Rux growled low in his chest like distant thunder.
“Inside voices,” Urien hissed. “Or inside growls. Whatever. Someone’s going to notice us.”
“Notice what? Three completely normal men reading a newspaper in a parked car outside a coffee shop in the middle of the afternoon? That’s completely…”
“You’re holding it upside down.”
Mabon looked down. The financial section was indeed inverted, a chart about municipal bonds pointing toward his lap. “Damn it.”
He flipped the paper right-side up, and the pages crackled in protest.
Through the window, their mate handed a coffee to an elderly woman, as he said something that made her laugh. His whole face lit up, and Mabon watched Urien’s hands tighten on the steering wheel hard enough that the leather creaked.
“Easy,” Mabon warned.
“I am easy. I’m extremely easy. I’m the easiest I’ve ever been.”
“You’re about to rip the steering wheel off.”
Urien’s knuckles had gone white. “No, I’m not.”
“Your hands are smoking.”
“That’s…” Urien looked down. Wisps of steam rose from where his palms gripped the wheel. “Damn.”
He released it quickly, shaking out his hands. Scorch marks remained on the leather.
“That’s the third steering wheel this year,” Mabon said.
“This is different. The other two were traffic-related.”
“And this is Treasure-related, which is apparently worse.”
In the back, Rux had begun narrating. “He’s making another coffee. Look at his hands. Did you know he has freckles on his hands? I didn’t notice the freckles on his hands before. There are at least six. Maybe seven. I should count them. I need to count them.”
“You can’t count his freckles from the car, Rux.”
“Not with that attitude.”
Mabon pinched the bridge of his nose. They’d been here for twenty-threeminutes. Twenty-three minutes of watching their fourth work, smiling and chatting with customers, and generally existing in a state of complete ignorance about the three dragon shifters who were having a collective crisis outside his workplace.
“We look like perverts,” he said flatly.
“We’re not perverts.” Urien sat up slightly, then immediately slouched again when a pedestrian walked past. “We’re concerned mates conducting reconnaissance.”
“That’s what all perverts say.”
“I found binoculars,” Rux offered from the back seat.
Both Mabon and Urien turned to stare at him.
“You broughtbinoculars?”
Rux held them up defensively. “They were already in here. For bird watching.”
“We’re not watching birds, we’re watching our Treasure, which makes the binoculars exponentially creepier!”
“I just thought…”
