Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3)

by Cynthia St. Aubin

  A blush stung my abraded lips.

  “For Christ’s sake! He was drunk, and he couldn’t even walk. And then he was making all these threats and he gave me a B minus!” I became vaguely aware that I was making not a lick of sense, and doing it pretty emphatically.

  Sickening crunching sounds came from Mark’s vicinity.

  Allan, Steve, and Shayla all found various spots on the walls and ceiling to become interested in as Mark’s fur began to recede, revealing patches of naked flesh.

  I grabbed the shredded wad of his clothing and pressed it into his emerging hands. Mark pushed slowly into a standing position, stark naked save for the bundle covering his naughty bits and the sheen of sweat clinging to pale, clammy skin. His soaking hair stuck to his neck and cheeks in dark clumps.

  Steve slapped a hand over Shayla’s bulging eyes.

  “Office,” Mark groaned.

  Allan and I each took an arm and helped him up the stairs. There, in his lair, we eased him down onto the leather sofa, where he collapsed into a heap.

  “I fink Hanna can take it from here.” Allan winked at me. “I’ll just get acquain’ed wif the bride and groom and ‘ave someone see to ‘at mess downstairs.”

  “Is that why you’re here?” I asked. “The wedding?”

  “Course it is,” Allan said. “Joseph gave us a jingle an said we ‘ad a weddin’ to plan. I ‘opped the next flight.”

  I cast a look down at Mark, whose color was returning. His broad chest rose and fell in something like a normal rhythm.

  “We’ll be okay,” I assured Allan.

  When the door was safely closed behind him, I knelt down beside the couch where Mark’s head rested on the rocky pillow of his curled bicep.

  His eyelids fluttered open. “I can still smell him on you,” he growled/half croaked.

  “Really? Even through your…contribution?”

  His face softened slightly. “Even through that.”

  Unfamiliar fire kindled in my belly. The words that came next had neither precedence nor logic to argue their cause. “Well, what are you going to do about it?”

  Chapter 11

  My first sense was of urgent, stomach-flipping motion. Though I couldn’t be sure in which direction I was moving or how I was being propelled, the world around me blurred until it abruptly snapped back into focus.

  When it did, I was beneath Abernathy on the leather couch, my hands pinned above my head, his mouth mere millimeters from mine.

  He gazed down at me, naked hunger and bottomless need burning in his eyes. Yet, he was waiting. Seeking permission. Seeking assent.

  A million questions crowded my mind. Why do you want me? What do I want? What will this change? What will I do?

  In that moment, the only answer I needed was the body anchoring mine to this couch, to the earth, to life itself.

  Tentatively, by degrees too small to measure, I pressed my lips toward his. When they met, a sweet, dizzying wave of crippling desire rolled through me from head to foot. The pure, chemical loveliness of this man. The taste of his lips, his tongue as it stroked my lower lip then dared further, tasting me, drinking from me as I drank from him, hungry as a baby bird.

  Abernathy moaned, a ribcage rattling sound from deep in his throat that only threw gasoline on the banked coals at my center.

  Then it wasn’t just our mouths fusing, but every cell of our bodies. Our chests, our bellies, our hips, our thighs. Every available surface seeking out its match. In that moment, if I could have crawled inside his very skin, I would have done it.

  But like, in a totally non-creepy way.

  And did I want him. I wanted him like air, like breath, like food, like life. In that moment, I had never wanted anything more.

  “I want you.” Only when he lips disappeared from mine did I realize I had said this out loud.

  His breath stopped. His pupils dilated. “I told you not to say that to me.”

  In fact, he had. In London, he’d told me in no uncertain terms that the next time I said those words to him, I deserved what I got.

  “No.” Something seemed to shift in him as he decided. “You don’t.”

  “I do,” I said. “You think I don’t know how fucked up that is? You think I don’t understand the many ways it would fuck up my life? Has fucked up my life? I’ve got heads rolling out of every storage space I touch, for Christ’s sake! It’s no mystery the kind of shit-storm you come with. And no, I’m not saying I’m ready for all the consequences that decision would bring. But I want you. I want you in my bed. I want you in my body. I want you—”

  “Stop.” The ragged plea was followed by a hand planted across my lips.

  I parted them and slid my tongue across his palm. His eyelids fell closed as his nostrils flared.

  His hand skimmed over my breasts, down my stomach, dipping below the waistband of my jeans until I felt the heat of his fingers through my rapidly dampening panties.

  “Fuck,” he panted.

  “Now that’s more like it!”

  At the sound of Joseph’s voice, Mark and I leapt apart like teenagers caught in our parent’s basement:

  “I would have knocked.” Joseph grinned broadly. “But it seems your door has been relocated.”

  “Get out of my office,” Mark growled. “Now.”

  “Of course I wouldn’t have interrupted at all, but you are urgently needed in the gallery,” Joseph said.

  “It can wait,” Mark said, looking like he might relocate Joseph like he’d relocated the door.

  “There’s another body in one of the cabinets in the shop. Allan found it.”

  Mark’s naked shoulders sagged. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

  Joseph nodded and left us to put ourselves together.

  I stole a greedy glance as Mark rose from the sofa and walked bare-assed to one of his cupboards. The contours of his body cast in the desk lamp’s glow left me with the urge to throw rocks at Michelangelo’s David.

  Mark eased the cupboard open and tugged on the brass coat hook. The shelves pushed forward and out of the closet to reveal another door behind. A slight nudge of Mark’s finger on a knothole and a rod bearing neatly pressed shirts, slacks, and ties rolled forward. Several pairs of polished shoes winked from the hidden cubby below. Undershirts and skivvies were bundled into parcels on a shelf above the shirts and pants.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said. “Do you have like special werewolf carpenters that install secret clothes stashes for you, or what?”

  “Special werewolf carpenters,” Mark snorted, stepping into a pair of boxers. “Your vivid imagination never ceases to amaze, Hanna.”

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Where the hell do you get this stuff?”

  “So am I,” he replied. “Everyone knows that elves are the only carpenters worth having. And secret clothes stashes are standard issue.”

  Mark tossed a white undershirt and a pair of slacks at me. “Might want to put those on,” he advised. “Until I can accompany you home to shower.”

  “You’re not going to believe this,” I said. “But I’ve been showering and dressing myself for years. I don’t think I’ll need any help.”

  Mark finished tucking a freshly pressed shirt into his pants. “I wasn’t offering to help. Most of my security resources are here at the gallery, and there is no way in hell I’m letting you go unprotected. Speaking of which—” He paused to snug a silk tie against his corded neck. “Steve was on duty last night. I think he and I need to have a chat about the policy for visitors.”

  “That’s funny,” I said. “It sounded like you were planning on determining who I can see in my own apartment.”

  He cleared his throat. “When it comes to anyone who puts you at risk, that’s exactly what I’m planning.”

  “I think I’m capable of deciding for myself who puts me at risk.”

  “Your actions this morning would indicate otherwise,” he said.

  “Odd,” I said. “But I seem to rem
ember arriving to work on time and in once piece, where I was nearly attacked and peed on by a werewolf that nearly destroyed his own gallery during a temper tantrum.”

  The muscles in Mark’s jaw bunched until it look like he had a walnut squirreled away in his cheek.

  “Mark Andrew Abernaffy!” Allan’s voice called from downstairs. “Get down here ‘afore I have to come up and drag you down by your taiw! You can get your end away wif Hanna when you ain’t got a bloody dead vampire shackin’ up in your cabinet!”

  “We’ll finish this later.” Mark’s voice was tempered with the unnatural quiet I had come to know and fear. He pointed at the leather sofa and fixed me with a warning glare. “Stay,” he said.

  I smiled, but said nothing. In my defense, Mark had been around me enough to know this was the equivalent of a double barrel bird flip complete with spitting through forked fingers.

  As soon as I could hear Allan and Joseph’s voices threading with Mark’s in the gallery below, I slid down the stairs and out the front door.

  “Don’t ask,” I told Gilbert, who had followed me from the door to the bathroom where I shed my clothes in an unceremonious heap. He paused near the bathtub to sniff delicately at the pile, then looked at me with undisguised disdain. I fought the urge to apologize, and made a mental note to ask Steve about cat mind control powers.

  It would explain a lot.

  I emerged half an hour later in a cloud of steam and donned fresh clothes. Opting to wrestle my wet mane into a braid, I spent time on make-up instead. When Mark had not yet materialized after my full spackle and paint routine, I aimed the Mustang toward Jitters Java instead of the gallery. After what I’d faced this morning, something loaded with caffeine, sugar, and indecent amounts of heavy cream might be my only hope for bringing this shit-storm of a day around.

  “Hey Dan,” I called.

  Dan, one of Jitter’s regulars, glanced up from his conversation and gave me his somber smile. With his wire-rimmed spectacles, brown slacks, side-parted hair, and sweater the color of peanut brittle, Dan looked like a thirty year-old grad student who just couldn’t get to a retirement community quick enough. Most days he could be found engaged in a game of chess with an octogenarian companion at one of the coffee shop’s many two-top tables. Today, his audience was a man with a middle-aged spread, suspenders and a fedora. They leaned in conspiratorially over one of Dan’s many tattered notebooks.

  “Hanna.” He nodded.

  “How’s the thesis?” I asked.

  I’d been coming to Jitters for about four years now, and Dan had been working on his epistle on Dhobar-Chu, Nessie’s smaller, sexier, fiery Irish cousin, for at least twice that long. Of course, the rules were different when one was “reading at Northumberland,” or any other suitably European-sounding university. Most tenured professors of this persuasion seemed to regard my kind of exuberant insistence on finishing a degree in two years as the major cause for the downfall of western civilization. There was no rushing these things, they seemed to sigh from the dust of a thousand tomes.

  “Still waiting on some archives material from Marsh’s. The senior librarian is proving to be both reclusive and intractable.”

  I gave him my most understanding of dusty academic nods. “Not everyone understands the work.”

  “This is true,” he agreed.

  “Well, good luck,” I said.

  “Many thanks.” He turned his attention back to his notes and his neighbor.

  “Hanna! I haven’t seen you in a wee—uh oh. Wet hair. What’s up?” The bouncy little barista eyed me from behind the hissing copper monster she coaxed into producing magic elixirs.

  “Darcy,” I said, “you don’t want to know.”

  She leaned across the counter and surveyed the carnage with quick precision of a field surgeon. “Quad shot venti S’more Mocha, extra whipped cream,” she said, pronouncing her prescription with a nod of certainty.

  “Marry me?” I asked.

  She fixed me with a megawatt grin. “Honey, if I ever decide to ride the magic carpet, you’ll be my first.”

  “Deal.” I perused the display of designer mugs while she flitted around behind the counter like a healer from another time. Then I was looking at Dan’s table, my eyes drawn to his notes by a word that landed in my subconscious like a bag of concrete.

  Vampires.

  “They’re everywhere,” Dan whispered across the table to a pair of rapt, watery blue eyes. “It’s the Spring Lambing.”

  I inched closer, shuffling along a display of paperweights.

  “But that’s not even the half of it,” Dan continued in hushed tones. “The werewolves, they know. And they let it happen. Every ten years, all over the world.”

  Dan was staring up at me now. Any pretense of eavesdropping had been blown about the time I planted my elbows on his table and sandwiched my head in my upturned palms.

  “Danno,” I said. “Tell me everything.”

  Chapter 12

  “Dan told me everything.”

  Mark sniffed the air, nostrils twitching. “Quad shot venti S’more Mocha, extra whipped cream?” He set his pen aside, folding his hands on top the papers on his broad oak desk. “How many of those have you had?”

  “Why does that matter?” The pain exploded in my forehead as I sucked down another icy straw-full. “Four?”

  “Fuck.” He massaged his temples with fingers I knew to have expert knowledge of human musculature. “I’m not having this conversation with you when you’re on the sauce.”

  “Is it true?”

  “There’s true, and then there’s true,” he said.

  “You just repeated the same word twice with a slightly different emphasis. That doesn’t work on me anymore. But the sex thing still has some mileage. You want to make a suggestive comment or something?”

  Mark raised a dark eyebrow at me and leaned back in his chair. “That’s the whipped cream talking, isn’t it?”

  “Probably,” I admitted. “Sucks having your bluff called, doesn’t it?”

  He pushed himself away from me with a disgusted sigh.

  “So?” I asked. “Is it true?”

  “You need to take her.” Joseph Abernathy had appeared from the clear blue ether, leaning in Mark’s doorway.

  Mark cast a gritty look at his father. “Great idea. Let’s just bring a sixteen ounce ribeye to a dog fight while we’re at it.”

  “Aww!” I said, oddly touched. “You think I’m a ribeye?”

  “How is she supposed to decide if she doesn’t know what being the heir really means. You can’t keep her from that world forever.” Joseph shrugged away from the doorframe and paced toward the desk.

  “Right. How am I supposed to decide if—wait...are you saying I’m a ribeye because I have a lot of marbling?” I plopped myself down in my usual spot on the couch that I had almost agreed to have a litter of Abernathy’s puppy on earlier that day.

  “I’m not trying to keep her away from that world,” Abernathy said. “I’m trying to keep that world away from her.”

  “Because sixteen ounces is a huge steak,” I added. “And it would be really easy for me to assume you’re speaking proportionally here.”

  “How long do you think you can do that?” Joseph asked. “The last few decades have cost a king’s ransom in blood and treasure, and that with some pretty near misses.”

  “So are we talking a dry-aged ribeye here? Because now that I think of it, there are some pretty troubling implications there too.”

  “You try protecting this woman sometime.” Abernathy gestured toward the couch with an impatient jerk of his chin. “When she’s not hopping in the car with murderers, she’s offering to sharpen their knives.”

  “Mock if you will,” I said, folding my legs beneath me. “Good cutlery is as much a part of a proper eating experience as the food on the plate.”

  “Even if you’re the entree?” Mark asked.

  I slurped down the last gulp of condensed sugary slush at
the bottom of my recyclable plastic cup and tried to smile, only to realize that I couldn’t feel my face. “What were we talking about?”

  Mark and Joseph looked at me, then each other. Something crackled between them like a static tightrope.

  “You’re coming to the state dinner,” Mark announced, his eyes remaining fixed on his father, even as he addressed me.

  “State dinner? For what?” I asked.

  Mark turned to face me then, perhaps wanting to see how his next words would land. “For the Spring Lambing.”

  My sugar and caffeine haze evaporated as quickly as it had come. “The Spring Lambing is real?”

  Joseph nodded, saving Mark the task of answering.

  “This is beyond fucked up. You know that, right?” A throb began to pulse in my temple. I pushed the heel of my palm against it and closed my eyes.

  “Go to the dinner,” Joseph said. “Then make your judgment.”

  “What happens at this state dinner, exactly?” I asked.

  Joseph looked at Mark, who waved a hand at his father as if to say proceed.

  “Governing parties from both sides gather to review the terms of the Spring Lambing. When everyone is in agreement, the event begins.”

  “Governing parties?”

  “Select werewolves and vampires of influence,” Joseph explained.

  A wave of relief passed over me. “Welp, that counts me out, I suppose.”

  “I’m afraid not,” Joseph said.

  “As a werewolf heir, you qualify.” Mark delivered this revelation with all the enthusiasm of cinderblock.

  “Don’t sound so thrilled.” Offended, I sagged back against the couch.

  Mark looked his father. “If I’m taking her, you’re coming with me.”

  “Of course I’ll be there for the summit. But I won’t be able to make it to the dinner.” Joseph’s handsome face was an artful rendering of regret. “I’m afraid I have a conflicting engagement.”

  “Cancel it.” Storm clouds passed over Abernathy’s face.

  “Not possible.” Joseph seated himself on the opposite end of the couch.