On the Prowl (2 page)

De Santos enveloped her hand in his much larger one and raised it to his lips. “I find myself unexpectedly delighted as well, my dear. I would not have missed this evening for the world.”

His lips brushed the backs of her fingers, and Saskia blinked. In spite of years of instruction in etiquette and social rituals, in spite of finishing school in Switzerland and one memorable tea at Windsor Castle, she’d never had any man kiss her hand before. It should have looked and felt ridiculous, but Rafael De Santos carried it off as if the custom hadn’t died a century before. On him, the courtly act seemed completely natural, even expected.

Before Saskia could decide how to respond, the Felix had released her hand with a gentle squeeze, nodded briefly to Nicolas, and blended back into the crowd moving through the exit. Blowing out a discreet breath, she struggled to regain her equilibrium. Rafael De Santos was a force of nature. She’d heard stories about his potent charm and seductive wiles, but she’d never expected to experience them for herself. No wonder women supposedly dropped at his feet like autumn leaves. Saskia had zero interest in the man yet even she had felt a brief tug of fascinated attraction. The man should come with a warning label.

Nicolas shifted behind her, dragging her attention back to the matter at hand. They still had a couple hundred guests to farewell, and if she wanted to make it home to her bed and her painkillers before lunchtime tomorrow she needed to keep herself focused. Automatically she tilted her head back to offer her fiancé a reassuring smile, but his expression made her falter. His green eyes looked cool and distant and flicked immediately away from her. His hand at her hip withdrew, and his body canted subtly away as he murmured something polite and benign to the senior partner of a well-respected and ancient law firm. She couldn’t quite shake the feeling that she’d been simultaneously rebuked and dismissed.

But for what?

“Great party. Thanks for the invite. Good luck, and all that.”

This time, the voice that snapped her back to awareness was female, unaccented, and slightly ill at ease. Instinct and training pressed Saskia to fix that at once.

“We’re so happy you were able to join us,” she said, infusing her smile with extra warmth. She didn’t immediately recognize the woman before her, but something about the olive-skinned brunette tickled at the edge of Saskia’s subconscious. She usually excelled at remembering names and faces. “Please tell me you enjoyed yourself at least a little.”

The woman grinned in spite of her discomfort. “Well, the champagne was first rate, and those stuffed mushroom thingies they passed around before dinner tasted like an orgasm on a plate, so that’s something. More than I can usually expect from a work gig.”

Work. Ah, yes. This was the reporter from the
Chronicle.
Father had insisted she be invited, even though she didn’t normally write a social column. Something about a connection with both the Council and the Faerie Summer Court. Saskia eyed her with renewed interest.

“I find that adding in a bit of pleasure tends to make work both more enjoyable and more successful, Ms. D’Alessandro,” she said, pulling the name out of her mental database and smiling. “With luck, you’ll find that to be equally true.”

“‘Corinne,’ please,” the woman said, rolling her eyes. “Don’t make me look around this crowd for my mother. I can only take so much trauma.”

Saskia laughed, genuinely. She liked people with a sense of humor. “Corinne, then. Can I tell myself you had a good time? Please? It will help me sleep, you know. I’d hate to think anyone found my engagement dinner a chore.”

Something flashed behind Corinne’s eyes, but it happened so fast, Saskia barely had time to recognize it, let alone decide what it meant.

“It was a great dinner,” Corinne said. “Totally yummy. And I should say congratulations. I hope everything works out for you guys.”

It wasn’t difficult to read the genuine sentiment behind the woman’s words, nor the doubt that laced them. It wasn’t anything Saskia hadn’t encountered before. Very few people anymore understood the reasoning behind arranged marriages, and almost no one in America did. It might be the way the Tiguri had always done things, but Americans had deserted the practice along with horse-drawn plows and whale oil lanterns.

She smiled. “Thank you. I assure you, everything will be perfect.” Impulsively she reached out and squeezed the reporter’s hand. “Believe me.”

Brown eyes locked with her own and studied her for a long minute. When she spoke again, Corinne was frowning and smiling at the same time. Her brows still drew together, but her mouth had curved into a wry expression. “You know, I think you really mean that.” She paused, appeared to debate something with herself, then reached into her small evening clutch and pulled out a cream-colored business card. “I have to admit, I’m fascinated by your whole story. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d love to pick your brain about it at some point. My office number is on there. Maybe we could have a drink sometime and talk?”

Saskia tucked the card into her own bag. She couldn’t explain why, but she liked this reporter right away. Saskia wouldn’t mind meeting her for a drink sometime, maybe indulging in some girl talk. After all, Saskia had spent most of the last ten years in Europe and all her close friends were still there. It would be nice to make friends with someone more available.

“If you’re hoping alcohol will steal away my inhibitions and loosen my tongue, you’d be absolutely right.” Saskia grinned. “I have a pretty low tolerance. But I’m afraid it won’t help you discover anything scandalous about my engagement. There’s nothing so exciting to it. We’re just like any other couple.”

Corinne snorted. “Like any
Other
couple, maybe.”

Saskia felt her eyes widen and she scanned the crowd around them reflexively, searching for anyone who might have overheard her but perhaps shouldn’t. She knew the Other community in New York still felt very strongly about protecting their secrecy from the humans. In a mixed crowd like this one, the challenge of remaining undiscovered tended to require extra vigilance.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Corinne said, drawing Saskia’s focus back to her. “I’m part of one of those couples myself. My fiancé is … special. I wouldn’t let the cat out of the bag, even if he did manage to wriggle out of coming with me tonight.”

Saskia let herself relax. “Well, then, you shouldn’t have any questions about me. It’s all perfectly ordinary, I assure you.”

The reporter looked from Saskia, to her fiancé, currently schmoozing with her father and the head of a major movie studio, to her future father-in-law, currently glaring at the reporter, and back to Saskia. “Hm. Keep telling yourself that, toots.” She stepped back and raised a hand in farewell. “Anyway, call me sometime. Even if I can’t pick your brain. You’re new in town. I can show you around, introduce you to some of my friends. We all have … similar interests, you might say.”

Saskia smiled in agreement and Corinne moved away, threading purposefully through the crowd and out toward the hotel lobby. Saskia watched her go for a second, then turned back toward her other guests. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Stefan still frowning, but now the expression was aimed at her.

What was his problem? she wondered. She’d never gotten the impression that Stefan Preda liked her very much, despite the fact that he’d pursued the engagement between her and his son with as much assiduousness as her own father. She knew the former head of his streak wanted intensely for the Preda and Arcos clans to be united. As they were two of the oldest and highest-ranking families of tiger shifters left in the world, the move would solidify their power and shove the other four remaining clans firmly onto a lower tier of the rigid Tiguri hierarchy. For it to happen, Nicolas Preda had to marry her. It was that simple.

Pushing the question of her future father-in-law’s mood to the back of her mind, Saskia mustered up another social smile and got back to the task at hand. Time to show the crème of New York society exactly how happy she was to have landed herself a man such as Nicolas Preda.

*   *   *

Nic realized early on that the party was going to last until approximately the end of time. The invitations had requested the guests arrive at 7:00
P.M.
By 7:45 he had had his fill of glad-handing politicians and schmoozing executives, and by 8:00 he’d had enough of his future father-in-law. Gregor Arcos was a highly intelligent, crafty old sonofabitch, a man who had inherited his place in the world but who hadn’t been afraid to fight to keep it, and to fight dirty if he had to. That was a quality Nic could respect. What drove him crazy was the way Arcos seemed to believe that by getting Nic to marry his daughter he’d somehow acquired the power to control or guide Nic’s actions. Nic would have to find a way to disabuse the man of that notion, and quickly, without sparking a full-fledged battle of wills. Nic had no doubt he’d win—eventually—but he wasn’t prepared to risk the collateral damage. Not unless he had no other choice.

By 8:15, his own father had appeared on Nic’s shit list. Stefan Preda knew better than to let his son see his attempts at manipulation, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t working behind the scenes with all the determination and finesse of a master puppeteer. He might realize laying a hand on Nic’s strings was a bad move, but he showed no compunction about tugging Gregor’s here and there, or about doing his best to gather Saskia’s strings into his controlling grasp.

Nic couldn’t decide how he felt about that. Intellectually, he knew his father’s end goal was nearly the same as his own—to carve out a secure and significant niche for the Preda and Arcos streaks in Manhattan and to ensure the future of the Tiguri in local Other society, including winning a place on the Council of Others. The problem was that Nic’s social ambitions ended there. He reserved his other plans for his business, the family company he’d recently taken over from his father. Maybe that was part of the problem. Maybe now Stefan had too much time on his hands and the elder Preda was out to control Saskia from a sense of boredom or uselessness.

Maybe that was it, but either way, Nic found himself less than pleased over the way his father had treated his fiancée over the course of the evening, which was odd. He hadn’t expected to particularly care one way or the other. Oh, he would never tolerate anyone treating the woman with disrespect; to do so would be to show disrespect to Nic and his family, as well; that wasn’t the sort of thing a
ther
—a dominant male—would countenance. Still, Nic hadn’t expected the possessive instincts the small female seemed to call up within him. At least, not at this point in the relationship. Later, after they were mated in truth, he figured thousands of years of species memory would likely make him damned possessive where his woman was concerned. But now? They barely knew each other. It was too early for the beast inside him to be growling every time someone so much as said boo to Saskia Arcos.

Nic had struggled with the feeling all night. First, he noticed it when he and his father had gathered with the Arcoses before the party began. The families had known each other for generations, so the regular meet-and-greet introductions hadn’t been necessary. Nic had shaken hands with Gregor and his wife, Victoria, formally slid his ring on Saskia’s slender finger, and offered to pour everyone drinks. Fifteen minutes of polite chitchat and the party could get rolling.

Something unexpected had happened, though, the minute Nic slipped the diamond and platinum engagement ring past his fiancée’s knuckle. Although he hadn’t seen Saskia Arcos in almost twenty years, he hadn’t had any trouble recognizing her. With her pale, creamy skin, red-tinged blond hair, and huge blue eyes, she still bore a striking resemblance to the eight-year-old waif who had dogged his footsteps throughout the entire week he and his parents had spent at Shadelea, the Arcos summer home in the English midlands.

While their fathers had taken the first steps in negotiating an alliance between the two streaks, Nic had roamed restlessly around the aristocratic old estate, stretching his legs on long walks, tiring himself out with neck-and-nothing gallops over the hills, and relishing the UK drinking-age laws down at the village pub. Little Saskia had even followed him into that dim, smoky building, settling herself quietly in a corner with a coloring book and a cup of tea, keeping her hands busy even as her attention remained entirely focused on the baffled nineteen-year-old Nic. No one at the pub had commented on her presence, least of all Nic. He’d been deadly frightened that if he acknowledged her presence he would somehow be obliged to take care of her, and he’d had no desire at the time to take care of anyone. He’d still been learning to take care of himself.

Saskia had never asked anything of him, though. Not during that whole vacation. She’d literally become his shadow, following him everywhere, staying a few steps behind him, observing everything but never speaking. It was odd how she’d never said a word to him and yet still managed to drag him through a minefield of unexpected emotions. At first he’d found her dogged attention amusing, maybe a little flattering, but like any nineteen-year-old boy, his amusement had quickly turned to annoyance. He’d tried a million tricks to get rid of her, but even the few times he’d managed to give her the slip she’d always managed to pop back up within an hour or two, still silent but ever more determined. When he’d run out of ideas for getting rid of her that didn’t cross the line into outright cruelty or physical harm, he’d allowed his annoyance to shift into bafflement and then resignation. He still hadn’t spoken to the girl, nor she to him, but he’d grown accustomed to her presence just behind him, and when he and his parents had finally left Shadelea he’d felt somehow naked and exposed without her at his back.

Funny, but he’d forgotten all about that strange feeling until tonight, when the grown-up version of that little girl had once again become glued to his side like a shadow. Her presence brought those memories rushing back, but things felt different now. Saskia Arcos wasn’t eight years old anymore. She was twenty-eight and very clearly a woman full grown. Her skin and hair and eyes might look just as he’d remembered, but the slight, gangly frame of the girl he had ignored had lengthened, matured, and filled out in some very interesting places, each of them showcased in the strapless gown that floated around her every time she moved. The muted shades of orange and gold made her skin glow and her hair burn and the sweet sprinkling of freckles dusting her shoulders looked like a fine coating of cinnamon sugar. Nic couldn’t wait to lean down and taste them.