And all the time the men remained close, one either side of her. Good manners, she supposed. Must be ingrained in them to look out for people in distress. Noblesse oblige. She stopped to unwind her blanket and shuck off their jackets that she still wore. They’d need them in this breeze. When they merely looked at her, she helped first Ludo then Jago on with the damp items, smoothing along broad shoulders and down muscular arms. Her imagination must have been strong—she warmed herself with their heat, let her hands learn the feel of their hard muscles, took their scent deep into her lungs and lost herself in the earth and sky of their eyes.
And indulging herself in all these sensations, she nodded vehemently in agreement with Prince Alfred that yes, shifter rights were her life’s work. Naturally she was prepared to go further than she already had in promoting shifter acceptance as part of that. Of course she supported this new initiative. Obviously she would spearhead the first prominent match in which both parties were in the public eye, both non-shifter and shifter and—
“What?” She went to grab the prince’s arm and was glad when her hands were taken by Jago and Ludo before she could touch him. D’uh. Laying hands on a member of the royal family was treason, or something, wasn’t it?
“Yes, a great way for old, prominent families to atone!” The prince bounced on the spot.
“And the match is made! Thank God. I’m dying for a decent cup of tea.” Gerri bestowed a smile on them.
“I don’t— Oh, thanks.” Ellie smiled up at Jago, who was tucking her blanket more securely around her. Ludo lifted her hair free so it didn’t get pulled, both men’s hands gentle.
Alfred chuckled, from where he stood with the prime minister and Gerri. “I don’t think it’ll be that easy! Especially with these two! They’ve never done the required or expected thing. Always gone their own way. They—”
“Agree to the match.” Jago’s deep voice seemed to pad through the depths of the jungle to stroke along her nerve endings.
“We do.” Ludo’s affirmation came as if from the heights of the sky to feather along her skin.
“And the good doctor is, as she said, eager to be the face of this new initiative too. Excellent!” The prime minister clapped, for who or what, Ellie didn’t know.
It had just dawned on her this was no dream or hallucination, that she was truly there, tucked into the powerful body of one of the most handsome men she’d ever seen, held fast there by his arm around her. One of the handsomest, because the other most handsome pressed close on her other side, his arm wrapped her too. And she’d just agreed to a match with them, with these… “Shifters?”
Shifters who whispered, “Gryphon shifters,” and, “Twin gryphon shifters,” into her ears. Shifters who held her effortlessly when her knees threatened to give way under her.
Ludo looked at his brother across Ellie’s head, ignoring the speechifying around him about how good it was to see the Calters leading the way as their ancestors had done, their concern for their country clear and their dedication to duty finally evident… His crooked grin was mirrored on Jago’s face.
Gryphons were similar to wyverns, drakes and some types of dragons in that declining fertility, low birth rates and a tendency towards male offspring had long ago evolved their mating system into one of male-dominance polyandry—one female mating with the highest-ranking males, usually from the same family. There was no sexual taboo in their society. They simply shared. Period.
And his twin knew as well as he did that this woman, whom they’d scented in the middle of a crowd and been compelled to seek out, that this human to whom they’d both felt an immediate bone-deep, heart-pulling connection—was their mate.
And, he’d have betted, from her reaction to them, that on some level Eleanor Maxwell knew it too.
Chapter Two
Ellie didn’t recognize the woman looking back at her from the mirror. Her freckles had been mostly hidden under foundation, her brown eyes made catlike by eyeliner and mascara on both upper and lower lids, and her far-from-bee-stung lips looked plumper, slathered in a darker shade of lipstick than she’d ever worn. Her normally tumbling-down multi-brown hair had been cut—and not just by her hacking an inch from the ends—and nipped and tucked into a chignon that put her in mind of going to prom. She frowned at the line of the braid wound around her head like a band and pinned into place with stars and butterflies, then loosened it with her fingers and twirled tendrils loose near her face and down her neck. Better.
“Yep, a DIY messy updo. Just the thing,” sighed Soo. “Well, more you, at least.” Her co-worker made another swipe at Ellie’s face with the blusher. Ellie ducked and jammed her glasses on. She’d resisted any idea of getting contact lenses.
“I’m just not sure about this dress.” Ellie tugged the cocktail dress up at the neckline and down at the hem, as if she could stretch it.
“That was the one you were the least not sure about, and we only had lunchtime today to shop in, with the event being now,” Faria, the office’s fashion queen, pointed out.
“I can’t work out if having the party at your own apartment building is posh or tacky,” Ellie’s colleague and flatmate Mikki said, pouring them all another glass of champagne.
“It’s cost-effective,” Soo approved. “Saves money to combine the announcement with the inauguration tonight and works as promo for the building project.”
“Did you know the family business was a property group?” Rachel asked.
“She didn’t even know them until yesterday!” Mikki reminded her, dumping the empty bottle into the waste bin and reaching for another.
True. Ellie hadn’t known of Calter Group Limited or of Jago and Ludo Calter until yesterday. And now, here she was, getting ready in a gym changing room in Haliford House, one of the group’s newest projects, a serviced apartment building they’d just finished fitting out, for the big opening/reveal party there. Oh, d’uh, the whole thing was probably just part of a commercial opportunity the businessmen had seized on, piggybacking on a good cause. Charming. Oh, why hadn’t she had time to read up on them? She tried hard not to feel as if she were new property also, being shown to the world.
“So is this more like an engagement or a bachelorette party?” Rachel, always with the questions. It made her a good researcher, but a little limited on social occasions. “Or more like being introduced to the partner, like in an arranged marriage?” No tact either.
“We’re not using the A word,” Faria mandated, scowling.
“And it’s like none of the above.” Ellie signalled for Mikki to stop hogging the drink and give some to Rachel. It might help.
“Damn. We’ve got you some killer bachelorette presents.” Mikki pointed to bags and boxes along a shelf in their store room dressing room. “Mostly freebies too—shops were showering the office with stuff.”
“Oh.” At that, Ellie thought she’d better have another drink herself. “It’s a match,” she tried to explain, wondering if it, in fact, was. “And that’s a different concept in each shifter culture. In wolf packs, for instance— What?”
Soo’s groan had been the loudest. “None of us are paraethnologists or anthropologists, and this evening, you’re not, either. Forget about work. All that.” She advanced, a can of hairspray in her hand.
Pretty hard to forget about work when her work was what had brought her there, to further the cause. She’d be meeting reps from the departments, councils, offices, foundations and trusts that funded their NGO, all hastily invited to celebrate this latest and biggest stride forward. She and the other team members had been busy sending said invites.
“And you shouldn’t be thinking about wolves. You should be thinking about dragons,” Mikki opined.
“Gryphons.”
“Really? Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, well, same thing. And you’d know. Not because of living among shifters in the US and the UK, but because of Justin.” Mikki nodded.
“What kind of shifter was
he, anyway? Is he, I mean?” Rachel actually had a pen in her hand. “I’ve always wondered. Wanted to ask him—”
“That’s rude!” Faria almost yelled.
“I don’t know,” Ellie admitted of her relationship with Justin, a shifter and shifter rights activist. “We didn’t reach that stage.”
“Like in all those crappy magazine article!” Mikki snorted. “You know, all those relationship milestones, like how long before you can pee in front of one another? The ‘when is it okay to shift in front of human boy or girlfriend’ issue!”
“Well, he didn’t so much as floss his teeth in front of me,” Ellie admitted, giving another tug to the dress. She’d tried with Justin. Right up until the point that she’d finally lost patience and dumped him. And, God, he’d been trying various stratagems to get her back ever since. Things had never worked out with any shifter she’d dated. Well, not that she had much luck with men in general. Her to-the-point-of-rudeness bluntness tended to put them off, and her non-nonsense approach soon drove them away, if they actually got near.
“His teeth? Fangs, you mean!”
“Give me that.” Soo took the bottle from Mikki. She pointed at Ellie’s reflection and spoke loudly to be heard over the ensuing debate about just what animal Justin shifted into, with hedgehog and squirrel emerging as frontrunners. “And you’d better stop laughing. You’ll make that mascara run. Now, come on. Let’s get in there and be nice to grant-givers!”
“And enjoy ourselves!” Mikki cried.
“Enjoy self. Don’t think about the elephant in the room,” Ellie instructed herself. “Or the two elephants, actually. And in the recreation room, actually.” She was surprised none of her co-workers had mentioned the maths: one Ellie, two men. Perhaps they didn’t know how to.
“Yeah, right,” she scoffed. Whereas she was blunt, Mikki had no barriers and Rachel no filter. “Don’t think about maths. Or elephants. Think about dragons. Yep, dragons,” she muttered, trying to keep focused as she made her way through those gathered in the modern-looking room, treating the whole thing as a task list in an attempt to quash her butterflies, and not the fake jewellery ones in her hair. Funny, she didn’t usually get nervous at work.
There was going to be a short speech, and photos in the building’s meeting room; hence the new dress and makeup. She shook hands and smiled with the few people she knew, from the world of work, all of whom were puzzled about having been summoned to the inauguration of a new serviced apartment building.
“Wait. Did I say dragons? Because not dragons, damn it. Gryphons! Think about gryphons! Two gryphons!”
“At your service,” came from behind her.
“Jago,” she said. His voice had an earthier tone, whatever that meant. She spun to confirm it, and he caught her around the waist.
“Well done.”
His voice was low and peaty, she decided. Smokey. Oh, wait. That might be whiskey. Or his aftershave. Talking of, she leaned back to catch a fresher, airier note.
“Ludo.”
“You’re good,” he breathed. “And you look beautiful.”
They had to do that in public, she supposed. “You do. Handsome I mean.” More than, tall and powerful in tailor-made suits, but their dark curls still wild. “You’re lucky you don’t need mascara. Either of you.” Not with those thick eyelashes framing their uncanny eyes. Standing there with them felt as though it were just the three of them. The guests and their chatter, the waiters and their trays, all seemed to disappear, the trendy surroundings fading away. They did that, the Calters, with the force of their presence.
She couldn’t treat this like a day in the office, make this another task she completed. Although, she wouldn’t mind them on her to-do list. She coughed to cover up her snort of laughter. Talk about aiming out of her league. But, God, it’d been ages since she’d last—
“Ellie.” Jago spoke her name as if he liked the taste of it in his mouth. “Ludo’s right. You do look…delicious.”
For a second, she’d thought he was about to say edible. Her imagination took a sideways leap, showing her an image of being eaten. but in a very different sense, one that had her laid out like a feast on a decadent four-poster bed in a candlelit room, and them kneeling on the bed between her spread legs, indulging themselves, driving her beyond pleasure to the point of pain. Wow. She really had to take care of herself. Mikki, her flatmate, was right to try and drag her out more, to urge her to make time away from work. Maybe she should.
“Would you mind if I had another drink? Before this starts, I mean? I’m not good with everyone staring.”
Ludo narrowed his eyes. “But you’re the face of the movement.”
“Don’t.” Ellie shook her head. “I shouldn’t be. No platform should have to be built for a group by someone else. I just don’t know what else I could do.”
“Which is why you’re doing this.”
“Why are you?” she challenged Jago. “I don’t believe it’s because it’s your duty, that you should lead the way. I don’t know you very well, in fact at all, but I don’t think you do what you’re supposed to.”
“That’s right.” He stood closer, if that were possible, close enough for her to see tiny flecks of gold in his irises. “See? You do know us.”
She had to smile at that. “Is it rude? To ask about your beasts?” In the States, there hadn’t been much need—shifters tended to live with their own kind, wolves in packs, bears in sleuths, lions in prides. The secrecy surrounding the issue in the UK, something she was working hard to challenge, especially allied to British reserve and timidity, sometimes got her down.
Ludo’s eyes gleamed. “God, no. Ask anything you like.”
Where to start? She took a few seconds to think while the twins greeted a small party, most of whom, the women especially, started at her. “What do you look like?” she finally asked. “I mean, I know a gryphon has a lion’s body and eagle’s head, but…”
“Come and see.”
She didn’t have a choice, not with them taking her hands to lead her from the rec room and along the short corridor to the foyer, stopping in front of a large shield displayed high on a wall there. It was obviously old, and she hopped onto the small step to examine it in its niche, both men stepping close and four hands steadying her. On her rump.
“Oh, it’s you!”
Well, their family coat of arms. A teardrop-shaped shield in the middle, supported on either side by what she’d always assumed were mythological beasts, or heraldic beasts, or whatever they were called. Of course there’d be two. She’d read up on the behavioural ecology of their society and its survival-rate-influenced inter-fraternal polyandry. These creatures—no; that was rude—were on their hind legs, revealing their strong lion bodies…and lion heads? There was a suggestion of something birdlike to the length and curve of the necks, which bore feathery-looking manes, but the faces were those of noble lions, and their small pointed ears looked almost cute.
“May I?” Without waiting for an answer, Ellie stretched up a finger to trace the angle of the ears with a finger, then the matching angle of the raised, curled upward wings. Beautiful. The tails arched out in a proud curve too.
Jago indicated the four lion legs. “Some scholars call that type of gryphon an opincus.”
“But that’s just their opinion of us,” Ludo capped.
It was obviously a family joke, and Ellie smiled. “What does the wavy yellow line denote?”
“Land.”
“And the wavy blue line is the sky,” Ludo added to Jago’s explanation.
“You might have to help me with the Latin. Caelum et terram.” Ellie stumbled over the words.
“Of the sky and the earth,” Jago translated.
“Oh.” The eagle was traditionally considered king of the birds and the lion king of the beasts, so how powerful and majestic was a gryphon believed to be? And those emblems—talk about hardly being bothered to hide. Life must have been so different for shifters from this background
. Must be. She was surprised there wasn’t more criticism, from outside and within the shifter ranks. “Cael…terr. Calter!” she realized all at once.
“There you are! Your own pet project and now this circus on top and then you bloody well skip out!”
The annoyed words had her turning round, still on her raised step underneath the family crest, one twin on either side, her hands on their shoulders and their arms around her back, for a photographer to snap the picture that came to be the defining image of the event. She had a bad feeling about the man confronting them, though.
Chapter Three
“I suppose your misguided announcement can be here as well as anywhere,” continued the speaker, a past-middle-aged man in an iron-gray suit, his short silver hair brushed firmly off his stern face. His signals had the wait staff ushering the guests through to the foyer.
Initially thinking that must be the twins’ father, Jago introducing him as, “Michael Langton, CEO of Calter Group Limited,” reminded Ellie that the Duke of Normanston was in ill-health and had handed over to his sons a while back. Michael didn’t seem too pleased about it. The expressionless face of the thin, power-dressed brunette next to him was harder to read, but she arched an eyebrow at Ellie.
Applause broke out as a younger British Asian man, the architect or interior designer, described the challenge of turning the neglected four-story Georgian townhouse into modern, fully furnished extended-stay apartments with communal amenities such as the penthouse restaurant and the basement gym, while maintaining the building’s character.
“And the greater challenge of persuading residents of the square that guests here get a key to the communal gardens!” Jago threw in.
Paranormal Dating Agency: Think of England (Kindle Worlds Novella) (Roar Britannia Book 1) Page 2