Meet Your Mate (A Good Riders Romance Book 1) (17 page)

Hell, it was part of his job to
think on his feet, to come up with the right words for any situation. Normally,
this would be the time for something light, something glib. Something
meaningless like “Had a good time. I’ll call you.” But the one time he would
have meant it, she’d taken the punch out of that line.

“Thanks for tonight,” he said once
they reached the door. “It was special.”

“For me, too.” She crossed her arms
and shivered.

He wanted more than anything to
stay and warm her up again from the inside out. “I wouldn’t leave like this if
I didn’t have to.”

“Yes, you would. That’s your
pattern. I was expecting it.”

Wow, that put him in his place.
“Look,” he said, more frustrated than he’d been in a long while. “I can’t take
you with me. It’ll probably be one long bore. But just in case it’s not, it
doesn’t involve you and I don’t want you getting hurt.” He lifted her chin and
looked into clear blue eyes that beckoned him into uncharted depths. “I’ll call
you tomorrow?”

Unflinching, she answered, “I really
don’t want you to.”

He didn’t allow the finality of her
words to register. He was a firm believer in tomorrow. “Then I’ll see you next
week at
Let’s Talk
.”

“Oh, right, the follow-up show.
I’ll see you then—if I don’t run into you first.”

He could see the effort that went
into her small joke and he chuckled, dropping a last kiss on her lips. “In the
best interest of my Porsche, I hope you don’t.” He opened the door and stepped
outside. “Bye, Annabel.”

“Be careful,” she said, kissing him
lightly.

“I will.” He paused, ready to take
off.

“Here, take this.” Holding the door
open, she thrust a small packet in his hand. “You’ll need it before I will.”

By the time he realized it was the
last remaining condom, he was alone on the porch. A solid oak barrier standing
between them.

“Annabel!” He rapped his fist
against the door. The porch light went dark. The foyer light immediately
followed.

With a shake of his head, he turned
and ran through the slicing rain to the waiting limo.

Annabel’s body thrummed with
frustration as she closed the door on Max and ignored the sound of his voice
calling her name.

He’d promised her all night, damn
it!

She hadn’t wanted him to leave on an
adventure without her, with the promises unfulfilled, and one condom left
unused. Just like a man to stick her with kitchen duty while he went off on
another adventure.

Her every compulsive instinct
yelled at her to tidy up. For once, some small part of her rebelled against the
notion. She didn’t want to be the good little girl left behind to do the grunt
work anymore.

With her chin raised, she headed up
the stairs, but jumped at a chirping sound on the bottom step. She looked down
to discover Max’s cell phone. She scooped it up. Hmmm. The caller might be
another woman looking for late-night company. Or it could be important.

An emergency even.

Or an update on the stakeout.

“Hello?”

“Who’s this?” demanded a voice as
rough as sandpaper. “Where’s Max?”

“Who’s this?”

“Tell Max—No! Don’t tell Max
anything. Crap, I
shoulda
never got involved in this
mess.” Click.

Well! She didn’t know what to make
of the message, but Max would. It might have been Mercer. It might mean
trouble. She looked out just in time to see the limo’s taillights round the
corner.

If she hurried, maybe she could
still catch him.

She slipped into the kick-ass
gorgeous shoes she’d worn to the ceremony, pulled her raincoat out of the
closet, grabbed her car keys, and rushed toward the garage.

Max imagined even James Bond didn’t
arrive at many stakeouts in a chauffeur-driven limousine, but what the hell?

A motley assortment of teenaged
boys on the corner—maybe gang-bangers, probably up to no-good—scattered like
cockroaches when Eduardo dropped off Max a couple of blocks from the alleged
crime in progress. Max pulled the lapels of his tux over his white shirt and
kept to the deep, dark shadows while he edged toward the city warehouse. The
pouring rain added another layer of fun to the adventure. Soaked to the skin,
he ducked into a protected doorway with an unobstructed view.

As Mercer had predicted, a nondescript
moving van backed up to the loading dock. Ghouls in dark clothing hunched their
shoulders against the downpour, scurrying in and out of the building, filling
the truck with large, unwieldy boxes.

Keeping an eye out for Mercer, Max
about jumped out of his skin when a mountain-sized human tapped him on the
shoulder.

“Damn, Roger! Don’t sneak up on me
like that!”

The mountain chuckled with a deep
rumble. “Whatever you say, man. I thought we were recording this on the sly.
But next time, I’ll just pull into the parking lot and honk the horn.”

“Point taken,” Max grumbled. “Do
you have a long-angle night lens? We need to be able to read the labels on
those boxes and capture as many faces as possible.”

“I’ve got the distance for that,
but the rain’s a problem. And the lack of light.” Roger held his
plastic-covered video camera to his eye and recorded for a minute before
shaking his head. “I can make out the words on the boxes, but the faces are
fuzzy. I need to get closer. Maybe I can get on that roof next door without
attracting attention.”

Warily, Max looked from the roof to
the cameraman and back. “Uh huh, did you bring an extension ladder?”

“I thought you could give me a
boost.”

“Me and what forklift?”

“Listen, do you want my help or
not? It’s the middle of the night, it’s raining, and believe it or not, you
weren’t the only one
gettin
’ lucky. So if you don’t
need me, I’ve got better things to do.”

“I want your help.” Keeping an eye
on the activity at the warehouse, Max scowled. “How do you know what I was
doing?”

“I saw who you left the ceremony
with. And seeing as how my invitation for tonight’s caper didn’t indicate black
tie, I don’t imagine you came here from your own lonely bed.” Roger pulled a
black T-shirt out of his backpack and tossed it to Max. “Here, put this on over
that neon sign of a shirt.”

“Uh, about who I was with...” He
dodged behind the cameraman, took off his jacket, and tugged the black T-shirt
into place. “She wouldn’t want—I wouldn’t want her to think—”

Roger clapped a hand on Max’s
shoulder and turned him toward the corner as he slipped back into his jacket.
“It’s cool, dude. I won’t say anything.”

They fell silent as they closed in
on the action. Closer than Max wanted to be. Still watching for Mercer, he
occasionally thought he heard a footstep behind him. But when he turned to
look, there was no one. Before long, his dress shoes began to squish, and the
foot without the sock developed blisters.

The two men angled around behind a
building cattycorner to the warehouse. A couple of orange road barrels lay on
their sides. Max’s sense of unease grew. They should have stayed where they’d
been in the first place.

Hell, he should have stayed where
he’d been when he got the call. Even in this stinking back alley that smelled
like mildew, piss, and dead rats, Annabel’s sweet fresh scent drifted around
him. It was all he could do not to abandon the lure of breaking this story wide
open and turning around instead. He wanted to go back to her and pick up where
they’d left off, but this was his job. And something rotten was definitely
going down.

“Let’s roll one of those barrels
down to that fire escape,” Roger stage-whispered.

Stuck for a better idea, Max
agreed. Roger attached a strap to his camera and slung it over his neck to free
his hands, but the burden hampered his movements. Every sound magnified in
Max’s mind as they grappled with the weighted barrel, scraped it across gravel,
and ended up rolling it across the cameraman’s toe.

“Holy bat shit.” He released the
words in a hiss while hopping up and down with his foot in his hand.

A slim shadow separated itself from
a sheltered doorway, and Max instinctively crouched into attack position.
Flinging himself forward, recognition would have halted him, but momentum sent
him crashing full speed into Annabel. For a second he thought his previous
longing for her had conjured her image, but his arms around her sweet shoulders
verified her presence.

“What the hell are you doing here?”
Stunned, he pulled her into a hug despite his displeasure.

“Getting wet.” She snuggled into
the embrace.

“
Why
are you here?”

“You left this at my house.” She
pulled his cell phone out of her trench coat pocket. “Some guy called right
after you left. I thought it might be Mercer.”

“What did he say?”

“It was disjointed, but I thought
you should know he was trying to reach you.”

Annabel’s presence made the whole
scene even more surreal. He tried to follow her words, but he felt off balance
and out of sync. “How did you know where I was going?”

“I followed you.”

“What is this? A frigging parade?”
He threw up his hands, uncertain whether to shake her or kiss her. A
premonition of doom washed over him. Whatever happened next, he had to get rid
of her before this escapade turned into a major shit-show. He took the phone
out of her hand and dropped it into a pocket. “Thanks. Now, go away.” The words
came out sternly, but he ruined the effect with a swift kiss that somehow
deepened and lengthened and expanded into a distraction that grabbed his full
attention until Roger tapped him on the shoulder.

When he finally managed to pull
away from her, the cameraman gave him a big thumb’s up.

“But I can help.” She moved to one
side of the barrel. “Let’s just get this into place, then I’ll leave. Where do
you want it?”

Roger accepted her presence and
assistance as a matter of course. Her added muscle helped not a bit, but the
three of them wrestled it into place. Max’s niggling worry for her safety
mounted.

“Now go,” he told her.

“Sure. I’ll just be the lookout
until Roger gets up on the roof. I assume you want to avoid those guys loading
that truck at the warehouse.”

“No,” he began. “I want you to—” He
stopped talking because she’d already snuck around the corner and out of sight.
Damn.

Max didn’t know exactly when he’d
lost control of the evening, but it was probably when he’d arrived at Annabel’s
more than seven hours before and caught sight of her dressed like Snow White’s
naughty sister.

He turned to watch the cameraman’s
first attempt at hoisting himself on top of the barrel. A whoosh of air escaped
him after his failed leap.

“They’re taller than they look when
you’re driving beside them on the highway.” Roger rubbed the potbelly that was
his biggest obstacle. “You’re going to have to boost me up.”

Max linked his hands into a stirrup
and lifted when Roger put his sneakered foot inside. Roger’s landing on top of
the barrel didn’t get them home free. Struggling to stand, he looked a bit like
a circus elephant balancing on a performance pedestal. Even on tiptoe, he could
barely reach the fire escape.

Just as Max decided to give up and
call him back to the ground, the cameraman managed a one-handed grasp of the
bottom rung and shinnied up to the next level.

“I got it, buddy.” He hoisted the
camera onto his shoulder. “Man, oh, man, you’re not
gonna
believe what we’ve got here. This is better than your wildest dreams.”

Max’s hair stood up on the back of
his neck. “What? Who can you see? What are they taking?”

“We’re
takin
’
everything but the Mayor’s new computer, and we might take that too,” came a
gruff voice from behind him. “Too bad you and Fatso won’t be around to tell
about it.”