Hunting Ground

Her power hit the British wolf first; she saw it in the relaxing of his shoulders. He recognized what she was doing, raised an eyebrow at her, then took his coffee cup (or maybe he drank tea-didn’t the British all drink tea?) and sipped from it. A few of the Spaniards began breathing slower, and the tension in the room ratcheted down a full notch.

Charles turned, his eyes pure blinding gold-and growled. At her.

Leaving A

She fled through the door she’d been holding closed, fled before her blind terror became the tinder that caused an orgy of violence. She’d seen that happen, too, though never in such a public place.

The Frenchman said something rude as the door swung shut behind her, but she wasn’t paying attention. Panic, raw and ugly, made it hard to breathe as her conditioning tried to overwhelm her common sense.

She needed to find something else to focus on. So she looked around.

The patrons in the main restaurant were still u

Even though they were all in the next room, there was a weight to their presence, just like there was a weight to the Puget Sound. While Charles had been at her side, she’d been able to push it away-but now it ate at her. The sound of her heart beat loudly in her ears.

But the wolves were on the other side of the door-and Charles wouldn’t let them touch her.

She paused in front of the outside door.

She could go back to their hotel room and wait. The city at night held no terrors for her-all the bad guys were here. But that would be cowardly. And Charles would get the wrong idea.

Away from the drama and the first impulse to flee attack, she figured out the reason he’d growled at her: he needed to stop her. He couldn’t afford to let her quiet Brother Wolf.

Charles might be naturally more dominant-but he was the only wolf in the room who was not an Alpha of a pack. She knew that there were less dominant wolves coming to the conference, but none of them were here.

So many Alphas put Charles in a bad position. They had to fear him, they had to know that he would kill them if they moved against him-or they would smell weakness and attack him together, like a pack of wolves taking down a caribou. She’d been taking away his edge.

There was a battered piano on a small stage in the corner of the room that beckoned to her like an oasis in the desert. She could wait if she found something to think about other than old memories of pain and humiliation. A

“Do you mind if I play?”

The waitress, looking a little stressed, paused midstride and shrugged. “It’s fine, but if you don’t play well, the cook may come out and ask you to stop. He makes a big production of it. Or the crowd will boo you off. It’s kinda tradition.”

“Thanks.”

The waitress looked around the room. “Play a happy tune, if you can. Someone needs to liven up this place.”

The piano was an ancient upright that had been old a long time ago. Someone had painted it black, but the paint had faded to a dull gray, scuffed on the corners and sprinkled with initials carved into it. Most of the edges of the ivory keys were broken, and the highest E key popped up an eighth of an inch higher than the rest.

Something happy.

She played the theme from Sesame Street. The piano had a much better tone than it looked as though it should-and it was mostly in tune. She segued into “Maple Leaf Rag,” one of two ragtime pieces that every second-year piano student learned. The piano wasn’t her instrument, but after six years of lessons, she was moderately competent.

The lively feel and fairly easy music lines of the piece made it tempting to play too fast. “Ragtime is not fast” was a favorite rant of one of her teachers. She disciplined her fingers to keep a steady beat. It helped that she was a little out of practice.

CHARLES watched A

Most mates would be angry at being chastised in front of others. But most mates hadn’t been brutalized in an attempt to break them. A

But he couldn’t afford to risk that she’d quiet Brother Wolf before she affected the Beast. Brother Wolf’s aggression, his willingness to kill, was the only weapon Charles had to control the situation.

Thoroughly tired of Chastel, though he’d only been in his presence for less than a quarter of an hour, Charles called on Brother Wolf, who wouldn’t be bothered about the future, to take center stage. Negotiations, as far as he was concerned, were over, had been over the moment he’d had to growl at A

“You don’t want to talk about my mate,” he told Chastel in a very soft voice. Brother Wolf could care less about politics. This one had made him hurt A

Chastel lifted his upper lip-but couldn’t make himself say anything, not when faced with Brother Wolf. They stood there, eye to eye for a count of four. Then Chastel dropped his eyes, grabbed his coat, and stormed out of the room.

Charles followed him out, intent on trailing the Beast to make sure he wouldn’t take it into his head to go after A

He’d thought she’d be halfway to the hotel by now. Instead, she sat on a short barstool that wobbled under her and played the infamous battered piano, her back to him and the rest of the people in the room. The piece she played wasn’t complex, but it was a happy little tune. Familiar. He frowned but couldn’t place it beyond the thought that it was some sort of children’s tune.

Automatically, he swept the room for possible threats and found none. The only people here were human-and as he watched, they were relaxing into the music. Someone laughed and someone else called for more ribs.

She hadn’t left. And that meant he could clean up the mess Chastel had left behind. It would only take a few minutes, then he could come back here and protect her from… Charles stopped and took a deep breath. Brother Wolf thought he could fix this by saving her from some danger-he didn’t understand women very well. That A

SHE glanced out at the audience and saw that the unusual muted quality of the restaurant had dissipated somewhat. She also hadn’t heard any sudden noise that would signal a fight, so she was hopeful that Charles had matters under control. She needed something more modern next, something appropriate to the mostly middle-aged crowd she was playing for-which on the piano generally meant Elton John or Billy Joel, both pianists who could also sing. She took the last few notes of “Maple Leaf” into “The Downeaster ‘Alexa.’ ” It wasn’t a “happy tune” precisely, but it was beautiful.