Page 22 of Blind Date with a Werewolf
“Yes, I agree I am magnificent,” 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. He thought about the betting pool his Concerned Friends had mentioned in the very first email and amended his reply. “Not for me. It is a gift—one that I cannot return if it doesn’t fit.” He lifted an eyebrow, inviting her toappreciate 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 with someone who also loves to garden in a restaurant with good food 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. She stared at it for a few long seconds, then looked up at him with a faint, crooked smile.
“Asil,” she repeated, getting the pronunciation correct. “How did you get a Black 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 kept her unaware by tightening the leash that 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. Or even a sixty-hour one.”
“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 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.
This woman protected the people no one wanted.
He looked at Tami from a predator’s perspective for a moment—she was average height for a woman and looked as though she spent some time at a gym. But most men would outweigh and outmuscle her.
“Hazardous work,” he murmured.
She raised an eyebrow at him and he understood. Physicallyshe 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—not as restless in her company as it had been in Kelly’s, though the young man from his first date wasn’t as tempered by life as she was. Maybe it was because 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 my last boyfriend and I broke up,” she told him. “Mind you, Chris is a cop. Andmyjob scared him spitless.”
As it should, he thought.
