Louis unfurled himself from the sofa. “D’accord.Then we go on the charm offensive. Seduce her. Convince her to tell us all of her secrets.”
Putain. His cock liked that idea.
“We are new to the building. We do the neighborly thing and invite her over for drinks andapéritifs.”
“What makes you think she’d come, Louis? Everything we’ve learned about her over the last few dayssuggests she lives most of her life online.”
“Mm, but she’s suspicious of us, no? This would be her chance to scopeusout. If we invite the other tenants on this floor, and a few from the one above and below, she’ll think it’s safe enough to step inside the lion’s den. Or”—he grinned, his canines peeking through—“the wolf’s den.”
Pierre stared at his brother. That might actually work. “We need to do this soon. We’ve wasted enough time trying to track Cordelia down.”
“I can pick up a few bottles of wine, beer, maybe some rum to make a few mojitos tomorrow. Let’s make it Saturday night. We don’t want to give her too much time to think about it.”
Pierre headed for the door. “I’ll go invite our neighbors.”
Louis’ hand on his shoulder stopped him. “You invite the other neighbors. I’ll invite her. You had her all to yourself in the elevator. I barely got a good look at her in thepâtisserie.”
Pierre studied his twin. There was a determined set to Louis’ shoulders he rarely saw, and dark shadows flitted in his eyes, signaling his wolf was close to the surface. She was affecting him, too.
Could it be…? Couldshebe…?Fate had a funny way of interfering when it came to the mates of Langeais wolves. It’d happened in the past with their ancestors. They’d seen it with Laurent and Nathalie. And again with Gabriel when he’d been reunited with his mate Annabelle.
“Oui.You should go.”
If Louis reacted as strongly to her as he had… It wouldn’t be the first time in the history of the Langeais wolves twins had shared a mate.
Chapter Three
Melinda let herself into her flat, keeping a wary eye on the closed door down the hall. She disabled the internal alarm and leaned against the door, the adrenaline rush subsiding, but her body still buzzing. Her new neighbors werehot.
A rub of fur wound its way through her legs, and she picked up the little ginger cat and snuggled him against her face. “Have you been a good boy, Manchu? Watching over my flat while I was out?”
Manchu bunted his head against her chin, purring his little heart out. She removed her shoes, reset the alarm, then carried her preferred male company into the kitchen and set him up with a dish of cat food. While he tucked into it with feline gusto, Melinda set the electric kettle to boil. She needed to calm down. Jumping to conclusions wasn’t the wisest thing to do. Tea. She needed tea.
From the cupboard, she took out her teapot. She rubbed her hands over it, the clay cool against her palms. It’d been her mother’s, and was the only thing she’d kept from her past. Etched into her memory, her mother’s gentle smile as she’d poured tea for them both. A shared moment of quiet in their turbulent lives. The ritual, the steeping—it never failed to calm her—as though the act of making tea, the familiar scent and the turning of the teapot wiped away the bad memories, the grief and the anger. If only for a brief minute or two.
Melinda poured boiling water into her pot and swished it around, heating the clay. She repeated the process with hercup, then discarded the water. From the tin of jasmine tea, her mother’s favorite, she scooped in the fragrant leaves and covered them in boiling water. Twice she rotated the pot, aiding the infusion, before pouring more boiling water into it and letting the leaves steep.
Calmer, with her cup of tea in hand and the scent of jasmine in the air, Melinda unlocked the second bedroom, punched in her alarm code, switched on the light and plopped into the chair in front of her screens. Sipping at her tea, she brought up her surveillance—the kitchen, the living room, the hall, the front door. She found only Manchu—stretching on the couch, shifting to the windowsill to watch the traffic below, wandering into the kitchen to check his empty food bowl. No one had got past her security and into her flat.
She ran a scan and waited for it to confirm all was clear in her cyber world. It took a lot of expertise to get through her firewalls and security measures, but… She eyed the silent monitor on the left, no longer connected to a router. Whoever was after her client was good. Or had hired someone who was good.
The scan came back clear. She relaxed in her chair.
With a tap of a few keys, she hooked into the building security again, specifically the camera in the corridor outside her and her new neighbors’ front door. All clear. She paused, her fingers hovering over the keyboard. Should she…?
She typed in a few more commands, brought up the building’s stored footage files, and clicked on today’s, fast-forwarding until she spotted herself leaving. A minute or so later, the door down the hall opened and her new neighbor stepped into the corridor, waiting for the lift to return. On one wrist, the leather cuff. On the other, that expensive watch.
The timestamp clicked down, and the second twin stepped into the corridor with the same leather cuff, but his left wrist was bare. He headed straight for the stairwell. Perhaps Mr. No-Watch liked his pastries a little too much and used the stairs to burn off the extra calories.
She skipped ahead to her return. There. One after the other, they strode down the corridor. Again, no concern for the cameras watching. Like any regular person. Or someone who was deliberately ignoring them,pretendingto be unaware of their presence.
Had they followed her or not? The timing of their departure and return could be a coincidence. She occasionally ran into Joe from apartment thirty-three. He worked a nine-to-five job in an office, took the metropolitan line to work. On one of the infrequent times she’d had to catch the Tube that early, they’d shared the same car.
Mr. Patel, across the hall from the hottie twins, rarely left his flat, but his son would stop by with his wife and two kids on the weekend. She’d shared the lift with them a few times, spotted them having lunch in the café down the street a time or two.
It wasn’tunreasonableto expect to run into her neighbors, other people from different floors in her building, too, in the local area. But that watch, the expensive platinum Roger Dubius Excalibur, bothered her. This apartment block wasn’t in a shady area of London, but it wasn’t somewhere someone who could afford to spendthatamount of money on awatchwould live. And the timing? So soon after the malware attack?
Melinda clicked out of the file and into another one, the one from last week. She skipped through the footage, watching their comings and goings. Back another week, then another until she found what she was looking for. On a Monday, three weeks ago, according to the timestamp, she’d left the building at eight. She’d had an appointment with a client at the women’s refuge. At eight forty-six, the twins stepped out of the lift carrying overnight carryalls and laptop bags slung over their shoulders.
