Where Winter Finds You (Black Dagger Brotherhood #18)- J.R Ward Page 0,53
do that—”
Trez clapped his mouth shut as the butler recoiled like someone had cursed in front of his grandmahmen.
“Sorry.” Trez put his palms forward. “I, ah, you’re doing great. This is great. This is all so incredibly… great.”
Once again, at least Fritz was fast, but still, the second that last bag was folded flat, Trez wanted to frog-march the butler out the front door. But if suggesting that the doggen needed help was a problem, actually touching the male was going to cause all this forward-motion-back-to-the-front-door to crash to a halt. Grounded in their ancient traditions, Fritz’s kind couldn’t handle any sort of acknowledgment, praise, or physical contact from their masters.
It was like having a hand grenade with a mop around: Very helpful, but you were extremely aware of whether the pin was where it needed to be.
“So thank you, Fritz—”
A strange sound—part thud, part thump—emanated from out behind the house, bringing their attention to the sliding glass doors on the far side of the kitchen table. Through the glass, the security lights come on and illuminated the back deck.
“I think you better go,” Trez said in a low voice. “In case I have to deal with something.”
Fritz bowed low. “Yes, sire.”
And justlikethat the doggen was gone. Which, again, was the good news when it came to the male. Fritz was used to the kinds of emergencies that left bullets and knives in people. He might dawdle with paper bags, but when the shit hit the fan, he knew when to get gone.
As Trez outed his gun again, he was unaware of having reholstered it—and he killed the outside lights with his mind.
The human neighbors didn’t need to see him flashing his piece all around.
Moving through the darkened kitchen, he back-flatted it against the wall by the slider and focused on the backyard—
Freezing in place, he did a double take. “What the…”
With a leap to the slider’s handle, he unlocked the thing and shoved it back on its track. “Are you okay?”
Jumping into the snow on the deck, he tucked his gun and ran over to his female—who, for reasons he could not understand, was lying flat on her back in the snow.
And laughing.
Trez threw himself on his knees and looked up. The window in the bathroom upstairs was wide-open.
“Did you jump?” he said. Which was a ridiculous question. Like she fell out of a double-paned, closed set of Pella? “I mean, why? What—”
“I thought you needed help,” she got out between laughing. “I’m sorry. I just—I don’t know what I thought I would do, but I didn’t hear anything like banging and crashing, so I was worried you were hurt.”
His female lifted her head and indicated her fully clothed body. “I put everything back on, went into the bathroom—I was so nervous, I couldn’t calm myself to dematerialize. I threw up the sash, jumped, and then panicked in midair that the snow wasn’t going to be enough of a cushion. Good thing I managed to get myself turned around or I would have landed on my face—”
Lights came on in the yard next door, and a man in boxers and a flannel robe opened his own slider and piff’d out into the fluffy snow on his own deck.
“You okay over there?” he said.
Behind him, inside his kitchen, a dog the size of a throw cushion was barking in a series of high-alarm, high-register yaps that made Trez question how long that glass slider was going to survive without shattering.
“We’re fine,” Trez’s female said with a grin. “But thanks for asking.”
As the human looked suspicious and opened his mouth—no doubt to ask if 9-1-1 needed to be called—Trez lost his patience with everything and everyone. Reaching into the man’s mind, he threw a patch on the memories of anything strange-noise, strange-sight related, flipped a bunch of switches relegating everything to misinterpretation, and sent Tony Soprano back into his two-story with his little dog and whatever wife was waiting for him upstairs in their bed.
“I hate the suburbs,” Trez muttered as he got up and held his hand to his female. “I really do.”
She accepted his help and brushed the snow off the seat of her pants. “Well, maybe you could move? Although this is a great house.”
With a grunt, he checked out her mobility. “Are you sure you’re okay? Do we need a doctor?”
Batting a hand, she brushed the concern aside. “Oh, God, I’m so perfectly fine. I’ve been jumping out of windows into snow forever.”