7. Jace #2
Emma glanced at her phone, snorted, turned the screen his way. Don’t step on the poor boy’s feet. Also smile more, you currently resemble a woman conducting an interrogation.
“She’s watching us from somewhere, isn’t she?”
“She’s always watching us from somewhere.” Emma pocketed the phone, let him pull her back in, close enough that the next words came out quieter than the song. “I’m a very good dancer, incidentally.”
“Noticed.”
“You’re better. Deeply unfair, given the number of skills you’ve already got.”
“Had to learn. Pack functions. State dinners with prides that didn’t trust me yet.
” He turned her under his arm, easy, brought her back without missing a beat.
“You get good fast when the alternative’s embarrassing your whole family in front of an alpha already looking for a reason not to like you. ”
“Is that what this is? A state dinner?”
“Worse. State dinners don’t have Victor Kane in them.”
She laughed, low and real, and his chest loosened at the sound in a way three days of dodging the feeling hadn’t managed to prevent. “Tell me one true thing,” she said. “Not tactical. Not for the room.”
“Why.”
“Because we’re supposed to be falling in love in front of two hundred people, and it’ll play better if one thing out of your mouth tonight isn’t a lie.”
He turned her again, bought himself a second, gave her the truth anyway. “I don’t know how to do this halfway.”
“Do what.”
“Any of it. You. This.” He nodded once at the room without breaking the turn.
“Ten years making sure nothing gets close enough to cost me anything if it goes wrong. You’ve been close enough to cost me plenty since the second I caught you in that ballroom, and I still haven’t worked out how to mind. ”
Emma’s steps slowed, barely, enough that he registered it more than saw it. “That’s not tactical at all.”
“No.”
“I liked it better than tactical.”
The song hit its last chorus. Neither of them sped up to meet it.
The kiss happened because Kane’s security chief drifted close enough to listen, which gave Jace exactly one legitimate professional reason to close the last six inches between his mouth and Emma’s.
That reason lasted about as long as it took their lips to touch.
She made a small, startled sound against his mouth, and then her hand fisted in his lapel and pulled him in instead of pushing him back, and every ounce of tactical restraint he owned went up like dry paper.
His arm banded hard around her waist and dragged her flush against him, no permission requested, none needed—she was already there, kissing him back with a heat that had nothing rehearsed in it at all.
His wolf came up fast and hungry, closer to the surface than it had been since the ballroom, and this time, it didn’t want to catch her or protect her or track a threat across a room.
It wanted to mark her. Claim her. Get his hands under that green silk and his mouth on her throat until the whole city knew exactly whose she was, and the sheer, blinding force of that want was supposed to terrify him.
It didn’t. It landed instead like coming home to a house he hadn’t known he’d been building.
He kissed her deeper, one hand sliding up to cradle the back of her skull, angling her exactly where he wanted her, and swallowed the small sound she made.
She tasted like champagne and underneath that a warmth utterly her own, and he wanted an embarrassing length of time to just keep chasing that taste until he had it memorized past forgetting.
The animal in him wanted teeth. Wanted the soft place at her throat under his mouth, wanted her pulse jumping against his tongue the way it had against his palm at a handshake that seemed a hundred years ago now.
He didn’t do any of it. He held the line by a margin so thin, it terrified him more than any op he’d run in a decade, and settled for kissing her as if he might not get another chance, because for one suspended, reckless second, some old animal part of him was certain he wouldn’t.
The room, the donors, Kane’s security chief—none of it registered. His whole world had narrowed down to the give of her mouth and the way her fingers had curled into his jacket, no more intention of letting go than he had.
Her free hand slid up to rest flat against his chest, right over a heart that had abandoned every pretense of a normal rhythm, and her breath hitched the second she registered it hammering under her palm—proof she knew exactly how far past performance this had gone.
When they finally broke apart, she was breathing like she’d run somewhere, staring up at him with an expression that had nothing rehearsed left in it either.
“That was—” she started.
“Yeah.”
“For the cover.”
“Sure.”
Neither of them believed it. Neither said so.
Emma smoothed a hand down her dress, visibly recalibrating, and Jace discovered his own hands had gone unsteady, which hadn’t happened to him in a professional setting since his first field op a decade ago—and even then, nobody had been trying to kill him with a green dress and that exact mouth.
His wolf, still riding close under his skin, wanted to drag her off that dance floor, out of that ballroom, away from every man in the building who’d looked at her tonight and thought about it twice.
He locked his jaw and did none of it. Rules.
A room full of witnesses. A woman who deserved better than getting hauled off by her instincts instead of her choice.
“I need air,” she said.
“I need a minute,” he admitted, which was as close to the truth as he could get in a ballroom full of people who couldn’t, under any circumstances, watch him lose his composure over an accountant in a green dress.
She found her air in the donor records office two floors up, which was, Jace reflected later, exactly the kind of resourceful, reckless move that was going to put ten years on his life before this operation ended.
He covered the hallway while she worked—leaning against the wall with a champagne flute he wasn’t drinking, playing bored fiancé for a camera that would show nothing more interesting than a man waiting on his date.
Inside the hotel’s donor records room, he knew without seeing it, she’d be photographing donor files fast and quiet, the same methodical focus she brought to every ledger she’d ever cracked.
A minute passed. Then two. His pulse climbed. It was the room he couldn’t see into that had him rattled, not the kiss.
Footsteps rounded the corner. He straightened, angled his body to block the door with no visible effort at blocking anything, and greeted Kane’s security chief with the easy nod of a man with nowhere else to be.
“Lost?”
“Waiting on my fiancée. She wanted a look at the silent auction sheets before bidding closes. You know how it is.”
The man’s gaze drifted past Jace’s shoulder toward the records room door, lingering half a second longer than curiosity required. Jace shifted his weight, blocking the sightline without seeming to move at all.
“This floor’s for staff,” the man said, finally.
“She got turned around. New building, three glasses of champagne, you understand.” Jace let long-suffering affection creep into his voice—years of practice fielding his fiancée’s small disasters, and he’d considered every one worth it. “I’ll walk her back down myself.”
The man moved on, typing something into his phone that Jace couldn’t see, and thirty seconds later the records room door cracked and Emma slipped out, phone already tucked away, pulse visibly hammering at her throat.
“Got it?”
“Got it.” She fell into step beside him, smoothing her dress, pulling herself back together piece by piece, her pulse still not fully under control either. “Get me out of here before I do anything else reckless tonight.”
“No promises,” he said, meaning far more than the case.
They took the bait read the text message, sent from a phone leaving the staff floor of the offices. Begin Phase Two.
Somewhere below, the string quartet started its last song of the night, and nobody in the room noticed the message had gone out.