to do that was for him to open the bond between them. Bran didn't want the feds scared of werewolves, and Charles, especially the past few months, was really scary.
If he were just doing it for business's sake, he would have closed their link down when they left the hotel, but he hadn't. And he'd touched her.
Bran, it seemed, had indeed found a cure - or at least a bandage - for his son.
"What?" Charles asked. Evidently she'd been staring at him too long. He reached up and tucked a flyaway piece of her hair behind her ear.
She wanted to grab his hand and hold it to her, wanted to climb into his arms and feel them close around her. But she was afraid if she drew his attention to it, he'd close her off again. So she kept her hands to herself and bounced up and down on the balls of her feet a couple of times instead. She needed to keep him off his game, keep him thinking about other things - and she had just the thing to do it with.
"Let's go exploring." She pulled the city map she'd taken from the hotel's lobby this morning out of her pocket and opened it up.
"I know Boston," said Charles, with a slightly pained look around to see if anyone had noticed the map. It was bright orange and highly unlikely to evade even the most casual glance.
"But I don't," she told him, enjoying the expression on his face. Being mated to a wolf two hundred years her elder meant that she seldom got to see him disconcerted. "And since I want to do the exploring..." He would take her to interesting places, she knew. Tomorrow that would be good, and doubtless she'd enjoy it more than anything she found herself. But today she wanted to be more...spontaneous.
"If you run around with that bright orange map in your hand," Charles told her, "everyone will think you're a tourist."
"When was the last time you were a tourist?" she asked archly.
He just looked at her. Charles, she had to agree, was not tourist material.
"Right," Anna told him. "Buck up. You might even enjoy it."
"You might as well have 'hapless victim' tattooed across your forehead," he muttered.
She grabbed his hand and pulled him across the street to King's Chapel and the oldest graveyard in Boston - according to her map.
TWO HOURS LATER, she was vying for food in the North Market building of Faneuil Hall Marketplace with what felt like four hundred tourist groups while Charles waited nearby with his back against the wall. The three feet of empty space around him was probably the only space open in the whole place - but that was Charles; people just didn't crowd him. Smart people.
Since most of the tourists in front of the booth where she'd chosen to grab lunch came all the way to Anna's waist, she was pretty sure she was in no danger, but you couldn't tell it by the focused attention her mate aimed at the children.
If you can't tell that I'm looking at something on you that is precisely on level with the little ones' heads - his voice in her head had a rough purr - then you need your eyes checked.
Her jaw dropped. Was he flirting with her? Anna turned her head to meet his gaze, which dropped immediately to her rear end. She jerked her head back before he saw her smirk - or her red cheeks. He had been checking out the crowd. She'd seen him do it, seen him take a good long look at each of the kids.
But Charles certainly wasn't lying to her, either, so all the rest had been automatic, but checking her out had been on purpose. She smiled and felt her wolf relax into the rightness of flirting with her mate.
She had plenty of time for her cheeks to cool. It took a while before she managed to order food - mostly because she took pity on an overwhelmed teacher who seemed to be in charge of a million kids all by herself. Anna escaped at last with a pair of sandwiches and a couple of bottles of water and let Charles escort her outside the building to hunt for someplace to sit and eat.
"We could have gone into a real restaurant," Charles said, taking a bottle of water she handed him. "Or waited for the starving hordes to disperse before joining the fray." He sounded serious, as