Mane Rival in Store (The Matchmaker’s Book Club: Villains #3)

Prologue

GERRI

The dark chocolate sea salt cookies were perfection tonight.

Gerri Wilder stood near the north wall of the Bellhaven Gallery, a private exhibition space tucked behind an unmarked door on a cobblestone side street in the Meatpacking District, and surveyed her empire.

Twenty-three women occupied the gallery’s main floor. Crystal flutes of Veuve Clicquot caught the overhead track lighting. A string quartet played Debussy in the corner, largely ignored. And every single one of these powerful, elegant, impeccably dressed women was here for one reason.

Their children were disasters.

Romantic disasters, specifically. Brilliant, accomplished, wildly successful romantic disasters who could run companies and negotiate treaties and perform surgery and win court cases but could not, for the love of God, figure out how to go on a second date without imploding.

Gerri selected a cookie from the silver tray she’d arranged on the gallery’s center table and bit into it with the satisfaction of someone who understood her purpose in the universe.

She was seventy-two years old, five-foot-four in her wrap dress and kitten heels, and she had matched more stubborn hearts than any algorithm, any dating app, any well-meaning aunt at a holiday dinner could dream of producing.

She’d stopped counting years ago. Counting implied a quota. Gerri didn’t work quotas. She worked instinct, timing, and a batching method for dark chocolate sea salt cookies that had never once failed her.

The Dojin and Nari match was still fresh — the mothers’ network humming with the success of it, new names appearing on her invitation list with the regularity of compound interest.

Fresh off that bear of a romance, the Book Club had swelled from a cozy gathering into a proper society event.

Ozara Stone and Colette Keiser had made calls.

Suki Saitō had suggested the gallery. And suddenly Gerri had a Meatpacking District exhibition space with fourteen-foot ceilings, polished concrete floors, and the kind of lighting that made every woman in the room look ten years younger.

Not that these women needed the help. The Matchmaker’s Book Club attracted a specific breed: formidable.

Wealthy enough to orbit the same social galaxies.

Connected enough to know that Gerri’s matchmaking was the real deal, not some reality-show gimmick.

The “book club” pretense had thinned to gossamer by this point — Colette Keiser hadn’t cracked a spine in three meetings, and Ozara Stone had been reading the same Anne Tyler novel since October.

Nobody cared. The books were a polite fiction, and Gerri was the real text.

Three new faces tonight.

Gerri cataloged them with the instinct of a general surveying fresh recruits. A Korean-American tech heiress from San Francisco whose son apparently collected medieval weaponry and hadn’t smiled at a woman since 2019.

A British baroness whose daughter ran a sustainable fashion label and kept dumping men who couldn’t pronounce ‘sustainability’ correctly. And near the cheese table, nursing a champagne flute with the restrained discipline — she rationed herself one sip per five minutes, Astrid Sterling.

That last one — Gerri had been waiting for her.

Astrid hadn’t RSVP’d. Hadn’t called ahead. She’d appeared in the doorway twenty minutes ago, swept the room with a single assessing glance, said nothing, and positioned herself near the hors d’oeuvres with the strategic patience of someone accustomed to choosing her moment.

Most people wouldn’t know who she was. Gerri wasn’t most people.

Astrid Bergman Sterling. Sixty. Former art dealer.

Wife of Erik Magnus Sterling, the retired alpha of the Sterling Pride — one of the oldest and wealthiest lion prides in Northern Europe.

Mother of Rune Sterling, who had taken over the Pride at twenty-two and turned his father’s legacy into a global conglomerate of premium comic book and collector stores.

Gerri had matched lion shifters before. She understood the species — the pride dynamics, the courtly politics, the mane vanity.

And she recognized — from the way Astrid was not-looking at her while very much tracking her every movement across the gallery — that the Sterling matriarch had a specific situation.

Not a general concern. A situation.

Gerri straightened the cookie tray, adjusted the angle of the napkins, and made her rounds.

“Gerri.” Ozara Stone materialized at her elbow, champagne in hand, her auburn hair swept into the kind of effortless chignon that required forty-five minutes and professional help. She wore Chanel. She always wore Chanel. “Suki says you’ve spotted a new project.”

Gerri plucked a cookie from the tray. “I haven’t spotted anything. I’m circulating.”

“You’re circulating toward the blonde who looks like she’s about to annex the cheese table.” Ozara’s gaze tracked across the room. “She’s been watching you for fifteen minutes.”

“Has she?”

“With the intensity of a woman who has exhausted every other option.” Ozara sipped her champagne. “I recognize the expression. I wore it before you matched my Zeir with Lumi.”

Gerri patted Ozara’s arm. “Your Zeir was brooding. Bears are simple — feed them, love them, give them a woman who won’t take their nonsense.

Wolves are intense but straightforward. Lions...

” She trailed off, watching Astrid lift her champagne with measured grace, the posture of someone who made minimalism look like an Olympic sport.

“Lions are dramatic. And political. And vain. And they court like they’re staging a royal ceremony with a twelve-month budget. ”

“You sound excited.”

“I sound hungry.” Gerri bit into her cookie. “There’s a difference.”

Ozara laughed — the easy laugh of a mother whose son was mated, settled, and no longer her problem in the romantic department — and drifted toward Colette Keiser, who was holding court near the bar with a story about Dojin and Nari’s latest domestic catastrophe involving a broken dishwasher and a bear who refused to call a repairman because he could “fix it himself.”

He could not fix it himself. He’d flooded the kitchen. Nari had recorded the whole thing.

Gerri smiled and turned her attention to the blonde.

Astrid Sterling approached how a glacier approaches a coastline: with unhurried, inevitable certainty.

She was tall — five-ten, at least — with silver-blonde hair cut in a precise bob that framed a face of extraordinary cheekbones and pale blue-gray eyes.

She wore coral cashmere over black trousers, a single statement earring of hammered gold, and the look of someone who had never in her life needed to repeat herself.

The air around her dropped two degrees. This was not metaphorical.

Gerri had attended enough shifter social functions to recognize the ambient effect of a high-ranking lion in a confined space.

“Mrs. Wilder.” The accent was Scandinavian — clipped, musical, precise.

“Astrid.” Gerri extended her hand and watched the flicker of surprise cross those pale eyes — there and gone, suppressed with the efficiency of a woman who considered visible surprise a personal failing.

“I was wondering when you’d make your approach.

The cheese table was a nice staging ground, but you’ve been here twenty minutes and you haven’t eaten a single cube.

Strategic positioning without commitment. Very lion.”

Astrid’s handshake was firm, cool, and measured exactly three seconds. “You know who I am.”

“Darling, I knew who you were before you walked in.” Gerri selected a cookie from the tray.

“Vivienne Coleman mentioned you’d be coming.

And even if she hadn’t — I make it my business to know the mothers.

Especially the ones who arrive without an RSVP and spend twenty minutes pretending they’re here for the Gruyère. ”

Astrid Sterling was not a woman who filled silences with nervous chatter. She occupied them how her species occupied territory: completely, calmly, daring anyone to challenge the claim.

“I have a son,” she said.

“Rune Aleksander Sterling. Thirty-four. CEO of Sterling & Mane International. Alpha of the Sterling Pride since his father retired twelve years ago.” Gerri bit into her cookie.

“He’s accomplished, disciplined, responsible, and — if the social pages are any indication — hasn’t been photographed with a date in over three years. How am I doing?”

Astrid studied her with the expression of someone recalibrating a significant assumption. “Vivienne said you were thorough.”

“Vivienne is generous. I’m nosy and I just know. There’s a difference, but the results are the same.”

A shift passed through Astrid’s composure — not a crack, exactly, but a deliberate loosening.

The decision to stop performing and start talking.

“He has been leading since he was twenty-two, and he has done it brilliantly. The pride respects him. The business thrives under him. He is disciplined, serious, and controlled.” Each word arrived like a tile being placed in a mosaic.

“He is also incapable of having a normal conversation with a woman he finds attractive. He becomes...” Astrid’s lips thinned. “Architectural.”

Gerri’s cookie paused halfway to her mouth. “Architectural.”

“Rigid. Formal. He compliments their revenue models. He discusses market trends. He once told a woman her earrings demonstrated ‘excellent material sourcing.’” She sighed. “She didn’t call back.”

“I can’t imagine why.”

“He doesn’t know how to be warm.” Astrid’s voice softened — the first real crack in the glacial exterior, and Gerri leaned into it how a safecracker leans into a tumbler click.

“He used to be. As a boy, he was warm and curious and gentle.

Then his father retired and handed him the pride, and two senior members challenged his authority immediately.