“Parrots can be a handful. Imagine an emotionally volatile toddler who has a knife for a nose and wolverine claws, and who’s probably going to outlive you.”
He chuckles, a pleasant rumble. “I think I’ll stick with dogs. All of the innocent sweetness, none of the knifework.” He maneuvers the cage into position and looks back at me as if measuring my grip strength.
I head over and heft the other side. “I helped load it, so I can help unload it. It weighs around a buck-fifty, but it’s unwieldy.”
“If you don’t mind walking backward, that’ll have me carrying the brunt of it.”
It’s a good plan. I nod and lift with my legs, not my back, and then the banter stops and the grunting begins. We cross the alley, and I begin the laborious work of walking backward up unfamiliar stairs while carrying something that weighs as much as I do in sopping-wet clothes and squelching sneakers while staring down at the taut forearms of the best-looking man I’ve seen in ages. I somehow manage not to trip or drop the cage on him, and soon we have it sitting on the balcony.
“You’re strong,” he says. “Are you a powerlifter, too?”
“I’m an office manager,” I tell him. “But it’s very heavy stuff.”
He raises his eyebrows and reaches for the cage.
I hold up a hand. “Let me get Little Miss Knife Face into her backpack, just in case.”
Hunter nods, and I squeeze through the door.
As soon as it’s shut, I hurry to the next room, where Maggie is tangled up in the blinds. I gently extract her and whisper, “What on earth are you doing? You were better behaved when your brain was the size of a walnut.”
“Life’s a lot easier with hands,” she says as I smooth down her feathers. “It’s like I’m wearing oven mitts and stiletto heels, and my eyes go in opposite directions.”
“Then why’d you decide to get in a fight with the blinds? Apparently, you can still think like a person, even if you’re not great with this body.” I snort. “God, that sounds completely unhinged.”
“I was trying to tell you to get away from the Blakely boy, but I guess my telepathy can only go so far. Didn’t you hear me shouting?”
“We both heard you screeching. And smacking your beak on the glass like a damn fool.”
“That’s cockatoo for ‘Get away from the grandson of my mortal enemy Joyce Blakely.’ ”
“Mortal enemy?” I ask her.
She shakes herself. “Well, let’s cross that bridge when we come to it. Not that it matters. When that boy finds out you’re a Kirkwood, he won’t want anything to do with you.”
7.
“And what’s wrongwith being a Kirkwood?” I ask.
For the first time in our life together, the bird goes absolutely silent.
“Maggie?”
She turns her head away, but at least she’s not struggling against me, so I pop her into the backpack and firmly zip it up.
“Fine. Enjoy your silence in the Hot-Pink Backpack of Shame.”
“You okay in there?” Hunter calls from outside.
“Just the usual Bird Problems,” I shout back. “You know, like tax fraud.”
I hurry to the photos of young Maggie I saw earlier and hide them all in a drawer. If she’s right, I don’t want him to put two and two together and figure out I’m her granddaughter. Not yet. I need to know more about this “Joyce Blakely is my mortal enemy” business, and I want to know more about him. After I do a quick scan to make sure there’s no other damning evidence ofmy relationship to the egg-throwing menace, I hurry back to the door.
“Did you turn her in to the feds?” Hunter asks.
“Oh, yeah. She’s already in prison. Ten-to-life for a pyramid scheme.”
He grins and rolls in the cage—which he has already set up on his own! Swoon!
