Catarina’s head came up and she looked around Poetry Slam. It was crowded, but she knew she would always, always, know when Ridley was in a room, and he hadn’t come in. They spent a lot of time together, mostly in her warehouse. His latest endeavor was tiling the shower and putting in plumbing.

“I don’t have a boyfriend,” she denied.

David took another order and then nudged her. “Seriously, Cat, his lovesick poems are getting hard to take. All that unrequited love pouring out for the world to see. You’ve got to put the man out of his misery and go out on a date with him.”

She took a breath. He wasn’t talking about Ridley. Ridley came every night to walk her home, but he stayed in the corner after he ordered his coffee, reading. He made certain she was safe walking home, but he never acted interested in her publicly. And since that one brief kiss at breakfast, he hadn’t made any other moves.

He did spar with her a lot. She knew she was improving. He showed her all kinds of self-defense moves. He was an exacting teacher and he didn’t like it if she messed up. He sometimes scowled at her, his golden eyes glittering with anger.

That will get you dead if you don’t do the move right. Pay attention to what you’re doing, Cat. If your head isn’t in the game, we can do this another day.

He said that a lot. She always paid more attention and tried harder. She kept to her routine, working out on her own, running before work, going to the shooting range as often as she had the money for. She slept a lot easier with the security system. Ridley had placed the monitor right by her bed so when she activated the system, she could see each individual area the cameras covered. She could zoom in and she could record.

Ridley always walked her home, and he never allowed her entry until he’d checked the place out first. She’d been a little uncomfortable with him going into her bedroom the first few times, but she’d gotten used to the way he was about protecting women. Clearly, it was just who he was. And she liked who he was.

Twice he gave her a hard time because she’d left her safe open and the cash in plain sight. Both times he’d been concerned someone had been there, but she’d just forgotten that when she closed the door she had to bang it with her fist to get the stupid thing to close all the way. She’d found the safe in a thrift store and it was old and tired. Still, it worked just fine for her.

“Cat, don’t go all silent on me,” David cautioned. “I’m just trying to keep Bernard from getting his heart ripped out when the masses rise up and rip the microphone out of his hands.”

“Bernard?” Catarina handed David another drink, this one a simple mocha latte, one of the easier drinks those in the crowd asked for. “You think I’m going to go on a date with Bernard? Our main poet? He’s supposed to be my mythical boyfriend?” She hissed it at David. “I don’t date. Not ever. Are you crazy? He doesn’t even notice me. My coffee yes, me no.”

David rang up two more orders and handed out the mocha latte before he rolled his eyes at her. “Who do you think all those love poems are written to? ‘Ode to my Rina’? Is that not an indication?”

If she didn’t have such acute hearing she would never have been able to hear him over the buzz of the crowd. She glanced up again. Bernard was in line, second row back. He smiled at her and waggled his fingers. She flashed a smile back.

“Seriously, he doesn’t look like unrequited love is happening in his life, David. You’ve been in the romance section of the books again, haven’t you?”

He gave a little sniff and tossed three more orders at her. “You do not have a romantic bone in your body,” he announced, and turned away from her, his nose in the air.

She tried not to laugh. She didn’t laugh at work, but really, David’s little snits were hysterical, especially when he guessed incorrectly that someone was fixating on her. Bernard liked the spotlight, plain and simple. He loved writing his poetry and he wanted everyone to hear and admire him. As a rule, everyone did. He actually was quite good.

She made a few more drinks, working fast, trying to clear the crowd when she felt the first tingling of her radar. Goose bumps rose on her arm. The curious itching beneath her skin came like a wave and receded. She took a breath and didn’t make the mistake of looking up right away. Someone was watching her. She felt them. Not like the normal crowd, but someone interested in her.

Alarm bells shrieked at her, but she breathed right through them. Over the years she’d acquired discipline and she used it, calmly making another drink and handing it off to David. He winked at her to show her he was over his annoyance with her. David didn’t know how to hold a grudge and if he got irritable it was usually because he needed to eat something. If he got too bad, she left her post, marched around the counter to his side and tossed him a muffin. This wasn’t one of those times.

Catarina glanced up just like she always did, letting her gaze scan the crowd for one brief moment. She was good at taking every detail in. She’d trained herself in that too. Observing the enemy. She’d actually studied Rafe’s ways and she’d learned from him. She committed to memory every detail about each and every one of his soldiers, the ones that were closest to him, the ones he trusted the most and those radiating out of that inner circle.

She took in as many faces in the now much thinner crowd as she could with that casual glance. No one was familiar, but one man’s gaze slid away from her when she touched on him. She kept going, not making the mistake of allowing her eyes to settle on him, but he had definitely been watching her and trying to be discreet about it.