"I like a challenge," she said. "There's a corner with some good food trucks near here. Buy me lunch and we'll talk."
* * *
Max was an even more striking person outside. It wasn't just that the sunshine showed her off better than the lights in her office, although the way her hair caught the light was distracting and made him once again think of what it would look like if it was let down.
But seeing her moving, in her natural element, filled him with joy. There was a fluid grace to her stride, an intense alertness to the way she looked around. She was definitely a shifter, he thought. As a fixer of shifter problems, it stood to reason that she was one. But he would have known anyway.
She was also one of the most energetic people he had ever met. Even with his longer stride, he had to settle into a ground-eating lope to keep up with her. She stopped at a food truck across from a park with large shade trees.
"This is a good place to talk," she said, while they waited for their food. "Good sightlines, lots of potential exits onto busy streets, but the park itself is usually not too crowded. Still, there are enough people around that we won't stand out." She gave him a quick look up and down. "To the extent that you everaren'tgoing to stand out, I mean."
The woman running the food stall handed them a box of piping hot empanadas—savory meat and potato pastries—in waxed paper. It was difficult to eat while walking, juggling the box between them, so Max directed them to a park bench under a shade tree. She glanced around warily and gestured him to sit first, then followed suit a moment later.
Gio had occasionally traveled with bodyguards when he was a young man with wealthy parents, and he noticed that she had automatically slipped into treating him like her principal.She's done bodyguard work too,he mused.
Max placed the takeout box on the bench between them and dug in. "Let me tell you a few things up front," she said between bites. "I don't take every case that comes to me. What you want has to be possible, for one thing. I'm not going to take your money if you got caught shifting on the six o'clock news and want me to make it go away. There are a lot of things I can't fix."
"I understand," Gio said. "To be honest, I don't know if what I want evenispossible. Let me explain to you what happened to me."
"This I very much want to hear," Max said. She broke off a piece of empanada pastry. "Especially if there are magical cultists involved."
"They're magical cultists who want to raise an army of gargoyles," Gio said, just to see how she'd react.
"Better and better," Max said, unfazed. After eating another large bite, she said, "So how did you get them on your case?"
"Stealing a valuable magical artifact and going on the run," Gio said.
"Ah," Max said. She nodded as if this was perfectly normal. "That'd probably do it."
MAX
There wasa distinct possibility that the guy was nuts, but Max had seen just enough completely insane things in her life that she wasn't going to write him off immediately.
And she really did like a challenging case. Preferably one without anything terribly painful at stake. She liked helping people; it was one of the reasons why she did this work. But she hated having to work on cases involving, for example, kids. It was too depressing when things didn't turn out okay.
Gio's case already had all the hallmarks of an assignment she was going to love. It was weird, it was interesting, it didn't seem to involve broken families or day-care-shifting toddlers. And she enjoyed being confronted with an interesting puzzle that expanded her knowledge of the world.
"So what made you decide to Indiana Jones a magic cult, out of curiosity?" she asked.
"I didn't intend to," Gio said, a bit testily. "You're taking this all very well, by the way."
"I've seen some things," Max said, turning her attention to her food.
Besides just being curious about his story, she felt that there were worse things than sitting with Gio Romano on a park bench. His hair had turned a stunning gold in the sun, in which the silver threads laced through it lit up like the dazzle of snow in the mountains of her childhood. Sitting this close to him, she was once again aware of his pleasant spicy smell. She had taken it at first for a subtle cologne, but now she was no longer sure if it was that, or just the light, pleasing musk of his skin.
She still felt the tug of the mate bond, but it was no longer as strong, as if her jaguar was now uncertain after it failed to get the expected receptive response. Was it possible to get a mate-bond misfire? she wondered. Maybe being exiled from her clan had messed her up on all kinds of levels, and this was her clan sense trying to latch onto a fellow shifter. She had never heard of it happening before. But she had just been talking to Sofia, thinking about her clan ... was it possible she could have primed herself for this?
In any case, Gio's animal definitely didn't think Max was its mate. She had to keep that in mind. Even if she wanted to date him, she would have to overcome the resistance of his animal—and that didn't bear thinking about. She had never heard of such a thing.
No, she had to keep her expectations managed. Max had a lot of experience at managing her expectations. She could still enjoy his company on a light, friendly, fixer-client level. Sure, why not?
The conversation had fallen into silence, with Gio seeming unsure how to proceed. At least coaxing reluctant people to talk was a skill she had honed over the last few years.
"Start wherever you like," Max prompted. "It's okay, I've probably heard weirder things." Although not many.
"I'm not sure where to begin," Gio said. "I was helping a friend—whose story is not mine to tell, so I'll leave that out. The important thing is that this cult had been bothering him as well. There was an artifact, a stone medallion, that he had come into possession of. The cult also wanted it. We ended up in a fight, and I, er—swallowed it."
Max paused with an empanada halfway to her mouth. "You did what now."
