“What does a guy have to do to get a drink around here?” Drake said a little too loudly, leaning into an umbrella of amber light.
Emelia spun around slowly, as though she’d sink into quicksand if she moved too fast. With a nervous smile pulling at her lips, she approached him, tossing a napkin on the bar.
“We don’t have Lafite,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans, “or anything like what you’ve got in that cellar of yours.”
“Do you have scotch?” He removed his coat, draped it over the stool next to him, and tipped his chin at the top glass shelf.
She pulled down a bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue Label, Drake’s favorite and the most expensive in the brand, and poured a stout glass. “Ice?”
“Straight.”
“You sure you don’t want to hit the BevMo across town? You could save yourself the thirty-five-dollar shot and invest in the bottle.” She slid the glass across the bar; it stopped right on the mark, right in front of him. “Not that I couldn’t use the money.”
Drake held up the glass in mock cheers and took a sip. The smoky drink warmed his insides and erased the last hint of sickness that’d plagued him over the week.
Who was he fooling? The ease of tension in his middle had nothing to do with the scotch.
Moving with a kind of grace Drake hadn’t seen often, Emelia checked on Mr. Lumberjack at the end of the bar and refilled his beer. She wiped up a mess Mr. Goth had just made and double-checked to make sure Ms. Corkscrew didn’t want to order another round. When Emelia circled back around to Drake, she stared as if she expected him to poof into a cloud of smoke and disappear once more. That wasn’t happening. Not now. Not when he had the chance—away from prying company eyes—to get to know his Luminary.
“So this is your place?” Drake had been curious about the Knight Owl. He hadn’t expected a newspaper-clad bar with a dark, tavern feel. The bar wasn’t the kind of place he’d normally visit. It was warm and friendly and gave an unconventional, homey vibe. “It’s clever.”
“What are you doing here, Mr. Wilder?” Emelia’s hands found her hips, but attitude didn’t follow. She looked nervous. Like he’d invaded her turf and caught her being nice when it was the last thing she wanted. “Don’t tell me you came to pay compliments to my bar. I might have to hurl.”
Drake’s stomach wrenched. “For the love of God, don’t mention hurling.”
“Mr. Wilder, are you all right? You look…green.” She eyed him carefully. “Like Kermit green, you know? The men’s room is right over there.”
She hitched her thumb like a hiker, pointing over her shoulder to the main room, but Drake’s gaze didn’t follow. He focused on breathing. In and out, in and out. He closed his eyes. Despite the overwhelming aroma of his scotch, Emelia’s natural feminine scent invaded his nose. As tantalizing hints of warm sugar, and something a bit sweeter, worked their way through Drake’s senses, coating away the last of the queasiness, he sighed. Emelia truly was the calm to his storm, the Chicken Soup to his howling soul.
And he was royally botching this.
“You’ve been MIA all week,” she said, her voice like liquid velvet.
Drake opened his eyes and drank in the softness of Emelia’s features: gently rounded chin, high cheekbones, silky, honey-blond hair flowing to her shoulders. She was a goddess. Aphrodite in human form.
And she’d noticed his absence.
Before Drake got too excited, a hard bout of logic sucker-punched him in the gut. Of course Emelia noticed. She sat in front of his office door all damned day. Idiot.
“Glad to hear that I’ve been missed,” he teased. He could’ve sworn Emelia shuddered before averting her eyes.
“Wouldn’t count on it.” She snatched a wet glass off the drying rack and toweled the rim, scraping it like she aimed to shave it down to sand.
“Has Mr. Bloomfield been showing you the ropes well enough?”
“Not as good as you.” Her eyes widened as if she caught herself. “What I mean is, there were some things I wanted to talk to you about this week…” She paused, her gaze snapping to the kitchen as a plate banged against a sink. “Where’ve you been, anyway?”
“I had business to take care of in LA.” He drank to soothe the burn in his throat. “I won’t be going back there for a long while now.”
Not unless he wanted to compete in the Influenza Olympics. There was no way his businesses could slow down, no way he could ignore the work that had to be done at his offices around the country.
Emelia would just have to come with him, though he wasn’t sure how he felt about it yet. She was easy on the eyes—understatement of the year—but she also had a mouth like a sailor and Drake never knew what she was going to say, or do, next. Wild cards never panned out well. Not in a business run by logistics and numbers and margin calls. Drake had built his life around predictability, only inviting people he could trust into his inner circle.
Mother Nature certainly had a twisted sense of humor, matching him with a loose-cannon bartender…a human, loose-cannon bartender, no less.
“So you come back into town and decide to stop by my bar?” she asked, eyebrows pitching. “No offense, but you don’t look like my typical customer. Most of my patrons can’t afford the tie cinched around your neck.”
“This one?” Drake eyed his charcoal-gray, Italian silk tie lying against his pristinely white Forzieri dress shirt. The ensemble had been purchased by his stylist—she’d said it exuded powerful grace. He thought she was full of shit, but the clothes fit well, so he couldn’t complain. “This tie couldn’t have cost more than fifty.”
More like three hundred, but who cared?
“Is that so?” she said, a playful gleam in her eye.
Leaning over so that the swell of her breasts pressed against the bar, Emelia dragged a finger across Drake’s chest. He fought to keep his eyes off the plumpness of her breasts as his slacks tightened at the seams. She smiled, slow and teasing, as she spun small circles over his pectoral muscles. Drake’s mouth dried as blood froze in his veins. He couldn’t get their kiss out of his head, couldn’t forget the way her lips had felt brushing against his. She was so close. All he’d have to do is lean forward, drag his hands through her hair, and catch her mouth.
They weren’t in his building or on duty. They wouldn’t be doing anything wrong. He could kiss her, drive her crazy, pleasure her in the back room, and they wouldn’t be breaking any company rules. Hell, even if they were, he was the damned boss. If it meant kissing Emelia again, he’d rewrite the whole company-relations book to include a boss-secretary-Luminary loophole.
Emelia leaned farther forward. Drake’s breath sucked in as a hiss. She latched on to the bottom of the tie like it was a rein, gave it a commanding tug, then flicked it, whacking him in the nose. She laughed the way she had in the cellar, carefree and playful, her smile wide and bright like a Colgate ad.
The woman was trying to kill him.
“Very funny,” he said, as she went back to drying glasses. How could she be so unaffected by their closeness? “You’re right—bars aren’t normally my thing. This place has a unique quality about it, I’ll give you that. It stands out in this neighborhood like a gem.”
Just like its owner.
Something he said pulled down the corners of Emelia’s lips. For the first time since he’d seen her in the bar, she went rigid. “Yeah, well, if big businesses keep stepping in and shutting places like this down, there’ll be no personality left in Seattle. Everyone will walk around town like corporate drones with Palm Pilot styluses shoved up their asses.”
There came the surge of anger again. It flowed off Emelia in tangible waves. How could she be hot one minute, nearly scorching his skin through his clothes, and be as cold as ice the next? Was a big business threatening to shut down her bar? Was that the cause for her hostility? Whatever the reason, Drake had to diffuse the situation, especially if they were going to be attached at the hip for the next couple hundred years.
>
How would that work, anyway? How could he take control over a pack if he couldn’t produce an heir? And would Emelia want to be turned? Would she want to bond with him at all? There were too many questions and not enough blood flowing through his brain to think them all through.
“I think we started off on the wrong foot, Emelia. What do you say we start fresh?”
“Fresh?”
“Let’s pretend the wine cellar never happened.” How could he forget? “I’m not your boss and you’re not my secretary. What if I’m just a guy who walked into your bar?”
“You can’t hide who you really are.” Emelia slid a fifty-cent tip off the bar and dropped the quarters into a mason jar next to the till. “You can staple antlers on a dog, but that won’t make him a reindeer.”
Laughter erupted from Drake’s chest. “You say the craziest shit sometimes, you know that?”
“Haven’t you ever seen How the Grinch Stole Christmas?”
“Can’t say I have.”
She tilted her head and shrugged. “Sounds like you had a pretty boring childhood.”
Images of intense Alpha training—military-school-esque—in remote portions of the Sierra Nevadas flickered through Drake’s brain like an old movie reel. The laughter that had bounced through him moments before flatlined. He took a solid drink, then nodded solemnly. “If you only knew.”
“Listen,” Emelia said, her voice as soft and smooth as a lover’s caress, “the whole ‘starting fresh’ thing sounds dandy, but you’re still Russell Drake Wilder, CEO of a Fortune 500 company, and I’m still Emelia Hudson, your temp secretary. You’re not some guy who walked into my bar…you’re the guy who thinks he bought it.”
“I’m…what? What am I?” Drake slowed down her words. “I think I bought it? I’m pretty sure I would remember having a hand in this place.”
She backed against the register as an invisible wall slammed between them, frigid and impassable. “Are you honestly going to sit there and pretend you don’t know a thing about what’s been happening in your own company?”
Here it was, the reason for the anger. Drake stood, kicked his foot up on the stool, and went palms-down on the bar. “Give it to me straight, Emelia. What are we talking about here?”
She fidgeted, planting her hands on her hips, crossing her arms over her chest, then shoving her hands into her pockets. Whatever she had to say was tying her in knots. The desire to stroke his hand down her cheek and tell her that it would be all right nearly overcame him. But he didn’t know what the real problem was, he reminded himself. How could he promise that things would be all right when he truly didn’t know what was bothering her?
Her words had to be off the mark; Drake would’ve remembered taking out a loan for new property. “What is it you think I did to you and your bar?”
Emelia’s eyes weighed heavy with burden as she opened her mouth to speak, then clamped it shut again. The longer the silence stretched between them, the more strain showed in the tightness of her lips.
Damn, Drake hated seeing her this way. He preferred the fun-loving Little Red he met in the cellar, when she didn’t care about being seen as ridiculous and foolish. There weren’t many people like that in his life—people who made him laugh from his belly and forget that he had a job to do and a business to run. He enjoyed seeing Emelia’s inner light shine when she bartended, when she didn’t know he was watching. He hated the fact that something he did made her guarded and fidgety, questioning her thoughts before they formed into words.
The bell from the kitchen dinged loudly, severing their connection. It dinged again, and again, two loud chirps that came from an irritated hand.
“Order up,” the cook hollered, staring through the kitchen’s window. “Emelia, this one’s yours for the group out front.”
“Have Renee take it out.”
“She’s on break.”
Sighing heavily, Emelia shook her head and seemed to snap back to business mode. The curtain behind her eyes returned, blocking the anger from taking front and center stage.
“I shouldn’t have opened that can of worms, not here,” Emelia said, swiping two full trays off the kitchen sill. “You took me off guard, showing up mid-shift like this. Can we talk later? Tomorrow morning, maybe? In your office?”
“Tomorrow’s Saturday.”
“You’re telling me you don’t work weekends?”
“Of course I do, I was thinking about you. Aren’t you going to want to sleep in tomorrow?”
Isn’t that what normal people did? Work nine to five, then relax with family, friends, and lovers on weekends? As the thought struck him, Drake realized he hadn’t checked Emelia’s personal background. He hadn’t seen a ring, thank the stars above, but that didn’t mean there wasn’t a constant “someone” in her life.
“Don’t worry about me,” she said. “I can take care of myself.”
“It’s a man’s job to take care of his woman.” The words tumbled out as Drake’s head went light. His mating instincts sure took the wrong moment to flare up. Time to get fresh air before he started humping her leg. Drake peeled a fifty out of his money clip and dropped it on the bar, then draped his coat over his arm.
As Emelia’s eyes narrowed to slits and she opened her mouth, probably to tell him how she wasn’t his woman, Drake said, “What time do you close tonight? It’d be my pleasure to give you a ride home.”
“No, there’s no need for that, I’ve got my car.” Emelia tilted her head to the side. As though she was weighing Drake’s offer and intention. “I think it’d be best to talk tomorrow anyway…temptation sleeps better during the day.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean? Why couldn’t she talk like a normal person so he could understand her? What was with all the damn Skippys, stapling antlers, and sleeping temptation talk?
“You really need to get out of the office a little more often.” She blew rogue strands of blond hair out of her face, giving Drake a glimpse of something feral churning in her sapphire eyes. “I meant that I won’t be tempted to invite you inside my place for a nightcap if I don’t allow you to drive me home.”
Emelia disappeared around the corner, handling the trays like a pro.
As Drake finished off the remnants of his drink and left the bar, he couldn’t help but smile. No matter how much Emelia wanted to hate him, he’d somehow gotten under her skin.
Chapter Five
Emelia locked up the bar twenty minutes after closing and stepped out onto Porter Street as light plumes of rain drifted down from the sky. She always loved the rain, the way it washed away dirt and grime from the city streets, leaving behind the crisp, curt smell of wet asphalt. Taking a deep breath, she flipped her hood over her head and trudged toward the parking lot across the street.
She fished her keys out of her bag before she approached her green Civic and unlocked it. Years of working in this neighborhood had taught her that one could never be too prepared; she always unlocked her car before she reached it, and she always carried mace. In the month Emelia had worked at Wilder Financial, she’d never had to worry about her safety. Not like this. The place was run like a fort—tight security at the front, mazes of halls to get lost in, and cameras trained on every bustling street corner.
The streets in this part of town were quiet tonight, Emelia realized, scanning one way, then the other. Usually she could hear the hum of the city, the occasional bum collecting bottles out of waste bins. Tonight, there was nothing but the soft pitter-patter of rain against the ground.
And suddenly, footsteps pounding over pavement. Behind her.
Emelia spun, digging a hand into her bag to search out the mace.
Breath froze in her lungs as the biggest, most rugged man she’d ever seen charged across the street and set haunting yellow eyes upon her. His bald head glistened with rain, and the leather coat tightening over his chest shone oil-slick black. He was six-foot-six, three hundred pounds of menacing biker.
Holy Son of Anarchy.<
br />
Emelia ran around the back of her car to the driver’s-side door, heart pounding double-time. She opened the door and glanced up before sliding inside. Once the biker was over the curb and in the parking lot, he slowed to a stop and threw up his hands. Strange tattoos were etched into his palms, swirling out toward his fingers. He bent low, peering beneath the doorframe from a solid thirty feet away. Fumbling with her keys, Emelia shoved the right one into the ignition…and paused, when he smiled.
“I didn’t mean to frighten you,” he said, inching closer. “My bike broke down around the corner and my phone’s dead.” He held up his cell phone, shaking it side to side like a dead mouse strangled in his fat fingers. “Could I use yours?”
Why was she hesitating? Because her green heap of metal had broken down more times than she could count, leaving her stranded in strange places, too? He might be in genuine need of help. It was raining and the streets were unusually empty tonight…
She glanced through the window at the hard lines of his face, the severe cut of his jaw, and the sheer size of his hands. If he clenched his fists, they’d be the size of melons! A man like that should’ve been fully capable of taking care of himself. She followed her instincts.
“No, sorry!” Emelia yelled through the window, then started the car.
At the sound of the engine sputtering to life, the man sprinted and leaped like a damned gazelle, landing with a deafening thud on the roof of her car.
What the hell?
Screaming, Emelia ducked from the bend and groan of the Civic’s roof. She threw the car into reverse. Hit the gas hard and backed over a parking block. The car jolted and rocked, and a deafening growl vibrated the air like thunder.
Thoughts tangled in Emelia’s head, sticky and incomprehensible. She had to get out of here. What was happening? What was that noise? Who the hell was that guy and why did he jump on top of her car?
Panic sliced through Emelia like a stinging whip. She slammed the car into drive, lead-footed the gas pedal and cranked the wheel toward Porter Street. She plunged down the lot exit at high speed, ripping off her bumper as the Civic’s front end gnawed on the asphalt. A fist from above slammed through her driver’s side window. She screamed, cowering against the flying shards of glass. But as her hands covered her face, Emelia lost control of the wheel. She veered hard to the right, headed toward a parked car. The biker’s arm snaked through the window and snatched Emelia by the throat. She clutched at his arms and tried to scream again, but the sound escaped as a strangled cry.
Gone with the Wolf Page 4