Chapter 1 #3
Another female voice cuts through the air.
Maybe Nick Love isn’t here at all. Maybe the top floor of his business is nothing but a stockpile of unruly female shifters, none of whom have been mated, I suspect.
There’s a certain unshifted quality about both the girl at the front desk and the one behind the filing cabinet that is clearly taller than her.
I don’t know if she thinks someone else is here and she’s talking to them, or if this is just a stream of consciousness I happen to be overhearing.
“Hello?” I speak for the first time.
At my voice, a figure shoots into view, rubber-banded from the depths of this fever dream.
She’s got shaggy blonde and brown hair, hacked into a wolf cut. It looks good on her. It also looks like she’s one glitter-star-painted-onto-an-eye away from joining a glam rock band.
She’s very cute. She has obstinate features, though.
A snub nose, big brown eyes that are currently narrowed at me, full cheeks.
She’s on the curvy side and it suits her.
Her clothing would horrify Fescue into an episode of some kind.
She’s wearing a fitted black T-shirt with an expletive on it, and bootcut jeans that have come in and out of fashion twice since I’ve been alive.
She really could have stepped right out of a picture from a time before she was born.
She stares at me too, much like the desk girl did, but she’s got a lot more going on behind her eyes.
Annoyance, mostly, but I’ll take it. Her gaze runs up my body and back down it again, and I’m somewhat relieved Fescue decided to pitch one of his sassy fits today.
I know I project traditional strength. That is the one thing this place is clearly missing.
Everything around me, including her adorable, petulant face, screams spank me, Daddy.
I’d be more than pleased to oblige. The young woman looking at me has an aura about her that draws me. She has a perfect mixture of vulnerability and rebellion. She’s got me down here by defying me. That’s earned her a good, long spanking before we even start.
“Can I help you? Are you lost?”
Even her questions show that same dyad. The first one felt almost helpful. The second one is clearly a thinly veiled fuck off. I get the impression I am lucky to have been given the veil.
“I’m looking for Nick Love.”
“I am Nicky,” she says. “Who are you?”
That last question is insolent and insubordinate. I can already tell that she knows precisely who I am. At first, she might have been confused. She isn’t now. Her gaze has roamed up and down my body several times, and now there is an adorable flush on her cheeks and across her nose.
“I am Rex Regent,” I say, though I know she knows precisely who I am. I am the alpha of this city. The one whose authority she has been blatantly flouting.
I can smell her.
I can smell everyone here, of course. But the scent coming from her is laced with endorphins. She’s enjoying this. We have only just met and she is already starting to be consumed with chemical want.
Our eyes are locked on one another with an intensity that demands we do not break the contact. I take a step toward her, and immediately her scent becomes richer.
My expression intensifies. I can see myself reflected in a dozen surfaces.
The hard lines of my face sharpen, my eyes narrow.
I am locked in on her entirely. I don’t care about anything else anymore.
Not about the takeover. Not about the building makeover.
Not about the reserve. Not about my own company. I care about her. And having her.
There is a big desk covered in various items of a decorative nature. Some of them look delicate. That rules out tossing everything on it onto the floor when I fuck her into submission. Perhaps we’ll do it on the oversized shaggy toon wolf rug. I am going to defile this woman.
No. More than that.
I am going to mate her. No.
The beast inside me demands more still.
I am going to breed her.
The realization comes over me all at once.
I just met my mate.
I expected to do it in the deep woods and wilds of the reserve, but instead it is happening inside a cotton candy fever dream squatting in the shell of my childhood.
“I’m here to do a deal,” I tell her.
She has to be feeling this as well, the magnetic pull between us. The very near feral impulses coursing through my body have to be answered.
I look at her, seeking signs of blushing, of heat.
She takes a step back and narrows her eyes even more.
Her hackles are invisibly raised. I don’t see arousal.
I see hostility. She’s scared. But not the kind of scared that will make her turn tail or submit.
This is the kind of fear that turns into deep bites and savagery.
There is so much more going on here than I had bargained for. My instincts make me want to take her roughly here and now, but we live in a civilized world and there are motions that have to be gone through. She has to want it. Scrap that. She has to beg for it.
“I’m sorry,” she smirks at me.
If I couldn’t smell the fear, I might believe her bravado.
“We’re not interested in doing a deal with you. You left this place abandoned, because the city is too big for you to handle on your own. We’re actually doing you a favor.”
I smile at her with the indulgence a powerful predator shows a yapping pup.
“Is that right? Because from my perspective, you’re squatting.”
“Squatters have rights,” she says. “I think, if you call one of your fancy lawyers, you’ll soon discover that you don’t own this building as much as you think you do. Now. Get the hell out of my office.”
* * *
Nicky
Get the hell out of my office.
Those words hang in the air between us. That was a big swing, and it might turn out to be an even bigger miss. He could rip me apart if he wanted to, and we both know nobody would do anything about it.
I didn’t plan on meeting Rex Regent today.
If I’d known, I would have worn something prettier, or scarier.
My t-shirt has curses on it, but it’s a t-shirt and there is only so much aura you can have wearing a shirt and jeans.
I can feel a whine inside me as the animal I try not to be responds to him.
This man is, well, he’s not a fucking man. He’s a fucking beast. I’ve never encountered anybody with such intense and pure alpha energy. He looks at me, and his blue eyes glint with a fierceness that makes my inner animal rouse in response.
He’s six feet five. They don’t explain to you how tall that is outside a basketball court. It’s basically like having a living giant stroll into your office. Some of the guys in my pack are large as well. Some of them might even be almost as tall as him. But none of them make me feel this way.
I keep my distance for a lot of reasons, one of them being I don’t want to have to look up at him too much.
I feel lightheaded and slightly high in general, like I just took a hit of something illegal.
I guess I knew this moment would come. When we turned down the acquisition, the lawyers politely threatened us that Rex Regent would make an appearance himself.
I told them that the stupid man with his even stupider name was welcome to try to change our minds.
We have the law on our side. Human law. The kind of law that holds the world together.
He knows it too. That’s why he’s here. If it wasn’t on our side, he would have put his weight against it and he would have let it crush us for him.
That’s what Regent does. It’s a company too powerful to notice what it is fucking up. But every princess has her pea, as my mom used to say, and I know that being small can also mean being mighty as long as you use your little leverage in the right ways.
He’s smoldering at me now. He could glower if he wanted, but he’s saving the intimidating alpha energy for another time. I saw what his brows did when he first laid eyes on me. He’d assumed I was a man. Men do that.
And now I feel a different energy from him. Something deeper, darker, something that makes me try to pretend it’s not there even while the core of me starts to melt for him.
I’m still not backing down. We’ve worked really hard on this building, and when we got here, it had obviously not been touched in years.
We spent months and months renovating it ourselves using tutorials from the internet.
Some of us even learned how to weld, for gods’ sakes.
And now this rich fucking older man walks in and tells me the place belongs to him? Not going to happen. Not ever.
He looks at me with that stoic expression that I find unreadable.
“No,” he says. “You know what you need, little whelp? You need to be spanked. Long. And hard. You need to be taught how to behave…”
“You lay a finger on me, and you’ll lose a part of your anatomy you’re attached to,” I tell him. “You think you’re the first big guy I’ve dropped? You’re not.”
He takes several swift steps toward me, but before he can grab me, I pull the flick knife out of my pocket and press the tip of the blade low on his stomach, right above an appendage I know he likes.
I press it forward hard enough to make a cut in the waistcoat.
The blade is sharp enough to eviscerate him. I want him to know that.
“You just keep making this worse for yourself,” he chuckles darkly.
“Funny. I was going to say the same thing about you.”
He smiles down at me, and now I am so close that I don’t have any choice but to look up at him. His dark hair falls forward around his face, framing his eyes. I am absolutely transfixed by him.
But he’s an asshole. He’s everything I’m trying to fight against. And he’s not doing himself any favors by walking in here like he owns the place—well, I guess he does own the place, but that’s not the point.
He reaches out and cups my chin, resting the pad of his thumb on my lower lip in a gesture that feels more intimate than if he’d outright kissed me.