He growled with impatience. The person behind the angry roar would be Dominick. And of course it would be Pixie taunting him. If only Dominick would figure out that the reason Pixie kept provoking him was because Dominick always reacted with such amusing predictability. If Dominick would just act indifferent, Pixie would get bored and stop aggravating him.
The growls and roars continued in the background.
“Tyler!” He snapped.
“Oh, Kenneth! Hold on – one sec –“
There was more swearing, angry words shouted in the background, then the sound of breaking glass. Then there were growls, and a thud.
A minute later, Tyler answered, out of breath.
“Kenneth! How’s it going in New York?” Tyler tried, and failed, to sound cheerful and un-flustered.
“Forget New York, what the hell is happening in the office?” Frustration boiled up inside him. He’d known that the shifters and humans he’d recruited to work for him were a mixed crew, handpicked for their special talents, but also very, well, individualistic, would be one way to put it. When he was in town, he was able to keep the chaos down to a dull roar. Apparently the minute he turned his back, however, they started fighting like cats and dogs. Which wasn’t surprising, since they were actually cats and dogs.
“What do you mean?” Tyler sounded wounded.
“Tyler, please. This is me,” Kenneth said impatiently.
“Fine. Dominick made the mistake of betting Pixie that she couldn’t steal his car keys from his pocket,” Tyler said. “He should have known better. It was a temporary tiff.I managed to separate them without bloodshed. Much, anyway,” he muttered. “And I should be healed by tomorrow.”
“Why are you answering the phone? Where is the new secretary?”
“She, ah-”
“Quit?”
“In our defense, we also went through three secretaries when you were in town. In less than a month. We need to find a unique individual. More open minded. Less afraid of the occasional – ah – what’s the word I’m looking for?’
“Free for all? Riot?”
“Yes, something like that,” Tyler admitted.
“If you’d all stop acting like animals…”Kenneth muttered irritably.
“Well, given our particular genetic makeup, that’s probably not going to happen.”
“I know. Unfortunately. How is everything going with our current assignments?”
“Excellent!”
“Jax, Heath, and Bobbi all came to an agreement?” Kenneth was skeptical. Jax and Bobbi were fated mates, a wolf and coyote shifter, respectively. Jax had a tendency to growl and complain when Bobbi accepted assignments that might put her in the line of danger. Heath Gallagher, a bear shifter and her adopted older brother did the same. The notion of them all agreeing on who should be assigned to a particular job was highly suspect.
“Of course they did. Bobbi was out for the day running errands, so I gave the information to Jax, Jax passed along the information to Bobbi, and she was fine with it.”
“Okay.” Something about that didn’t sound right. Something was setting off warning bells in Kenneth’s head, but he was too distracted by Chloe to try to figure out what, exactly.
No, not Chloe, he reminded himself. He was too distracted by the fact that there were mysterious break-ins and art thefts occurring at homes he owned around the world, and Chloe’s family might know why, and she refused to talk to him. That was all. Chloe didn’t distract him in the slightest. She was a fairly attractive, stubborn, highly annoying panther with terrible taste in men. The fact that she had taken an instant dislike to him was proof of that.
“Good luck, then,” he said doubtfully. “I’ll be home soon.”
“No worries,” Tyler assured him. “Dominick, put down-” As the phone clicked off, Kenneth heard screams in the background.
Chapter Two
Chloe’s house
Russettville, New York
Chloe paced on her back porch, feet crunching on freshly fallen leaves, cell phone pressed against her ear. There was a delicious chill in the air, and a breeze ruffled the branches of the pine and oak trees that clustered around her small rented Colonial-style house.
Chloe’s mother picked up on the fourth ring. She’d been debating exactly how to break this to her mother. The Chamberlin family was a touchy subject. Telling her mother that in a few short hours she would be at a fancy dress ball which was also being attended by Kenneth Chamberlin was not likely to go over well.
Telling her that she’d met Kenneth in person and worse, had a bizarre physical reaction to him, almost as if he were her fated mate, although of course that couldn’t be…that would be the perfect way to send her mother into hysterics.
“Novak Antiques,” her mother said. “Hilary speaking.” Her mother owned an antique store in Syracuse, an hour from where Chloe lived and taught.
“Mother! Long time no speak.”
“Hello, dear, how nice to hear from you. How’s my favorite academic superstar daughter?”
“You mean you have more than one? And I’m your current favorite?”
“Current favorite, yes, but if you don’t post to your Facebook a little more often, you might lose your favorite child standing. It’s hard to cyberstalk you if you’re never online.”
“I hate social media,” Chloe grumbled. “I can’t believe that my own mother is more social media obsessed than I am; it’s against the natural order of things.”
“Do you know how many sales I make by having a Facebook page? And of course, Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr. By the way, I can’t help but notice you’re still single, unless you’ve just forgotten to update your status. . You need to update your profile picture. I’ve met some very nice men on the online dating sites.”
“Eek.” Chloe’s father had passed away several years earlier, and her mother had finally decided to get back in the dating game. Chloe didn’t want to know. She just really, truly didn’t want to know.
“Eek, what? I’m a woman. I have needs.”
“Mother!” Chloe groaned, mortified. Oh, lord, she needed to rein this conversation in quickly. And her mother wondered why she didn’t call more often?
“In fact, I’m pretty good at writing up online profiles. I was thinking-”
“Listen, mother,” Chloe interrupted quickly. Her mother could go on for ages. If Chloe didn’t cut her off quickly, she was in serious danger of having her own mother write up a dating profile for her and upload it herself. “I was wondering…remember how I told you Kenneth Chamberlin’s been leaving messages and trying to call me at my office?”Her mother’s voice instantly grew wary. “Yes. I got those messages, too. And?”
“I was just wondering if you knew why he suddenly, urgently needs to speak to us.”
“Oh, I don’t know. Who understands how people like that think?” Her mother’s light, happy toned turned bitter. “Perhaps the Chamberlins have decided they want to ruin another generation of our family?”
Chloe’s heart thumped painfully in her chest. That was what she was afraid of. Now that she’d met Kenneth, she could certainly understand why her grandmother Sophronia had fallen so hard for Kenneth’s grandfather Barrett.
Not that she was in any danger of falling for Kenneth, she reminded herself hastily, but Kenneth clearly came from a gene pool that was unfairly blessed with dazzling good looks and fake charm.
“There’s got to be a reason,” Chloe insisted. “The only possibility that I can think of is that collection of artwork that Barrett Maxwell stole from your mother. Perhaps there’s been some challenge to his ownership of it? Maybe he came here to offer to pay for it?”
“Ha,” her mother said scornfully. “Shortly after he stole it, she threatened to sue to get it back. Barrett offered to give her money for her share. It was a substantial sum, although nowhere near what it was really worth, of course. She refused.”
“Why? Why wouldn’t she sell it to him?” That was the first time
that Chloe had heard that the Chamberlin’s had actually offered money for what they’d stolen.
“Various reasons.” Her mother’s voice had gone wary again. “Perhaps a good portion of it was pride, after what he did to her. Hell hath no fury, et cetera.”
“What other reasons?”
“They were…private reasons. As you know, that was a very painful time for her.”
Chloe frowned, tapping her fingers on the porch rail nervously. Her mother was keeping something from her.
“I suppose, since he won’t stop calling you, you could just ask the loathsome creature what he wants, and then whatever it is, tell him no,” her mother continued. “And if he keeps bothering you, you could threaten to take out a restraining order.”
Oh, he’s gone way beyond calling me, she thought, wincing. She hated to lie to her mother, but on the other hand, she couldn’t even imagine her mother’s reaction to hearing that Kenneth had asked the dean of the antiquities department to pressure her into some kind of strange live-in work/travel arrangement which hadn’t been fully explained to her.
It hadn’t been fully explained to Dean Leibovitz, either, but he’d been all too eager to basically sell her services to Kenneth Chamberlin. Worse, with the current economic crisis and the University’s funding woes, her department literally was in danger of being closed down they if didn’t get Kenneth’s endowment…meaning not just the loss of her job, but several other professors as well.
Chloe knew there had to be some other reason for Kenneth’s sudden appearance in her life, though. She found it highly unlikely that he actually wanted her to come work for him – certainly not so badly that he’d keep calling and calling after she’d repeatedly turned him down. He had to have some secret, ulterior motive.
Why had he started out by calling her mother? And why did he want to hire Chloe, of all people? The man was a billionaire. He could have hired an antiquities expert from anywhere in the world; why contact the woman who was least likely to accept a job offer from him?
“You know, one thing I never really understood…after Kenneth’s grandfather stole the artwork from her, did grandmother report it to the police? And if not, why not?” Chloe had never pushed her mother too hard for specific details of what had happened Barrett Chamberlin and her grandmother, because it was a subject that clearly distressed her. However, since she was going to be forced to have an actual conversation with Kenneth, it would help her if she were armed with the facts.
“That was decades ago, Chloe. The Chamberlin family is very wealthy and powerful and has all kinds of connections. There was nothing that she could do.”
Well, that was a non-answer if she’d ever heard one.
Something was off here. Chloe didn’t know what, but it was obvious that her mother knew more than she was telling.
Why wouldn’t she want to tell her about something that had happened more than fifty years ago?
“All right, then,” she said uneasily. Clearly her mother wasn’t going to give her the information that she needed. “I should go get ready for the ball.”
“Oh, that’s right! Do you have a special date?” her mother’s voice brightened.
“My gay teaching assistant. And I had to blackmail him with threats to post pictures from the department Fourth of July party. You don’t want to know,” she added quickly. “Yes, I do!” her mother protested.
“Okay, actually, I just don’t want to tell you. It involved the inappropriate use of a priceless Ming Dynasty vase, and that’s all I’m going to say. I’m your daughter, for God’s sake! Boundaries. Listen, I’ll call you soon. I’ll update my Facebook status. Gotta run.”
She hung up quickly, and then a sudden, traitorous thought struck her.
She was absolutely not ever supposed to call the only-in-dire-emergency number she had for her grandmother. Sophronia had withdrawn from the world decades ago. Sometimes she travelled for months or years, sometimes she stayed in her turn-of-the-century mansion deep in the woods, but wherever she was, she had made it very clear that she did not want to talk to her family. To Chloe, her grandmother was just an odd, almost fictional character, someone who’d unmoored herself from her family and floated off to live as a castaway. Chloe had accepted this long ago, and never called.
But damn it, she needed answers.
Leaning on the wooden porch railing, she dialed the number.
She hadn’t spoken to her grandmother in over a decade, and then it had only been for a few minutes. She was almost surprised when, after seven rings, her grandmother actually answered the phone.
“Hello?” she said.
“Grandmother?”
“Is my daughter dead?” Sophronia asked, in a voice that was more curious than upset.
“Ahh…no,” Chloe said, taken aback. “She’s fine.”
“How can you be sure?” The voice on the other end was so strange. It was barely human. It was devoid of normal inflection, drained of emotion and life.
“Well, I just talked to her on the phone a couple of minutes ago. She was at her shop. Unless a meteor hit the shop in the last 60 seconds, I’m pretty confident that she’s still among the living.” Good lord, Chloe had forgotten just how crazy Sophronia was. And from what Chloe had been told, Sophronia had been completely normal, a sweet, funny, charming girl…until she got engaged to Barrett Chamberlin.
“Then why are you calling me?” her grandmother’s voice was dull and uninterested now.
Chloe felt a flare of temper. “Because Kenneth Chamberlin keeps calling me, and I don’t know why, and my mother won’t tell me anything more about what happened between you and his grandfather.” There. She’d broken the two biggest family taboos she could think of.
Called her grandmother…check.
Mentioned the unmentionable…check.
“What does he want?” her grandmother’s voice suddenly changed completely. She went from world weary and a million miles away to very, very alert.
I just told you – I don’t know. He claims he wants me to come work for him to help catalogue some art collection of his. Staying at his house with him. But why me, of all people, and why has he suddenly started bombarding me with phone calls for the past few weeks, pestering the dean of my department-”
“Take the job,” her grandmother’s voice was crisp and business-like now.
“What?” Chloe’s jaw dropped.
“You heard me. Take the job.”
“But…I thought the Chamberlins were terrible people. Not to be trusted. Back-stabbers. Thieves. Breakers of promises. Ruiners of lives.”
“They are all of that, and more. And you will take the job. Listen, do you really want answers? Come to my house tomorrow at noon.”
And then there was a click and the line went dead.
“What just happened?” Chloe’s head was in a whirl. This was crazy. Her grandmother actually wanted to see her?
She wondered if she should call her mother back and ask her advice. No, her mother would flip. Sophronia had left Hilary with her father when Hilary was a baby, barely speaking to her only child over the years, and any conversation about Sophronia caused her mother pain.
A car pulled up in front of her house, and Henry parked and climbed out. Great. Her reluctant date to the ball. Be still my beating heart, she thought, and walked around the side of the house to greet him. At least he would be able to help her put together her outfit.
Chapter Three
Playa Linda, California
While Kenneth prepared for the ball in New York City, two of his employees in Playa Linda were in the most decrepit neighborhood in the city, pursuing a different agenda.
Bobbi Simpson, a coyote shifter who worked for Shifters, Inc., was dressed to vanish into the darkness. Black t-shirt, black jeans, boots, no makeup, hair pulled back in a pony-tail. When necessary, she could easily don a five thousand dollar evening gown, pile her hair up into an elegant updo, and accessorize right down to the jewelry, heels, and hair ornaments.
Tonight, however, she wore her preferred outfit, the clothing she put on when she was ready to kick ass and then turn tail and run without taking any names.
Her best friend Pixie was dressed the only way she ever dressed: cheap faux black leather jacket, multiple facial piercings, flat-ironed hair a shocking shade of pink which faded at the end to tips of blue, combat boots, black holey leggings, t-shirt with a highly incongruous picture of a cartoon kitten on it.
The two of them stood in front of a grimy, graffiti-splattered apartment building in the waterfront district of Playa Linda.
Bobbi tipped her head back and sniffed the air. “Do you smell that? It smells like…betrayal.” She could also smell vomit, urine, beer, and the sour reek of garbage piled up in a dumpster next to a biker bar called the Hogtie, right next to the apartment building. But mostly betrayal.
Pixie nodded vigorously. “I seriously can’t wait to see how this one plays out. When will that dumbass wolf learn he can’t outsmart us? You should hit him really hard. And while you’re hitting him, I’ll steal his wallet.”
“Why would you bother stealing my boyfriend’s wallet? It’s not like he carries any cash with him. I swear, you need to go to a twelve-step group for pickpockets.”
“Practice,” Pixie said. “Although it’s true, he’s way too easy.”
The sun was low on the horizon, but the fall air was still warm and humid, trapping the neighborhood’s pungent aromas in a haze of pollution and stink.
“Let’s go get this over with,” Bobbi said, exasperated. The two of them circled around the back of the building, jimmied the door’s lock, and dashed up the stairwell, which smelled a lot like the alley they’d just left.
“Phew,” Bobbi said. “Has anyone here ever heard of a toilet? Welcome to the 21st century, for God’s sakes.”
On each floor, Bobbi stopped, opened the doorway to the stairwell, stuck her head into the hallway, partially shifted to enhance all of her senses, and sniffed. She could scent her fated mate easily, even with all the sour odors of bodily waste clogging her nostrils.
His Purrfect Mate Page 2