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But this new agreement? Getting married? Forming a proper pack with a wife? It’s so far beyond anything I could have imagined would happen after this merger, and it feels like my life is about to spiral into chaos.
Xavier is usually easy enough to get along with. He walks the midline, remaining cool and charming while Dominic and I butt heads over every little thing that needs to be done. Sometimes Xavier and I switch positions, and I’m the middle ground between him and Dominic, but there is always someone on the other side of the conflict. Dominic is headstrong, stubborn, andtoo used to getting his own way. He charges through life and arguments like he expects everything around him to fall in line the way he wants them to.
I’m still getting used to their personalities and figuring out where to take our newly formed conglomerate, and now this.
Now we’re a pack. Now we’re going to have a wife.
Just the word ‘wife’ makes me tense, and I have to force myself not to clench my jaw.
“We’re here, Mr. Blackwell,” Jonas says, and I blink, shutting down that line of thinking.
I focus on where we are, noting that we’re not that far from the Vantage offices, but we might as well be in a completely different city for how different it looks.
Where our building is in a thriving downtown area, with coffee shops and trendy little shops lining the streets between office high rises and apartment buildings, this area is much less developed.
There’s a convenience store advertising cigarettes and half price six packs of some off brand beer on the corner, and people hanging out in front of the rundown apartment complex Jonas has pulled us into.
The pavement is cracked, a massive pothole at one end of it, in front of an overflowing dumpster. Laundry and bicycles hang from fire escapes and balconies. The whole thing seems to be held together with cracking plaster and peeling paint.
Three buildings make up this area of the complex, with concrete breezeways between them. A group of teenagers hang out in one of them, smoking and laughing. A woman walks by, pushing a stroller, and she dodges around a smaller pothole in the parking lot to get to the stairwell that disappears around the back of the building.
A door opens at the middle building, and a familiar figure steps out, walking down the crooked stairs to the parking lot.
Penelope.
I watch her through the tinted window of the car, taking in everything. The way she carries herself, glancing around the parking lot like she’s checking to make sure it’s safe to keep walking before she leaves the dubious safety of the building’s awning. She’s breathing slightly harder, like she rushed out of her apartment to meet us, and she takes a second to collect herself.
Her auburn hair is pulled up into a high ponytail, sending the thick locks cascading to her shoulders as she walks. When she gets closer, I can see she’s dressed nicely in a sage green dress that hugs her curves and falls to her ankles. The neckline is wide enough to show just a bit of her shoulders and good stretch of her chest, but it’s modest enough that it’s just a glimpse. Just enough to keep you looking.
I can see when she notices the car, and it must stand out in the parking lot full of cars at least fifteen years older than this one is. She hurries over, her teeth sunk into her bottom lip.
There’s a pull as she comes closer, like something in me wants to meet her halfway. I ignore it and stay in the car.
She’s attractive, that much I can admit to myself. Her skin is soft, her face is intriguing, and she smells edible. But it’s irrelevant to what we’re here for. Irrelevant to everything, really. So I try to push it away, ignoring the pull that makes me want to be closer to her.
We’ll be close enough when she gets out of the car.
Jonas hops out of the driver’s seat as soon as Penelope approaches the car.
“Ms. Dalton?” he asks, smiling at her.
Penelope smiles back, a little caught off guard. “That’s me,” she says. “But please, just call me Penelope. We don’t have to be so formal, right?”
“If that’s what you want,” Jonas says, and I can hear the surprise in his voice. He’s been a driver for long enough that he knows this isn’t how it usually goes.
Most people wouldn’t even bother to address him beyond telling him where he needs to take them.
“It is,” Penelope says. “You’re doing me a favor anyway.”
“I’m just doing my job,” Jonas insists. He opens the door to the backseat for her, and she slides in.
Up close, her scent is distracting. Lemon, lavender, vanilla frosting. It should be sickly sweet and cloying, but somehow it’s light enough that it works for her.
“Thank you,” she says to Jonas as he closes the door and gets back in the car. Then she turns to me and her smile dims a little with what are obviously nerves.
In the time she’s worked at Vantage, we haven’t had a reason to be alone together. She’s dealt mostly with Xavier if she needs to deal with any of us, and I can tell she’s not sure what to make of me.
“Hi, Mr. Blackwell,” she says, sounding almost shy.