If it was that Phoebe, Tami trusted that she would never connect Tami who loved herbs with the Tami who’d headed the team that fought successfully to build a series of new homeless shelters in the downtown area—where they were the most needed. Tami hadn’t returned Phoebe’s email.
The second email she’d gotten a week later had been from Carter in Billings, Montana. Billings was more than five hundred miles away. They’d exchanged a few emails, found no real connection to make spanning the distance worthwhile, and ceased communicating.
She’d looked up profiles herself after that, determined to get the most out of the three months of service she’d paid for. She’d found there were clusters of people in Florida and Southern California. But other than Phoebe, Carter in Billings was honestly the closest person signed up at the site.
She chalked the whole mess up to experience, and put it behind her. The next day, Moreno (she assumed it was his last name), a rose lover who lived in an unspecified small town in Montana but often found himself in Spokane on business, contacted her.
She’d checked his profile, but there was very little other than what he’d told her in his initial email. There was no date of birth—“not quite as old as dirt” wasn’t much of a clue, though it left her with the impression of someone who was past middle age. His profile picture was a Black Baccara rose held between two fingers. His fingers were in shadow and told her nothing about him.
With those few hints, she made up a story about him in her own mind: an older man, Hispanic from his name, and well educated from his emails. He raised roses in the snowy mountains and needed someone to talk to. He would come, laugh about the atmosphere of the restaurant—she had told him that she could be awkward in social situations, and she could tell from the emails they had exchanged that he had a sense of humor.
She heard a sound behind her and turned to see a man murmuring to the host who had seated her. The host glanced in her direction and smiled. The man looked over and up and met her eyes. If she had had any doubt, it was extinguished by the Black Baccara rose in his hand.
Instead of the older gardener she had dreamed up, she was getting . . . something else. He looked dangerous and expensive, gorgeously dressed in a fitted bronze shirt that showed muscle without clinging too tightly and formal black slacks.
His face was the color of teak, but he wasn’t Native American, African American, or Hispanic, or any other race she could pinpoint. None of that mattered, though, because he was the single most beautiful man she’d ever seen in the flesh.
Wow, was her first thought.
Her second thought was, There is no way in hell this man needs a dating site to find someone to talk to. She’d been set up. Maybe Phoebe had connected the Tami from the site to the Tami from the homeless shelters. Maybe one of her coworkers figured out that she was registered on a not-dating site.
She straightened herself in her chair and pulled on her professional mask to cover her anger. Her hand reached up to grab her mother’s pendant necklace for reassurance and she forced it down to rest on the table in front of her.
This was supposed to be something she was doing for fun, dammit.
* * *
—
The woman’s face grew grimmer the closer Asil got to her table. She glanced at the rose in his hand, folded her arms, and looked away.
Amusement fought with pique—he had dressed carefully for this “date” his Concerned Friends had arranged for him from the Platonic Plantophiles—a Meeting Place for Plant Lovers site. His shirt was silk, yes, but it was a dusty brown a few shades lighter than his skin, a most ordinary color. Nothing romantic. The shirt a friend would wear going to dinner with another friend.
Maybe she hadn’t wanted a platonic friend? The restaurant was more romantic than he had expected. But he thought that even in a brown silk shirt he wouldn’t make a bad date. Her reaction reminded him of . . . the very first of these dates, actually.
Ah, of course. The problem was that he was too beautiful. That reaction was something he was used to dealing with.
He sat down, thanked the host, set his rose down gently, then folded his hands on the table and waited. It was better to make her speak first. He took the opportunity to look at her.
The dim light didn’t hinder his sight except that it made colors a little harder to determine. Her hair was light brown and her eyes another light color—blue or hazel. She had a face that showed signs of smiling a lot, which he liked. Her jaw was stubborn, which might be mostly a result of the current situation, but he liked that, too. She appeared to be somewhere in her early thirties.
“You are Mr. Moreno?” she asked.
“I am,” he responded. “You were expecting someone different?”
“Yes.” She considered him, her body stiff. “No.” She finished the dark wine in her glass, and said, “Did Phoebe set this up?”
“No,” he told her. “Who is Phoebe? And why would she want to set you up?”
She ignored his question, and instead waved a hand in his general direction and said, “Why would you need a dating service?”
“Yes, I agree,” he said, stating the obvious. “But we are not on a date, yes? This is to see if we might become friends.” He smiled at her gently. “I am set in my ways, and tend toward isolation. Some friends of mine thought it would be good for me to socialize.”
“This is a bet,” she said flatly.
“Not at all,” he said. “It is a gift—one that I cannot return if it doesn’t fit.” He lifted an eyebrow, inviting her to appreciate the awkwardness of such a gift. “They set both of us up. I don’t know who they are, yet, these generous friends of mine who have been corresponding with you. Because of that ignorance, I cannot vouch for their pure intent. But spending time in a restaurant with good food with someone who also loves to garden doesn’t seem like such a terrible thing.”
She smiled faintly, but it was a real smile. Ah, good. She was warming to him.
“So,” he said. “I brought you a rose from my greenhouse. I thought you might enjoy it.” He nodded to the flower he’d set between them. Like bait.
She hesitated, then took it and lifted it slowly to her nose.
“It’s December,” she said. “How did you get it to bloom in Montana in December, Mr. Moreno?”
“Call me Asil,” he told her.
She pulled the flower to her face one more time, set it down, and appeared to come to a decision. “Asil,” she repeated, getting the pronunciation correct. “How did you get a Baccara rose to bloom in the middle of winter, Asil?”
And so they talked roses.
He was pleased to discover she was nearly as avid a gardener as he was himself, though she preferred herbs to flowers, even roses. His breadth of knowledge, deeper than hers, even about her beloved herbs, finally convinced her that someone had not sent him to humiliate her. After that she relaxed a bit and he found her to be funny and a bit ironic, which he enjoyed.
“You know why I was signed up at the dating site,” Asil said, taking a bite out of the crusty bread their waiter had brought. “Why were you?”
“The not-dating site,” she corrected him, blithely unaware that his wolf did not like being corrected. He tightened the leash and kept his darker half out of sight.
“I broke up with my boyfriend,” she said after a moment. “If he had time off, I didn’t. I decided that maybe I wasn’t cut out to be anyone’s girlfriend, not until we get a few more people in at work so my job resembles something that might be done in a forty-hour workweek.”
“What do you do?” he asked.
“I’m a social worker,” she told him. “I work for a nonprofit involved with finding housing—temporary and permanent—for the homeless.”
That was not what he’d expected.
As in his youth, the homeless population was the result of society’s failure to care for
their own. This land’s homeless tended to be drug addicts, alcoholics, and the mentally ill—victims. He was a dominant werewolf, and caring for his own was sealed into his bones, so he felt society’s failure to care for their most vulnerable to be a shame upon this country.
However, wherever so many lost and vulnerable prey gathered, there were predators who hunted among them. Contemptible scavengers who knew that the police would not hunt them for taking what little the homeless possessed—their money, their bodies, or their lives. And yet this woman had set herself up against them.
He looked at Tami from a predator’s perspective for a moment—she was average height for a woman and looked as though she did some working out. But most men would outweigh and outmuscle her.
She raised an eyebrow at him, and he saw it then. Physically she was no match for a violent man, but she had dominance, and that could help keep her safe.
“I’ve been doing this for ten years,” she told him with the chill in her voice that her eyebrow had promised. “Outside of a few bruises, I’ve been fine.”
Tilter of windmills, he thought. But that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Interesting that his wolf wasn’t upset with her tartness. But she wasn’t challenging him. Her eyes met his and then slid away, as though someone had taught her not to engage in a stare-down—good manners at an instinctive level. There was this also: the wolf respected and honored a fighter who took care of others.
She sighed, and the tension in his spine relaxed as she stopped confronting him. “But I’ve moved mostly into macro-work anyway—grant writing, property management, supervision. I spend more time dealing with city officials and business owners than I do with clients.” She slanted him a smile. “I only had a knife pulled on me once this month.”
He knew that she wasn’t lying. She had had a knife pulled on her this month. But she was trying to lighten the atmosphere—so he smiled, though he was not amused at her attempt to make light of such a threat.
“And that—the danger—was another reason I and my last boyfriend broke up,” she told him. “Mind you, Chris is a cop. And my job scared him spitless.”
As it should, he thought.
“What do you do for work?” she asked.
He shrugged. “I manage money,” he told her truthfully—but didn’t tell her it was his own money he managed. “Boring. Which is one of the reasons I grow roses.”
The waiter came and they ordered their food. She got a salad with steak on it—which he had never seen the point of. Salad should be salad and meat should be meat. He ordered a steak, medium rare out of deference to her “well-done, please” order. People who liked their steak burned to a crisp often had unhappy reactions to the way he preferred to eat meat.
When the waiter left, Asil asked, “What do you like best about your work?”
“It’s never boring,” she said, playing with her wineglass. “I meet all kinds of people, you know? Good and bad. Broken. Strange.” She laughed at a thought.
“What?” he asked.
“Last week we found a place for one of the regulars—one of the guys who’s been homeless for decades. A studio on the second floor—and the first thing he did was open his window and pee on the head of his caseworker. And his neighbor. And the mailman.”
Asil laughed. That had, at various times and places, been a common pastime for schoolboys—though they were more likely to have used chamber pots.
She grinned. “I’ve known him for years, we have a certain rapport—and I’m in charge of the case manager he peed on. So he and I had a visit.”
Asil waited.
“I asked him why he was peeing on people,” she said. “He started laughing. ‘It’s fun,’ he told me. ‘You should see their faces.’”
Asil laughed again. This was going to be an enjoyable evening, he thought, no lionesses or princes in distress to rescue on this date. Not-date.
“How did you stop him?” he asked.
She paused, watching his mouth for a moment, took a breath, and shook her head. “You are too pretty.”
“That is true,” he said, “but I want to hear the rest of the story.”
She laughed, looked at him, and then shook her head again. “Okay. Well, I couldn’t argue with him about it being funny. His caseworker’s expression was”—she raised her eyebrows and made an exploding gesture with her hands—“pretty extraordinary when he burst into my office. So instead, I said, ‘What would you do if someone peed on you?’ He jumped to his feet, already mad. ‘I’d beat them up,’ he told me. ‘You can’t let that kind of disrespect stand.’ I looked at him—and he deflated. He’s not stupid, just differently educated. He told me, ‘I guess if I don’t want to get beaten up, I’d better not pee on people.’”
“Did he stop?” Asil asked.
She nodded and the amusement faded from her face. “I hope it will work out for him. It’s hard for the ones who’ve been out on the street that long. He sleeps in his closet when he’s not back out with his buddies sleeping by the river.” Her expression was wry. But then she shook off the story. “My turn for a question. Why do your friends think you need a friend?”
He lowered his eyes and thought. There were several things that he could have said, all of them true, but not the truth.
Her phone rang.
* * *
—
He’d been going to tell her something interesting—she knew people. Something interesting—or something light and funny to cover up whatever had caused his expression to turn thoughtful.
She glanced at her phone, intending to send it to voice mail if it wasn’t important. Joshua.
“I’m sorry. I have to take this.”
She got up and moved to the front of the restaurant to the empty benches by the door—halfway across the restaurant from her table, where her voice wouldn’t bother anyone.
In the relative privacy offered by the alcove, she accepted the call.
Joshua said, “Tami? I’m sorry to call but we’re trapped in Mama’s place and I’m pretty sure I smell smoke.” His voice had dropped in the last year, but it cracked when he said smoke.
“Trapped?” Tami asked calmly—because panic never makes any situation better. Joshua was claustrophobic—and had good cause to be so. If there was smoke, someone in that neighborhood would call the police. “You and the girls? Or all of you?”
“I don’t know about Mama,” Joshua said, obviously trying to mimic her calm demeanor. “Something fell in the hallway and caused an avalanche and these fu—” He caught himself. “The doors in the house open out into the hallway. I can’t get the door open.” His voice cracked again, and he took a breath. When he spoke again he sounded about six years old and terrified. “Mama had bars put in all the windows so the thieves couldn’t get in and steal her stuff.”
“I remember,” said Tami, still sounding calm. “You should call 911 as soon as I hang up.”
“No,” he said. “Please, Tami. I can’t call them on Mama again. She tried to kill herself last time. I don’t think there is really smoke. Tabby? Do you smell smoke?” There was a murmur Tami couldn’t hear. “No smoke,” he said. “Mama doesn’t mind if you come. If the police come . . . she’s doing better.”
There was more hope than conviction in his voice.
“Okay,” she said. “I’m coming right now. Hold tight. If there is smoke—you call 911. If I see smoke as I’m driving over—” She’d walked to the restaurant from her apartment because she was nervous and needed a walk in the snow to calm herself down. It would take her fifteen minutes to walk back—she’d have to call a car.
She looked over at the table, and frowned. Asil was putting money—three hundred dollars—on the table. As she watched, he stood up, gathered her purse and her coat. Something about her coat made him frown.
He was beautiful even when he frowned.
“I�
��m sorry,” said Joshua in her ear. “I know you told me not to meet the girls here, but it’s cold outside and they don’t got warm clothes.”
“It’s all right, Joshua. I’m coming.” Tami disconnected.
“Let me help,” Asil said, handing over her purse. He held her coat out so she could put it on. “If I don’t spend an hour and a half with you, they will cry foul and send me on a date with someone who likes drag racing or something.”
She started to put her coat on and stiffened. “How did you overhear my call?”
He wiggled his hands to draw her attention to the coat. She shrugged it on and turned to look at him. Her heartbeat picked up.
“It will be faster if I drive,” Asil told her, ignoring her question deliberately.
“But . . .” she said, and then her voice hung in the air as she looked into his eyes and saw the bright gold of his wolf looking out at her. “Werewolf,” she whispered.
He nodded. “Witch,” he responded flatly. Then his mouth softened a little. “White witch.”
Asil gave an impatient huff in response to the fear on her face. She had had no intention of letting him know what she was. Her hands wanted to reach up and cling to her mother’s pendant—but she forced them to stay at her side.
“No,” he said drily. “I don’t go around eating little white witches. No, another werewolf wouldn’t pick up what you are unless they got very close to you. You are very good at concealing yourself. I just caught the scent of your magic on your coat.”
She stood frozen.
“Children are in danger,” he told her slowly. “I can help.” He paused. “Let me help.”
She blinked as if his last words had broken a spell. She took a deep breath and said, in a businesslike voice, “If you are a werewolf, you heard that whole conversation. Okay, Joshua and his little sisters first.”
Fantastic Hope Page 20
