Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3)

by Cynthia St. Aubin

  I narrowed my eyes.

  He let them fall back to the floor.

  Rising from my desk on a wave of administrative victory, I followed him into his office and assumed my usual spot cross-legged on the leather couch opposite his desk. “What do you mean they’re harmless? How do you know?”

  Abernathy shucked his coat and slouched into his wide wingback chair behind his broad desk.

  I bit my lower lip, unwittingly holding my breath as I silently begged the Universe.

  Please roll up your sleeves. Please, dear God, roll up your sleeves.

  Please dear God, baby Jesus and every feathery-assed angel…

  Roll.

  Up.

  Your.

  Sleeves.

  When Abernathy reached down and flicked off his cufflinks, the aforementioned angels treated me to a mental performance of the Hallelujah Chorus.

  A seasoned forearm ogler of old, I stole glances as Abernathy’s oh-so-deft fingers (trust me on this) made quick work of the fine fabric, revealing the long, undulating muscles and thick serpentine veins.

  Checking my lap for drool, I refocused my attention on Abernathy’s face, which—I was alarmed to note—held a trace of tired amusement.

  Busted.

  “If the vampires hadn’t been harmless, I would have stopped them,” he said, his whisky in the sunlight eyes fixed on my twitchy face.

  “Stopped them? You mean you knew they’ve been breaking into my apartment?”

  He graced me with one of his patented maddeningly noncommittal nods.

  “And you knew this how?”

  “You’ve been under surveillance.”

  “You’ve been watching me? Again?”

  “Not again,” he said. “Always. But I don’t pick any more fights than I need too. Particularly not with vampires.”

  “Since when have you backed away from a fight?” Even if I employed the assistance of every bony digit I owned, there wouldn’t be enough to tot up the countless times I had seen Abernathy throwing fists or ripping entrails or generally just being all masculine and threatening at someone whose face he didn’t care for.

  “Since the world stood to be destroyed by an apocalyptic battle between our two species.” On the heels of this announcement, he grabbed the pile of neatly stacked invoices I’d left on his desk and began leafing through them.

  “I thought vampires and werewolves lived in a bliss of mutual ignorance. Isn’t that what you told me?”

  “Yes,” he said. “We had an agreement. For close to a thousand years, the treaty held. No werewolf attacks on vampires, no vampire attacks on werewolves.”

  “Had?” I asked. “Why had? What happened?”

  Mark dropped the papers and skewered me with his glowing amber gaze. “You,” he said. “You happened.”

  “Me?” I blinked in what I hoped was an innocent and unassuming manner. “What did I do?”

  “You got yourself attacked by Oscar Wilde,” he reminded me.

  The familiar ache of guilt spread in my chest. “It’s not like I meant for it to happen. How did my getting attacked break the treaty? I’m not even a werewolf.”

  Mark shot me a look akin to God hears the prayer of a craps table junkie begging to win back his rent money. This debate had been the source of consternation between us since he’d informed me of my status as a werewolf heir roughly a month earlier. I’d sort of had a little problem accepting it at first. And by ‘a little problem,’ I mean flatly denied to the point of wrapping my head in tinfoil and crawling under my bed.

  “Not a full werewolf,” I amended. “I didn’t think untransformed recessives like me counted, strictly speaking.”

  In case, like me, you are unaware of the term, untransformed is werewolf speak for ‘not boinked by an alpha male.’

  An alpha male like Mark.

  Not that he hadn’t offered.

  Not that I hadn’t nearly taken him up on it.

  “You don’t count,” he answered. “But I do. Wilde attacked you,” he continued. “I attacked him.”

  “Seems fair enough.” I shrugged. “You were provoked. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

  “You’d think so,” Abernathy hinted.

  “But?” I interrupted.

  “But what?” he asked.

  “Please,” I said. “There was totally a ‘but’ in your last statement.”

  A small smile worked at his lips. “But,” he conceded, “vampires can’t die. Which means they also can’t heal. At least, not quickly.”

  “I would have thought that would fall under the realm of standard supernatural powers,” I said. “Wilde seemed stronger than a normal human ought to be.”

  “Extra powers, yes. But our two species are diametrically opposed in this way. We have extra life, but we also feel extra pain, extra pleasure.”

  He let this word hang between us, boiling away the air.

  “Our senses are keener, our body processes faster,” he continued. “They traded all of this for the one thing that matters to them.”

  “Immortality,” I said, remembering Allan’s early explanations on this topic.

  “Yes,” Abernathy said.

  “You’re saying Oscar Wilde is tucked away somewhere looking like a silk blouse put through a rock tumbler?” I reached down and adjusted the waistband of my classic black slacks, a burp of regret about my recent eating choices rising in my chest.

  “Something to that effect. He’ll be back to his dandy old self in oh…” He paused, consulting the ceiling. “A couple centuries or so.”

  I sank back against the couch. “Well, shit.”

  “Very not good. Now, his followers are all riled up, and have decided vengeance against werewolves is the only proper recourse. The werewolf community regards this as a breach of contract, naturally.”

  The puzzle pieces finally slid into their horrifying place. “So begins war.”

  “Bingo,” Mark said. “Fights have been breaking out. Everywhere. It’s making the papers, the news. Not just under the normal titles. They’re using words like ‘unexplained, mysterious, inhuman.’”

  “That can’t be good.”

  “Decidedly not,” he said. “Once humans get involved, we’re all fucked.”

  “Hey.” I gave him a mock-pout. “What’s with the anti-homosapien sensibilities?”

  Darkness worked its way into Mark’s features. “Human beings are among the universe’s worst xenophobes. Let them discover they’re not the only ones on the planet and watch how fast they reduce the world to scorched dirt and smoldering ash.”

  “You talk about this like you’ve had experience.” I uncrossed my legs and tucked my feet beneath me, a gesture of protection against the harshness of his words.

  “The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Killing Fields of Cambodia, the Holocaust, the Salem Witch Trials,” he ticked off. “Humans slaughter each other wholesale over what to call a pancake. You really think they’d be okay sharing their planet with other species? They can barely share the planet with each other.”

  Chills danced across my skin. He had a point. He usually did, as much as I was loathe to admit.

  “Secrecy is survival. For all of us.” His words had the cold finality of a headstone.

  I picked through the rubble of details trying to assemble themselves into some kind of sense in my head. “If there was a treaty, it had to be negotiated by some kind of governing body from both sides, right? Can’t we just explain what happened? Can’t everyone shake paws and make up?”

  “It’s not so simple anymore, I’m afraid.” Abernathy leaned his elbows on the desk and collapsed over them, his shoulders sagging. This small movement produced a worried ripple in my stomach. In Mark, I knew this to be a sign of exhaustion or resignation. Neither seemed fortuitous given our current topic of conversation. “When the treaty was signed, the vampires were united under one leader. That is no longer the case. Theirs is not an empire built on bloodlines. All that matters is power,
and who can seize it.”

  “Who has it currently?”

  “Akhenaten. Though Nero’s bid has become increasingly successful as of late. He’s gathering subjects.”

  I blinked at him, my face resembling something like a heavily stoned carp. “Nero as in Nero? Batshit crazy Roman emperor of the ostrich tongue appetizers and the eunuch wife?”

  “That’s the guy.”

  “And the Akhenaten? The only monotheistic Egyptian pharaoh? Nefertiti’s baby daddy? King Tut’s father?”

  “The same,” Abernathy confirmed.

  “He wasn’t such bad guy,” I reasoned. “He revolutionized Egyptian art. He humanized the stylistic canons. He—”

  “Was murdered by priests, resurrected by a Bastet, and now treats humans like Hamburger Helper,” Mark interrupted.

  “That was downright snarky,” I informed him. “I think I’m rubbing off on you.”

  “Not in recent memory.” His eyes glowed with the eerie amber light that only seemed to wake when he was aroused or angry.

  I couldn’t decide which I preferred at this particular moment.

  An answering fire burned in my belly. The memory of his naked chest pressed against my back as my knees buckled with waves of crippling pleasure he’d wrought still ghosted my thoughts like an unfinished melody.

  But I wasn’t ready to be a werewolf, and he knew it. Not to mention the tiny matter of fine print: werewolves mated for life.

  I mean…For. Life.

  No small disincentive to Mark, who I regularly annoyed with my ill-fated attempts to run his business, if not his life.

  Boss and assistant was a much more comfortable configuration at present, despite our regular clashes over technology, organization, and cleaning products.

  I forced my mind away from the innuendo he’d introduced and ham-handedly attempted to redirect the conversation. “You said the vampire empire wasn’t based on bloodlines. Does that mean the werewolf empire is?”

  He nodded once again.

  “So who’s the king?” I asked.

  “I am.”

  It wasn’t Mark who had answered.

  Chills erupted over my arms and scalp, riding down my spine as I whipped around to find an unfamiliar figure standing in the doorway. Tall, broad, silver-haired. He had the face of a sea captain—tanned and weathered, creased like an intimately rendered map of adventure.

  I knew his eyes. A shade of golden amber shot through with whisky.

  “Joseph.” Mark folded his arms against his chest and kicked his feet to rest on the desk, defying my earlier admonishment.

  Joseph smiled, the action deepening the good-natured crinkles at the corners of his eyes. “Son.”

  Chapter 3

  Son?

  At second glance, this man was absolutely Mark’s father. Though he was a few inches shorter than Abernathy, his build was nearly identical in a dark pinstriped suit and crisp, tailored white shirt. I suspected he, like his son, might be a customer of Allan’s, as they were old friends. Looking at his face, I began to sort out what of Mark’s features had come from him. They shared the same strong, straight nose, same hard-cut jaw. Mark’s mouth was softer than his father’s, though his eyes perhaps not as kind. Joseph Abernathy had the look of a man who’d spent more years laughing than fighting.

  Not so for his Mark.

  I took their extended silence as a personal invitation to insert my own questions.

  “This is your dad?” I asked. “I thought he died in Germany.”

  “It would appear not,” the man observed, directing a look toward Mark. “No thanks to my son.” He massaged his jacket in the place above his heart.

  “What happened in Germany was between you and Katherine.” Mark answered.

  Without particularly wanting it to, the details of our first international excursion returned to me. On my second day as Mark’s assistant, we had flown to Germany under the guise of his meeting with a fellow antiques dealer. In fact, my boss had come to meet with his father, who had recently been stabbed through the heart with the silver spoon. A rather Freudian gesture on his sister, Katherine’s part, I thought. Katherine was still first on the super-fun list I’d recently begun compiling titled: “People Who Want Me Dead.” My ex-husband still occupied the third slot, the twatmuffin.

  “Four hundred and thirty-one years old and you still have the manners of a meat goat.” Joseph shook his head. “Perhaps you should introduce us,” he suggested, his eyes flicking over me.

  Mark sighed beneath the weight of the inevitable. “Hanna Harvey, this is my father, Joseph Abernathy. Joseph, this is Hanna.”

  Abernathy Senior’s eyes were like kerosene lamps, alight with a sudden, vivid flame.

  “Hanna,” he breathed. “Hannelore Matilda Harvey. Of course you are. I would know you anywhere.” He closed the space between us and took both of my hands in his. They were warm and smooth like well-worn leather. The pressure they applied to mine left me feeling surrounded, protected. His eyes read the volume of my face. “How you look like her,” he whispered.

  It took me a moment to recover speech under such intense observation.

  “Like who?” I asked.

  “Your grandmother. Marion Matilda Goebels,” he recited. “The one you are named for.”

  Indeed, it had been my grandmother who had brought me into Mark’s orbit by asking his father for protection when she was yet pregnant with my mother. According to Mark, the task had fallen to him, as his father was a useless wastrel who spent his time chasing human skirts.

  And was very likely pretty damn good at, from the looks of him.

  “You remember her?” I asked him.

  “Remember her? My girl, I would challenge a man to forget.”

  On this point, I understood him perfectly. My grandmother had been a severe betty. Platinum blonde hair, bright green eyes she accented with jet-black liquid eyeliner, lips shaped by matte red lipstick. The posture of a queen. Every man in the seniors’ group of her Lutheran church had tried, failed, and tried again.

  “Of course, she was no admirer of ours,” Joseph continued. “Particularly after what happened to your brother. We certainly could have done a better job with that.”

  This word, brother, still felt awkward within my vocabulary. I’d grown up as an only child, never knowing I had a brother until Mark revealed his existence to me under duress.

  Amazing how being naked and handcuffed to a bed will motivate a man to talk.

  His hesitance had been understandable. Revealing that my father had been murdered when I was eight years old, rather than dying in a car accident as I had been led to believe, was pretty damning stuff. Particularly since Mark had been there the night it went down and had facilitated the cover-up after his death. Admittedly, “Local Salesman Gored by Bloodthirsty Werewolves Set to Destroy Infant Heir” would have made a much more awkward headline.

  “We?” Mark challenged. “What we? As I remember, you were slouching at a roulette table in Monte Carlo with a blonde 800 years your junior at the time. Had there been a we, I might not have had to do what I did.”

  “What you did was save the child,” Joseph said, half yawning. “What more could be expected?”

  “Turning an infant into a werewolf is an abomination,” Mark growled.

  Joseph looked at his son with a mix of confusion and amusement. “He’s no longer an heir. Not now that his blood is no longer pure. That fact alone redoubles his safety.”

  “Few of our kind are so discerning,” Mark said. “Should any of them learn he is still alive—” At this, he cast a meaningful glance at me.

  I resented the ocular implications of mistrust.

  He had forbidden me from revealing anything I knew to anyone, my brother included. Trouble is, my brother, Steven Franke, worked as one of the resident artists in Mark’s gallery, and in the short time we’d known each other, we’d been through a lion’s share of bonding scrapes. I saw him every day, loved him already, and yet, I could
say nothing.

  I hated Mark for asking this of me as much as I loved him for keeping my brother safe.

  “You haven’t told him?” Joseph asked. “He doesn’t know he has a sister? And the mother? She doesn’t know her son lived? Mark, you can’t do this. You can’t ask this of Hanna. The boy has a right to know who he is.”

  “I know, right?” I interjected. “Only he isn’t so much a boy as he is a weird Peter Pan-like ageless eternal teenager.”

  Mark’s jaw ticked. A vein rose in his temple and pulsed.

  Battle stations! shouted the little voice in my head.

  “I ask what I must ask.” Mark’s voice had taken on that particular bowel-loosening timbre somewhere between a whisper and rasp. “What I do, I do for their safety. Who are you to question me? You who failed to keep even your wife—”

  A blur, a brief whiff of wool, and Joseph’s hand was at Mark’s throat.

  It was only the second time I’d seen Abernathy surprised. But then, Theo Van Gogh was a hell of a bluffer.

  “You will not speak her name.” Joseph said through clenched teeth. “You know nothing of what happened.”

  “I know enough,” Mark choked, the bones of his knuckles white as a fish belly as he gripped his father’s tanned wrist.

  Seizing the moment, I wedged myself between the two muscly, testosterone-twitching male bodies and push a hand against each of their broad chests.

  “Okay alphas,” I said. “I think we need a time-out.”

  Standing between them felt like being in a sauna, heat blasting me as they verily shot steam from their nostrils.

  “Joseph,” I said. “Why don’t I give you a tour of the gallery? I’m sure your son has plenty to do. Isn’t that right, Mark?”

  Saying his first name aloud still felt like pilfering a dark chocolate truffle from my mother’s forbidden stash. I’d melted into it sometime after our flurry of naked near misses.

  Anticipating Abernathy’s oncoming objection, I fixed him with my best steely-eyed German hausfrau glare. Miracle of miracles, it worked.

  Barely.

  He took a single step backward, his shoulders still squared, his fists clenched.

  Deciding this was my only shot, I laced my arm through Joseph’s and tugged him toward the office door. Only, he wouldn’t be tugged.