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Chay put his arm around her and gathered her against him.

“Yes,” he said. “I can tell.”

His arm was hard and comforting around her and after a minute, she let out a long sigh, lay her head against his shoulder and gave up fighting the inevitable.

He was big.

Strong.

Determined.

He was intent on protecting her whether she wanted his protection or not.

He was—she knew the appropriate term—a classic alpha male, which was just an academic’s way of saying that Chay Olivieri was really a classic bad boy, and she wasn’t into bad boys, not as a woman, not as a psychologist.

A little tremor raced through her and it had nothing to do with being wet or cold.

It had to do with admitting—but absolutely, positively only to herself—that what she might be into was him.

CHAPTER EIGHT

Chay hadn’t spent a lot of time in New York.

Big cities, big buildings and lots of people crowded against each other—that kind of living wasn’t his thing. Still, he’d made enough trips to the Big Apple to have gotten the hang of urban survival.

Walk briskly. Never stroll.

Avoid eye contact unless you meant business.

Attitude was everything.

So was an aura that said: Don’t fuck with me, Jack. Not unless you want to pay the price.

All that made sense.

Lions didn’t survive the Serengeti by being pussycats.

Still, knowing how to survive in a city didn’t mean understanding why anybody would willingly choose to live in one.

He thought about that as he and Bianca stepped onto the sidewalk in front of the four-story brick building where she lived in SoHo.

As neighborhoods went, SoHo was one of the easiest to take. Not much grass or blue sky or trees, but the buildings were mostly old and, he had to admit, interesting. There was lots of cobblestone, lots of out-of-the-ordinary little restaurants, bars and shops. True, most of those places were almost painfully trendy, but Chay had to admit they were an improvement over the big, glitzy places farther uptown.

The buildings on Bianca’s street were mostly four and five story jobs. Still, they made him feel penned in. Maybe it came of growing up in the vastness of the Dakotas. Maybe it came of spending most of his working life—the missions, anyway—in the open.

Maybe it was because of what had happened in the coffee shop, or the phone calls Bianca had dealt with, or even that power outage. He hadn’t said anything about it to her and he wouldn’t, but even that had made him wary.

Whatever the reason, being in a place he didn’t know, hemmed in by buildings, traffic and people, made him vaguely uneasy.

Fortunately, he knew what to do about that feeling.

You found yourself in a place that was new to you, you checked it out. Identified visual landmarks. Made a mental note of egress and access routes. Observed and quantified whatever creatures shared your space.

He was living proof that survival often depended on such things. It certainly had a couple of months ago, on that mountaintop on the other side of the world.

When Bianca started towards the brick steps that led into her building, he caught her hand, then put his arm around her.

“Give me a minute,” he said.