“Fated Mountain Lodge is very safe. You don’t have to worry.”
“Let me have the key back, kid,” Sam told her. “Trade you for the car keys. Go and grab our water bottles out of the car so they don’t freeze, and I’ll take our luggage up to the room.”
It would be nice if Charlie was a little more enthusiastic, but he figured that once she experienced the outdoors and the company of other shifters, his daughter would settle down a little. Fawkes had said their surveillance target, this kleptomaniac shifter Maggie, wasn’t too much trouble; they were just there at the behest of Mauro and Hester in case anything went wrong.
And he was looking forward to seeing the honeymoon suite and finding out what it was like.
This weekend was looking up already.
MAGGIE
After being runoff her feet in the kitchen all evening, Maggie had to admit that relaxing in the honeymoon suite’s huge hot tub was wonderful. She didn’t bother getting dressed quite yet, walking around in a towel as she put her things away.
The room was definitely ... a lot. The bed was huge, covered in at least a dozen heart-shaped throw pillows in shades of pink, white, and red. The colors continued around the room, but at least it didn’t have risqué art on the walls or a mirror on the ceiling. It was actually very tasteful, at least as tasteful as a large hotel room decorated in pink, white, and red possibly could be.
She had actually been in here briefly before, in the course of trying to thwart Fawkes’s investigation of her, but she hadn’t exactly had time to look around and appreciate the decor. It was nice to be able to enjoy the place properly.
And she loved the bathroom. It was enormous, with a luxurious hot tub, a huge vanity-style mirror, and large marble counters. There was plenty of room for the handful of cosmetics she’d brought with her, as well as bright light over the sink for applying makeup or doing things with her hair.
Not that she expected to have much opportunity this weekend for that sort of thing. She’d worn a hair net all evening,and her mass of dark hair, streaked with early gray, was pulled into a sloppy bun for the bath.
She moved about the room happily, enjoying the plush carpet on her bare feet and the brush of warm air from the vents on her legs. Every now and then her gaze went to the opening window, with the drapes pulled shut for privacy.
She knew from experience that a magpie would easily fit through a cracked-open hotel window. The bird inside her yearned to go stretch its wings in the sky. Flying at night was not as satisfying as a daytime flight, but it was its own kind of fun.
She couldn’t, though. She had promised. And it was a promise she planned to keep. She wouldn’t, shecouldn’tmess up this weekend.
Her feet ached from being on them all evening, rushing about from the kitchen to bus tables, loading the dishwasher, handing things to the chefs. She had been put in a position to fill in wherever anything needed doing that didn’t require a lot of skill. With a full dining room, the kitchen had been a madhouse. Just a single shift was exhausting; how did people do this all the time? Maggie looked ruefully at her hands, the skin red from washing and marked with a spray of spatter burns from unwisely dropping a fry basket into hot grease. It would heal overnight—benefits of being a shifter—but her sparkly purple nail polish was already chipped and peeling.
I owe it to the hotel. I wanted to make up for my actions, and it’s not like I expected I was going to be giving manicures or leading yoga sessions. I’ll deal.
She raised her head at a sudden, unexpected clatter and click from the door.
It took her a too-long instant to figure out what it was. She thought it might have been a large vehicle passing by, perhaps a train, rattling the doors. And then she remembered they were in the middle of nowhere, there obviously wouldn’t be trains here,and a split second later came the realization that the noise had been a key in the lock, and then the door was opening.
Maggie whirled toward the door, an unwise move which caused her already precarious towel to slip.
A man stood there. She had never seen him before. At the same time, it seemed she had known him her whole life.
He was around her age, late forties or early fifties, with short silvering hair and piercing blue eyes. His tan windbreaker-style coat was open, revealing a denim shirt and an enticing V of chest hair at the cleft of his collarbones.
Maggie’s magpie reacted as if it had just seen the brightest, shiniest, most enticing bauble ever, just as Maggie lost her grip on her towel and it fell the rest of the way off.
SAM
Sam was expectinga number of things from the honeymoon suite, not all of them appropriate for a man chaperoning a teenager, but he definitely was not expecting a beautiful woman.
A naked, beautiful woman.
“Sorry!” Sam yelped, spinning around and slapping a hand over his eyes, as if that could block out the vision of the lean, gorgeous body, the full breasts tipped in pink-brown and the tendrils of damp hair straggling down her long neck and— “Sorry, I think you’re in my room!”
His inner animal was losing its mind. The thing about hosting a horse as the other half of his soul was that it had a tendency to ... react ... to things. Sam had developed a truly rigorous inner calm just to stop himself from jumping at shadows, dogs, and blowing grocery bags like his stallion sometimes wanted to do. But this wasn’t the usual random homicidal panic at moving objects. This was something truly different, a fierce and focused intensity pushing him to—do something, he wasn’t sure what.
“Excuse me?” The woman’s voice was husky, a voice he could have listened to all day every day for years. It was also brimmingwith offended dignity. “You’re inmyroom, and I’m calling the management!”
Feet pounded on the stairs, and Mauro called, “Wait! Mr. Grange! Don’t open the door—I’m sorry, there’s been a mix-up?—”
“Sounds like the management’s here,” Sam said.
