Alpha Omega 03 - Fair Game

one-person benches, unlike the table, looked sturdy enough and didn’t creak beneath his weight, though she saw him rock a little to make sure it would hold. “Except for your ring, you don’t wear them. And the ring is not worth four thousand.”
    “That one necklace, right? Wearing it wouldn’t make me cut in front of some poor, hungry kid.” He was playing with her, he was, teasing her because she was afraid to wear the jewelry his father had given her when they were married. Her wolf wanted to wiggle in joy and go hunt something to celebrate. Anna took a bite of sandwich. “Though maybe I’d have to put on the bracelet, too.”
    “No,” he said. “Just the bracelet would do. But you don’t wear them.”
    Her necklace was covered in at least twice the number of diamonds and several larger stones. She absorbed the idea of the bracelet itself being worth more than four thousand dollars, and was doubly grateful that she hadn’t wornthem. She tended to play with anything hanging around her neck—what if she broke the necklace?
    “There’s a time and place for stuff like that.” Anna tried not to show him how appalled she was at the value of the jewelry. She preferred to downplay the material changes in her life since she’d met and mated with Charles. They weren’t the important changes—if occasionally she found them more difficult than the real ways her life had altered. “When you’re going shopping isn’t a good time for jewels, especially if that makes you think that pushing around little kids is okay.”
    He raised his eyebrows. “Oh? When
were
you planning on wearing your diamonds?” Charles sounded amused. He knew that she was planning on never wearing them now that she knew what they were worth.
    “Maybe if we were meeting the Queen of England.” She thought about it for a moment. “Or if I really needed to outshine someone I didn’t like.” She took a few more bites of a sandwich that needed a little something…onion or radish, maybe. Something with a bite.
    She really couldn’t imagine a situation dire enough to risk wearing something like that set, especially not if the
bracelet
was worth four thousand dollars. What if the clasp gave way?
    “Ah. That would be never?” It didn’t seem to bother him one way or the other.
    Anna thought about it seriously. “Maybe if I needed to intimidate someone—like if my brother decided to remarry and my dad told me he didn’t like her so I had to fly to Chicago and drive her off. I would even cut
her
in line for a hot dog while I was wearing them. But she wouldn’t be seven, either.”
    Charles smiled. It wasn’t a laugh or a grin. But it wasn’t his you’re-going-to-die-before-you-breathe-your-next-gulp-of-air smile, either, which was as close to a real smile as she’d seen on his face for a while.
    She gave a contented sigh and tapped the toe of her boot against the leg of his suit. They’d have been more comfortable in casual clothes, but then they’d have had to go change. And she was afraid that going back to the condo would give him an excuse to shut down again.
    “It’s all right,” he said. “We can go change and do some more touristy stuff.”
    He was reading her through their bond. Hiding the warm fuzzies
that
gave her behind a distrustful look, Anna took a bite of her sandwich and then said, “Okay. But only if you’ll agree to do this with me.” She took her now-bedraggled map out of her pocket and tapped a finger on an advertisement.
    Charles looked, heaved a long sigh. “I should have known we wouldn’t get out of here without doing the imitation trolley car cemetery tour complete with costumed ghouls.”
    “
Not
in my territory,” snarled someone behind her.
    As it seemed an unlikely response to Charles’s pseudo-reluctant agreement, Anna initially assumed it was directed at someone else. But Charles tilted his head and lowered his eyelids, the muscles tightening subtly in his shoulders, so Anna turned around in her seat to see who had spoken.
    In rows along the outdoor marketplace were dozens of dark green wagons, resembling nothing so much as the covered wagons in her father’s beloved old Western movies. The wagons served as kiosks where people sold T-shirts, purses, or other small portable goods. Standing on the top of the one nearest them was a young-looking black man, fine-boned and slight, watching them—watching Charles, anyway—with yellow eyes as the strings of beading supplies hanging