Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery #3) - Cynthia St. Aubin Page 0,3
polished liberally with Murphy’s lemon oil half an hour before his arrival.
“Smells like fruit,” he grumbled.
“I believe lemony fresh is the term you’re searching for,” I said. “And don’t you dare put your feet on the desk!” I leaned forward at my desk just in time to see the heels of his Italian leather shoes hovering in midair above the glossy surface.
I narrowed my eyes.
He let them fall back to the floor.
Rising from my desk on a wave of administrative victory, I followed him into his office and assumed my usual spot cross-legged on the leather couch opposite his desk. “What do you mean they’re harmless? How do you know?”
Abernathy shucked his coat and slouched into his wide wingback chair behind his broad desk.
I bit my lower lip, unwittingly holding my breath as I silently begged the Universe.
Please roll up your sleeves. Please, dear God, roll up your sleeves.
Please dear God, baby Jesus and every feathery-assed angel…
Roll.
Up.
Your.
Sleeves.
When Abernathy reached down and flicked off his cufflinks, the aforementioned angels treated me to a mental performance of the Hallelujah Chorus.
A seasoned forearm ogler of old, I stole glances as Abernathy’s oh-so-deft fingers (trust me on this) made quick work of the fine fabric, revealing the long, undulating muscles and thick serpentine veins.
Checking my lap for drool, I refocused my attention on Abernathy’s face, which—I was alarmed to note—held a trace of tired amusement.
Busted.
“If the vampires hadn’t been harmless, I would have stopped them,” he said, his whisky in the sunlight eyes fixed on my twitchy face.
“Stopped them? You mean you knew they’ve been breaking into my apartment?”
He graced me with one of his patented maddeningly noncommittal nods.
“And you knew this how?”
“You’ve been under surveillance.”
“You’ve been watching me? Again?”
“Not again,” he said. “Always. But I don’t pick any more fights than I need too. Particularly not with vampires.”
“Since when have you backed away from a fight?” Even if I employed the assistance of every bony digit I owned, there wouldn’t be enough to tot up the countless times I had seen Abernathy throwing fists or ripping entrails or generally just being all masculine and threatening at someone whose face he didn’t care for.
“Since the world stood to be destroyed by an apocalyptic battle between our two species.” On the heels of this announcement, he grabbed the pile of neatly stacked invoices I’d left on his desk and began leafing through them.
“I thought vampires and werewolves lived in a bliss of mutual ignorance. Isn’t that what you told me?”
“Yes,” he said. “We had an agreement. For close to a thousand years, the treaty held. No werewolf attacks on vampires, no vampire attacks on werewolves.”
“Had?” I asked. “Why had? What happened?”
Mark dropped the papers and skewered me with his glowing amber gaze. “You,” he said. “You happened.”
“Me?” I blinked in what I hoped was an innocent and unassuming manner. “What did I do?”
“You got yourself attacked by Oscar Wilde,” he reminded me.
The familiar ache of guilt spread in my chest. “It’s not like I meant for it to happen. How did my getting attacked break the treaty? I’m not even a werewolf.”
Mark shot me a look akin to God hears the prayer of a craps table junkie begging to win back his rent money. This debate had been the source of consternation between us since he’d informed me of my status as a werewolf heir roughly a month earlier. I’d sort of had a little problem accepting it at first. And by ‘a little problem,’ I mean flatly denied to the point of wrapping my head in tinfoil and crawling under my bed.
“Not a full werewolf,” I amended. “I didn’t think untransformed recessives like me counted, strictly speaking.”
In case, like me, you are unaware of the term, untransformed is werewolf speak for ‘not boinked by an alpha male.’
An alpha male like Mark.
Not that he hadn’t offered.
Not that I hadn’t nearly taken him up on it.
“You don’t count,” he answered. “But I do. Wilde attacked you,” he continued. “I attacked him.”
“Seems fair enough.” I shrugged. “You were provoked. Doesn’t that count for anything?”
“You’d think so,” Abernathy hinted.
“But?” I interrupted.
“But what?” he asked.
“Please,” I said. “There was totally a ‘but’ in your last statement.”
A small smile worked at his lips. “But,” he conceded, “vampires can’t die. Which means they also can’t heal. At least, not quickly.”
“I would have thought that would fall under the realm of standard supernatural powers,” I said. “Wilde seemed stronger than a normal human ought to be.”