In The Predator's Boardroom: Carrying The Alpha Billionaire's Heir novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Green Dress
At the pack's engagement party Jared calls Wynne too ordinary in front of everyone and Bree steps up wearing the ring meant for her; Wynne walks out the garden gate to a black car and a stranger who knows her name.
"You're a little ordinary, Wynne."
Jared said it into the microphone, so the whole garden heard.
Two hundred members of our werewolf pack stood under the fairy lights with champagne in their hands.
They had come to watch him announce our engagement.
I stood on the grass in a sage green dress, holding a glass I had already emptied.
I had paid for that dress with two months of diner tips.
"Don't get me wrong," Jared said, and smiled at the crowd. "I love her. But the man who leads this pack needs more than nice and quiet."
A man in the back row laughed.
Then more people laughed, low and polite.
Three phones were already held up in front of me.
My face went hot, and my wolf, who has never once been loud, curled up small inside me.
"Jared," I said. My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Let's talk about this somewhere private."
"Why?"
That was not Jared.
It was Bree.
Bree Danvers, my best friend for eight years, stepped out from behind the oak trees.
She was the one who had held my hair back when I had food poisoning last month.
She was the one who had stood in the fitting room clapping her hands, saying green was my color and Jared's mother would adore it.
She walked straight up to Jared and slid her arm through his.
"Everybody should hear it," she said. "It's kinder than letting her find out slowly."
Then she lifted her left hand to the fairy lights.
On her finger was a silver pack ring.
Winifred Lowell had shown me that ring last week.
She had told me it was being sized for me.
I looked at the ring, and then at Bree, who would not look back at me.
I looked at Jared, who was checking whether the crowd was still on his side.
It was.
Over by the buffet, Winifred Lowell watched all of it with her hands folded.
She was the Alpha of Howling Bay, and the woman who had pushed a warm casserole into my hands every Sunday for two years.
That afternoon she had hugged me at the door of the Gardens and smelled of lavender.
"Whatever happens tonight, dear," she had said, "go out by the garden gate on the road. The front lawn will be crowded with the cousins."
She had said it twice.
Now her face was gentle and sad, and she did nothing.
I understood then that nobody was going to stop this.
I understood that I had been the only person at my own engagement party who did not know what it was.
"Say it again, Jared," I said.
His smile slipped. "What?"
"Say it again, slowly. Some of them are filming and I want them to get it."
Nobody laughed that time.
Jared looked at the phones, and then at his mother, and then at nothing.
I set my empty glass down on the champagne tower, very carefully, so that it did not ring.
Then I unpinned the little silver pack badge from my collar, the one every pack girl is given when she is promised.
I dropped it into Jared's full glass.
It made a small clear sound against the crystal.
"Keep it," I said. "Bree can have the dress too, if she wants it. She picked it."
Bree finally looked at me.
Her mouth opened, and for one second I thought she would say something true.
She said nothing.
So I stepped out.
I walked across the manicured grass with two hundred wolves pretending not to stare, and my heels sank into the lawn with every step.
I did not run.
I did not cry until I had gone through the iron gate at the back of the Gardens, where the path ran down to the road.
Then it came all at once, hard enough that I had to stop and hold the cold bars.
I had worked every morning shift for two years.
I had given them my whole weekend, my Sundays, my trust.
Rain started to fall on the gravel.
A car engine idled at the bottom of the path.
It was not Winifred's driver, and it was not one of the pack's trucks.
It was a long black car with its headlights off.
The back door opened and a man got out.
He was tall and bareheaded in the rain, in a charcoal suit that had cost more than my whole year of rent.
He looked at my face, at the gate behind me, and at the glow of the party up the hill.
"Miss Tarrant," he said.
I had never seen him before in my life.
"How do you know my name?" I said.
"I read the guest list," he said. "You shouldn't walk home in this rain. Get in the car."
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