I Think We Missed Our Turn - L.A. Witt Page 0,24

giggle. “She can have a few pieces, but be careful—she’ll con you out of everything if you let her.”

“He will,” I said.

“Hey.” Armin shot me a look, but he was blushing, not to mention losing a battle against a smile. To the cat, he said, “Okay, you can have one more piece, but that’s it. One more.”

Another meow.

“She is going to con you out of that whole sandwich,” I said.

“No, she won’t.” He held out another piece for her. “She just gets a little bite, and—hey! What did I say about my fingers?”

From the purring, she didn’t seem to care that she’d nearly bitten him. He made a sound like he was genuinely exasperated by her, but I was pretty sure he’d be giving her another bite before too long. Armin was always so freaking adorable with animals.

As we finished our lunch—and Armin fed Raven again—Zoe said, “Well, we’d better start packing everything. After we do that, would you boys like to see what I’m working on?”

I sat up straighter. “Um, yes, please?” I flicked my eyes to Armin and silently asked him to back me up.

“I can’t say no to a cat who wants my food.” He grinned. “Do you really think I’d say no to you seeing Zoe’s studio?”

Chapter 10

Armin

First things first, now that we’d eaten and relaxed a bit with Zoe, we needed to pack up the art we’d come to collect. She took us into a back room where seven pieces had been arranged beside some boxes and a mountain of packing material. Beside them was a machine for foam packing.

We didn’t use foam packers for a lot of art because certain materials were heat sensitive, but these sculptures were metal, concrete, and stone. They’d be fine. Hell, they’d probably be fine rolling around in the back of the Trailblazer, but they were liable to get scraped or dented, and if we got into a crash, I didn’t want to think about what a Zoe Neelan sculpture could do once it became a missile.

“I wasn’t sure how much space you’d have,” she said, “so I didn’t want to put them all in giant boxes and not be able to fit them. But I think these will all fit if we put them in those boxes.” She gestured at a stack of medium-sized boxes. Mentally measuring them against the space inside the Trailblazer, I was pretty sure we could make it fit.

“Hmm,” I said. “On the way here, I was thinking we could leave the seats up just to put a buffer between some of the boxes, but if they’re foam-packed, that won’t be necessary.”

Marques nodded. “That’ll make it easier to fit our bags in there, too.”

“Perfect. Let’s start with that one.” Zoe gestured at the largest of the pieces—an elegant woman in a flowing skirt made from diamond plate. I’d have to spend some time staring at that one back at the gallery, because it was amazing, but for now, it needed to go in the box.

Zoe put a box on the floor and some gray plastic in the bottom. Once she’d hooked up the foam machine and it started filling the gray plastic bag, she gestured for us to lower the statue in. It was heavy, but between us, we eased it down onto the slowly rising pillow of foam.

“Hold it just like that,” she told us, and she nudged the foam to make sure there was enough underneath the statue. When she was apparently satisfied, she nodded for us to let it rest on the foam.

Then she put another bag over the top, put some foam into it, and we closed the flaps over the top so it would create a perfect lid. Repacking these for a buyer or to bring them back to Zoe would be a snap. In fact, packed this securely, they’d be perfectly safe to ship, but I understood why she was wary of shipping one-of-a-kind pieces of art. A shipping company that would not be named had destroyed a painting my dad had sold for almost twenty thousand dollars a couple of years ago. It was insured, but the loss was devastating to everyone involved.

So, no pressure for us to get seven pieces of Zoe’s work to Virginia Beach without anything getting stolen, without crashing, or without, like, a meteor hitting the Trailblazer. No pressure. None at all.

Packing the remaining pieces was a quick process, and Zoe and Marques dealt with the gallery paperwork. Once that was done, he