Fair Game (Alpha & Omega #3)(18)
Author: Patricia Briggs

"Let’s go exploring." She pulled the city map she’d taken from the hotel’s lobby this morning out of her pocket and opened it up.

"I know Boston," said Charles, with a slightly pained look around to see if anyone had noticed the map. It was bright orange and highly unlikely to evade even the most casual glance.

"But I don’t," she told him, enjoying the expression on his face. Being mated to a wolf two hundred years her elder meant that she seldom got to see him disconcerted. "And since I want to do the exploring…" He would take her to interesting places, she knew. Tomorrow that would be good, and doubtless she’d enjoy it more than anything she found herself. But today she wanted to be more…spontaneous.

"If you run around with that bright orange map in your hand," Charles told her, "everyone will think you’re a tourist."

"When was the last time you were a tourist?" she asked archly.

He just looked at her. Charles, she had to agree, was not tourist material.

"Right," Anna told him. "Buck up. You might even enjoy it."

"You might as well have ‘hapless victim’ tattooed across your forehead," he muttered.

She grabbed his hand and pulled him across the street to King’s Chapel and the oldest graveyard in Boston – according to her map.

TWO HOURS LATER, she was vying for food in the North Market building of Faneuil Hall Marketplace with what felt like four hundred tourist groups while Charles waited nearby with his back against the wall. The three feet of empty space around him was probably the only space open in the whole place – but that was Charles; people just didn’t crowd him. Smart people.

Since most of the tourists in front of the booth where she’d chosen to grab lunch came all the way to Anna’s waist, she was pretty sure she was in no danger, but you couldn’t tell it by the focused attention her mate aimed at the children.

If you can’t tell that I’m looking at something on you that is precisely on level with the little ones’ heads – his voice in her head had a rough purr – then you need your eyes checked.

Her jaw dropped. Was he flirting with her? Anna turned her head to meet his gaze, which dropped immediately to her rear end. She jerked her head back before he saw her smirk – or her red cheeks. He had been checking out the crowd. She’d seen him do it, seen him take a good long look at each of the kids.

But Charles certainly wasn’t lying to her, either, so all the rest had been automatic, but checking her out had been on purpose. She smiled and felt her wolf relax into the rightness of flirting with her mate.

She had plenty of time for her cheeks to cool. It took a while before she managed to order food – mostly because she took pity on an overwhelmed teacher who seemed to be in charge of a million kids all by herself. Anna escaped at last with a pair of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of water and let Charles escort her outside the building to hunt for someplace to sit and eat.

"We could have gone into a real restaurant," Charles said, taking a bottle of water she handed him. "Or waited for the starving hordes to disperse before joining the fray." He sounded serious, as always, but she knew better, knew because their bond conveyed his amusement.

"They were all of seven years old. I was confident that I was unlikely to end up on their plate when there were hot dogs and ice cream to be had."

"If they weren’t predatory, you shouldn’t have had to manhandle them," he said, making tracks toward an unoccupied seating area. Anna saw at least one other person start for the same place, then notice Charles and turn away, but at least he didn’t look panicked.

"They couldn’t see over the counter to the food," she told him. "We had a deal. They didn’t bite me and I’d lift them up so they could see." She’d expected them to be shyer, but they’d really seemed to have had fun. Maybe they’d been too young to be worried about strangers. The teacher had been too busy lifting up her half of the class to worry about Anna. Apparently the mothers who were supposed to be helping had wandered off to the ladies’ room.

"All of the children?"

"Half. One at a time. It’s not like they weighed very much. And I had help."

"Hmm." Charles raised an eyebrow. "There was some pretty intense jockeying for position considering that the prize was hot dogs and sandwiches and not priceless art treasures. I saw you elbow that woman."

"She cut in front of a seven-year-old little boy," Anna told him indignantly. "Who does that?"

"Ladies wearing four thousand dollars in diamonds, apparently." He cleared the table of the remains of someone else’s meal and tossed it in a nearby trash can.

"I don’t cut in front of children and I have four thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds." She plopped on a narrow bench and put her food on the minuscule table, hoping it wouldn’t wobble and dump everything on the ground.

"Do you?" Charles asked mildly, taking a seat on the other side. The one-person benches, unlike the table, looked sturdy enough and didn’t creak beneath his weight, though she saw him rock a little to make sure it would hold. "Except for your ring, you don’t wear them. And the ring is not worth four thousand."

"That one necklace, right? Wearing it wouldn’t make me cut in front of some poor, hungry kid." He was playing with her, he was, teasing her because she was afraid to wear the jewelry his father had given her when they were married. Her wolf wanted to wiggle in joy and go hunt something to celebrate. Anna took a bite of sandwich. "Though maybe I’d have to put on the bracelet, too."

"No," he said. "Just the bracelet would do. But you don’t wear them."

Her necklace was covered in at least twice the number of diamonds and several larger stones. She absorbed the idea of the bracelet itself being worth more than four thousand dollars, and was doubly grateful that she hadn’t worn them. She tended to play with anything hanging around her neck – what if she broke the necklace?

"There’s a time and place for stuff like that." Anna tried not to show him how appalled she was at the value of the jewelry. She preferred to downplay the material changes in her life since she’d met and mated with Charles. They weren’t the important changes – if occasionally she found them more difficult than the real ways her life had altered. "When you’re going shopping isn’t a good time for jewels, especially if that makes you think that pushing around little kids is okay."

He raised his eyebrows. "Oh? When were you planning on wearing your diamonds?" Charles sounded amused. He knew that she was planning on never wearing them now that she knew what they were worth.