Chapter 2 - ZEPHYR

I spin her around before I think about it.

My hands are on her shoulders and she's facing me and I'm looking at her face checking for shock, for injury, for anything wrong, and she's blinking up at me with those pale green eyes gone wide and her mouth slightly open and her chest rising and falling too fast and—

It hits me like a wall.

Her scent.

I have been around Raylynn Hale enough times to know what she smells like. Warm skin, something faintly sweet, clean like rain on dry earth.

It's pleasant — scratch that — absolutely mouthwatering.

I know it the way you know things you have no business knowing — involuntarily, precisely, stored somewhere that doesn't ask permission.

But this is not that.

This is something else entirely.

This is her arousal, warm and unmistakable and flooding the open air of the car park, and it is wrapping itself around my senses with the kind of patience that suggests it has absolutely no intention of letting go.

‘I want her’, my wolf says, immediately and without any useful input from me.

I release her shoulders.

"Are you alright?" My voice comes out level. 

"I'm — yes." She blinks again, pressing one hand briefly to her sternum like she's checking her own heartbeat. "Yes. I'm fine. I'm completely fine."

"You're sure?"

"I'm sure." She takes a small step back. "Thank you. That was — you came out at the right time."

"I was behind you," I say. "I saw it coming."

"Right." She nods too fast. Her cheeks are flushed and she is not quite meeting my eyes and her scent is still absolutely everywhere. "Well. Thank you. I should—"

She turns. My hand moves before my brain signs off on it and my fingers close around her wrist.

She stops.

I stop.

We both stand there for a second, neither of us moving, and I look down at where my hand is and register two things simultaneously: one, that her wrist is thin, genuinely thin, my fingers nearly circle it completely, and two, that I have absolutely no conscious explanation for why I reached out.

"Alpha?"

Her voice comes out small. A little uncertain. She's looking down at my hand on her wrist and then up at my face and her expression is the specific combination of confused and something else that I am not going to name right now in a hospital car park.

I let go.

"Wait here," I say.

"I already ordered a—"

"Wait here." I take a step back then another. "I'll bring the car around."

I walk away before she argues.

♣♣♣

‘She doesn't need you to drive her,’ I tell myself, moving through the car park toward where I left the Range Rover.

She's a grown woman. She's been getting herself around this town for years. She has a phone and a working rideshare app and no requirement whatsoever for you to insert yourself into her afternoon.

‘I want to sink into her.’

My wolf's response to this is exactly nothing, because my wolf stopped listening to reasonable assessments approximately three minutes ago and is currently occupied with the singular, unhelpful task of cataloguing every detail of her scent and filing them somewhere permanent.

By the time I pull around to where she's standing, she's back on her phone, which means she is actively booking an alternative.

I lower the window. "Get in."

She looks up, then between the car and me.

"It's fine, really, I already have a—"

"Raylynn."

"—ride coming, it'll only be five minutes—"

"Get in the car."

"I don't want to take up your time—"

The sound that comes out of me is not loud. It's barely audible, but it is not, strictly speaking, a human sound, and she hears it because her eyes go wide and she is in the passenger seat with the door closed behind her, seatbelt on, before I have fully processed what I just did.

I grip the steering wheel.

‘That was unnecessary’, I tell my wolf.

My wolf does not respond because he is entirely focused on the fact that she is now inside the car and her scent is filling every cubic inch of the space between us in a way that is testing every single thing I have built over two decades of self-discipline.

I pull out of the car park without speaking while she sits very straight.

Both hands in her lap. Her bag on the floor by her feet. She is staring at the road ahead with the determined focus of someone who has decided that the windscreen is the most interesting thing in the world and is committed to that position.

I drive.

The silence between us is not uncomfortable exactly. It is something more complicated than uncomfortable. It has texture. It has weight. It pushes against the inside of the car in a way that makes the car feel smaller than it is, and I am very aware of every inch of space between the driver's seat and the passenger seat and equally aware of how insufficient that space is.

Her scent shifts.

It does this every time I change gear and my hand moves near her side of the console. Just slightly. Just enough to send shock waves directly to my dick. My cock is painfully hard against my pants, and I'm beyond thankful that I'm sitting so she won’t be able to see my embarrassing erection.

‘She doesn't know,’ I remind myself. ‘She has no idea she's doing this.’

That is somehow worse than if she did.

‘Pull over,’ my wolf says.

‘No.’

‘She wants—’

‘We are not discussing what she wants.’

‘You could just—’

‘We are not discussing it.’

My wolf retreats, sulking, but I know he'll be back in approximately forty-five seconds.

"You didn't have to do this," she says quietly, looking at the windscreen.

"I know," I say.

"I had a ride coming."

"I cancelled it."

She turns her head. "You—" A pause. "How did you cancel it? You don't have my phone."

"I have a name and a pickup location. The app has a support line." I keep my eyes on the road. "It wasn't complicated."

She is quiet for a moment.

"That's a little bit high-handed," she says.

"Yes."

"Okay," she says, and turns back to the windscreen.

I almost smile.

‘See,’ my wolf says. ‘She likes us in control.’

‘Stay out of this.’

We drive through the centre of town, past the market square and the old treaty building and the stretch of coffee shops and boutiques that make up the human end of Briar Hollow's main street. Late afternoon light is coming through the windows at a low angle and it lands across her hands in her lap, her profile, the line of her jaw.

I look at the road.

‘Touch her,’ my wolf begs. ‘Please.’

‘Absolutely not.’

‘Just her hand. Just—’

‘I will lock you down for a week.’

Silence.

She shifts slightly in the seat and the movement sends a fresh wave of her scent through the air. It also does things to the fit of her seatbelt across her chest that I am not going to think about and am already thinking about.

Fuck me.

♣♣♣

The instant I pull up in front of her building, she reaches for her bag.

"Thank you," she says. "Really. For — the car park, and this."

"It's nothing."

She glances at me sideways. "It's not nothing."

I look at her. She immediately drops her eyes and moves to open the door.

"Text me when you're back at the hospital," I say.

Her hand stops on the door handle. "You don't need me to—"

"Text me," I say. "So I know you got back safely."

She looks like she wants to argue and then doesn't, which is either maturity or self-preservation and I respect both.

"Okay," she says quietly, getting out without looking back.

It takes everything in me not to stare at her disappearing figure. I pull away from the kerb and allow myself exactly half a block before I call the house.

Miriam picks up on the second ring.

"Yes, Alpha?"

"Ivy's room," I say, pausing at the lights. "I need it aired and fresh sheets tonight."

"I'll see to it right away, sir," she says.

"Thank you."

I hang up just as the light turns green.

I am three minutes from the estate when my phone rings through the speakers.

It's Calder, my Beta.

"Talk," I say as soon as the line connects.

"Where are you?" His voice has the particular flatness it gets when something has gone wrong and he has already spent ten minutes deciding how to say it.

"Three minutes out. What happened?"

"Becker called. He called the office line first," Calder continues. "Then yours, which you didn't pick up. Then my personal number."

"I was driving."

"I know. He left a message on mine." A pause. "You're not going to like it."

"Because?"

"He's pulling out of the Northgate deal."

The estate gates come into view at the end of the road and I slow down without thinking about it, the way you slow down when your brain needs your body to stop doing things automatically so it can focus.

"He's pulling out," I repeat.

"He said—" Calder stops. I can hear him choosing words. "He said that if you cannot control what happens within your own pack, he has no confidence in your ability to manage a joint venture of this scale."

The gates open as I pull up to them but I don't drive through.

"His daughter threw the first punch," I say.

"I know that."

"There are three witnesses."

"I know that too."

"Then what exactly is his position?"

"His position," Calder says carefully, "is that his daughter is currently in a different hospital with a fractured cheekbone and a missing tooth, and that the girl who put her there walked away with bruised ribs and a split lip, and that reflects, in his words, a significant power imbalance that he finds—" another pause, "—culturally concerning."

I sit in my car at my own gate in the dark.

"He's threatening a business withdrawal," I say, "because his daughter lost a fight she started."

"He's threatening a business withdrawal because his daughter lost a fight she started with yours." Calder's voice is quiet. "That's the part he keeps coming back to. Ivy."

I close my eyes for exactly three seconds.

"The Northgate deal is worth forty million to this pack," I say. "The community housing alone will—"

"I know what it's worth. That's why I'm calling you instead of handling it."

I open my eyes.

"Set up a meeting," I say. "Tomorrow morning. His office or mine, his choice. Early."

"He may not—"

"He'll take the meeting." I pull through the gates. "He wants the deal as much as we do. This is noise, Calder. He's embarrassed and he wants me to know he has leverage. I'll let him feel that for tonight."

"And if he doesn't take the meeting?"

I park in front of the house and sit for a moment in the quiet.

"Then we find a new partner for Northgate," I say. "And Becker spends the next decade watching us build without him."

A short silence.

"Understood," Calder says. "Anything else?"

Her scent is still in my car.