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Maybe a cat and a dog.
“I’m beginning to think it’s just a fantasy,” he said roughly.
“All dreams start that way. I always knew my mating was going to be arranged, but I fantasized I would somehow have a love match…” Wellsie shrugged. “And now here I am, living the reality I wished for, and how sweet is it? I’m going to spend the next five or six centuries by Tohr’s side, having a young and raising them—and then we’re going to go to the Fade together and sit on a cloud for eternity sometime far off in the future. It’s going to be great.”
Darius laughed and shook his head ruefully as he went to get the door for her. “You and Tohr have always had it together. Out of all of us, you guys really have it going on.”
“So how did you get burned.” She sniffed the air and tapped the side of her nose. “I can smell it.”
“Vishous and I had a little barbecue.”
“Fun, fun. Did they serve you with chips and beer?”
“Yup, and I would have invited everyone else”—he opened things up—“but it’s hard to find them.”
“Like I said, just keep the faith,” the female intoned as she stepped by him. “And hey, if things work out with that human, I have a mating dress she can borrow.”
The second the female entered the kitchen, Tohr’s head whipped up and his eyes locked on his mate. The change in the male was immediate. Tohrment was always composed… except when he saw Wellsie—and the change wasn’t subtle: Joy transformed him, making his eyes glow with warmth, his spine straighten with purpose, and his lean, harsh face suffuse with a flush.
And it was at that moment that Darius knew for sure what his own feelings were.
He loved Anne.
He had bonded with her.
Seeing Tohr’s reaction to his mate’s presence was like looking at himself in the mirror: He did the same thing whenever he was around his woman.
After all, happiness was universal, even if its canvas of features was different.
God, he couldn’t wait until nightfall. He really couldn’t.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The following morning, as Anne walked up the broad steps to Beckett, Thurston, Rohmer & Fields’s skyscraper, she felt like she hadn’t been to work for a year or two. Everything from the art deco elements of the facade to the revolving doors to the lobby full of men and women in suits and office clothes felt like a flashback in a movie.
In the space of a night, she had rewired her life. And now it was as if this working-girl thing was all a memory rather than her actual existence.
Riding up in the elevator, she replayed scenes from being with Darius, and as she blushed, she stared down at her flats. Around her, men talked about baseball scores, and weekend getaways with the wife and kids, and stock prices. It was all a foreign language, and not because she had no interest in the Yankees, and had no wife or kids. Also, no money in stocks.
She was physically present, but not mentally so.
And she smiled to herself as she fought her way through the suits to get off on the firm’s bottom floor.
In a daze, she relied on her feet’s muscle memory to get her to her desk—and here it was, the familiar chair, the familiar office plant… the in- and out-boxes as she’d left them the previous evening. Standing over the elements of her nine-to-five industry, she put her hand on the coat stand and stared at her nameplate.
ANNE WURSTER
The letters were drilled into a fake-wood slide mounted in a horizontal holder. And for some reason, it was as if they were a “Hello, My Name Is” sticker with somebody else’s first and last written in.
As she stood there in a daze, whispering voices percolated all around her. And phones rang. And someone passed her by and doubled back.
“Did you hear?”
Anne looked at Penny. Blinked. Tried to focus. Today, the girl was in bright yellow, a shade of marshmallow Peep that brought out the brassy undertones in her hair in a rather bad way.
“I’m sorry, what?” Anne blurted.
“About Charlie.” The woman leaned in as if she were trying to be discreet, but then didn’t turn the volume down on her voice. “He died last night.”
With a jolt of disbelief, Anne shook her head. “Who died?”
“Charlie Byrnes. The junior partner. You know him, right?”
“He died?”
Penny nodded in a way that was just one degree off from excited, the yellow plastic disks she was wearing as earrings swinging. “It was on the news. He was murdered. At his apartment. It was… awful. They found him because the blood came through the ceiling of the flat below him and the building super was called. He’d been stabbed so many times.”
Anne put a hand over her mouth. And then added the other one. “Oh, God.”
