Wolf at the Door

by Christine Warren

  “But why would they do that? I mean, if all they wanted from her was the evidence to prove we exist, they could have gotten it without killing her, right?”

  He followed her inside, shed his coat, and joined her on the sofa. “They could, but why would they want to? They hate us, and they’d consider Ysabel tainted by association. Plus, if her death prompted Gregor or someone else from the community to retaliate, it would only give them more rope to hang us with.”

  “Do they really need more rope?”

  Her face wore an expression of sadness that tugged at his heart, and he wanted nothing more than to erase it. He never wanted to see his mate look like that. Unable to resist, he lifted one hand and pushed a strand of hair back behind her ear, his knuckles brushing tenderly against the curve of her cheek.

  “Why is it that you’re so determined to get involved with me, Quinn?” she asked after a silent moment, her dark eyes wide and watchful. “I mean, somehow I doubt you’re lacking for female companionship. So why me? Is it just the situation? Am I a way to blow off steam? A distraction from thinking about an unpleasant situation? Or am I a novelty because I’m American? Because I’m a Foxwoman?”

  He blinked and fought the urge to ask her to repeat herself. He had excellent hearing; he just couldn’t believe she felt it necessary to ask that question.

  “This isn’t about novelty,” he assured her. “I’m not the sort of man who feels he’s more of one the more women he has.”

  “Then what is it about?”

  “It’s about you.” He knew he probably sounded incredulous, but he couldn’t help it. He was. “You can’t tell me you don’t know you’re a beautiful woman, Cassidy. You’ve mirrors in this place. I see one right over there. Surely you look into them from time to time.”

  “I know I’m a long way from ugly, but I’m not America’s next top model, either.”

  “What use have I for a model? Skinny, pale little things with bones I’d be afraid to touch for breaking. I’m not interested in models. I’m interested in you.”

  “Why?”

  He ran a hand through his hair in frustration. If this had been any other woman, he’d have accused her of fishing for compliments, but Cassidy Poe looked genuinely perplexed.

  “You call to me,” he finally ground out. “Before I ever saw you up on that rooftop, I smelled you. Downstairs, at the party. There was this trace of . . . something in the air. Like full-bloom honeysuckle flowers. It drove me mad and led me right to you. Then all I had to do was look at you to know I wanted you.”

  “Does that happen to you a lot? You just see a woman and decide right there you have to have her?”

  “No, damn it, it doesn’t. I won’t deny I’m a man, Cassidy, and I won’t deny I’ve had my share of women, but I’m not the sort who’s ever had trouble taking no as an answer. Before, there have always been other women if one I fancied refused me.”

  She watched him. “And now?”

  “Now if there are others, I don’t see them. It’s you I want, Cassie love. No one else.”

  “But you don’t know me.”

  “And whose fault is that?” He growled, pushing up from the sofa to pace across the floor. “I’ve been trying to get to know you from the moment I set eyes on you. Before that. From the moment I scented you. You’re the one who keeps pushing me away.”

  “Can you blame me? The manner of our meeting was a bit disconcerting, and as of now we’ve known each other for a total of”—she glanced at her watch—“about twenty hours. I think I have a right to be wary.”

  “Damn it, I know you do.” He shoved a hand through his hair and bit back another curse. Maybe this was a bad idea. He shouldn’t have agreed to come upstairs. His nerves were too frayed to try and have an intelligent conversation when all he wanted to do was strip her naked and make her admit she belonged to him, which wouldn’t do much to reassure her.

  “I know you do,” he repeated, struggling for a calmer tone. “I’m in unfamiliar territory here, Cassie love. I’m used to a woman being pack. I’m not accustomed to one I have to treat . . . delicately.”

  “You sound like you’re blaming me for that.”

  “I’m not,” he said, sinking back to the edge of the sofa and taking her hand carefully between his. “I don’t want you to think that I am, Cassie love. But I need you to understand what you do to me. You go to my head like whiskey, and I’m asking you nicely to please let me have another sip.”

  Cassidy stared into those warm amber eyes and felt her stomach do a slow somersault. Gods, this man got to her, on every one of her levels. And after the night and day she’d had, she wasn’t sure she had any strength left to fight her response to him. If ever in her life she’d needed a distraction, it was now. She needed to take her mind from the thoughts of kidnapping and death. She needed to shut her mind off altogether and just glory in the feeling of being alive. Her mind might still be enumerating the reasons why it would be the height of self-destruction to get involved with this man, but her body had stopped listening. If she wasn’t careful, she was very much afraid that her heart might follow suit.

  Run! Run away! her brain screamed. The man is emotional Häagen-Dazs. You’ll enjoy it for a few minutes, but you’ll pay for it in the end!

  Oh, let her live a little, her hormones countered. No one is talking love here. This doesn’t have to be about happily ever after and a white picket fence. What’s the harm in two healthy adults spending some quality time together?

  Cassidy shivered at the thought of that kind of quality. The argument presented by her hormones was making a lot of sense to her right now. And the heat radiating from the gorgeous and very intense Lupine beside her was not helping.

  “You’ve naught to fear from me, Cassie love,” he murmured, raising her hand to his lips and brushing whisper-soft kisses against her palm. She could see the mingled sincerity and hunger in his eyes and her resistance crumbled. “I swear it.”

  “All right.” She surprised herself with her words, but just then she couldn’t care. She felt overwhelmed by the situation and by her reaction to this man, and her fear was easily outweighed by desire. By need.

  He jerked a little in surprise, his eyes narrowing with suspicion. “All right what?”

  “If you want to get to know me better, go ahead. Ask me something. I promise I’ll answer. But if this is going anywhere, I need to get to know you better, too. For every question I answer, I get to ask one in return.”

  She thought for a minute she might have really thrown him for a loop—she’d certainly thrown herself for one—but in the end, he just nodded. “Fine.”

  “You’re the one with all the curiosity.” She tucked the hand that still tingled from his kisses between her knees and nodded to him. “You go first.”

  Quinn was silent for a moment, as if wondering where to start. “Tell me about Foxwomen. I thought they were a myth until Rafael De Santos introduced me to your grandmother. I’d never met anyone like her.”

  “There isn’t anyone like her. My grandmother is a force unto herself.” She smiled wryly. “But I’m not surprised you’ve never met any others. We’re the only ones in the city. The next closest den I know of is in Montreal, or maybe the one in northern Michigan. There just aren’t very many of us.”

  He shook his head. “It’s hard for me to fathom. My pack is nearly three hundred strong, and the Stone Circle Clan’s territory borders ours outside Dublin. Here in Manhattan, it seems you can’t throw a stone on a full moon without hitting someone furry, but maybe that’s the company I’ve been keeping.”

  “Yeah, it’s a bit different for us. Nana says there used to be more, but not in a long time. Most of us are descended from the Native American population, if you go far enough back. And we all know how well they fared in American history.”

  “True enough.”

  “If my grandmother were here, I’m sure she’d go into a really long explanation about what makes Fox-women unique and how important ou
r legacy is and why it’s my responsibility to carry on our family heritage in a way that would make my ancestors proud. But since she’s not, I’ll tell you I don’t think we’re all that different from you guys.”

  “From Lupines?”

  She nodded. “We shift, just like you do. I mean, you guys don’t only do it when there’s a full moon, and neither do we.”

  “I’m not so sure about that. If you were just like werewolves, for one thing, there’d be a damned sight more of you.” He grinned. “We’ve none of us ever been hesitant to be fruitful and multiply.”

  Cassidy snorted a half-laugh. “Yeah, I had noticed that. But it’s not that Foxwomen don’t multiply, it’s just that since the trait is only passed from mother to daughter, only the female part of that equation can really be called Foxwomen.”

  “So it really is only Foxwomen. You don’t have any Foxmen hidden away in a closet somewhere?”

  “Not a one. Something about that pesky Y chromosome seems to throw a wrench into the DNA. Only double Xs have the option to get furry.”

  “But if your father wasn’t a fox-shifter, what was he?”

  She smiled, remembering, and it was her father’s smile. “He was human.”

  Quinn looked genuinely surprised. “Human? You mean you’re . . .”

  “A half-breed. Yes. We all are.” She snuggled deeper into the corner of the sofa and shrugged. “Foxwomen have only ever mated with humans, as far as I know. It’s just what we do. I’m not even sure what would happen if one of us mated with a werekin or a Fae or something, which set of DNA would win out. Who knows? I’m sure Nana would say we’d spontaneously combust.”

  Quinn didn’t seem to find that amusing. He scowled. “I’m sure nothing so drastic would happen. I’ll bet it would be perfectly safe for both of u—for both parties.”

  “I know. That was a joke. Nana’s a bit of a snob about the whole heritage thing, which is kind of ironic when you think that half of that heritage is nothing more than the human next door. But the stories seem to indicate that even before Europeans came to America, there was some sort of taboo against Foxwomen mating with anything other than a human because it might weaken their spiritual powers.” She shrugged. “I guess there just haven’t been enough of us to really test the theory. Since there are so many more humans in the world than there are Others, there’s not much incentive for anyone to go bucking tradition.”

  An expression Cassidy couldn’t quite define passed across his face at that, but he kept quiet.

  “I think this means it’s my turn,” she said after a moment. “So now you get to tell me about your family.”

  “They’re fairly average, really. Mum and Da have moved to a small town just outside Dublin, but the pack has been in the city since before the city was, so I’m still there.”

  “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “No. I’m a singleton. Plenty of cousins, though. It’s that fruitful thing again. Though I have to say, large families don’t draw attention in Ireland quite the way I imagine they would in Manhattan.”

  She smiled wryly. “True. So I guess no one thinks twice about pack members all living in such close proximity? You just seem like the average extended family.”

  “We are. The average extended furry family, in any case.” He settled farther back into the sofa cushions but kept his body canted so he could continue to watch her face as they talked. “I’ve met your grandmother, and you mentioned you had a cousin, but you never said anything about other family. Where are your parents?”

  Cassidy hesitated, her gaze skipping away from his. The question tugged at her heart, the way memories of her mom and dad always did. “They’re dead.”

  Quinn winced. “I’m sorry, Cassie love. That was insensitive of me. I apologize. Were they ill?”

  She shook her head, her mouth curving in a sad smile. She couldn’t remember either of them ever so much as sneezing. They’d seemed invulnerable and immortal to her back then. “Not a day in their lives. And it’s okay. You didn’t know. Besides, they’ve been gone a long time. I was only six when they died.”

  “And you’ve lived since with your grandmother?”

  “Yup.”

  “They must have been quite young themselves. How did they die? Was there an accident?”

  “Not at all. It was very much on purpose.” She took a deep breath and raised her hand to push a fall of hair behind her ear. She didn’t enjoy reliving it, but time had allowed her to at least retell it without faltering. “They were diplomats, just like Nana. And you, for that matter. They were helping with the negotiations between two of the important vampire houses in Washington, D.C., when the treaty broke. They were killed along with at least two dozen vamps and nearly a hundred humans. It was a mess, in more ways than one. The local council burned down three city blocks trying to cover it up.”

  Quinn swore under his breath. “I’m sorry, love. That’s horrible.”

  “Like I said, it was a long time ago. And that was two questions in a row for you. Don’t think I’m not keeping track. Now I get another one.” She forced a smile onto her lips and hoped he’d let her get away with it.

  “Have at it.”

  “What made you decide to be a politician?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Well, I don’t consider myself to be one. I’m guth of my pack. The guth of Black Glen has always been a Quinn. It’s a tradition in my family, a bit like diplomacy is in yours, I imagine.”

  She ignored that last statement. “Guth. That’s like an ambassador, right? I don’t think any of the packs in this area have kept up with the custom. In fact, I can’t think of a single pack I know that does.”

  “It’s something a lot of Lupines have forgotten. A guth is an ambassador of a sort, but he’s also a herald and a storyteller. Like a Norwegian skald, I suppose. I’m not surprised a lot of packs have forgotten the custom, since the guth of a pack is the one charged with passing on the customs to each new generation. It’s a bit of an irony.”

  “I guess so. Okay, so I get another question to even things up—”

  Quinn shook his head. “Oh, no. It’s my turn again.”

  “But I only asked one question.”

  “You asked two. You asked about why I do what I do, then you asked me to explain what I do, remember?”

  Cassidy frowned. “That second one wasn’t a real question.”

  “Now, now,” he said, grinning. “No cheating, Cassie love. It isn’t ladylike.”

  She rolled her eyes, but gave in. “Fine. Go ahead.”

  “Good. Then I want to know if you’re romantically involved with anyone right now.” She hesitated until Quinn raised an eyebrow at the pause. “It’s a simple question, Cassie love. I asked if you were involved with a man. Or a woman, for that matter. If you’ve an understanding with anyone, I want to know what it is and with whom.”

  “Isn’t that something you’re supposed to find out before you jump a woman in a public place?”

  “I’ve already apologized for last night.”

  He inched forward and inhaled deeply. She knew he was smelling her and she hoped her scent wasn’t giving her away. If she wanted him to believe she was still undecided about whether to accept his advances, she really shouldn’t smell aroused.

  “I intend to make your romantic entanglements very much my business, Cassie love. You see”—he paused, breathing her in—“I intend to make certain that the only one you’re entangled with in the future is me.”

  She forced out a laugh, but even to her ears, it sounded more nervous than amused.

  “Down, boy,” she said, leaning slightly away from him. “I think you’re getting ahead of yourself here. I said I was willing for us to get to know each other better, but I haven’t decided yet whether or not I’m willing to get involved with you.”

  Somehow she got the impression that Quinn wasn’t paying attention. He shifted even closer until the narrow width of space between them ceased to serve as any barrier at
all.

  “I mean it,” she said, trying to lean away when there was really nowhere for her to go. “I’m not going to be rushed into anything, Quinn. This is not something I take lightly.”

  He inhaled deeply, his grin turning feral as he scented the rush of desire that pooled between her thighs. “Let’s just see about that, shall we?”

  Growling soft and low, he leaned across the distance that separated them and brushed his lips against hers.

  Fourteen

  Cassidy held her breath and sat frozen as he leaned in for the kiss. Her mind whirled and her heart raced and her stomach Jazzercised, but she held herself motionless in anticipation. As stupid as it might be, she wanted this kiss more than she wanted her next breath. Which was a good thing, since she’d stopped breathing the moment he began to ease forward.

  A whimper escaped her when he finally made contact, a sharp, breathy little squeaking sound she couldn’t hold back. The soft, beguiling pressure of his lips on hers sent heat coursing through her body; not the fiery conflagration set off by their wrestling match of last night, but the slow, invasive warmth like that brought on by a heavy shot of pure, single-malt whisky. This kind of heat started where his mouth touched hers and eased its way on liquid tendrils up into her cheeks and her head, clouding her thinking further. Then it slid down her throat to her stomach and between her legs, drawing an echo of moisture from another source.

  God, he tasted good. She’d tried not to notice last night, but he reminded her now. She caught a faint tang of something citrus buried beneath layers of spice, clove, and cinnamon and freshly candied ginger. It all mingled with the earthy palate of a Lupine and that intoxicating, underlying flavor that was all his own. Essence of Sullivan Quinn. She sipped him thirstily.

  She parted her lips further, unconsciously urging a deeper tasting, but he frustrated her by pulling back and hovering a hairsbreadth away, so that his breath tickled her oversensitive skin and made her shiver. She forced open her heavy eyelids.