Page 20 of The Bones in the Yard

Jesus fuck. I really couldn’t hide anything from this man.

I played with one of the cucumbers on my side salad. There was absolutely no point in denying it. “I guess because I don’t really know you, but you lived in my house for two months, and that’s weird,” I replied.And also because you’re gorgeous, and I’m having a hard time with the fact that I used to fucking pet you on a regular basis.But there was only so much honesty I was prepared to drop at once.

“Would it help if I paid you back for that?” he asked.

“Fuck, no.” Not only would it not help, it might actually make it worse. Especially since he couldn’t be making that much as a janitor, and I wasn’t about to take his fucking money anyway, even if he could have afforded it. I didn’t need it.

He sighed. “I’m the same person,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, except you weren’t exactly inpersonform,” I replied.

“Why does that matter?”

I viciously stabbed a cherry tomato. “Because even though Iknewyou were a person in a dog body, my brain is stupid and had a hard time remembering that.”

Taavi calmly took a bite of his sandwich, chewed, and swallowed. “You didn’t treat me like a dog,” he replied.

I raised an eyebrow.

His lips twitched. “Honestly, I was worried you didn’t treat me enough like a dog when we were at your work,” he said. “I thought someone was going to figure it out.”

I snorted. “Seriously? They wouldn’t know a goddamn shifter if it bit them in the ass.”

Taavi let out a laugh. “Caroline was nice.”

“Caro is nice.” Caroline Little-Bruneski was in fact so nice that she insisted that we go out for lunch or drinks once a month since I left. Sometimes Dan Maza and Dani Bowman came with us.

“Do you still talk to any of them?” Taavi asked.

I nodded. “Caro, Dan, and Bowman.” I grunted. “Actually, I even called Villanova the other night to convince the Hampton PD to stop being complete fuckheads and listen to Ward.”

“The case you were on?”

I nodded.

“Can you tell me about it?”

I could, and since it gave me a chance to talk about something that didn’t make me sound like a jibbering fool, I did.

And as I talked, Taavi listened, sometimes interrupting to ask a thoughtful question.

It was the most like myself I’d felt all fucking night.

Weirdly, that made me both feel better and worse. Because clearly I wasn’t capable of being a normal fucking person unless I was talking about dead people or crime. And it was also clear to me that Taavi was quite clever—not like I’d thought he was stupid, but he asked questions about procedure and timing and CSI protocol that probably wouldn’t have occurred to me to ask if someone hadn’t essentially forced me to learn them.

I was licking aioli off my fingers when Taavi asked another question.

“So what was the seashell for?”

I blinked. “What?”

“The seashell. You said you found a shell with the bones. What was it for?”

I shrugged. “No idea. Lots of people decorate their yards with shells.”

“Did you see other shells like that in the yard?”

“No…”

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