She really didn’t know what to wear. It was embarrassing, remembering that she’d asked Brody that question, as if he were her best girlfriend. What do I wear? He’d given her a funny look and said, Whatever you want.

Because he truly didn’t understand. Why would he?

She wanted to look nice, and feminine. She also wanted to look competent, and not like she was trying to seduce him. (The idea of her seducing Brody Donovan was laughable, but she didn’t want any misunderstanding.) At the same time, this was a man who wore jeans and flannel shirts three hundred and sixty-five days a year, so fussy wouldn’t cut it.

She picked out jeans and a t-shirt she’d bought at the local craft market, which had a handmade design on the front of a spray of colorful flowers done in paint. She had bought the shirt because she loved it, then couldn’t think of anywhere to wear it. Well, today was the day.

She added ankle boots, mascara, and lip gloss, and kept her hair down. She felt a giddy moment of pleasure that she didn’t have to go to the diner anymore and wear that godawful uniform, nor did she have to smell coffee or French fries ever again. Then she drove to Brody’s house.

The house was beautiful at sunup, just as it was any other time of day. The air was clear and cold, and the rising sun glinted off the house’s big windows under its peaked roof. The driveway was cobblestone, leading to a wide front porch in dark wood, covered and shady. There was a single chair on the porch, as if Brody sometimes sat there alone. Her heart was in her throat as she knocked on the door. This was it: If he didn’t mean it, if he’d changed his mind, he’d tell her now.

There was a second of silence, and then the front door was flung open. And there he was, wearing jeans and a white t-shirt and nothing else. No flannel shirt, no baseball cap, just Brody and his damp, tousled dark hair. Even his feet were bare. “Hey,” he said. “Just come in next time. I’ll leave it open.”

She followed him into the house. She didn’t know what to look at: his retreating form—Brody was heavenly to look at from the back—or the house. So she swiveled her gaze around discreetly, trying to look at both.

The house was breathtaking. The main room was huge and open, with high ceilings, done in rich wood. There was a bar and a big fireplace and sofas placed here and there, all of it lit with sunlight from the windows looking out over the woods. She could even see the mountains in the far distance, their sharp purple silhouettes. It was incredible. Everyone wondered why Brody holed up in his house all the time, never leaving. Alison could perfectly see why. If this was her home, she’d never leave either.

He motioned her toward one of the sofas, in front of which was a table with some papers piled on it. “We have about two hours,” he said.

“Before what?”

“Before my brothers come to the meeting I called. To tell them about you. I figured we should go through some things first.”

“Okay,” she said. She sat on the sofa, putting her purse down next to her, but he didn’t sit.

She looked up at him. He looked big from down here, much bigger than usual. He was clean-shaven like always, his gaze calm. He looked at her hair, which was down, his expression unreadable. Then he looked back at her face. “You like coffee?” he said. “I have some on.”

“Oh,” she said. Instinct took over—she’d been a waitress too long. She got her feet under her to jump up. “I’ll get it.”

He put a hand on her shoulder, his fingertips pressing down. Strong, but not forceful. Implacable. “I’ll get it,” he said. “How do you like it?”

This was alpha behavior. He did it automatically, she knew, without thinking. It was him arranging things the way he wanted to see them and expecting it to work. So she sat back down. “Just milk, please.”

He walked away, and she heard him moving around the open kitchen. He came back with two cups, and she knew that his cup had just the smallest amount of cream, exactly as he liked it. He dropped down onto the sofa opposite her and put his elbows on his knees. He looked at the papers between them and scrubbed a hand over his jaw.

She sipped her coffee, which was delicious, and watched him. “What?” she said after a minute.

“Just thinking of where to start,” he said. He scrubbed his jaw again. “I’m going to offend you when I say this, but it’s too important, so I’m going to say it anyway. This stuff, in these papers—no one knows about it. No one. Just my brothers and me.” He looked at her. “I’m trusting you with that.”

“Okay,” she said. “I understand. I do.”

“I knew you would,” he said. He picked up the first papers. “This is the Dirty Den project.”

Alison blinked. The Dirty Den was Shifter Falls’ strip club, right downtown. Charlie, the old alpha, had used it as a place to do business, and aside from the stripping, it was known as a spot for prostitutes and drug dealers. “What’s the Dirty Den project?” she asked.

“We’re closing it down,” Brody said. “We’ve already gotten all the girls out of there, sent them on their way. Now we want to tear down the building. Not remodel, tear down. So that everyone knows Charlie’s reign is finished, and it’s never coming back.”

“That sounds good,” Alison said. “I hate that place.”

“Everyone hates that place,” Brody agreed. “We were thinking about tearing down the Hi-Lo, too, but the Falls could use a movie theater. A legitimate one.” The Hi-Lo was a porn theater, now defunct, that had also been used as one of Charlie’s meeting places. Brody had changed the tone of the Falls just by doing business in the Four Spot instead of in the Falls’ seedier hangouts. “The MacKenzie brothers are interested in taking over the Hi-Lo building and doing regular movies in it, if we can make a deal. But the Dirty Den has to go. We’ll put a park and a playground there instead.”

Alison smiled. “Charlie would hate that.”

“That’s part of the idea. That, and the fact that we don’t have a proper park anywhere in the city limits. The people running the Falls have always just assumed that shifters will go run in the woods when they want to go outdoors. Which we do. But no one has been considering the humans here, and their little kids. They have nowhere to go.”

She thought this over. He was right. Kids in the Falls played in the streets when they weren’t in school. There was a small park wedged into a quarter of a city block downtown, with a few kids’ slides and a couple of benches, but it wasn’t much. “Okay,” she said. “What do I do to help?”

“To tear it down, we need a wrecking crew,” Brody said, handing her some papers. “These are quotes. The crews need permits in order to do the work. The permits come from the county.” He handed her more papers. “To get the permits, we have to prove ownership of the building. That’s where it gets tricky.”

Of course it did. Shifters didn’t deal with real estate agents or lawyers if they could avoid it. A lot of property deals in Shifter Falls were done with verbal negotiations, handshakes, or inheritances that were simply understood from one generation to the next. “There’s no ownership on record?” Alison asked.

“There is, and it’s surprising. The building was Charlie’s,” Brody said. “I didn’t know he owned any of the Falls real estate personally. I always thought it was pack property. But the fact that Charlie was stockpiling his own wealth doesn’t surprise me.”

“Okay,” Alison said, taking yet more paper from him. She was starting to see why the job of alpha would be stressful for a man whose letters jumbled on him. How many nights had he sat here alone on this sofa, into the late hours, staring at papers and waiting for the letters to align? He keeps to himself, lives all the way out in the woods, her father had said. Everyone just assumed he was a loner, antisocial. Which he was. But there was more to him. There always was.

“The fact that Charlie owned the building opens two other cans of worms,” Brody continued, still frowning at the table between them. “The first is that Charlie didn’t have a will or a clear heir. I’m the oldest son, so you’d think his property would fall to me.”

“That should make the Dirty Den project easy,” Alison said, “since you own the building now.”

“That’s shifter logic,” Brody said. “Sensible. It doesn’t hold water when I’m trying to get a permit. I can’t go to the permit office and say Well, my sonofabitch father died, and of his four bastard sons I’m the oldest, and none of the others want this shitty strip club, so give me a permit.” He scrubbed a hand over his face. “I know that doesn’t work, because I tried it.”

She was starting to see where he was going here. “Leave it with me,” she said. “I’ll go online, and I’ll go to the permit office. I’ll figure it out.”

Brody didn’t say anything. He looked away, out the window, quiet for a long time.

She knew what he was thinking. Despite the fact that she was sitting here, despite the fact that he’d asked her for help, he was the alpha. He was supposed to do it all. The alpha’s voice in his head was telling him he was a failure. Again.

“Brody,” she said. “Stop it.”

“Fucking hell,” he said, still not looking at her.

“Get used to this,” she said, more firmly. “This is best for the pack. And no one man can do all of this. There are thirty years of incompetence and corruption to clean up. So let me go to the permit office. Okay?”

He took a breath and turned back to her. “Fine,” he said, dismissing the problem by force of will. “That’s only the first problem. The other problem is here.” He picked up another pile of papers.

“What is it?” she asked.

“When I saw that Charlie owned the Dirty Den, I went digging. And I found papers in his personal effects. The Dirty Den wasn’t the only thing he owned.” He handed the papers over to her. “He owned other property, other things. Pack property that he took for himself. So, presumably, whatever is in that pile is also mine. I haven’t gone through it. I found it the other day, and…” He trailed off, scrubbed a hand over his eyes. “I was fucking exhausted. It’s always worse when I’m tired.”

“Then these are mine,” Alison said, taking the papers from him. “I’ll do a summary for you.”

“I need to go run,” he said. He stood up, walked to the sliding glass door at the back of the house, and slid it open. Then he walked straight into the trees, pulling off his white t-shirt and dropping it behind him before he disappeared. He was going to change into his wolf. To do that, he had to be naked. But he wouldn’t strip in front of her, wouldn’t change in front of her. Only a wolf’s mate got to see him change.

He didn’t look back. She had never seen him shirtless before, and she saw the dip of his spine, the muscles of his bare back, the edge of the wolf tattoo he had on his left shoulder. The one that identified his animal. He’d have a stylized D on the back of his neck, too, which identified him as Donovan pack elite, but she didn’t get a chance to glimpse that. She was too busy staring at that back, those muscles. Then he was gone.

She blinked herself back into reality. Then she sighed.

The house was quiet. A breeze blew in. He hadn’t even closed the door behind him. He’d left her alone.

“Werewolves,” she said, and got to work.