Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery #3) - Cynthia St. Aubin Page 0,2

shooed three furry cat bodies off Hemingway’s clothes and tossed them in his direction.

The clothes, not the cats. Though the latter option would surely have ensured a quicker departure.

“Thanks for stopping by,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d never do that again.”

He captured my hand and kissed it. The surface of his lips was warm from the bath, but he lingered long enough for me to feel the cold flesh beneath.

“I promise nothing.” He bowed, and was gone.

Chapter 2

Mark Andrew Abernathy, my aforementioned 431-year-old werewolf boss, rolled in an hour late to the gallery he owned and I pretended to help him run. I say gallery, but really it was an oddities shop attached to an exposition space, where a ramshackle pack of werewolf artists routinely exhibited their work.

Though my official title was gallery assistant, my regular duties involved lint-rolling werewolf fur from Abernathy’s custom made suits, scheduling appointments and gallery shows around the lunar cycle, and stocking a doomsday arsenal worth of Tide sticks and other blood removing chemicals.

Because that’s totally normal.

Seated at my desk on the landing of the old wooden stairs that lead up to Abernathy’s office from the gallery below—I was eye-humping a catalogue of office supplies when I heard the gallery door open. Abernathy’s familiar warhorse-on-the-hunt gate thundered across the wood floor. He took the stairs two at a time—an easy task for a guy that busted the height charts at six foot five inches.

(Insert your favorite tall guy stereotype here.)

Standing a wobbly five foot eleven inches myself, his height often felt like a personal blessing. It’s always an unsettling feeling to know that if shit gets real, your friends and family are likely to scamper behind your back for protection. Mark’s back could shelter about three of me.

Four, if I laid off the French baguettes.

Unlikely.

I shoved my mouse to the corner of my Apple monitor and used the brief black flash before the screensaver descended to check my wild mane of auburn hair. Due to the previous evening’s unexpected visitor, I’d had little sleep. Still, I managed to make it through an expedited makeup routine, complete with black cat-eye liner and matte pin-up red lipstick.

Mark, on the other hand, looked like hell.

Which is a complete reversal of roles for us, by the way.

I’m the one who flaps through life in a perpetual state of feathery panic. He, meanwhile, utilizes centuries of patience to glide from one situation to the next in his perfect dark-haired, dark-eyed, stony-jawed stoicism.

But not today.

Today, Mark was handsome’s shadowed, stubbled, edgy cousin: dangerous.

I mentally stripped away his custom-tailored suit as he slogged up the stairs. To be honest, after seeing him naked a handful of times, it didn’t require much imagination.

Though imagine I did.

Like, a lot.

Because although he was still my boss, we had pretty much leapt over the line dividing “employee” from “person you work for but also rolled around naked with” once upon a time.

But not lately.

Lately, we had reverted to a strictly paws-off, quasi-professional, fully awkward mutual denial that the naked rolling had ever happened.

Owing in part to the aforementioned consequences of bones-jumping.

Namely, I hadn’t yet decided whether I wanted to complete my transformation to alpha werewolf female.

“You have got to do something about these fangers,” I announced, borrowing a term introduced to me by Allan Ede, Mark’s 1,000 year-old werewolf tailor.

I’d been the unwitting recipient of a couple pints of Allan’s blood after my little run-in with Oscar Wilde. A curious side effect of my nontraditional transfusion had set me on Mark like a hunting dog on a ridiculously sexy fox.

That’s how it goes when your blood donor has a penchant for Gucci specs, velvet jackets and well-muscled men.

“What about them?” Mark asked, pausing in front of my desk. If I had to describe the sound of Abernathy’s voice and its affect on my lady bits, it would be something like: coffee, dark chocolate, and whisky have a sweaty, hours-long, back-breaking, bed-splintering threesome that ends in simultaneous orgasms.

Which is pretty much how I would describe the rest of him as well.

His hair was the dark chocolate. His eyes, the whisky. His deep-chested, long-limbed, hulking form, the coffee.

Scorchingly hot.

Definitely prone to making my nerves crackle and my blood burn.

“Do you know how many vampires have broken into my apartment since we’ve been back from London?” I demanded. “I might as well be running a blood bank.”

“They’re harmless.” He shoved past the door to his office, a veritable man-cave of leather and wood, all of which I’d