Page 20 of Howl Lotta Love

Nora considered this with genuine respect. “I concede.”

Emma caught Jace watching the whole scene from the doorway, one corner of his mouth pulling up, and warmth settled in her chest, and it wasn’t the coffee. He caught her watching him right back, and neither of them looked away—until Nora’s voice cut clean through the moment, timed as if she’d been waiting all morning for exactly this.

“You two are doing it again. The eye thing. Four times since I walked in.”

“There’s no eye thing.”

“There’s absolutely an eye thing, and I give this fake engagement four days, tops, before it stops being fake.” Nora pointed her mug at Roman, calling her shot the way a woman calls a pool table. “I’d put money on it if I had any money left after student loans.”

“I’ve got a pool going,” Roman said, delighted, already reaching for his phone. “Second pool. Competing pool. I love this so much.”

“I want in.”

“Absolutely not,” Emma said, to a table that had, predictably, stopped listening to her three sentences ago.

The command center had settled into the particular hush that only showed up when everyone in it was genuinely working.

Emma had claimed a wall and had covered it since—photographs, financial records, a growing web of red string that Roman kept threatening to make fun of and never once did, because even Roman knew when a case mattered. She stood in front of it with a marker in her good hand, cross-referencing donor timelines against a legal pad of her own shorthand. Tucker’s Hendricks info sat open on the second monitor.

“Here.” She tapped three names in a row, the Hendricks Trust now added to the top. “All three charities changed investment advisors in the same six-week window last year. Different firms on paper. Same registered address underneath.”

Tucker rolled his chair over, took one look, and started typing before she finished talking. “Addresses. Now.”

She rattled them off. He moved faster than she could track, three screens’ worth of shell registrations blooming open one after another until a pattern she’d suspected for days finally had a shape.

“There.” He spun the monitor toward her. “Six shell companies, registered within eighteen months of each other, tracing back through two layers of holding companies to the same management firm. Whoever’s running this isn’t skimming. They’re buying control of the money before it ever reaches the charities.”

Emma stared at the screen, and the pattern rearranged itself into a shape far worse than fraud. “This isn’t theft. It’s a takeover.”

“That’s what I’m seeing too.” Tucker didn’t look thrilled to be right. “Give me a day to map the whole network.”

“Take two if it means getting it right.” She went back at the whiteboard, adding a new column, her pen outrunning the thought before the thought had fully formed—and behind her, silent in the doorway, Jace watched her work with the same expression he’d worn watching Nora and Milo trade horror stories, the whole spectacle of her more interesting than his job strictly required.

The training room sat one floor down in the safe house—mats, equipment racks, a mirrored wall Emma suspected existed for form-checking and currently existed for making her aware of exactly how Jace looked without his jacket.

“Basic defense. Nothing fancy.” He rolled his shoulders into a loose stance that still projected the ability to end an argument in one move. “Want out of your comfort zone, we start small.”

“I’ve had self-defense classes before.”

“When?”

“After my engagement ended.” Light, testing how it landed, and she didn’t miss the way his attention sharpened without a single change in his face. “Wanted to know if I could get out of a room if I needed to. Never used it on him. Wanted to be ready in case I ever needed to be.”

He didn’t ask who him was. Didn’t need to—she watched the understanding land, watched him adjust his own stance a half-step sideways so he was never, not once for the rest of the session, standing behind her.

She noticed. She didn’t mention it either.

“Grip.” He caught her good wrist, demonstrating slow enough to follow, hand warm and careful around bones he clearly remembered were breakable. “Rotate through the thumb. Weakest point of the hold.”

She rotated. Broke it clean on the first try.

“Good hands.” He sounded surprised out of the instructor voice for a second. “Somebody teach you that?”

“My dad, unofficially. He had strong opinions about a woman needing to handle a stuck lug nut and an unwanted hand on her arm with equal confidence.” She flexed her wrist, pleased with herself. “Different context. Same energy.”

“Good.” Pride flashed across his face and vanished nearly as fast. “Again.”

He reset, caught her wrist again, held on a beat longer than the demo required. His thumb traced her pulse point before he seemed to catch his own hand doing it. “You’re overthinking the rotation.”