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Fuck. Too late.
“Wait. I might need some help.”
“Showering?” Did I sound too hopeful?
Her cheeks turned delightfully pink. “No. I mean.” She looked flustered. “I need to find a small cage for Nugget, something portable, temporary, so she has a place to sleep at night. I know it seems trivial, but birds get stressed out moving around.”
“Of course. I’ll take you to the pet store. It’s nearby. We can go in about an hour. Is that enough time for you to settle in?”
“Yes. Thank you!”
“Youwanttodowhat?” Graham asked.
“You heard me the first time,” I grumbled.
All of them had. I was on a group call with everyone, Graham, Grayson, and even Gunnar, who’d joined us from the ritzy yacht.
“I want to take Tansy pro bono. I don’t have anything else lined up, and it doesn’t affect anyone else.”
“Damn! This girl must be gorgeous,” Gunnar said, the sounds of gulls calling in the background coming through his microphone.
She is. But I kept my mouth shut. That wasn’t why I was doing this for free. “We can’t just let her go off on her own. She needs our help.”
“You’re right about that,” Grayson said, his mate nodding enthusiastically next to him. “But since when did you become Mother Theresa? And how would you know if you’re successful? Couldn’t Amrita take her over without us knowing? I don’t want to put Shelby at risk.”
“She hasn’t done it yet. Maybe because something is stopping her, and Tansy’s pet bird can tell. I think she’ll warn us. Even if she doesn’t, I’m a demon; I can sense spirits. Her spirit will have to get close to do its thing.”
“That’s assuming you’re next to Tansy 24/7,” Grayson countered.
“With the ward on our penthouse, she should be safe from bodily possession.” But maybe I could use that as an excuse to move her into my suite, right into my bedroom.
“She’ll need to leave the penthouse eventually. What about a personal ward for when she’s not at Redrock? We can get Sybil to craft one and put it in a charm,” Shelby suggested.
“That might work,” Graham said pensively. “Expensive, though.”
“I’ll cover it.” The words tumbled out of my mouth.
“Oh yeah,” Gunnar piped in. “She must be smoking hot. I can’t wait to meet her.”
I growled at the thought of Gunnar turning on his charm for Tansy. She wasn’t mine, but that didn’t mean I wouldn’t tear off his hand for touching her.
“But she’s gonna think you pity her if you offer to do it for free. No one wants to feel pitied,” Shelby said. “Especially since she offered her jewelry, and when you rejected that, she offered to work it off. Why don’t we just give her something easy to do around the penthouse? Like ordering groceries. Or watering the plants.”
Nugget already fertilized one. “We can do that. I’ll tell her we’ll take her on.”
“Just make sure you bring her up to the penthouse,” Graham said. “We have that senator coming in for the weekend. He’s been getting death threats, so I’m keeping him in the office quarters while he’s here.”
Another case I’d hate to take. Unlike the gargoyle brothers, I didn’t have the need to guard something all the time. I’d joined them on their venture because they were my best friends, and they considered me an honorary gargoyle. But my instinct to guard and protect was flaring up hard with Tansy.
“She’s already up there. I put her in one of the guest rooms,” I said. “The first one.”
“Ooh! She is?” Shelby perked up. “I’ll go say hi.”
“Watch out for Nugget.”
“Nugget?”
She’d find out soon enough. “You’ll see.”
