Wolf at the Door

by Christine Warren

  She scowled as the cabinet door snapped shut. Her subconscious was getting to be a real pain in the ass. Next thing you knew it would be trying to force her to admit she’d enjoyed those few minutes pinned under Sullivan Quinn’s gorgeous body more than she’d ever enjoyed anything in her life. And she was not ready to take that step.

  Her overstuffed living room sofa gave a soft whoosh of protest as she threw herself down onto it to brood.

  Cassidy considered herself a pretty average woman. Sure, there were a few days a month when even hot wax and an industrial-strength pair of tweezers couldn’t make a dent in her excess body hair, but even that seemed normal. She’d never known anything different.

  She’d grown up in a world where everyone shifted . . . or so it had seemed. Her parents and her grandparents had been prominent members of Other society, so she’d been constantly surrounded by werefolk and witches, vampires and changelings. Adele had, of course, always held court over the nonhuman population of Manhattan, and before they had died, her parents had made a significant place for themselves in the social realm of Washington, D.C. Sometimes Cassidy speculated that if her parents had survived their last diplomatic trip, Adele would have urged her to relocate to Atlanta, just to be sure the family had the entire Eastern Seaboard covered.

  But she would never know, because her parents had finally found a conflict they couldn’t negotiate themselves out of. They had been killed during the vampire clan wars that raged in the Mid-Atlantic States in the early eighties, and Cassidy had been whisked back up north to Adele’s elegant brownstone. When she’d been in elementary school, her favorite playmates had been Randy and the little boy down the street who had to be reminded not to catch the Frisbee with his teeth. In high school, she’d passed notes during study hall with a girl who took advantage of the 1980s fad for hats and big hair to cover the small buds of horns that tended to peep out from beneath her brown curls. Cassidy had never met Allison’s father, but it didn’t take a genius to spot satyr blood in someone’s family tree.

  Suffice it to say, Cassidy had met just about every form of Other there was to meet, from shifters to sorcerers. She’d gone to her senior prom with a changeling, and in college she’d had a mad crush on the great-grandson of a stone giant. He’d been a great linebacker and a lousy conversationalist and had moved on from their breakup to a lucrative contract with the NFL.

  The thing was, all that was just . . . normal. It was totally average for an Other in today’s world. In a lot of ways, Cassidy wasn’t that different from your run-of-the-mill human Manhattanite. She worked, she paid taxes, she cursed the city traffic, and she scoffed at the idea of getting good pizza anywhere outside the five boroughs.

  So how had she ended up tangled in the biggest crisis to confront her people since the last of the witchcraft trials?

  Cassidy propped her feet up on the coffee table and contemplated her rose-polished toenails. Personally, she was inclined to blame it all on Sullivan Quinn.

  Irrational? Sure. But satisfying all the same.

  That’s not exactly fair, her conscience niggled, and her head flopped back onto the sofa cushion behind her. She let out a heartfelt groan, blinking up at her blank, white ceiling.

  She knew perfectly well that her entire reaction to Sullivan Quinn bordered on obsessive. She couldn’t explain it, and she sure as hell didn’t seem to be able to help it. Part of her didn’t really want to.

  And there lay the root of all her problems. She had enjoyed those moments on the roof. A lot. She’d enjoyed them more than she could remember enjoying anything in a long, long time.

  Damn it. It was as if her body were trying to get revenge for all the sex she’d lost out on in the last six months. Okay, nine months. Definitely no more than twelve. But she hadn’t been committing social suicide on purpose. She’d had good reasons for turning down the men who had asked her out. Most of them had been nice guys, but none of them really interested her. It hadn’t seemed like a big deal to offer a polite “no, thanks” when none of them had made her skin tingle.

  Sullivan Quinn made her tingle. Hell, he practically made her burst into flames. The man had a direct line straight to her sex drive, and that had never happened with anyone before. It made Cassidy more than a little uneasy.

  Despite the shameless begging of her hormones, she had no intention of getting involved with a diplomat with wolfish tendencies and an Irish brogue. She’d grown up with diplomats. She knew the dangers involved in trying to keep the peace in the world of the Others, and she wasn’t willing to put herself through that again. Even when someone in that line of work did manage to live to a ripe old age, matters of business always took precedence over matters of the heart, and Cassidy had spent enough of her life playing second fiddle.

  Her parents, as doting and devoted as they had been, had viewed their jobs as more of a calling than a duty, and even their daughter couldn’t compete with a higher purpose. Diplomacy had been their lives’ work, and they were dead because of it. They had been killed during an assignment playing negotiator between two powerful vampire clans who hadn’t particularly cared if they reached a peaceful settlement to their dispute. But if it hadn’t been that mission, it would have been another. Sticking a nose into the business of creatures who didn’t want it there and had the power to rip it off your face was hazardous to your health.

  Once Cassidy had come to live with Adele, her grandmother had spent more time in meetings with Other politicians than at parent-teacher nights. It was like a family curse. There were days—especially yesterday when she’d found herself playing a reluctant negotiator—when Cassidy could feel the grasping tentacles of diplomacy twining around her own ankles. She wasn’t going down without a fight, though, and Sullivan Quinn looked like a slippery slope if she’d ever seen one.

  She groaned again and pushed herself up, contemplating a dust-bunny massacre in her bedroom and maybe color-coding her wardrobe. She only made it about halfway across the room when her front door buzzer rang. Figuring it had to be either Randy or her grandmother, she considered not answering it. Then again, she wouldn’t put it past them to start buzzing other apartments to find out if she was in. She winced, remembering the last time that had happened. The satyr down the hall, who was the only Other she knew of in the building, had offered to forget about reporting her to the super if she’d come in to look at his etchings.

  Turning on her heel, she stalked over to her door and pressed the button for the intercom. “Yes?”

  “Sullivan Quinn, Miss Poe. Are you ready to get to work?”

  A long moment of stunned silence was followed by her oh so articulate, “Uh . . .”

  “Not to be rude, Miss Poe, but I’m not wearing my fur coat this afternoon and it’s a tad chilly out here at the moment. Do you think you might let me up so we can talk?”

  What she thought was, Can I have some time to put on my little red riding hood? What she said was, “Certainly, Mr. Quinn. I’m in five-seventeen.”

  “I know.”

  She unlocked the front door, then looked down at her ratty old clean-the-apartment clothes and bolted for her closet.

  The doorbell to her apartment rang three and a half minutes later, about the time Cassidy was sprinting back toward it, tugging a cotton sweater over her head. Lucky for her, she knew her floor plan well enough that she didn’t need to see to make it from one room to the other. She skidded to a stop in front of the door, smoothed the hem of the sweater into place, and checked to be sure she’d zipped up the jeans she’d shimmied into in five seconds flat. She took a deep breath, said a fervent prayer against self-humiliation, and tugged open her door.

  She should have worn a blindfold. Maybe that would have helped keep her pupils from dilating and her salivary glands from kicking into overdrive. Sullivan Quinn looked even better than she remembered, and she remembered damned good. His coat was open to the cold, which she figured was because of the infamously revved-up Lupine metabolism, and beneath it he wore a t
hin cashmere sweater the color of good burgundy. His jeans were just tight enough to be interesting, and his hair looked mussed and rumpled from the wind. She swallowed hard against the drool.

  Then she got a whiff of his scent, dark and musky and evergreen, and she decided only complete unconsciousness would have spared her from the magnetism of his presence.

  “Good afternoon, Miss Poe.”

  The rough, liquid gravel of his voice washed over her and did unspeakable things to her nerve endings. She exerted great force of will to keep her eyelids from drifting shut. “Mr. Quinn. I wasn’t expecting to see you so soon.”

  “I could hardly stay away.” He flashed her a charming grin and pushed his way inside. He didn’t actually have to push all that hard. As soon as he took a step toward her, she took a reflexive step back until he was inside her apartment. She realized she looked like an idiot standing there holding on to the doorknob like the end of a rope in a game of tug-of-war.

  She snapped her mouth closed, the door shut simultaneously, and she turned to face her visitor, her arms crossed over her chest. “So what can I do for you, Mr. Quinn?”

  His expression of friendly relaxation shifted almost imperceptibly at her words. She thought she saw a flash of something darker there, more Lupine. Something almost like hunger. But even if the fleeting glimpse made her belly tumble and her heart flutter like a teenaged girl’s, it was over so quickly, she couldn’t have said whether it had even happened outside of her very vivid imagination.

  Vivid when it came to this particular Lupine, anyway.

  “Actually, there is something,” he said, in a voice so mild and so utterly nonthreatening she almost looked over his shoulder to see if it were coming from someone else. “You can accept my apology. I behaved inexcusably last night, and if there is anything I could do or say to make it up to you, you have only to name it.”

  To call her stunned would have been doing Cassidy’s reaction to his words a disservice. She was speechless.

  Unfortunately, her hormones chose that moment to pipe up with a truckload of ideas about things he could do to make it up to her—some of them involving positions she wasn’t even sure were anatomically possible—and the heat rushed to her face like a volcanic eruption.

  God, she was doomed.

  Quinn watched her, seeing her skin bloom poppy-red and her eyes glint yellow-gold. Add a nice green bow and he’d look forward to opening her on Christmas morning.

  Right now, though, she didn’t look as if she’d appreciate the sentiment. He was going to have to be very careful in wooing this mate of his.

  Cassidy cleared her throat in the quiet of her apartment and fussed for a moment as she engaged the locks on her front door. When she finally turned around, her face looked flushed but otherwise expressionless, and her sharp little chin jutted into the air at an even higher angle than usual. She had also wrapped her arms around herself, which he was sure she wouldn’t have done if she’d been able to see how it pushed her breasts together and lifted them up to him like offerings.

  “I think it would probably be best if we simply forgot about it, Mr. Quinn,” she said, her voice cool and calm and very at odds with the sharp tang of nervous tension he could smell on her skin. “I expect that from now on we can keep our interaction strictly on a business level.”

  For a moment, that tone of voice made her sound so much like her grandmother that she almost won the war then and there. He couldn’t in his wildest fantasies imagine snuggling up to Dame Adele.

  “Well, I’m not so certain about that,” he said. “In my experience, I’ve always found cooperation to be a lot easier among people who get to know each other than among those who try to keep themselves distanced from their partners.”

  “I wouldn’t go so far as to call us partners. We’ve been assigned to work on a project together, but that’s it.”

  He aimed for an ingenuous smile and knew he’d be lucky if it didn’t come out feral. “But it doesn’t have to be that way, does it?”

  He saw her eyes narrow and thought she could teach suspicion to a customs agent.

  “Oh, I don’t know. I find I have a hard time making friends with men who attack me before we’ve been properly introduced.”

  He wrestled down his inner beast and reflected on how much easier things were in his pack. If Cassidy had been Black Glen, she would have been his as soon as he managed to pin her on the roof last night. The lines of dominance and submission were clearly drawn among Lupines, but he was beginning to think Fox-women might be as stubbornly independent as their vulpine namesakes. It made him contemplate the consequences of flipping fate an obscene gesture.

  “Am I to take it you’re not going to be accepting my apology, then?”

  “What do you think?”

  Her tone was sulky, even downright hostile, but Quinn couldn’t smell any real anger on her. The only things marring the sweet musk of honeysuckle and woman were a whiff of embarrassment and the hint of something subtler.

  “I think you’ve every right to be angry with me.” He aimed his most charming smile at her, then toned it down when her frown deepened. She required something other than the irresistible-rake tactic. “I behaved like a beast, and I know my own mother would be ashamed to call me her son. I pray you’ll have a bit of mercy on me and not mention this to her.”

  Cassidy stiffened. “I’m not likely to ever meet your mother, Mr. Quinn, but you’re an adult. I don’t blame the behavior of a grown man on someone who I’m sure taught him better.”

  “I’m relieved.” He made a show of glancing around her apartment, taking in the warm, earthy colors and comfortable furnishings. “You have a lovely home, Cassidy. D’you think you might invite me into it?”

  He stood still and tried to project nonthreatening patience while she stared at him for a long moment. He knew very well that she was trying to figure out a way to refuse without sounding rude, and almost sympathized with her when she realized there wasn’t one.

  “You seem to have invited yourself, Mr. Quinn.”

  Her emphasis on the formality of the address didn’t faze him. He had no intention of calling the future mother of his pups by her family name.

  “In that case, I’ll just invite myself to a seat, shall I?”

  She gave in, but wasn’t particularly gracious about it. “Fine. Come in and have a seat.”

  She stepped around him, giving him a wide berth, and led the way farther into her apartment, trailing her enticing scent behind her. He doubted she’d have done that, either, if she’d known how much he enjoyed seeing the feminine sway of her hips beneath snug blue jeans, or the way the smell of her tightened the fit of his own jeans.

  She stalked into the living room but chose a chair opposite the sofa where he sat. She kept the low coffee table between them, as if she thought she might need to use the piece of furniture like a lion tamer to fend him off when he got out of line.

  Clever girl.

  “So why don’t you tell me why you’re here,” she said, her voice tight and laced with impatience. “I have a hard time believing you tracked me down just to apologize.”

  “You’d be right,” he admitted, “though I’m glad enough to offer an apology when it’s warranted. Unfortunately, I came on business.”

  “What sort of business?”

  Lord, but she was a hard one. “The sort we discussed last night. The sort with which the leader of your Council asked for our help.”

  She didn’t appear to relax, but she did uncross her arms, and her glare shifted into something more like a concerned frown. “Has something new happened?”

  “Earlier today, we had a phone call with Gregor Kasminikov.”

  Cassidy bolted up in her chair and leaned forward in excitement. “Did he find his mistress? Is she alive?”

  “We don’t know. They haven’t been able to locate her yet,” Quinn said, holding her gaze with his own. “But they were able to unearth some information leading to the American cell that the
y believe gave the original order for Ysabel’s kidnapping.”

  “Where is it?”

  “New York.”

  Cassidy felt as if she’d been poleaxed. She wasn’t sure what a poleaxe was, but it sounded like something that could turn her world on its end as easily as that terse answer had.

  God, was he serious?

  “How did Kasminikov’s people figure that out?” she demanded when she could finally speak. Her voice still sounded strangled and hoarse, but she got the words out. “What makes them think the Light of Truth has an operation in New York? I thought that group was based in Germany, or someplace like that.”

  “They are. And the Mormons are based in Utah, but that doesn’t mean you never find them in Des Moines,” Quinn retorted. “Gregor’s people didn’t decide anything. They followed the evidence, which led them to New York.”

  “What kind of evidence?”

  “The kind supplied by a captured member of their organization and the cell phone records he handed over.” Sighing as if no one had ever given him this kind of trouble before, Quinn summarized the call he’d been on that morning.

  Cassidy took a moment to digest it. “And they’re certain it was the group here that ordered the kidnapping? Not one of the European cells?”

  “Dead certain. There was a trail of communications and messengers. It all leads right back to New York.”

  “Shit. So if the orders came from here, do they think that she was brought here?”

  Quinn shook his head. “No. Where they took her is an entirely different trail, and one they were much more careful to cover up. Gregor and his men are still searching, but the more time that passes, the more difficult it will be. I don’t think the Lightheads were worried about anyone finding out they’ve been expanding. I think they want us to know.”

  “Why?”

  “So we’ll get nervous. The more nervous we get, the more chance there is that some Other somewhere will take it upon himself to do something about them.”