“We can close it off,” he said, and she felt how carefully he spoke.
“But I don’t want to. I want to get used to it. I want to have gotten used to it fifty years ago. But we don’t get that time back. So what I’m saying is, I love my house. I’m sure you love yours. It’s not fair to ask you to give yours up. So either it’s the planes, trains, cars, or bus, or . . .”
“Like I said, it doesn’t have to be either-or. We can spend some months here, then there. I like this town. I like the people. I like your friends. Took to ‘em once they stopped looking at me as if, and I quote your detective here, I was a wall of plague rats. Which I don’t resent, because they did it out of loyalty. So, time here, and when it gets hot and dry and the fire season starts, we’ll go to the ranch, where the autumn nights are cool, and the colors spectacular.”
Godiva sat up again, more cautiously this time. “But . . . one thing I’ve read over and over, is that ranch work never ends. Can you be away for months?”
“I’ve been a boss only in name only for years now. Alejo has been running things for ten, fifteen years. And even he has been traveling for Guardian business off and on. We’ve got residents who could use a turn at managing. It’s all negotiable. Godiva, you’re too important to me. We’ll figure out how to make it work.”
He leaned forward and took her face in his hands. “I, too, wish we could get those fifty years of silence back, but since nobody I know has a time-travel power, we just have to make up for it.”
He kissed her long and thoroughly.
They napped with limbs entwined. Despite still being sore from Cang’s rough treatment, Godiva dropped into sleep with that wonderful feeling of wishing the moment would never end, then remembering, oh, wait, things are just going to keep getting better.
They woke at sunset to an empty house, and found a tasty soup left in the crockpot on warm, with fresh-baked bread on the cutting board. Godiva was still sensitive to the miracle of Rigo being in her space. It still seemed like she was caught in a delightful dream world. Now that the urgency about Long Cang was over, she could enjoy everything about Rigo. Once again she sensed that he was doing the same when his eyes turned toward her, brimming with laughter and love.
All the house guests were elsewhere, for which Godiva was grateful, though she felt invisible question marks hovering around her. They took their dinner out onto the patio behind the house, overlooking her garden, lit some lanterns, and when they sat down, Godiva said, “We’ve got to figure out what to say to my houseguests, none of whom know anything about shifters.”
“Whatever you’re comfortable with.” Rigo’s voice was as soft as the summer air.
“Then we’ll keep it simple,” Godiva stated. “We squabbled, I ran off, you tried to find me, we both got lost in those pre-internet days. Until you read one my books and someone put you onto me. I hate to be a walking cliché, especially when it comes to what I call the Stupid Plot, the Big Misunderstanding. But I buttered that bread, so now I have to lie in it.”
Rigo laughed, accepting that as their story, as she’d known he would.
They didn’t stay up much past that. She tried to hide her stiffness, until he grinned and said, “How about experimenting with that bath in there?”
By the time he was done with her, she felt like her bones had been magically smoothed and her muscles combed like silk. She was scarcely aware of the two of them pouring themselves into the water bed, his arms around her as he whispered, “Are you all right with me taking a predawn flight?”
She had just enough strength to mutter, “Is that how Mr. B gets his exercise?”
Rigo’s soft chuckle stirred the top of her hair. “Mr. B., heh. Judging by the hum inside me, my basilisk likes that.”
She pressed her ear up against Rigo’s chest, hoping to hear the hum, and tumbled into slumber.
When she woke, Rigo was gone. She shut her eyes, trying to imagine him in the air, and for a heartbeat got a glimpse of the dimming lights over Los Angeles, spread like an emperor’s treasure below. She sensed his burst of joy in working his wings to increase speed until the wind whistled, then spreading them to ride the air currents high in the sky, as he contemplated with happiness coming back to his mate.
She squinched her eyes shut and tried to send him a pulse of love back. Did it work? She’d have to ask. She stretched deliciously, her body feeling far less achy than she had expected. Was that due to Rigo’s magic fingers or the magic mate bond?
“Both,” she decided, and was about to get up when her phone rang.
It was the ringtone for general friends. “Hello?”
“Godiva!” It was Mattie’s breathless voice. “It’s not too early, is it?”
“Perfect timing.” Remembering that Mattie had been one of her recruits, she added, “I hope nothing’s wrong?”
“Not at all! No, no, no, no, it’s just the opposite, oh boy, you have no idea . . .” She heard squidgy phone-bobbling noises, then Mattie stage-whispered, “I didn’t get a chance to call yesterday, because, between one thing and another—but wait, I should probably start at the beginning, shouldn’t I, or I’ll get all tangled up, and forget where I was, so anyway you got up so fast to follow those poor people yesterday that I wondered if you knew, and so I thought maybe I’d better ask you, but I wasn’t sure how to do it and not get myself into a sticky situation, if
you know what I mean, and I was thinking over what I should say when my daughter called about my nephew who she saw over at Bridge Way walking like a zombie, if you get my drift, and I got distracted between one thing and another, and . . .”
“When Mattie finally got to the point,” Godiva said to Jen, Doris, and Bird later that afternoon, “it turns out she saw Long Cang grab me. She’s a shifter! Her entire family, they’re all shifters.” She swung her head toward Doris and Bird. “I know you two have met Mattie.”
“She’s donated clothes at my synagogue’s drives to collect for the homeless,” Doris said.
Bird spoke up. “She used to be a regular at the shop I worked at. She made all her own clothes.”
Godiva turned from one to the other. “Did you know she was a shifter?”