Love Lies (Tails from the Alpha Art Gallery Book 3) Read online

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  No part of this publication may be sold, copied, distributed, reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical or digital, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage and retrieval system without the prior written permission of both the publisher, Oliver Heber Books and the author, Cynthia St. Aubin, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  PUBLISHER'S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  COPYRIGHT © Cynthia St. Aubin

  Published by Oliver-Heber Books

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  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Also by Cynthia St. Aubin

  About the Author

  To wild girls and willful women, wherever they can be found.

  Acknowledgments

  Having your very own hot, tattooed, talented musical genius of a cheerleader/fiancé is pretty much the coolest thing ever. Thank you, Ted Levin, for believing in me even when all I believed in was crawling under my desk with a bag of M&M’s and a bottle of whisky.

  My undying gratitude to Kerrigan Byrne, my first reader, Emotional Support Human and Friend. Thank you for being the Gutter Bear to my Trash Panda. Thee and me.

  My sincere thanks to Casey Harris-Parks, who was Team Abernathy and Team Crixus before it was cool.

  Much love and endless thanks to Tanya Anne Crosby, writer and publisher extraordinaire, for being willing to take a chance on my silly little werewolf stories.

  Prologue

  I couldn’t breathe.

  I couldn’t move.

  I couldn’t scream.

  It was neither day, nor night, but some hellish unidentifiable interval in between. Not light enough to see, not dark enough not to.

  Something cold brushed the soles of my feet and began a slow, sinister journey upward. Gripping my ankles, stalking slowly up my calves, slithering up the insides of my thighs and over my hips.

  Mute, suffocating, panicking, I couldn’t so much as twitch as it licked its way up my stomach and settled itself on my chest. Faceless, formless, ancient.

  Looking at me.

  I felt its regard on my face like the tingling of a numb limb, knowing instinctively when it moved to my hair, my eyes, my mouth.

  My throat.

  A touch as light as the tip of a feather began at the indentation at the base of my throat and slowly slid upward, ending beneath my chin. There, it grew to the sort of gentle pressure a lover might apply to turn your mouth to theirs.

  The chill sank downward, circling my neck like a scarf.

  Then, tightening.

  Beneath that inexplicable, deadening grip, my heart beat hard enough for me to feel it against my ribs, my oxygen-starved brain beginning to shrink my vision to a single darkening point.

  Hot tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and ran down my temples. Pooling in my ears.

  The scream I couldn’t release vocally tore loose within my mind. I imagined it echoing off the rough stone walls like a singular, violent choral note as I sank deeper into the circling black.

  Chapter 1

  One week earlier…

  “Ernest Hemingway, get out of my bathtub.”

  Hemingway’s heavy lidded eyes met mine, his thick dark hair gone a little wiry at the edges from the steam. Defiantly, deliberately, he reclined further into water that could have boiled the flesh from his bones.

  Turns out the vampires aren’t so great at monitoring water temperature.

  I mentally added this to the long and mostly horrifying list of discoveries I’d begun documenting in the previous months.

  Discovery number one: My boss is hot.

  Discovery number two: My boss is a werewolf.

  Discovery number three: If I bang my super-hot werewolf boss, I’ll become a werewolf too.

  Why?

  Enter, discovery number four: Even though I’m not a werewolf, I am the female heir of a super old and infinitely powerful werewolf bloodline.

  Weird, right?

  Hemingway cleared his throat, disturbing the bubbles anchored in the rugged shoreline of his chest hair. In one hand, he clutched a glass of amber liquid. In the other, a pipe.

  “That had better not be the Balvenie Portwood,” I said, narrowing my eyes at the cut crystal rocks glass clutched in his meaty palm.

  Hemingway’s eyes, the exact color of freshly turned earth, slid guiltily to the side.

  “You can’t even drink scotch,” I said, my hands flying up in frustration. “You’re a vampire!”

  Hemingway took a sip demonstratively, then promptly spat it into the bathwater before squaring his shoulders and sitting up straighter. “Drinking the scotch is not the point. Only that I set out to drink it with honest intention.”

  “I honestly intend to drag you out by your nostrils if you don’t get the hell out of my apartment immediately, if not sooner.” Snatching the glass, I walked through to the kitchen and paused at the sink. For a brief moment, I considered just downing the remnants myself, but decided against it owing to probable undead cooties.

  “Don’t worry, I’m getting rid of him,” I told Gilbert, Stewie, and Stella, my three feline roommates, as I slung the glass’s contents down the sink. They sat poised like gargoyles on the kitchen counter, sniffing at the pear-scented tendrils curling out into the kitchen.

  It had been the smell of my best bubble bath that tipped me off when I’d opened the door of my small studio apartment in a converted Victorian home in historic Georgetown, Colorado.

  So much for an evening of Netflix and chill.

  And cheese.

  So. Much. Cheese.

  Palming my Gunter Wilhelm butcher’s knife, I stomped back into the bathroom, where Hemingway puffed at his pipe.

  An impressive effort, considering vampires didn’t actually breathe.

  “Stop that!” I hissed, slapping the pipe from his hand. “You’ll set off the smoke detector.” Bits of charred tobacco flake floated on the water’s surface like autumn leaves on a pond.

  “That was altogether uncalled for.” Hemingway sniffed, his impressive mustache tugging upward.

  Feeling no particular need for ceremony, I angled the butcher knife’s tip at his jugular. His borrowed blood would quickly make the bath a salty soup should the vein be severed.

  “I’m calling for you to get out of here before I give you a second mouth,” I said, pressing the blade into his skin just enough to create a tiny dart of flesh.

  His chest ceased to rise. He’d been undead long enough that breathing was no longer a habit and died away under pressure.

  “And before you explain to me
why I should be honored by your visit and reveal the sacred purpose which brings you, let me save you some time by telling you the answer is no. And not just no, but hell no.”

  “I don’t recall asking a question.” Hemingway’s thick brows drew together, creating a ponderous crease in the center of his forehead.

  “You didn’t,” I said, “but you will. All the others have. Twain, Poe, Dickens, Fitzgerald...”

  He sat forward in the bath, the water sloshing against the sides of my once-beloved claw foot tub. “They have been here?”

  “Bro, I’ve had enough famous writers wander through here to make a tenured literature professor cream his starched boxers.”

  Hemingway’s eyes took on the same kind of gleam I often caught in my own accidental reflection in a doughnut shop window. “Wilde said—”

  “Oh, I know what Wilde said.” A hot blue flame of irritation flickered to life at the base of my skull. “I know what he said because I lived it.”

  Hemingway opened his mouth to speak, but I retracted the knife from his neck, plopped down on the toilet lid and rattled on.

  “There I was, minding my own business, schlepping around London looking for my 431-year-old werewolf boss, and shazaam! Oscar Wilde starts snackin’ me down like I’m a triple cream brie croque monsieur. And if that’s not bad enough, he’s got to tell every damn vampire in his knitting circle I’m the sanguine equivalent of crack. Next thing I know, I’ve got a line of vampires around the block asking for samples. Samples! ‘Oh just one little sip, Miss Hanna. I promise I won’t try to eat your soul, Miss Hanna’.”

  “Well, I—”

  “If you run into Oscar, tell him there’s a dick punch coming his way,” I said, pointing the knife’s tip for emphasis.

  “Might you be persuaded to cease waving your weapon in my vicinity?” he asked.

  “Might you be persuaded to get your undead ass out of my tub?”

  Hemingway appeared to consider this. “I might.”

  “Look, it’s not like I don’t understand your curiosity. I really do. I mean, shit. There’s all kinds of cheeses I want to try. Pule, for instance. Never mind it’s made from the milk of a genetically superior pack of Serbian donkeys. Speaking of, did you know that donkey’s milk has sixty times the amount of vitamin C compared to cow’s milk?”

  “I can’t say that I—”

  “True story,” I said. “And it only has one percent of its fat content, which is why Pule is so crumbly. Why anyone would want to pay $567 a pound for crumbly ass cheese is way beyond me, when there’s such a thing as triple cream brie in the world. You follow me?”

  Ernest Hemingway blinked.

  “Okay, maybe not my best work metaphor-wise.” Scooting forward on the toilet seat, I looked Hemingway straight in the eye. “The point is, I get it. But all the same, the answer is no. I know that as a werewolf heir, my blood is super tasty, but I’m kind of determined to keep it inside my body.”

  Hemingway folded his arms. The resulting wave drove the bubbles away from his groin. I looked away before I accidentally caught sight of his kibbles and bits. “Perhaps I could write you something. Something to express my appreciation,” Hemingway suggested. And suggest he did. His eyes were mischievous beneath their straight, dark brows. His sensitive lips drawn into a lascivious curve, the masculine dimple like a thumbprint in his chin. He was younger than he had been when he died to the world.

  This was the chief advantage to being a vampire, I supposed. Werewolves only continued the lives they lead before transformation. Vampires banished life, and all its skin-sagging, boob-drooping indignities, into retreat.

  “I’m flattered,” I said. “I really am. But I kind of already died once with Wilde, and I didn’t really care for it.”

  “I understand,” Hemingway said, setting his pipe in the soap dish and pressing himself upward. I jerked my head over my shoulder and shoved a towel at him. He scrubbed it brusquely over his body as I kept my eyes trained firmly at the floor.

  When the tub voiced its final, gurgling protests, Hemingway pulled the curtain and set the shower running to rinse it.

  An oddly gentlemanly gesture for someone who had come to guzzle my life’s blood.

  I shooed three furry cat bodies off Hemingway’s clothes and tossed them in his direction.

  The clothes, not the cats. Though the latter option would surely have ensured a quicker departure.

  “Thanks for stopping by,” I said. “I’d appreciate it if you’d never do that again.”

  He captured my hand and kissed it. The surface of his lips was warm from the bath, but he lingered long enough for me to feel the cold flesh beneath.

  “I promise nothing.” He bowed, and was gone.

  Chapter 2

  Mark Andrew Abernathy, my aforementioned 431-year-old werewolf boss, rolled in an hour late to the gallery he owned and I pretended to help him run. I say gallery, but really it was an oddities shop attached to an exposition space, where a ramshackle pack of werewolf artists routinely exhibited their work.

  Though my official title was gallery assistant, my regular duties involved lint-rolling werewolf fur from Abernathy’s custom made suits, scheduling appointments and gallery shows around the lunar cycle, and stocking a doomsday arsenal worth of Tide sticks and other blood removing chemicals.

  Because that’s totally normal.

  Seated at my desk on the landing of the old wooden stairs that lead up to Abernathy’s office from the gallery below—I was eye-humping a catalogue of office supplies when I heard the gallery door open. Abernathy’s familiar warhorse-on-the-hunt gate thundered across the wood floor. He took the stairs two at a time—an easy task for a guy that busted the height charts at six foot five inches.

  (Insert your favorite tall guy stereotype here.)

  Standing a wobbly five foot eleven inches myself, his height often felt like a personal blessing. It’s always an unsettling feeling to know that if shit gets real, your friends and family are likely to scamper behind your back for protection. Mark’s back could shelter about three of me.

  Four, if I laid off the French baguettes.

  Unlikely.

  I shoved my mouse to the corner of my Apple monitor and used the brief black flash before the screensaver descended to check my wild mane of auburn hair. Due to the previous evening’s unexpected visitor, I’d had little sleep. Still, I managed to make it through an expedited makeup routine, complete with black cat-eye liner and matte pin-up red lipstick.

  Mark, on the other hand, looked like hell.

  Which is a complete reversal of roles for us, by the way.

  I’m the one who flaps through life in a perpetual state of feathery panic. He, meanwhile, utilizes centuries of patience to glide from one situation to the next in his perfect dark-haired, dark-eyed, stony-jawed stoicism.

  But not today.

  Today, Mark was handsome’s shadowed, stubbled, edgy cousin: dangerous.

  I mentally stripped away his custom-tailored suit as he slogged up the stairs. To be honest, after seeing him naked a handful of times, it didn’t require much imagination.

  Though imagine I did.

  Like, a lot.

  Because although he was still my boss, we had pretty much leapt over the line dividing “employee” from “person you work for but also rolled around naked with” once upon a time.

  But not lately.

  Lately, we had reverted to a strictly paws-off, quasi-professional, fully awkward mutual denial that the naked rolling had ever happened.

  Owing in part to the aforementioned consequences of bones-jumping.

  Namely, I hadn’t yet decided whether I wanted to complete my transformation to alpha werewolf female.

  “You have got to do something about these fangers,” I announced, borrowing a term introduced to me by Allan Ede, Mark’s 1,000 year-old werewolf tailor.

  I’d been the unwitting recipient of a couple pints of Allan’s blood after my little run-in with Oscar Wilde. A curi
ous side effect of my nontraditional transfusion had set me on Mark like a hunting dog on a ridiculously sexy fox.

  That’s how it goes when your blood donor has a penchant for Gucci specs, velvet jackets and well-muscled men.

  “What about them?” Mark asked, pausing in front of my desk. If I had to describe the sound of Abernathy’s voice and its affect on my lady bits, it would be something like: coffee, dark chocolate, and whisky have a sweaty, hours-long, back-breaking, bed-splintering threesome that ends in simultaneous orgasms.

  Which is pretty much how I would describe the rest of him as well.

  His hair was the dark chocolate. His eyes, the whisky. His deep-chested, long-limbed, hulking form, the coffee.

  Scorchingly hot.

  Definitely prone to making my nerves crackle and my blood burn.

  “Do you know how many vampires have broken into my apartment since we’ve been back from London?” I demanded. “I might as well be running a blood bank.”

  “They’re harmless.” He shoved past the door to his office, a veritable man-cave of leather and wood, all of which I’d polished liberally with Murphy’s lemon oil half an hour before his arrival.

  “Smells like fruit,” he grumbled.

  “I believe lemony fresh is the term you’re searching for,” I said. “And don’t you dare put your feet on the desk!” I leaned forward at my desk just in time to see the heels of his Italian leather shoes hovering in midair above the glossy surface.