Lark doesn’t smile. If anything, she looks a bit disappointed when she lowers her mask and raises the safety glasses onto her forehead to eye me as though I’ve ruined her hopes by showing up at her door. “Hi.” The dog rises to stand between us, its posture stiff as though the stocky legs have been cast in steel beneath the fur. If she gives the right command, I’m pretty sure Lark could ask the beast to rip my throat out and it would happily oblige. “Go lie down.”
The dog gives me a dirty look and takes a step closer before it drops to the floor with a huff, its legs askew.
“What is it?” I ask, shifting my attention to Lark as the beast drills its glare into the side of my face.
“Some would call it a dog.”
“What kind of dog.”
“American Akita.”
“He looks … broken,” I say, taking in his wonky legs that seem bent at uncomfortable angles.
“He’s an Akita. It’s what they do.”
“What’s his name?”
“Bentley.”
“Bentley?” I snort a laugh. “Let me guess, the last car you crashed before the Escalade?”
Lark glares at me then turns away, smoothing her hand across the table. “Bentley Beetham.” The dog lets out a long sigh as though he’s heard this explanation a thousand times before. He’s clearly just as done with me as she already is. “Ornithologist. Mountaineer. He climbed Everest in 1924. But my dad was more interested in how he’d rappel down cliffs with a rope around his waist so he could photograph gannets with a camera that probably weighed half as much as he did.”
“Bit of a twitcher, is he?” I ask, and when Lark casts me a sharp glance over her shoulder I smile. “Your dad. A bird watcher.”
“Yeah. What was your first clue?” Larks says, her voice dripping with sarcasm.
“When do I meet him? I’ll bring some binoculars and birdseed. Fionn should have some to spare.”
Lark shakes her head, her eyes trained on her hand as she sweeps the dust from the table’s surface. She doesn’t answer at all, so I take a few steps into the room with a wide berth around the dog, absorbing the details of what seems to be her hobby space. There are unopened cans of quick-curing epoxy resin stacked beside a steel counter where tools lay next to folded fabric and boxes of hardware. Nails. Screws. Crafting wire in gold and silver and copper and pink. Paintbrushes in mason jars stained with a rainbow of dried splashes. And glitter. Pots and pots and pots of glitter, in every color glitter can possibly be made. Gold most of all.
“Big fan of sparkles?” I ask as I pick up a pot of gold flecks and twist it in the light. The glitter sticks to the walls of the jar like a threat.
“You came down here to harass me about glitter?”
“Actually, I came to talk about the plan. We have a lot to figure out. Where do you want to start?” I set the pot down and pull a worn metal stool from beneath the table. When I’m seated facing her, I undo my custom stropping belt and loop the metal ring around my middle finger to pull the strip of leather taut.
“Umm, not with getting naked, that’s for sure.”
“You wish, duchess,” I say with a wink and a grin as I take my switchblade from my pocket and start to run the edge across the leather, sharpening the polished steel. “I mean for real. Where do you want to start? Probably best to not Blunder Barbie our way through this situation of ours, don’t you think?”
Lark eyes me over her shoulder and I feel the burn of her gaze as it slides across my face, down to the ink that covers my arms, to the new wedding band on my finger and back again. “I guess you had a point about meeting my family. We’d better get that done first before they slit your throat and cremate you in an industrial batch oven.”
“That … that escalated quickly.”
Lark shrugs. “Wouldn’t be the first time they tried that, according to my auntie Ethel, anyway.”
“You mean the sweet old lady Ethel from yesterday? That Ethel?”
With a dismissive flick of her hand, Lark lowers the safety glasses onto her nose. “Yeah but like, who knows with her. I don’t think the rotary batch ovens get hot enough to cremate someone. But they’d do a pretty good job at the killing part.” Lark shoots me a bright, untroubled grin before she pulls the mask over her nose and turns on the sander to scour the surface close to one end of the table. “We should go over to my parents’ place on Sunday though,” she says over the whine of the sander. “Family brunch, rain or shine.”
“Nothing like diving into the deep end. Maybe we should practice before then? You know, to be convincing and shit?”
“If you mean, ‘maybe we should have sex,’ you can fuck right off.”
I snort, though the image of my tattooed hands on her soft thighs unexpectedly bursts through my mind. “I mean, maybe we should try pretending we can stand each other in a public setting. I like not dying.”
“You’re not the one whose family is being actively killed off,” Lark says. A spike of protective rage instantly replaces the desire I just felt. “So yeah, I also don’t think it’s wise to leave it longer than we have to. For my sake or for yours.”
“Right. The batch oven.”
“Exactly.” Lark glances over her shoulder at me as she continues swirling the sander across the table. Her gaze lingers on me for a long moment and I should probably mention something about how she’s about to make the table surface uneven, but it feels like the words have slipped right off my tongue. “We’ll need to be convincing with my family,” she says before I can cobble a sentence together. “Do you think you’re capable of that?”
One corner of my mouth turns up in a cocky grin. “Are you?”
Lark rolls her eyes. My smile spreads. Something about getting under her skin is addictive. Every time I do, it feels like I’ve sneaked beneath her defenses to run amok in a place most people never even see.
But as I’ve quickly learned, she’s never one to be outdone. “Bitch, please. I’ve had years of practice,” she says.
My laugh seems to startle her. The sander growls against the table to accompany the lethal look she gives me.
“I can’t wait to see how quickly this whole thing will be feckin’ banjaxed.”
“I’m guessing ‘banjaxed’ is bad?” she asks, and my brows raise in affirmation. “Well then, if it all goes tits up, it won’t be because I’m the one who couldn’t pull it off. And I can guarantee it won’t be me in the batch oven. So I guess you’d better not fuck it up.”
Lark gives me a saccharine smile beneath her mask, one I can see in her eyes, the way they narrow and crinkle at the corners. I reply with a dark smirk of my own. If she thinks I can’t play this game with her folks, she’s wrong. I’ll make this the best goddamn parental first meeting she’s ever had, so good that even she’ll think she’s fallen in love with me.
… Probably.
Fuck.
Lark pulls me out of my spiraling doubts when she says, “What about your boss? I’m assuming we’ll need to meet him too.”
All that amusement I felt while teasing her only moments ago snuffs out as though she just flipped a feckin’ switch. The thought of taking Lark to meet Leander has slithered around in my mind since Sloane and Rowan’s wedding. It’s swum in the murk of all the other worries that came along with this insane plan, but this is the first time it’s landed a bite.
“Yes,” I reply, my grip on the blade handle so tight that my hand aches. “He doesn’t expect to see an actual romance—”
“Thank God.”
“—but he will want business assurances. Likely a financial commitment.”
Lark gives me a single sharp nod. Her gaze doesn’t waver from mine. “Give me the paperwork. I’ll get it done.”
“Leander Mayes is seriously fucked up, Lark. Even if he wants something from you, you can’t count yourself as safe, yeah?”
“I’ll be fine,” she says, her eyes narrowing behind the safety glasses. “I said I’ll get it done, and I will.”
Though I hate to admit it, I admire her determination. Lark doesn’t falter, even when I expect her to. But I don’t know why I keep thinking she’ll break apart when she never has, not once since the first time I met her. She could have cowered from me that night, but instead she got all up in my face with her Budget Batman shite. I trapped her in my trunk and she feckin’ escaped. The moment I realized she was gone, I double-backed and zigzagged the country roads, searching for her until dawn. Every time I’ve argued with her since then, she’s either hit back just as hard or let my barbs slide over her shoulders like they were nothing more than silk.
“All right, duchess. Once you sign your soul to the devil, we’ll use Leviathan resources to track down this killer of yours. We’d better get on with meeting Leander as soon as we can after your family. He travels a lot, so I’ll get the details of what he wants and when he’ll be around so that you can have it ready in advance.”
Lark nods before she pulls her attention away from me. The moment she looks down at the table, she jolts as though shocked, her gasp audible despite the sound of the machine.
I’ve taken two hurried steps toward her before I even realize what I’m doing, my blade forgotten on the floor and the belt tapping against my thigh. I’m nearly at her side when that giant dog jumps to his feet, again putting his body between us.
“Are you okay?” I ask as she switches the sander off. Lark has the machine still clutched in one hand as she slaps the other down on the table, her gaze caught on the surface. She lets go of the sander to pull her safety glasses and mask off, but she doesn’t look my way. “Did you hurt yourself?”
“No. Nope. Totally fine.”
She doesn’t sound fine at all. “You sure about that, duchess?”
“Very sure.”
“Something wrong with the sander? I can have a look.” I take a few slow, careful steps around Bentley, but Lark tries to wave me off. “I’m pretty good with taking things like that apart, I can probably fix it—”
“No. I’m good. I just …” Lark’s entire body is tense, from the palm she presses her weight into, to her tight shoulders, to her lips that are set in a grim line that traps whatever words she was about to say.
“You just …?”
“I just realized I should put a star right here.” Lark nods down to her hand where it’s splayed across the scoured epoxy, but she doesn’t lift it away, not even when I edge into her space to stop at her shoulder. “Yep. Right there. A big black glittery star.”
“Okay … well … go for it.”
“I will.”
“Then what’s stopping you?”
“I don’t want to lose my place. It has to go right here. Yep. This exact spot. I can feel it.” A grimace flickers across her face before it transforms into a smile that’s both pained and a bit … deranged. “There’s a star-shaped cake tin in the kitchen, second cupboard to the left of the stove. Can you please go grab it for me?”
“You have a cake tin shaped like a giant star? Why does that not surprise me.”
“Just please go and get it, would you?”
“What’s that smell …?”
A sudden blush ignites in Lark’s cheeks. “Bentley. He farted.”