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“Our mostest is still at work, I take it,” I said.
“Yes, Nathaniel was onstage tonight.”
“Give him a kiss for me when he gets home.”
“I will.”
“Love you.”
“Love you more.”
“Love you mostest,” we said together.
That made us both laugh, and we hung up with the echo of it in our voices.
23
I WAS STILL smili
ng when an SUV pulled in beside me. I didn’t know the vehicle, and it was still dark enough that I couldn’t see inside the SUV, but the driver was most likely male and tall. Then he opened his door, and the overhead light illuminated him. My stomach fell into my shoes, and my pulse rate soared. I suddenly couldn’t swallow right. It was Olaf. He was perfectly bald, with a mustache and a Vandyke beard framing his lips. When I’d first met him, he’d been clean-shaven. He looked better with the facial hair; it gave his face definition and complemented the thick black of his eyebrows. Before, he’d looked like a henchman in some big-budget action flick. Now he looked like the main villain. I hadn’t understood what other women seemed to see in him until he grew the Vandyke. Then I could finally see that he was handsome in a scary-bad-guy sort of way.
Olaf, aka Marshal Otto Jeffries, unfolded himself from the SUV and stood all damn near seven feet of him on the other side of the vehicle from me. I had a gun naked in my hand, held against my thigh like I had for Leduc after he’d threatened me. Olaf hadn’t done a damn thing to me; he was even smiling at me as he started to move in my direction. I opened the passenger door and slid out so that I wasn’t sitting there staring at him like a mouse caught in a cobra’s gaze. I even holstered my gun, because he had his badge on a lanyard around his neck. We were both U.S. Marshals in good standing. He hadn’t done anything wrong yet, so I put up the gun that my fear had made me draw, but I did start moving toward the building behind me. I tried to make it casual, like I was just going to stand on the porch with its light and people just inside to chat with him, not so that I wouldn’t be alone with him. He was one of the only people on the planet who could make me feel like a victim waiting for a crime to happen. I hated that I was afraid of him. I fought to quiet my pulse rate, though it was probably too late to hide my physical reactions from him. He was a werelion now, which meant he’d probably tasted my pulse the moment my heart rate spiked.
“Anita,” he said. He had a deep voice to go with the size of him, and it sounded like the rumble of a Great Dane.
I almost called him Olaf, but remembered in time that we were on the job, and when other cops were nearby, he used his legal identity. I could hear the murmur of voices just inside the building. I couldn’t understand what they were saying, which meant I probably could have called him anything without being overheard, but it was his secret, not mine.
My voice was even and neutral when I said, “Otto, what are you doing here? I thought you were on an active warrant somewhere else.”
He smiled again, and it almost pushed its way into the black depths of his eyes. They were set deep in his face like twin caves. Maybe it was the color of them? If he’d had bright blue eyes, would he have looked less intimidating? Maybe I could have talked him into colored contacts and see. Though any color would have ruined his style of all-black assassin chic. Whether he was out of work clothes or in them, I’d never seen him wear anything but black. There might have been a white T-shirt thrown in there once, but when I thought of him, I thought of black.
“The warrant is complete.” Which meant he’d killed someone recently, but I really couldn’t throw stones at him about that. We were both executioners with badges.
“Good for you,” I said. “Ted told me you were chasing down bad guys close to here.” I mentioned Edward on purpose, because he was one of the few people in the world Olaf respected man-to-man. Pretending to be my lover, Edward had helped me keep Olaf from pursuing his crush on me further.
Olaf smiled as if he knew exactly why I’d dropped Edward’s legal identity into the conversation. “Ted told me you were nearby as well.”
“No, he didn’t,” I said, and my voice was still neutral; even my pulse and heart rate were even. Good for me.
“How can you be so certain?” he asked.
“Because he would have told me that he’d talked to you.”
He gave a small nod. “There was a second crime attached to Newman’s warrant. As the closest U.S. Marshal, I was notified.”
I nodded, and some tension I hadn’t realized I was holding eased out. He wasn’t stalking me; he was on the job. “I thought the new protocol only alerted the nearest marshal if there was a second attack connected to a warrant.”
“As did I, but apparently it alerts for any major crime associated with the warrant.”
“So the attempted theft at the same crime scene was pushed through channels to you,” I said.
“Yes.”
“So you knew the second crime was just theft with no violence,” I said.
“Yes.”
“Then you knew that Newman and I didn’t need any more backup.”
