Even as Sinclair complained about the hour, his gaze was on the street. “Boast much, Cuddles?”
She flushed with anger and embarrassment, at the nickname, at his tone, and at the dig. Several cutting responses flew through her mind. As the silence lengthened, she caught herself short and laughed. “Sorry. You totally have a point there.”
He smiled. “Thanks. You do, too, but it would go down better with doughnuts.”
“I’ll try to remember that next time you’re snoring when I’m going through the drive-through. And I’m going to pretend you didn’t call me Cuddles,” she said.
They fell into a comfortable silence. Laura was tempted to quiz him on his undercover persona but resisted the urge. She had to acknowledge to herself he knew it. In fact, she had quizzed him far longer the previous night than she needed to. He had it down, but her own anxiety kept her at him. On several points, he had become so comfortable with the constructed history that his voice resonated near truth when he spoke. Now, that impressed her. As she had gone to sleep, she allowed herself to hope everything would work out for him.
As the caffeine kicked in, Sinclair eased straighter in his seat. He tapped his fingers to the beat of a song playing on the satellite radio. “Do you like to dance?”
“Sometimes,” Laura said.
He glanced at her. “That’s kind of a yes-or-no question.”
She pulled her hair back and flipped it up from where she was leaning on it. “Not really. There have been times when I’ve liked current music enough to dance to it and time periods when I didn’t. I liked the stuff in the seventies and some of the eighties.”
Sinclair cocked an eyebrow. “Time periods? How old are you anyway?”
Laura pursed her lips. “Umm . . . right now, Mariel is twenty-eight.”
Amused, he grunted. “Okay. How old was Janice Craw-ford?”
Laura lifted her eyes in thought. “Well, I wanted to create a SWAT persona who was old enough to have some experience but not too old to be considered a washout. She was twenty-eight.”
“Uh-huh. And Laura Blackstone?”
“Oh, Laura Blackstone is older. Twenty-eight and a half.”
He tilted his head at her. “I like younger women.”
She smirked back at him. “Oh? And how old are you?”
He rubbed his chin. “I’m going to go with thirty.”
She let a smile linger on her lips to hide a sudden sense of unease. Her truth-sensing ability detected a fluctuation. His statement should have registered as an outright lie, but it didn’t. Granted, he had been joking, but humor didn’t hide underlying responses. “That’s not what your birth certificate says.”
He arched his eyebrows with a playful look. “Really, Mariel Tate? My birth certificate might be altered?”
She pressed her lips into a thin line to hide her annoyance. She hadn’t considered that his biographical details might have been altered. Cress wasn’t the only person in the world who was good at constructing fake life histories. “Thirty, is it, then? It must depress you to be so old.”
He laughed as he shook his head. “Nah. It works out ’cause, like I said, I like younger women.”
“Then maybe you should—” Laura began.
“There she is,” Sinclair interrupted.
Fallon Moor had emerged from the entrance of her building and turned up the sidewalk. Laura mentally chastised herself for being distracted. She had not seen the brownie leave the building. Moor stopped at her car, parked a few spaces up, and unlocked the door. Sinclair started to open his door. “Not here. She’s sufficiently high-profile that Legacy might have security watching her,” she said.
He closed the door. “I didn’t notice anyone.”
“Me, either. That doesn’t mean they don’t have someone in one of these buildings.” Laura started the SUV. When Moor pulled out of her space, Laura merged with the traffic behind her. She watched her mirrors for several blocks, but no one appeared to be following. Moor cut across the lane, parked her car on the corner of a side street, and turned on the emergency lights. Laura pulled into the space in front of a fire hydrant a few car lengths away while Moor entered a small tea shop.
“What’s she doing?” Laura asked.
Sinclair narrowed his eyes. “She’s getting tea . . . and . . . wait . . . a croissant. It’s definitely a croissant. I’m thinking she’s secretly French.”
Laura pretended to be impressed. “You’re good.”
He grinned. “Want to know how good?”
She rolled her eyes and got out of the car. “Let’s go.”
They both slipped on sunglasses as they strolled up to the shop. The glasses were clichéd government-agent intimidation, but they looked good. Moor shouldered her way slowly out of the shop with her cup of tea in one hand and the croissant in the other.
Laura held up her badge. “Fallon Moor? Agent Tate, InterSec. This is Agent Sinclair. We’d like to talk to you.”
Moor froze, her expression hard-edged for a second before slipping into puzzled confusion. “InterSec? What’s that?”
Laura didn’t need her sensing ability to pick up the obvious subterfuge. “Let’s not play games, Moor. We’re enforcing a Homeland Security warrant. You’ve overstayed your visa.”
Moor’s eyes began to bulge. Cornering a brownie like this was breaking with routine, especially since Moor was on the run from the law. Laura recognized the first stages of a boggart mania as the panic at being confronted set in. Laura took a casual step to her left to increase the distance between herself and Sinclair. “Let’s keep this calm, Moor.”
“You must be mistaking me for someone else. It happens to brownies all the time,” she said.
“Let’s talk about that back at the station,” Sinclair said.
Moor stepped back with indecision. “You’re making a mistake.”
“No, you are,” said Laura. Before Moor could react, Laura held her hand out and muttered in Gaelic. A small tangle of essence shot from her palm and settled over Moor. The brownie’s body flexed and pulsed as the boggart mania tried to kick in, then went still as the spell activated. Moor’s eyes glazed dully with sleep.
“That was simple,” Sinclair said.
Laura removed the tea and croissant from Moor’s still hands and placed them on the window ledge of the tea shop. “There was no point in prolonging it. She knew the warrant was an excuse.”
“So, to be clear, we have a legal right to kidnap people, right?” he asked.
She shot him a mildly exasperated look. “It’s an arrest, Jono. The warrant is real.”
He splayed his hand against his chest. “That’s a relief. I was afraid without a warrant, we’d get in trouble for spelling the woman into a stupor.”
She ignored him and muttered in Gaelic again. Moor rose an inch or so off the ground. Laura gestured to Sinclair. “Care to do the honors?”
Sinclair took Moor’s elbow and coasted her toward the SUV. “This reminds me of our first date.”
Laura fell into step on the opposite side. “It wasn’t a date.”
“We had drinks.”
“We had a fight. Threats were involved,” she said.
He sighed. “Yeah, it was pretty hot.”
She shook her head. “You are incorrigible.”
Sinclair brightened with faux excitement. “Encourageable? I knew you couldn’t resist me.”
“And you’re hard of hearing. Another flaw.”
She opened the rear passenger door of the SUV and helped Sinclair lift Moor onto the backseat. Sinclair leaned inside and buckled Moor in. He pulled out and grinned down at Laura. “Maybe we can talk about me over dinner?”
She gave him a sweet smile. “That will double your usual audience.”
He chuckled as they resumed their seats. “Then we can go dancing. I bet you’ll like new music. I can show you some pretty good moves.”