Challenging the Center (Santa Fe Bobcats) Read Online Free Page A

sound of annoyance and opened his door again. God, this was already a pain in the ass. The IOU for this one was going to be big. Huge. Mega. “She’s in her apartment. Watch.” He knocked on the door, waiting. Then knocked again. “Kat! Sawyer’s on the phone.”
    Nothing.
    “Okay,” Michael said slowly, “so she’s ignoring me. She wasn’t all that pleased to meet me in the lobby. I think she’s just doing this to piss me off.”
    “She’s gone,” Sawyer said with annoying certainty. “Check the front desk.”
    “You know they won’t tell me that. She doesn’t have a car. She doesn’t know anyone here. Know anything about the area. She…” Michael listened harder at the door. Silent as a tomb.
    “Okay, yeah… she’s gone.” Damn Uber.
    “Find her,” was all Sawyer said, then hung up.
    Right. Because that had to be easy. With a growl, Michael started texting.

    * * *
    K at had been to the southwest—though not specifically Santa Fe—a handful of times before. Mostly for tournaments, with very little local flavor thrown in. Airport to hotel to playing site to hotel to airport. Her travel budget left little in the way of “tourist” money. So when she’d had an Uber driver take her to somewhere “very Santa Fe, with local color,” she had expected something a little more… southwestern.
    Not this bar, that seemed like it could have been yanked out of any major city in any state and plunked down in the middle of downtown Santa Fe. With simple, scuffed wooden floors and wide, planked tables, peanuts in the baskets thrust in front of drinking patrons at the bar, with Keith Urban playing through the loudspeakers and muted ESPN on the big screen… she could have been in Milwaukee or Seattle or back home in Florida. Where was the culture? The unique zest that this city carried?
    She sipped her beer and snorted, watching a replay of a college football game on the big screen. Nothing about this evening thus far was working to her advantage, with the exception of slipping past the manny. Clearly he was new to the job if he didn’t realize she would walk in, drop her suitcase off, and go right back out again. Kat smiled a little as she reached for a peanut. Amateur.
    “There’s an interesting smile.”
    Kat started and looked toward the voice. A few feet away a young woman sat with her hip propped on a stainless steel cooler behind the bar, wiping out a beer mug before reaching above her head to rest it on a hook.
    “Me?” Kat looked around, but she was one of only a few people in the establishment.
    “Yeah. You’re here early. Most people don’t get here until late. I figure the reason you’re here is the same reason for that smile.”
    Kat took in the other woman, who was probably close to her age. The bartender’s long black hair was pulled into two pigtails, which should have looked juvenile, but she’d done something with it to make the parts poof out and it almost looked… edgy instead. Combined with the tight polo shirt that exposed a few inches of pale stomach, short denim shorts and painfully high heels, she was everything Kat wished she could have been. Confident, no excuses, full stop.
    “I, uh…” Kat checked her phone. “It’s, like, eight. Isn’t this when people go out for drinks? Why is it so dead in here?”
    The bartender laughed, a throaty sound that fit her look, and wandered over to lean against the bar a few inches to Kat’s left. Now that she was closer, Kat could see her eyes were a gorgeous, vivid blue and were heavily accentuated with eyeliner and mascara, which should have been too much when combined with her cherry-red lips but looked just about perfect. “You’re new here, aren’t you?”
    “That obvious, huh?” Kat smiled and shrugged one shoulder. “I asked the driver to take me somewhere for local color. I got dropped off here. How much does your manager pay for that service?”
    The other woman laughed again. “Nothing. You’re early, that’s