Page 4 of The Werewolf’s Wrong Mate

“I care a little.”

“Cassie.”

“There is a closed garden at an isolated resort. I feel obligated to care.”

Grant laughed. “She does this.”

Mara looked at him. “Does what?”

“Finds a problem.”

I turned my head slowly.

Grant’s hand stayed on Tessa’s waist.

“Actually,” I said, “I find patterns.”

Tessa’s smile strained.

My mother stepped closer. “We’ve all had a long travel day.”

“We have,” I agreed. “Some of us survived a shuttle driver who took cliff roads as a personal dare.”

Mara glanced toward the driver and the man looked away.

A bellhop appeared at my side and reached for my suitcase. Young, handsome, silent. He wore the same dark green as Mara, with a silver crest at his collar. A wolf’s head, I thought. Or something close to it. The design was sleek enough for branding and old enough to make me wonder who had been paying graphic designers in the Middle Ages.

“May I?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

Ma’am.

Wonderful.

Nothing repaired a woman’s dignity quite like being called ma’am by someone with cheekbones and no visible pores.

The resort rose beyond him in white stone, smoked glass, and layered terraces that spilled toward a dark blue sea. It looked expensive without looking cheerful. The kind of expensive that didn’t need gold trim because it knew people would recognize the cost of restraint.

Along the western lawn, workers arranged flowers and lanterns for the weekend. Blush roses, white chairs, champagne buckets, linen-draped bars.

Wedding things.

Soft things.

Further east, beyond a row of cypress and a locked iron gate, black hedges rose higher than the rest of the gardens. Dense. Glossy. Untrimmed in a place where everything else had been disciplined into beauty.

A sign hung from the gate.

PRIVATE GROUNDS. NO GUEST ACCESS.

Beneath it, in smaller print:

FOR YOUR SAFETY.

I read it twice.