The Taken (15 page)

“No.”

Paul froze. Grif remained still, keeping him in his sights. Kit wished desperately for popcorn to go along with the show. Alas, Nic’s wake was no place for a scene. Sighing, she told Paul, “I was attacked last night after I got home from work.”

He was suddenly listening, which was something, but Kit wanted more, and so she added, “Grif saved me.”

“Jesus, Kit. Why didn’t you—” He stuttered, because she
had
called him. He lifted his chin, and stood taller. “Well, you can fall back now, Shaw. Katherine doesn’t need protection from me.”

“But she needs it all the same.”

Paul, slightly taller than Grif, stepped forward. “And you’re the man?”

Grif squared up. “I’m just the man.”

Kit sucked in a deep breath and held it, slightly high from all the testosterone. But she should stop this.

In a moment.

“Fine.” Paul blinked first, sniffing before looking at Kit. “I just wanted to tell you that Caleb Chambers is having another ball.”

“You came all the way down here to tell her about a party?”

This time Paul ignored Grif completely, though Kit stayed him with a hand on his arm. It would do no good to push Paul to petulance. Experience had taught her that much. Still she left her hand on Grif’s arm. His warmth and strength and presence had butterflies cannonballing into her gut. “You could have left me a message.”

“It’s a Valentine’s Day benefit for children in need of heart and lung transplants,” Paul replied, like that explained everything. “Most of the players on your list will be there. I can get you a ticket.”

“You’ll have to make it a pair.”

Impatiently, Paul turned and looked Grif up and down. It was challenging, but Grif didn’t wilt. In fact, he seemed to grow two feet under the scrutiny, like a cobra flaring its hood.

“It’s a
charity
ball,” Paul clarified, his pretty face twisting in an ugly way.

“Oh.” Grif frowned. “Then she probably should go with you.”

Kit snorted before she could help it.

“I’ve already got a date,” Paul said tightly. “It’s Valentine’s Day.”

“I think we’re free. Thank you, Paul,” Kit intervened again, but hoped that somewhere, in some other realm, Nic could see Paul getting cranked up about his ex-wife and some moody stranger.

“So have you learned anything else about the list?” Paul asked abruptly.

“Thought that’s why she gave it to you, ace.”

Though she didn’t want to, Kit put a hand on Grif’s arm. “Grif, would you give us a minute?”

“Yeah,” said Paul, like he’d won the moment.

“Sure. I can do that.” Grif nodded, and began to turn away, but paused halfway to level Paul with the same stare she’d first seen, when he’d been bounding from the shadows to beat another man to the ground on her behalf. “By the way,” he said, “her name isn’t Katherine. It’s Kit.”

And, mouth half-open, Kit watched him stalk to the bar, noting the way the women there opened up to him, reacting as instinctively to that coiled
maleness
as she did. He glanced back to make sure she was fine, and Kit shivered. She already knew he wasn’t a man who normally glanced back.

“What the hell is up with that guy?” Paul said, face twisted like he’d just eaten something sour. But Grif’s eyes were still trained on her, even with Layla chatting him up, and suddenly Kit didn’t want to talk about him with Paul. In fact, watching Layla gesture animatedly, she wanted to keep him all to herself.

“Do you want to hear about the list or not?” she asked impatiently.

Paul held out his hands, like he’d been waiting for that all along.

Kit chided herself for ever thinking he’d come because of Nic. “I’ve winnowed it to one name.”

Paul’s brow rode high. “In one day?”

“The man who attacked me last night is on there, Paul. His name is Lance Schmidt, but he’s not a politician. He’s a cop.”

Paul frowned. “How’d a cop get on that list?”

That
was his response?

“I don’t think you heard me,” she said tightly. “Schmidt attacked me, hit me, and I believe would have killed me if Grif hadn’t been there to stop him.”

“But he was,” Paul said blandly, glancing at Grif like he was the one under suspicion. “Why?”

Oh my God, Kit thought, jaw clenching. How could she have forgotten. It was always, ever, about
him.
“What time does the damned ball start?”

“What, now you’re pissed?” He put on his wounded pout, then gave an eye roll when she didn’t answer. “Seven sharp.”

“Can you get two tickets or not?”

“Sure,” he said snidely. “Though I can’t promise any cops . . . outside of security, that is.”

“No, Schmidt will be there,” Kit muttered, staring past him at the bamboo entry. “I know it.”

“Whatever,” Paul said, turning away. “Just dress appropriately. Chambers lavishes his woman with jewels. And tell Joe Friday over there that it’s black-tie only. If he’s got one.”

And before Kit could form a retort, before he so much as mentioned Nicole’s name or death, Paul exited into the night in the exact way he’d exited their marriage. Glancing back only once to make sure she didn’t follow.

G
rif watched Kit talk with Paul, wondering how she’d ever gotten mixed up with a piker like that. He was a swaggering suntan. She was a mysterious moonbeam. Their marriage must have been a terrestrial collision.

At least the rum was dulling his headache. As was Charis’s second rescue of him from that wildcat, Layla. Though Charis had told the other woman she needed to speak with him privately, and commandeered a low table in the lounge’s dimly lit corner, he still glanced over to make sure he was out of Layla’s sights before hunching over his weird tiki mug.

“Don’t mind her,” Charis said, one hand rocking the baby in the seat next to her as she caught his look. “She’s a cougar. Or, if you’re being era-appropriate, a minx.”

“And I bet she’s always era-appropriate.”

“About the only thing I like about her,” Charis grudgingly admitted, leaning forward to tuck a blanket beneath her little girl’s chin. The baby immediately pulled it off. “Though she came into a bundle of money, so that helps.”

“A little princess, huh?” he said, meaning Layla, not the pixie next to him.

“Oh, no. She worked for it. Not yet out of her teens and she married a man well into his eighth decade.”

Grif winced.

“Don’t worry,” she said, rocking again. “He died within the year, and Layla’s not shy in talking about it.”

“Doesn’t look shy about much,” Grif replied, and Charis laughed.

Kit had been right. He liked her flighty hens. But Kit herself was too far away for his liking, too close to the front door. Grif had defied fate in saving her, and now anything could happen. If his gut was right, it would also happen fast. But Kit had asked for some space and he’d respect that.

Didn’t mean he had to like it, though.

Leaning back, Charis rested a hand on her belly. “Did you sense a bit of tension between her and Kit?”

“Yeah. I got that.” He sipped some more. Rum . . . not his first choice, but it was strong. He could appreciate it for that alone.

“Well, that’s why,” she said, jerking her head toward Pretty Paul. “Five years ago, when they were still hitched, and Layla’s lawyer was still wrangling with her deceased husband’s family over his estate, she saw that young Paul’s career was on an upswing. Also saw that he’d stopped doting on Kit the way he used to.” Her lined brows lowered, and her mouth twisted with the memory. “We all saw it. But Layla hit on him, thinking that if it was a billy girl he wanted, any billy would do.”

“And Kit didn’t hit back?”

“You clearly don’t know our Kit.” Charis shook her head, but the smile on her face now was warm. “She’s never as curious about what people do as why they do it. It’s the questions that intrigue her, the mystery. So she sat Layla down, bought her a drink, and ‘interviewed’ her about her behavior. Learned that despite a marriage that left her wealthier than all of us put together, Layla believed she was never given a fair shake in life.”

“Who has?”

“Said she had to work for everything she’s got.” Charis huffed, too.

“Who hasn’t?”

“And said she had to raise herself to be street-smart. Told Kit she has a ‘back-door’ education.”

“What’s that?” Grif asked, sipping.

“My guess? Something her first boyfriend talked her into.”

Grif choked.

Charis waited until he settled again, and continued with a smile. “Anyway, long story short, Paul didn’t want a billy, and he didn’t want Layla . . . but he also didn’t want Kit anymore, either.”

“So what, he just walked out on her?” Grif squinted at Charis’s responding nod, then glanced again at the former couple. “And she can just give him a hug? Chat like nothing happened?”

“That’s Kit,” Charis said. “She tries to see the best in people, even when they don’t deserve it.”

“Are you hinting at something, Charis?”

Charis leaned forward to check on her baby. The child’s eyes were drooping despite the decibels ricocheting in the air. She sat back. “It’s not a hint.
Don’t mess with her.
”

Grif frowned. “I don’t mess with people.”

“Don’t mess with this, either,” she said, waving around at the room, the people in it. “You were asking us earlier why we live the rockabilly lifestyle, but it’s not that hard to understand. Living nostalgically is just one more way to pretend that death isn’t going to happen to us. Don’t you see? Instead of deferring it with technology, or defying it with babies,” she nodded down at her child with a half-smile, “we celebrate the past, keep it alive by reliving the best of it.

“But staying alive,
being
alive, is time mostly spent trying to stave off the Reaper. We work out, take our vitamins, keep looking for the fountain of youth. We choose lovers and careers based on who we want to be in the future, and where we want to go.”

“You’re not guaranteed a future,” Grif pointed out.

“The way Nic died proves that.” She looked at her baby and frowned, as if trying to read the future across the child’s soft, unlined brow. “You want to know the most horrifying thing about it? Her death wasn’t indicative at all of the way she lived. That violence just doesn’t fit with . . . all this.”

Grif knew what she meant. You expected violence to touch only those who dealt in it. But when it claimed people like his Evie? Like Nicole and Kit? It meant that even if you sucked the marrow from life, your future could be snuffed out at someone else’s whim.

“Kit lost the people closest to her at a young age, so she surrounds herself with things that make her feel alive, and yeah, that includes the past. You do, too.”

Grif shook his head. “I don’t got much left from my past.”

“That’s not what I meant. I meant you also make her feel alive. I can see it.”

“Oh.” Grif shifted in his seat, face burning at her words. He looked at Kit, again wished her nearer, then cleared his throat. “So what about you? How do you cope with a cloudy future?”

“I’m Mexican. Same as Fleur and Lil over there. So we were raised Catholic.” She pointed to herself. “Under the iron fists of Sister Mary Francis of the Immaculate Conception School. So whatever I do, I do it with unwavering discipline and relentless guilt.”

Grif smiled, and clinked his tumbler against her sad-looking water glass. “I’m a product of St. Paul’s myself.”

Charis sipped, smiling back. “When I was little, I even aspired to become a patron saint. I could recite the Mass verbatim, and Hail Mary myself into a coma. And I saw God everywhere.”

Grif narrowed his eyes. “Really?”

She nodded and leaned close. “We were actually pen pals. I’d write Him letters in Latin and leave them in my closet.”

“Why the closet?”

She shrugged. “Because He didn’t appear after I set my front yard’s bushes on fire, so I decided He was shy.”

Grif laughed so deeply it stretched his lungs. He realized that despite his recently removed celestial state, this was the most overtly religious conversation he’d had in a long time. Charis shrugged, and resumed rocking her baby one-handed, the other hand draped over her belly.

“Wanna hear a secret?” Charis lowered her voice and leaned close. “A few weeks ago I was dying of hunger. I mean, this little bean inside of me was taking all my energy and nutrients for itself, and I was feeling so hollow I thought I could eat my young.”

“Ironic.”

“I know, right?” Her eyes flared wide. “Anyway, I was eating a bag of Cheetos, the whole damned thing, mind you, and I saw a Cheeto that, I shit you not, looked exactly like Jesus Christ.”

Grif stared at her.

“With his head bowed in prayer.” She shrugged when Grif just kept staring. “But smaller. And cheesier.” She frowned. “And a snack food.”

Grif signaled for another drink.