Noah's Boy by Sarah A. Hoyt

Author:Sarah A. Hoyt [Hoyt, Sarah A.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Urban, Fiction, Contemporary, General
ISBN: 9781451639049
Google: Y6S-NAEACAAJ
Amazon: 145163904X
Publisher: Baen
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 17

The breakfast rush over, Tom realized how exhausted he was. He’d sent Jason home at the beginning of it, and didn’t expect him back till lunch, but for all that, he felt like he could fall asleep in his tracks. It had been much too long a night, since they’d woken with Rafiel’s phone call. Under normal circumstances—like those ever happened around here—just the rush of people for Conan’s maiden show would have been enough to leave Tom feeling battered, but there had been so much on top of that.

He stared out the back window at the parking lot, and squinted at the burned-out ruin of the bed-and-breakfast. He wondered if Louise would be able to rebuild, if she had the money. Though the operation had always kept up a good front of seeming classy and well stocked—which he supposed was essential in the boutique hospitality industry—he felt that it had been run very close to the bone.

Perhaps it’s a reflection of how we run the diner, he thought, and rubbed his hand pensively on his chin, shocked to hear and feel the grating of half-grown beard. Vague, disconnected thoughts ran through his mind. With a quirk of the lips, he wondered about Rafiel and Bea and how they were getting along. Rafiel could be forbidding and patriarchal. Part of being the policeman in charge of anything involving shifters in this area, Tom thought—unofficially in charge, of course, which made it worse. Also possibly something to do with the fact that he was a third generation policemen. Such families tended to raise boy children in the expectation of serving and protecting.

And Tom wasn’t, of course, absolutely sure about Bea. He’d barely met her, even if he’d seen her twice so far, but he got the impression you could tell her what to do all you wanted to—you just couldn’t get her to obey. A young woman who would tell the Great Sky Dragon where to put it and with how much force, even if he suspected she’d been more polite than that about it, was not the sort of young woman that Rafiel could intimidate. He grinned at the idea that she and Rafiel would probably hate each other the more time they spent together. It didn’t matter, of course, provided they both were safe.

Then he thought of Conan and that voice. Who would have thought it? Certainly neither his parents nor the triad to whom Conan had been handed over at puberty when his shifting started. But Conan had dreamed of a career, and Tom meant to make sure his dreams came true. Which, even taking into account that Conan was dating Rya and that Rya was the more practical of the two, probably meant Tom would have to keep a very close eye on everything. Dreamers could be good artists, but most of them were terrible businessmen. And being a businessman, it turned out, required training and thought—a fact Tom was learning, slowly, through his mistakes. He’d

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