Taming the Beast

“How many are there?”

“Do you want to pay for that question?”

He chuckled. “Fair enough. I do believe I enjoy sparring with you, sweet Mary.”

The nickname knocked her off-kilter in such a way that she could conceive of no satisfying retort.

Why does he call me that?

The only other person who’d ever called her sweet had been her father, but he’d been easy to be sweet to. He’d been so kind and always had a smile for her. Most of their kind weren’t so nice.

She tried to force the flare of grief away on a long exhalation and shook her head to clear the thought of him. Nothing useful would come from more tears.

“I’m glad you find this exchange entertaining,” she said after she’d gotten her wits about her, at least somewhat. “The first of my middle names is Charlotte.”

“The goddess Mary Charlotte. Lovely.” He closed his eyes. “I was going north.”

“North.” She jotted down a note and withdrew from her tote bag a photocopied drawing of the area around the accident scene. “Okay. You were going north. Did you cross in front of the blue car, or behind it? I’m trying to visualize which view you had.”

“Next name?”

She sighed, and muttered, “Hilda.”

He cocked a brow.

She had a similar sentiment about that name. Some distant aunt on her mother’s side had been called Hilda, and that was all Mary knew about her.

“I crossed behind the blue,” he said.

“Approximately how far from the rear bumper of the blue car did you cross?”

“Next name?”

“Shawn.” Her father’s name. Her mother had buried the name after the others because she’d thought it too masculine, but it had ended up being Mary’s favorite.

“I’d estimate around thirty feet.”

“You like to cut things close, don’t you?”

He canted his head and raised one corner of his exquisite lips. “Would you like me to answer that?”

She actually had to think about it. She was curious, but not that curious. In the scheme of things, thirty feet may not have been all that close if the vehicles were both moving as slowly as the drivers had claimed. The speed limit on the street was only twenty-five miles per hour.

“No,” she said. “Don’t answer that. I can always follow up later if I think the information is actually important.”

He pouted teasingly.

She rolled her eyes. Even his pout was sexy.

“Next,” she said. “When you were crossing, were you looking at the vehicles or at the place you were crossing to?”

“Next name?”

“Sorry. Fresh out.”

“Hmm. So you’re Mary Charlotte Hilda Shawn Nissen. That’s certainly a mouthful.”

“That sounds approximately like what my kindergarten teacher said when she was teaching me to spell all that stuff in the middle.” She shrugged and tapped her pen some more. “I always figured that I could dump a couple or all three when I got married. If I get married. That’d be the easiest way to do a name change.”