Toni sat up straight, not knowing if the receptionist would be part of the hiring process, and said, “Hi. I’m here to see—”
“Yeah, yeah.” He dismissed her with a shake of his head while he grabbed a messenger bag from under his desk. He had it in his fist and was just moving around the desk when the glass door was thrown open and the hockey player from the day before, Novikov, stood there. He wasn’t in his training gear, but in jeans and a T-shirt, a duffel bag over his shoulder. And even though she didn’t know the man very well, Toni could say with great confidence that he was definitely seething.
“What,” Novikov began, spitting out the words through clenched teeth, “do you not understand about a schedule?”
Uh-oh. Toni remembered her brother Troy beginning a conversation with his onetime babysitter. Afterward, the babysitter sued for medical bills and pain and suffering, plus got a restraining order against her brother. In the end the family settled with her out of court. At the time, Troy was six and weighed about thirty pounds.
Novikov was thirty something and at least four hundred plus pounds . . . so this situation could easily end up much worse.
Trying to defend himself, the bobcat began, “I did what you ask—”
“No!” Novikov cut the cat off. “You didn’t do what I asked. Because if you’d done what I’d asked, I’d be surprising my fiancée in Chicago with the wonder that is me. And later tonight, I’d be watching a bout with her and a bunch of other hot girls racing around a banked track in tight shorts and tank tops and pretending it’s a sport. Instead, since last night, I’ve been in Iowa. Then Kentucky. Then Minnesota. None of which had my fiancée, but did have grizzlies. Lots and lots of really pissy grizzlies! Who aren’t fans of polar bears or lion males! And I’m both!”
In the face of that roar, the bobcat backed up against the wall behind him, his messenger bag held against his chest. “I just got your schedule confused with Markowitz’s. It was an accident.”
“Wait a minute . . . you’re telling me that Markowitz is in Chicago? With my fiancée?”
“I doubt he’s with Blayne.”
“Does Blayne know you got the schedules mixed up?”
“Well, she called—”
“Which means,” the hybrid growled, “she probably felt bad for Markowitz and now she’s making sure he’s doing okay. You know how she doesn’t like anyone to be sad. And we all know how Markowitz is a scumbag leopard who’ll take advantage of any do-gooder idiot that comes along. Especially when they have legs as long as my Blayne’s!” The player stalked over to the bobcat’s desk and slammed really big hands onto it, making the thing nearly buckle. “But you know what’s the worst part of this? What really sets my teeth on edge and makes me want to just twist your head around until it pops off your body? The worst part is that because of you I haven’t had my workout today. I haven’t had my swim. I haven’t had my practice. Because of you I’ve missed almost an entire day of my schedule.”
The bobcat blinked. “That’s really more important than your girlfriend?”
Utilizing years of unplanned training, Toni dropped her book, charged across the room, and cut in front of the bobcat, her one free arm stretched out in front of her. She knew her skinny jackal arm and battered shoulder would never stop the player from getting those big hands on the idiot cat, but she felt the need to at least try because she, above everyone else, understood what was going on here.
Because Toni understood drive. The drive that one had to have in order to be the best.
So while the bobcat didn’t “get” Novikov’s schedule issues, Toni did. She also knew that she didn’t want to spend the rest of the day in a police precinct giving a statement on a tragic shifter-on-shifter murder case.
“When’s your fiancée’s thing tonight?” she asked loudly in an attempt to get Novikov’s attention and keep him on the other side of that very flimsy-looking desk. “Eight? Nine?”
Novikov yanked his hand back and, since it had been dangerously close to her face, she appreciated that he had enough self-control to do that.
“Eight thirty Chicago time,” he snarled, blue eyes still locked on the bobcat behind her.
“Great. I know a carrier that I use for my family all the time. There’re eleven of us not counting my parents, and regular planes and full-human run airports are not always the friends of jackals with pups. So I can easily get you on a direct flight to Chicago, have a car meet you at the airport to take you right to wherever she’s playing her game tonight.”
“It’s called a bout.”
Bout? Was she a boxer?
“Okay. Her bout. I can get you to her bout.”
“You can do that?” he asked, looking a bit calmer.
“Just need a phone and a computer.”
The player pointed at the bobcat. “You. Out.”
“This is my desk.”
Toni rammed her free hand against Novikov’s shoulder before he could finish climbing over the bobcat’s desk and strangling the feline to death. She had no illusions that she was somehow physically holding him back. Instead she was trusting in his desire not to hurt the one person who might be able to help him.
“Go take a break,” she ordered the bobcat. “I won’t be long.”
“Whatever.”
The bobcat sounded tough, but he still slinked around them and then darted out of the room before the player could get his hands on him.
“Sit,” Toni firmly ordered, using the same tone she often used with Kyle.
“I’d be making everyone’s life easier if I just took that cat’s neck and—”
“Sit. Now. Over there by the wolf.”
Novikov walked over to Ricky and glared down at him. Toni thought she’d have to jump between those two when the wolf only stared back. That same placid look on his face. But Novikov, instead of fighting yet another person, just grabbed the chair Toni had originally been sitting in and pulled it close to the desk.
Toni decided to ignore the fact that the chair had been bolted to the floor. Nope. It was better not to think about that little feat of strength at all.
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 Ton
i 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.
“I know we’ve talked to Whitlan’s past associates who are still on the outside,” Ric said. “But what about those inside?”
“We haven’t done that yet,” Dee told him.
“Then do it. Maybe if we’re lucky, it’ll give us something new.”
“I’ll—” Cella began.
Ric quickly cut her off. “No. Dee-Ann, work with Desiree and Crushek on getting together a list of names of anyone that was once a cellmate or prison buddy of Whitlan. Go back as far as you need to. Once you’re ready, bring in Cella.”
“Why can’t I help now?”
“Because I’d like for my team to at least have a shot at getting into this year’s championships.”
“I’m working on it,” Cella snarled. “But you know it’s not been easy.”
“You wanted to keep Novikov on,” Ric reminded her, speaking of his least favorite human being. “Even after what he did to Heller.”
She shrugged and made excuses. “That was an accident. Heller got in Novikov’s way.”
“You don’t really believe that, Cella.”
“Accident!”
And, as if summoned from the pits of hell Ric always accused him of originating from, Bo “The Marauder” Novikov stalked into Ric’s office. No knock. No request to come in. Just throwing the door open and barreling his way into the room of his team’s owner and captain, the way Ric imagined Novikov’s Mongolian ancestors barreled into China.
Yet what horrified Ric was not that Novikov stood there with wet hair, a dozen roses, and a box of chocolates from the high-end chocolate store down the street under one arm, but that he held Toni under the other.
Ric would admit that until this very moment, he’d forgotten that Toni had been waiting outside for a job interview, but it had never occurred to him that he’d be putting her in danger by having her sit out in the goddamn waiting room!
“Wait!” Cella bellowed, and Ric looked away from Novikov long enough to see that Dee-Ann had been startled to her feet, her favorite bowie knife that Dee had named Big Betty out and ready t
o use. Which didn’t really bother him unless poor Toni got in the way.
“It’s just Novikov,” Cella snapped. “So fucking calm down, canine.”
“That boy better learn how to enter a room right,” Dee muttered.
“Why are you touching my cousin?” Ric demanded.
“Another cousin?” Cella asked him. “Seriously? You Van Holtzes are worse than the Malones.”
“She ain’t blood.” Dee-Ann dropped back into her chair.
“That makes it weirder,” Cella said softly as if she were really analyzing something so damn meaningless.
Ric ignored her and snarled at Novikov. “Put her down. Now!”
But instead of putting her down, Novikov roared and kind of shook Toni at them. To be honest, Ric couldn’t understand what the She-jackal could have done to piss off Novikov this much. Although easy to rage when it came to hockey, Novikov mostly ignored the rest of the world unless they fucked with his oh-so-precious schedule. Now, if this was one of Toni’s brothers or sisters, then, well . . . yeah. They probably deserved it because that was one batch of kids who could wield words the way samurai could wield swords. But this was Toni. Rational, calm Toni.
With her gaze locked on Novikov, Dee slapped the flat of the blade against her palm and warned the hybrid, “Looks like it might be time to start the killin’, boy.” And Dee-Ann meant that threat because she liked Toni. Amazing since Dee didn’t really like many people. But she did like Toni, and Dee protected her friends.
Yet before Dee could prove how much, Toni calmly stated, “Or everyone could just take a breath and not . . . you know . . . start the killin’.”
“Are you okay?” Ric asked Toni.
“I’m fine.” And she sounded fine. She was even smiling. Not in a forced way, either, which he’d seen her do when she was trying to smooth over something one of her siblings had done or said. Usually Kyle or Oriana. “He’s just in a rush and frustrated,” she went on, “so he’s having a hard time getting his feelings across without the roaring.” Wait. Was she trying to explain the completely irrational actions of a completely irrational idiot?