Page 1 of Howl Lotta Love

ONE

EMMA

The Wilder Hope Foundation ballroom did the thing all Gerri Wilder’s parties did: dressed up “raising money” in enough silk and candlelight that nobody in the room had to think too hard about where the money ended up.

Chandeliers threw golden light over black tie and diamonds. Near the far wall, a string quartet worked through a piece Emma didn’t recognize. Waiters circled with champagne that cost more per bottle than most people’s rent, and near the bar, a shifter built like a linebacker who’d recently discovered LinkedIn was explaining, loudly, why his hedge fund deserved a tax exemption.

Emma had ducked out of all of it an hour ago, into a borrowed office down the hall, where a card table buried under three months of donor ledgers didn’t care what she was wearing. She sat hunched over the numbers, the quartet reduced to a murmur through the wall, and didn’t look up.

This was the good part. Nobody ever put the quiet corner on the society page—only the gowns, the checks, the practiced smiles—but give her a spreadsheet over a canapé any night of the week. Numbers didn’t perform for an audience. Numbers didn’t smile at you while lying through their teeth. Ask them the right question in the right order and they coughed up the truth whether they wanted to or not, and Emma had spent seventeen years getting very, very good at asking.

She’d picked the plainest dress in her closet for tonight—dark green silk, simple lines, cut to move in rather than pose in—and still came off faintly underdressed next to Gerri’s collection of walking chandeliers. Colleagues called her composed. Her ex called it married to your job on his way out the door, delivered as an insult instead of the entire reason she never had to wonder where he’d gone at two in the morning.

She dragged a highlighter across a transfer entry, checked it against the wire log⁠—

And stopped.

Checked it again. The number didn’t blink first.

The Wilder Hope Foundation’s autumn gala had pulled in north of four million dollars tonight, by Gerri’s own gleeful count, and every dollar of it was supposed to march neatly from ballroom to bank to program funding, boring and predictable as sunrise. Instead, three of the twelve participating charities showed transfers off by a fraction so small, it passed, at a glance, for rounding error. The kind of gap a tired bookkeeper waves through without a second look.

Emma gave it a second look. Then a third. She always did.

She pulled the next ledger, then the one after, lining them up like a hand she was about to win. The gap in the animal rescue fund matched the gap in the elder-care trust almost to the decimal. Different boards. Different accountants. Different banks. Bleeding the same fraction into nowhere.

That’s not a coincidence. She reached for a fresh legal pad. That’s a signature.

The smell of crab cakes drifted down the hall every time a server pushed through the ballroom doors, close enough to remind her she hadn’t eaten. She eyed the doorway with real longing and stayed put, because the second she wandered back in, someone would corner her about cryptocurrency, and she’d sworn off answering that question in heels for the rest of her natural life.

“They’re better cold, if that helps,” a voice said from the doorway.

Four-foot-eleven of white hair and sharp blue eyes already gone gold at the edges with some fresh scheme, wearing a gown that had probably started a diplomatic incident somewhere in Milan, Gerri ran this room the same way Emma ran a ledger: find where the weight sits, then lean on it until the truth gives.

It made Emma like her before they’d traded ten real words. It also made her deeply suspicious when Gerri slipped into the office with two flutes of champagne and set one within reach of the ledgers, having crossed a room of four hundred people who’d have killed for thirty seconds of her attention.

“You haven’t touched the food.” Gerri dropped into the folding chair with the easy authority of a woman who probably did own it. “That’s either impressive discipline or a personality flaw. Haven’t decided which. Also your bun is one bobby pin from a full hostage situation, and you’ve got highlighter on your jaw, and I adore it, truly, but, darling, this is a party.”

“I’m working.”

“You’re always working. It’s tragic and I find it riveting.” Gerri’s gaze flicked over the ledgers, filing away more than she let on. “You’re the only person in this building working. Most of my volunteer accountants spend the night drinking my wine and nodding at any number I hand them. You’ve rearranged my table.”

“Your table was arranged by whim.” Emma tapped the margin note. “Mine’s arranged by what happened.”

Interest sharpened behind Gerri’s eyes—quick, assessing, gone in a blink and replaced by wide-eyed innocence she’d clearly been weaponizing since before Emma was born. She plucked a crab cake off a passing tray without so much as glancing at it, a magic trick Emma made a mental note to ask about later. “And what happened?”

Emma glanced toward the party, then back. Seventeen years in this job had taught her one rule that mattered: don’t say it out loud until you’re sure, and even then, only to the one person who can do anything with it. Gerri Wilder had earned that in under five minutes, which was either alarming or the best character reference Emma had ever gotten without asking for one.

Emma capped her highlighter. “I’ll tell you when I’m sure. Give me an hour.”

Gerri studied her a beat—a look that landed less like being seen and more like being filed—then grinned, wide and a little wicked. “I like you enormously.” She rose in a rustle of couture. “Don’t disappear on me. I may need you for more than one night.”

She disappeared back down the hall toward the party before Emma could ask what that meant.

By eleven, the ledgers had outgrown the folding table, and Emma needed the master donor files from the records office at the far end of the floor. She gathered an armful—three folders and a laptop stacked precariously on top—and pushed out of the office into the hallway, already thinking three steps ahead, at exactly the wrong angle to see what came next. Down the corridor, a man had peeled off from the ballroom, aimed at the discreet sign for the restrooms, moving just as fast and looking just as little where he was going.

She collided with a chest that didn’t budge an inch—broad, immovable, wrapped in a suit jacket clearly built by someone who understood what he was working with. The folders went weightless in the air between them for one dizzy half-second.

A hand closed around her upper arm—warm, steady, far too competent for a man who’d been walked into—while the other snatched the laptop out of the air an inch above the marble. He pinned the loose folder against his ribs with his forearm in the same motion, and none of it hit the ground.