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Tori heard a crunch and cursed.
She ran down the driveway, rounded the corner of the road where it hugged the cliff face, and saw a tricked-out SUV that had to be worth at least $100,000 beached on the grass between the tracks.
Awesome.
Great first impression. He’s really going to have confidence in anything else you can do for him…
The driver staggered out, and her breath caught.
He was a tall man, fit but not insanely built, with clipped light brown hair. He wore khaki slacks and a blue button-down shirt with battered tennis shoes. When he turned toward her, she realized his shirt matched his eyes. He was gorgeous.
That wasn’t the right word. There was nothing flashy about him, but she couldn’t keep her eyes off him.
Was it a werewolf thing? He didn’t look like her vision of a werewolf. She’d only seen two shifters before from the pack in the mountains east of town that dressed in homespun clothes and seemed to be waiting for the apocalypse. They came into town once every five years and didn’t talk to anyone. She’d seen two of them three blocks down the street, years ago.
He looked nothing like them, but of course, why would he?
Wouldn’t it be hilarious if the Double Thirteen house they feared their entire lives hosted random New York rich people who suddenly wanted to learn how to ski?
In October?
Maybe they just hadn’t checked the opening dates. Maybe they had enough money to force one of the hills to make a bunch of snow that would melt by the end of the day. She couldn’t assume.
Or maybe there was an entire werewolf pack ready to descend on her hometown.
For the first time, she felt afraid. No one knew she was here.
The twins had completely overreacted when they found a lone wolf in their territory. She’d dismissed them as crazy and then walked into a literal werewolf den without any kind of weapon or backup, and now there was potentially one standing right in front of her.
She felt her smile waver, the smile that she could keep on her face when a toddler pooped in a swimming pool two hours before a quarter-million-dollar pool party for some starlet, or when an avalanche buried the road out of town for a senator who needed to get back for a vote.
Something about this man made it impossible for her to stay calm.
You’re a force witch, idiot. She had nothing to fear.
If she concentrated, she could throw him off the mountain. Of course, then he would know she was a witch, and that would bring its own kind of problems, but that was for later. She could not show weakness or fear.
Or desire.
Shut up!
She had to know for sure, and frankly, so did he. Part of her job was preparing her clients for what they would face. Wouldn’t a wolf pack moving into a new territory inquire about the boundaries of that territory and who lived next to them? That was kind of Territory 101, wasn’t it?
Witches and shifters didn’t agree on a lot, but staying away from each other was job number one. There had been centuries of war between the two before they signed a binding treaty to enforce the peace with separation. It meant drawing lines around their lives, but the price was worth it.
How would she find out? Throw a bone and see if his eye twitched? Attempt to set a squirrel loose through the house and see if he chased it?
Someone should write a book: How to Out a Werewolf.
She sighed. If someone ever had, it would already be in the twins’ study.
“Um, hi,” he said.
She blinked and realized she’d been standing twenty feet away, staring into the ether. She cleared her throat. “I’ve got a call into a couple of Earth movers to smooth out this road. I’m so sorry I couldn’t get it refinished before your arrival.”
He rubbed the back of his neck and examined the SUV. “No worries. Sometimes you can’t move the Earth. That’s what my boss says.”
She laughed. “I say that reality works, and in this case, I’m literally trying to move earth.”
He didn’t laugh or react in any other way. For a shifter, he had excellent control or was just more awkward than she was.
She cleared her throat. “Um, shall I give you the tour?”
He looked around, and she realized he was tall enough to see over the top of the SUV.
Telekinesis. You are actually stronger than him, she had to remind herself again.
“Where is the house?”
She held out a hand and gestured behind her. “Walk this way.”
He started forward, negotiating the rocky road with grace. Was that a werewolf thing?
“Are you hungry?” she asked. “I’ve stocked the fridge with the standards. But let me know if you have any special requests.” Raw meat? A herd of deer?
“Boba tea?”
Tori choked and glanced back at him.
“Hell no,” he added, “not for me. My boss is a little bit addicted.”
“There is a combination boba, pho, and sushi restaurant in Aspen, an hour away.”
“No, there’s not.”
She frowned. “This is going to go a lot faster if you just believe me…”
“Sorry. I’m just horrified.”
“It’s good!”
“I’m sure.”
She squinted at him. He didn’t have a New York accent, but suddenly, he sounded exactly like her East Coast clients, who seemed to believe no one ever immigrated anywhere else, and therefore, the only authentic food of any kind was to be found at the corner store in their neighborhood.
“Anyway,” she said. “I can have something delivered.”
“From Aspen.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, great.”
It would involve a two-hour drive with an ice cooler, for which she charged several hundred dollars, but, wolves or not, these guys had kept the kind of money that had allowed them to build this house. They wouldn’t blink.
She walked around the edge of the cliff to see it ahead of them on a hill with the view of the continental divide stretching in the distance above it.
He whistled. “So that’s the famous house.”
“Did a movie get filmed here I don’t know about?”
“What? No. I guess I should’ve said infamous house. Famous within the family.”
The family. The Italian New York family that was fleeing to the wilds of Colorado.
She swallowed. “And when will the family arrive?”
He glanced over at her. “You know how it is.”
“Sure,” she said. You know how it is meant a private jet dropping by whenever the hell they wanted. “Well, the perishables have about a week’s shelf life before I should get them replaced, so keep me updated.”
They hiked up to the porch, and she tried to see the building through his eyes. It couldn’t look that big if he lived in New York. He took in the porch and the stained-glass sun above the door.
“Can we get an electronic lock?”
“Absolutely.” She pulled out her tablet to make a note and added the boba, which she really should’ve done in the first place. She reminded herself that she knew how to do this.
“With a keypad?”
She nodded, wrote that down, and drew the obvious conclusion. They wanted a keypad so that many people could come and go as they wanted without worrying about keys. How many people?
She pulled an old-fashioned key off the ledge above the door and unlocked it before handing the key to him. She’d stashed it there from the locksmith she hired and pretended it had always been there. She paid the locksmith with the promise to talk him up with her sister, Beatrice. She didn’t specify exactly what she was saying to her about him.
Tori opened the door wide and let him precede her, aware all over again how much taller he was.
He looked around the living room with its various couches and whistled. “It used to be so much bigger.”
“This house?” she asked in confusion.
“What? No. The, um, family. It’s a lot of chairs.”
Tori twirled the tablet in her hand. “And how many are you expecting on this visit?”
“Hell if I know who else is coming.”
“Look, I know they’ve got their private business, but I am a vault. If I’m going to be as effective as possible, I’m going to have to know the details.”
“Sorry, of course, it’s just I don’t know.”
“Of course.” Tori did a quick inventory of the living room. “I don’t need to know the exact number or the exact dates, but if you were impressed by the size, we’re talking less than thirty. More than one?”
He nodded. “Five to ten?”
Tori swallowed. There was a big difference between five and ten.
“Great. And ballpark arrival?”
“If he had his way, never. If she has her way, he’d already be here. Sorry, my boss and his great aunt. She runs the, um, family. I’m guessing based on experience he’ll be able to delay for three weeks but will cave before a month.”
Tori nodded, but her brain wandered a thousand miles away. The Godfather was a woman?
“Is the broadband up?” he asked after turning away from the fireplace like it was a museum exhibit he didn’t understand.
“Right.” She was used to this conversation. “It’s not going to happen. Nobody in town has it. But there are two satellites on the roof. They’re linked together to provide speeds almost as fast. This is one of those not-moving-earth situations. They hook up to a huge satellite network. Not the one from the crazy billionaire, the one that actually works, but it’s still going to be satellite. There’s going to be interference, but it’s as good as you’re going to get and better than anybody else has in a hundred square miles.”
She braced.
“Thanks.”
She should be relieved. She’d had far worse reactions to the news, but instead, she gritted her teeth. He was being completely reasonable, a lot more reasonable than many of her clients. He wasn’t acting like he had a ravening beast inside of him.
“And if we wanted to wire broadband?” he asked casually.
“It’d be a multi-county utility installation. Probably millions.”
“I’ll tell him.”
“You’ll tell him.” Oh, these people had money. Or they just really liked the internet. That didn’t sound like a werewolf thing.
She took a chance. “Any pets coming? Dogs? Parakeets? Wolves?”
He froze for half a second. “Wolves?”
“You’d be surprised around here?” she said, trying to sound sane.
“No pets,” he said after far too long. “None that need dog food, anyway.”
She squinted at him, but he didn’t say anything else, so she led him into the kitchen, where he dove for the pastry display. He picked up a round, yellow oval with a darker top. “This is the smell!”
“It’s a concha, a pastry from Mexico. Not literally from Mexico. Well, Marta is, but she baked that this morning.”
He took a huge bite and closed his eyes.
“You are magic,” Matt said when he swallowed.
Tori realized the hysterical laughter was coming from her mouth and choked. “Maybe that’s what I should call my company.” She made a note to tell Marta to expect a regular order, mostly for something to do with her hands. “Anyway. Standard hall of groceries, perishable and non-perishable weekly.” She opened the freezer. “I hope you’re not vegetarians?”
It used to be one of the first questions she asked, but now she never bothered, because the people with dietary restrictions mentioned them first, last, and at least twice in between, and the people without never mentioned food at all. He hadn’t said a word.
He stared at the white paper-wrapped bundles. “No. Definitely carnivore. Omnivore!” He corrected quickly and held up the pastry. “Obviously.”
“Right,” she said and went to the sink. “Water is on, tested. Power’s on. Obviously.”
She walked toward the pantry and opened it to show him the endless supply of popcorn and s’mores-making ingredients. “We can get up regular propane refills and septic emptying.”
“Whoa. What?”
“You have a septic system. And also a propane tank. If you practice archery, don’t aim for it.”
He grinned. “Oh, there’s a story there, isn’t there?”
“Will there be any other deliveries? I don’t have to know their business, but is it online or offline, international…”
Illegal…
“Nothing physical at all. Enterprise cyber security.”
She blinked. “So you’re the reason I keep getting antiviral pop-ups on my computer…”
“No. Enterprise, meaning really big companies, protecting their private networks, that sort of thing.”
Tori thought of the two satellites on the roof, which she had been so proud of. “I don’t think you can do that via satellite.”
“Don’t worry. The actual data centers are in upstate New York. Amato hasn’t done any actual work in a decade. And by that I mean he’s the damn CEO.”
Her brain seized on the name, the first time she’d heard it.
She coughed. “Let me show you the bedrooms. The house was completely stocked, so all the linens and blankets were from the house. Obviously, freshly laundered.”
She caught him smiling.
“What now?” She was aware she wasn’t being professional but was unable to prevent her extreme reactions to this man.
“You toss around the word ‘obviously’ pretty freely for things that are not obvious at all. I appreciate your work. You have no idea how much. I could arrange all of this in about four phone calls if we were in New York, but I don’t have any contacts here.”
She turned to him and held out a hand. “Now you have me.”
He took it and shook it gently. His hand was huge and hot, and she had to be making up the connection that sparked between them. That didn’t happen in real life.
They both dropped the handshake like they’d shocked each other.
She opened her mouth to tell him about the nearest town of Silver Spring with its charming coffee shop, bookshop/coffeeshop, and the Cauldron and Broom, the twins’ new age bookstore/teashop, which, yes, was located next to the bookstore next to the library. No one would ever accuse the small businesses of Silver Spring of competitive advantage. But if he were a wolf, he couldn’t go into town.
Was he a wolf?
