fizzed up inside her like champagne and the strangeness of it only made her realize how long it had been since something had really excited her. A website full of her images, full of her beautiful birds. For everyone to see. She knew about the other falcon locations in New York but hadn’t thought for a moment she might ever be able to do something similar in Morningside.
“You can design a website?”
His expression darkened. “Sanmore’s mailboy can design a simple website. As can half the fifth graders on Manhattan. It’s no big deal.”
Not for him, maybe. She turned her mind to the ledge. “I guess it wouldn’t be too hard to set a camera up on the ledge, focused on the nest box. If anything of interest happens, it’ll probably happen there.”
“How can you be sure they’ll use the box?” he asked.
“I can’t. But I’m encouraging them down every day. So I’m optimistic.”
His eyes narrowed. “Encouraging?”
Might as well tell it as it was. “Luring. They’re usually pigeon eaters, but mice are easier to trap. This building has no shortage.”
His lips thinned. “All buildings have vermin.”
Her laugh was raw. “Not this many.”
He stared at her, considering. “Excuse me a moment.” Then he stepped into her small kitchen and spoke in quiet tones into the cell phone she’d held for him the week before. When he returned, his expression was impassive. “You may need to find a new source of bird bait.”
She frowned. “What did you just do?”
“I took care of the vermin problem.”
“With one phone call?”
“I have good staff.”
One phone call. It could have been solved so long before this. “Good staff but not residential agents, I’d say. We’ve been reporting the mice for eighteen months.”
He thought about that. “I trust our agent to take care of code issues.”
“This is the same agent you trusted with my door selection?”
His eyes shifted back to the hideously inappropriate door and she felt a mini rush of satisfaction that she’d finally scored a point. But snarking at him wasn’t going to be a fun way to spend the next hundred hours. And as much as she’d like to make him suffer just a little bit for the torn carpet and clunky pipes and glacially slow elevator, she had to endure it, too. And she had a feeling he would give as good as he got.
“Anyway,” she said. “I’m sure raw meat will suffice in the unlikely event I run out of fresh food.”
“Then what? They’ll just … come?”
She slid her hands onto her hips. “Is this interest? Or are you just being polite?”
His left eye twitched slightly. “I have a court order that says I should be interested, Ms. Morfitt. No offense.”
She arched a single eyebrow. People like him had no idea how offensive their very existence was to people like her. To every tenant who scraped together the rent to live in his shabby building. To the people who went without every day so he could have another sportscar in his parking space.
Her birds had no way of making him money; therefore, they didn’t rate for Nathan Archer.
“None taken.” She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction. “I’m planning on moving the mice to the nest box tomorrow, to see how the falcons respond to it.”
“Might as well get the camera set up and operating straightaway, then,” he said.
“You’re assuming I’ve agreed?”
“Haven’t you? Your eyes twinkled like the Manhattan skyline when I suggested it.”
It burned her that he could read her so easily. And it bothered her that he was paying that much attention to what her eyes were doing. Bothered and … something else. Her chest pressed in tighter.
She shook the rogue thought loose. “Can we use something small and unobtrusive? I don’t want to scare them away just as they’re starting to come close. It took me weeks to get them accustomed to visiting the ledge, and any day now they’ll need to start laying.”
He moved to the window and looked out, examining the wall material. “I can probably core out one of the stone blocks in the basement and fit the camera into it. They’ll barely know it’s there.”
She smiled. “There you go, then. You’re not totally without practical skills.”
He opened his mouth to argue, but then seemed to think better of it. “I’ll need your bathroom.”
She flinched. That seemed a stupidly unsettling and intimate request—not that the dictatorial words in any way resembled a request. The man was going to be here for one hundred hours—of course he was going to need the facilities at some point.
She stepped back from the doorway. “You know the way.”
One brow twitched. “You’re not coming?”
Both her own shot upward. “Uh … no, you’ll have to manage by yourself.” Who knew, maybe the man had assistants for that, too.
“You’re going to play hardball on this court order, aren’t you? Well, don’t come crying to me if I pull out something I shouldn’t.”
What? Tori frowned after his retreating figure. Then, as she heard the exaggerated ziiip, her frown doubled and she muttered, “What, Mr. Corporate America isn’t a door-closer?”
Seconds later she heard another metallic ziiip and she realized her mistake. Heat flared up her throat. The man wasn’t peeing. He was measuring—with a steel tape measure. Probably the ledge window.
Of course he was.
And she’d just come across as the biggest moron ever to breathe. Things were off to a great start.
Just fabulous.
Nathan turned out of West 126th Street onto St. Nicholas Avenue and wove his way through the late-afternoon pedestrian traffic heading for the subway. It didn’t matter that it was nearly evening—activity levels at nearby Columbia University didn’t drop until much later, which meant the streets around it were perpetually busy during class hours. Even a few blocks away. He’d spent a lot of time out on these streets as a kid—more than most—so he knew every square inch.
Something about Tori Morfitt really got his people antennae twitching. What was a young, beautiful woman—a wildlife photographer—doing living alone in his shabby building, with no job or family that he could discern, spending her time hanging out with birds?
In a world where he tended to attract compliant yes-men—and oh-yes women—encountering someone so wholly unconcerned about appropriateness, someone who
