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She gave me a falsely innocent smile and snapped her gum. “Thanks.”
“Brat,” I muttered, stalking away.
She laughed in an odious way as I went to the fridge. I opened it, keeping one eye on Mattie, and then bent down to find the sandwiches my small operative team had stocked for us. I found them, wrapped in plastic wrap with little packets of mustard and mayonnaise, and I set them on the counter.
“Coffee first?” she queried.
I rotated a half-lidded glare her way. She widened her eyes in question, like she didn’t know why I was being so cranky. Sighing hard, I pointed to her. “Stay. There.”
She held up her bound wrists. “Like I could go anywhere.”
I shuffled around the counters, looking for the coffee maker and grounds, but they weren’t set out on the counter like most house rentals. I spied them in the pantry to my right, across the kitchen and near the back door. It was one of those enormous pantries that looked like it had been a small bedroom at one point, and it had a frosted glass door with “pantry” written over it like it wasn’t already obvious what it was.
I shot Mattie another suspicious look. If I was smart, I’d zip tie her ankles to that chair, but I’d already spent the morning wrestling her into handcuffs, dragging her along to another operation that had been half-finished when I’d found her, and then she’d scraped the rest of my energy clean away with her abominable personality. I gave her a threatening stare. “If you so much as scratch your ass in that chair, I’m tasing you.”
She chuckled, brown eyes bright as she flicked her blond bangs away from them. “Are you this fun in bed, too? ‘Stay there. Don’t move. Orgasm. Or else.’”
I pulled in a bracing breath, willing it to imbue me with a measure of patience. Her laugh chased me as I turned and went into the pantry to grab the coffee maker and pods that went with it. I was in there for maybe five seconds, my hands on the coffeemaker, when the pantry door slammed shut. I dropped the machine and rounded on it, already knowing I’d fucked up.
Thwack. The sound of a chair being jammed against the other side of the pantry door sounded through the enclosed space just as I rammed my body against the glass door. Mattie stood on the other side of the glass door, pink bubblegum pinched between her feral teeth and a pen twirling between her very free hands. Where did she get a pen?
Isla. The “other assignment” I’d dragged Mattie along with. She’d given my uncorked captive a fucking pen.
I tried the handle, but I already knew she’d wedged the back of her chair under it. She shoved the chair tighter with her foot for good measure, grinning. Although my view of her was distorted by the frosted treatment over the glass, I could see enough of her to completely enrage me.
“Open the door,” I ordered, my voice just loud enough for her to hear through the glass.
She gave me a brilliant smile that I knew charmed droves of men and women everywhere she went. “I didn’t hear a ‘please’ in there.”
I leveled a hard glare her way through a decorative line in the frosted glass. “Let me out now, and I’ll go easy on you.”
She laughed, low and soft, and came right up to the glass door so her lush lips were angled up to me. “That’s no fun. Make it rough, baby Ghost.”
I slammed the glass, but she only laughed again, and bringing up the felt-tip pen to the frosted glass, she drew a pair of bunny ears in black ink. Moving fast as I backed away to get a good angle to kick down the door, she scrawled out two words with tallies. And because she was a lot cleverer than she let people see, she wrote backwards so I could read her words. I slammed my foot against the glass, but she finished before I could raise my foot and take another crack at it.
“I will find you, Mattie,” I warned.
She smiled, completely unconcerned. “I escaped an entire fleet of bodyguards in France. I can handle one ghostie.”
I backed up, ready to smash the door and barrel out to full-body tackle her. But then she dropped the pen, winked, and vanished from view. It took me maybe forty seconds to break the door open—which was twenty seconds longer than I expected with a pantry door—and by then, there was no trace of her.
My bunny had escaped.
Again.
I’d been in a cat-and-mouse game for over a year. Although, if you asked me, “cat and mouse” was a bit of a misnomer. For one thing, the expression assumed that the mouse was small and weak—pathetic. But just because I was on the run, it didn’t mean I was the one lacking power in our “relationship.” If anything, I had his handsome neck under my mousy foot.
For another thing, cat and mouse assumed that the cat was toying with its prey, batting it around and playing with the poor creature before it devoured it in one swipe of its clever tongue. But there was no playing here. Ghost had tried to catch me, and he’d even had me between his paws a few times, but in the end, I’d eluded him.
So, was I really in a cat-and-mouse game? Not really. We were in a Ghost and Bunny game, and it was a very different kind of contest. The kind that amused me almost as much as it terrified me, and although I’d managed to slip through his fingers like they were actually incorporeal, I had stayed on my guard.
As fun as it was to watch Ghost’s handsome face turn purple with rage every time I managed to give him the slip, I really hoped that my last stunt had finally deterred him from trying anymore. I had to assume it had, because I’d last seen him in May, and it was October, now. I’d eat my bunny ears if he bothered with me anymore. No matter how much my parents were offering for bounty hunters to pick me up and bring me back to New York, was it really worth the money if I kept handing his toned ass to him?
“Feel like handing someone’s ass to them?” Dylan asked.
I blinked, banishing thoughts of Ghost and his icy blue eyes. The steady hum of chatter and laughter accompanied by Bavarian folk music cranked back to an eleven in my ears, and I looked up from the order counter. Dylan stood in front of me, his soft features pulled into a grimace, and his bushy eyebrows contracted together. I blinked at him. “Do what, now?”
“Ass. Hand it.” He gestured behind him to the crowded Biergarten tent. He was wearing the same lederhosen server’s uniform the other waiters in our tent wore, and it somewhat unkindly accentuated his authentic beer gut.
