chapter Two
I was in hell.
In my twenty-three years, I had hunted vampires, chased errant fae and even decapitated a demon. But none of them could hold a candle to the horror I had to face tonight.
Kimberly.
Or Miss Kimberly Kaitlyn Carlyle, as she introduced herself to me the first time. Her wrist was jangly with gold Tiffany bangles, and her nails were fake gel talons that gave me a shudder when they brushed against my skin.
“I simply adore your sweater,” she drawled, putting too much emphasis on her vowels and too much friendliness in her voice. She was lying.
I was wearing a sweater I’d pulled out of the back of my closet that had once belonged to my ex-boyfriend Gabriel Holbrook. It had holes in the sleeves and the yarn was pulling loose across the chest, but I couldn’t bring myself to throw it away. Three months earlier I’d watched Gabriel die, and it made it difficult to discard the earthly remnants of him.
But in this situation it helped me divine what kind of person Kimberly was, because the sweater was a piece of crap. Unless she thought I was wearing it in an ironically messy way, there was no way she would compliment for any reason other than sucking up.
Which—considering she was one of the highest paid wedding planners in New York—was exactly what she was trying to do. She wanted to please me because she wanted to make nice with the money. Not my money, since I didn’t have any to speak of, but the money associated with the man I was engaged to marry.
Lucas Rain. Billionaire, corporate head honcho, and the reason I had a massive, flawless diamond ring on my finger. A ring Kimberly kept sneaking glances at while she dangled her bracelets in my face.
Kimberly was one of those New York City girls who talked a lot but never really said anything.
“Secret,” she said, leaning close to me. We were both seated on plush divans in her too-bright, too-big, too-airy office. Her breath smelled like cinnamon chewing gum, and her nearness made me nervous and defensive. Where the hell was Lucas? He was fifteen minutes late, and I was ready to throttle him for leaving me alone with this woman. She said my name again, making the first e sound like a mosquito’s buzzing.
She had my attention.
“What?”
“I said do you have a preference? Monique Lhuillier or Vera Wang?”
The only thing I knew about wedding dresses was that they were all white, tight and probably impossible to kill someone in.
Unless that someone was Kimberly, in which case I’d find a way.
“I don’t know,” I admitted.
“Well, we’ll schedule a trial at Kleinfeld. You might want something totally different.” She laughed as if this were the funniest idea in the world. “And you’ll want to have your mother there, I assume.”
My ears felt hot, and I had my hand balled into a fist without meaning to. “My mother…” I let my fist fall open and dazzled her with the gleaming rock. She was like a kitten looking at a laser pointer. “My mother is dead.” This was a lie, but since she’d pretended to like my hideous sweater I figured my lie made us even. The truth about my mother was too ugly for Kimberly and her taffeta-drenched world.
It was too ugly for my world, and my full-time job was to police the goings-on of the entire vampire population of the East Coast. So…that was saying something.
“Oh…goodness.” Kimberly’s hand flew to her mouth, then her other darted out and held mine, fingers fumbling against the ring. I fought to not wince. “I’m so sorry.”
I started to say, I’m not, but that was the moment Lucas chose to waltz through the office door in his perfect Armani suit trailing a cloud of apologies behind him. Lucas was the kind of man you wanted to forgive for anything the instant you laid eyes on him. Six foot two and well muscled, he had the blond hair and blue eyes of a corn-fed, all-American, football type. His smile showed off beautiful, even teeth and made a glimmer shine in his eyes brighter than the light off my diamond.
My breath hitched.
This was the man I was going to marry.
He stooped low and planted a kiss on the crown of my head, making tingles radiate down my spine and setting off a chain reaction of tremors that ended low in my pelvis. Kimberly practically fell over me to offer him her hand. Politely, he dusted a kiss over her knuckles and gave her a puckish, panty-melting grin.
“So sorry I’m late, ladies. Business.” He shrugged one shoulder then sat next to me on my divan.
Lucas was larger than life. His personality overwhelmed everyone around him—myself included—and suddenly the seat felt too small.
This was what it was like to be dwarfed by the werewolf king of the East. Even humans like Kimberly who knew nothing about our world respected the authority he threw off in waves. She probably assumed it was the power of wealth that made him so indomitable. It wasn’t. He was royalty.
And soon I would be too.
My mouth felt dry, like I’d swallowed a shot of sand.
Lucas sensed my unease and took one of my hands in his, squeezing gently. Once upon a time being this close to him would have filled my mouth with a burst of cinnamon. Now, with our mate bond sealed, the connection was deeper, but the comforting flavor was gone. The only cinnamon in the room was the strong waft of it coming from Kimberly’s mouth as she caught Lucas up on what he’d missed.
“Well, Miss McQueen,” she said, switching to an unnatural-sounding formal address, then she caught herself doing it and giggled. “Oh goodness, I guess pretty soon you won’t be hearing that anymore.”
I wrinkled my nose and stared at her as though she were a duck who had learned to knit. “Why the hell not?”
Her attention darted back and forth between me and Lucas, and I knew she wasn’t sure where she’d made the mistake. “I just meant…with you getting married…well, your name would be—”
I waved a hand at her, trying to erase the 1950s logic she was trying to weave into sensible reasoning. Sure, I’d wear a white dress. I’d force my scant collection of girlfriends to dress up in matching gowns and fawn over me while eyeing Lucas’s groomsmen for prospects. But I would be damned if she thought I’d be changing my last name.
“Kimberly,” I cut her off. “I appreciate that Lucas’s name has a lot of heft in the financial world and in…other arenas. However, my name is ridiculous enough as it is. If I changed it to Secret Rain, people would assume I was a stripper. Or a yacht.”
I figured Lucas would chide me for my impropriety. He was a big fan of pointing out how I always chose the most inopportune times to be snarky. However, in this case, he attempted to fight off his laughter, and it ended up bubbling out as a loud snort.
Kimberly looked appalled, but her veneer restored quickly, and she was back in ass-kissing mode in no time. A true professional. The first rule of being a New York City wedding planner—do everything your client wants, and never ask them why they want it. Never ask. Never correct. Especially if your client is worth over a billion dollars and has insisted you “spare no expense” in planning his big day in less than a month.
The average bride spends over a year planning her wedding.
Well, let’s be honest, the average woman starts planning her wedding the day she learns what one is. The actual bridal planning, however, cannot begin until the ring is firmly on finger and the husband-to-be has made the big commitment.
I was not an average bride.
Lucas’s proposal, though it had been a grand and romantic public gesture, hadn’t been made because he was crazy in love with me. He could profess his love all he wanted, but we both knew the truth. The werewolf king had proposed because having a queen would solidify his throne. Bonus points if his new queen happened to be from royal werewolf lineage.
That’s where I came in. Southern werewolf princess, bonded soul mate, and the on-paper perfect queen. On-paper being the operative term. Lucas had come to realize over the last year I wasn’t at all the perfect-princess type, and it had started to wear on our relationship. It didn’t help that I was also soul-bonded to another werewolf, Lucas’s lieutenant Desmond Alvarez.
And it certainly didn’t help that I loved Desmond more than I loved Lucas.
Yet here we were. There was a massive diamond on my finger and a wedding planner with dollar signs in her eyes waiting to yield to my every wedding whim.
Lucas took my hand and kissed it, his lips lingering a few seconds too long as he looked up at me and winked, which sent another thrill down to my toes. Love was such a complicated bitch, more so when the supernatural got thrown into the mix. On a logical level, I knew Lucas was wrong for me. On a metaphysical level, though, a part of me needed him as much as I needed oxygen. Now that our mate bond was complete, we were connected on a level that defied explanation.
I knew he needed this from me, and I couldn’t deny him something as simple as a wedding.
“Let’s talk about bridesmaid dresses,” I said, giving Kimberly my most saccharine smile.