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I did look up at him then and caught him running a hand over his face. “Soon?” I asked without any real hope.
McMahon sighed. “No. Not likely. We don’t know who’s targeting you, and I’m not willing to risk it.”
“So what? I’m just supposed to stay here? No offense”—I gestured to the cup of water—“but the hospitality sucks.”
“Sorry, and no, you aren’t staying here.”
“Safe house?”
A scoff. “Yeah, right.” Another sigh. “I called in a favor.”
“What kind of favor?”
“The kind of favor that is going to suck every tiny pleasure I usually get to enjoy right out of my future.”
“Oof, sounds serious. Does that mean you’re taking me home?”
The door had opened silently since the latch hadn’t caught, and I didn’t even realize there was someone standing thereuntil the sexiest voice I’d ever heard rumbled through the room, bouncing off every surface so I felt like I was surrounded. “No, I am.”
I whipped my head toward the door so fast I felt something pop in my neck, but the pain was worth it. The most gorgeous man I’d ever met was standing in the doorway, blocking out all the light from the hall. I was tall, but he was taller, and he had to have close to a hundred pounds of muscle on me. His eyes and hair were dark, and there was a large, almost black patch on his neck. If someone didn’t know, they’d think it was some kind of botched tattoo cover-up, but I knew what a mark like that meant. Everyone in the Pacific Northwest did.
He was an orca shifter.
An orca shifter with a killer smile that he shot my way when he caught me taking him in from the top of his head to the tips of his heavy black boots.
When I finally took a breath, I realized he was the source of the seawater-and-kelp scent, and some instinct tried to push me up out of the chair so I could climb him like a tree and find out if he smelled even better up close. But I squelched the urge as much as I could, white-knuckling the lip of my chair.
“Felix White, this is Nero Hunter.”
It was my turn to scoff. “You’re kidding, right?” I gave the massive man who’d now crossed his arms over his chest some serious side-eye. My brain sometimes made random connections between things, and I couldn’t help that my synapses started firing the second I heard his name. The irony that his last name was Hunter when his nonshifter cousins were some of the ocean’s top predators wasn’t lost on me, but my mind had latched on to something else.
“What?” The single word was a delicious rumble.
I pointed at myself. “White.” I pointed to him. “Unless my Italian is failing me, nero is black, right? Which is funny becauseyou’re”—I shot a quick glance toward McMahon, who was watching the exchange like a spectator at a tennis match—“a?—”
“A sea panda.” Nero raised an eyebrow and smiled.
My mouth dropped open at the joke, but I wasn’t sure if I should laugh. Holy crap, a man that big shouldn’t have a smile that damn pretty, and dazed as I was, it took a second for me to get it together enough to speak. “Um, not what I was going to say, but… I guess. Yeah.”
“Hmm.” Nero looked at me, assessing me with something hungry and predatory in his eyes, which made sense because, as far as shifter species went, he was one hundred percent predator to my prey. I mean, I held my own among the small predators, but I was a teeny little otter to his giant carnivorous whale. A shiver skated down my spine as the thought of him bending me over the metal table and devouring me in a different way flashed through my imagination.
What the actual fuck was wrong with me?
“Nero?” McMahon asked when the huge man said nothing else.
“Yeah. I’ll do it.”
I’d lost the plot a little, and my mind was maybe still a little in the gutter. “Do what?”
“Take you home with me, Lucky.”
The way he’d said that made me shiver again, thinking of how he might mean that in a different context, but I tried to shake the delicious mental images away. “Lucky?”
He smirked, showing some teeth. “Unless my Latin is failing me, Felix means lucky, right?”
A small gasp slipped past my lips. Oh shit. Hot, huge, and smart? I was in big, big trouble. “Uh, right.”
“Okay. Excellent.” McMahon pushed himself up from the table, which groaned under the pressure. “That’s settled. Felix, Nero will take you back to his place. We already took your cellphone, and we’d advise you to lie low until we know where the threat is coming from. Nero and his brothers will keep you safe, and he knows how to contact me if you need me.”
