On the Prowl (23 page)

“Twenty minutes is a long time for someone who moves like a tiger,” Dmitri pointed out, but some of the ice had melted from his eyes.

“It is, but regardless of the time, I know Nicolas never left the apartment. We had just gotten engaged, and that was our first night together. I knew where he was the entire time. Before you ask, I was nervous. I listened. I could hear him moving around, and I would have heard if he’d left.”

“Again, you expect us to take your word for it?” Graham sneered, but the taunt lacked a certain heat.

“You don’t have to take my word for it.” She extended her hand to him, her fingers steady. “Scent me. You’re Lupine; you should be able to smell if I’m lying. Taste me if you have to. I’m telling the truth.”

Silence descended, enveloping the occupants of the room for several tense moments. Then Graham swore.

“I echo the sentiment,” Dmitri said. “I must admit, our path seemed much clearer when we believed we knew the source of our troubles.”

“I’m sure Torquemada thought his path was clear, too,” Corinne offered, falling silent when Dmitri aimed a raised eyebrow in her direction.

“As I was saying, this leaves us with a bit of a dilemma. If we rule out the involvement of your mate, then we’re left with the question of where to turn our attention.”

This time, Corinne raised her hand before she spoke and Dmitri rolled his eyes. “Yes, Corinne?”

The reporter flashed him a cheeky grin. “Easy answer. You ask Mac.”

“Mac?” he echoed.

“As in ‘McIntyre Callahan’?” Graham asked.

“Yup. Sass wasn’t pulling your leg when she said she and Nic had hired an investigator to look into this mess. Luckily, they had the good sense to go with Mac.”

Dmitri looked to Saskia. “Is this true?”

She nodded. “It is, but we haven’t heard anything from him yet. We only spoke to him the first time on Sunday. I think Nicolas mentioned he would give us his first report on Friday.”

“That’s tomorrow,” Missy pointed out.

“So it is.” The vampire rubbed the back of his finger along his jaw and sized Saskia up. “I would be very interested to learn what Callahan has managed to uncover, Ms. Arcos, as, I imagine, would the Council. Do you think your fiancé might consent to receiving this report while we listened in?”

Oh, yeah. Right after he salaamed each and every one of them and declared them all Grand High Poo-bahs of Righteousness.

She choked back a laugh. “I don’t think that’s likely, Mr. Vidâme. The Council doesn’t rate very highly in my mate’s estimation at the moment.”

“Perfectly understandable. Do you think you might be able to persuade him to allow only myself, Graham, and Rafael to be present?”

Saskia hesitated. She didn’t think Rafe would be a tough sell, since he clearly had the most at stake in this entire mess—his life. She figured Nicolas would balk at the other two men, however, both Council members and neither what anyone would call a friend.

“I can ask him,” she finally said, doubt coloring her voice, “but I can’t promise anything. He’s been under a great deal of stress lately, and he’s not always in the best of moods.”

“Also understandable. All we ask is that you try, Ms. Arcos. It would make everything much simpler. For all of us.”

Saskia didn’t doubt that. What she doubted was her own sanity for even agreeing to make the attempt. She could practically hear Nicolas’s denial already.

Nine

“Absolutely not.”

“But—”

“No. It’s out of the question.”

“Nicolas—”

“Saskia, this is not open for debate. The answer is no.”

She frowned at her mate as he climbed out of bed and headed for the bathroom. “I think you’re being unreasonable.”

He turned to glare at her. “Unreasonable? Believe me, little tigress, I would be happy to show you unreasonable. In fact, I wanted very much to show you unreasonable last night when you finally walked in the door hours after I myself had returned to our home and found it empty.”

“We left you a note! And a voice mail,” she pointed out. “And Corinne said she told you we might have to go out if you were late.”

“Yes, she did, which is why I controlled myself so
reasonably
last night. But I’m afraid I’ve used up my allotment for the week. You’ll have to survive me being unreasonable until at least Monday.”

She stuck her tongue out at the bathroom door when it snapped shut behind him.

Flopping back on the pillows, she contemplated the ceiling as she heard the water turn on in the shower. She had to admit he had behaved with remarkable restraint last night when she returned to their apartment shortly before ten. She had seen his impatience in the way he pounced on her the minute she stepped over the threshold, sweeping her into his arms and crushing her to his chest. She’d also tasted it on his lips and felt it when he carried her to the floor and mounted her on the parquet of the entry, unwilling to wait as long as it would take to move the dozen steps to the living room and their favorite chenille sofa.

He hadn’t asked her a single question until he rolled his weight off her and pulled her against his sweat-dampened chest. She hadn’t answered any until she’d caught her breath five or six minutes after that. The interrogation had lasted at least another sixty. They had discussed Corinne at first, whom Nic liked; then Saskia had explained to him how they had adjourned to the house of another friend, a woman named Missy Winters.

Nicolas was an intelligent man. He remembered the connection immediately, and that was when he’d stopped liking Saskia’s friends. He had especially not liked hearing about the accusations hurled in his absence by the Silverback Alpha and the Russian vampire, nor had he liked that his mate had been forced to defend him. The fact that the two men had eventually come to see that he was not De Santos’s mysterious attacker failed to even the scales in his eyes. He had immediately rejected the idea of allowing anyone to be present when he received Mac’s report, and he apparently didn’t like the idea any better in the light of day.

Saskia, though, wasn’t done persuading.

She rolled out of bed and crossed the room naked, slipping into the bathroom and joining her mate under the pulsing jets of the shower. The space, with its tiled walls and multiple heads, could easily have held six, but Saskia didn’t let that keep her from pressing close against Nicolas’s back and wrapping her arms around his chest. He ducked his head to rinse away his shampoo, then shook off the excess water.

“This isn’t going to make me change my mind,” he rumbled, sounding almost amused.

Amused was a good sign.

“Who’s trying to change your mind?” she asked, pressing a kiss to the skin between his shoulder blades. “I’m just trying to get clean. I feel like I’ve been very dirty lately.”

Nicolas laughed outright and turned to take her in his arms. “In that case, hand me the soap, and I’ll see what I can do about cleaning you right up.”

As it turned out, her mate’s idea of washing her focused on a very few specific spots and left her feeling more invigorated than truly clean. She discovered a handy way to expend her excess energy, though, by washing her mate in turn, paying similarly close attention to a few of her favorite spots along the way. By the time they emerged from the bathroom, thoroughly relaxed and squeaky clean, Saskia felt ready to launch her next sortie.

She began in the kitchen, reasoning that a beast with a full belly always felt more receptive to suggestions.

“You know, your way is probably better,” she said, toying with her toast while she snuck glances at her mate’s face, half-concealed behind his morning copy of the
Times
. “This way, there won’t be any chance of a messy confrontation between you and anyone on the Council.”

“Sass,” he warned, eyeing her over the fold.

“No, I mean it,” she persisted, donning a mask of earnest innocence perfected after years of practice. “If you let De Santos, or Vidâme, or anyone sit in on the meeting with Mac, there’s a chance he might make a scene, no matter what Mac has to tell us. It’s much better if we meet with Mac alone. Then I can be the neutral party and meet with the others alone to give them the information.”

“Over my dead body.” He slammed his paper down on the counter with a snarl.

Saskia stiffened her spine and pushed aside the urge to back down. “It’s the logical solution. They’ve already eliminated me as a suspect, and they know I won’t lie to them because they could easily check back with Mac to verify what was in his report. This way, they get to feel like we weren’t deliberately insulting them and you don’t have to risk a direct confrontation. It works for everyone.”

“It does not work for me.”

“Why not?” she demanded.

His eyes snapped at her. “Because aside from the fact that I already told you this subject was not open to discussion, this subject is
not open for discussion
! I will not have my mate act as my emissary as if I’m not strong enough to carry my own messages, and I will not pander to those idiots on the Council by giving them the slightest indication that I care whether they think I’m guilty or not.”

“Of course you care! Nicolas, the Council has the authority to have you banished from the city, or even killed! We can’t afford not to care about them.”

“Yes, we can.” He set his jaw. “If we have to, we’ll relocate, but I will not play some ridiculous game and act as if they ever had any justification for accusing me of seeking to undermine their authority in any way. They set this in motion by acting on old prejudice and assuming I was guilty because of the lay of my stripes. Now they know they were wrong, but I’m not going to help them repair their public image by handing them the real culprit on a silver platter.”

“So this is about your pride?” she asked quietly.

“Damn it, Sass, don’t put it like that!” He pushed back from the counter and paced restlessly around the kitchen island. “This is about more than wounded pride. Yes, they stung me by accusing me of having such little honor that I would attack a man from ambush and attempt to kill him before he even got a look at my face. But they also threatened my mate when I wasn’t around to protect her, and that’s something I’m not willing to let go.”

Saskia sat back, momentarily stunned. “Threatened me? Nicolas, no one ever threatened me. What are you talking about?”

“You were a guest in the Lupines’ home, and Winters accused you of lying to protect me. Worse than that, he growled at you and raised his voice to you and showed you disrespect because you had no one to protect you.” His hands clenched at his sides and his eyes burned with pain and fury. “I should have been there to protect you, Saskia, and instead I was off on a wild-goose chase that led nowhere. I couldn’t find either of our fathers, and I couldn’t defend you from that dog. I will not let you make yourself vulnerable to them again.”

Heart aching, she slid off her stool and hurried to him, wrapping her arms around his rigid frame. “Oh, Nicolas, I was never in any danger. Not for one second. And I did have you to protect me.” She tilted her head back to meet his gaze, fixing him with an earnest stare. “You’re always with me, my mate. I carry your strength inside me. That’s what gave me the courage to stand up to the men accusing you and make them listen to the facts. I felt you standing beside me the whole time, no matter where you thought you were.”

She felt him shudder an instant before his arms closed around her like metal bands, crushing her against his chest. He lowered his head and buried his face in her hair to breathe deeply.

“I can’t stand it,” he growled roughly, his voice muffled. “Just the thought of anyone harming you, or threatening you, or even upsetting you when I’m not there to protect you … it drives me crazy, Sassy. I can’t stand it. You’re becoming too important to me.”

“And you’re becoming too important to me,” she told him, pulling back just far enough to look up into his face. A lump formed in her throat at the mixture of tenderness and fear and pain she read there. “Nicolas, you’re my mate. You’re the center of my world now. You say you want to protect me, but I feel the same way about you. The thought of anyone accusing you of such horrible crimes, let alone trying to actually place the blame on your shoulders, makes
me
crazy. I can’t let anyone get away with that, especially not when I know it’s so blatantly untrue. I have to defend you, love, just as you have to defend me. I have no choice.”

She knew her words hadn’t entirely won him over, but she could see the softening of his expression, the lessening of the fear as he tamped it back and reached for some sense of calm. When the corner of his mouth ticked upward, she felt a tight knot unravel in her belly.

“Is this another one of those areas where we’re going to have to compromise?” he asked.

Saskia chuckled. “It really, really is.”

“I’ll do my best, but I can’t make any promises,” he said, unconsciously echoing her own words from last night.

She laid a hand against his cheek and leaned up to kiss him. “That’s all I ask.”

When the phone rang and shattered the moment, they laid their foreheads together and laughed softly.

“I hate telephones,” he groaned against her cheek.

“Me, too. Alexander Graham Bell should be shot.”

“Probably make more of an impact if he weren’t already dead.”

“Don’t nitpick.”

“Sorry.” Nic sighed and reached for the receiver on the wall behind her. “Hello?”

“Nic, listen, it’s Mac Callahan.”

Her acute Tiguri hearing allowed Saskia to hear the greeting almost as clearly as her mate.

“Speak of the devil,” she murmured.

“Mac, I wasn’t expecting to hear from you. I thought you were going to come—”

“Yeah, the plan has changed. “You’re going to have to come to me. There’s something I need to show you.”

Saskia watched her mate stiffen.

“What have you found?”

“It’s better if I show you. Can you meet me in one hour? I’ll give you the address.” He rattled off the information, and Saskia immediately jotted it down on the message pad beside the phone. Nic nodded his thanks.