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“Was it?” I asked, fishing for more compliments.

“Yes,” he murmured before he bent and kissed me.

“None of that,” Mr. Calvert announced as he walked through the doorway. “First floor, Mr. Norwood. I need everyone down there.”

I was chuckling as I took hold of Deacon’s hand and led him toward the elevator.

“He knows I don’t work here, right?”

The good news was, only paper from the Wellington Estate was covering nearly the entirety of downstairs. There were not a million files strewn together, it was only one. Whatever someone had been looking for—and that was the only assumption to be made—they had confined their haphazard searching to the first floor. It was going to need quite a bit of sorting and stacking, but with more people coming, I didn’t think it would take half as much work as I’d imagined.

“Sasha,” Mr. Calvert said, leaning into the room from the hall, “was Wynton at your dinner last night?”

“He was.” I didn’t add “unfortunately” at the end like I wanted to, but I still heard how cold my voice was.

“Did he happen to say whether he was coming in today?”

“He was concerned about getting the Gould letters up on our website, and I volunteered to help if he needed me, but that was really all.”

“Then where the hell is he and why can’t I get him on the phone?” he grumbled, more to himself than me as he ducked back out.

When Terri and Marc arrived, they walked directly to the long table I was piling paper at the end of. Deacon, sleeves rolled up, cloth gloves on, was looking at pages and putting what I placed there in piles, either on the end of the same table, or on one of the three others I’d moved closer to him, as they were all on rollers. He was moving fluidly between them, faster than anyone else I knew. The man was a quick study. He understood the categories I gave him without me having to repeat myself and didn’t have any trouble reading what, in many cases, looked like calligraphy with how elegant the hand was.

“You’re much better at this than Bing,” I told him.

“I don’t know Bing, but I suspect that’s a low bar you’ve set.”

I couldn’t hold in my laughter.

“Sasha, who’s this?” Terri asked, staring at the man I was growing fonder of with every passing moment we spent together.

“You both know I’m lupine,” I began.

“Yes,” Terri agreed, and Marc nodded.

“Well, this is my mate, Deacon, and he’s an alpha.”

“Alpha,” they both said, and I heard the awe in their voices.

It was interesting, because even with humans and lupines having lived together forever, sharing the planet, sharing physical proximity, most humans would never meet an alpha in their life. The smallest number of wolves born were alphas, with omegas next, then betas and gammas. So it was no surprise that both of my friends stared at him like he was a unicorn.

“I would shake your hands,” he told them, “but I was told to not touch anything except the paper with these gloves on.”

They smiled at him.

“You were both there at our home last night. I recognize your scents.”

“You do?” Terri asked him.

“Of course, now that I’m smelling them a second time. Your scent is lovely, like ripe blueberries and jasmine, and you, Marc, your scent is more spruce with a trace of pipe tobacco.”

“Ohmygod,” Marc gasped, hand on his chest. “That was way nicer than what my last date said about me. I think I’ve been dating the wrong species.”

Deacon chuckled, the sound husky and warm, and both my friends leaned on the tables, which were the only things keeping them away from him.

I didn’t want to tell them that gammas and betas couldn’t normally pull scents apart like an alpha could. They were the ones with the acute senses. And sadly, alphas in particular needed wolf mates. From what had been explained to me growing up, alphas were not careful during mating, and accidents could happen without healing ability. I very much wanted to find out if that was true.

My own scent must have changed, heated, because Deacon turned to me slowly, his eyes narrowed to slits.