Beast Behaving Badly (12 page)

CHAPTER 11

B
layne slept hard. So hard, she only remembered someone waking her once to shove several big pills down her throat, followed by an attempt at drowning her. The next time she woke up, she felt much better and was starving.

Yawning, she sat up and stretched. Her migraine was gone, her face no longer felt ten times bigger than her entire body, and she could now see out of both eyes. It was still dark out, but she had no clue what time it was. She glanced at her watch, but quickly remembered it didn't work. Okay, so Bo was right about
that
. She did need a new watch . . . a task she'd get around to eventually.

She stood and headed to the bathroom, her need to pee overriding her need to eat. She took care of that, washed her hands, and walked back into the living room. That's when she stopped and gawked.

“What . . . wait . . . where's . . . uh . . .”

“Are you well enough to be up?”

Blayne looked over her shoulder. Bo Novikov stood in her kitchen doorway. He was actually kind of stooping a bit because he was too tall for her doorways. To be honest, she'd forgotten he'd come over. Questions like why and how did he know where she lived in Brooklyn faded away as it hit her that she hadn't been robbed by very neat thieves.

She pointed at her living room. “What did you do?”

“Cleaned up. Looks much better, don't you think?”

Blayne walked farther into the living room. “Where's all my stuff?”

“You mean all that trash?”

Blayne faced the insolent beast in her apartment. “Trash? Did you call my stuff
trash
?”

“Isn't it?”

“No! It's not trash. It's my stuff!”

“Which was trash.”

Annoyed by his calm but self-righteous attitude, Blayne pointed an accusing finger. “You threw it out, didn't you?”

“Well—”

“Because
you
think it was trash. But it wasn't trash. It was
my
stuff.”

“Blayne—”

“Mine!” she bellowed. “Not yours.
Mine, mine, mine!
”

“Blayne—”

“Who do you think you are? Coming into
my
apartment? Taking
my
shit! Throwing
my
shit out!”

At this point, Blayne was good and frothy, but when Bo rolled his eyes at her and let out some kind of soul-weary, put-upon sigh, she'd had enough!

“Out!”
she barked. “Get out of my house!
Now!
” She turned to make the short trip over to the front door so she could dramatically throw it open, but he caught hold of her sweatshirt and swung her around. For a brief moment, she thought he was about to pummel her, but instead of spinning her around to face him, he spun her around to face the wall behind the couch. The wall with the bookcases she'd originally tossed stuff up onto when she was unpacking and had been meaning to reorganize once she had a chance. Sadly, that “chance” had never made an appearance.

Not only had the three sets of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves been reorganized, but all the books and magazines Blayne had laying on the floor were now on the bookshelves. And not only were the items organized alphabetically, they were organized alphabetically by author within subgroups that were broken down by topic. And yeah, the topics were also in alphabetical order. He'd even found time to do a makeshift binding of her magazines by year and label them so she knew which magazine they were without having to pull them down and look.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, that's nice—eek!”

He swung her around again and this time she faced the kitchen. The spotless kitchen with all the dishes, pots, and pans put away, the counter and stovetop scrubbed clean, and the four bags of trash she'd been meaning to throw in the Dumpster downstairs for the past two weeks finally gone. And she was sure, if she wanted to, she could
eat
off that kitchen floor.

“Wow—”

Another swing and she was looking into her bedroom. All the clothes that had been on the floor were now in the hamper—
I have a hamper?—
and the pile of clean clothes she had in her laundry basket were gone, leading her to believe they'd been folded and put in her chest of drawers. A few had been hung up and put in her closet, which had also been organized, the clothes aligned by size. The shoes, sneakers, and boots she'd tossed into the bottom of her closet—and then spent an hour every morning trying to find a matching pair—were organized on the closet floor. First her work boots, then her sneakers, then her skates, and finally a very small row of dress shoes and heels.

Okay, so he hadn't thrown everything out in a fit of manly I-know-what's-good-for-you-ism but, instead, he'd merely organized all her crap so that she had a clean apartment and actually knew that her carpet was a festive plum color. And he'd managed to do all that in a few hours.

Blayne briefly gnawed her bottom lip, much like that badger had gnawed on her face, but she knew she couldn't avoid it. She had to apologize and say thank you. All in the same sentence preferably. To Bo Novikov.

Taking in a deep breath, “Bo—”

That's when he swung her around again. Now she was staring at the small dining table that was in her living room because she didn't really have a dining room. Of course, even if she had a dining room, she wouldn't have used the table to eat on because usually it was covered with old and new bills, business paperwork she'd been promising for a month—
or was it two?
—to get finished for Gwen, and the empty family photo album and box of family photos she'd been trying to put together since she'd moved in for her dad's upcoming birthday. Yet all that stuff was neatly piled and arranged on a side table—the urgent bills in their scary pink envelopes right on top of everything with a large piece of paper that had written on it, “Pay these now!” taped across—so those things weren't completely out of sight, which meant they would not be out of mind.

So what was on the table now? Dinner plates and glasses—
I remember those plates and glasses!
—chopsticks, and a rather large quantity of Chinese food from her favorite twenty-four-hour place on the corner.

“Oh . . . wow. I—”

And that's when she heard her front door slam shut.

Blayne cringed and looked over her shoulder. And yeah. She was completely alone. “Dammit!”

 

 

Bo was at his truck when he stopped, his head lifting. He sniffed the air and snarled when he realized it was wolf he smelled. She-wolf. Already in a bad mood, he turned toward the scent coming from an alley across the street, but before he could go find out why a She-wolf was lurking around Blayne's apartment, Blayne leaped in front of him, her arms outstretched, her legs straddling the curb. He knew it was her rather pathetic attempt at blocking him from going any farther.

Considering she couldn't fight off a badger, Bo had to admire her moxy.

“I'm sorry,” she said. “I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!”

To be honest, he didn't expect her to apologize. At least not right away. And if she did apologize, he didn't expect her to mean it. But she did mean it. He could tell.

“Please don't go,” she begged. “I was a total bitch. I know. And I'm sorry.”

If she could be an adult about this, then so could he. “And I'm sorry if I freaked you out. I was only trying to help.”

“I know. I know.” She pressed her hands on his chest and, um, that felt awfully nice. “And I really appreciate it. I just freaked out because one time me and my dad got into it about my ‘pig sty' as he liked to call it. And he threw out all my shit. With me standing there! I was fourteen at the time, but I'm sensing now that I've never recovered from the trauma of that event.”

Bo wanted to laugh, but he knew she was serious. “He just threw it out?”

“According to him he didn't have time for my lazy ass to shift into motion and do what I needed to do, which meant now, not later, and not when I felt like it.
You hear me, little miss?
” she demanded in a much lower and bellowing voice, most likely imitating her father.

Bo cleared his throat, held back a smile. “Your old man wasn't a Marine, was he?”

Her smile was resigned but still loving. “Navy.”

“I figured. My uncle was a Marine. He raised me after my parents died. I recognized the . . . uh . . . tone.”

“That explains everything,” she said with a rush of cheeriness he'd never seen from any predator before in his life. “Military parents or guardians raise two types of kids. Either the super-orderly kid, which is you. Or the rebellious messy one, which is me.”

“So I'm boring?”

“I didn't say that!”

“But you're the rebel and I'm the orderly one.”

“Yes. But I bet you can find whatever you need whenever you need it.”

“This is true. Which I guess explains why I kept finding four or five packages of the same products lying around?”

She cringed. “You mean like plastic sandwich bags?”

“You had sixteen boxes of those. Most of them unopened or with only a few baggies used.”

The cringing grew worse. “Dammit!”

Chuckling and relieved she'd simply forgotten about those bags and wasn't using them for some kind of illegal-drug business, Bo asked, “Did you take the rest of the antibiotics? You need to take the rest of them now that you're up.”

She peered up at him with those gorgeous brown eyes. “I'll take 'em, if you come back with me and have some of that Chinese food that I am
dying
to eat. I'm starving,” she whispered.

“And if I don't come back in with you?”

“I don't take the meds and then the infection returns, I die a horrible and sad death in my spotless apartment, and it'll be all on your head.”

“You really go there, don't you?”

“I do. Can't help myself.” She grabbed his forearm with both her hands. “You can't let me die all by myself because I was an impossible bitch.”

“When you put it like that . . .”

“Chinese food,” she reminded him. “Who can resist the allure of the mighty Chinese food? I know I can't. Why should you?”

How could he turn her down? Especially when she was so damn cute?

“All right. But the dumplings are mine. I'm not sharing.”

“Rude and stingy,” she said, tugging on his arm until he began to walk, letting her lead him inside. “But I'll let you off the hook this time.”

“That's very big of you,” he said dryly, making Blayne laugh.

 

 

Using the dining table as a dining table lasted all of two minutes before Blayne couldn't stand feeling so constricted and quickly set up the living room floor for an impromptu picnic. Bo didn't complain, but he seemed baffled by it.

“I don't like constrictions,” she'd explained. If he understood, she couldn't tell because he simply stared at her before grabbing his wonton soup and taking it over to the blanket she'd laid out.

To be honest, Blayne wasn't sure how a meal would go with Bo Novikov. It was one thing to spend time with him when she was training since most of the conversation involved him telling her what to do. But dinner conversation required a back-and-forth Blayne adored, and it often dictated who became her long-term friends and who she only saw when she happened to pass them on the street. Until now, Blayne had been pretty certain that Bo would end up in the “happened to pass him” pool. He didn't do much that didn't involve hockey, so what exactly would they talk about? Her living room floor seemed an excellent place for a meal because her remote control and twenty-seven-inch plasma was right there for emergency viewing should the silence grow painful.

After two hours, she hadn't reached for the remote once.

“This,” she said, handing over the picture, “is my mom.”

Bo's smile was wide, his laugh genuine. “Your mom is rockin' the 'fro.”

Blayne made her little rock-and-roll sign—that the nuns called devil's horns—with both hands, pinky and index fingers up, middle and ring fingers down and held by thumbs. “Damn right she did. She used to call it her dog mane, which annoyed every lion in a ten-mile hearing range.”

“How come you don't work the 'fro?”

“Because my hair grows out like Pippy Longstocking, which is not a look that works for me.” She motioned with her hands. “Okay. Your turn. You got a picture of your parents?”

“Yeah.” Rolling his eyes like the big geek he was, Bo pulled out his wallet and slipped the small picture out, handing it to her.

The Asian female was almost an atypical lioness, her unblinking gold stare capturing the camera's eye, the small smirk on her full lips appearing mocking and dangerous at the same time. Her cheekbones sharp and her nose wide and rather flat, like her son's. And who was brave enough to cuddle up next to her? The white-haired polar bear with bright brown eyes and an adorable smile standing behind her. Bo's genetic makeup was clearly a fifty-fifty mix of his parents, but he obviously favored the bear side. Not that Blayne could blame him since it was the bears who'd taken him in, who had raised him.

“They look happy.”

“They were mostly. They argued a lot, but I think they liked to argue a lot.”