“You have plenty of advantages.” His voice deepened, rough with the memory of exactly how she’d used some of those advantages earlier that morning.
Her cheeks flushed pink.Adorable.The thought was followed by a surge of possessive satisfaction. This brilliant, stubborn, impossibly brave woman was his. His to protect. His to cherish. His to drive slowly insane with wanting until she gasped his name?—
“Adrian.”
He blinked, dragging himself back to the present. Derek was watching him with poorly concealed amusement.
“You’re staring at your mate again.”
“I wasn’t staring.”
“You absolutely were,” Julie said. “It was sweet. Slightly terrifying, but sweet.”
Harper laughed again, and he felt his carefully maintained composure crack further. He signaled for the check, suddenly eager to have her alone again.
Later,he told himself.Business first.
The reminder sobered him. They still had to deal with the cyber threat. Had to figure out who had targeted the pack’s finances and why. Had to ensure his people were protected before he could fully settle into this new, unexpected happiness.
“I need to stop by my office,” Harper said, as if reading his thoughts. “Just for an hour. I want to run some additional traces on those attack vectors.”
“I’ll come with you.”
“You don’t have to?—”
“I want to.”
Derek and Julie exchanged a look that he chose to ignore.
Harper moved through the TalkToMe building like she owned it, nodding to security guards and swiping through access points, and the old worry gnawed at him.
She belongs here.
He did his best to push the thought aside. They’d had this conversation. She’d chosen him. She had given herself to him completely, body and heart and bond. But watching her navigate this world with such easy confidence, he couldn’t entirely silence the voice that whisperedfor how long?
Her office was smaller than he’d expected—a glass-walled space barely larger than a closet, crammed with monitors and cables and a coffee mug collection that bordered on concerning.
“Home sweet home,” she said, dropping into the same custom chair he’d bought for her with a sigh that was half-contentment, half-resignation. “Well. Former home.”
“You’ll miss it.”
“Parts of it.” She was already pulling up screens, her fingers flying across the keyboard. “The coffee machine in the break room. The twenty-four-hour dim sum place around the corner. The way everything just works when you have a tech budget bigger than most countries’ GDP.”
“We could improve the compound’s infrastructure.”
“That’s literally why I’m there.” She flashed him a grin over her shoulder. “But I appreciate the thought.”
He moved to stand behind her, watching data scroll across her screens in patterns he couldn’t begin to interpret. Code. Networkdiagrams. Things that might as well have been magic for all he understood them.
“What are you looking for?”
“The breadcrumbs.” Her voice had gone distant, her attention funneling into that laser focus he’d come to recognize. “Whoever attacked us was careful. Professional. But everyone leaves traces. You just have to know where to look.”
He watched her work in silence, content to simply be near her. She chewed on her lower lip when she was thinking hard—a habit he found unreasonably distracting.
Minutes stretched into half an hour.
His wolf grew restless, pacing beneath his skin, unhappy with the enclosed space, the artificial lights, and the thousand unfamiliar scents pressing in from all sides. Everything in him wanted to grab her and carry her back to the mountains where the air was clean and the trees were tall and threats could be dealt with using teeth and claws.
