“If you promise you can keep it safe.”
“Sure I can. Probably.”
Probably. What a great word. I gave one to him—the one that had once belonged to Anastasia. He wrapped it in a white handkerchief and put it in his pocket.
“Consider this a job,” I said. “Standard rate.”
He looked away, surly, like I knew he would. “You don’t have to pay me anything—”
Ben grinned at him. “We’re going to force you into business whether you like it or not.”
Cormac just scowled, because while he might argue with me, he wouldn’t argue with his cousin.
Supernatural PI: Cormac was particularly suited to the job, if he would only admit it. We were working on him, slowly.
I put the other three coins back in the jar and went to the restaurant’s back office to lock the jar back in the safe. When I came back to the table, Cormac was gone.
“What, he just left?” I said to Ben.
“Said he wanted to get started.”
“It’s past midnight, the library’s closed.”
He made an exaggerated shrug, indicating his cousin didn’t make any more sense to him than he did to me.
“I can’t decide if I want him to find a way to use them or not,” I said.
“I think I’d just as soon have the coins turn out to be harmless.”
“But then we don’t have anything we can use.” I fidgeted, tapping my feet. I’d gotten to where I half-expected Roman to show up anywhere, anytime; I always felt like he was looking over my shoulder. Ben regarded me with an amused hazel gaze, the lines around his eyes crinkled. His hair was shaggy, always two weeks overdue for a cut. I reached up and brushed it. He caught my hand and kissed it. Warmth passed between us, and once again I felt a tingle—he was my husband. The fact often amazed me.
He pulled away, turned to his briefcase, and drew out a stack of papers—way too many real estate listings. “To get your mind off conspiracies, you want to start making some decisions?”
I called for a round of beers.
We were supposed to be looking for a house. Ben had been doing most of the work, narrowing down choices, checking out neighborhoods. I kept dragging my feet. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to move into a house—preferably one on the edge of civilization, with access to forest and places to run. The condo we shared had gotten a little cramped over the last couple of years. But I was having a hard time taking that first step. If I was really honest, I was afraid of change, of moving into a situation that resembled far too closely that of the previous alpha pair who’d led the Denver pack. Having a house in the wilderness where the pack could gather would make us look a little too much like them, and they had been abusive and evil and incompetent.
Maybe I just didn’t want to admit that even after being in the position for years, Ben and I really were the alphas of the Denver pack. People kept coming to us for answers. I would never get used to it.
“Kitty—” Ben must have sensed my consternation.
“I know, I know. What have we got?”
He shuffled the pages in front of me. “These are all the ranch-style houses on at least one acre of land between Castle Rock and Boulder.”
“Closer to Denver would be better.”
“Agreed. We have Golden, Evergreen, Georgetown, Idaho Springs, Brighton—”
“I’d rather be in the mountains than out east, if we can swing it.” Frankly, the listings had all started to look the same to me. They all said the same things: lovely, sunny, big yard. Lots of character, which I’d come to believe was the real-estate version of “has a nice personality.”
He shuffled a few more pages, pulled one out. “What about this one? It’s the right size, great location, it backs up to open space—”
I pulled the page out of his hand and stared. I knew this house—the ranch design, the roof shape, the spread of the driveway, the landscape around it. I checked the address just to be sure, and my stomach flopped. I swallowed back nausea.
“No,” I said, wadding up the page and shoving it back at him.
“But it’s got everything we’re looking for—”