He crossed the distance between us, and given his height advantage, I had to look up to see his eyes. With one hand on each of my shoulders, he bent down and gave me a gentle, sweet kiss on the lips. I licked the lower curve of his mouth, hoping for a lingering taste of cinnamon, but tasted nothing there other than the faint salt of his skin. I kissed him back anyway, wrapping my hands around his wrists and letting my tongue explore the bumpy ridges on the roof of his mouth before capturing his lip between my teeth and giving it a playful nip.

“I know you don’t want the big show.” He kissed my nose, then my forehead, and last but not least, each of my closed eyelids. “I know you’re being incredibly patient about this. Or as patient as you can be.” I didn’t miss his little jab. “And if there was any other way to do this, I promise you we would be doing it, but there isn’t any other way.”

“No courthouse steps? A quickie trip to Vegas?” I smiled hopefully.

“It needs to be big. Nothing can be overlooked. News of it has to spread to all the other kingdoms, and they need to see that we are really, truly united. Once that happens, I think we can finally be at peace.”

He was dreaming. For the past several months some of the Alphas of the smaller packs in Lucas’s territory were showing signs of unrest. There were rumors circulating of packs attempting to leave the protection of the East and seek the leadership of the South. My uncle, Callum McQueen, King of the Southern packs, swore he had no part in it, but it was hard to imagine small packs making such a bold move on their own.

And if my uncle was cut from the same cloth as my mother, his sister, then he wouldn’t rest until he had all of Lucas’s territory. We’d made slight headway when Lucas proposed, and I understood why he thought the big wedding would help more, but I didn’t think it would be enough to shut Callum down.

It might be enough to reaffirm our own pack’s opinion of our leadership though. Making a pack protector the queen certainly gave the impression of a powerful team at the helm.

A team that took two players working together to function properly.

“Okay,” I said, kissing his cheek and once again mourning the missing taste. “We’ll go big or go home.”

“Thank you.” Lucas’s smile this time was hesitant.

“What? You’ve got one of those looks you get when you know I’m going to be mad about something.”

“I want you to remember what you just said,” he suggested, then handed me a stiff envelope. For a moment I trembled. When I was still an assassin for the council, I used to receive the names of my targets in envelopes identical to this one.

My hands shook slightly as I opened the unsealed back flap and pulled out the card inside. Just like with my hits, the card had a name on it. Two names actually. One was mine and the other was Lucas’s.

“What is…?” But I was already reading the rest of the text. This slip of paper was cordially inviting me to my own engagement party.

Tomorrow.

My gut reaction was to crumple the invitation and throw it at him. We’d had more discussions than I cared to remember about him springing things on me or doing things that involved me without talking to me about them first. My cheeks felt warm, and I took a few short breaths to steady my temper.

“Surprise?” he offered, a boyish smile creeping over his mouth. “Admit it. If I’d asked ahead, you would have said no outright.”

“I—”

“Admit it.”

He was right. Never in a million years would I have agreed to an engagement party. I slid the invitation back into the envelope and threw them both inside the car beside the binder.

“Well,” I sighed. “I guess I had better go buy a new dress.”

Chapter Four

Time is meaningless to vampires, which makes them a pain in the ass to carpool with.

“Brigit,” I bellowed, stomping around her sparsely decorated living room in my five-inch Christian Louboutin heels. The shoes were amethyst purple and looked extra gemlike when paired with my butter-yellow, long-sleeved, scoop-necked party dress. Normally the only fashion sense I have is picking out pretty shoes, but I thought the dress was sophisticated and downright regal.

Not that anyone was going to get to see me in it at the rate my vampire ward was dragging her ass to get ready.

The vampire in question popped her head out from her bedroom door, her blonde hair still pinned up in hot curlers. My eyes bugged when I saw how far removed from good-to-go she was. I swear I could feel an artery swell in my temple, throbbing loudly with the threat of bursting at any minute. Oh please, let me die of an aneurism. Then I wouldn’t have to kill her.

“Seriously?” I croaked.

“No, no, no.” She waved her hand dismissively at me, batting away my irritation like a cat with a toy. Then she stepped out of her bedroom to show me she was fully dressed in a pretty cornflower-blue dress. She looked like every pretty, perky Midwestern girl-next-door cliché I could think of. But more than that, she was fresh-faced and beautiful. As she pulled the rollers out of her hair, I couldn’t help but let out a laugh. “What?” she asked, her gaze drifting down to her dress as though the outfit was the source of my mirth.

“Your hair.” I pointed to the thick, bouncy curls now forming where the rollers had once been.

“What about it?”

I ran a hand through my own hair, stick straight from an earlier stop at the salon. My hair was naturally a mess of thick, loose curls, much like those Brigit had created for herself. Her typical style was straight and glossy. We looked like twins who had decided to swap roles for the night. Once she had taken out all the rollers, it was uncanny how similar she looked to me, even from my less-than-objective perspective on things.

“You want to pretend to be me for this stupid party?” I asked, only half kidding.

“Secret, I love you and all, but there isn’t enough money in the world to make me want to be you.” Her long lashes fluttered innocently, but there was a flash of fang in her smile, giving her the appearance of something predatory.

My baby vampire was really settling into her new life. It had only been a year since she’d been forcibly turned into a blood-sucking fiend, but she was taking her new status in stride. Although she’d once hated being an undead American, it seemed as though she was starting to relish it more and more with each passing month. I wish I could accept my vampiric heritage as well as she did.

“You ready?” She slung a purse over her shoulder and tapped an impatient toe as though I’d been the one dragging ass this whole time. The great thing about Brigit was no matter how hard she tried to look serious or menacing, she could never fake it. In a moment she was grinning and giggling like a preteen.

“Let’s get this show on the road.”

Central Park West would never not remind me of the shitty prime-time soap opera that once bore the same name. My grandmere had loved the cheeky show so much she used to tape it weekly, which was how I’d stumbled across it years after it aired and before I moved to the city itself. Parked outside the shiny monstrosity of an apartment block where my future sister-in-law lived, I couldn’t help imagining people cheating on their spouses and sleeping off midday hangovers within the bowels of the complex. Rich people didn’t tend to want for material things, so they spent most of their time wanting attention instead. When they didn’t get that, well…shit met fan.

The reputation of one Miss Kellen Rain was a prime example of attention whoring gone wrong. Although I now knew her personally, I still got a sick sort of voyeuristic pleasure from reading about her exploits in the weekly gossip columns. From burning down the bar of an Italian bistro in the West Village, to having sex in the turtle pond in Central Park, there was never a shortage of rumors. The turtle-pond rumor had been made even more humorous, given Kellen’s reaction when I asked her about it.

“Please,” she’d said with a dramatic eye roll. “Do you have any idea what kind of bacteria is in that pond? Not to mention the turtles. Ugh. I have a shapeshifter predisposition. As if I’d risk getting bitten by a turtle and becoming some bizarre Ninja Turtle freak.” At that point I had made a comment on the lady protesting too much. “Well, I did have sex in the park…but in the castle, not the pond.”

That was Kellen Rain in a nutshell. Unapologetic and somehow totally loveable.

She had also missed the memo on bridesmaids not overshadowing the bride at wedding-related events. When she bounded past the building’s doorman, even he did a double take, and I’d never seen the man so much as blink before. In spite of the brisk mid-April weather, Kellen was wearing a slinky gold dress dripping with flouncy fringe. She looked like a Bond girl. Or a stripper from the ’20s.

Once she had clambered over Brigit into the tiny backseat of the BMW, which was barely a backseat at all, Kellen put an elbow next to each headrest and perched her smiling face on both hands. Only when the car door slammed did the doorman shut his mouth and come out of his stupor.

“Subtle ensemble, Kel.” I shook my head, unable to be genuinely irritated. Between Brigit and Kellen, I was in danger of losing my killer edge. They were making me soft, at least when the attacks involved charm.

“You look like a chandelier,” Brigit added, but the awe in her voice was all it took to know she wasn’t being rude.

Kellen, who had heard every possible derisive comment and cruel barb, seemed taken aback by the young vampire’s compliment. She blushed. “Thanks, Brigit. You look pretty too.”

I revved the engine. “All right, all right, enough. Have either of you two ever driven on the highway with a vampire in a sports car?” My two bridesmaids exchanged nervous glances in the rearview mirror and fastened their seat belts in a hurry. I flipped my straight hair over my shoulders and gave a wicked chuckle. “Smart girls.”

And with that, I peeled out of the parking spot with enough burning rubber to make Steve McQueen proud to share a name with me.

Chapter Five