Page 16 of The Claiming of the Shrew
Fawkes turned the bag inside-out and used it like a glove to scoop up the shears without touching them. Leah presented the purse, and he sealed the bag and put it in.
“Not to throw shade on your excellent suburban-mom preparedness skills, but what all else do you have in there?” he asked, peering curiously inside.
Leah snapped her bag shut. “The interior of my purse is not for the merely curious,” she said loftily, then let her haughty mask slip as a mischievous smile peeked out. “But I am willing totrade information if you answer a few questions yourself. Want to buy me a coffee in the hotel restaurant?”
With the increased business for the lodge, Hester now had a couple of employees, unlike the bare-bones nature of the place when Leah had first come there at Christmastime a couple of years ago. However, they still didn’t open the restaurant for lunch, instead offering a self-serve buffet of snacks, sandwiches, and a coffee urn kept constantly full and hot.
Now regrettably re-shirted, Fawkes filled two paper coffee cups while Leah picked up a handful of muffins and sandwiches. If Fawkes was like the other shifters she knew, shifting would have cost him energy and he’d need something to replenish his reserves. Everything was wrapped in plastic, so she could easily slip them into her purse for transport.
“If you don’t mind a question,” Fawkes said, “how do you carry drinks? Open-topped, I mean, like a coffee cup.”
“With great care and only when I have to. Usually I put liquids into screw-top thermos bottles.” She nudged her purse with her hip. “Which I keep on hand in case of need.”
“So now I know one other thing that’s in there.”
Leah hid her smirk as she selected a table by the window. “You’re right. At this rate, you’ll have a full accounting of my bag’s contents by 2049.”
“I look forward to the challenge,” Fawkes said. He pushed a cup of coffee toward her across the table. “I forgot to ask how you take it, but I grabbed a handful of creamers and sugars.”
“That’ll do.” She unloaded her selections onto the tabletop. “I guess I didn’t ask what you wanted from the buffet, but if you’reallergic to blueberries or something, you and your two fully functional legs can go grab something else.”
Fawkes made an OK sign with his fingers and nabbed the blueberry muffin.
“If I have to ask you to repeat yourself, by the way, it’s because of my shrew,” Leah added, stirring sugar into her coffee. “Imagine having a hyperactive, sugar-addled toddler screaming in your ear at random intervals. That’s what it’s like.”
“Uh—that doesn’t sound fun.”
Hmm, put that way, she did make it sound like kind of a drag now that she ran the words back in her head. “No, it’s fine, I like it. I mean—my shrew loves things, just absolutelylovesthem, like on a primal basis. It makes me feel everything twice as much. Isn’t your animal like that?”
“My raccoon does love some things,” Fawkes said carefully, “but it mostly loves trash.”
Leah stifled her snort. “I’m sure it was having a great time today, then.”
“You have no idea.”
“Well, it’s nice to be able to talk to you openly about it—the shrew thing. Most of the people I work with outside of the theater are human, and I think they consider me a total space cadet. Which is fair, Iama little bit of a space cadet, but it’s not just me, it’s?—”
“The sugar-addled toddler screaming in your ear?” Fawkes asked with an incredibly sexy sideways quirk of his mouth.
EEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!!
“Yes,” Leah said with all the dignity that she could muster while her shrew was, to put it simply, going out of its tiny mind. “That is absolutely correct.” She cleared her throat and added a creamer to her coffee. “So, cards on the table time. What exactly are you doing here at Fated Mountain Lodge, where you’re definitely not sneaking around at night?”
FAWKES
Fawkes spent no morethan a few seconds debating whether to tell her. It made more sense than not at this point. She was right: cards on the table. And he was confident by now that Leah liked secrets enough to be okay with keeping this one rather than immediately going and telling her entire theater group.
If he was wrong, Sam would have one more thing to mock him for.
“I’m a private investigator,” Fawkes said.
Leah gazed at him over the top of her coffee cup, hazel eyes wide. “Ohhhhhhh.” Then her gaze went laser-focused. “Prove it.”
“Really?”
“If you’re a P.I., you have a license, right? Let me see it.”
Fawkes shrugged. He opened his wallet and handed over the card with his license number.
