Rhyannon Byrd - Last Wolf Watching

He slanted her another quick, questioning look, then turned his attention back to the road. “You said you can’t read me at all, but what about Cian?”

She rolled her eyes at his boyishly hopeful tone, snickering softly. “If I could, I wouldn’t tell you. It wouldn’t be fair, because you’d just use whatever I said to torment the poor guy.”

A crooked grin played briefly at his mouth, making him look entirely too sexy. “Picked up on that, did you?”

“It’s uh, kinda hard to miss. You two go at each other like brothers. It’s ruthless.”

“The bastard likes to push my buttons,” he sighed with good-natured humor, the light sound warming her heart. It was surprising to see him like this, the corners of his eyes crinkled with laugh lines and a small smile playing at his beautiful mouth. Michaela didn’t know what had brought it on, but she enjoyed the effect. An easygoing Brody was even more devastating than a brooding one, and she shivered with awareness, crossing her arms over the painful thudding of her heart.

Mistaking her reaction for cold, he reached out with his right hand to adjust the vents, making sure the warm air was blowing in her direction. A strange, electrified silence settled between them, and though she was staring at her lap, Michaela could feel the press of his eyes on her as he cast another look in her direction, this one lingering, briefly, on her profile, her mouth. Her lips tingled, and she rolled them inward as his left hand tightened on the steering wheel. The silence grew, thickening like a roux set over the simmering heat of a pan—and she watched the softened lines of his expression slowly slip away, replaced by his customary brooding darkness.

“So you own and run your own business,” he finally said in a low, gravelly voice.

Whoa . As quickly as that shivering sense of awareness had come, it disappeared, like a rainbow bleeding back into the misty, rain-dappled beauty of the sky. And it wasn’t the words themselves that chilled her. No, Michaela could tell from the sudden change in his tone that there was something behind the innocuous statement, and her stomach clenched with all-too-familiar disappointment. “And?” she murmured, silently berating herself for being such a nitwit, knowing her reaction was foolish. With everything going on in her life, she didn’t have time to be sensitive over the moody Runner’s opinions, but damn if she wasn’t. For some stupid reason, she’d wanted him to be…different. To see her in a way that others didn’t.

He shrugged his shoulders at her sharp tone. “Nothing.”

Oh no. She wasn’t letting him off the hook that easy. “Uh-huh. You brought it up, so you might as well go ahead and spit it out, Brody.”

And she had a good idea of what it would be, aware of how most people pegged her as an eccentric basket case, walking around with her head in the clouds, once they learned that she owned a paranormal specialty shop. But the truth was that she had a good head for business and had simply chosen a market that she found fascinating as well as financially promising. She had her feet planted firmly on the ground, even if her mind was open to the world beyond what most humans considered normal.

“You just don’t look like the business type.” The look he cut her way said so much more than his words, and heat rose in her face that had nothing to do with the hot air gusting toward her. Oh yeah, she didn’t need to read minds to know what “type” he thought she was. Her entire life, her looks had never given her anything but trouble, affecting how people treated her, judged her, thinking she was nothing but a pretty face with fluff for brains. Thinking she was good for some fun, but nothing serious. Her last boyfriend, Ross Holland, had enjoyed her body, but when it came to his blue-blooded public image and budding political aspirations, he hadn’t wanted a woman whose sensuality was so blatant—so “in your face” as he’d put it. In Ross’s eyes, her business had only been another strike against her.

She didn’t want to admit it, but it hurt to realize that Brody apparently looked at her in the same, narrow-minded light. “Believe it or not, I don’t sleep to dream, Brody. You shouldn’t make assumptions about me based on physical appearances or what I do for a living.”

“Sleep to dream?” he repeated, his brow furrowed over the deep green of his eyes. “What does that mean?”

Michaela struggled to keep her voice even. “It means that I don’t have my head stuck in the clouds, worrying about when my next pedicure’s gonna be and who’ll buy me dinner on Friday night. When I sleep, I sleep hard because I work hard. I don’t live in a fantasy world, playing dress up. My business takes up all of my time and I’ve worked my backside off to make it successful.”

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he grunted in a low rasp, surprising her. “And I imagine I’ll get to see firsthand just how hard you work, since we’ll be spending the next day or so at your shop.”

“I guess you will,” she muttered, looking down to realize her knuckles had gone white, she was fisting her hands together so tightly. She hadn’t realized she was so touchy on the subject, but apparently she was. Or maybe she was just touchy about Brody’s opinion. An unsettling thought, and another one she didn’t want to look at too closely.

Without glancing in her direction, he went on to say, “And seeing as how we’re going to be in the city for the next few days, are there any boyfriends I should know about? I don’t want to have to deal with some jealous bastard who gets his nose bent out of shape because we’re staying together.”

“No,” she sighed, squeezing her eyes shut, wondering how the hell this was going to work. The guy had her twisted up in knots and they’d only been together for a few hours. How was she going to endure days, if not weeks? She was too aware of him, too on edge.

“No what?”

Her mouth thinned and she opened her eyes, staring at the dark stretch of road through the front windshield. “No boyfriends.”

A rude sound vibrated in the back of his throat. “Right.”

Michaela shook her head in baffled amazement. She wasn’t easily flustered, damn it, but something about Brody Carter made her feel stripped down to the raw, vulnerable, as if she were vibrating with energy, tension and anticipation. “I’m not sure what you mean by that.”

He lifted one hand off the wheel, shoving his long, scarred fingers back through the auburn threads of his hair in an utterly male gesture of frustration. “If you want to lie about it, fine, but women like you always have a line of guys waiting in the wings, six or seven deep at least. I’d bet my life savings on the fact that you’re involved with someone , Doucet.”

“Then you’re an idiot,” she snorted, “and if you took that bet, you’d be a broke one at that.”

He grunted in response, and she turned her head to glare back out her window. She kept quiet the remainder of the drive, not even giving him directions, since he already knew where she lived. But when they pulled to a slow stop behind the dark Mercedes parked in front of her house, she couldn’t stop the low groan that fell from her lips, unable to believe her rotten, miserable luck. “ Merde ,” she cursed. “That’s all this day needs.”

“A friend of yours?” Brody asked with a smirk, eyeing the shadow of the man lurking on her front porch.