Page 14 of Shifters in the Night

“Can I ask how you got into a business like this? The whole construction thing?” Jon asked.

“What business do you think I should be in?” she asked, grinning at him.

“High-powered law firm?” he guessed. “High-powered corporation? High-powered something.”

“Again, I don’t know whether that’s a compliment or not,” she said, wiping at her lips with a napkin from the table-top dispenser.

“It is. It says you’ve got spine on you. I couldn’t do it. I’d get too claustrophobic,” Jon said.

She blushed again and he wondered how he could make that happen as often as possible without coming across as weird. “Well, thank you. And I got into it because I have a particular set of skills.”

“Wait, I think I know this reference. Dani said something about a movie with that guy from The Haunting. Are you going to pursue me and kill me?” he asked, damn near making her choke on her pie. He scrambled to hand her more napkins. He rose to come around the table to help her, but she waved him off, shaking her head and drinking a good bit of her water.

“I’m so sorry! That’s so rude!” she said, coughing lightly.

“No, I’m the one who made you laugh while you were eating!” Jon said.

“Well, I would be sad if you didn’t try to make me laugh while I was eating. Trust me, I’ve been to meals where nobody tried to make me laugh and it’s so boring. And I don’t even have girlfriends to get me out of them with ‘fake emergency’ calls. I work too much to make friends.”

“With your special set of skills that may or may not make you a secret assassin?” he suggested.

“I’m not an assassin. I’m a negotiator,” Lia said.

“That’s still sounding like ‘cool secret agent job you can’t tell me about,’” Jon answered.

She seemed to have a moment of hesitation, before lowering her voice and leaning across the table. “I don’t tell everybody about this. But you’ve seen all of my secrets–”

“Again, you swam into my yard,” he noted.

She snickered. “So you know I’m a hind. And we can see the colors of other people’s emotions and that helps us figure out whether our tactics are working in the boardroom. It gives us the advantage in a lot of situations.”

“You see colors, like auras?” He knew his expression was skeptical. He didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but even in Mystic Bayou, this was a strange claim to make. Then again, one of Will’s friends was a banshee who could foresee people’s deaths … and sometimes he threw up afterwards. Jon would much rather see pretty colors.

“We can use the word ‘aura,’ if it helps. Right now, you’ve got a blue smoky sort of vapor hanging over you. Blue is usually disbelief.”

“That seems a little obvious.”

Lia smirked at him and moved closer. And he leaned forward because he was scared of missing whatever she was about to say. She murmured in a tone that seemed to tiptoe up his spine and caress his ears. “That night in the woods, even though I was naked, you didn’t look at me with lust in your eyes. You looked at me with awe, like I was some divine thing come to Earth. It was a golden cloud, floating over your head, even when you were underwater.”

Well, that didn’t help the situation in his pants at all. Damn his parts.

But Lia had proven her point. He had looked at her in wonder that night. Any man who didn’t, would have to be a fool. And now that he’d spoken to her, he knew that wonder wasn’t enough. He swore he could hear what sounded suspiciously like Will’s voice crowing, Dooooomed.

Jon cleared his throat, rubbing his damp palms against his thighs. “Uh, there was some lust there, too.”

“Well, it wasn’t your primary emotion and I appreciate that.” She bit her lip and he wanted more than anything for that to be his lip. Then he realized his colors were probably shifting from blue to whatever color outright desire was, and he didn’t want to offend her, especially after she’d just complimented him on his restraint. Desperately, he tried to think of something un-sexy, to neutralize it. Decaf coffee. The smell of Will’s gym bag. Zed’s occasional pantsless episodes after shifting.

Yep, that did it.

But given the amused satisfied look on Lia’s face, Jon wasn’t sure he caught it in time.

He cleared his throat again. “So you can talk people into doing what you want?”

Lia shook her head. “I can’t convince anyone to do anything, but I can read them. I can see if they’re bluffing. I can see what they want and if the signal is clear enough, I can figure out how to get it to them. That’s all negotiating is. If both parties walk away from a negotiation happy, it’s not such hard work. I try not to take advantage of people. My dad does something similar at his job, and tries to be as conscientious, but he has my mom to support. She’s got very expensive tastes.”

Lia’s voice sounded like she meant that, and “expensive tastes” certainly wasn’t a compliment around Mystic Bayou. But she laughed about it with an exasperation he couldn’t have managed when talking about his own parents, so he assumed that at its core, their relationship was sound.

“So there’s not much hiding from you when you want to know something, is there?” he asked.

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