“Let’s not.” Jim stepped between us.
Curran looked at him. His voice rasped with the beginning of a snarl. “What are you doing?”
“My job.”
He had lost his mind. Curran was hovering on the verge of violence and Jim had just made himself into a target. “Jim, you want to step back.”
Jim remained rooted to the floor.
Curran’s gaze fastened on me, the gold burning scalding hot. Like looking into the eyes of a hungry lion and realizing I was food. My body locked, tiny hairs on the back of my neck rose on their ends, and inside me a tiny voice whispered in desperation, “Don’t breathe and he might forget you’re there.”
I flicked my saber, warming up my wrist. “Your headlights don’t scare me.”
Jim squared his shoulders. “You can’t do this. Not here and not now.”
Curran’s voice slid into icy calm. “Be very careful, or I might start thinking you’re telling me what to do.”
If Curran ordered him to move, and Jim refused, it would be a challenge. Curran would have to fight his own chief of security and his best friend. They both knew it. That was why I was on the receiving end of Curran’s alpha stare. If he leveled it at Jim, there would be a fight.
I sidestepped. Jim moved with me. I stared at the ceiling and growled.
“Cute,” Curran said.
Die. “Why don’t you come over here and I’ll show you cute.”
“I’d love to, but he’s in the way. Besides, you had your chance to show me anything you wanted to. You’d just run away again.”
For the love of God. “I didn’t run away. I made you your damn dinner, but you didn’t have the decency to show.”
Jim’s eyebrows crept up. “Dinner?”
Curran’s eyes blazed. “You took off. I smelled you. You were there and then you got cold feet and ran. If you didn’t want to do this, all you had to do was pick up the phone and tell me not to show up. Did you actually think I’d make you serve me dinner naked? But you didn’t even bother.”
“Bullshit!”
“Hey!” Jim barked.
“What?” Curran and I said at almost the same time.
Jim looked at me. “Did you make him dinner?”
He’d find out sooner or later. “Yes.”
Jim turned on his foot, went out of the room, and shut the door behind him.
Alrighty, then.
“He thinks we’re mated.” Curran moved forward, too light on his feet for a man of his size, his gaze locked on me—a predator stalking its prey. “In the Pack, one doesn’t stand between mates. He’s being polite. He doesn’t realize you broke it off.”
“Oh no. No, I didn’t break it off. You had your chance and you blew it.”
Curran’s mask cracked. “The hell I did.”
All of the pain and anger of the past month smashed into me. Having him near was like ripping the dressing off a raw wound. Words just came tumbling out and I couldn’t stop them.
“So it’s my fault? I made you your bloody dinner. You didn’t show up. Just couldn’t pass up a chance to humiliate me, could you?”
Curran bit the air as if he had fangs. “I was challenged by two bears. They broke two of my ribs and dislocated my hip. When Doolittle finally finished setting my bones, I was four hours late. I asked if you called and they said no.”
He’d sunk enough gravity into that “no” to bring down a building.
“If you were late, I would’ve turned the town inside out looking for you. I called you. You didn’t answer. I was so sure something happened to you I dropped everything and dragged myself to your house. I came to check on you with broken bones and you weren’t there.”
“You’re lying.”
Curran snarled. “I left a note on your door.”
“More lies. I waited for you for three hours. I called the Keep, thinking that something happened to you, and your flunkies told me that the Beast Lord said he was too busy to speak to me.” I was shaking with rage. “That in the future I should address all my concerns to Jim, because His Majesty declared that he didn’t want to be bothered with talking to the likes of me anymore.”
“That phone call happened in your head. You’re delusional.”
“You stood me up and then rubbed my nose in it.”
Something hissed behind the frosted glass in the main hall.
Curran lunged toward me. I should’ve thrust straight through him. Instead I just stood there, like an idiot. He clamped me to him, spinning us so his back faced the glass.
The glass wall exploded.
Shards pelted the dining room behind us, breaking against Curran’s back. A black and gold jaguar crashed against the opposite wall. Twin jets of water burst into the room from the main floor. The first thudded into the wall, pinning Jim. The second smashed against Curran’s spine. He grunted and clenched me to him.
We were caught out in the open. No place to hide. Oh, the stupid, stupid idiot. He was shielding me.
Jim snarled, trying to get to his feet, but the water slapped him down and kept him there.
Gold flooded Curran’s eyes. His big body shook.
I jerked left, trying to see past Curran’s shoulder. A man stood in the middle of the main hall, his hands raised. Behind him a broken pipe jutted from the wall, spilling water under his feet. Two pressurized jets shot from the water, following the direction of his arms. A water mage. Shit.
I pressed closer to Curran to speak into his ear. “One-man fire brigade, dead center of the room. He’s broken the main pipe and is emptying the Guild’s water tower into the lobby. Let me go.”
“No.” Curran gripped me tighter. “Too risky.”
“He’s sanding the skin off your back.”
“I’ll heal, you won’t.”
Until he let go of me, he couldn’t maneuver. If he did, the mage would cut me down.
The jet that pinned us was only a foot wide. I pulled out a throwing knife. Slayer was too long for close-up fighting. “Throw me.”
Golden eyes looked into mine.
“Throw me at him.”
He grinned, showing me his teeth. “Over or under?”
“Under.”
“Say please.”
Red spray hit my lips. Magic nipped at me—I tasted shapeshifter blood. The water was scraping the skin off his back, but he didn’t give an inch.
When this was over, I would rip his head off. “Throw me, please!”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
He spun, twisting, and hurled me like a bowling ball. I slid across wet floor and broken glass, the twin water jets shooting above my head, right at the mage standing in a ten-inch whirlpool. Water drenched my face. The mage’s bare feet loomed before me. I grabbed his left ankle. The momentum jerked me behind him, and I sliced across the Achilles tendon of his right leg.
The mage dropped to his right knee, his back to me, his filthy cloak pooling about him. I knocked his left leg out from under him and sank a throwing knife deep between his ribs. He twisted to me. I saw the fist coming, but could do nothing to avoid it. The blow smashed into my jaw like the strike of a sledgehammer. I slid across the wet floor, through the whirlpool, and rolled to my feet on instinct. The world shuddered and swam sideways in a haze of pain. I stumbled back, shaking my head. Things snapped into focus.
The mage grinned at me from twelve feet away. Pale hair framed a narrow face. Mid-twenties, maybe a bit younger. His tattered cloak hung open, revealing a martial artist’s body: hard, crisply defined, and completely nude. Too short. Five ten at most. I had a guy in a cloak, he was naked, and he wasn’t the Steel Mary. Only I could be this lucky.
The jets behind the water mage kept spraying, changing direction. He was still tracking Curran and Jim. How the hell did he do that?
Water swirled around his feet, surging up. A needle-thin jet hit me, burning my left thigh. A narrow cut sliced through my jeans and skin, like a slash from a scalpel. Another jet singed my ribs. He was playing with me. If he hit me straight on with one of those, the water would punch right through me. As long as he didn’t hit heart or eyes, I would survive. Everything else medmagic could fix.
The mage pulled my knife out of his side and looked at it. “Nice knife.”
The voice was deep but female.
I threw my second knife. The blade bit into the mage’s chest. Shit. Missed the neck. “Here, have another one.”
The mage laughed. Definitely a female voice. The only way he could sound like a woman would be if he . . .
A demonic shape leapt above the man: a seven-and-a-half-foot tall muscled monster, sheathed in gray fur, half-human, half-beast, all nightmare. He came sailing above the water as if he had wings, huge arms opened wide, eyes burning with gold on a terrible face.
God damn it. “No!”