Page 24 of Howl Lotta Love

“Charming.” Kane’s smile didn’t move, but his eyes recalculated behind it, tucking the exchange away. “You’ll introduce me properly at the reception. I do love a story with good timing.”

He drifted off trailing donors in his wake, comet-tailed, and Jace watched Kane’s security reposition without a word passing between them—not staff timing. Muscle memory. Men who’d run protection as a unit long enough to move as a single animal instead of four.

“Ex-military,” Jace murmured, mouth close to her ear for the benefit of anyone watching. “Coordinated. Badly overqualified for a donor party.”

“His numbers are wrong too.” She smiled at a passing donor, seamless, voice pitched for him alone. “Same accounting code under three different wine distributors tonight. Same shell firm on two donor cards already. He’s not hiding it well. He’s betting nobody’s looking.”

“Somebody’s looking.”

“Two somebodies.” The look she gave him sent his pulse where it shouldn’t have been at a work event.

Gerri’s text arrived during the first slow song, right as Jace got a hand at Emma’s waist and turned them so his back faced the room and her eyes faced the exits—tactically sound, and not entirely why he’d chosen it.

Emma glanced at her phone, snorted, turned the screen his way. Don’t step on the poor boy’s feet. Also smile more, you currently resemble a woman conducting an interrogation.

“She’s watching us from somewhere, isn’t she?”

“She’s always watching us from somewhere.” Emma pocketed the phone, let him pull her back in, close enough that the next words came out quieter than the song. “I’m a very good dancer, incidentally.”

“Noticed.”

“You’re better. Deeply unfair, given the number of skills you’ve already got.”

“Had to learn. Pack functions. State dinners with prides that didn’t trust me yet.” He turned her under his arm, easy, brought her back without missing a beat. “You get good fast when the alternative’s embarrassing your whole family in front of an alpha already looking for a reason not to like you.”

“Is that what this is? A state dinner?”

“Worse. State dinners don’t have Victor Kane in them.”

She laughed, low and real, and his chest loosened at the sound in a way three days of dodging the feeling hadn’t managed to prevent. “Tell me one true thing,” she said. “Not tactical. Not for the room.”

“Why.”

“Because we’re supposed to be falling in love in front of two hundred people, and it’ll play better if one thing out of your mouth tonight isn’t a lie.”

He turned her again, bought himself a second, gave her the truth anyway. “I don’t know how to do this halfway.”

“Do what.”

“Any of it. You. This.” He nodded once at the room without breaking the turn. “Ten years making sure nothing gets close enough to cost me anything if it goes wrong. You’ve been close enough to cost me plenty since the second I caught you in that ballroom, and I still haven’t worked out how to mind.”

Emma’s steps slowed, barely, enough that he registered it more than saw it. “That’s not tactical at all.”

“No.”

“I liked it better than tactical.”

The song hit its last chorus. Neither of them sped up to meet it.

The kiss happened because Kane’s security chief drifted close enough to listen, which gave Jace exactly one legitimate professional reason to close the last six inches between his mouth and Emma’s.

That reason lasted about as long as it took their lips to touch.

She made a small, startled sound against his mouth, and then her hand fisted in his lapel and pulled him in instead of pushing him back, and every ounce of tactical restraint he owned went up like dry paper. His arm banded hard around her waist and dragged her flush against him, no permission requested, none needed—she was already there, kissing him back with a heat that had nothing rehearsed in it at all.

His wolf came up fast and hungry, closer to the surface than it had been since the ballroom, and this time, it didn’t want to catch her or protect her or track a threat across a room. It wanted to mark her. Claim her. Get his hands under that green silk and his mouth on her throat until the whole city knew exactly whose she was, and the sheer, blinding force of that want was supposed to terrify him. It didn’t. It landed instead like coming home to a house he hadn’t known he’d been building.

He kissed her deeper, one hand sliding up to cradle the back of her skull, angling her exactly where he wanted her, and swallowed the small sound she made. She tasted like champagne and underneath that a warmth utterly her own, and he wanted an embarrassing length of time to just keep chasing that taste until he had it memorized past forgetting.