She should have enough time to do that. Asil needed to spend two hours with her to be successful for his bet. She owed him that much.
She smiled at him, inviting him to accept her word on the matter. “I’ve had this—” Her tongue stumbled as she tried to find a way to word it so it would not feel like a challenge to him. And it had to be the truth because werewolves could smell a lie. “—problemfor a long time, and it is unlikely to kill me.” No matter how much death would be preferable to the endless cat-and-mouse game.
“Youdo not know who I am,” he said slowly.
“The Moor, right?” Ruby said, hoping—after she said it—that it wasn’t really an epithet.
But he didn’t appear offended. He looked at Alan and, evidently seeing something she didn’t in her friend’s face, he shook his head and changed whatever he’d been going to say.
He gave her a charming smile, which made him even more beautiful—and she was sure he was secretly laughing at her.
“By all means,” he said. “Let’s go hunt ghosts.”
Behind Asil Moreno, Alan’s eyes widened in surprise at Moreno’s response. She wondered what Alan had expected the other werewolf to do.
Asil decided not to argue with her determination to push him away from whatever she’d originally wanted from him. His experience in the past three dates indicated he did not need to force matters—disaster would come in its own time. He braced himself for the rebellion of his wolf at his decision to be patient—and it did not come.
The wolf agreed with his assessment. Asil was intrigued by the strangeness of sharing his skin with a reasonable being.
Today’s date was only minutes long, and already it was shaping into something at least as interesting as his last three dates had been.
He followed Ruby and Alan into the mansion and found himself in a large, lightly furnished room that was mostly a showcase for the massive oak stairway, heavily carved with small animals, flowers, and leaves. The room was awash in colored light filtering down from two gigantic Tiffany stained-glass windows that dominated the first landing of the stairway. The effect of elegant opulence was diluted somewhat by thesound of someone in the distant heights of the building swearing like a sailor.
Alan and Ruby exchanged a look. Alan said, “Someone needs to keep Terry from killing Peg. If you two will excuse me?” He didn’t wait for a reply before running lightly up the stairs.
Ruby watched Alan leave as if he were a life buoy sliding out of her reach. Asil’s wolf wanted to go grab Alan and stand him back beside Ruby so she wouldn’t be unhappy—but, and this was the amazing part, did not make any effort to make that happen.
When Alan disappeared above them, Ruby swallowed. Then she turned to Asil with the bright fake smile he was already tired of. “Okay, Mr.Moreno—”
“Asil,” he told her silkily. “Please.”
“Asil,” she said without dropping her smile a single watt or making it a degree more real. “Every ghost hunting team I’ve ever spoken to has a routine they follow when they are looking for hauntings. We start with a walk-through—”
“For psychic impressions,” Asil said, not quite interrupting her but disturbing her rhythm, pushing at her in a way that was not quite flirtatious. But not quitenotflirtatious, either.
She gave him a wary look. “Yes.” At least the plastic had gone out of her expression.
“I’m not a psychic,” he told her.
“No,” she agreed dryly, “it wasn’t on your profile.”
He almost grinned at the bite in her voice.Thereshe was—the real person beneath the plastic mask and the roil of fear and uncertainty.
“I cannot apologize for the profile,” he said, a purr in his voice that caused a flush of something she almost controlled. “I didn’t write it.”
Arousal, his wolf assured him.The binding spell she wears sometimes hides things from our sense of smell, but look at the darkening of her eyes and the warmth of her skin.
If the ground had rolled under his feet, he would not have been more startled than he was at hearing his wolf speak to him in words. He hadn’t spoken to his wolf this way since his mate had last walked beside him. The only other werewolf he knew who spoke to his wolf like this was Charles—one of the myriad of things that made Asil dislike the Marrok’s son. Asil was not above admitting to jealousy.
Ruby drew in a deep breath. “Alan’s wife and I did a preliminary walk-through of this place a couple of weeks ago when they first asked us for help.”
She paused as if she were waiting for him to throw her off her game again. But he was too busy trying to regroup. He let her proceed unhindered, even though it irritated him when she dropped back behind the safety of her tour-guide mask.
“We come prepared with the history of the house,” she continued briskly. “Some of that we get from the owners, but we do record searches, too. Mostly we don’t find anything very useful that isn’t already well-known to the owners. It’s not necessary to have a complete history with names and dates to help the spirits, but sometimes it has proven useful.”
“Help them?” he asked.
“That’s what we do,” she said. “Help trapped spirits.”
