by Zoe Chant
“It doesn’t matter that I was right,” she continued. “I didn’t know that for certain at the time. I just wanted you to do what I thought was best. Stubborn, arrogant control freak.”
“You’re not taking into account—” he started, and then stopped. This argument was just illustrating her point. All of her points. He wanted to be right, so he was arguing with her about her own mind.
What would someone who was better than that do? What if being right, being in control of the situation, wasn’t the most important thing in the world?
What if she was the most important thing?
What if he didn’t want to be a loner, didn’t want to keep everything important locked up inside? What if he wanted Shoshanna’s love?
“I think you’re more giving than I am,” he started. “I think you’re better at talking and compromising. But ever since I discovered the lab, I’ve been trying to be better myself.”
That made her frown. “The lab?” she said. “Why did that change your mind? I would’ve thought something like that would just...make you want more control. It was your CFO who was running it, without your knowledge, I know that.”
“It was,” he said. “And yes, I’ve been making sure I’m much more familiar with the financial office’s numbers ever since then. But that’s not what I meant. I was referring to Seth.”
“Your brother,” Shoshanna said. “You sent him to infiltrate the lab, right?”
Max shook his head. “I didn’t know about the lab. I sent him to find out where the money was going.” He remembered that day, Seth showing up unannounced in his office, straight off the plane from Peru. Max, certain of his own infallibility, sure he was making the right decision, sending his brother alone to investigate.
Learning that Seth had been kidnapped, hurt, and drugged had been the worst moment of his life. “I knew there might be danger,” he said now. “I had no idea how much, and I didn’t take into account the possibility that I was wrong about the risk. I didn’t think, my brother might get hurt, and I should take every precaution to prevent that. I didn’t even ask him if he was willing to put himself in danger. It was arrogance, pure and simple. And Seth suffered because of it.”
“He knew you’d get him out again,” Shoshanna said. “In the cells. None of us had a pack, any close family. That’s why they picked us to kidnap, because no one was coming after us. Seth told us they’d made a huge mistake with him, and they had no idea what was coming. And he was right. You showed up, and that was that. You saved all of us.”
“I was responsible,” Max reminded her. “If I had been more vigilant, no one would have needed to be saved at all.” He closed his eyes, and his breath shuddered out of him. “Shoshanna, it’s my fault you were hurt.”
“That’s what I meant!” She sounded frustrated, and he opened his eyes to look at her.
She took a step forward, and put her hands on his shoulders. “It’s Carl Hendricks’ fault I was hurt,” she said deliberately. “It’s that sociopath Dr. Benson’s fault. Seth, Kevin, and I got revenge on Benson. You got revenge on Hendricks. You can’t take responsibility for something someone else did.”
“It’s not what I did. It’s what I didn’t do.”
“What, personally examine every cent passing through Hendricks’ hands? Assume that he must have started a secret lab somewhere and search the entire Rockies for it? What? What should you have done?”
“I told him about shifters,” Max said. “I thought—he’d been a friend of my father’s for years. He’d been with the company decades longer than I had. I assumed he was loyal. I didn’t keep the secret, and once I told him, I didn’t...”
“Have him followed? Bug his house? There was no reason for you to do that, Max.” Shoshanna took another step forward, until Max could feel her body heat, even though they weren’t quite touching. “This is what I meant. What happened to me isn’t your fault, and if anyone in the world gets to make that decision, it’s me.”
Max closed his eyes. She was right.
She was right. He couldn’t tell her who to blame. He couldn’t make her agree with him about her own suffering.
Stubborn, arrogant, loner control freak.
“And if you can’t believe me about that...well.” Shoshanna leaned in, until her breath washed sweetly over his cheek. “I forgive you. For trusting someone you’d known since you were a child? I forgive you.”
Max opened his eyes and leaned forward, so their foreheads were resting against each other. The words sent a rushing sensation through him, like he was falling, or underwater. The next words seemed to just spill out of his mouth. “My father trusted Hendricks, which was strange because my father didn’t trust anybody. I think, now, that my father trusted him to be ruthless in pursuing his advantages, which helped the company. And that was what my father cared about the most.”
“Sounds like a difficult man.” Shoshanna pulled back, and took his hand. She drew him along with her to sit side-by-side on the bed.
“He wasn’t difficult as long as your priorities aligned with his. I wanted to follow in his footsteps and turn RGS into an empire, so he and I got along very well. My sister was the same. Seth wanted nothing to do with the business, and so he and our father fought constantly. Reid was too young when he died to have gotten into it with him.”
“You did it,” Shoshanna observed. “RGS is an empire.”
“Yes, it is.
“So what do you want now?”
Max was quiet for a moment. “Six months ago, I didn’t have an answer for that. Or, my answer would simply have been that I wanted to make RGS bigger and better than it already was. Now, though...I don’t want anyone to have to go through what you went through. I don’t want anyone else to do what Carl Hendricks did.”
“And that’s why you were investigating Elite.”
“Yes.”
Shoshanna leaned in and kissed him fiercely. Max was surprised, but recovered fast, and threaded his fingers through her hair, kissing her back.
She pulled back after a long moment, breathing heavily. “That’s a good goal,” she said. “Max. You’re doing a good thing.”
“I have the means,” he said. “Hardly anyone else does. It’s right for me to do it.”
“It is,” she agreed. “Now ask me what I want.”
He ran his thumb softly along her cheek. “What do you want?”
“I want the same thing,” Shoshanna said, rock-solid with conviction. “There’s nothing I want more. No one should have to go through that. There’s no reason for you to keep it from me. There’s no reason to insist on doing it all yourself.”
“What about the thugs down the street?” he asked softly. “What about your safety? No one should have to go through what you went through, but I’ll argue that even more, no one should go through it twice.”
"I'm not going to go through it twice," Shoshanna said. Confidence shone through her face, her voice. "We're going to stop these assholes. They're not going to hurt any more shifters like they hurt you, or like Hendricks hurt me. We're on to them. You're Max freaking Rowland, are you telling me you can't obliterate a company like this?"
A smile tugged at the corner of Max's mouth. He'd been surprised, over the last day, at how much Shoshanna made him smile, how much he would surprise himself with a sudden quirk of his mouth. "Not at all," he assured her, in his most confidently urbane CEO voice. "I can promise you that Elite is destined to become a subsidiary of Rowland Global Solutions. The acquisition process will start as soon as I get back to New York."
Shoshanna kissed him again. He kissed her back, hard, and the next thing he knew, they were tilting sideways in a flurry of hands and mouth, her body pressing against his.
He rolled them until he was on top of Shoshanna, holding himself up on his hands and looking down at her beautiful face. Those fierce dark eyes, the generous curve of her mouth...he'd never wanted to taste anything more.
And he could. He leaned down and kissed her agai
n. She opened her mouth for him, and moaned when he thrust his tongue inside.
He pulled back. “Clothes.”
“Good idea,” she gasped. They shed their clothes quickly, stripping naked and coming back together in a rough embrace, too eager for each other to take their time. Max reached down and found Shoshanna already wet under his fingers. He slipped two inside and she moaned, thrusting her hips forward. He rubbed his thumb over her hard clit, feeling her shudder under him as he moved it back and forth, up one side and down the other.
Before long, though, she was tugging his hand away, impatient. "Inside me, now!"
"Yes, ma'am," he murmured. She wrapped one strong thigh around his hip and pulled him in.
Pushing inside her was the closest thing to heaven that Max had ever experienced. She was like silk, hot and tight and perfect. When he was fully seated inside, he stilled, wanting to keep this moment, savor it.
But Shoshanna moved under him, impatient. Max cupped one of her breasts in his hand, and flicked his thumb—still slick from her wetness—over the nipple. When she gasped, he bent his head to taste it.
"Max!" she said in a strangled voice.
He pulled back. "Yes?"
"I swear, if you don't start moving in the next five seconds..."
"You'll what?" He hid his smile in her neck.
Shoshanna bit him. The sharp sting of her teeth on the meat of his shoulder made him twitch, and she caught the motion with her body, and clenched down around him.
At that, he couldn't help but thrust again. Shoshanna kissed the bite mark she'd left, soothing it with her tongue, and moaned with him as he moved. "There," she said breathlessly. "Just like that."
Max surrendered to his mate's wishes and kept up the rhythm, drinking in the noises she made. They rose in pitch as he went on, the sound of her pleasure going higher and sharper.
Finally, Max reached down again, and once more slid his thumb alongside her clit, riding against it as she moved into his thrusts. The quick, frictionless stroke left Shoshanna gasping, her fingernails digging into his back. Max pressed harder and thrust deep into her, holding onto his own control with iron will and not much more.
Shoshanna's lips parted as her climax took her over. Her head tilted back, her eyes fell closed, and she went absolutely silent as she shattered around him. Every muscle in her body seemed to clench tight as she came. Max couldn't take his eyes off of her.
He kept himself together long enough to keep moving through her spasms, drawing the orgasm out as long as he could, and then as she started to relax, still clenching softly around him in the aftershocks, he let go.
Orgasm crashed through him in an overwhelming wave. The wash of sensation was more than physical. It was as though he was caught up in Shoshanna, as though he forgot that anything in the world existed but her. He tasted her, scented her, felt her in every nerve in his body. And he knew, he knew, that he could never leave.
Eventually, they came back to themselves. Max found himself sprawled next to Shoshanna, limbs tangled carelessly with the covers. His arm was around her, his hand stroking up and down her arm. Her skin was soft and smooth, and she smelled intoxicating.
Her eyes blinked open, and she smiled at him. "Mmmm," she said. "I could get used to doing that twice a day."
"Why limit ourselves?" Max was allowing himself to envision the same future he'd imagined earlier, where he could be here all the time, lie in bed with her for hours, cook with her, help her clean the kitchen, chop wood for her...
It still wasn't possible, of course. He had responsibilities. And even if he hadn't, he knew himself. He wasn't meant for an idle life, and he would go crazy if he was forced to live one.
But just for these few minutes, he let himself think it was possible.
Eventually, Shoshanna shifter. “I really need a shower,” she said.
“I think you smell fantastic.” Max could hear the growl in his voice, coming from somewhere deep in his chest.
It was surprising—he wasn’t the type to let his instincts overwhelm him. He lived in a glass-and-steel world, where predators wore suits and hunted their prey with cool calculation, pouncing in boardrooms, with numbers as their claws. His smooth, cool mask was as much instinct as any growling could ever be.
But somehow, with Shoshanna, the mask disappeared as though it had never been.
Shoshanna started to sit up, but got distracted halfway through, apparently by the need to run her hands up his chest and kiss him. “You’re too good-looking,” she murmured against his mouth. “It’s unfair.”
“Look in a mirror,” he replied. “I’ve never seen a woman as beautiful as you.”
She pulled back at that, and gave him an unimpressed look. Did she really not know how beautiful she was?
“I’m showering,” she informed him, and took herself off.
Max stretched out amid the tangled sheets, thinking about what a contrast this was to his penthouse bedroom in New York, furnished in clean lines with hardly any embellishments. This room had yellow curtains on the windows, and wallpaper with a pale green leafy pattern. There were cheerful rugs on the wood floor, and the quilt on the bed looked homemade. He wondered how many of the things in here had come with the house, and how many Shoshanna had brought with her, or bought after she moved in.
Shoshanna reappeared only fifteen minutes later, hair wrapped up in a towel, but moving with the naked, unselfconscious grace most shifters had.
“Still in bed?” she asked him, with a raised eyebrow.
“Just admiring the room,” he told her. “It’s lovely.”
Shoshanna looked around. “I like it,” she said. “The house came furnished—the last person to live here was a little old lady, and her heirs were happy to sell the house with a lot of her things still in it. I didn’t have anything after...after I got out, and I liked the idea of being somewhere with a history, with things that were loved.”
Max shook his head. “I admire you,” he said. “It’s only been six months. You have a successful business, and I know you’ve built a strong partnership with your friend Kevin even though you met each other in the worst possible way, and you put yourself somewhere as nice as here.”
Shoshanna frowned. “The house didn’t take any work on my part,” she said. “I had your company’s settlement money, and I just told you, I bought it like this.”
“But you wanted to,” Max tried to explain. “I have enough money to live anywhere, but my apartment is...sterile. Expensive, because that’s what’s expected and because I prefer the security that comes with an expensive building, but without any...personal touches. My own, or anyone else’s. It doesn’t say anything about me except that I have money. This, the fact that you wanted to live somewhere like this,” he waved his hand to indicate the room, “says something about you.”
“I suppose I see what you mean,” Shoshanna said slowly, although she wasn’t looking at the room, she was looking at Max. “So where would you live, then, if you were going to choose something else?”
Here. Max didn’t say it aloud. He couldn’t, somehow, but he thought Shoshanna could hear it anyway.
The moment stretched on, where Max thought they were both envisioning the future he’d imagined before.
Shoshanna was the one who finally broke the silence. “Take this,” she said.
She’d picked up her phone and was handing it to him.
“Why?” he asked, taking it.
She’d gone to her closet and was looking for clothes. “You have to call your sister,” she said over her shoulder.
“Alexandra? Why?” And then he put it together. “That’s how you knew who I was. She was on the phone downstairs.”
Shoshanna had acquired panties and a bra—Max suppressed an automatic objection—and was tugging on a pair of jeans. “She was,” she confirmed. “She wanted to hire me to find you.”
“I called my secretary and told her I’d be away just to prevent this eventuality,” Max said, frustrated.
“Apparently, that’s vastly out of character for you.” Shoshanna’s voice was dry. “Also, you were ‘terse and unlike yourself.’ And you weren’t at your apartment, you weren’t answering your phone...”
“It broke in the crash.” Max looked blankly at the phone. “I had no idea Alexandra would get worried.”
“She cares about you,” Shoshanna said softly. She pulled a T-shirt over her head and came over to sit next to him. “She said that it was possible you were fine and you’d just be mad that she sent me after you, but she was willing to take that risk.”
Max brought up the last number answered and stared at it.
“Have you told her what you’re doing?” Shoshanna asked.
Max shook his head. “She knows about the lab, of course, and she’s been instrumental in bringing together evidence to prosecute Hendricks in a way that will not reveal the existence of shifters to the general public, but she doesn’t know I’ve been investigating others who might be doing the same thing.”
“Let me guess,” said Shoshanna. “It wasn’t safe.”
Max looked over at her. “My brother got hurt because I dragged him into this,” he said flatly. “I won’t get my sister hurt, too.”
“No.” Shoshanna punched him in the arm, not hard enough to hurt, just to get his attention. Max tried to remember the last time someone had done that to him, and couldn’t. “He got hurt because he went alone into an evil lab staffed with dozens of thugs. The solution to that is to involve more people, not fewer.”
Max started to object, but she kept going. “You doing this alone, maybe with one security guy, is just increasing the possibility that someone else will poison your coffee and stage a car crash. If you had a whole team, something like that wouldn’t work. And if you keep on doing it alone, the odds that you’ll die, and hurt everyone close to you, keep getting higher.”
“...I admit that I hadn’t been thinking about it like that,” Max said.
“Well.” Shoshanna took his hand. “We’re in this together from now on. All right?”