Not enough, not enough, not enough.
I might have continued on after middle school, but once I started winning, I attracted too much attention. I was a rough-and-tumble girl, but bruises shaped like fingerprints were hard to blame on falls, and she enjoyed my tears too much to curb her growing appetite for punishment.
Eager for a distraction, I jerked a thumb toward the lobby. “I think that lady fainted.” I made my eyes wide with concern. “Do you think we should check on her?”
Midas whipped his head around. “What lady…?”
“Made you look.” I beamed at him. “No one fainted, probably, but a few looked primed and ready.” I didn’t attempt to remove myself from his grip, but I offered more resistance to let him know he was still holding on. “You shocked a lot of people back there. You marked me, for what I now suspect is the second time in two days, you laughed at a joke like a normal person, and you—goddess forbid—touched a woman of your own free will.”
“I don’t understand why I act the way I do around you.”
“I don’t understand why I act the way I do around you, either.”
He snorted but held on. “You mean like a five-year-old?”
“That was prepubescent humor, I’ll have you know.” I harrumphed, broke free, and climbed in the truck. Mostly so I could sit in the middle and provide a physical barrier between the two friends who seemed to be struggling for civility lately. “Give me your seat belt clicky thing.”
After Midas sat, he frowned at me. “Why?”
“There are noses pressed to the glass in there. I doubt they can see us clearly, since the windows are fogging, but I want to make it obvious you didn’t touch my butt to reach the clasp. They almost hit the floor when you latched onto my wrist. I can’t imagine what would happen if they thought you had touched lower.”
“Lee,” Ford sighed. “Leave the man alone.”
“Where’s the fun in that?” I grinned when Midas let me fasten him in. “There. Your dignity is preserved.”
Midas dragged a hand down his face, but he didn’t wipe off his smile fast enough.
He might not want to, but he thought I was funny, and that was all the encouragement I required to dial it up to ten.
“How do you put up with her night in and night out?” he asked Ford over my head. “She doesn’t drive you crazy?”
There was a rumble in his voice when Ford answered, “She drives me crazy, all right.”
I decided to take it as a compliment.
Fifteen
As soon as Ford pulled into the driveway of the suspect’s house, Midas cracked his window and filled his lungs, filtering out the mundane to focus on the hint of musk that told him a warg lived, or had lived, here.
The brush of Hadley’s hand against his hip as she hit the release on his seat belt he ignored. The smell of her shampoo, the tang of barbecue sauce staining the hem of her tee, which reminded him of how she held his gaze while she licked her fingers clean, he ignored too.
He tried damn hard to, anyway.
“What do you smell?” She leaned over, invading his space, flaring her delicate nostrils like she might catch the scent. “All I smell is the neighbor cooking out down the street who must have marinated his hamburgers in lighter fluid.”
“A warg lives here.” He almost bumped noses with her, she had gotten so close. “I can tell the species, so that might eliminate our killer.”
“Bonnie used magic to conceal her scent,” she reminded him. “Her son probably knows the same tricks.”
“I’ll take the back,” Ford said, expression all business. “You take the front.”
“All right.” Hadley withdrew. “Coming?” Challenge glinted in her eyes. “Or are you waiting here?”
Mom was going to skin him. If he was lucky, he would be dead before she got started.
“I didn’t come along just for the ride,” he said to earn one of her wicked smiles.
He got out, turned back for Hadley, but she jumped down before he could stress about if he ought to offer her help. After working with Ford for the past few days, she had clearly learned her way around his truck.
That shouldn’t have bothered him as much as it did, but he was here, wasn’t he? Sticking his nose where it didn’t belong yet again.
All those years where Lethe chafed under Mom’s rule, he never understood her problem. He was starting to grasp it now. The urge to make Mom see things his way, to let him do things his way, to let him run things his way began to itch beneath his skin. It wasn’t a reflection on her or her ruling style. He had no complaints about how she ran the pack. As it was thriving, no one had cause to question her methods.
Still, he couldn’t help he believed he was wasted as a figurehead, that he ought to be securing the pack’s future in a way that didn’t involve him selecting a mate who wanted the same thing from him that he wanted from her: nothing.
For the first time since he took his place as heir, he felt…good. Right. Like he had taken a step down his own path.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Hadley fisted the back of his shirt, yanking him to a stop with a strength he hadn’t expected from her small frame. “You’re backup, Goldilocks.”
The beast in him bared its teeth, but he didn’t have a leg to stand on. This was her case, and he had been the one to hand it to her.
“Fine,” he growled, and saw the crimson in his eyes reflected in hers.
As though the night itself scabbarded her blade, she drew it from darkness.
Tension thrummed in the tense lines of her body as she tested the doorbell, then knocked on the door.
With neighbors on either side, most of them human, she didn’t risk announcing herself. She took a measured step back and braced. Soft words passed her lips, too faint for even his ears to catch, a prayer to Hecate, maybe? Then she kicked in the door. She flipped on the lights with the tip of her sword, though he knew her night vision was as sharp as her weapon of choice.
“He’s not here,” she said with certainty that made him curious how she could tell so quickly.
Pulling in long breaths, he filtered the scents and decided they were hours old. “I agree.”
A door creaked open in the rear of the house, and Hadley was off like a shot, chasing after danger.
Midas’s heart almost stopped as he followed, but it kicked back into gear when Ford entered the living room.
“You’re not subtle, are you, darlin’?” he teased Hadley. “Do I need to teach you how to pick a lock?”
“Pardon me for not carrying a set of lock picks with me everywhere I go,” she bit back. “Who does that?”
“I believe in emergency preparedness,” he said primly. “You never know what might come in handy.”
“True.” She eyed the silver picks in his hands with avarice. “You’ll have to teach me sometime.”
“It’s a date.” His smile was as big as Midas had ever seen it. “That will put us at two, after our movie night.”
“I will call your momma and tell her you tried taking me out on a lock-picking date,” she threatened, “and you won’t be able to sit for a week.”