“Oh, come on.” I stole another napkin. “Everyone knows there are ax murderers in the woods. That’s why people leave axes in stumps, ripe for the plucking, in the first place. They’re feeding the local wildlife.”
“I wouldn’t worry about the mark.” Midas wiped his hands clean. “No one will smell it over your geek.”
“I see you’ve been talking to Ford about me.” I wrinkled my nose. “Did he braid your hair while you gossiped?”
Midas self-consciously raked his fingers through the wavy length. “No?”
The only thing that stopped me from teasing him more was the fact his hair was obviously a hot-button topic for him. Looking the way he did, I wondered if he got challenged more often than others in his position might. I wondered if packmates mistook his reserve for weakness. Then I wondered how, if they noticed his arms, and all of them must have, they could ever think he was less than a survivor.
Whatever happened to him, he wore the experience in silvery scars down his forearms. Just because they didn’t put the story into actual words on his skin, it didn’t silence the message. If anything, it amplified his mystique. He hadn’t snapped under pressure. That much was evident. He was still functional, still able to laugh, to enjoy friendships, to…
I don’t know what he was doing with me. Not flirting, not courting, not anything I could put a name to, but it was something all the same. Otherwise, he would have left me under Ford’s supervision. Midas didn’t strike me as the micromanaging type. He didn’t appear to be the managing type at all.
Power and leadership abilities weren’t the same thing. Plenty of gwyllgi were formidable. That didn’t mean they needed to be in a position where they made decisions that affected their smallest and weakest members. Midas, through his concern for the latter, might cripple the growth of the pack if he led unchecked. He would forever be looking behind him, circling back, when it was up to the alpha to forge new paths, blaze new trails.
“You’re staring.” Midas shifted in his chair. “Do you want to braid my hair?”
Gears in my head ground and crunched, but it didn’t compute. “Are you offering?”
“No.” A smile lifted the right corner of his mouth. “I’m not.”
“Meanie.”
“Watch your language.” He gathered his dishes and stood. “What if there were children nearby?”
“They would laugh at a woman my age name-calling like I’m still in kindergarten.”
A text chime prompted me to check my phone, and I did to make sure Ford wasn’t nudging me.
“Bishop got a hit on a rental house on Braddock Street Southwest.” I read down to what flagged his attention. “The agent in charge of the listing disappeared two weeks ago.” I kept going, expecting what I found. “Alisha Brown.” I held my screen where he could see her picture. “She was one of Clairmont’s.”
There were times when I hated being right about a hunch, and this was one of them.
“Let’s go.” Midas scraped his plate clean then tucked it in the dishwasher. “He might still be there.”
“The last time he called to brag, he got you and not her. Depending on how closely he’s watching us, he’ll notice his mom isn’t tagging along for a change. He might go to ground if he thinks we’ve moved her into witness protection. He may already be gone.”
As much as I hated wasting food, the rest was picked over, and I couldn’t stand the sight of it after I had eaten so much the first time around. I would feed it to the stray cats the next alley over after I got home.
Not that I would ever admit to gwyllgi that I was occasionally a feline sympathizer.
Midas held the door and locked up behind me, which was weird on every level. That I had gone out the front door, that I hadn’t thought to check it but he had, that he was here, after eating with me. Just—all of it. Very weird. Very strange. There was no time to think about why, but it felt so…nice.
Ford stood in the lobby with two older women, obviously a couple, and a cute one at that, and allowed them to each kiss him on the cheek before he broke away to join us.
The moment he realized Midas had marked me again, he did an almost comical double take, like it could be seen as well as smelled, and he looked Midas in the eye long enough Midas had to choke back the rumble building in his chest.
“We’ve got a lead.” I eased between them, forcing Ford to shift his focus onto me. “Can you give us a lift?”
“He’s coming with us?”
Muscle bulged in his jaw, and I didn’t miss the slightest emphasis on us. “Yeah, he is.”
“Midas?” Ford made his friend’s name sound like an accusation. “You’re coming with us?”
“You heard her.” Midas stepped up behind me, not touching me, barely breaching my personal space. From what I had observed from him, it was the same as him humping my leg in public. There were audible gasps from the peanut gallery. “Do you have a problem with that?”
“Not at all,” Ford said breezily. “Your chariot awaits.”
However, the charioteer was quick to leave us in his dust.
“He wouldn’t be so pissy if you’d let him braid your hair,” I muttered. “This is all your fault.”
Midas chuckled, and that attracted even more eyes from residents in the lobby.
“Nothing to see here.” Doing my best princess impersonation, I offered a royal wave. “Go back to your lives, citizens.”
Yet another one-liner from a cartoon. Who doesn’t love Toy Story? I should make a list of cartoons I’ve actually watched for Bishop. There were more in my repertoire than I realized when he shamed me for not watching Peter Pan.
“Are you done?” Midas shackled my wrist, his fingers light and warm and seemingly drawn like magnets to that exact spot, and hauled me out of the lobby. “Or should I bring you a ladder and a fresh box of sixty watts?”
“That you know what I was doing tells me two things.” I stumbled after him. “You definitely had a sister, and you’re definitely royalty.”
“What it tells me is you were murmuring unscrew the lightbulb under your breath.”
“Pageant kid, hello?”
On the circuit, I had heard it called screw in the lightbulb or elbow, elbow, wrist, wrist, or even just the rodeo wave or the royal wave. The first instructor I had was British, and she liked us to twist that bulb for all it was worth. Hers was the one that stuck with me.
“You did pageants?”
For the span of a heartbeat, I swore I could smell hairspray. Entire noxious clouds of the stuff. It made my eyes water, and my mother had always jabbed my scalp with a bobby pin and recited her favorite line in my ear.
“Stop whining, or I’ll give you something to cry about.”
You would think the trophies and crowns would have made her happy, or validated me, but all they did was shine a light on my inadequacies as far as she was concerned.
Those performances gave her the perfect excuse to critique me, to correct me. To tell me every wrong thing I said or did in great detail, to highlight every mistake I made in my routine, to point out every misstep on stage, to make sure I understood that even if I came home crowned, I hadn’t won a thing. Not her love, not her respect, not her happiness.