More Wicked Alphas, Wilder Nights: Sizzling Collection of Paranormal Romance (Wicked Alphas, Wild Nights Book 5) (20 page)

“I thought we could tell them,” Danny said with a sly tone, “that we were engaged.”

“En-what now?”

Danny pushed her panties aside expertly and slid one finger into her burning heat. “Sarah Honeywell, will you marry me?”

“Fuck yes,” she groaned.

When they arrived at Danny’s flat, much later than anticipated, reeking of sex and with big grins on their faces, Sarah was shocked to realize she’d never been inside his home before. If you would have asked her, she would have said of course she had. If pressed on details she would have described your basic minimalist modern apartment appropriate for an architect like Danny.

The reality was far better.

He had a converted warehouse in the Dogpatch neighborhood all to himself. He’d done right by it, too. Four stories tall on the outside, on the inside it was all expansive views of the bay and elegantly assembled rooms with just the right amount of vintage wooden furniture. It was as if he’d built a massive-yet-cozy Victorian hidden within the rough exterior of the warehouse. On the outside, it even still bore a sign that read “Murphy & Sons, Shipbuilders.”

“Your home is incredible,” Sarah gasped when she entered. “Did you decorate it by yourself?”

“I wish I could take credit for that.” Danny said. “But I had help. A lot of help.”

Sarah braced herself for him mentioning some devastatingly gorgeous ex who’d hand-picked everything. It was a hot, primal stab of jealousy that came out of nowhere to pierce her heart. He’d had so many lovers before her—a staggering number—she’d have to come to terms with them.

“I picked it out, honey,” said a voice echoing from within the cavernous living room. Sarah recognized it as belonging to Pretty Brandon, one of Danny’s pack. She walked deeper into the living room and saw him, dressed to the nines in a bespoke slate gray suit, sitting on a sofa long enough for twelve people to stretch out on. Beside him, the heavily tattooed and silent Rhett and ever-well-meaning Good Boy perched, playing video games.

Without glancing up, Rhett grunted something that sounded almost like “Congrats,” and Good Boy turned a big warm-hearted grin her direction. “It’s a good thing you found your mates. With each other,” he said before turning his attention to the game.

“Hey guys,” Danny said. “We’re going to throw a party. A giant party. Tonight.”

The magnificent house Danny had built—it was hers now. It was all hers. No more roommates in the Mission. No more staircases that wobbled as you walked on them. No more rats and roaches and street noise and stepping over plates of nachos that her neighbors inexplicably left on her doorstep at night. She had a home. A real home. And someone she loved to share it with.

Pretty Brandon leapt to action, whipping out his smartphone. “What kind of party?”

“Our engagement party,” Danny said. He walked past Sarah into the den and the scent of him made her knees tremble. This beautiful, handsome man was her mate. It was unreal. She watched as he removed his jacket and unbuttoned his shirt, stripping down to a tank top. The low light in the den cast glowing shadows across his broad shoulders and she sighed audibly. Showing him off to her family would be fun. Her mom would freak.

Danny touched his forehead to each of his pack in turn, bumping noses with them for the space of a breath. Their demeanor changed as he did it, as if they became more calm, more focused. Rhett and Good Boy didn’t even mind that Danny interrupted their game.

Sarah sat down with Brandon and made a guest list while Danny sent Rhett and Good Boy out for supplies. “Please make sure you pay for everything,” he said in a careful tone. “I don’t want to hear any stories on the news tomorrow about bears stealing kegs from liquor stores.”

At one point, in the not so distant past, Danny and his pack had been bank robbers. He’d given it up to go straight, but the other three hadn’t managed to entirely give up their love of crime.

“I’ll pay for what we need,” Rhett rasped. “Consider it an anniversary present.”

Good Boy laughed loudly, but agreed to nothing. With a shopping list in hand, they went off.

Sarah and Danny and Brandon worked the phones, calling and texting and Facebook messaging everyone they could.

The party would happen that night.

The world would know that Sarah and Danny were together, for real.

And her life would be forever altered.

Sarah didn’t know whose friends were more in shock, hers or Danny’s.

They filed into the party at his house—
their
 house—in a state of bemused wonder. None of them had seen his home before. Unlike many architects who had created something wonderful for themselves, he hadn’t shared it with the world until now. For reasons that were obvious to Sarah, Danny was a private person. He was warm and charming and generous to a fault, but also private. She didn’t know what sharing his world with their friends was costing him on a psychic level, but it likely wasn’t easy.

Many of their shared friends shot her a knowing look as they entered. Sly grins all around. Danny was right when he suggested their friends had seen the spark between them, even though they hadn’t. Claire Dee whispered, “It’s about time,” when she hugged Sarah in the foyer, which was the prevailing sentiment.

The buzz amongst their co-workers and Danny’s guy friends was that he must finally be opening his own firm. It was a secret launch party for an architecture start-up. They took one look at Sarah standing slightly too close to Danny and saw her as his business partner, not as his mate. That was fine. They’d see her in a new light soon enough.

She’d wanted to tell everyone as they came in. She trembled with the secret, but Danny said that’d ruin the surprise. He wanted everyone there, even her parents on a video chat, before the announcement. But it was so tempting to pull aside her closest friends, like Anna and just let it all out.

The handful of her ex-boyfriends that Pretty Brandon had invited had no idea what was going on. Brandon had gone above and beyond the guest list, sifting through her Facebook friend list, inviting anyone that seemed appropriate. This also meant that her dentist was at the party as well as at least a dozen people she didn’t recognize at all who claimed they knew her from elementary school. He’d done the same to Danny, inviting ex-girlfriends and college friends who hadn’t seen him in person in years. Brandon had an idea about how many people should be at a party, and the idea was “all of them.”

“What is going on?” her friend Natalie asked, pulling her into a conspiratorial hug. “You are seriously glowing. Did you just get back from a spa weekend, you bitch?”

“No way,” said another friend, Anna. “I know that glow. Sister here has been getting laid on the reg, right?” Anna wiggled her body in a lewd dance making grunting noises, until she realized everyone in earshot was watching her.

“It’s a surprise,” Sarah said. “I really can’t say any more.”

Natalie glanced at Danny across the party. “Mmm hmm. You don’t even need to.”

“It’s about goddamn time,” Anna added. Then in an excited whisper added, “How was he?”

Danny glanced over at them then. He was the tallest man there, standing head and shoulders above the crowd. With his shifter senses he must have heard Anna’s question. He cocked an eyebrow at Sarah, as if asking
Are you going to answer his question?

“The best,” Sarah said, her eyes locked with Danny’s across the party. “Seriously the best.”

“I need a big man like that,” Anna said, frustration dripping from her voice. “I’m tired of these skinny little hipster boys I keep finding on Tinder. I’m always worried I’m going to break them with my thighs.” Anna had curves to rival Sarah’s and zero hesitation about using them.

“What about that one?” Natalie nodded her head at Rhett. He was leaning against a far wall, in shadows, pointedly not talking to anyone.

“Yeah girl,” Anna said. “I could ride that all night. He’s almost as big as Danny and after these techie boys I could use a big rough man.”

“His name is Rhett,” Sarah said, pronouncing his name loud enough so the big man couldn’t miss it with his enhanced senses. “He’s been Danny’s friend since childhood. I could introduce you if you’d like?”

But then another group of friends arrived and peppered Sarah with a thousand questions. Her head spun from all the attention.

She was dressed to the nines in a little black dress that hug her curves rather more snugly than she liked—Brandon picked it out and had it messengered over. Around her neck was a string of fat pearls that Good Boy said were from a bank he’d robbed in Brazil last year. He whispered the value of them to her with his lopsided grin and immediately Sarah felt very weird wearing them in public. They were worth more than everything she owned put together. They were wedding presents, she realized only too late. Danny’s packmates were presenting her with wedding presents.

Sarah had known about the pack for years, ever since she’d found out that Danny was a bear. But it wasn’t until they started giving her gifts and doting on her that she realized what they would be to her going forward. As Danny’s mate, she was now inextricably and implicitly part of his pack. These strange shifters, these bank robbers and con artists and men of violence, were now family to her.

Rhett’s gift came later. He was the member of the pack Sarah knew least well. He kept to himself and rarely spoke. He was tattooed and scarred, even more muscled than Danny, but given to sitting a little farther away from everyone. At first Sarah took it for dislike, but then she realized it was a form of shyness. He approached her before the announcement, wheeling out a silver cart with a massive selection of chilled wine on top.

“Sarah Honeywell,” he said, bowing his head deeply as if she was the queen of all shifters or something. “This is my gift to you.” He nodded stiffly at the cart full of wine and stepped back. Was he blushing? The big man looked out of place in the formal wear Danny had insisted that the pack wear. He tugged at the collar when he thought no one was looking, as if he couldn’t wait to be shirtless again.

“Thank you, Rhett,” Sarah said carefully. “It’s . . . wine?”

“I’m sorry,” he rasped. “Spend so much time with shifters. Forget how to talk to mortals sometimes.” He hefted one of the bottles in a practiced motion and handed it to her. “We all of us did different things with the money. Brandon lives big and flashy and spends it as fast as he can. Danny invested it. Good Boy—no one knows what Good Boy did with his share. But me, I bought a little piece of land up north. I have a farm up there. Some grapes. Some cattle. It’s a lot for just me to handle and one day I hope to find a mate like you.” He blushed a deep scarlet color that made the scars on his face stand out like spiderwebs in the morning sun. “I mean, aww hell, you know what I mean.”

It was more words than she’d heard Rhett say all week. And in a row no less. “Thank you, Rhett. I’m honored.”

“It’s my wine. I don’t have a name for it or even labels. But it’s good and honest.” He took the back of her head in his hand in one quick motion and pulled her close and for a second Sarah was terrified he was trying to kiss her, but instead he pressed his forehead and nose against hers in the same way she’d seen him do with Danny. “I pledge myself,” she heard him whisper. And then he released her like nothing had happened. Everyone nearby gave them weird looks, and Sarah’s discomfort with crowds edged up another notch. She fought the urge to run outside, to find solitude.

“What kind of wine is it?” she asked, focusing on what was in front of her and ignoring the stares. “The bottles are so dark that I can’t tell. Is it a merlot or a zinfandel? I have to say, despite living here for years I know very little about wine outside of Two-Buck Chuck.”

“It’s a white,” Rhett said, his eyes scanning the crowd. “Sort of unique. But go easy on it. I spilled shifter blood on the crops and there’s a little something extra in the wine.”

“Shifter blood?”

“Don’t worry. It wasn’t mine.”

Across the party, her friend Anna was undressing Rhett with her eyes. She was never very subtle.

“You mind if I fuck your friend over there?” Rhett asked.

“Go for it,” Sarah said. “She’s an amazing person. Just wait until after the announcement, okay?”

The announcement was preceded by the passing around of Rhett’s magical wine. Brandon and Good Boy delivered it themselves, pressing glasses into people’s hands with charming bon mots and growls, respectively. Sarah wondered if some of the wealthy business associates at the party would turn their noses up at the unlabeled bottles, but the opposite was true. They took the rough exterior as a sign of hidden depths, not that Rhett noticed. He’d slipped off with Anna into a dark corner.

The wine tasted amazing. It wasn’t too sweet or dry or acidic or watery. The flavor was like drinking spring itself, full of possibilities and joy and beginnings. It went straight to her head, straight to everyone’s heads.

“I’d like to make an announcement,” Danny said. And to the crowd’s credit, they immediately shut up.

On a laptop screen across the room, Sarah’s parents watched from halfway across the country. She’d barely had time to chat with them. A bottle of Rhett’s wine stood on the table between them. They had an idea of what was going to happen and were bubbling with excitement.

Later Sarah would ask Brandon how he’d delivered the wine across country in a matter of hours and he’d just smile and refuse to answer.

“I’ve spent my whole life searching,” Danny began. “I left my small home town and searched for a better way to live and found hints of promise in this magical city. And within this city I searched first for myself, for who I was at heart. And even when I found my calling as an architect, I wasn’t done searching. I built this home, but what is a home without a family? It’s just a building, beautiful and empty. And that was me, until very recently.” He sipped the wine and smiled at the hushed onlookers.

Sarah’s heart pounded in her chest. It was happening. It was really happening.

Danny continued, “It’s no secret that I’ve been a bit of a player.”