We drifted back to the library because that room had a gravitational pull I couldn’t resist. I curled into the armchair with my legs draped across his lap, book open on my knee, his hand resting warm on my ankle. The fire was still going, the lamp casting gold light across the shelves, and my body was still humming from the kitchen and I couldn’t concentrate on a single word on the page.
I set the book down.
“Tell me about the King stuff,” I said. “Not the council and the territory disputes. The everyday part.”
He told me. The pack was hundreds of wolves and their families. Disputes, politics, livelihoods. Territory that needed managing, alliances that needed maintaining. His company funded a lot of it but the pack existed long before the business.
“And the Luna?”
“The King’s partner. His equal. She holds the emotional center of the pack. Mediates where the King can’t. The pack looks to the King for strength and the Luna for heart.”
I traced a circle on the arm of the chair with my finger. Heart. That was a hell of a job description. I tried not to think about whether he was describing the role or describing me and I failed at not thinking about it almost immediately.
“That’s a lot,” I said.
“It is.”
I didn’t push further. We were day by day. I wasn’t mapping out a future that involved wolf politics and leadership titles. But the question sat in my head, warm and heavy, and I could feel him watching me like he wanted to say more.
I changed the subject because I wasn’t ready for whatever he was holding back.
“You know I used to dye my hair? In high school. Dark brown, almost black. Wore heavy makeup, black clothes, tried to lookolder because everyone treated me like a kid who couldn’t be taken seriously.”
“What happened?”
“Woke up one day, looked in the mirror, didn’t recognize the person looking back. I’d spent years performing this version of ‘serious’ that other people decided I needed to be and I hated every damn second of it.” I shrugged. “So I went back to blonde. Wore pink. People underestimated me anyway so I figured I’d rather be myself and let my work shut them up.”
He remained silent for a second. Then he reached over, took my hand, lifted it to his mouth, and pressed his lips against the inside of my wrist. Slow. Warm. His stubble grazed my skin, his breath landing on the soft part where my pulse was going crazy, and my whole arm went hot. He held my wrist there, his lips barely moving against my skin, and I could feel him breathing me in.
“I love the way you dress,” he said, low, against my skin, and every nerve ending in my body lit up at the same time.
My brain just shut off. Full system crash. I sat there with my hand in his and his mouth on my wrist and I couldn’t form a sentence. Couldn’t form a thought. Just heat, his breath, his stubble, the low rumble of his voice vibrating against my pulse.
“That’s cheating,” I finally managed. “You can’t say shit like that while kissing my wrist. My head stops working.”
“Then stop thinking.”
“I can’t stop thinking, that’s my whole personality. Thinking and worrying and overanalyzing, that’s the Andrea Grey experience.”
“Sounds exhausting.”
“It is. You’re making it worse.”
I pulled my hand back and picked up the book because if I didn’t put a barrier between us right now we were ending up on the library floor and I hadn’t finished this damn chapter. My wrist was still tingling where his mouth had been. I pressed it against the cool leather of the armchair and pretended I was fine.
I read aloud. The terrible Scottish accent, all the voices, the hero being an idiot about his feelings while I did commentary between paragraphs. He listened with his head against the back of the chair, eyes closed, and at some point his hand found my ankle again, his thumb tracing slow circles that I don’t think he was aware of. The fire popped. My voice got softer. The pauses between sentences stretched out as the warmth of the room and the weight of his hand on my ankle pulled me toward sleep.
I finished the chapter, looked up, and he was watching me. Guard completely down. No CEO mask, no King face. Just him, listening to me read, with an expression I’d never seen him give anyone else. Open, unguarded, reverent. Like I was the most important person in any room and he couldn’t believe he got to be in the same one.
I love this man.
The words pressed against my teeth. I held them there. Not yet. But soon, because keeping them in was getting harder every time he looked at me like that.
The next day at the office, the elevator opened and Lorraine stepped out.
My stomach tightened before my brain even caught up. Lorraine Ashtor, Finneas’s childhood friend, the woman who’d been telling everyone at this company and apparently half the city that she and Finneas were basically engaged. She had a title here that amounted to nothing, a role Finneas gave her because their families were close, and she used it as a platform to walk around like she owned the place. Including, on a semi-regular basis, walking up to my desk to remind me that I was beneath her.
Red hair, sharp outfit, heels clicking across the tile like she owned the floor. She walked toward me with that stride she had, the one that said everyone else in the room was furniture and she was the person who’d ordered it.
