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The closer she gets, the more confused I feel. For half a second, my nostrils flare, almost picking up the edges of a scent. But when I try to inhale it, it’s gone.
Meg seems just as muddled. For a long, awkward moment, she stares straight at the V-neck of my T-shirt. Her pupils expand.
“Are you all right?” I snap. My voice is too gruff. Thanks to the bark I’m actively repressing. “You need to tell me if anything we ask you to do makes you uncomfortable.”
I must truly be losing my mind. As she looks up at me, I think of a hundred ways I could test this little one’s boundaries. And none of them have to do with work.
She suddenly straightens, raising her chin again. Resilient. Tough. “I’m perfectly fine. Lead the way.”
I nod and walk on, pointing out the different buildings as we go. My offices, Archer’s med center. I also give her a feel for the layout of the stadium, explaining that each player has their own locker at the stadium and in the gym behind the practice fields.
Meg nods along, but I notice the tight way she keeps her arms tucked across her chest. Silence stretches taut between us. The tension reminds me that there are things at stake here. My pack is counting on me; I need to figure out who this woman is. And she clearly wants this job.
It takes me way too long to realize she’s panting, trying to keep up with my strides—while only breathing through her mouth? It seems that way. Her voice sounds breathy as she asks, “So how long have you had your pack?”
I slow my steps down for her automatically, fisting my hand in my pocket to avoid reaching to touch the small of her back. When I turn and find her gaze on my face, it gets even harder to control myself. She has beautiful eyes.
“Close to fifteen years,” I grumble. “Dr. Monroe and I became friends in university.”
She does the math and looks stunned. I chuckle. “I’ll take your surprise as a compliment.”
Her eyes narrow. “But Dec—Mr. Howard is only twenty-seven.”
I nod. “Archer and I met Declan and Theo when they were in university. We were well into our thirties by then. But we saw their potential, and we knew we wanted to build something like this.” I wave at the facilities around us. “It seemed a natural progression for us to form a unit as soon as they graduated.”
It’s an extremely abridged version of our story, but I’m not sure I want to give her all the gory details. The truth tends to make me look like an asshole. I guess because I was.
But when she looks at me with her big blue doe eyes, so full of genuine interest, I find I can’t hold out on her. A sigh floats out of me.
“I met Archer at my first job. It was a smoothie bar,” I grunt, remembered vitriol filling my voice. “In our university’s gym.”
“You worked in a smoothie bar?” she chokes.
I smile ruefully. “Not by choice. My father made me get a job to pay off a credit card I maxed out and they were the only place hiring.”
God, I was so pissed about that. The man who sired me was the very worst kind of alpha and he did just about everything he could to make my mother’s life hell. Money was the one—the only—thing I could count on him for.
After a while, I started to regard his limitless credit cards and endless cash flow as payment for putting up with him. The day he decided to take his one contribution to my life and hold it over my head was the day I decided he would regret ever fathering me in the first place.
It took a while to figure out how to do that. I wanted to shatter him. It took Archer convincing me, over a few years, that sometimes a blade could be more effective than a hammer.
Making my father’s abuse public or ruining my own reputation would only cause temporary damage and indirectly punish my long-suffering mother, Archer argued. He thought I should play the long game. Wait for my inheritance to come in, wait for my father to feel safe passing off some of his holdings as he edged into retirement.
Arch has a mind for strategy and all the patience I lack. His plan was a thing of beauty. It enabled me to systematically take over more and more of my family business, keeping my mom’s post-humous reputation pristine while destroying the only thing my father cared for—his legacy.
The day after he officially retired, I liquidated everything he spent decades building.
It was cold. Legendary. The press reported on it for years. And the last I heard, my dad was dying alone in the one property I left in his name—the house I vowed never to return to.
Meg pulls me from my ominous thoughts, her face sparkling with mischief. “Did you have to wear a hairnet?”
A laugh staggers out of me. “Absolutely not.”
She flashes a beatific smile. “Dang. I was hoping there might be pictures.”
I glower, knowing it will make her giggle. She shakes her head while she laughs. “Okay, okay. Never mind. So you and Dr. Monroe hit it off right away?”
I must make some sort of face because she cracks up again. “Uh oh,” she says. “So you weren’t friends?”
