Page 2 of Howl Lotta Love

His gaze made one fast pass—green silk, auburn hair listing loose from its pins, the volunteer badge she’d forgotten was still clipped to her collar—and came back to her face and stayed there.

Emma looked up. And kept looking up.

He topped six feet by a wide margin, dark hair cut with military precision, a jaw sharp enough to open mail with, and eyes the color of good whiskey held to candlelight—the kind of eyes that made every wolf within twenty feet drop their voice half an octave without noticing they’d done it. Every predatory inch of him screamed alpha, and the part of Emma’s brain that cataloged threats for a living tagged him as extremely.

Her professional opinion, formed in under two seconds and completely inadmissible in court: his shoulders had no business fitting through a standard doorway, and his forearms—visible where he’d shoved his sleeves back for the party, formalwear apparently a personal grudge—legally required a warning label. She filed him away with the same thoroughness she gave a fraud case: methodical, unblinking, and utterly against her will.

He was staring down at her, visibly missing several words of the English language he’d had access to four seconds ago. Which tracked, because Emma’s brain had apparently walked off the job too.

Heat climbed her arm from the point where his hand still gripped her elbow, wildly out of proportion to a man catching a falling stranger. It hadn’t faded, and neither had he—hand still at her elbow, apparently forgotten, or not especially missed.

Say a word. Any word. You have two graduate degrees and a testifying voice that’s rattled federal judges.

“Sorry,” she managed, which was not the word she’d been aiming for. “The folders—I didn’t⁠—”

“No.” His voice landed low and rough, unpracticed, a voice that hadn’t planned on being used tonight. “Mine. Wasn’t watching where I⁠—”

He stopped. His gaze dropped to her mouth, brief and unmistakable, before it snapped back up with the visible effort of a man yanking himself back onto the road. His hand tightened at her elbow—one beat too long—before he let go, visibly startled to discover he hadn’t already.

Up close, he wasn’t wearing the suit so much as testing its seams. Every line of him sat coiled and ready, and heat pooled low in Emma’s stomach like her body had been personally addressed. Her pulse hadn’t gotten the memo that the danger had passed. She wanted to know why.

“Your folders.” He held them out, squared and stacked with an efficiency that suggested he’d resorted them by size while she stood there staring at his forearms with open, personal offense.

“Thanks.” She took them, and their fingers brushed the top folder’s edge, and warmth chased up her arm from the contact and landed, unhelpfully, behind her ribs.

He opened his mouth. A voice carried down the hall from the ballroom—not his name, as far as she could tell, but close enough to a summons that his whole body angled toward it, attention snapped tight like a leash had tugged. When he looked back at her, his face had shuttered closed, unreadable and remote, a man remembering he had somewhere to be.

“Excuse me.” And he was gone, cutting back down the hall toward the ballroom with a purpose sharp enough that anyone in his path would have stepped aside without registering they’d done it.

Emma stood very still, folders clutched to her chest, staring at the space where a very large, very immediate problem had been standing two seconds ago. Her heart hadn’t caught up to the rest of the space yet. It was still somewhere around her throat, pounding like she’d sprinted a flight of stairs instead of getting caught by a very large, very attractive stranger.

Professional composure had officially left the building. Get his name. Chase him down. Get. His. Name.

She did not chase him down. She turned around, marched back to her office, and spent the next twenty minutes furious at herself for wanting to—stamping the entire encounter professional hazard, do not repeat and immediately failing to stop thinking about his forearms even once.

The records office sat behind the ballroom’s back hallway—fluorescent-lit, filing cabinets, a server tower humming to itself, the kind of room built for work instead of performance. Emma spread the new files across a folding table and dug back in, grateful for the quiet and the excuse to stop replaying the ghost of a hand on her elbow.

The animal rescue gap. The elder-care gap. She pulled a third ledger—a women’s shelter, one of Gerri’s oldest programs—and ran the same check.

It matched.

Her pen stopped. She sat back, and the fluorescent hum seemed to get louder in the silence where her focus narrowed to a pinpoint.

Three unrelated charities. Three boards. Three accounting firms filing three sets of paperwork with three regulators who’d never think to compare notes. And underneath all of it, the same fraction bleeding out of every account, over and over, small enough to survive a hundred audits and consistent enough that it could not be an accident. Not by any math Emma trusted.

She pulled a fourth ledger. A fifth. The pattern held.

The chill that walked down her spine had nothing to do with the air conditioning. Somebody built this on purpose. Built it to stay invisible. And they’re good. Frighteningly good.

She allowed herself exactly one full-body shudder, the kind she usually reserved for expired yogurt and men who called her “sweetheart” in depositions, and got back to work.

She didn’t hear the door until Gerri was already leaning in the frame, watching her work with a look Emma hadn’t seen all night—stripped of the champagne-bright performance from the ballroom, sharp and quiet underneath it. Arms crossed, studying Emma with the focus of a woman deciding exactly how much of the truth she was about to hear.

“You found it.”

“I found a pattern. I don’t know what it means yet.”

“You will.” Gerri crossed the room and looked down at the spread of files, unbothered by numbers that would send most donors running for a lawyer. “I’ve had six accountants through my books this year, Ms. Burke. Every one told me my paperwork was in excellent order. All six are now uninvited to next year’s gala, retroactively, for the crime of being wrong.”