“You really go there, don’t you?”

“I do. Can’t help myself.” She grabbed his forearm with both her hands. “You can’t let me die all by myself because I was an impossible bitch.”

“When you put it like that . . .”

“Chinese food,” she reminded him. “Who can resist the allure of the mighty Chinese food? I know I can’t. Why should you?”

How could he turn her down? Especially when she was so damn cute?

“All right. But the dumplings are mine. I’m not sharing.”

“Rude and stingy,” she said, tugging on his arm until he began to walk, letting her lead him inside. “But I’ll let you off the hook this time.”

“That’s very big of you,” he said dryly, making Blayne laugh.

Using the dining table as a dining table lasted all of two minutes before Blayne couldn’t stand feeling so constricted and quickly set up the living room floor for an impromptu picnic. Bo didn’t complain, but he seemed baffled by it.

“I don’t like constrictions,” she’d explained. If he understood, she couldn’t tell because he simply stared at her before grabbing his wonton soup and taking it over to the blanket she’d laid out.

To be honest, Blayne wasn’t sure how a meal would go with Bo Novikov. It was one thing to spend time with him when she was training since most of the conversation involved him telling her what to do. But dinner conversation required a back-and-forth Blayne adored, and it often dictated who became her long-term friends and who she only saw when she happened to pass them on the street. Until now, Blayne had been pretty certain that Bo would end up in the “happened to pass him” pool. He didn’t do much that didn’t involve hockey, so what exactly would they talk about? Her living room floor seemed an excellent place for a meal because her remote control and twenty-seven-inch plasma was right there for emergency viewing should the silence grow painful.

After two hours, she hadn’t reached for the remote once.

“This,” she said, handing over the picture, “is my mom.”

Bo’s smile was wide, his laugh genuine. “Your mom is rockin’ the ’fro.”

Blayne made her little rock-and-roll sign—that the nuns called devil’s horns—with both hands, pinky and index fingers up, middle and ring fingers down and held by thumbs. “Damn right she did. She used to call it her dog mane, which annoyed every lion in a ten-mile hearing range.”

“How come you don’t work the ’fro?”

“Because my hair grows out like Pippy Longstocking, which is not a look that works for me.” She motioned with her hands. “Okay. Your turn. You got a picture of your parents?”

“Yeah.” Rolling hiseyes like the big geek he was, Bo pulled out his wallet and slipped the small picture out, handing it to her.

The Asian female was almost an atypical lioness, her unblinking gold stare capturing the camera’s eye, the small smirk on her full lips appearing mocking and dangerous at the same time. Her cheekbones sharp and her nose wide and rather flat, like her son’s. And who was brave enough to cuddle up next to her? The white-haired polar bear with bright brown eyes and an adorable smile standing behind her. Bo’s genetic makeup was clearly a fifty-fifty mix of his parents, but he obviously favored the bear side. Not that Blayne could blame him since it was the bears who’d taken him in, who had raised him.

“They look happy.”

“They were mostly. They argued a lot, but I think they liked to argue a lot.”

“For some couples that really works.” She asked what she’d been wondering for a while, “What happened?”

Bo shrugged those massive shoulders. “Drunk driver caused a pileup on the freeway. We were in the first few cars, and Dad didn’t hit his brakes in time and the cars behind us didn’t, either.”

“You were with them?”

He nodded. “In the backseat. All I remember is the sound of grinding brakes and then metal on metal—then I woke up in the hospital. A couple days later my uncle came and got me, and we buried my parents a few days after that in Maine.”

Blayne didn’t tell him she was sorry; she knew he didn’t want to hear it.

“What about your mom?” he asked.

“She was hunted.”

Bo turned, his arm resting against her couch rather than his back, his bright blue eyes focused on her. “What?”

“Daddy was stationed in Japan at the time, and Mom was in London. She was a translator for the Embassy.”

“Where were you?”

Her eyes crossed. “With the family in Georgia. My dad’s family. They never really took to me, although Mom tried to make that happen. I was supposed to be there for the summer.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Not really. Daddy won’t discuss it, and one uncle that got good and drunk and tried to tell me about it after the funeral—not realizing Daddy was right behind him—found out that tire irons to the head . . . really do hurt.”

Bo chuckled. “Don’t feel bad. My aunts missed my parents’ funeral but did make it in time to demand the return of their mother’s jewelry.”

“Rude.”

“And stupid. Mom was welcome in town because she came with Dad. I was welcome because I’m half bear. But full She-lions strolling into Ursus County? That’s all kinds of stupid. The sows had a field day.”