Page 4 of Little Blue

“I’m not talking about my cat’s balls with you.”

Rae shrugs. “I’m just saying, give the man a night alone.”

“He’s a cat.” I deadpan.

“Who is happily licking his?—”

Waving my hand in a flippant ‘see ya later’ gesture, I start to walk away with the sound of Rae’s laughter echoing in the space I fled. Rae handed her last drink token over when she ordered the martini she holds. I know her well enough to know she’ll soon be on the prowl for a hot hook-up. He won’t be from our company, either. Even though she likes to tease me about Hank—and his sticky eyeballs—she knows better than to shit where she eats.

She’ll sink her talons into some poor sucker before the hour is up, bang him in a semi-quiet hall, and leave him drooling.

I’ll give it another half an hour, and then I’m ditching.

I play a few slots before I’m bored out of my mind. Gambling isn’t my thing, and I’ve not won a penny. Not surprising with my luck. I stop at a Roulette table and decide there’s no better, or faster, way to spend my chips.

I look at the man standing at the table. “What do I do?”

He sets about explaining the rules for Roulette, and I listen. Then, deciding to go against the croupier’s advice, I place all my chips on number fifteen, black. I don’t really know why I do this. Maybe it’s because I was fifteen when my life went down the toilet. Mom went in for routine dental surgery and never woke up. Dad couldn’t handle a world without Mom, and he joined her by choice six months later.

Did he even think about me?

Without any extended family, I was tossed to the wolves in the system. Losing the two people who loved me had been horrific enough. Transitioning from lower middle class to the cold poverty of the foster system had been nearly too much to handle. The cold detachment of my foster parents had been shattering to me as a young girl, who’d just lost everything she’d ever known in the whole world. I’d been a good foster kid, though. I stayed out of trouble, and I kept my head down, not wanting to draw any negative attention that might get me placed in a home even more cold and uncaring.

I was little more than a mouth to feed, a check to pad the drinking addiction Mr. Wilson had.

It hadn’t been until I turned seventeen that my leering foster brother had decided to creep into my room, touching what wasn’t his to touch. It’d been summer, and he’d come home from school for the holiday—too lazy to work to continue paying for the room in his crummy, close-to-campus, apartment.

I’d been so afraid, for a few times, I’d just let it happen. I lay there, stone stiff on the thin mattress covered by the thinner bedspread. He’d only been touching. Always over my clothes. Before he made me watch as he got himself off.

But when his hand dipped into my shorts that last night?—

The night I…

“Risky bet,” a deep voice sounds as a man slides onto the stool beside me. The scent of winter and masculine cologne dusts over the table. It infiltrates the space between us, cutting off my traumatic thoughts as though with a sharpened blade, severing them completely.

My eyes lift. Something sparks in my chest. Something I’m more than familiar with, because I’d honed it since I took to the streets at seventeen. Rather than risk another night in that house—with that scumbag who leered and touched.

Who made me want to shed the flesh he made feel dirty…

It’s the instinct that I figure rabbits in the wild possess. Considering the foxes and coyotes and wolves they share their habitat with. The rabbit needs to develop a keen understanding early and quick, that they are prey. To survive, they must not only avoid the predator, but be able to spot the predator that lurks, sometimes in skin of a sheep.

This man is pure wolf. All teeth and bite and hunter. He doesn’t even bother trying to hide the power he possesses within the skin of a sheep.

Danger.

The instinct to run slams hard through my body. Somehow, I stay where I am, rooted to the stool. My heart slams painfully hard in my chest. Breaths rush shallow through my lungs.

Unique, light blue eyes rimmed in a blue much darker, dip slowly down my throat, to my chest, before drifting lazily back up again.

I feel an unwelcome rush of heat. It surges just below my skin, tinting my usually pale complexion pink.

Can he see the flutter of my pulse?

I think he might, given the way his eyes pause for a moment on my throat.

I think my heart seizes in my chest at the thought. The organ so accustomed to being the prey, that it quite literally stalls in my chest in some self-preserving attempt to hide from his wolfish eyes.

Then he smiles. Or I think it’s meant to be a smile. I’m not altogether certain. It’s a little odd, possibly forced. I think—is he trying to put me at ease?

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