Riley waved their hand. “Go. We’ll lock up.”
I grabbed my stuff, rushed out the door, and was on the back of my bike within a minute.
At the bar in just a handful more. Trivia started at eight, and I slid in the door at seven fifty-four.
From our usual table, Lucas smirked my way.
My drink was sitting there in front of an empty stool, despite my never having answered him.
“I almost thought you weren’t going to make it,” Lucas said as I shrugged out of my leather jacket.
“And then what? You’d have had to lose alone?” I dropped my jacket on the empty stool in front of the drink he’d bought me.
It had always baffled me that Lucas insisted on making his own team. His coworkers had teams that did decent enough. He could have joined one of them, but every time I brought it up, he scoffed and bumped me with his shoulder and said we were in it together, and it was... sweet. And stupid. And really, this whole thing just felt like an excuse to get me out of the house and off my ass and?—
That drink. That was the important bit.
I dragged the cold mug to my lips and took a sip before I even noticed Lucas was smiling across the table—not at me, but at some stranger.
As I licked the beer foam off my lips, I looked at the man in the chair across from me and breathed in slow. I definitely didn’t recognize his scent, but there was something familiar about it. Feline, sure, but in a way that spoke of fresh rain and the dense, ozone smell of a faraway city.
He was delicately featured, with fine, sharp cheekbones and eyes bright as amber. His hair was a warm golden brown that caught the light hanging over our table. Next to Lucas’s tricky panther smirk, the stranger looked?—
He wasn’t quite shellshocked, but there was a distance, a kind of startled confusion, that reminded me too much of how it felt to walk into a room now. Alone. It was hard to get used to. Impossible, without the beer.
“We’re not losing this time,” Lucas said, beaming at the guy. “Dean, this is Landon, new head of IT at Crescent. Landon, my brother, Dean.”
I shifted forward over the round table, holding out my hand. “Nice to meet you.”
Landon seemed to catch himself staring, and a second later, his expression had gone from hazy and startled to a perfectly reasonable smile. He shook my hand, his grip firm and confident. A rival predator?
I didn’t think so. I didn’t get that tingling feeling at the back of my skull that prickled at me around the wolves.
“You too.”
“Dean’s our resident music buff,” Lucas announced, “so he’s got that covered. And Landon’s basically a genius. He just started today, so obviously, I had to snatch him up for Team St. James.”
“Lucky,” I said. “But it seems like we need a new team name if we’re adding another player.”
Relegating Landon to third wheel on a team that shared our surname was rude, considering the fact that he was the only one of us at the table who had a single shot in hell of scoring tonight.
“Ideas?” I asked him.
Landon bit his lip. “Uh . . . ”
“Frisky Business!” Lucas announced, slapping the tabletop.
Landon snorted.
And it hit me—why he felt familiar and not, all at once. He was a cat, just not a werepanther like me and Lucas.
Interesting. Little kitties tended to stick to their own. I wondered what had dragged Landon away from his.
CHAPTER 3
LANDON
Trivia night was not a thing I’ve ever done back home.
