At First Light(Dr. Evan Wilding #1)(42)

Addie came hurrying back, beaming. “Sorry, gents. That was Clayton. His client had to cancel. Can I take a rain check on dinner?”

Patrick rolled his eyes.

Evan said, “Sure,” and turned to Patrick. “How do you feel about ax-throwing?”



Outside, Addie watched the two main men in her life, not counting Clayton or her father of course, walk away together through the rain. Water misted beneath the light falling from the streetlamps, creating a halo around the two figures. Out of nowhere, she had a flash of Humphrey Bogart walking away with Claude Rains at the end of Casablanca, and an unexpected sadness tugged at her as she watched Evan work to lengthen his stride to keep up with the six-three Patrick McBrady.

Evan would never ask Patrick to slow down. He’d shoot himself first.

Her friend was brilliant and kind and funny and good-looking. He laughed at all her jokes and made her favorite clam chowder and sourdough bread whenever she asked, which was often. He’d held her hand and offered a shoulder through countless breakups, family frustrations, and the dark night—two months ago—when her cat, Traveling Tom, had crossed the rainbow bridge.

She stayed under the eave as the wind gusted and Evan and Patrick stopped at Evan’s specially modified Jaguar convertible. Patrick walked around the ostentatious sports car, nodding in admiration. Men and their cars. And men and their dicks. Sometimes it was hard to distinguish between the two.

She snorted her disdain.

But as Patrick crouched to see whatever Evan was pointing to at the back of the car, something inside her softened. Was it possible she was yoking her horse to the wrong carriage?

Evan ducked behind the steering wheel. Patrick wedged himself in on the passenger side.

Not that it was her call. Evan had never evinced the slightest interest in her as anything other than his best friend. She knew he’d been in several serious relationships and plenty of casual ones. And that, in most cases, Evan and the woman in question eventually drifted apart without animosity. Almost all the women who floated through his orbit remained his friend. But nothing lasted. Not in a romantic sense, anyway.

Kind of like her relationships.

His laugh drifted back to her, warm and genuine as he closed the car door.

Dr. Evan Wilding.

Evan.

Was she wrong not to push?

Did it matter, in her heart of hearts, that Evan was a man who would have to stand on a stool just to reach past her shoulders?

Ruefully, she shook her head. She liked tall men. Call her shallow, but she did. Plus, she never thought it was a great idea to mix friendship and romance. One always messed up the other. She was just maudlin tonight. It was the worry about her job. And the thought of a serial killer out there in the darkness, ripping lives apart.



The Ragnar?k ax-throwing establishment—owned and managed, according to their website, by a man named Sten Elger—was clearly hopping when Evan and Patrick approached on the sidewalk. Light and noise spilled through the doors and the barred windows.

“. . . runs like a dream,” Patrick was saying to Evan. He raised his voice to a shout as he yanked open the door, then stepped aside for a chattering group of millennials as they spilled out. “I’d love to take a car like that out for a spin every Sunday. Just the missus and me. She’d be all made up. Isn’t that what you Brits say? All made up?”

Evan spared him a glance. Maybe he’d underestimated Patrick. “We mostly say that if we’re from Liverpool. But close enough. Aren’t you from the Emerald Isle?”

“Three generations back. I’m relearning the language. And I’ve been watching Downton Abbey with the missus.” The millennials ambled away in a cloud of laughter, and Patrick waved Evan inside. “What does it cost, a car like that, if you don’t mind my asking?”

Evan named a figure, and Patrick’s jaw dropped.

“They really pay professors that much?”

“Hard to fathom, isn’t it?”

“You guys don’t even have to dodge bullets.” Patrick seemed to reconsider that. “Not usually, anyway.”

Evan paused inside the door. Patrick nearly ran him over. They both stood in the entryway, rain dripping off their coats, and took in the scene.

Evan had been expecting the Old Norse equivalent of a bowling alley. Certainly, there were similarities. The cheerful, constant hubbub of conversation and triumphant shouts. The periodic echoes of a strike, although in this case it was that of edged steel thwacking into wood. The actual lanes were more like stubby alleyways constructed of plywood and chain-link mesh. Each lane ended with a red-and-blue bull’s-eye into which energetic men and women cheerfully hurtled the kind of weapon that could take off a man’s head.

A man like James Talfour. Evan looked around and spotted only one Black man among the throng. Maybe the sport hadn’t caught on with the non-Nordic crowd.

Along the wall on the far left ran a bar with high stools, a few scattered tables, and a menu that included kale shakes, veggie burgers, sweet potato fries with aioli dip, and other items that Evan was confident no self-respecting Viking ever let past his lips. As if in balance, the establishment also offered half-pound cheeseburgers and turkey drumsticks.

The bar, he noted appreciatively, was well stocked.

Then again . . . alcohol and ax-throwing? Who’d come up with that combination?

A couple walked past, faux-tanned and healthy thirtysomethings dressed in fashionable athletic wear, each staring intently into their phones. The woman lifted her gaze long enough for the bright-blue orbs, set amid heavily mascaraed lashes, to land on Evan. She startled and hurried after her partner, who’d kept walking. Evan saw her lean in and say something to the man, who glanced back at Evan and grinned.