a way that Reggie called movie star leading man trying too hard, paired with dark eyes, probably brown. All his clothes looked brand-new: solid red T-shirt made out of something satiny or silky, tight blue jeans distressed from the store, very expensive high-top jogging shoes artfully unlaced, so that they were useless for actually running. He had a watch on his right wrist that looked like Cartier and if it was, then it cost more than everything else he was wearing plus a car.
The man looked at me looking at him and there was a jolt of recognition, as if I not only knew him but I’d seen him in a bad place as a bad guy. I needed to figure out where I’d seen him before he figured out the reverse on me, so I bent over Miranda and met her offered kiss. If he’d seen me as a cop, I’d have probably been in a suit surrounded by other cops, not like this with a woman and flowers. People see what they expect to see most of the time, so I’d be a guy in gym clothes giving his girlfriend flowers and getting a kiss in return.
Miranda melted into the kiss, her arm encircling my waist so only the pressure of our bodies kept the flowers pinned. Her hand slid inside my tank top, tracing along the bare skin of my back. The feel of her fingertips tracing along my spine made me shudder in her arms. Which made her dig her nails lightly into my back. My knees almost buckled, sending me falling into her arms so that she had to brace before I caught myself.
The man passed behind us, and the angel at his back screamed for help. The psychic push of it stabbed through me like a spear. I pulled away from Miranda, but my arms were still on her arms; the flowers fell to the sidewalk as I turned to watch the man walking away from us.
My angel flared halo-bright at my back and I could see Miranda’s glow white and pale yellow in the sun, but the angel on the man’s back . . . It should have been all light, or a tall humanlike figure at his back with outspread wings and hands on his shoulders or spread above his head, but the white figure was covered in blackness like tar or ink had been poured over it, and the arm I could see was white and free of the blackness but was bent at horrible angles as if it had been broken in multiple places and let heal that way. It turned its head like the blackness was a hood over it, like the kind a kidnapper would use except this darkness wasn’t cloth but something liquid and heavy that clung. The angel opened its mouth like a hole in the darkness and screamed again. The sound stabbed through me, but I braced for it this time. I’d heard the cries of the damned before, and this was a shadow of it, except that angels couldn’t be tortured like this; they could choose to take some of the damage that their human suffered. I’d seen guardians that were damaged from that, but that was part of them helping their human in this lifetime. What I was seeing now wasn’t that. The man looked and felt fine; if his angel had taken damage for him it would have shown more on the human. He would not have been able to stride past us confident and whole.
“What’s wrong?” Miranda asked.
“Where’s your car?”
She smiled, but her eyes were still worried. “That way.” And she nodded in the same direction the man was walking. “Go back inside the florist, no, go back to the Cozy Cauldron and stay inside until it’s safe.”