"Tell Emilia happy birthday," she said and hung up.
She regretted it immediately; she hadn't meant to get short with the one person in her family who was still talking to her. But Sofia just didn't get it. For their entire lives, Max's little sister had been the family peacemaker, the level-headed one who got along with everyone in their sprawling family of jaguar shifters. Somehow Sofia still seemed to believe that sufficient family peacemaking efforts could make them all get along.
Things are definitely not that simple now, little sis.
"Okay, so far I've turned down two people who wanted to pay me, and snapped at the only person in my family who still likes me," she muttered. "Three for three, Max."
She picked up a stress ball on the edge of her desk and gave it a vicious squeeze. Unfortunately the ball wasn't made to withstand the strength of an annoyed shifter. It ruptured spectacularly, and silicon gel oozed out all over her fingers.
"Ugh!" Max dropped it in the trash. She dampened a paper napkin from yesterday's takeout lunch in her coffee cup and cleaned her hand as best she could. "Great. Superb. This day is going splendidly so far. Wonder what I'll do for an encore."
There was a tap at her half-open office door. Max looked up with a ball of coffee-soaked napkins wadded up in her hand, and her mind went blank.
The most striking man she had ever seen stood in the doorway. His hair was a cascading golden mass, threaded with silver, reaching to the shoulders of a gray suit jacket worn informally over a dark sweater. He had a deep Mediterranean tan, a lean muscular build, and eyes that immediately drew her attention as if a hook had been flung from his gaze to hers.
And at the same time, like a clear chime that rang inside her head, she knew that this man was her mate.
It came to her with the kind of clarity that she had always felt, as a shifter, when information came to her from her jaguar—the deep, instinctive part of herself that simply knew things, and believed them. She hadn't felt that kind of inner certainty in ten years, not since everything in her world had fallen apart, and along with it, her jaguar had stopped speaking to her. Or, if it still spoke, she could no longer hear it. Nacio had taken that from her along with everything else.
But now she felt that clear, bone-deep certainty again. The feeling shocked her. It was like clear water cutting through the mud that had clouded her life.
Are you there?Max thought.Is this true?
She was so astonished and so inward-focused that when the stranger spoke, his voice a rich baritone, it took her a moment to understand his words.
"I'm looking for Max Molina. Is this his office?"
His voice was polite but formal. Max had to collect herself, and as she did, she realized that this man—this striking, incredibly beautiful man—was looking at her with polite interest and nothing else. There was no hint of recognition, none of the thunderstruck feeling that Max knew had to show on her face no matter how hard she tried to hide it.
"Is this the office of Max Molina?" he asked again.
Right, she thought, scraping her scattered brain cells together. He was here as a client, and he believed Max Molina was a man. It was a common misconception that Max did nothing to discourage. There were times when she took full advantage of the plausible deniability.
But not with this man.
Max rose from her chair. She couldn't take her eyes off him. Shock and unexpected lust poured through every fiber of her being. Thishadto be something real. Nacio's prediction that she was too broken to ever have a mate had to be the lie, becausethiswasn't a lie. She couldn't believe it.
Maybe he was human, and therefore didn't recognize her as his mate. Humans often didn't know.
"I am," she said. "Max. Maxine."
She came over to him. He was even taller up close, and as if her senses were heightened by his mere presence, she could smell him: a faint, spicy male scent that made her knees wobble.
And yet there was no corresponding sign of recognition from him.
The entire time, the awareness ofMate, mate, mate,was ringing in her head, together with the shocking awareness that her alpha had been wrong. She wasn't fundamentally broken, a ruined shifter who could never find the one to make her complete. There was a mate out there for her, and she had just met him.
Max had no script for what to do when you met your mate, especially after having honestly believed it would never happen to her. Now all she could think to do was hold out her hand. "Max," she said again, feeling foolish but at the same time too bowled over to care.
"Gio," the vision of loveliness said. "Giovanni Romano."
He had a trace of an accent, lilting and beautiful. His large, strong hand closed around hers, and Max nearly wilted at the warmth of his skin.
Get it together, Maxine!
She raised her eyes to meet his.
He had beautiful eyes, the most gorgeous eyes she had ever seen. They were a deep, arresting brown, with hints of green and gold. She couldn't usually tell whether someone was a shifter at first sight unless their animal was extremely riled up, but with him, she knew immediately. She didn't know what it was, but as soon as she met his eyes, she was instantly aware that there was an animal in them, and it was looking back at her.
