“Tea?”

Asher Stanton’s casual inquiry made Zachary Hayden go cold. Zach knew that someone as powerful as the eldest Stanton didn’t give a hoot about whether he was comfortable and certainly wasn’t monitoring his needs.

Before Zach could reply, Stanton sighed, the man’s strong face like a slab of polished stone with two glittering gemstones for eyes.

“Of course. You’re American. How silly of me. Coffee?” An eyebrow rose along with his voice, the British clip thick and aristocratic, designed to shrivel balls. The eyes betrayed nothing.

Squaring his shoulders, Zach sat up taller. Broader. Bigger than before.

Before the lab accident.

Caffeine was the last substance he needed circulating through his bloodstream right now.

Well, second to last. Shifter serum took top prize in that category, but as Zach scratched his forearm absentmindedly, trying to buy himself time to answer Stanton’s question, he bitterly recognized that the choice on that issue was long gone.

They’d just met for the first time, brutal handshakes administered, and now they waited for Zach’s boss to appear so they could get on with business. Important business.

Life-altering business.

Asher cleared his throat, the sound a melodic growl filled with the implication that Zach was being rude by not answering his tea inquiry. Since The Incident, Zach’s senses were keener, sharper, picking up on emotional vibrations and social cues the average human would never catch.

Zach was anything but average now.

And today Zach would be discharged from his extended stay at LupiNex. Asher Stanton was the final hurdle.

“Sure,” he barked out, simply to end the tension, half hoping Asher would leave to acquire the drink, half hoping all these petty macho domination games would continue so Zach could see what his body did in the presence of a pack leader. His pack leader.

It was anyone’s guess.

The door opened suddenly, too soon for Asher to have called a secretary. Both men turned to look. A woman’s blue-cloth-covered leg crossed the wedge of space made by the open door, the click of a high heel on the office floor making Zach flinch, the sound triggering a reaction like aluminum foil on an amalgam filling.

Navy wool slacks, shined two-toned heels. A white lab jacket, so similar to the one he’d donned for the past decade between undergrad, graduate school, and work.

Flaming red curls hanging over one shoulder, her long ponytail coiffed with care.

“Dr. Baird,” Asher said, standing suddenly. Formality was the man’s idea of comfort, Zach realized, while Asher went through the motions as Dr. Samantha Baird joined the meeting. She’d been his boss for the past three years here at LupiNex, the first to recruit him for the shifter DNA project, an initiative so ludicrously fringe he’d had no choice but to join.

And a project that had sealed his fate in more ways than one.

“Mr. Stanton,” she said, voice controlled but her cheeks pink, eyes bright. She turned to Zach and caught his eyes, her look softening. “Zach.”

She reminded him of his grandmother, now long dead. The caring eyes.

“Your timing is impeccable,” Asher said to her. “We require a coffee-and-tea tray for three. Cream and sugar.”

Her face froze, still looking at Zach, mouth tightening, eyes going hard behind her glasses.

“Excuse me?” She didn’t bother to look at Stanton as she asked the rhetorical question. The man was scowling at papers in a manila folder. Zach’s gaze skittered to the folder’s tab, where he found his name scrawled in black Sharpie.

Of course.

“Make certain you bring whatever beverage you prefer as well,” Stanton said, not looking up. “While I shall endeavor to keep this meeting brief, we have much to discuss. Refreshments might help.”

“I prefer nothing,” Sam said smoothly, recovering step by step as she walked past Zach, lowering herself into a chair to his left. “I just had a latte.” Her eyes narrowed as she glared at the top of Asher’s head. “A double. I’m already quite refreshed, Mr. Stanton.”

Stanton’s nostrils flared. He gave no other indication of emotional reaction to her rejection of his patronizing assumption. Zach’s body tensed, heat flushing his neck and upper chest, the feeling fleeting but disconcerting. As he inhaled slowly, he smelled it.

All of it.

Every bit of subtext in the room had an odor. Sam’s anger, Asher’s annoyance, Zach’s own confusion. Sparks of sexual interest between Sam and Asher literally smelled like sulfur and wine and embarrassingly intimate pheromones, a rich, intoxicating scent that turned Zach into a voyeur.

Could you be a Peeping Tom with your nose? If yes, then Zach was guilty as hell.

“It’s fine,” he cut in, breathing through his mouth, arousal snaking its way across his skin, the scent a contagion. “By the time we’re done, I’d planned to drink something stronger anyhow.” His mouth curled up as Sam examined him, reading his body as much as she listened to his words. He knew before his conscious mind could form the thought that the desire blooming in him wasn’t for her.

It just was.

“You’re flushed,” she said, reaching for his wrist. As her fingertips found his pulse, his hand burned. Regulating his temperature had been a problem since The Incident (as he thought of it), his blood running hot. Asher’s eyes locked on the spot where Sam’s fingers met Zach’s skin.

Zach smelled his frown before he saw it.

“I’m fine,” he protested, tearing his arm away from Sam, moving in his seat, leaning forward and pressing his elbows into his knees. His hand reached up to rub his freshly shaved chin.

“Shall we then? Given Dr. Baird’s caffeinated state, this should be quick,” Asher said, eyes on her fingers.

The ones that had just touched Zach.

“What’s left to discuss? It’s time for me to go home. Leave LupiNex. I appreciate all the care you’ve given me, and Mr. Stanton—Gavin, I mean—has been more than generous with the settlement regarding my, um…” Zach’s rapid-fire speech died down as he tried to ignore Asher Stanton’s withering look.

“The lab accident,” Sam interjected. “The serum injection.”

The Incident.

Asher held a sheet before him and began reading. “The subject,” he read, eyes moving to glance at Zach, “injected less than two cc’s from a syringe into the tip of his left index finger, plunging third-generation serum made from batch X31 into his body. Three witnesses were present. In less than a second, subject’s eyes turned red. Within three seconds, subject’s body developed fur. Approximately four seconds post-injection, subject’s bone structure elongated, clothing shredding—”

“We’ve all read the reports, Mr. Stanton,” Sam said. “No need to go over every gruesome detail.”

“Gruesome.” Zach repeated her word. “What an understatement.” He gave Asher a wry smile. The man didn’t react.

Zach continued. “I’ll sum it up. Within seconds after accidentally injecting myself with a serum I wasn’t given full information about, I turned into a wolf. According to eyewitnesses, I growled, howled, jumped through a plate glass window dividing a conference room from a hallway, and promptly froze. Within five seconds, my shift devolved, leaving me with seventeen broken bones, a torn meniscus, rearranged organs, a complete alteration in my bone structure and musculature, and enough reconstructive surgery over the past eight months to make me a candidate for the Witness Protection Program.”

No one in the room laughed.

“I’ve healed. It’s time to let me go.” He’d used the same words three weeks ago, his tone a plea. This time, it was a demand.

“You left out the part describing the fact that you possess shifter abilities, Zachary,” Asher intoned.

“Don’t call me that,” he said sharply. “It’s Zach.” Zachary was what his parents had called him when they were alive. The asshole sitting across the desk didn’t deserve to call him by his full name.

Asher didn’t blink. “You possess powers no human has ever held. And your appearance is notably… changed.” Pictures inside the folder in Asher’s hands showed him before. Five feet nine, one hundred fifty pounds, a lab rat. Glasses and an old Michigan hoodie. Size nine men’s shoe.

As he stretched his restless legs before him and reached up to scratch his chin, he could see the after in his body. Seven inches of new height. Seventy new pounds of solid muscle. Size thirteen shoe.

Everything had grown. He willed himself not to think about certain body parts, ones that twitched as his blood pumped fiercely through him, his nose catching the wafting scent of a woman’s perfume from the nearby elevator. Electricity shot up the root of his cock, making his gut clench. Being watched twenty-four seven in a clinical setting for eight months wasn’t doing him any favors sexually, either.

Sam’s turn to cock an eyebrow. Zach could feel a lie in the air, as if Asher and Sam weren’t quite telling him everything, but couldn’t explain why.

“Look. It’s not like I want to be a wolf. I just won’t shift. It’s simple,” he declared, pinging his attention between Sam and Asher.

“If it were simple, we wouldn’t be having this meeting. Your powers are considerably more complex than you realize,” Asher replied.

“He’s right,” Sam added. “You can’t just go back to your regular life.”

Zach slid the rolled cuff of his white business shirt up to reveal scars that laced the long lines of his bones. “You think I’ll just ‘go back’?” He lifted a section of his wavy brown hair off his forehead, fingertips grazing the thick scarring there. “Do I need to show you the rest?” He resisted reaching for his belt buckle.

“No. We’re well acquainted with all the damage to your body,” Sam said in a pained voice.

Asher’s eyes just narrowed.

“I can’t ‘go back’ to a life that isn’t mine anymore.”

“Is this about money?” Asher asked drolly, a touch of cynicism obvious.

“It’s about freedom.”

The man’s dismissive huff made the hair on Zach’s neck stand up. “Mr. Hayden, I assure you, freedom is the very last priority you should have at this moment. Security is considerably more important.”

“Fine to say when you’re free. Tell me how important security is when you feel like a prisoner.” Zach was on his feet, hands in fists, fury rising in his chest, a lump he couldn’t swallow down. “I’m out of here.”

Sam looked at Asher, the two communicating some thought that made Zach pause.

“The shifting is under control?” Asher asked her, his tone clear; there was only one acceptable answer.

“In a controlled environment, yes,” she replied, clinical and dry.

“You haven’t tested him out there? In the real world?”

“Mr. Stanton, how, exactly, do you suggest we ‘test’ Zach’s shifter powers and ability to manage his shifting in the human world? There isn’t an ethics board for this. Peer-reviewed studies don’t exist. We’re making this up as we go along.”

Zach winced. Those last words were kryptonite to a scientist.

“He’s healed?”

“Yes. All the damage from the initial incident has been addressed. His appearance is, ah… altered. As you can see.”

Zach resisted the urge to flex a bicep. Turn green. Pick up a car. Roar.

“I’m leaving,” he reiterated.

“Can you control yourself around women?” Asher asked, his voice as casual as if he were asking Zach’s golf handicap.

Zach avoided Sam’s eyes. “What?”

“My kind experiences uncontrolled shifting during two phases: puberty and… Well, the other one isn’t important. Silly old legend.” He smirked. “Can you control your shifting around women?”

“I haven’t shifted since The Incident.”

Asher looked shocked. “Not once?”

“No.”

“Have you tried?”

“No.”

“Could you shift if you wanted to?”

Zach’s fingertips tingled, his toes spreading, thighs thickening as rage fueled the prodromal symptoms of a shift. A thick, earthy scent of a woman a few floors away fed into the deepening change in him, making linear thought difficult.

“Yes,” he said in a voice darker than he’d intended.

“But you can control it?” Asher sounded skeptical.

“Of course,” he and Sam replied in unison, though she gave him major side-eye.

A long, slow breath came out of Asher, his attention suddenly entirely devoted to Sam. “I defer to your professional opinion.”

“I suspect you never defer,” she shot back, “but it is a relief to know you view me as a professional.”

“You created this mess with the serum. I have no choice but to trust you to solve the problems related to it.”

“I’m not a problem,” Zach retorted. A blur of colored smoke and ribbons, of music and sweet spun sugar danced on his skin, the scent of some unnamed woman like fast-growing morning glories wrapping around his cock. She was in the building somewhere, his body thick where it shouldn’t be, his restraint thinning as he stood on the threshold of freedom.

Now? Of all times to pick up the scent of a woman he couldn’t ignore, it had to be now?

“But you are a complication. If it were as simple as letting you go home, trust me, we would,” Asher said, brow furrowed. He looked at Sam and waited, impassive.

Zach’s heart slammed against his ribs, the beat matching sex thrusts, going faster and faster until he felt the fine beads of sweat under his collar, his armpits on fire, his lip soaking. He had to get out of here now.

He had to find her.

“Trust me,” he said calmly, fighting to hide the struggle within. “Besides, if I’m wrong, I’ll just come back.” That was a lie. Every word out of his mouth was a lie, rushing out of him pell-mell, his urgent need to go and find her making him say whatever it took.

Asher blinked exactly once. “If you are wrong, humans could die. If you are wrong, you could reveal our kind. Our survival depends on your discretion, much to my chagrin. You’ve hardly proven yourself trustworthy.”

Rage pumped Zach up, making him lean in, aggressive and dominant. “If anyone has anything to prove, it’s you.”

A flicker of emotion registered in Asher’s face as he stood. Sam touched Zach’s arm, her voice low and soothing.

“I think we need to give Zach the benefit of the doubt. He still works here. Let him go home, Asher.” Her use of Stanton’s first name was touching. “He’ll be back tomorrow for work. He’s suffered enough. I can see his frustration.”

Zach looked down at his crotch. Was it that obvious?

“We can acclimate him to his new reality,” she insisted.

Zach’s new reality was blurring around the edges as he smelled her, floors away, her hair tickling his nose, the need to bury himself in the unnamed woman such a primal craving that he couldn’t stand being away from her for a minute longer. Crossing the small office, he grasped the doorknob and turned, looking only at Sam.

“I am one hundred percent in control of myself. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Slamming the door on Asher Stanton’s protests, Zach ate up the floor, strides long and determined as he bypassed the elevator and went straight for the stairs. A magnetic pull told him to go up, two stairs at a time until he reached the twelfth floor.

Barreling through the metal door, he tore down a hallway, pivoting until he stared at the sign.

The Platinum Club.

He’d been here once before, for a LupiNex holiday party, but memory served as no anchor, his body very much in the present, second by second, step by step, as her scent grew stronger. Loud, booming laughter filled his ears, the sound like church bells, like heaven, like every musical note forged into a single drumbeat meant for him.

“Excuse me. Can I help you?” A catlike woman wearing a dark pantsuit and gold hoop earrings gave him a smooth look, her face placid but authoritarian. Old enough to be his late mother but too sophisticated, she looked like she ran the place.

“I’m here for—” He halted, hearing the change in his voice.

No.

No.

He met her eyes, seeing a cold disapproval morph into disbelief as she reached into her jacket and pulled out a phone.

“Derry!” she called out, the word meaning nothing to Zach. Racing away from her, the unnamed woman’s scent strengthening, he turned to the right of a large bar and found a beast of a man with a blonde human in his lap, the two drinking out of large wineglasses.

“Sorry, chap, the Plat’s not open yet. We’re—”

“Here’s the sangria! Derry, get another glass.”

Zach turned to find a goddess holding a pitcher, her long black hair like spun obsidian, her scent the answer to every mystery he’d ever pondered.

And just then he realized how terribly wrong he’d been moments ago.

Nothing was under control.

Least of all him.

* * *

Sophia Stanton would’ve recognized him even without the supernatural senses her bear shifter nature gave her. And right now every one of those senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste—was electric with the sudden charge of awareness. She registered his skin, his muscles, his blood, the wave of his hair, the tangy, tantalizing allure of his sweat.

She would’ve recognized him if he’d shrunk to a tenth of his original size, been dipped in blue paint, dressed as an elf, and stuck in a toy shop window with a price tag on his ear.

“You,” she whispered.

Him, a voice inside her echoed.

The pitcher of sangria in her hands suddenly felt like a brick, a millstone, a lifetime.

His lips parted, but only a soft, deep growl came forth.

Heat flooded her as she recognized the new part of him. Not completely human anymore, this man, the one who had humiliated her so long ago, yet the one she couldn’t forget.

No, she wouldn’t even admit it to herself. He hadn’t hurt her; he was simply a fool. An idiot. Too stupid to realize what a tremendous loss he’d suffered when he’d turned down her invitation last year. A real man—shifter or human—would’ve been honored. Real men begged for her attentions and thanked her profusely afterward, right before they begged for more.

Being a bear shifter, even a female bear shifter, she’d frequently indulged. Not as often as Derry—let’s be serious, her twin brother had been pathological in his sexual escapades before he’d gotten engaged to Jess—but as often as she pleased, which was quite often.

She wasn’t ashamed of who she was. Unlike her brother Gavin, who was always running from his nature, trying to control the wolf within, she reveled in who she was: a bear shifter with a passion for life. Not just sex, but adventure. Action. Achievement.

That night in the elevator, however, this man standing before her now with lust radiating from his eyes had turned her down as quickly and as forcefully as her previous lovers had begged for more.

But how things had changed. He didn’t look as if he would reject her now.

My goodness. He was as flushed and eager as an adolescent shifter at his first orgy. His eyes were black as licorice, the golden brown shoved aggressively aside by some biochemical process in him, his sensual mouth moist from hungry swipes of his tongue. The man was bigger—taller even—with the thick build of a beast in command.

She could hear his accelerated pulse, the shallowness of his hot breath, and even the lurid thoughts in his brain—a mantra of words such as kiss, lick, taste, pound, thrust, take.

You.

“How lovely to see you again,” she purred, savoring the way his eyes darkened further, the rush of his blood pumping through his veins, making the pulse on his neck jump.

She hadn’t made an impression then, but she certainly was making one now.

Sophia held out her hand, eyes holding his, letting him know she saw his arousal, that she could manipulate it, that—this time, at last—he was her prisoner. “I don’t believe I ever got your name. I’m Sophia Stanton.”

He dragged his gaze away from her face to stare at her hand a moment before grabbing it between both of his and bringing it to his lips.

At the feel of his tongue against her knuckles, her amusement faltered, replaced by a blast of molten need.

Him.

If it weren’t for years and years of practice, she would’ve melted to the floor in a puddle, speech impossible. But she did have practice managing her own desire, and she brought it to heel, with far more effort than was reasonable, by snatching her hand out of his grip. Heart thudding in her ears, she staggered back a step. “Your name?” she demanded, although her voice quivered.

He raised his head slightly, and his eyes met hers. Dark pools of hot pleasure she wanted to dive into naked and screaming the name she didn’t know.

“Zach Hayden,” he said, his voice rough. She heard a faint howl at the edges of his speech, the way a werewolf sounded when he was on the verge of a shift.

She studied him more closely, acknowledging he was not only more muscular now but taller, impossibly so. As a shifter, she was so accustomed to seeing incredible transformations in her friends and family, she hadn’t paused to think why her brother’s human employee, whom she’d fruitlessly propositioned once on a drunken whim ages ago, was now a sexually potent werewolf with claws straining at his fingertips.

Wait.

The accident at the lab. The human researcher. It must’ve been him.

And he was about to shift—here, now.

Belatedly she realized the danger. They were at the Platinum Club, not a shifter haven. This was no place for a man to turn into a wolf. She was here with Derry and Jess as the club opened, so thankfully the place had few patrons, but there were enough—plus the human workers who could not be exposed to an uncontrolled shifter.

Assuming that was what she saw unfolding before her.

“Derry!” Eva appeared, her typical smoothness pushed aside by concern. “Can you help with this—he’s—this human? Shifter?”

“I’ve got him,” Sophia declared.

“Are you sure?” Derry’s voice was a curious mixture of concern and amusement.

“Since when have I ever had a problem managing your kind?”

“My kind?” he replied, the amusement taking over.

“Men in heat,” she shot back.

“Take him downstairs!” Eva called out to her. “Morgan will be expecting you.”

Shoving aside her questions for later, Sophia risked touching him again, clamping her hand around a muscled bicep that was tightening into a predator’s foreleg, and hauling him with her to a service corridor behind the bar.

Even that slight contact, her fingers on his arm with thick fabric between, burned hot enough to make her flinch. Each step they took together was timed to her heartbeat, loud enough now to drown out the sounds of the bar’s Friday night dance music blaring from the speakers overhead, the nightclub about to open.

The service elevator, thank God, was already on this floor, and she pushed him inside and joined him, breathless and confused. She set her palm on the metal plate that would bring them to safety downstairs.

To the secret Novo Club.

“Sophia.”

His voice didn’t make the usual path—it didn’t travel through the air to her ears to her brain, where the nerves deciphered the sound and filed it away rationally. Instead, the sound of her name on his lips pierced her skin, sliced through flesh, muscle, and bone until it found her heart, where it embedded itself deep inside, barbed and deadly.

The chestnut waves of his hair were spreading into his cheeks, his eyes flashing golden over his narrowing jaw.

She slapped him. She was taller than most men, with the strength of a bear who lifted pianos for exercise, and her hand knocked him off-balance. “Control yourself!”

His animal features flickered, faded. Very human, very male eyes captured hers. A slow smile spread over his lips, and she shivered.

“I thought you didn’t like men who controlled themselves,” he said slowly, raising an eyebrow.

A memory struck her as powerfully as her hand had just hit his jaw: her hand sliding up his (then narrow) chest, pushing away the lapels of his lab coat to feel the beat of the heart that, for some reason, she’d wanted to touch.

“Come home with me,” she’d said, mindlessly following the impulse to get him into her bed, gift him with her body.

But he’d refused her. The shock hadn’t left her for days—if ever.

For he had been the only man to refuse her.

She put a hand on the wall of the elevator for support. Silently she begged the elevator to descend more quickly. To the Novo Club. To safety. Something was wrong with him. Something that could hurt her. Trained as a nurse, she wasn’t too proud to admit there were times everyone—even she—needed assistance.

And as Zach’s look intensified, every nerve ending in her body simultaneously stood on end, buzzing, the sound of thousands of vibrations all coming together to form a single beat.

One that drowned out all her fear and replaced it with something worse.

Fate.