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In other words, Daniel would have Adrienne, and I should find someone as boring as me.

Lukas turned his chair sideways to the table—and to me—as he basked in the adoration of his fans.

“Excuse me,” I said to the intruders. “We’re in the middle of a meeting.”

No one acknowledged me, though I thought I saw a tightening at the corner of Lukas’s eye.

“We just couldn’t leave without telling you how excited we are that you’re in Minnesota,” one of the nymphs said, her voice dripping with honey.

“Winters can get so cold here,” said another one of the nymphs, going so far as to brush her fingers against Lukas’s arm.

Fine. Whatever. I stabbed at my French toast and shoved the last remaining bites into my mouth, waiting it out while Lukas and the nymphs continued their inane flirtation.

I tried not to listen. But when my plate was empty, and the nymphs were still eye-fucking Lukas—to the point other diners were starting to watch—I gave up. We could do this some other time. I’d had enough.

I pushed my chair back, making a scraping noise against the floor. Then I was up and out of there.

“Oh, come on, Elliette!” Lukas called out just before I reached the door.

I ignored him and clomped through the exit and out onto the sidewalk, stomping my frustration into the concrete. Fortunately for the sidewalk, I’d parked close.

Unfortunately , Lukas was a berserker wolf. He caught up to me before I reached my car. He wrapped his hand around my elbow and pulled me to a stop.

“Let go of me,” I demanded, yanking on my arm.

He released me. “Sorry. But you didn’t need to take off. Those nymphs were just leaving.”

“My time is valuable.” I walked around the front of the car, opened the door, and slid behind the wheel.

Lukas put his hand to the edge of the car door and kept me from pulling it closed. “Of course your time is valuable.”

“I don’t need another sleepless night with your headboard banging against my wall as you fuck three nymphs simultaneously.”

“ Jesus , Elliette. What the fuck?”

“You heard me.” I tugged at the door, but it didn’t budge, such was the strength of his grip.

“That wasn’t going to happen,” he said.

I let go of the door handle and looked up at his ridiculously handsome face. “Like the other night didn’t happen?”

He blew out a gust of air. “It didn’t. I wasn’t having sex. I was assembling my bed and a bookcase.”

“What?”

“What you heard wasn’t me pounding into some woman . I was pounding all the furniture pieces together. They’re up against your wall.”

“But you said?—”

“No, you said. I just didn’t correct you at the time.”

It took a second for that to sink in, and when it did, heat flooded into my cheeks. “Why do you always have to embarrass me?”

He gave me a look that said he thought I was crazy. “If you’re embarrassed by me or by anything else, Elliette, it’s your own fault. Your choice. I don’t embarrass you; you allow yourself to be embarrassed.”

“Are you kidding? You keep humiliating me. In public. On purpose.”

He scoffed. “When did I ever do that?”

My lips parted in dumbfounded disbelief. “You can’t be serious.”

“I couldn’t be any more serious. When did I intentionally embarrass you?”

I tossed my hands up, and they landed with a slap on the steering wheel. “Oh, I don’t know…maybe at a bonfire when I was eighteen?”

Lukas’s expression went blank, and a few seconds of silence passed before that familiar storm cloud settled over his face. “You’re still jacked up about that?”

“Yeah, I’m still jacked up about that.” My god, he’d eviscerated me. Just like a wolf.

“Why would you care about anything I do or say?” he asked. “Or did or said a million years ago?”

“Seven. Seven years ago.”

“Fine. Seven years ago?”

“Because, you idiot, I was eighteen, and I’d had a massive crush on you for three years.”

Something I couldn’t identify flashed in his eyes, and his throat convulsed like he suddenly found it hard to swallow. “You were my best friend’s little sister.”

“Which is one of many reasons why you should have taken more care. What do you think Evan would have done if I’d told him?”

Lukas didn’t answer that, but his pale-blue eyes glowed with the threat of an impending shift .

I’d never seen Lukas in his wolf form before. The look on his face was as terrifying as it was riveting, but nothing I wanted to see while sitting in my car outside Le Coq Gourmand.

“You were like my own little sister,” he finally said on a menacing growl. “Why would you even think of me like that?”

Before I could answer, his lip curled into a sneer. “Oh, wait… Let me guess. You liked the packaging.”

Well, there was no denying that. Who didn’t think Lukas was the most beautiful man they’d ever seen? But his looks weren’t the main reason my fifteen-year-old self had fallen for Lukas Bakken.

“That’s not why.” I looked down at my steering wheel, unable to look at him any longer.

“It isn’t?” He sounded both surprised and curious.

“Wasn’t,” I said, correcting him. “That wasn’t why I had a crush on you. Past tense. I don’t like you now .”

“Oh, right,” he said.

I kept talking to my steering wheel. “I had a crush on you because there was a time when you were nice to me, Lukas. You were the only one who truly saw me, even more so than Evan because to him I was just a little sister. But you…you protected me. You rescued me.”

I dared to look up at him, and when I did, his face was completely blank, as if I were speaking a different language, and all the color seemed to have leached out of his face.

“When I was fifteen,” I reminded him, though it didn’t look like he needed the reminder. “That night when you found me walking home. Or later…when my date to the winter formal stood me up… Or a million other examples leading up to that night at the bonfire.”

Lukas said nothing, even though I’d lain all my vulnerabilities at his feet, so easy to trample. My body bloomed with heat.

“I’d thought…since I was finally eighteen…you’d… I thought we could…”

If I said anything more, it would only betray my visceral yet unwelcome physical reaction to his presence in my life again—to the sound of his voice, to the power of his body, to the pure fantasy that he could be there for me in the future, even though he’d been absent for so long.

Lukas’s gaze remained locked on mine, his eyes like ice—not cold, but the kind that burned. And the longer he stared, the quicker my long-stifled desire buoyed up to the surface.

Who was I kidding? There was nothing past tense about my feelings for him.

As aggravating as he could be, my memories had gone soft and warm—much like the space between my legs, which was quickly turning into a puddle of need.

Suddenly, Lukas’s nostrils flared, and he jerked his head away as he’d hit sensory overload. “Jesus, Elliette.”

I pressed my legs together tight. Who would have thought my humiliation could get even worse? What I wouldn’t give for a fae’s ability to actually disappear.

“We’ll finish your interview later,” Lukas growled, the sound of his wolf slipping past his lips. “I’ve had enough for today.”

He slammed my car door shut, but I quickly lowered the window before he got too far away. Regardless how embarrassing my reaction to him was, I still had a job to do. “Where? What time?”

He stopped walking, set his hand on the hood of my car, and turned over his shoulder. “Tomorrow night. After the game. My apartment. ”

Uh…what? No.

“Six o’clock. I’ll make dinner. We won't have any adoring fans interrupting us.”

My heart pounded against my rib cage. “I thought we established we were only meeting in public.”

His lip curled. “Don’t worry. There won’t be a repeat performance of the towel incident.”

I tried to block out my memory of the towel incident and that arrow of dark hair disappearing under the single layer of white terry cloth, but it didn’t really work. “Okay, but?—”

“Lukas Bakken?” It was a man’s voice, but Lukas’s body blocked me from seeing who it was.

Lukas twisted to look in the direction of the voice, and that’s when I saw a bevy of paparazzi with their cameras aimed straight at us.

“Who’s the girl?” one of them asked.

Then it sounded like a million shutters clicking open and shut in blast mode. I closed my eyes and stuck out my arm, palm flexed up like a shield, but my reaction was too slow to do any good.

“Thanks!” one of the photographers called.

When I opened my eyes, they were all leaving and Lukas’s hand was squeezing the edge of my car’s hood so tightly, I swore he was going to dent it.

“Lukas?” I asked.

“See you in the papers,” he growled, then stormed off as if this were all my fault.

Fucking berserker .