Total pages in book: 82
Estimated words: 78507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 78507 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 393(@200wpm)___ 314(@250wpm)___ 262(@300wpm)
I don’t know what to do with that feeling. He makes me nervous. He’s actually too hot, in a way, and besides that, he seems to have an inability to just be nice. I’m not sure I like nice, but I definitely don’t like whatever the hell this attitude is either. All growly, dominant, stompy, demanding, rude, terse…
“I can’t talk right now,” I tell him. “I’m at work.”
“What the hell are you talking about, Darcy? You’re a cadet at the academy.”
“Not anymore, I’m not. Not after everything that has happened lately,” I tell him. “There’s no place for me there. I have to be an independent woman. I have to support myself.”
“What are you babbling about?”
He interrupts me while I’m explaining, which is really annoying, not to mention condescending. I kick the bike back into life, and that’s when he makes his biggest mistake yet. He tries to stop me by grabbing me and dragging me off it. I feel his big hands wrap around my arm as he prepares to haul me into his custody.
Big mistake. Huge.
The thing with Delivery 2 Go bikes is they’re expensive. They’re expensive because they’re custom made with all sorts of features that help deliveries go more smoothly. I’m discovering this for myself on the job, as it were. One of the features is an electrical field that activates when someone not wearing Delivery 2 Go livery steps into the immediate radius of the bike and tries to assault the rider.
As Kirin grabs me, I see a blue snap of electric light wrap around his arm. Kirin goes flying backwards like he’s been donkey kicked. Lucky for him, he’s wearing protective gear, because if he weren’t he’d have some nasty Eclipse special road rash.
He curses as he stands up.
This entire scene is not going unobserved. A little crowd of people has decided that they need to use the alley and is flowing past us, because that’s how things are in a city like Eclipse. Nothing happens unobserved.
A woman laughs as she catches the tail end of our conversation.
“He likes you? Girl, good for you. Nobody has time for being liked. Liking is for ice cream. A man wants you? He better crave you.”
To Kirin’s credit, he doesn’t answer back to her. He keeps his eyes locked on me. Hell, maybe it’s not to his credit. He looks focused and annoyed. Oh, well. He can deal with that on his own. I gun the engine, toss the wrapper at him, and swing back into the flow of traffic. I’ve got deliveries to make.
CHAPTER 8
Einar
“Good news,” Kirin says as he swings his bike back to park beside us. “I found Darcy.”
“You went looking for a burrito and you found our mate?” Rafe snorts the question in disbelief.
“Our mate is a…” Kirin’s face performs contortions of annoyance, and I think maybe pride. “She’s a fucking handful.”
“Where is she?” I try not to snap the question with too much impatience, but we don’t need a breakdown of her temperament right now. We need her location.
“I don’t know where she is now, but she’s moonlighting as a D2G driver. She says she’s left the academy.”
“You can’t leave the academy,” I say. “That’s not how it works. So she’s gone AWOL.”
“To work as a delivery driver, yes. It was her that stole my burrito. What are the odds of that?”
“That a one-woman crime spree would do crime to us at some point? Fairly high, I’d say,” I sigh.
We only met Darcy a day or so ago, and I know she is our mate, but I don’t think I have ever encountered a woman so entirely troublesome. She is young and unsettled, and I hope with a firm hand and some real structure she might settle down. But then again, people send their wayward sons to the academy all the time in order for them to experience structure and a firm hand. She grew up there, so I don’t know what to make of that.
“What corporation did you say she’s working for?”
“Delivery 2 Go.”
“We need to go and get her. I say we go to the Delivery 2 Go place and we wait for her to show up.”
“Can’t do that,” Kirin says. “There’s so much security around those places. You really can’t lay hands on a courier unless they want you to. Trust me. I found out the hard way.”
“Then we go talk to the man in charge there and buy out her contract.”
“No deal.”
The man in front of me is covered in dust from a bag of corn chips, which his hand remains ensconced in as he conducts a very unsatisfying conversation with us.
This man is not young. He is not in good shape. He could not best a single one of us in a duel. I doubt he could beat us over a hundred-yard brisk walk, and yet he somehow has the nerve to refuse us what we want.