Tony pulled his phone from his coat pocket, and quickly punched in a number.
“Hey, rain cloud, what do you have for me today? Lightning or sunshine?” Charity hummed absently on picking up, the sound of her continuously typing away noticeable.
“Good to know it’s not just me she annoys with nicknames,” Harlow snorted.
“Oh is that sugarplum, I hear!” She laughed. “Oh, I got Foxx’s text. It sounds like they both had a trying night. Do let them know, trying or not, I will be sending over all the necessary paperwork they now need to fill out for burning a random house down.”
Tony let out a long-suffering sigh, before saying, “Charity, we need you to come here.”
The typing stopped. “Here, as in...?”
“My apartment,” Foxx said.
“Why?” she slowly asked.
He was the one who sighed this time. “It’s…complicated.”
In Harlow’s fair and non-judgmental opinion, Charity had looked pretty put together as she’d arrived in her red power suit, black blouse, and red heels. The key word beinghad. He couldn’t help but feel quite impressed by how quickly someone so put together had managed to devolve into a blubbering mess. And Charity had done just that…in a matter of seconds.
Said blubbering mess was now sitting on Foxx’s couch, clinging to a box of tissues as she loudly blew her nose after each complaint and accusation she made, adding to the growing pile of used ones on the coffee table.
As the woman let out another ear-piercing wail, in a long line of sounds that made him uncomfortable, Harlow realized that the wordimpressedhad not been correct. No…the word he’d actually been looking for was terrified.
And in the face of such adversity…he, of course, did the only thing he could do…stand in abject frozen fucking horror while the woman continued to bawl.
“Kidnapped?! And no call?!” she cried. “No, I get a fake text AFTER!” she whimpered, more tears falling as she grabbed up another tissue and blew again.
Foxx, who was sitting next to the woman, his arm around her as he tried to ‘comfort her’, murmured, “We are sorry, Charity.”
What was this‘we’? Harlow was not sorry about shit. Well, no, he was sorry he hadn’t run the fuck upstairs when she’d arrived.
“Youneedto start takingmyjob asyourhandler seriously! Don’t you know I care?! And you really don’t! Because who do you call?! TONY!?” The woman sent an accusing glare at the older human, who still remained sitting exactly where he had first parked his ass on arriving. “You encourage it!”
Tony, looking fucking sheepish as hell, slowly said, “I am sorry, Charity. I’ll try to do better.”
“You better!” She blew her nose before her teary gaze flicked to him. He stiffened, eyes widening when she started to cry harder. “And you!”
He barely held back the wince at the pain her voice caused. “Me?”
“You almost died!” she sobbed, voice wavering with each word.
How…should he respond to that? Should he respond? He eyed Foxx. The vampire was giving him a look as if he should probably say something. “Yeah…?” Harlow said slowly.
Another ramping up of tears followed his words. Foxx stared at him with disgust before rolling his eyes.
Well, what else was he supposed to say?!
“Poor, Harlow… Poor, poor, Harlow.”
Yeah, poor fucking him. His head had already been throbbing before this, and with Charity’s ear-piercing wailing… Fuck, he—his eyes flicked to Foxx—was thirsty. Harlow found his gaze drawn to the vampire’s neck, even though it wascovered. Ahh...fuck, he was thirsty. More than thirsty. He licked his lips.
Foxx frowned and sent him a pointed ‘cut it the fuck out’ look.
Sighing, Harlow tried again by lying. “We’re sorry for not calling you first. Well…I wasn’t actually awake to call anyone since I’d been drugged and then changed, but Foxx is sorry. And Tony will do better.”
“Yes,” Tony grunted. “I’ll be more respectful towards your job as their handler and attempt to redirect them.”
“You better!” Charity repeated, before sniffling and dabbing at her eyes with a clean tissue. Taking a shuddered breath, she said, “I’ll keep this to myself. And when the time comes that you two have to return to work, I’ll be selective about your cases.”
