“Good. The meeting starts in an hour.” He turned to Irene. “You’ll attend as well. Your perspective may be useful in managing the elders.”
“Of course.”
He left without another word, but she could swear she felt his attention linger even after his physical presence had departed. The air in the kitchen seemed to resettle, molecules rearranging themselves in the absence of his particular gravity.
“Well.” Irene’s voice was mild, but her sharp eyes missed nothing. “That was interesting.”
“Was it?”
“He didn’t once look at your documentation. Most Alphas leading technology initiatives would at least pretend interest in the details.” Irene moved towards the door, pausing at the threshold. “Instead, he looked only at you.”
Heat crept up her neck. “He’s probably just… assessing my competence. Making sure I’m not going to embarrass the pack in front of the elders.”
“Probably.” Irene’s smile was entirely too knowing. “One more piece of information. When wolves are interested in something,we watch it. Constantly. Possessively. It’s instinct—we can’t help doing it any more than we can help breathing.”
She was gone before Harper could formulate a response.
Interested.Adrian watched her constantly because he was interested? Not because he was suspicious? Or because he genuinely didn’t trust her and was waiting for her to fail?
The logical answer was the latter. She was a human outsider disrupting his traditional pack with modern technology they didn’t want. Of course he was watching her.
The other possibility—that he watched her for the same reason she felt a jolt of electricity every time their eyes met—was too dangerous to contemplate.
She quickly shoved the thought aside and returned to her laptop. She had a presentation to finalize, elders to convince, and a pack to modernize. She didn’t have time to analyze the behavioral patterns of one infuriating, overwhelming, impossibly distracting Alpha.
Chapter Nine
Adrian forced himself to remain calmly seated at the head of the table in the conference room, even though his wolf was prowling restlessly in his head. Instead he concentrated on the other members of the council, studying their body language and breathing in their scents, analyzing their possible reactions.
At exactly one minute before the meeting was due to start, Harper came hurrying in, flushed and breathless, and all the blood in his body rushed to his cock. She’d changed into a white blouse and a short pleated skirt over black tights. Some distant part of his brain recognized that this was her version of a professional look, but all he could focus on was the way the white fabric of the blouse clung to her small breasts and the way the short skirt revealed a sliver of pale skin above the tights. He could feel a growl building deep in his chest and swallowed it down. He’d have to sit through an entire meeting with her looking like that and not touch her.
He should never have kissed her. His wolf snarled its disagreement, but he knew that the kiss had been a catastrophic mistake. For eight years he had kept tight control over himself,refusing to let anyone get close enough to see the cracks. The memory of Vivienne had been a wall between him and any kind of vulnerability. But one look into her eyes and the wall had crumbled into dust.
When she hesitated at the doorway, he pointed to the chair next to him in silent command, praying she wasn’t going to defy him. In his current condition, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to prevent himself from chasing her down, pressing her against the nearest wall and exploring every inch of smooth skin under that tempting little skirt. His muscles tensed with the sheer effort of maintaining control, and he could feel his eyes shifting, gold bleeding into his vision as his wolf pushed forward.
Thank the goddess she flashed him a shy smile and walked to the indicated chair, her head held high. Her sweet scent washed over him and even though his arousal didn’t diminish, his wolf calmed enough for him to focus on the business at hand.
The meeting room was filled with elders and members of the pack leadership. Elder Howard, of course, was there, scowling at a place on the table just to her left. Two other elders were present, a male named Magnus who’d been a loyal supporter of Adrian’s father and a female named Rosemary who’d been one of his mother’s closest friends. There were also a handful of younger pack leaders, including one who was looking at Harper with an admiration that had his wolf growling. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand.
“As you know,” he began, forcing a calm he was far from feeling, “Derek’s investment allows us to upgrade our technological infrastructure. Ms. Bailey has been assigned as the lead consultant on this project and will give us a brief overview of her findings.”
He sat back and folded his arms, determined to project an aura of calm authority he did not feel. He was the Alpha, and this was a business meeting. He would treat it as such.
“The human wishes to address the council.” Howard’s voice dripped with condescension. “How… novel.”
“Ms. Bailey is here at my invitation,” he said. He managed to keep his voice neutral, but every wolf in the room caught the undercurrent of warning. “She will present her assessment of our infrastructure needs. Questions and discussion will follow.”
“I have a question.” Jared, one of the younger wolves, leaned forward. “Why are we letting a human tell us how to run our communications?”
She didn’t even blink. “Because your current communications infrastructure is held together with duct tape and wishful thinking. Also because I’ve been doing this for six years and I’m very, very good at it.”
A ripple of surprise moved through the room and he hid his smile. His little kitten had fangs, had she?
She calmly pulled up her presentation on the wall-mounted display. “I know many of you are skeptical about this project. But the current system is a liability. In the event of a real emergency—a natural disaster, territorial dispute, even a simple medical crisis—your inability to communicate effectively could be fatal. This isn’t about convenience. It’s about survival.”
The network diagram appeared on screen, and several wolves actually winced.
“This is your current setup. Notice the seventeen different access points, none of which communicate with each other properly.Notice the complete absence of redundancy. If your main server goes down, and I promise you it will go down, you’ll lose communications across the entire compound.” She clicked to the next slide. “Notice the security vulnerabilities that would make any competent hacker weep with joy.”
