“I don’t believe it.”
“Which is why, dear Lilah, I do hope you will consider coming in and talking about this in person.”
Lilah rubbed the scar over her eyebrow again. The dull ache returned, though nothing compared to the stabbing pain of the night before—unless she thought about the man in the limo, remembering those blue eyes, the tawny hair.
Then it returned with violence.
Good reason not to think about him.
Smoky jumped up and put his feet on her shins, smiling up at her. Before bed, she’d fed and bathed him, cut off some of the matted hair, and brushed him as well as she could. Now he was as downy as a dandelion fluff, looking more like a celebrity’s fashion accessory than a mangy rescue dog from the inner city.
And Jess was staring at her too, now with a worried, pinched expression.
“It’s wise to be skeptical,” Eva continued. “We wouldn’t be interested in hiring you if you lacked intelligence. Or education. Everyone we interview goes through this process, and we expect it. Therefore, I have emailed you links to several password-protected documents, images, videos, and audio recordings. It should take you the rest of the day to study all of the materials. If after viewing them you are still unwilling to talk to us in person, then you can simply do nothing. The links will expire, as will the offer.”
When the woman said “expire,” a shiver undulated down Lilah’s spine. Some deep, voiceless message echoed in her mind: you cannot let that happen.
“The password is luna-one-seven-zero-one, no caps,” Eva said.
In a daze, Lilah jotted it down on their unpaid phone bill: luna1701. “I can look at the, uh, materials,” she said. The pain in her forehead was returning. Beats of pain, still faint, throbbed like a distant drum.
“Wonderful. We look forward to meeting you, Lilah.”
The phone went quiet.
Gavin swiped the keycard to his penthouse apartment overlooking the river. He owned the entire twenty-third floor, with a panoramic view of the nightscape ever at the ready. Most nights, he ignored anything beyond the remote-controlled curtains, using the apartment for sleep.
Tonight, though, he had other plans.
Pouring himself a full tumbler of whisky his father had sworn was made in the 1700s under his great-grandfather’s watch at a private distillery in the highlands of Scotland, Gavin turned to the windowed wall and flicked a switch, the tinted glass doors to the terrace opening so quietly they might not have had motors. Powered by magic.
Magic. Like the legend of the One. The Beat.
The ludicrous. What he felt for Lilah was pure animal attraction. Lust. There was no need to clutter it with silly notions of superstition. The only throbbing that mattered was the beat in his cock, and he’d experienced that with plenty of other women. More than he could count, really.
He paused as he went to take a sip of his drink. That wasn’t quite true. While more than enough women had been the recipients of his sexual attentions, none had made him so crazed.
So obsessed.
He made a derisive sound in the back of his throat, the noise lost on the wind. He paused, body edgy and filled with impulses he could not name.
What was it that Isaac Asimov once said? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Science was how Gavin made his billions in biotechnology, but magic was what turned his heart and mind in circles tonight. A wicked wind whipped through his hair, body bathing in the moonlight afforded by the barely waning moon.
His throat drank greedily from the glass in his hand, head tipped up to take in the night not with his eyes, but with his nose. Could he find her through scent alone?
Science told him that his werewolf status was a simple accident of DNA, a mutation generations back that made him and his bloodline different from humans. He was half wolf, half Homo sapiens, and fully in charge of his own destiny. His own life.
His own heart.
The beating began in his core, traveling down, blood pooling where his ardent desire lived.
No. Gavin was a man of science, of rational thought, of evidence and reason, but even he had to admit that there were realms where mere fact was no competition for some deeper force.
The hollow feeling inside him was new, and wholly unexplained by fact.
Gripping the balcony’s railing, his arms flexed with muscle fibers that wanted soft curves, hands tight on the carved wrought iron. The night was cool, the solid metal a grounding force.
His heart thudded in his chest, steady and full, even as his mind pounded for her.
Her.
Her.
Her.
“Are you quite done?” said a voice like a serpent. Gavin froze, senses preternaturally fast, absorbing the surprise with no startle.
His older brother, Asher.
“Make yourself at home,” Gavin grunted.
“I already have.” The clink of ice on glass, the scent of his own whisky in his nose told Gavin that Asher was telling the truth.
Asher always told the truth.
“Derry tells me you’ve found ‘her.’ I can smell the need on you,” Asher said quietly. Never one to yell, he could express displeasure with a single turn of one syllable. All of the Stanton brothers could detect his moods. How their younger brother Edward managed to live most of the year so close to Asher at the family estate out west was a mystery to Gavin.
Gavin had no desire to explain how he felt—what he felt—to his older brother right now. The invasion of home was bad enough. The invasion of his heart would not do.
“I found a woman I plan to bed. Nothing more,” Gavin replied.
Asher’s laugh made Gavin grip the railing so hard he might bend it. “Your lies are as bad as Derry’s debts.”
Gavin turned around to meet Asher’s eyes.
“Unnecessary and, in the end, more destructive to you than to me.”
“Why are you here?”
“To save you from making an enormous mistake.”
“How can it be a mistake if I feel the Beat? What if she’s the One?” Gavin asked with a tight smile. His voice carried a mocking tone and yet—a vision of that long blonde hair, those wide hips, the kind arms that reached for the dog and her lingering eyes, reflecting back his desire…
Gavin studied his brother, who now hovered in the balcony threshold. Moonlight gave Gavin a full view. The same dark hair that Derry possessed, but blue eyes like Gavin’s, though a deeper color, as if black onyx had married the azure blue sky. Asher wore his hair longer than any of his brothers, pulled back at the nape of his neck with a simple ribbon. He looked, for all intents and purposes, like a man from the 1800s. Derry’s Mr. Darcy joke resonated, though he’d teased the wrong brother.
If any man in the family were close to a Regency hero, it was Asher.
In terms of age, he was also the closest. The Stanton bloodline, like all of the other old shifter families, gave its members long lives. Long, extended lives. None were immortal, but living parts of three centuries was not unheard of. All five Stanton children looked to be in their thirties and twenties, but their true ages were nearly three times that.
The bitter laugh that greeted Gavin made his breath seize in his chest. Asher’s words felt like a knife. “You don’t believe in the old ways, but they believe in you when you’re not looking. If this woman, Lilah—”