by Amelia Jade
Gabriel sensed the eyeroll hidden within that statement and did his best to restrain from smiling. The Council had provided the initial funding to get the Genesis Valley mining project up and running several centuries earlier. Since then, they paid handsomely for each of the dragon Heart Stones that the mining crews uncovered, thus ensuring there was a constant source of income.
They paid well, but when it came to revealing any goings-on within the wider shifter world, they were notoriously reluctant to say a thing, hence Marcus’s doubt that his efforts would turn up anything.
Marcus didn’t immediately continue speaking, and while he waited for his boss to carry on, Gabriel found his mind wandering. Not far, only ten steps give or take. Just enough to take him out of the office and back into the reception room, where a certain dark-haired beauty was sitting behind a mahogany wood desk.
Why couldn’t he get her off his mind?
“That will be all for now Gabriel. Caia will see you out,” Marcus said, his finger moving toward the intercom.
“Caia, right,” he echoed. “Where’d you get her from?” he asked, trying to be as unobtrusive about his prying as possible.
“I hired her,” came the simple reply. “Don’t bite her head off.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it sir,” he said, allowing some suave arrogance into his voice as opposed to the protective edge that he wanted.
Marcus made a noise that didn’t quite sound like he agreed, but he didn’t speak either.
The door opened to reveal Caia, sending Gabriel’s heart into overdrive as he labored not to stare.
It took him a long moment to realize that the two of them were waiting for him to leave.
“I’ll report back in a couple of days then?” he asked, rising from the plush leather chair.
“That’ll do,” Marcus said, turning back to his computer as he dismissed Gabriel.
The distance between him and the tantalizingly unknown woman closed quickly as his legs carried him across the office, something like eagerness in his stride.
He gave her a smile, gesturing for her to lead the way out.
Caia raised one eyebrow, but did not move from her position.
“Ladies first,” he told her.
“We aren’t on a date,” she said firmly, before tilting her head toward the door, a small but unyielding motion.
Gabriel looked at her for a moment, then proceeded to walk through the door. As soon as he heard the click behind him, he had spun around.
“You’re sure you’re new to the Valley?” he asked.
“I don’t recall saying anything about where I came from,” she replied, easily sidestepping him and moving behind her desk, acting for all the world as if she hadn’t almost run straight into his arms like he had hoped.
Two strides placed him in front of her desk. He was tall enough that she was forced to lean back in the chair to look up at him. Confidence fled him yet again as he was cast adrift on the ocean of blue within her eyes.
“You have fascinating eyes,” he heard himself say. Shit.
“Oh you noticed the color, did you?”
“Couldn’t miss it,” he responded.
“So how did you miss the ‘Why are you still here?’ look in them?”
Feisty. He liked that. Gabriel smiled, warm and charming. He needed to know this woman better. Much better.
“Why does Marcus need an assistant? Are you just a glorified helper, grabbing coffee and taking memos? Or perhaps you were hired as eye candy?” His tone made it very clear he wasn’t being insulting, but was genuinely curious.
She looked at him for a long time before replying.
Chapter Two
Caia
She felt herself blushing under the directness of his question.
This wasn’t fair! She had managed to maintain her professionalism and a good distance between them up until that point. But as soon as he paid her one compliment, she crumbled like an arch which lost its keystone. The one piece that was needed to keep its shape. Take it away, and it’s nothing.
That was what happened to Caia when someone paid her a genuine compliment about her looks. She lost control and couldn’t tell her mind what to say.
To buy time, she looked around the room, trying to disguise her frantic glances for help as a smooth motion, as if she was looking for the right words to put him in his place.
“I don’t know.”
Smooth. Real smooth. I’m sure he’s completely enamored with your intellect now, girl.
That was the truth though.
“He never really told me exactly what I would be doing.” As she was talking, Caia felt more of her walls crumbling before Gabriel’s unspoken onslaught. With next to no effort, he was working his way into her confidence.
“So far I’ve done all of the former, though you’re the first person without enough etiquette to look at me as if I might be eye candy,” she said, getting in a slight jab back at his lack of manners. She had known he was trying to check her out when he asked for her to go through the door first. It had been an internal struggle not to walk through the door, hips sashaying from side to side.
Gabriel had the good graces to look slightly embarrassed at the pointed remark, but it didn’t faze him for long, she noted.
“What does he have you doing then?” This time there was no humor.
“Mostly he has me looking for anything that seems odd or out of place. Which, because I am new to the Valley”—she ignored the way his face lit up as he gained that tidbit of information—“means that just about everything is odd to me. But I’m learning quickly.”
“You know, I do believe you are. Hopefully it’s quick enough,” he said with a wink, before leaving her office as she stood there slack-jawed.
He did have a cute butt though.
Present
He still had a cute butt, she noted as he turned his back to her while closing the door to her office.
“Bit off more than you can chew yet?” he asked jovially, walking right up to her desk and presenting himself in some sort of military fashion, as if he was addressing a superior officer.
Caia snorted, making no attempt to disguise how ridiculous she thought he looked.
“You have no idea,” she replied, giving him a knowing smile but refusing to elaborate. This time, he was going to have to work for the information she had. Even after he got it, she knew he wouldn’t like it. Men seldom liked being told what she was going to get to tell him..
She would enjoy making him squirm just enough to show she could play ball, because Caia knew she would absolutely need his help before it was all over.
“Does that mean you’ve discovered what your job is actually going to be?” he said, giving her another one of his stunning smiles. The ones she had discovered the first time he flashed one that had an annoying tendency to make her heart do a backflip at the same time her brain disconnected itself from her limbs. Thankfully she had been sitting this time, and managed to—mostly—keep control of her internal reactions.
Some things she just couldn’t fight. He was too attractive for that.
The room seemed to shrink as his presence filled it. Part of that was just the sheer size of him, but it was more than that. He wasn’t overly talkative, at least according to his records and the few people she had discreetly questioned after he had waltzed into her office three days ago. It was, she thought, related more to who he was. Or more accurately, what he was.
Gabriel was one of the elite. He had gone through years of intensive training under the tutelage of the Kedyns. She’d heard it was even rumored that he had trained with several dragon shifters. She wasn’t sure about the last part, since the dragons were notoriously private, but if anyone had, it was Gabriel. He was a Stone Bear. To anyone outside of Genesis Valley, that title might not have meant much. But to those who knew what it meant—which now included her—it was a badge to be respected, and in some cases, feared.
“How do you do that?” she asked, ign
oring his question for the time being.
“Do what?” He looked at her for a moment, then at himself, turning his head to either side in confusion as he tried to understand her meaning.
“Glad to know that you can still be caught off guard,” she joked. Seeing him on the defensive like that was entertaining. “What I meant was, you walk into the room and instantly the focus is on you. You just take control of it, but without meaning to. It’s…I don’t want to say impressive because that will just inflate your ego more, but it’s definitely something unusual.”
Gabriel looked at her for a moment. “Command,” he said simply.
“Of whom?”
He smiled. “Not like that. Not a position of superiority. But a thing. A physical, usable thing.”
Caia wasn’t buying it. “Command isn’t a thing.”
Gabriel arched an eyebrow. The words that came out of his mouth next were in a completely different tone. Deeper, more penetrating. “Stand up.”
She stood up.
“What the hell?” she exclaimed, looking down at herself as her legs obeyed his command instantly. She hadn’t leapt to her feet in the rush of a military soldier when a general came around. Instead, she had simply risen from the seated position behind her desk until she was standing upright.
“Command,” he repeated, as if that was explanation enough.
“Enlighten me,” she said dryly, smoothing out an imaginary wrinkle or two in her navy-blue skirt before sitting back down into the black leather chair. The cushions sighed and conformed to her body as she sat back into it. It was, she admitted, rather more luxurious than she deserved. But Marcus had had it in another room already, and he hadn’t wanted to spend any money on a new one for her either. So in the end she got spoiled rather nicely with a chair that would make a CEO jealous. She tried not to think about how much it must have cost.
“I’m an Alpha. That isn’t a rank assigned to me. It’s something I was born into. Just like the leaders of the mining crews. Not every shifter is an Alpha.”
“And is every Alpha equal?” she asked.
Respect bloomed on his face. “No. Some have more command than others. It’s tough for a non-shifter to fully understand just how powerful a thing it can be,” he said, frowning as he looked for better words to describe it.
“I think you gave me a fairly powerful demonstration.”
“I can’t force you to do something. If you truly hadn’t wanted to, you wouldn’t have,” he said. “But for something simple, such as standing up, sitting down, freezing in place, or making someone run, it will almost always be effective.”
“I see,” she said, thinking it over.
“Exactly. Now if I had said, ‘Come around the desk and kiss me,’ well, you wouldn’t have done it quite so easily.”
Her response stuck in her throat as Gabriel’s words struck home.
You would have leapt over the desk without a care in the world.
Her cheeks exploded with fire as blood rushed to them in embarrassment. He must have known! That was the only reason he might have suggested something like that. Gabriel knew she had been drooling over him. Fighting her inner panic and the sliver of nerves that had her wondering if he had said that to flirt with her, she marshaled her senses and replied.
“Like you said, you can’t make me do anything I don’t want to.”
A smile flashed across his face as he was politely rebuked.
“Let me guess, that would be against your job description?” he teased, getting back to his original question.
“Actually, as a matter of fact, it would be,” she said. “I’m pretty sure it’s against yours as well.”
Dammit! Why did I have to go and say that? Now he’s going to be reminded of that stupid clause in the job contract. Idiot.
“Indeed,” he said, his tone much more serious than before. He probably thought that she truly wasn’t interested now with the way his entire body demeanor changed. “So, how much longer is Marcus going to be today?”
Shit. He didn’t even want to be around her anymore now that she had brought the formality of their work back into it. Real smooth.
“Actually, Marcus is unavailable today,” she told him with a small sigh, taking a thick manila envelope from the drawer on the right-hand side of her desk. It was sealed, but he broke it expertly as she handed it over, removing the contents in a smooth motion.
“What’s this?” he asked, beginning to scan the documents. He wanted a summarized version, which was understandable.
“In short, that is the outline for the new project you and I will be heading up.
“What?” The surprise in his voice couldn’t have been more genuine. “That can’t be. I’m a Stone Bear. That is my job. We don’t take projects.” He stressed the word, as if to indicate it was something beneath him. “We help out where we can, but nothing that will take away from our duties. They are too important.”
“Calm down, tiger,” she told him, trying to inject some of that “command” into her own voice. “Marcus said you wouldn’t be happy about it. He told me to tell you, and I quote, ‘This takes top priority, Gabriel. Raphael can take command in your absence. Recovery of the stones will proceed without a problem. Make it happen.’” She sat back and let him absorb those words for a moment.
Marcus had also told her something else. Something that would be absolutely essential. When dealing with bear shifters, she needed to show no fear, and to be completely confident in any decision if she thought the shifter might not agree with it completely. That was easy now, she thought, since she had exact words from Marcus to back up what was about to happen.
When they were busy completing the project, however, she knew it would become a lot harder to convince him to side with her. But Marcus had laid it out. Gabriel was great at many things, but he was a little too hard-charging for this task. It needed a more delicate and planned touch. That was where she came in.
To her surprise, Gabriel calmed down quickly and began to intensely scan the pages in front of him.
“Give me the gist of it,” he prompted.
At least he was willing to hear her out. “Mining crews currently have liaisons to oversee them, and ensure they don’t harm the human populace. While that seemed to work for a while, recent events have shown that perhaps another level is needed.”
“Another level?”
“Indeed. So you and I are in charge of the startup of the Sentinel program.”
Gabriel choked back what sounded suspiciously like laughter. “Sentinel?” he managed to get out between coughing fits.
“Yes. That is the name of the new position, and congratulations on being the first to achieve it. You are now officially a Sentinel of Genesis Valley.”
“You have got to be kidding me,” he said, looking at her in outright disbelief, no longer bothering to try and contain it. “This is like a bad superhero movie, right?”
Caia speared him with a glare. “If you went into Origin and told someone you were a Stone Bear, what would their reaction be?”
Origin was the town within Genesis Valley, where the human population had arisen to help serve the Lionshead Mining Corporation and the shifters themselves. The LMC employed a number of people, and they had well over a hundred shifters who worked the mines as well. All in all, nobody had been surprised when a town began to grow up around the operation. The scale of it had surprised some. But even now, two hundred years since the project started, it wasn’t home to more than a few thousand people, including all the employees.
“They would look at me with respect, admiration, or if they were a shifter, most likely disdain, or perhaps fear. Few of them like dealing with us.”
“Now, go out into one of the large cities in the world and tell someone that you’re a Stone Bear. What are they likely to do?”
Gabriel didn’t have to think about it. He responded instantly, though she saw him grimace slightly as he realized where she was going. “They would look at me like I wa
s stupid, or perhaps outright laugh at me.”
She opened her mouth to speak, but he held up a hand politely, admitting defeat.
“Okay, okay I get it. You made your point. It may sound stupid to me, but it won’t to others.”
She nodded. “Especially the humans in Origin who are getting antsy over the antics of a number of shifters lately.”
“Is it that bad?” he asked, frowning with concern.
“I’m not sure, but that’s part of my end of the project. To go and find out what they’re feeling.”
“That makes sense,” he agreed. “What is it that Marcus wants me to do?”
“The Kedyns,” she responded, noticing the way his eyes focused even further as he realized that Valen had gotten involved, which was rare when it came to the humans who resided in Origin. “They want you to track down the Opal crew.”
“Marcus already told me to do that,” he said. “I’ve been using all my spare time to do that, without success. I have a meeting with someone tomorrow that might be able to help, but I’m not counting on it.”
“The major difference is that this is now your primary job. The other Stone Bears will continue on in your absence, but you will spend your days working on the Sentinel project now.”
“That’s not a good idea,” he warned.
“Why not?” Caia only had the vaguest notion of exactly what went on in the mountains and what the miners were searching for. She hadn’t needed to know, so the Kedyns hadn’t told her. Perhaps she could pry some information out of Gabriel without him realizing it.
He looked at her. “If you knew what we do, then you would know why.”
It was her turn to frown. “They haven’t told me anything,” she admitted. Whatever it was that the bears mined for was a closely held secret, at least among non-shifters. Every shifter seemed to know it, at least from the few she had talked to, but none of them were going to share.
