“Um … what?”

The knob turned and the door pushed open.

“Not now, Mike,” Raul said, right before a tall, handsome stranger entered my foyer and shut the door behind him like he’d done it a dozen times before.

“Right. I know you’re busy, but I need a moment of your time, please,” he addressed Raul directly. He seemed vaguely familiar to me. “Could we talk outside?” He gestured over his shoulder to my front door. “There’s been a development. Time was of the essence, so I took the liberty of improvising.”

Raul looked annoyed. “Improvising?”

“Fully deviating, actually,” Mike replied before turning his attention to me. “Hi, Bethany. I’m Mike. My apologies for the interruption.”

“Hi. Have we—”

“You two met last night,” Raul supplied before I could ask, giving my hand a reassuring squeeze.

“Oh.”

Mike laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t say that we were properly introduced,” he expounded, his grey eyes awash with humor. “But I helped hold you down once or twice while Raul—”

“Outside! Right now.”

At Raul’s sharp command, Mike turned and exited my apartment as quickly as he’d entered it a moment ago, chuckling and muttering, “You’d best be joining me.”

Raul released my hand. “Please excuse me.”

His chair scraped noisily against the floor as he scooted back from the table, and he arose so quickly and with such force that it toppled over behind him when he stood. He didn’t bother to right it as he stormed out my front door after Mike.

I overheard them exchanging rapid words in Portuguese in the hallway a moment later. The arguing seemed to escalate quickly. Raul growled in anger, and I caught him tossing out the word “motherfucker” amid all the Portuguese. Mike said something in response, and then the hallway went completely silent—as if they’d done more than simply stop talking. It sounded as if they’d vanished from the hallway.

I sipped my coffee, contemplating whether they’d magically poofed somewhere. And then I began quietly giggling when I realized how insane it all was—the notion of people “poofing” places.

No, not people, I reminded myself. Werewolves. Because Raul was a werewolf. And he’d bitten me.

I was soon laughing so hard I had to set my coffee aside to wipe the tears of humor from my eyes.

Mike was probably a werewolf too. What if all the well-built “manny” friends of Raul’s at the club last night had been werewolves? Should I ask? No, no, that might be rude. Or dangerous. Yes. I settled on dangerous, deciding it was best to know as little as possible.

I reined in my giggling fit when I heard a key being inserted into the lock of my front door, and the manny named Stephen, the one who had addressed Raul as “Sir” last night, entered.

Apparently, everyone but me had keys to the new locks on my apartment. Were they planning on giving me a set?

“Come, Kitsune,” Stephen called into the hallway behind him, holding the door ajar for my Akita puppy, who ran in after him and headed straight for his water bowl in the kitchen.

“That—that’s my dog.” I stood, dumbfounded, as Stephen shut the door behind him. I was the worst new mommy ever. I hadn’t even noticed my own puppy’s absence this morning.

“Yes. I know,” Stephen replied, his mouth set in a thin line. “I’ve been tasked with training him for you.”

Tasked? “Excuse me? Why would you—?”

My front doorknob jiggled and opened yet again as Raul and Mike abruptly returned.

“You can go now, Stephen,” Raul told him.

“No way,” Mike objected. “Stephen stays. I am not handling you by myself.”

“There’s nothing to handle,” Raul said through clenched teeth. “I’m fine.”

“And your wolf?” Mike gave him a raised brow.

“Under control,” Raul insisted.

O-kay. Yeah. Now was about the right time for a girl in a werewolf slasher flick to casually back her shit up out the door.

“I’m just gonna go get dressed for work now,” I mumbled quietly, taking a step in the direction of the bedroom and hoping they would keep arguing and not notice me.

Raul’s head whipped in my direction. His eyes took in the plate of food I’d barely touched, and he was at my side and steering me back into my seat at the table a second later.

“You need to eat more, sweetheart. Are you feeling okay?” Raul crouched next to my chair and placed a hand to my forehead. “You only got a few hours of decent sleep last night.”

“I feel fine.”

In the background, I overheard Mike and Stephen begin conversing in Spanish, and my ears pricked up. I was by no means fluent, but I understood a fair bit of Spanish. The dialect they were using sounded different from the Spanish I was familiar with, though.

“It’s my fault.” Raul’s fingertips caressed my cheek before trailing down the side of my neck to the double mark he’d left there. Brushing my damp hair aside, he fingered the spot. “Still hurt a little?”

I shook my head. “I’m fine.”

His frown indicated he wasn’t convinced. His other hand fell to my lap, parting my knees as he palpated the bite mark on my upper thigh through the fabric of my pajama pants. “How about this one?”

I swallowed. “Also fine.” His touch was examining, not sexual, yet my arousal kicked in nonetheless.

I had a feeling Raul knew it, too. He held my gaze as he continued to rub a larger circle around the mark on my inner thigh, his fingers inching ever higher. “Less tender than the bites on your neck?”

I nodded.

“Good.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “Then I’m not sorry for waking you up last night to heal it.”

My breath caught. “What?”

He leaned closer. His hand curled around the back of my neck, and he said in a low voice, “You looked beyond gorgeous straddling my shoulders.” The tip of his tongue skimmed over his bottom lip. “I’m already dying for another taste of you.”

It hadn’t been a dream. I’d actually ridden Raul’s face last night.

I was at once mortified and terribly turned on. I should’ve realized the sex was too good to have been a dream.

He drew closer, his nose touching mine, as he whispered, “The way you rode my fingers and squirmed against my mouth was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

I heard Stephen say in Spanish, “If they start fucking again, I’m out of here.”

Raul’s face pulled abruptly away from mine, his nostrils flaring, his irises swimming with gold.

I assumed his ire was for Stephen, but then his gaze turned sharply toward the front door, and I caught the sound of a key trying to force its way into the lock.

It didn’t fit.

Shit. My heart began to pound, because I just knew. “I think that might be—”

A fist banged against my door. “Fucking bitch, you changed the locks on me?” Gregg yelled from the other side. “This is my building, Bethany. Open the damn door. I want my ring back.”

My jaw unhinged. Gregg had never spoken to me like that before. Ever.

Clearly, either the doormen or one of my neighbors had tipped him off about Raul’s overnight stay.

“Raul, no!”

I hardly had time to process that it was Mike who’d whisper-shouted before the table next to me flipped over, sending food and plates flying—and me ducking for cover—as Raul growled and lunged toward the door, transforming into an enormous black and white wolf in midair.

Oh.

My. God.

Mike and Stephen flew out of the kitchen and sprang into action, tackling Raul—as a wolf—to the tile floor of the foyer, knocking my entryway stand with fresh flowers over and smashing a sizeable hole into the wall that the foyer shared with my bedroom when all three of them crashed-stopped into it.

My brain was struggling to grasp what it was witnessing, when the three of them suddenly vanished—poofing into thin air.

Kitsune came running to me, barking up a storm. I scooped the little orange and white furball into my arms and cuddled him to my chest, babbling that everything was okay. The guy at the rescue shelter had told me Akitas only bark when something is wrong and they’re unsettled.

“What the hell is going on in there?” Gregg pounded on the door again. “Bethany, let me in or I’ll get security. Fuck that; I’ll call the police.”

Kitsune continued barking at the door. Agreed. Something was definitely wrong all right. I wasn’t sure which of us I was hoping to convince otherwise as I continued to ramble soothing platitudes, carrying Kitsune past the wreckage in my living room and foyer to the front door.

I’d barely turned the knob and Gregg was forcing his way into my apartment, his eyes bloodshot and his skin ruddy with signs of another rosacea flare-up.

“Where is he?” he demanded, pushing past me. “I know he hasn’t left yet. I want to meet the loser you threw our entire future away on. I cannot believe you—”

He stopped, his eyes blinking in shock when he saw the hole in the drywall and scanned the mess of food and dishes all over my living room floor.

“What the? Are you out of your mind? What have you done to my apartment? This is destruction of property.”

I had no good answer for what had happened, so I assumed the offensive as he proceeded into my living room, stepping over a broken plate. “Stop calling it your apartment. My name’s the only one on the lease, and last I checked, I’m the one paying rent and living here, not you.” I kept my tone as steady and as calm as possible, hoping it would help to soothe Kitsune, who was now growling at Gregg.

“I own the building, Beth—”

“Your parents own this building. Along with other investors.”

He had the gall to look affronted by that truth, the jackass. When I continued to stand there calmly holding Kitsune, providing no further explanation for the destruction Gregg was still taking in, he snapped, his face turning blotchy shades of red and purple as he blustered, “Seriously? You’ve got nothing to say to me? I’ve been texting and calling you all morning.”

Crap. What had I done with my phone? I hadn’t seen it since I’d woken up—when Raul had shut the ringer off for me.

“I show up here and find that you’ve blown apart not only our future but my whole damn apartment, and nothing?”

“I’ve destroyed our future?” I took a deep breath and set Kitsune down. “Go to the bedroom, Kitsune.” I pointed to my open bedroom door, and I was shocked when the little mutt actually listened to my order and scampered off into the room instead of going straight for the food all over the floor like I’d expected.

“You’ve been fucking around on me for months, Gregg, so drop the self-righteous BS. It takes two people to ruin a relationship, and I’m not going to take all the blame for ours.”

“Me? Who told you I was cheating?”

His green eyes lit with indignation, but I glimpsed the guilt behind them. He was furious that I knew. I could almost see his brain running over the possibilities as to which of his friends might have ratted him out. Yeah, he’d definitely been cheating for a while. Maybe more than the five months I’d estimated from the skanky texts I’d found.

“I’ve never cheated on you, Bethany. Don’t try and blame your whorish behavior on—”

“I saw the texts on your phone, Gregg.”

His mouth opened and shut several times. I crossed my arms over my chest and waited. The sound of a phone vibrating in his pocket filled the silence, reminding me that I still needed to locate my own phone.

“That’s impossible. What texts? What were you doing going through my private texts? You had no business—”

“I needed a contact for the caterer.”

“And I sent it to you the other day when you asked me for it.”

“You sent me the wrong contact. When I called Brandi with an ‘i,’ she seemed unusually flustered when I gave her your name for the booking and the date of our reception.”

His expression paled a fraction, but he shook his head in denial, nonetheless, as I continued.

“She rambled an apology, saying she wasn’t the caterer and that she hadn’t known you were engaged, before hanging up on me. I got curious and went through the texts on your phone after that.”

He was still stubbornly shaking his head. And I couldn’t help but note he seemed oddly reassured somehow by what I’d just told him—as if what I knew only scratched the surface, and he was relieved to hear how little I’d actually uncovered.

“You had no right,” he lectured. “Whatever you think you found, you’re mistaken. Do you have any idea how many women come on to me in a given week?”

A shout of laughter escaped me before I could restrain it. Gregg may have been tall and an attractive-for-a-corporate-guy type, but his inflated ego was so far out of sync with reality it was a joke.

“They do,” he insisted. “I’m a broker, Bethany. I interact with a lot of people, and yes, sometimes that means flirting with potential female investors.”

“Strippers are investing in multimillion-dollar Bay Area real estate now? Good to know. By the way, I went through your online credit card receipts, too.”

His eyes flared and he sputtered, “Y—you have no proof of anything. You know damn well it’s part of my job to sometimes take clients to gentlemen’s clubs. So what if you found a few texts from random women on my phone? That doesn’t make me guilty of cheat—”

“It does when you’re texting them back photos of your dick, Gregg.”

“Well, you had sex in a public elevator with some roided-out meathead you met at a dance club!” he exploded, talking loudly enough for the whole floor to hear him. “I had to wake up this morning to an email from security with a link to video footage of a stranger plowing my fiancé up against the wall of my own building’s elevator, for fuck’s sake.”

My heart dropped into my stomach.

There was video footage?

Holy shit, I’d forgotten all about the surveillance cameras.

“You let him carry you through the lobby downstairs half-naked wrapped in a blanket for everyone to see,” Gregg indicted. “And you couldn’t even wait to get inside our apartment to spread your legs. No, you let him bang you in a public elevator like some desperate horny bitch in heat. You disgraced me in front of my own management staff, my own building security.”

And that’s what this was about: Gregg’s ego. Not our relationship. Not me.

“Then I went online and checked the feed for the camera that I had installed months ago in this very foyer—for your protection,” he emphasized, “and I had the joy of watching footage of you on your knees sucking that asshole’s cock. What the hell were you thinking, Bethany? Was this your childish way of getting back at me for a few harmless flirty texts you found on my phone? You couldn’t even come talk to me first? You just jumped on the first dick you could find?”

“First of all, fuck you for continuing to assume I’m an idiot. Secondly, I did not mean for things to happen the way they did last night. I was planning to confront you about the texts—”

“Well, it’s too late now, because I’ve already forwarded your sex tapes to everyone on our guest list, letting them know that the wedding is off.” He held his hand out. “I want my ring back.”

“What did you say?”

“I said the wedding is off and I want my ring back.”

“I meant the other part!” I screeched.

“I said I’ve already emailed your sex tapes to everyone you know, Bethany.” His smirk was nasty as he watched that bomb settle.