Kitty and the Dead Man's Hand (Kitty Norville 5)

I definitely wasn’t going to explain to them what I’d been doing all night. The important thing, the only thing they needed to know: “Ben’s right here, Mom. He’s fine. Everything’s fine.” And didn’t that feel wonderful to say?

“Oh, that’s great! Thank goodness!” she gushed. “So when are you getting married?”

I looked at Ben. He looked at me. I sighed. “I don’t know, Mom. I’ll give you a call when I find out what’s going on with that.”

“All right. Kitty, I’m glad Ben’s safe.”

“Yeah. Me, too.” I shut off the phone. “She wants to know when we’re getting married.”

“That turned out to be a little more complicated than we expected, didn’t it?” he said.

Frowning, I looked away. “It does seem like the universe is conspiring against us.”

He regarded me a moment, holding my left hand, rubbing a finger over the engagement ring, pondering. Then he smiled.

“I have a plan. Meet me out front in, oh, let’s say an hour.”

“You think I’m going to let you out of my sight after everything that’s happened?”

“I know. But I’ll be careful. I have an idea.” He smiled and looked at me with the gaze of a predator.

“An idea?”

“It’s a good idea.” He dressed, slipping on boxers, jeans, shirt, and socks, and running fingers through his hair in lieu of a comb.

“What idea?”

“Do you trust me?”

We’d already had this discussion, and the answer wasn’t any different now. I nodded.

“Just meet me outside in an hour.”

He kissed me, deeply and fiercely, then walked out.

Rather than sitting around waiting, I got dressed and took a walk. I was curious, so I went back to the Hanging Gardens.

The police cars were all gone, though I suspected yellow crime-scene tape still wrapped the theater and stage. A couple of TV news vans had replaced the squad cars, but I didn’t see any reporters. I wasn’t going to go near them to find out what was happening.

I only went as far as the lobby, where the poster for Balthasar

’s show had changed.

The photo was the same, showing the big cats perched in their Babylonian temple setting, and the name of the show was the same: “Balthasar, King of Beasts,” blazoned across the top. Another sign, attached to the side, announced a new opening date set for sometime next week. But a picture of Nick had replaced Balthasar in the center of the poster. There he stood, hands on his hips, smiling haughtily, brown hair swept back, looking like the cover of a romance novel. His eyes seemed to follow me as I moved around the lobby.

Nothing had changed.

Outside the hotel, even the Las Vegas desert heat couldn’t dispel the chill in my spine.

But I had a date, so precisely one hour after Ben left, I arrived on the sidewalk in front of the Olympus. A minute later, a huge white Cadillac convertible pulled into the drive. All it needed was a longhorn hood ornament. Ben—in the driver’s seat, his shirtsleeves rolled up, one hand on the steering wheel, the other elbow resting on the door—looked out at me over his sunglasses.

“Hey,” he drawled.

The rest of the weekend receded to a pinpoint of distant memory. This was all about here and now, Ben’s crazy plan, and all the reasons I never wanted to be without him.

I almost cackled. “Oh my God. It’s perfect.”

“Get in,” he said, a glint in his eye and curl to his lip.