Free BlindHeat by Nara Malone Page B

point. “Who the fuck is
Eddie?”
    She saw it then, that everyone in the diner was staring at
her, both of them. She picked up the chair. Waved off the guys ready to defend
her. “I’m fine.” She sent them another fluorescent smile, brushed the hair from
her eyes and said loudly, “I’m clumsy today. All thumbs.”
    Franny didn’t look convinced, but the guys sat, eyes still
on him. Allie turned back to Marcus. “Walk me back?”
    She saved him with that simple request. He wondered why.
    Marcus stood, dropped a fifty on the table and followed
Allie, careful to give Franny and her coffee pot a wide berth. Allie kept a
brisk pace and when they reached the corner, just out of view of the diner
windows, she whirled. Her eyes drilled into his. “You don’t know Eddie?”
    “No.”
    She dissected him with her eyes for another few seconds,
then turned away. “If you’re going to pretend you’re a spiritual leader, you
should drop the word ‘fuck’ from your vocabulary. And learn to manage your
baser urges—translate that as temper and sex—better.”
    Manage his urges? He was the high magus of the Pantherians.
Pretend? He was a millennial being…almost. She probably hadn’t walked the earth
a quarter of a century. She was human. And she was telling him to control
himself? And since when was sex anything less than the true merging and sharing
of two spirits? It was not a baser urge.
    She was walking away and he hurried after her.
    “Who is Eddie?”
    “My father.”
    “And a father would send someone after his daughter, someone
who’d have sex with her in the park as some sort of torment to her?”
    “Why were you in the park?”
    “Answer my question first.”
    She whirled to face him again. “I don’t know what fathers
normally do. I only know about Eddie. If all he did was send you to the park to
torment me, then I got off light.”
    He reached for her then, both hands cupping her face. She
slapped them down, her lips pulled back over her teeth in a snarl. “Don’t.”
    He stepped back when everything in him screamed to grab her
up and kiss her.
    “What would Eddie normally do?”
    “I answered your question. It’s your turn.”
    “I was at the park looking for something I lost there.
    “What?”
    She’d started walking again, the light was green and she
crossed, leaving him to trot after. She stopped on the other side and whirled
to face him.
    “Great, I didn’t have enough to deal with already. God, what
is it with this day?”
    “What?”
    “Trouble headed this way.”
    Marcus looked over her shoulder. “Those ladies with your
boss? The garden club is trouble?”
    “I swear they share the same bottle of hair dye and why are
all of them dressed in shades of beige? It is spring after all.”
    He tried hard to keep up with the sudden change in topics.
Hair dye? And Allie wanted them to be more colorful. He thought of her closet,
seven outfits in varying shades of black to gray. Her room, with its
furnishings so old that they’d all taken on a gray patina, her rug a grayed
green, her bedspread, grayed white.
    She tossed another quick glance their way and grabbed his
hands in hers. “I don’t have my glasses with me. Which is my boss?”
    Her hands were cool in his. Her pulse was hammering like a
cornered rabbit’s. Allie didn’t wear glasses or contacts. But Marcus knew when
to ask questions and when making himself useful would earn him points. He needed
points right now a whole lot more than he needed answers.
    “The one in the middle, in the lightest of the brown suits.”
    “Do you know any of the others?”
    He thought he knew them, but was certain Allie must.
“Caroline to her right and Joyce to the left.”
    Allie frowned. “How do you know the garden club?”
    Was that a glint of jealousy in her eyes? Millennial being
or not, his ego needed the boost her possessiveness gave it. He shrugged. “They
don’t mind sharing a table with me when the diner is busy.”
    “You have