Wolf at the Door

by Christine Warren

  PLUCKED, he corrected himself, ready to be plucked.

  “Young man, I demand an explanation of this discourtesy!”

  Adele’s voice rang brittle and strident in his ears, and he couldn’t have cared less. One more deep sniff told him his honeysuckle flower had been here before she disappeared. She had been near this woman, maybe even hugged her, and her scent led directly away from the grande dame and toward the hallway stair.

  “Pardon,” he growled, already turning and moving toward the door. “It’s the Irish in me. Not a civilized bone in our bodies. Ask a Brit.”

  He didn’t stick around to see her jaw snap shut, but he wouldn’t have cared if he had. He was too busy licking his chops and grinning the grin of a big, bad wolf.

  A wolf with a taste for honey.

  Two

  I am so going to pay for this, Cassidy Poe scolded herself as she pushed open the door to the roof and peered out. And I so don’t care.

  If she had to endure one more minute at the party downstairs without a break, her control would snap and she’d end up doing something really stupid, like throwing her champagne in some vampire’s face. Then she’d be in big trouble. They had no sense of humor about that kind of thing, so she was better off sneaking up to the greenhouse garden here on the roof and taking a few minutes to regroup before she returned to the fray.

  She figured she’d better finish the champagne, too, and disarm herself. Just in case.

  She made a face as she drained her glass. You would think by now that she’d have the whole obligatory social event thing down pat—after all, her grandmother had lectured her on their importance since she was six—and in a way she did. She knew the right things to say, the right gestures to make. She even knew exactly which fork to use under every conceivable dining circumstance. She descended from something like ten generations of diplomats and ambassadors. Her some-ridiculous-number-of-greats-grandmother had been one of the negotiators at the end of the Fae-Demon Wars all those centuries ago. With a history like that, she should be a natural at this sort of thing, right?

  Too bad she hated it with such a fiery passion.

  Making a face, Cassidy forced herself to admit that “hate” might be a bit too strong of a word. In reality, she found parts of it fascinating. The way people and races and species interacted had always held her riveted. If it hadn’t, she never would have become an anthropologist and made a living studying cultures and how they related to each other. It was just the political side she couldn’t stand. Politics always reminded her a bit too much of nights spent with a babysitter while her parents were off negotiating with the head of some vampire house, or the representative of some obscure order of magic-users. And that reminded her of their deaths, which just made her want to cry like a little girl, so she interpreted her feelings for the entire world of Others diplomacy as hate and felt better for it.

  Except that her grandmother refused to take no for an answer, even from Cassidy. Especially from Cassidy. When Adele issued a command invitation, you didn’t refuse, and a blood relationship was no protection against the mighty grande dame’s wrath.

  Take tonight, for instance. Cassidy would have preferred to be out somewhere having a root canal than mingling with the elite of Other society, members of the Council and diplomats from the European High Council of Others, but here she was all the same. She’d gotten all dressed up, put on one of the useless, slinky dresses her grandmother had picked out for her, strapped herself into high heels that promised to be the death of her and schlepped herself across town to the Upper East Side all because Nana had told her tonight’s event was an important one. Hell, she’d even put up her hair for it!

  She had to face it. She was nana-whipped.

  Cassidy slipped her shoes off and padded along the flagstone aisles of the greenhouse, barely seeing the collection of blooms and vines that surrounded her. The slight coolness of the slate beneath her bare feet and the warm humidity of the air against the exposed skin of her arms and shoulders reminded her of one very important fact that she considered obvious, but that her grandmother had never managed to accept. Much to Adele Berry’s dismay, Cassidy would never be a diplomat, and she would never be a politician, and she would never be able to keep a pair of shoes on for more than an hour at a time.

  She stared into her empty champagne flute for a moment before sighing and setting it down on a table between a spray of fern and a potted hibiscus. She could use another drink—or five—but running downstairs for a nip and a belt didn’t top her agenda at the moment. She’d rather stay up here and hide.

  Cassidy had a talent for hiding. She’d developed it over a lifetime, first as a toddler playing games with her mother in the yard behind their old farmhouse in Virginia; then later as a confused child in the enormous brownstone her grandmother kept just a few blocks from Central Park. When her mother had been teaching her how to use the talents of a Foxwoman, she’d thought of them as a game, something to do on a whim, the source of a good giggle and a fun round of hide-and-seek. She hadn’t realized until later that foxes used their ability to blend into their environment as a defense mechanism. And it wasn’t until she moved to Manhattan that she discovered the same talent could be quite useful for a Foxwoman who shared it.

  She had moved in with Nana just after her sixth birthday, two days after her parents died, and she had learned very quickly that hiding could be even easier in the city than it had been in the woods back home. There, a girl had trees and rocks and tall, prickly grass to shield her from prying eyes. But in the city, the eyes hardly ever paid attention. Soon she had learned how to hide in plain sight, even when people were looking right at her. If she wanted to, she could make sure they never even registered she was there.

  If only she’d been able to make the talent work on her grandmother. The problem with having a talent unique to Foxwomen was that it almost never worked on another Foxwoman.

  That being the case, Cassidy figured she had about seven and a half more minutes before someone came up here to find her, instructed where to look by Adele herself. For a woman in her seventies, Cassidy’s nana could teach sharp to an ice pick.

  Taking a deep breath, Cassidy tilted her head back to look through the glass-paned roof to the night sky above. In Manhattan, no one could really see the stars, but it still made her smile to know they were there. When she was little, she had imagined that the stars were the eyes of the angels watching over the world, and if that were true, she knew two sets belonged to her mother and father. Sarah and David Poe had both had eyes that seemed to always sparkle with warmth and amusement, so it seemed fitting. And it made her miss them a little less to know they still looked out for her in whatever way they could. Even as an adult, she found it comforting to know that even when the world changed, the stars would still look constantly down.

  With her head tilted back and the low back of her cocktail dress exposing her skin to the humid air, she missed the silky tickle of hair against her skin. Reaching up, she pulled the elegant silver sticks out of the knot of her hair and let the long, reddish waves tumble down, as a soft growl filled the night air.

  A growl?

  Cassidy shook her head as if to clear it and heard the low vibrating sound again, coming from somewhere behind her. Spinning on her heels, she found herself facing a strange, towering shadow with the glowing amber eyes of a Lupine.

  And he was growling with a low, smoky rumble.

  Naturally, Cassidy did what any self-respecting fox would do when confronted with a predator twice her size and three times her level of aggression. She turned tail and ran, leaving the hair sticks, her evening bag, and possibly a few minutes of the end of her life clattering to the floor behind her.

  Quinn had the best of intentions. Honestly, he did. He intended to introduce himself. Smile warmly, offer to shake her hand. Maybe compliment her on her dress, which draped enticingly over a ripe set of curves that made his mouth water and his palms itch. He had intended to do all of that,
to be a gentleman and a scholar, but every single one of those intentions flew out the glass walls of the greenhouse the moment she turned and ran from him.

  That was when instinct took over, and after that, he had no choice. His man lost the battle with his beast, and the chase was on.

  He couldn’t stifle the flash of disappointment he felt at knowing how short the game would be. He loved to play chase, but there was no way the woman could outrun him. He could double her stride, and her muscles could never outpace his, but it would be fun while it lasted. He took two long, bounding steps (during which he couldn’t be sure his tongue wasn’t hanging out the corner of his mouth in a wolfish grin) and reached for her, his hands closing easily around her shoulders.

  Or rather, that’s what they would have closed around if her shoulders had still been there. Instead, they grasped thin air as she ducked, twisted, and darted away, flinging herself in one fluid motion out of his reach and up onto one of the long trestle tables that held the exotic plants surrounding them.

  As if the fact that she’d eluded him wasn’t enough to pique his interest, while he watched, eyes sparking with pleasure at the unexpected extension of playtime, she shifted. In the liquid second between her launch off the slate-flagged floor and her landing on top of the wooden table, she shimmered and stretched and shifted, melting in his sight from lithe, silk-clad woman to slinky, red-furred fox.

  His breath hissed in appreciation. Her were form was gorgeous, small and sleek and lushly furred. Her ears and paws were tipped in black, as if she’d been investigating through a tar patch, her tail a thick brush that waved like an invitation before him. With a glad roar he gathered himself, shifted, and leapt after her.

  He heard the sharp crack of pottery hitting the stone floor as he dove into the space she had recently occupied. Being considerably larger than a red fox—in this form he was a timber wolf of rather formidable proportions—his mass required some accommodations hers had not. Since he had no intention of losing her, the large clay pots on the table had to do the accommodating, and they shattered to the ground.

  Her claws scrabbled against the wooden table as she fled from him, sending leaves and fronds rustling madly after her. In comparison to her sleek new form, the potted plants could have been a jungle, but it didn’t matter. She could have run over hot flowing lava and he would have caught her.

  She leaped off the edge of the table in a russet blur. Crouching to absorb the impact, she didn’t pause for breath before she turned and darted through a curtain of ornamental grass into the next aisle of the greenhouse. He followed right on her heels, slipping on the slick floor. He barked in irritation and threw on a burst of speed, nearly catching her beside a well-groomed shrub. His jaws snapped on air and her tail waved tauntingly against his nose as she made a hairpin turn to scoot beneath a potting bench.

  He hadn’t had this much fun since he wrestled a weretiger in India during a diplomatic assignment a few years back. And his quarry at the moment smelled a hell of a lot better than the tiger had. She also had better legs, from what he’d seen in the split second during her change when her dress had fallen away.

  He attempted to dive in after her, banged his skull on a table leg, and sat back on his haunches, shaking his head to clear it. Time to regroup.

  Pausing, he cocked his head to the side and listened. The frantic clatter of the chase had subsided, leaving the greenhouse eerily still. Somewhere deeper in the forest of plants he heard the splatter of a water fountain and the low hum of the pump that powered it. He heard the rustle of the leaves and, from outside, the sounds of Manhattan droning on as usual. What he didn’t hear was the click of neatly trimmed fox nails on the floor. Swishing his tail restlessly, he tilted his head to the other side and listened harder.

  There. To the left, at the other end of the potting bench. He heard the distinctive sound of something small, furry, and delectable trying to catch its breath.

  His mouth drew wide in a wolfish grin, and he pushed back to his feet. Shoulders rising, he dropped down into a crouch and began to slink slowly toward the sound of the brisk panting. He kept to the shadows, fur standing on end, skin crawling with excitement. Animal instinct warred with human emotion, both pushing him forward in his chase. The man inside him wanted to meet this woman, to get to know her, to find out her favorite color and whether she liked Thai food.

  The wolf wanted to flush her from her cover, chase her down, roll her onto her back, and treat her like prey. Whether that meant killing her or fucking her, the beast didn’t care. It would be up to the man within to make the right decision.

  It helped that she still smelled so damned good.

  He found himself licking his chops and forced himself to stop thinking about how she would taste.

  Rich and sweet and spicy—

  Forced himself to stop thinking how she would taste.

  Pulling his tongue back into his mouth, Quinn dropped another inch closer to the floor and eased forward on his belly. He got his nose under a fall of creeping vines and inhaled deeply.

  God, she smelled like heaven.

  Quinn was the fifteenth male of his family line to be called guth of his pack. Too restless to stay in one place as Alphas, his ancestors had always been storytellers, negotiators, and ambassadors, literally the voice of the Black Glen pack. They had roamed the earth and raised their voices, but always, they had returned to the pack, mated within the pack, raised cubs within the pack. It was a point of pride in his family, something his father had woven into the story of their history in the Glen, and the implication had been that Quinn would continue that lineage just as he’d continued the lineage of the eldest Quinn male becoming guth. But all thought of that went out the window the minute he drank in her scent. He wanted this woman, pack or not, Lupine or not, and he intended to have her.

  Now, if the gods looked on him favorably.

  Pressing his muzzle as far under the table as he could, Quinn gave in to one last grin, gathered his breath, and howled right into the ear of a wily female fox.

  Three

  Cassidy crouched beneath the potting bench and trembled. Not with fear, but with the hot rush of adrenaline pumping through her.

  She didn’t know who the wolf was. She couldn’t remember ever seeing him before—in either form—and he wasn’t the sort she would have forgotten. She sure as hell couldn’t picture forgetting him now. A girl never forgot a werewolf who attacked her in a deserted greenhouse. Or so she assumed.

  To be honest, “attacked” was a pretty strong word. While the Lupine had reached for her, she hadn’t detected any sort of threat from him, and she usually had pretty reliable instincts about those types of things.

  She usually had pretty reliable instincts, period.

  The plant whose shadow she hid in had some sort of spiky leaves that tickled her nose, and she raised her forepaw to scratch before she could give in to the urge to sneeze instead. Even though she didn’t have the impression that the Lupine meant her any harm, she wasn’t feeling up to taking the chance that she might be wrong.

  Peeking out from among the foliage, Cassidy sniffed the air and tried to pinpoint the wolf’s location. He’d been right on her heels from the moment she shifted, not missing a beat even when she changed from woman to fox right in front of him. Of course, when one attended a party at the oldest and most exclusive private club for Others in Manhattan, one had to expect to see some things beyond the ordinary.

  Like this Lupine.

  She sensed something extraordinary about him, something beyond the average and not-so-average pack members she had met through the years. Oh, he smelled like wolf, that dark, earthy, evergreen smell they all had in common. And he certainly looked like one. She’d caught a glimpse of him over her shoulder when she took a corner at top speed, so she’d seen the huge white teeth, the rich charcoal-colored fur, and the deep black pigment of his skin. The eyes she’d noticed the moment she’d turned after hearing his growl. You couldn’t miss those eye
s—a dark, rich color something like ancient gold that seemed to glow in the dim moonlight.

  They had fixed on her with an intensity that set her pulse racing. Along with her feet.

  She’d read his intent to touch her in those eyes and instinct had kicked in, sending her darting out of the way a split second before skin made contact with skin.

  Skin against skin, flesh against flesh, mouth against mouth—

  Down, girl.

  She shook her head again. Where had that come from? Clearly, the adrenaline was messing with her head. She pricked her ears forward, listening for the sounds of his movement. He was still out there somewhere; she just couldn’t pinpoint where.

  “Arrroooooooooooooooo!”

  She bolted, sprung like a pheasant by a spaniel, at the sound of the howl so close behind her. He’d managed to sneak up on her somehow, but she sure as hell didn’t intend to stand around and ask about his technique. She ran as if the hounds of hell were on her heels. Some might argue they were.

  She felt her sides heaving as she ran, air billowing in and out of her lungs, her paws searching for purchase on the slick slate tiling the floor. When she hit a corner, her hind legs skittered out from under her, and she lost a valuable nanosecond righting herself. The slip let him get so close she could feel his breath ruffling her fur. Desperately, she poured on another burst of speed and dove frantically for the greenhouse door.

  She never made it.

  She managed to get herself airborne only to collide mid-flight with a much larger and more vigorously propelled body. He knocked her off course and sent her hurtling back to the floor before she could so much as wriggle away.

  Cassidy lay there, dazed, the wind temporarily hammered out of her, while he stood above her, tongue hanging out, one massive forepaw planted against her chest, pinning her in place. She had about as much chance to get away as she did to become the next Mr. Universe. Faced with that harsh wall of reality, she gave one disgruntled yip and shifted.