Sam pursed her lips. "Like who? I want names."
"Nope." Fiona shook her head. "That would be telling."
"You should tell me. I'm the one you're all betting will be seduced before the next full moon. I think I deserve to know who you expect to do the seducing." Her indignation had no discernible effect on her friends.
"And spoil all our fun?" Tess asked. "Not a chance, fur face."
Sam shot a glance toward Abby, the only one present who might be persuaded to spill her guts if Sam played on her sympathies. But judging by her expression, Abby had no more idea of the names than Sam did.
"Were they this interested in your love life?" Sam asked her.
"Of course," Abby responded promptly. "Don't you remember? You were there. Among the interested."
So much for sympathy. Sam scowled. "Traitor. I should have gone and hung out with Annie at her lab."
"Why? One party pooper in a room is more than enough." Tess balanced the base of her wineglass on her knee. "And since Dr. Cryer told me she couldn't make it tonight because she'd be working, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't have had time for you any more than she had time for the rest of us."
"So why didn't Annie come tonight?" Abby asked.
Samantha had been waiting for this question. She'd rehearsed her response. Since she'd given it plenty of times over the past few months, she didn't think anyone would question it. Actually, it made a good distraction from anyone snooping too closely into why Annie really hadn't come. Sam pasted on a scowl. "Three guesses."
Tess raised an eyebrow. "Because she's a huge geek who couldn't be dragged out of that lab of hers if you tied her to the back of the bull herd in Pamplona?"
"That's reason number one. I'll let you have the others guess reason number two."
"Ugh." Missy wrinkled her nose over her milk glass. "Don't tell me she's still crushing all over that creep Gordon?"
Samantha nodded and sipped her wine. "Unfortunately."
"And it hasn't penetrated her admittedly narrow field of vision that there's a reason no one she knows likes him?" Tess asked.
"As far as I can tell, no one on the planet likes him," Abby said.
"This may be true."
"Forget liking him; I don't trust him," Samantha grumbled, trying to sound disgruntled. It wasn't hard. That much of her story was absolutely true, and it was nothing she hadn't said before. "He doesn't smell right. I don't know why Annie hasn't picked up on that."
"Because love is blind. And tasteless. And apparently odorless as well," Tess said.
"Still, it's not right. And it's beginning to tick me off."
Fiona sighed. "Well, she is a big girl, so I suppose we don't get to pick her friends or her boyfriends. Though I have to say, if we were in Faerie, I would get to."
Tess snorted. "It's good to be the princess."
"Damn skippy!"
"I don't want to pick her friends or her boyfriends," Samantha said, affecting an air of righteous worry. "I just want her to be better at picking them herself."
"Considering that she never leaves the lab, I suppose it makes sense that she'd fall for him," Missy said. "I mean, she never goes out. The only men she ever sees are oblivious old scientists with as much sex appeal as the average eggplant. So when Gordon came along—under fifty, in decent shape, and reasonably attractive… if you ignore the slime quotient—and started paying attention to her…" She shook her head. "It almost seems inevitable."
"That doesn't make it any better."
"No, but if you look at it from another point of view, at least she's acknowledging that another sex exists and is in possession of some interesting bits worth a closer examination," Tess said, her gaze fixing pointedly on Samantha.
Who shuddered quite authentically. "Please, do not make me picture Gordon Entwhistle's 'bits.' I could conceivably never sleep again."
Tess unfolded her legs from beneath her and leaned forward to set her empty wineglass on the coffee table. "You know what I mean. I think it's time we took a closer look at the lack of a social life of someone already in this room."
Samantha suppressed the urge to shout, "Look! The sky is falling!" and make her escape while the others were distracted. As much as she wanted to move the subject off Annie, she did not make an acceptable substitute.
Come to think of it, she wasn't sure her friends could be distracted. "Hey, just because I'm the only one in the room who hasn't been taken in by some smooth-talking thing in pants and started adding to the looming global population crisis is no reason for you guys to get bent out of shape."
"We're in perfect shape. We just think you should join us."
Samantha looked askance at Missy. "You do realize that made you sound like some kind of cult leader, right? Were you about to offer me some Kool-Aid?"
"Not at all." Tess picked up an open bottle of Syrah and topped off Samantha's glass. "Wine is ever so much more useful. Have some more, Sam. It will take your mind off other things."
"Off-guard, you mean," she muttered into her glass, but she sipped anyway.
"Semantics. We're all friends here. What could you possibly have to worry about?"
The trouble with friends, Samantha reflected, was that they caused the only kind of worry worth stressing about. Especially friends like these.
* * *
CHAPTER FOUR
The night air was as crisp and clear as it ever got in Manhattan by the time Sam left Tess and Rafe's a little before 1:00 A.M. Sam breathed it in, automatically sorting the scents of car exhaust, humanity, asphalt, and Others. She caught a whiff of coffee, too, from the little shop down the street, and a hint of water. They'd have rain before the weekend was out.
Glancing up at the sky, Sam's eyes strayed automatically to the half-moon floating high in the darkness, visible the way the stars never were in the city. In a couple of weeks, the moon's call would prove irresistible, but for now she walked in its silver light through the De Santoses' swanky Upper West Side neighborhood toward the subway and her own more modest apartment in Gramercy. She looked forward to the moments of peace.
She'd enjoyed spending the evening with her friends, but she had to admit her mind hadn't been entirely on the merriment. She'd been too busy brooding about Annie.
What the hell had the girl been thinking? She'd genetically engineered them a whole barrelful of trouble, and somehow she'd managed to put Samantha right in the center of it.
Not that Sam believed even a bit of it was deliberate; Annie didn't operate that way. The idea of malicious intent made Sam frown and blink behind the lenses of her glasses, as if someone had suggested that the Earth's crust actually consisted of rock candy. Annie had just been doing what Annie always did, seeing a scientific question that no one else could answer for her and finding a way to answer it herself.
When the woman got her teeth into a problem like that, she was like a dog with an especially juicy bone—no pun intended—and she worried the thing down to a nub until she found what she was looking for. You got used to it after a while, and it started to seem almost natural. The sun rises in the east, the moon pulls the tides, and Annie Cryer figures stuff out. The only problem with that was the fact that a bunch of other people world really, really want her to share her latest discovery.
Sam shoved her hands deeper into the pockets of the jacket she really didn't need and kicked at a stray pebble. Whether or not Annie had intended to make a mess didn't affect the fact that someone would have to clean it all up. Every instinct in Sam's body screamed at her that it should be the Alpha, but she'd promised Annie a week and she wouldn't go back on her word. Graham would have to stay in the dark until next Friday. With any luck, by then Sam would have thought up a plausible story to disguise the fact that she'd been lying to him for a week. Because lying to one's Alpha tended to greatly reduce the average life span of a Lupine.
Gagk. Maybe she could just call in sick next week. Say she'd caught a cold, or the flu, or the Ebola virus. Anything. Of course, that would
stand a better chance of working if Lupines were actually susceptible to human diseases. She sighed, beginning to understand why some pack members preferred to work in non-pack-related businesses.
But on the other hand, if she survived until her promise expired, she'd be providing Annie with a whole other medical marvel worth studying… And Noah Baker would be right on the other side of the office watching the whole excruciating thing.
Groaning, Sam stalked down to the nearly empty subway platform and leaned against a pillar to wait for her train. Talk about that old "insult to injury" thing. She'd have a rough enough time keeping her cool around the Alpha, but fate had to toss GI Joe into the mix, too? Exactly which god's shit list had she worked her way onto?
Noah Baker drove Sam absolutely out of her mind; he had from the first minute she'd seen him, right before she'd tackled him in the middle of the neighborhood park down the street from the club. At the time, she'd thought he was kidnapping Abby, not realizing he was Abby's brother there to help her escape from the pack's custody, so Sam had taken him down in an effort to protect the girl she'd been assigned to guard. If she'd known how rolling around in the grass with that particular human would affect her, she might have pretended to be blind, deaf, and dumb when Abby had made her break for it. It would have saved Sam a world of trouble and made a positive impact on her sanity. Not to mention the soothing effect on her libido, because Noah Baker made her want to sit up and beg.
She couldn't explain it. In fact, when she tried, it short-circuited something in her brain that she figured she should probably keep in working order. But no matter what she tried to tell herself when she had full possession of her faculties, the minute he got within twenty feet of her she ended up in thrall to her own raging hormones. It was embarrassing, damn it. She was a grown woman and a Silverback; she shouldn't get weak in the knees at the scent of a human, no matter how rich and musky his spicy scent was. It shouldn't matter to her that his body was more toned than some of her fellow pack members, including a few on Tobias's elite security staff. And she damned sure shouldn't be able to remember what that body had felt like when it had pressed against her almost six months ago now. Maybe this was the evidence that her claim of never having been sick in her life didn't hold water after all, because just thinking about the feel of Noah raised her temperature to positively feverish levels.
The train ride back to 23rd Street took fifteen minutes, which wasn't nearly enough time for her to wrest her thoughts away from Noah. Once she dropped her guard enough to let her mind go there, it practically took an act of God to yank it away again. Even telling herself scornfully that she ought to know better than to develop a crush on a human didn't make any difference. She was a sick, sick puppy.
It might be different if Noah had ever done anything to indicate he had any real interest in her. Oh, he flirted, sure, but in the same recklessly casual way he seemed to flirt with all women, with the possible exceptions of his sister and the wives of those men he knew could eat him raw and smile while they picked their teeth. Sam had no reason to take him seriously, aside from her own schoolgirlish stomach-fluttering reaction to his presence. For all she knew, he viewed her the same way he viewed Gina, the breakfast shift waitress Sam had seen bring him coffee during some of his visits to the club. He gave Gina that slow, crooked smile, too. It didn't mean anything.
If it had, he would have asked Sam out months ago, not treated her just like any other casual female acquaintance. The jerk.
Rolling her eyes at herself, Sam walked the last two blocks to her apartment and debated jogging her way through the neighborhood in a bid to dump some of this restless energy. Between worrying about Annie and lusting after Noah, Sam felt charged up and a long way from ready for bed, but as safe a neighborhood as hers might be, this was still Manhattan. Even though Sam felt confident in her ability to kick the ass of anyone stupid enough to bother her, she preferred not to have to do such things in public. She got along well with her neighbors; she didn't need to go scaring them. Some knew she was Lupine, some didn't, but knowing something and seeing a live-and-in-Technicolor demonstration were two different things.
Stifling a growl, she dug in her pocket for her house key. She should just go inside and go to bed. Clearly both problems currently driving her demented would still be there in the morning, and she'd need her energy to deal with the kids on her weekly visit to her aunt and uncle's house. Even though her own pups had long since grown up and left the den, Aunt Ruby's house always strained at the seams with all the youngsters running around. She was the official Silverback nanny, and the entire pack knew that if their young needed minding, Ruby Howell could do the job with skill and good humor. Heck, she'd survived raising Sam after her mother took off; what more proof did anyone need?
So, Sam would go get herself some sleep, get through her visit with Aunt Ruby—whose sharp eyes were certain to see something was bothering her—and then use the rest of her Noah and temptation-free day to tackle the one problem she just might have a little influence over. She'd make one more attempt to talk some sense into Annie. And she'd keep her fingers crossed while she did it.
It couldn't hurt, right?
By the time Noah returned to his room at Vircolac, the sky outside his window had lightened to a wintry gray streaked with vibrant flashes of pink and orange. It was sunrise, and he was just now getting to shuck his clothes and become reacquainted with Graham Winters's extraordinarily comfortable mattresses. And Noah had been worried this assignment wouldn't keep him as occupied as Noah had grown used to. Christ, he was an idiot sometimes.
He slipped between the cool cotton sheets with a muffled groan and indulged in one long stretch before stacking his hands on the pillow behind his head and blinking up at the fancy plaster ceiling of the bedroom his host had assigned him.
"You'll stay at the club," Graham had told him a week ago when he'd been trying to give the Lupine the address of the hotel the army had booked for him. "That will give you a lot more access to the pack members you're trying to recruit, and I don't think I'm tooting my own horn when I say you'll be a lot more comfortable at my place than you would in that one. Besides, if you're in a hotel, Abby will worry and then she'll tell Missy she's upset, which will upset my wife and generally put me in a very bad mood. So think of it as a kind of community service act."
The only trouble with that, Noah reflected with a grimace, was the fact that his current assignment required him to lie to that community with every damned breath he took and he didn't like it one bit. The constant knowledge that he was deceiving the people he now thought of as friends gnawed at his gut like an ulcer.
This was why he hadn't gone into military intelligence, he acknowledged. He hated lying to people who mattered. It pissed him off, especially given how he felt about being lied to, and he didn't like to think of himself as a hypocrite. He'd much rather be blowing stuff up than dancing around with the undercover bullshit. Bombs he got. They made perfect sense, an elegant sequence of physical and chemical reactions with predictable results and measurable impact. Lies were trickier; you never knew who might get caught in it when they blew or who might wind up in the path of their shrapnel. Lies were messy, and Noah considered himself an orderly man. He didn't like them at all.
And neither would the Others, if they ever found him out. He couldn't picture any of them dealing well with the sense of betrayal his little stack of lies would undoubtedly cause, and while he knew perfectly well they posed no physical danger to him—they weren't the type to repay his actions with violence—he stood in very large danger of causing irreparable harm to some relationships that meant a hell of a lot to him. His sister, for one, would not be pleased. It had taken her a while to assimilate to the world she'd become part of when she'd fallen in love with and married a demon, but she was part of it now and Noah knew the Others who surrounded her had come to be both friends and family to her. And as timid as his baby sister might look at first glance, Noah knew for damned sure she wouldn't
hesitate to take a swing at him if she found out what he was doing.
Hell, he reflected, Abby's reaction was likely to be the one he had to worry about least. As mad and hurt as she might be, she was still his sister, and she would still love him in the end, no matter how long it took to forgive him. It was the other Others who were likely not to forgive so quickly. Others like Samantha Carstairs.
Noah swore into the lifting darkness. Just the thought of her name caused a tug somewhere in his gut, not to mention the reaction it caused a few inches to the south. He couldn't explain what it was about the woman that got to him, but whatever bug it was had burrowed its way under his skin the first time he'd set eyes on her. By now, it had exploded into a full-blown infestation. He wanted her like a drug, a craving that nothing else seemed to take the edge off of. Half the time all he had to do was look at her and he'd be sporting a hard-on to scare a lifelong hooker.
He'd never understood it. It couldn't just be Sam's looks. They were fine enough, all sleek curves and warm, animated features, but not the kind to stop a man in the street and make him forget which way he'd been going. But that was exactly how Noah felt when he looked at her, as if everything in his mind had been evicted by the burning, pounding need to have her.
What made it even worse was that Noah knew she had a similar reaction to him. He couldn't vouch for whether or not it was as intense, as consuming, as the one he had to her, but he knew he affected her. It showed in the way her muscles tensed whenever he got close, the way she looked at him, the charge of hot electricity in the air of any room that confined the two of them together. He knew she was just as aware of him as he was of her. It made him think that if circumstances had been any different, their situation couldn't have lasted too much longer before both of them wound up naked. And probably sweaty. But what would happen if she found out the truth?
She'd try to rip his balls off.
Noah acknowledged it with a wry twist of his mouth. He'd known Sam long enough to see the temper that burned beneath her civilized exterior. It wasn't something she'd lose control of often—in fact, Noah wouldn't be surprised to learn she'd never truly allowed it out of her grip—but he knew it was there, and knew the force of it unleashed would be something to reckon with. The way he saw it, if he was going to get Sam all worked up, he didn't want it to be with rage. Which meant she couldn't be allowed to know why he was really here.
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