In The Predator's Boardroom: Carrying The Alpha Billionaire's Heir novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: Ask Me Again

Dashiell Crane takes Wynne to a pier bar, she kisses him and he stops her, and at his hotel door she says she has no home to go to.

I got in the car because the other choice was walking four miles in heels with a hundred phones still recording me.

The seat was warm and smelled of cedar and rain.

He got in on the other side and told the driver, "The pier."

The driver pulled away without a word.

"You know my name," I said. "You didn't tell me yours."

"Dashiell Crane."

I knew it.

His face was on the side of the ferry terminal in Seattle, above the words Crane Harbor Group, and every wolf on this coast knew the Tidewater Alpha by name.

I had poured his coffee once, two summers ago, when he stopped at the Salt Cellar Diner with three men in suits.

He had not looked up from his phone.

"You were at the party," I said.

"I was invited."

"Why?"

"Business," he said. "It's finished."

That was all I got, and he did not ask me a single thing about the pack.

I noticed that, even then.

Everyone else I knew would have wanted the whole story, with details, so they could carry it home.

He took off his jacket and put it around my shoulders.

It was heavy and dry, and I realized I was shaking.

"They filmed it," I said. My voice cracked. "Every phone in that garden. By morning the entire coast will have seen it."

"Then the entire coast will see you walk out with your head up."

I laughed, and it came out ugly.

"I walked out crying."

"You walked out after you put your badge in his drink," Dashiell said. "I watched from the gate. That's the part they will play."

I looked at him.

He was looking out the window at the rain.

The pier bar was a long wooden room over the water with one bartender and nobody else.

Dashiell ordered whiskey for me and water for himself.

I drank the first glass in two swallows.

"Why aren't you drinking?" I asked.

"I'm driving," he said.

"You have a driver."

"I drive better than he does."

I almost smiled.

I drank the second glass slower and told him about the ring.

I told him Winifred had shown it to me last week, and how I had looked at it and let myself believe it was mine.

I told him about Bree, and the food poisoning, and the fitting room.

He listened without saying anything stupid.

He did not tell me they were not worth it, or that I deserved better, or any of the things people say.

When I finished he said, "She smiled at you in that fitting room because she already knew."

"Yes," I said. "I know that now."

"Good. Don't forgive it."

"I wasn't planning on it."

"You'll want to," he said. "Around next week. Don't."

I stared at him.

The corner of his mouth moved, very slightly, and it changed his whole face.

His eyes were dark grey, and when he looked at me properly, I felt it in my stomach.

The whiskey had made my chest warm.

His jacket still smelled of cedar and of him.

I had spent two years being kissed carefully by a boy who was always checking who was watching.

I put my glass down.

"I'm going to kiss you," I said.

"Are you?"

"Yes."

I leaned across the little table, and he did not move away.

His mouth was warm and sure, and for a few seconds he kissed me back, slow and hungry.

His hand came up to my jaw, and I heard my own small sound.

Then he took his hand away.

"No," he said. His voice was low and rough.

"No?"

"You've had two whiskeys and the worst night of your life, Miss Tarrant."

"I'm not crying anymore."

"You were forty minutes ago." His thumb brushed once across my lower lip, and then he lowered his hand. "I don't take what's handed to me while someone is bleeding. Ask me again when you've slept."

My face burned.

"That's a very convenient speech," I said.

"It's a true one."

He paid the bartender and put me back in the car.

I sat there with his jacket around me and my lips still stinging, and I watched him not look at me the whole way along the water.

The car stopped under a glass awning.

The sign above the doors said The Pier Hotel.

It was lit gold, and it was a mile from every person I knew.

Dashiell came around and opened my door.

"The driver will take you wherever you want to go," he said. "Home, a friend's, anywhere. Or I have a room here tonight and nobody in it but you."

"Where would you be?"

His jaw tightened.

"Upstairs," he said. "In the room beside yours."

I thought of my apartment.

I thought of Bree's key, still on my ring, and the pack's whole town waiting there to be sorry for me.

I thought of the garden, and Winifred's folded hands.

Dashiell held the door and did not push.

"Last chance to go home," he said.

"I don't have one," I said.

I got out of the car.

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