Page 4 of Howl Lotta Love

“Cameras up on all three sites. Got an unregistered car circling the gallery block twice in ten minutes—could be nothing, could be somebody casing the place. Sending Roman the plate.”

“Copy.” Jace took the stairs to the executive floor two at a time out of habit rather than urgency, shoulders rolling loose the way they only did when his wolf had spent the night pacing instead of sleeping, and told himself the two things weren’t related.

They were.

His office sat at the end of the floor—dark wood, black leather, desk angled to watch the door because old habits didn’t retire only because the war did. No photographs anywhere. Sentiment was a liability in his line of work, and he’d learned that lesson so early, he couldn’t remember learning it.

There was a name he still didn’t say out loud, a war and a continent removed from the reason he’d learned it, and habits built on graves didn’t get gentler with time. He dropped into the chair, pulled up two feeds, and reached for the coffee Diesel had left on his desk sometime before dawn without being asked.

His hand closed around the mug hard enough to test the ceramic.

He set it down. Flexed his fingers. Told himself it was nothing.

It was not nothing. It hadn’t been nothing since ten forty-five last night, when a woman with an armful of ledgers walked straight into his chest and every instinct he’d spent a decade leashing broke loose in one hot, ungovernable second.

He’d caught her before she hit the ground—hands moving faster than thought, same as they always did for anyone he could reach in time. That part made sense. What didn’t make sense was everything after. Four seconds with her folders in his arms and his whole body had gone on point, treating her as a threat instead of a woman who smelled like ink and rain-damp wool and a warmth underneath both that had made his teeth ache.

He’d run those four seconds on a loop from midnight until now, the way a man checks a wound to gauge how bad it is. It was worse. He’d led men through firefights without his pulse changing. A stranger’s elbow in his hand had done more damage than most of his combat record.

My wolf’s opinions are not appropriate for a professional engagement.

He went back to the feed. It solved nothing, and he knew it.

Roman didn’t knock. Roman had never knocked in four years and wasn’t about to start, shouldering through the door with two coffees, already grinning like he’d smelled gossip a floor away.

“You’re doing the thing.” He dropped one coffee on the desk hard enough to slosh over the rim, folded himself into the chair with the proprietary comfort of a man paying rent on it, and grinned—built like a wall that had wandered into tactical operations out of spite, a grin that had gotten adversaries killed underestimating him more than once, currently aimed at Jace with the precision of a loaded weapon. “The staring-at-nothing thing. Twice in the briefing. Twice in the elevator.”

“I don’t have a thing.”

“You’ve got several things. This one’s new.” Roman kicked his boots onto the edge of the desk, which earned him a look that would’ve sent a smarter man home early. He left the boots where they were. “So. Who is she?”

Jace considered denial. Considered, for one full second, the dignity available to men who simply didn’t answer. Then he did the math on how long Roman could sit there being smug in total silence—infinite, the answer was infinite—and decided honesty cost less.

“Ran into someone at the gala.” Flat. Nothing in his voice to suggest it mattered. His hands, gripping the mug again without his permission, disagreed. “Literally walked into me.”

“And?”

“And nothing. Caught her. She apologized, visibly offended by the whole situation. Handed back her files. She left. Over in seconds.”

“You don’t get that face over nothing, boss.” Roman pointed his coffee at him, a broad accusing sweep that took in Jace’s whole posture, his jaw, the mug he was strangling again without noticing. “What was her name?”

Silence.

“You don’t know her name.”

“No.”

“You held a woman for several seconds, and you don’t know her name.” Roman set his coffee down with actual reverence. “But you know more than that. I can see it on you. What?”

Jace exhaled, long and put-upon, a sound that fooled exactly nobody in this building. “Ink. Rain on wool.” His jaw ticked. “Warm.”

“Warm.”

“That’s what she smelled like.”

Roman stared at him for a solid three seconds before he lost it—a laugh that came from somewhere deep and unfair, rough enough that it had made grown mercenaries reconsider their life choices mid-firefight. “You noticed her scent and skipped the name. This is the best thing that’s happened to me all year, and I once watched Diesel adopt a raccoon he swore was a very small, very angry dog.”

“It’s not a thing.”