Chapter 1
Irelynn
“Girl, the scowl.” Rae waves her glittery, red-tipped nail in my face. “Wipe it off or you’re going to secure that pesky virgin status for another year.”
My eyes slide to hers, and I slow blink.
The crap she says sometimes. Honestly.
“You’re the only one who say’s it’s pesky.”
“Apart from you, I’m the only one who knows.” She takes a big sip of her martini, shoulders shimmying in a way I just know spells trouble.
I don’t want trouble. I certainly don’t need it.
I’ve had enough to last me a lifetime.
When it comes to trouble, I’m retired!
Rae’s grin turns scandalous. “Hank has been staring at you, you know?”
Yep. Trouble.
“I’m not sleeping with someone I work for.” I swear, she says these things to get a rise out of me.
None-the-less, I can’t believe I’m having this conversation at a company Christmas party. In November! Last week was fricking Halloween.
We haven’t even had Thanksgiving, and we’re celebrating the coming of Christmas. I get it, though. Money is tight, and it’s astronomically cheaper to rent a party room outside the Christmas demand. Still…
To make matters worse, they’ve decided to host this party in a casino.
Of all the places.
My nerves jitter. I fight not to fidget, nibbling my lip instead.
This is so not my scene.
The chips in my purse (curtesy of the company) should be burning a hole. If I was normal, maybe I’d already have spent them, hopeful for a lucky break. That is, if I wasn’t listening to Rae attempt to find someone—anyone—to deflower me.
The fishbowl of steaming poop my life has become… I just—I can’t even.
“You need to break the seal with someone. You’re legally allowed to drink in public, and you don’t even know the magic that is the D.” She pouts. “It’s a travesty.”
I give her big eyes. “I think you get enough of the D for both of us.”
Those glittery red talons flash as she swats playfully at me, a devilish smirk flirting at her red lips. She knows it’s true. “Oh, whatever.”
Besides, having listened to most of Rae’s sexcapade’s in painful detail, the only innocence I maintain is the thin skin of my hymen. It’s more obstruction (no pun intended) than advantage.
I could probably sell it for a few months’ worth of rent. I’ve heard of girls doing that. Of getting something out of the thing so many men simply take.
But I just can’t.
I take a sip of my sparkling water with its pretty twist of lemon, and feel my insides cringe when I glance at the clock to see it’s only quarter past nine PM.
When is it acceptable for a single woman with no familial responsibilities to leave her office Christmas party?
Gnawing the corner of my lip, I debate the merits of faking a stomach flu. Or a migraine. Possibly food poisoning…
Or anything—anything at all—that’ll get me out of this silly blue silk dress Rae demanded I borrow for tonight. I’d had to borrow one of hers, because I have not one dress to my name that’s fitting of a swanky—or trying to be swanky, party.
Do I really have to justify why I’m leaving to anyone?
Another quick glance around the casino shows my coworkers are having a blast. Most have moved past their first three company-paid-for-drinks, and a few are well past drink number four and five, even though we congregated here little over two hours ago.
It shouldn’t surprise me, what with the way this party had been on the lips of nearly every employee for the last two weeks. Talk of letting loose, no judgement (until the New Year), and wild times of years past at this event, had been the highlight of the water-cooler chit-chat.
I hate public events.
The thought has anxiety prickling at the back of my neck and between my shoulder blades. With a shrug, I do my best to shake it off.
But my skin itches.
I’m lucky to have this job, even if I’m just the front desk receptionist. I’m responsible for little more than smiling pretty, transferring calls, and sipping office coffee. Which is pretty great, as it’s the only coffee I can afford, being that it’s free.
The job is a huge step up from spraying sweaty shoes at the bowling alley, which is what I’d been doing when I met Rae. Somehow, we’d become unlikely friends. She’d convinced me to lie on my resume to snag the position at the mega massive construction company she worked for. Rae is four years older than me, at twenty-five, and the personal assistant to Jeremy Lowman, part owner of Low and Bard Construction. Hank Bard, the man currently eye-fucking me from where he leans against a slot machine, semi-engaged in conversation with Tracy from human resources, owns the other half—if the stamp of his last name on the company header means anything.
I met Rae last year this time while volunteering in the local soup kitchen, and she wormed her way into getting my number. Then, she wormed her way into my life. How she managed, I’m still not sure.
Probably the same way she managed to convince me to wear this dress. Rae is like any invasive species. She sweeps in before you have time to comprehend, she’s there—and then, well, it’s too late.
I love her for it. This dress, though…
I feel like a fraud in my own skin.
“Stop trying to think up some excuse to leave.”
She knows me too well.
I frown. “Lucy misses me.”
“Lucifer is home, alone for once on a Saturday night, gladly licking his balls in peace.”
My eyes widen and I feel my lips part as my jaw unhinges. “He’s neutered.”
She points a finger at me, her eyes landing firmly on mine. “They’re smaller, but they’re still there. I’ve seen them.”
“I’m not talking about my cat’s balls with you.”
Rae shrugs. “I’m just saying, give the man a night alone.”
“He’s a cat.” I deadpan.
“Who is happily licking his?—”
Waving my hand in a flippant ‘see ya later’ gesture, I start to walk away with the sound of Rae’s laughter echoing in the space I fled. Rae handed her last drink token over when she ordered the martini she holds. I know her well enough to know she’ll soon be on the prowl for a hot hook-up. He won’t be from our company, either. Even though she likes to tease me about Hank—and his sticky eyeballs—she knows better than to shit where she eats.
She’ll sink her talons into some poor sucker before the hour is up, bang him in a semi-quiet hall, and leave him drooling.
I’ll give it another half an hour, and then I’m ditching.
I play a few slots before I’m bored out of my mind. Gambling isn’t my thing, and I’ve not won a penny. Not surprising with my luck. I stop at a Roulette table and decide there’s no better, or faster, way to spend my chips.
I look at the man standing at the table. “What do I do?”
He sets about explaining the rules for Roulette, and I listen. Then, deciding to go against the croupier’s advice, I place all my chips on number fifteen, black. I don’t really know why I do this. Maybe it’s because I was fifteen when my life went down the toilet. Mom went in for routine dental surgery and never woke up. Dad couldn’t handle a world without Mom, and he joined her by choice six months later.
Did he even think about me?
Without any extended family, I was tossed to the wolves in the system. Losing the two people who loved me had been horrific enough. Transitioning from lower middle class to the cold poverty of the foster system had been nearly too much to handle. The cold detachment of my foster parents had been shattering to me as a young girl, who’d just lost everything she’d ever known in the whole world. I’d been a good foster kid, though. I stayed out of trouble, and I kept my head down, not wanting to draw any negative attention that might get me placed in a home even more cold and uncaring.
I was little more than a mouth to feed, a check to pad the drinking addiction Mr. Wilson had.
It hadn’t been until I turned seventeen that my leering foster brother had decided to creep into my room, touching what wasn’t his to touch. It’d been summer, and he’d come home from school for the holiday—too lazy to work to continue paying for the room in his crummy, close-to-campus, apartment.
I’d been so afraid, for a few times, I’d just let it happen. I lay there, stone stiff on the thin mattress covered by the thinner bedspread. He’d only been touching. Always over my clothes. Before he made me watch as he got himself off.
But when his hand dipped into my shorts that last night?—
The night I…
“Risky bet,” a deep voice sounds as a man slides onto the stool beside me. The scent of winter and masculine cologne dusts over the table. It infiltrates the space between us, cutting off my traumatic thoughts as though with a sharpened blade, severing them completely.
My eyes lift. Something sparks in my chest. Something I’m more than familiar with, because I’d honed it since I took to the streets at seventeen. Rather than risk another night in that house—with that scumbag who leered and touched.
Who made me want to shed the flesh he made feel dirty…
It’s the instinct that I figure rabbits in the wild possess. Considering the foxes and coyotes and wolves they share their habitat with. The rabbit needs to develop a keen understanding early and quick, that they are prey. To survive, they must not only avoid the predator, but be able to spot the predator that lurks, sometimes in skin of a sheep.
This man is pure wolf. All teeth and bite and hunter. He doesn’t even bother trying to hide the power he possesses within the skin of a sheep.
Danger.
The instinct to run slams hard through my body. Somehow, I stay where I am, rooted to the stool. My heart slams painfully hard in my chest. Breaths rush shallow through my lungs.
Unique, light blue eyes rimmed in a blue much darker, dip slowly down my throat, to my chest, before drifting lazily back up again.
I feel an unwelcome rush of heat. It surges just below my skin, tinting my usually pale complexion pink.
Can he see the flutter of my pulse?
I think he might, given the way his eyes pause for a moment on my throat.
I think my heart seizes in my chest at the thought. The organ so accustomed to being the prey, that it quite literally stalls in my chest in some self-preserving attempt to hide from his wolfish eyes.
Then he smiles. Or I think it’s meant to be a smile. I’m not altogether certain. It’s a little odd, possibly forced. I think—is he trying to put me at ease?
The rabbit in me quivers.
When I say and do nothing but stare at him with what I just know are pathetically wide eyes, he leans just a little closer. Winter and spice and pine flood my airways, gripping me in a stranglehold.
“Your bet. It’s risky.” Gosh, his voice is like gravel. It has pinpricks of awareness rising on every inch of my flesh. When those eyes drop to take in the very visible evidence of how he affects me, I’m struck by the sight of his tongue sliding over his full lower lip, before that lip curls into his mouth for a quick assault of his teeth.
An image of his teeth biting into my own lip strikes hot and unexpected in my mind.
I jolt. WTF?
I clear my throat. “I-I know.”
A single brow rises as he cocks his head slowly to the side. I have a suspicion that every single movement, every expression, everything this man does, is plotted. Planned. Thought out.
I’ve never met anyone so absent of unconscious movement. He’s too still. The movements he makes are too sure. Or maybe they’re delayed? I can’t put my finger on it, exactly. I just know that he feels dangerous to me. He’s too collected to be real.
“Do you take risky bets often?”
“Never.” Why do I tell him that?
Why is he watching me like he’s cataloguing every flicker of my pulse, every breath, every nervous twist of my hands in my lap? I feel like a mouse caught between the claws of a cat who isn’t sure if he wishes to play with me or devour me whole.
His lips part. My heart kicks. Something hitches his mouth—the first involuntary movement I’ve seen. It looks like the formations of a grin, before he shuts it down.
He leans in closer. Oh, God.
Is he playing with me?
“Why tonight, then?”
Swiping my nearly finished sparkling water with the pretty twist of lemon from the table, I finish off my drink. Then, I scowl down at the empty glass. With the way this lethal man is looking at me, trying to slay me with his eyes alone, I need something to cool me off.
I’m starting to feel too hot.
I’m flushed.
I don’t want him to know he’s affected me this way.
I should get up and walk away. Leave my chips where they lay and forget about this ungodly handsome man. Sure, he’s handsome. Probably the most attractive man I’ve ever seen—but I believe the Devil is handsome, too.
The man’s eyes tear from me for the first time, and my eyes drop to his hand as it lifts. It’s a big hand with the kind of veins Rae would go on and on about. But that’s not what snags my attention. What I can’t look away from is the bloom of purple that spreads across healing knuckles.
My mouth goes dry. Prickles of unease raise the hairs on the back of my neck.
“Why the risky bet tonight?” He pulls his hand under the table. My eyes snap up to his. He’s watching me with a calculating interest that makes me feel exposed in a way I don’t like.
I swear, his unnatural eyes see beneath my dress and skin to the web of secrets I hide deep within. I’m confident with time, this man could unravel that web to lay every hurt I contain deep inside, bare.
Instead of answering his question, I risk one of my own. “Why the interest in my bet?”
His eyes flare. My inner bunny tries to cower, but I force my chin to lift, a brow to rise.
He smiles. I think it’s genuine this time, even though it’s the pinnacle of wolfishness. “People place bets like this for one of two reasons. Out of desperation or because they have nothing left to lose. Which are you?”
I used to be desperate, before I got my new job—and could afford to eat. I know what it is to be hungry, so now that I’m a little more blessed, I do what I can to help those who know the sharp pain of an empty belly.
Now, I have everything to lose. A job that pays for the rent of my very small, very run-down apartment that houses me and Lucy, paying for our full bellies in a crowded city that cares not about those who are down on their luck.
“I’m neither,” I say, as a fresh glass is set in front of me. I see the spiral of lemon in the glass as my empty glass is swiped, the server gone before I can hand over one of my drink tokens. I stand, “Um, wait?—”
A hand lands on the small of my back. It’s big, and warm, and powerful. I feel it everywhere and have to fight my answering gasp as my eyes snap to the wolf who observes me.
“What do you need?” he asks.
I shake my head. His touch is muddling my thoughts, but I manage to reply, “I didn’t pay.”
“It’s taken care of.”
“By whom?” I demand, and when he says nothing, it clicks. I gape. “You?”
When he nods once, I sit and begin to rummage through my small purse. Plucking one of the tokens from inside, I slide it to him. I’m pretty sure I see amusement in his eyes as they hold my own, then he places his own bet on the table. The croupier does his thing, and I watch as, as usual, I lose.
“Thank you.” I offer a small, wobbly smile to the croupier, who nods apologetically. Then, I stand and face the man who won, even though his bet was just as risky. His suit is top tier, though I don’t know brands well enough to call out the one he wears, and his shoes shine in a way that only new shoes can.
He”s clean, his body perfectly honed. Everything about him screams wealth and power—and yet as fate would have it—he won.
The rich always get richer. It’s the way of this very fucked-up world.
“It was—interesting speaking with you.” I keep my tone respectful and cool. “Congratulations on your win.”
Even though I’m parched, I ignore the drink on the table and walk away. It’s ten-thirty anyway, and I miss Lucy.