The courtyard after was roses and vineyard columns and the cool clarity of March air doing what it did—cutting through the warmth of the evening, making everything feel more real rather than less. I’d handed her champagne and taken the scotch Cole had poured with the particular care of a man who knew his audience, and we stood at the balustrade with the groundsspread below and the quiet settled between us like it belonged there.
She laughed when I asked why she'd come.
A real laugh—short, unguarded, the kind that arrived before she'd decided to let it, and it did something to my chest that I catalogued and did not examine further in this moment.
She talked about the open bar the way someone talks about the best part of something they hadn't expected to find worthwhile, and I found myself chuckling, which was not a sound I produced often or without cause. She said Cole's name again and this time I managed to simply continue the conversation rather than notice it with the irrational specificity of a man who apparently had opinions about bartenders now.
She'd given me the observation about my dancing—specific and direct, no performance attached to it—and it caught me in the particular way that honest assessments catch you when you're used to managing people's perceptions. She hadn't said it to give me something. She'd said it because it was accurate and she'd noticed and those were the only reasons she needed.
The scent question was inevitable.
I’d been aware of it since the balcony, the way her signature moved through the courtyard air unrestrained—the suppressor perfume evident in the formula of it, the iris-and-resin quality of something applied, but completely insufficient against the natural force of what was underneath. I’d meant to mention it neutrally. It came out as a statement of fact because that's what it was.
"I don't think it worked."
Her response was to step forward.
She stepped into my space with the absolute confidence of someone who has decided to be bold and is committing fully, and every professional instinct I possessed exited the premises.
"Tell me, masked Alpha. Does my scent displease you?"
Low, deliberate, with that undercurrent of amusement she kept in reserve for moments she was enjoying more than she wanted to let on. I held very still—not from distance, from the opposite, from being very close to something I’d been aware of all evening and was now standing two feet away looking at me with those dark eyes from behind the mask.
I told her the truth.
Every note, in order, the way I’d been taking it apart since the ballroom: honey, vanilla, lime zest. I watched the warmth reach her face as I said it and felt something resolve in my chest with a finality that made no practical sense for a man who'd known this woman for under three hours.
I reached for her chin.
She let me.
My thumb traced her lower lip and her lips parted and her scent shifted—the lime zest flaring bright and immediate, the honey warming, every note of her sharpening at once—and I asked about the kiss because I’d learned early that certain things required the question even when the answer was already in the room.
She started an answer that I didn't let her finish.
The kiss was?—
I’d account for it later. Right now it was too immediate to reduce to description.
Her hand found my lapel somewhere in the middle of it and held on, and her scent was everywhere, and the roses and the night air and the string music drifting from the ballroom all became backdrop to the single fact of her.
I didn't want to stop.
A bell rang.
Clear, formal, the kind of bell that carries authority through a large stone building—a signal, I understood from the evening's programme, marking the final segment of the formal event. Theroom would be transitioning. The next phase of the evening would begin.
She went still in my arms.
And then she pulled back.
I felt it before I saw it—the change in her, something shifting from present to calculating, the lime zest suddenly sharp as she processed the bell with a focus that had nothing to do with me. She looked toward the building, then toward the gardens, then at nothing, running something through her head at speed.
"I need to—" She stopped. Started differently. "The time. What time is it?"
I checked. "Just past midnight."
Something resolved in her expression that I didn't like—the soft edge of the last hour compressing into efficiency. She straightened. Her hand left my lapel.
