by Zoe Chant
Sure enough, she was visibly pulling herself together, covering the obvious attraction with a professional mask. “Can I help you?” she asked politely.
“Hi, I’m Seth,” he said, smiling. “I’m—”
And then he stopped short.
Because he couldn’t tell her who he was.
He couldn’t tell her anything.
***
Cassie had gotten into work early on Wednesday, so she could get all of the tax info prepared for the IRS guy.
She’d never been audited before. The IRS was always painted as a huge scary monster, and she had to wonder how much of that was correct. Were their auditors trained to put the fear of Uncle Sam into everyone they met? Or was it just going to be like another boring meeting about financials?
Cassie doubted the IRS guy would try to show her a PowerPoint presentation about overtime, at least, so that was one big plus.
She had everything ready before any tax auditors showed their faces, so she glanced around and guiltily clicked back into Facebook for just a minute, to see if anyone else had posted any vacation pictures recently.
It was her one work vice. She figured vacation pictures were pretty low on the scale. She didn’t steal anyone’s lunch from the fridge or skip out early when the boss wasn’t looking. A few pictures of exotic locales on company time wasn’t that bad.
She was in luck. One of her Facebook friends had just gotten back from Norway. Cassie paged through pictures of starkly dramatic fjords, fascinated. The way the cliffs jutted out into the ocean, the snowy-peaked mountains and the gorgeous blue water...it was so beautiful.
“Excuse me.”
Cassie looked up, startled, clicking quickly out of her Facebook window and turning around in her chair to face...
The most beautiful man she had ever seen.
He was huge, looming over her in her desk chair, muscles visible under his shirt. His golden-blond hair was long enough to tuck behind his ears, with a forelock falling almost into his eyes. And as if the gorgeous hair wasn’t enough, those eyes were also gold. A deep, melting golden color that Cassie felt like she was falling into, the longer she stared.
She realized that she’d been staring silently at this man like an idiot for who knew how long. Quickly, she got herself under control, and managed a professional-sounding, “Can I help you?”
He blinked, looking distracted—at least she wasn’t the only one!—and then smiled. Her eyes traced his strong jaw.
“I’m Seth,” he said. His voice was deep and powerful, with a hint of a rumble in it. Cassie resisted the urge to close her eyes and just let it wash over her. “I’m...”
He trailed off, and she mentally filled in the end. Incredibly sexy? Here to fulfill all of your wildest dreams? Way, way out of your league?
“...with the IRS.”
“Oh.” Cassie knew she sounded shocked, but she couldn’t help it.
This guy worked for the IRS? She hadn’t thought tax auditors were allowed to be so...masculine.
Well, it didn’t matter how masculine he was, or how magnetically attractive to her personally, she had a job to do. She made herself stop ogling. This was important. Time to put the sudden, inconvenient hormones away.
She’d just been thinking that Facebook was her only fault as an employee. She definitely didn’t want to add throwing herself at government investigators to the list.
“It’s nice to meet you,” she said as professionally as she could manage. “I’m Cassie Shaw, I’m Dave Crews’ assistant.”
His face changed. He looked...worried? Upset? That didn’t make any sense. Did he think she might not be able to help him because she was just an assistant?
Well, she’d show him.
“You’re David Crews’ assistant?” He sounded disbelieving. What was his problem?
“That’s right,” she said. “You’re in the right place. Mr. Crews asked me to put together all of the documents for you.” She kept her eyes on her computer screen so that she wouldn’t be tempted to stare at him anymore. “We can go over them here, or I can print them out and give them to you, or whatever you want.”
“You compiled all the documents for me.”
Cassie suppressed a sarcastic Like I just said. “That’s right. Do you want me to just pull them up here?”
She couldn’t believe that this guy didn’t seem to think she was capable of the job! Sure, she knew some people thought assistants were always idiots, but for some reason she’d gotten the sense that Seth The IRS Agent was a good guy.
That was silly, though. She’d only just met him. She couldn’t know anything about who he was just from saying hello.
She snuck a glance at him. He looked...uncertain.
“How about you print them out.” God, his voice. It was down in the deepest depths of masculine rumbles, and it was making her shift in her seat as things happened in the pit of her stomach.
Surely a man who made her feel like this couldn’t really be a jerk. Could he?
She pulled up the enormous compiled document she’d made and hit print. Across the room, the printer started up.
The silence between them stretched out. It was starting to edge into awkward territory when Seth said, a little abruptly, “That was a beautiful picture you were looking at when I came over.”
A flood of embarrassment came over her. This guy already thought she was incompetent, and now he’d seen her on Facebook at work. “Oh, man.” Cassie put her hand over her face. “Listen, I promise I’m not the type of employee who goofs off on Facebook all day.”
“Hey, no,” he said. “I wasn’t criticizing. It was a fantastic picture, that’s all.”
Well, that was nice of him. Maybe he wasn’t that much of a jerk.
She didn’t want him to be a jerk, was the problem. Which was probably just her thinking with her pants.
Which was weird enough in itself. She never felt this sort of instant attraction to anybody.
Focus! He’d asked about the picture.
“It’s from my friend’s vacation to Norway.” She tried to keep any sadness out of her voice. She didn’t want to be that jealous friend who couldn’t be happy for anyone else’s accomplishments. “She went backpacking through Europe all on her own this summer, and she took all of these gorgeous pictures.”
“That sounds amazing.”
Cassie glanced up at Seth. He seemed sincere. “Most people think it’s not safe for a woman to travel alone like that.”
She heard that all the time when she talked about her own plans to travel alone.
But Seth shook his head immediately. “It’s not safe to get in a car and drive on city streets, but plenty of people do that every day,” he said. “I think that women should travel however they want to travel.”
That was...very refreshing to hear.
“I’ve known some women who got a lot of flak for wanting to travel on their own,” Cassie said, “so it’s nice to hear someone supporting the idea.”
“What about you?” Seth gestured to the computer. “Do you travel too? Are there any fantastic pictures on there of your own trips?”
Cassie bit her lip. There was no way he could know that he was hitting a sore spot, but it still hurt. “No,” she said. “I’ve been out of the country once, to Mexico, and that’s it. I mean, that’s already something amazing—plenty of people aren’t even lucky enough to travel that far once in their lifetimes.”
“But you want to travel more,” Seth prompted.
Cassie nodded, unable to suppress a wistful sigh any longer. “I would love to travel more. But,” she waved a hand around, indicating the office, “for the moment, it’s not practical, so I’m sticking around here.”
Seth glanced around and made a face. “Seems to me like practicalities are overrated.”
Cassie shook her head. “Maybe for you. I can’t afford to get an international plane ticket, and even if I could, I can’t take more than a couple of days off at a time right now, or my boss..
.well, he wouldn’t like it at all.”
Seth’s face sobered. “I see,” he said slowly.
That had sounded a little fatalistic, Cassie thought. Even though it wasn’t possible right now, that did not at all mean she was giving up on her dreams.
“But as soon as I can afford it,” she said firmly, “I’m going to go to the first place that pops into my head. Europe, Asia, Africa, Antarctica...it doesn’t matter where. I just want to see the world.”
He was looking at her with the weirdest expression. What had she said? It was just what she’d always thought.
Maybe he was thinking that she was being silly, or unrealistic. It was a problem she’d had with men before. She’d talk about her dreams, and they’d just smile indulgently, or tease her about wanting to be Lara Croft or something.
The silence stretched out. “Uh,” Cassie said, “I think the printer’s done. Let me just go grab that stuff for you.”
She escaped across the room, still not sure what that look had been about.
Fortunately, there was plenty of other material for conversation in the truly enormous stack of paper she lugged back to her desk.
“Here you go!” She dropped it with an audible thunk in front of his chair. “All of the expenditures that we supervised for the last four quarters. I can walk you through it or I can just leave you alone to work.”
He looked at the stack of paper with a distaste that surprised her, considering his job. “How about you walk me through it. Do you...are you familiar with all of the expenditures yourself? There’s nothing left out of this document?”
“There’s nothing left out.” Cassie wondered if he ever caught any tax dodgers with a question as obvious as that. “All of the data for expenditures goes through me. Well, technically, through my boss, Dave. But really through me.”
A frown was wrinkling Seth’s forehead, and silence stretched out again. Cassie couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Did he think she was overstepping her responsibilities?
“Dave has the last say on most things,” she offered, in case that was it. “He signs everything.”
Cassie hadn’t had to resort to forging his signature, yet, although Dave definitely signed a lot of things he hadn’t read.
“But you do most of the work,” Seth interpreted slowly.
Cassie hesitated. “Well...yes.”
He looked at the stack of paper again. Then back at her. “It’s still not nine o’clock yet,” he said finally. “Why don’t you tell me about your trip to Mexico first?”
Cassie blinked. What was up with this guy?
***
Seth was stalling.
He knew he was stalling, but he couldn’t make himself stop.
Because Cassie—Cassandra Shaw, on the summary of personnel he’d read on the plane, administrative assistant to David Crews, who was the man in charge of the office and the person most likely to be in on Carl Hendricks’ plan—was unquestionably his mate.
And she was beautiful, smart, funny, competent...and she wanted to travel the world. The passion in her voice when she’d talked about it had made him ache. He was dying to take her hand, pull her up from her desk, and lead her out into the world. Even if he hadn’t felt the intensity of the mate bond between them, he would have wanted this woman by his side for as long as she’d have him.
And she’d put a stack of paper in front of him and said, All of the data for expenditures goes through me.
She’d made it clear, without badmouthing him, that her boss made her do most or all of his work.
And as an administrative assistant, she was in a prime position to see communication about the “Environmental Research” lab. To overhear conversations, read emails, look at documents.
So Seth was stalling. Because he didn’t want to find out that his mate—his mate!—was working on the project he’d been sent here to demolish.
So he’d asked her about Mexico instead, wanting to hear more of that passion.
She’d looked surprised at first, but quickly plunged into a story about a time that she clearly looked back on with pleasure.
“Oh, it was wonderful,” she was saying. “I met so many amazing people—some of the abuelitas had tons and tons of stories, and I learned all about them.”
Seth had been expecting to hear about the beaches or hiking in the countryside—maybe Chichen Itza. He’d been looking forward to hearing what she’d thought of the landscape, and ready to share his own memories of when he’d seen the same things.
This wasn’t the sort of travel story he tended to accumulate, though.
“Like what?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“So many things! One woman, Señora Jiminez, told me all about this tragic love affair she’d had with a military man when she was young—only sixteen. She’d promised to marry him, but he went out on duty and never came back. She waited for two years before he was finally, officially reported dead.” Cassie shook her head. “Can you imagine being eighteen and having something like that behind you already?”
When Seth had been eighteen, his parents had just died and he’d been getting ready to leave his home behind forever.
It had been hard, and he’d grown up a hell of a lot that year. But he couldn’t imagine having fallen in love and had that love die. Not at all, let alone as a teenager. “No, I can’t.”
“So then she married another man, because he’d asked her and she had to get married sometime. But he was such a good man, she said. Not a heroic soldier, just a heroic office worker.”
Cassie laughed, her eyes sparkling. Seth was entranced by the curve of her cheek, the fall of her honey-brown hair over her shoulders.
And by her story. In all of his travels, he’d never learned anything so personal about anyone he’d met.
“That’s how she phrased it,” Cassie continued, “a heroic office worker. I mean, in Spanish, obviously. Anyway, Señora Jiminez spent the first year of their marriage sleepwalking, still grieving for her lost love, and then one day she woke up and looked her husband in the eyes and realized he was the kindest, sweetest, most hardworking man she’d ever known, and that she’d fallen in love with him without realizing it.”
Cassie smiled softly. “So it was a happy ending for her after all. But she never forgot her first love, either—she said, ‘I carry him with me still.’”
“I can’t imagine that,” Seth said. “It must have been so difficult for her.” He hesitated, not sure how much to reveal right now. “I don’t think I could do that. Have two loves, I mean. I think there’ll just be one person for me, when it comes.”
Cassie’s eyes dropped. “I’ve never thought too hard about that,” she said slowly. “When I think about the future, it’s mostly about where I could go, what I could do. Who I might be with hasn’t been much of a concern for me, but...”
“But?”
“I don’t know, the idea of being with one person forever is...it sounds right. It sounds like something I’d want.”
Tell her! Seth’s inner lion growled.
Not yet, he insisted. Even if he wasn’t worried about the lab, right at the beginning of her workday in a crowded office was not the time to tell her that he was a shifter, that, oh yeah, shapeshifters existed, and they mated for life, and most importantly of all, Cassie was the one person he was fated to be with forever.
No, he had to wait until they were alone. Whenever that ended up being.
Seth wasn’t used to feeling so uncertain about himself. He couldn’t decide what would be the best way to reveal to Cassie that she was his mate, or what to do about whatever she might know about the lab. Normally he was a decisive person, making his choices without second-guessing himself or delaying.
Of course, the stakes had never been as high as this before.
Cassie had stopped talking and was watching him. “Is everything all right?” she asked hesitantly.
He shook his head. “Yes! Everything’s fine. I was just...thinking about something.” What had
they been talking about? Oh, of course. “Your story made me think about how I usually travel, that’s all.”
“How’s that?”
“I focus on the areas where there aren’t any people at all,” he explained. “Mountains, jungles, anywhere that’s beautiful and remote. I love to hike through areas where no one ever goes, see things that no one ever sees. I hardly ever spend any time in the cities.”
“Well, that makes sense,” Cassie said. “I guess you get enough of talking to people during your job, right?”
“Uh...yeah,” said Seth. “That’s right.”
Wrong! his lion growled. Don’t lie to your mate!
Lying to Cassie felt almost painful, like he was ripping something inside. But for Max’s sake, he needed to keep his real reason for being here a secret.
And even if he trusted Cassie to keep that secret, there were other people moving around the office, settling into their desks. Someone might overhear him, or Cassie might say something out loud in surprise if he told her.
He had to wait.
It won’t be long, he promised his lion. Soon she’ll know everything.
“So where have you been?” Cassie was asking. “Or where did you like best?”
This he could tell the truth about, at least. “I’ve traveled a lot, and I always like where I’m at the best. My last trip was to Peru.”
Cassie’s eyes widened. “Really? What did you do there?”
“A lot of hiking.” Seth remembered how he’d felt coming out of the jungle. “It was beautiful, but...solitary. I’ve been starting to think that my way of traveling is too lonely sometimes.”
Cassie smiled, and shrugged. “It’s all about what you like. I do love hiking in the wilderness too. I did plenty of that in Mexico.”
She laughed a little, and Seth went briefly absentminded at the low, musical sound of it. “But I wouldn’t want to go to an entirely different country and not get to know anyone. Think about the people who grew up right next to the place where you’re hiking! They must know so much about it.”
Seth hadn’t ever thought of it that way. He’d always focused on how many people hadn’t ever been where he was going, not the people who had.
“I have to admit that lately it’s been a little too...isolated.” He hesitated, and then added, “I even cut my last trip a bit short, because I had to get back to see my family.”