Chapter 3 3

I agreed, which surprised precisely nobody in the room except possibly me, and the following two weeks turned into a crash course in pretending to be desperately in love with a man I'd known for exactly fourteen days and still hadn't decided whether to fully trust.

"You're doing the thing again," Kieran observed, watching me across the mock dinner table Milo had set up specifically to rehearse gala etiquette, complete with a seating chart and, inexplicably, mood lighting.

"What thing."

"The thing where you look at me like I'm a puzzle you haven't finished solving."

"You are a puzzle I haven't finished solving. You've told me approximately four percent of what you actually know about my family's death and expect me to convincingly gaze at you like you personally hung the moon."

"To be fair, I did suggest we work up to the moon material gradually." Kieran's mouth twitched, the first real hint of humor he'd shown all evening.

"Milo's script has us starting with prolonged eye contact and working toward feelings later in the week."

"There's a schedule."

"There is absolutely a schedule. Milo made a spreadsheet."

"I did tell you the moon comment specifically wasn't in the script," Milo called from the corner, where he'd been unhelpfully critiquing our chemistry for the better part of an hour. "Also, for the record, your gazing needs work. Right now it reads more hostage negotiation than smitten fiancée."

"I am extremely comfortable with hostage negotiation energy."

"The Concord will not be." Milo leaned back, entirely too pleased with himself. "Try again. Kieran, say something romantic."

Kieran's expression went carefully, deliberately blank. "Milo."

"I'm just trying to help you two not get murdered in three weeks. Consider it a professional courtesy." Milo waved a hand between us. "Go on. Pretend."

Kieran reached across the table, slow and deliberate, and took my hand in his, and something about the simple, warm weight of it sent an entirely unwelcome jolt straight up my arm.

"You look beautiful tonight," he offered, deadpan enough that it took me a full second to realize he wasn't actually mocking the exercise.

"That's the best you've got?"

"I'm new to this."

"You're a thirty four year old werewolf Alpha. Surely you've flirted before."

"Not recently. Not sincerely." Something in his voice shifted, quieter, and the teasing edge dropped away entirely.

"I haven't had much practice being sincere about anything for a considerable number of years, Sable."

Milo, sensing the shift in tone with the specific radar of someone who had clearly been waiting for exactly this moment, cleared his throat loudly.

"And that's my cue to go check on, uh, something. Anything. I'll be upstairs."

He left. Kieran still didn't let go of my hand.

"You don't have to perform sincerity for me right now," I murmured, though my voice came out considerably less steady than I wanted it to.

"Milo's gone."

"I know." His thumb traced slow, absent circles against my palm. "I'm not performing."

The air in that room had gone thick and charged in a way I hadn't fully braced myself for, two weeks of careful, professional distance suddenly collapsing under the weight of a single honest sentence, and I found myself leaning in before I'd fully decided to, some old, exhausted instinct finally losing its long argument with a want I'd been ignoring since the night in that alley.

"This is a terrible idea," I murmured, close enough now that I could feel the warmth coming off him.

"Almost certainly."

"You're supposed to be protecting me. Not doing," I gestured vaguely between us, "whatever this is."

"I've been failing spectacularly at maintaining professional distance since the moment you called my kidnapping technique unimpressive." A ghost of real humor crossed his face, warm and unguarded in a way I hadn't seen from him yet.

"I'm not going to pretend otherwise to either of us tonight."

"I uhhhh.."

"Come here.." He whispered faintly.

And in that exact moment, his mouth found mine before I could construct another argument against it, slow at first, careful, giving me every chance to pull back, and when I didn't, when my free hand fisted in the front of his shirt and pulled him closer instead, something in him seemed to break loose entirely.

The kiss turned hungry fast, his hand sliding from my palm up my arm to cup my jaw, and I made a small, helpless sound against his mouth that I was going to be embarrassed about later and could not currently bring myself to care about at all.

"Tell me to stop," he murmured against my lips, echoing something that felt like it should have been a formality and wasn't, not with the way his voice had gone rough and careful all at once.

"Don't stop."

He didn't.

Good boy.

He lifted me onto the edge of the mock dinner table with an ease that should have been alarming and was instead simply devastating, settling between my knees with a low sound of his own when I pulled him flush against me, and what followed was slow and thorough in a way that undid every careful wall I'd spent eight years building around exactly this kind of vulnerability.

His hands worked my clothes away with a patience that felt deliberate, reverent, like he wanted to memorize every inch of skin he uncovered rather than simply claim it, and when he finally settled over me, bare and warm and unmistakably real, I arched up into him with a need that had nothing to do with strategy or cover stories at all.

"Look at me," he breathed, and I did, holding his gaze through every slow, deliberate movement, through the building heat that made my breath catch and my nails drag down his shoulders, through the exact moment his own composure finally broke and my name spilled out of him like something he'd been holding back for considerably longer than two weeks.

When I finally came apart beneath him, gasping, every careful defense I owned in shambles, he followed me over the edge with a groan that sounded like relief as much as pleasure, and we stayed tangled together afterward on that ridiculous mock dinner table, breathing hard, neither of us in any particular hurry to acknowledge how thoroughly the rehearsal had stopped being pretend.

"That was not in Milo's script," I finally managed.

"No," Kieran agreed, low and rough against my hair. "It considerably wasn't."

"Any regrets?"

"Exactly one." His mouth curved against my temple. "That it took me twenty two years of watching from a distance to finally do that."

Something warm and terrified in equal measure settled in my chest at the admission, and I was still trying to figure out how to respond to it when a sharp knock at the door made us both freeze entirely.

"Sorry, sorry, I know, terrible timing," Milo's voice came through the wood, apologetic and urgent at once.

"But you both need to see this right now. We just got a hit on Concord activity three blocks from here, and it does not look like a coincidence."