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“Is everything okay?” he croaked once we were out of earshot of the others. “There’s paperwork?”

I laughed, pressing my sharp canine into my bottom lip. “Not exactly. Nothing that couldn’t wait. I just wasn’t ready to let go of you yet.”

25

Dakota

Iwas in an alternate dimension. That was the only possible explanation.

I’d never been in any situation before where Donnie hadn’t become the center of everyone’s attention. Everyone loved Donnie, always.

Except my coworkers did not.

Was it a werewolf thing? Did he smell bad to them? Or was it because I smelled pitiful and jealous, so they’d gotten protective of me?

I had no idea how to react, other than the way I always instinctively reacted when Jax got close to me. I pulled him even closer.

Maybe it was me being inexperienced, or immature, or something else bad, but it didn’t feel bad. It felt like getting closer to Jax could only be right and good.

He tugged me up against him as we walked to the office, and I leaned into him.

It felt odd, going into the office after hours, when everything was dark and locked down. Not that the night security man stopped us—quite the contrary, he greeted Jax with a smile and a nod. It was just strange to even be there when all the lights were out, and the only noise was the whirring of a vacuum cleaner in one of the offices. Maybe mine.

Jax took me to his own office and started fiddling with his computer, so I glanced over his shoulder. An expense report about the karaoke bar. I tried not to swallow hard as he typed in the amount of money the company had spent on that private room and everyone’s food and drinks, but it was more than I’d ever seen in one place, for sure.

“I should... Donnie isn’t an employee. I can pay for?—”

“You didn’t invite him,” Jax said, smiling at me, then reaching over to squeeze my hand. “If I were annoyed with the expense of him, I’d be asking him to pay his way, not you.”

It was a valid point, but if I hadn’t been there, Donnie would never have thought to crash a random company’s private party.

Come to think of it, I wasn’t sure why he’d thought it appropriate to crash this private party. Just because I was there? What if my coworkers had been less accommodating? I could have gotten fired for this. How had he even found us?

Suddenly, I was angry. Donnie had basically been trying to sabotage my whole job, from which I was going to be paying half the damned rent. What would I have done if I’d gotten fired over this?

“You’re not going to fire me because of what he did, are you?”

This time, Jax looked flummoxed. “Do what?”

“I... that is, it was incredibly inappropriate of him to show up. He interrupted work, and he could have put the whole Igarashi merger in danger, if Minori had turned out to be anything like what I thought she was. It was a real dick move on his part.”

“It was,” Jax agreed, nodding. “But I don’t see what that has to do with you, your roommate acting inappropriately.”

“He wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t work for you,” I pointed out, like maybe I wanted Jax to find fault. To fire me. “It’s a more rational reason to fire me than because I’m a mage.”

Jax winced at the point, then shook his head. “It’s really not.” He turned back to the report, then shook his head and turned to me, tugging me down to sit on his lap. I lifted a brow at the position, but didn’t say anything, so he just started talking. “I’m a wolf, Dakota. You’re a mage.”

“Yes, Tarzan, I was aware. You’re the one who told me all this to begin with, remember?” I patted him on the cheek, and if it was a little patronizing, well, he’d started that.

He sighed, like I was being particularly difficult. “I want to bite you. No, more than that. Every time I get near your skin, I have an instinct screaming at me to bite you. Make you irrevocably mine. Make you part of my pack. Keep you forever.”

Suddenly, the office was very dry. I needed a drink of water, badly.

“And that’s... I’m sorry, how is that not a good thing? It kind of sounds amazing to me.”

He groaned, dropping his head onto my shoulder. “You’re not helping, Dakota. You’re not—you can’t—Mages can’t be werewolves. If I bite you, and you do become a werewolf, you won’t have magic anymore. I’ll be taking your magic from you. If you don’t become a werewolf, well, you might just die.”

Oh.