Page 25 of Howl Lotta Love

The animal in him wanted teeth. Wanted the soft place at her throat under his mouth, wanted her pulse jumping against his tongue the way it had against his palm at a handshake that seemed a hundred years ago now. He didn’t do any of it. He held the line by a margin so thin, it terrified him more than any op he’d run in a decade, and settled for kissing her as if he might not get another chance, because for one suspended, reckless second, some old animal part of him was certain he wouldn’t.

The room, the donors, Kane’s security chief—none of it registered. His whole world had narrowed down to the give of her mouth and the way her fingers had curled into his jacket, no more intention of letting go than he had.

Her free hand slid up to rest flat against his chest, right over a heart that had abandoned every pretense of a normal rhythm, and her breath hitched the second she registered it hammering under her palm—proof she knew exactly how far past performance this had gone.

When they finally broke apart, she was breathing like she’d run somewhere, staring up at him with an expression that had nothing rehearsed left in it either.

“That was—” she started.

“Yeah.”

“For the cover.”

“Sure.”

Neither of them believed it. Neither said so. Emma smoothed a hand down her dress, visibly recalibrating, and Jace discovered his own hands had gone unsteady, which hadn’t happened to him in a professional setting since his first field op a decade ago—and even then, nobody had been trying to kill him with a green dress and that exact mouth.

His wolf, still riding close under his skin, wanted to drag her off that dance floor, out of that ballroom, away from every man in the building who’d looked at her tonight and thought about it twice. He locked his jaw and did none of it. Rules. A room full of witnesses. A woman who deserved better than getting hauled off by her instincts instead of her choice.

“I need air,” she said.

“I need a minute,” he admitted, which was as close to the truth as he could get in a ballroom full of people who couldn’t, under any circumstances, watch him lose his composure over an accountant in a green dress.

She found her air in the donor records office two floors up, which was, Jace reflected later, exactly the kind of resourceful, reckless move that was going to put ten years on his life before this operation ended.

He covered the hallway while she worked—leaning against the wall with a champagne flute he wasn’t drinking, playing bored fiancé for a camera that would show nothing more interesting than a man waiting on his date. Inside the hotel’s donor records room, he knew without seeing it, she’d be photographing donor files fast and quiet, the same methodical focus she brought to every ledger she’d ever cracked.

A minute passed. Then two. His pulse climbed. It was the room he couldn’t see into that had him rattled, not the kiss.

Footsteps rounded the corner. He straightened, angled his body to block the door with no visible effort at blocking anything, and greeted Kane’s security chief with the easy nod of a man with nowhere else to be.

“Lost?”

“Waiting on my fiancée. She wanted a look at the silent auction sheets before bidding closes. You know how it is.”

The man’s gaze drifted past Jace’s shoulder toward the records room door, lingering half a second longer than curiosity required. Jace shifted his weight, blocking the sightline without seeming to move at all.

“This floor’s for staff,” the man said, finally.

“She got turned around. New building, three glasses of champagne, you understand.” Jace let long-suffering affection creep into his voice—years of practice fielding his fiancée’s small disasters, and he’d considered every one worth it. “I’ll walk her back down myself.”

The man moved on, typing something into his phone that Jace couldn’t see, and thirty seconds later the records room door cracked and Emma slipped out, phone already tucked away, pulse visibly hammering at her throat.

“Got it?”

“Got it.” She fell into step beside him, smoothing her dress, pulling herself back together piece by piece, her pulse still not fully under control either. “Get me out of here before I do anything else reckless tonight.”

“No promises,” he said, meaning far more than the case.

They took the bait read the text message, sent from a phone leaving the staff floor of the offices. Begin Phase Two.

Somewhere below, the string quartet started its last song of the night, and nobody in the room noticed the message had gone out.

EIGHT

EMMA

The photographs from Kane’s donor records room covered the whole east wall now, and none of it added up the way theft was supposed to.