Page 28 of Colton’s Mate

When she got back he was still standing at the bar cart with his back to the room, so his partial boner wasn’t visible.

“Heads up!” she called. Hah. The wrong head was up, unfortunately. He half-turned and caught the sweatpants she threw at him, and then pulled them on before turning around.

He’d topped off both their glasses, but he brought the bottle along with him into the living room and settled onto the couch. Callie sat beside him.

Then she told him all about the crow woman who’d come to see her. Rohene. Who sounded scary as fuck. “You thinking she was a Corsair?” Colt asked.

“Well, she wasn’t a Talon. And she was lying about being related to Caleb. She had a strange accent I’ve never heard before. Maybe Eastern European?”

“In any case, it seems that this ‘heirloom’ she was looking for was not in either of the boxes you gave her from your shed.”

“Apparently not. But if it wasn’t there, I don’t have it. I went through everything Caleb left here. Burned most of it. There was nothing that looked old or valuable. Not in his things, and not in Tex’s.”

He paused, wanting to be careful of what he said here, and how he said it.

“I get that you probably looked through everything, and you knew both of them, which I did not. But… our crew has some tight connections with dragons, and they know a hell of a lot about shifter artifacts. I’ve learned some stuff over the years. I’m thinking that even if Caleb or Tex didn’t have the whatever-it-is—”

“The Lost Ark?”

He bit his lip. “Can we just call it the McGuffin? That’s what movie scriptwriters call the thing that everybody’s after in an action-adventure movie.”

“Fine. Take away my Indiana Jones vibe.”

“If Caleb or Tex didn’t have the McGuffin, they might have something in their personal papers that referred to it. Something you might not have noticed. Could I take a look?”

“I appreciate how hard you worked right there, to make me think you don’t think I’m an idiot and you’re not trying to take over.”

“It’s nice to have my efforts appreciated. Can I see the stuff?”

She gazed at him for a moment. “Okay. I’ll get it out of the—” She rose to her feet and started toward the bedrooms, then stopped in her tracks.

Colt dropped his head back on the headrest. “For fuck’s sake, I’m not trying to take over!”

“It’s not that.” She looked slowly around the room, and then came back and sat down.

“Say you’re looking for something you think somebody has,” she said. “You search their place. You don’t find it. But you were really careful to try to make it look like the place wasn’t searched.”

“Yeah…” Colt wasn’t sure where she was going with this.

“But then you leave the front door ajar. Which is totally obvious.”

Colt frowned. “Right. After covering all their tracks, they made sure you knew someone was here. That doesn’t make sense.”

Callie shifted in her seat. “Doesn’t it? Because if I did have this valuable thing hidden somewhere clever, and I saw someone had searched my place, what’s the first thing I’d do? In fact, what’s the first thing I would probably do even if I didn’t have it?”

Then he got it. Damn, she was quick. “What you just started to do. You’d go see if it’s still where you hid it. Or in your case, you’d go check your valuables.”

“Exactly,” she said. “And if you were the crows, you’d be thinking, ‘Gosh, if only there were some way I could see where that hiding place was.’”

Colt narrowed his eyes. “Yes. Yes you would. Hold that thought.”

He went out to the car and found the tatters of his jeans that Callie had rescued, pulling his phone out of the back pocket. Luckily it hadn’t been broken, in all the brawling and Changing.

He tapped the screen to bring up the special app Remy had installed, and then went back inside and began walking around the living room, scanning it with the phone.

It beeped by the lamp. And the bookshelves. And the air vent.

There was surveillance equipment hidden all over the room, transmitting its little heart out, waiting for Callie to reveal the location of the McGuffin.