“Like saving dessert until after all the other courses,” Eloise responded smoothly, and gave Francine a little nudge in ‘Niki’s’ direction. “You can fend for yourself, babes, I’ve got to go bite off some heads.”
Francine sized up the man who’d approached her. He was somewhere between his late thirties and mid-forties, she guessed, with thick dark hair and black eyes set in a tanned face. Tall and broad-shouldered, which was so common as to be unremarkable with most shifter men, but thicker-built than anyone else she’d met that night.
Like her, he was built on a large scaffold.
“Niki?” she asked.
“Vassilios Nikolaidis,” he said, extending one hand. “Niki to people who find the other syllables a challenge. And you are Ms. Delacourt, are you not?”
“Francine,” she said, and he repeated her name. He didn’t linger over it like a lot of men did, as though he was licking every letter and leering at her. It might have been less unsettling if he did.
How did he know her? Why was she thefamousFrancine Delacourt?
There was a limit to the number of wealthy shifters in the world. Almost everyone in North America knew her—she took that for granted. Harper’s guests had been rich, but they had run in different circles. They hadn’t recognized Mathis, and she could hope they wouldn’t recognize her.
She’d been in Paris since everything fell apart, slouching her way through public events, but her lioness wouldn’t have been obvious during that time, and she hadn’t encountered more than a handful of other shifters.
“We haven’t met before, have we?” she asked carefully.
“Alas. My people were in contact with your people a year or so ago about bringing some new life to one of my old villas, but I think I did not make the cut.”
She blinked, and he gave a smile that managed to be apologetic and enigmatic at the same time. “But perhaps now is not the place to talk of work.”
“No, no. It’s just been a while since I moved away from that sort of thing. You must have caught my assistant while we were winding things down.”And I was winding myself into a frenzy of paranoia and unhappiness, she added silently, her jaw tightening.
“A sad case of poor timing.” He sighed. “And now it is too late.”
“I’m afraid so. I don’t see much building design work in my future.”
“No, we are all more in the business of knocking them down now, are we not?” He really was very good at smiling.Though—there was something about his face that made her lioness go still inside her, watchful and wary. As though beneath the smile was another expression, and another behind that.
She shook her head, resisting the urge to twitch whiskers she didn’t have. What was he?
Her thoughts were interrupted by the delicate ringing of a bell.
He extended an arm. “I believe that’s the call for dinner. May I?”
As they took their seats around the perfectly laid-out and decorated table, it became obvious that Eloise abandoning her with Mr. Nikolaidis hadn’t been a coincidence. Francine was seated with Eloise on one side and the mysterious Greek shifter on her other, opposite the two men she hadn’t yet been introduced to.
Over the first course, conversation remained light and pleasant, or at least only boring in the ways she was used to—investments this, returns that, I’ve got so much money and a big dick as well, blah blah blah. Exquisitely professional waitstaff whisked away empty plates and replaced them with fresh morsels. Francine’s wineglass never fell below half full no matter how many absent sips she took from it.
But as the evening wore on, the atmosphere thickened. Francine’s head buzzed from the overflow of private telepathic conversation. People’s inner animals began to rise to the surface.
She’d missed the company of other shifters, but she never missed this. It was even more tiresome than the business bragging.
Francine managed to catch the waiter in time to wave them away from refilling her glass. Her lioness tensed.What?she asked it, half teasing, half exasperated.Now youwantme to make bad decisions?
It flinched away, and she paled.
One of the men across the table eyeballed her. His lip curled back in a snarl.
“Oh, whoops! I totally forgot to introduce you!” Eloise covered her mouth with one hand, but her eyes were sparkling. “Frankie, this is Stevey Panshaw. Stevey—”
“You’re some sort of lioness? Come on. Let’s see it.” Stevey leaned back, sneering to his seatmate out of one side of his mouth. “Bet the bitch isn’t even a shifter.”
Eloise gave a delighted gasp of horror.
Of course, Francine thought, looking up at Stevey Panshaw with deliberate slowness. Her lioness hadn’t been reacting to her refusing another drink—it had picked up on the razor’s-edge balance between her fellow guests’ grandstanding and real danger.
