It wouldn’t change me. It wouldn’t rule me. Not happening.

“Were you tempted, Your Furriness?” I asked.

“By your evil?” His voice was a hot, deep whisper near my ear.

“Yes.”

“No. If you and I ruled forever, I would never have you all to myself. We tried that, remember?”

“So you’re greedy?”

His voice raised the tiny hairs on the back of my neck. “You have no idea.”

I was playing with fire. “How greedy are you?”

He spun me around, his eyes full of gold sparks and predatory excitement. “Let me show you.”

We made it to the tub eventually. It took a lot longer than planned.

Chapter 6

IT WAS MORNING and I came downstairs because Barabas was at the front door and Curran was in the shower.

“Kate,” he said. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.” I held the door open.

He walked in and followed me to the kitchen

“Tea?” I asked. Peace offering.

“Yes, please.”

“Earl Grey, mint, chamomile . . .”

“Chamomile.”

I walked to the kitchen island, pulled a tin labeled TENSION TAMER off the shelf, and spooned some loose tea into a diffuser. Apparently his tension was in need of taming. This conversation would suck.

Silence stretched.

“Where is Christopher?” Kate Daniels, the ice breaker.

“Asleep in the hammock on the porch. He had a rough couple of days.”

“Julie said he burned Bullfinch’s Mythology.”

Barabas sighed. “I bought a beautiful leather-bound edition for his birthday and hid it in the closet in the spare room. He found it yesterday as I was about to leave. I went to say good-bye and found him burning it in the fire pit outside.”

So not only had he burned a book, he’d burned the book Barabas bought him. Of all the people Christopher cared about, Barabas was the most important. I was a distant second.

“Did he say why he burned it?”

Barabas shook his head. “He stayed with it until it was ash, pacing back and forth around the fire pit. When it was gone, he got a blanket off the couch, lay in the hammock, and covered his head. He didn’t even take Maggie with him. She was crying by his hammock until I put her with him. He got up in the afternoon to go meditate with you and then went back into the hammock. He’s been withdrawn since then.”

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

“I can’t figure it out. Was it something about the binding? He has other books bound in leather.”

“Maybe he didn’t like one of the myths.”

Barabas sighed. “Sometimes I wish I could open his head and fiddle with his brain to put it back the way it needs to be.”

I poured water into our teacups and pushed honey toward him.

Beating around the bush any longer would just waste his and my time. “I was rude to you yesterday. I’m sorry. I’m trying to stay myself, but it’s been difficult lately.”

“Apology accepted,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry, too. I know you’re under a lot of pressure. And you’re right, I wasn’t there.”

Well, this wasn’t awkward. Not at all. I stared into my tea.

“Do you know why I left the Pack?” Barabas asked.

“No.” I never understood it. He had so much going for him there. Jezebel seemed absorbed in keeping track of Julie and guarding my back. She threw herself into it. Barabas, however, ended up running the Pack’s legal department. He was viewed as the Beast Lord’s personal lawyer. He didn’t have the longest tenure or the most experience, but people deferred to him anyway.

“I went as far as I could go there,” Barabas said. “I’ll never be an alpha. I don’t want to be an alpha. I didn’t even want to be the lead counsel. I like problem solving. I like taking a crisis, breaking it into manageable pieces, and finding a solution. I don’t like the minutiae. I don’t like paperwork.”

“You like trials, though?” He always seemed really keyed up before the trials.

“The last trial I handled involved a custody dispute and the divorce of my mother’s best friend’s daughter and a human she married. The opposing counsel asked for copies of income tax returns for the last five years. We obliged and sent them to him. During the pretrial hearing, he couldn’t figure out where they were, and then he found the tax returns for the first two years, but not the last three. He claimed we didn’t provide them, which made no sense because he had the first two and they were all in the same packet. He speculated that they might have been lost in the mail, except we had hand-delivered them to his office. He’s standing there shuffling his papers, and I wanted more than anything in the world to rip him open and chew on his insides.”

I laughed into my cup.

“Standing still required such an effort of will, my hands actually shook.” Barabas smiled. “One of my professors in law school referred to this as the glorious drudgery of the legal profession. I’ve had all the glory I can stand. Working for the Pack was just that, working for someone else. It was the thing I did, while waiting for something else to come along. I was a glorified servant.”

“Barabas . . .”

He held up his hand. “I’m not implying that it was the result of something you or Curran did. It was simply the nature of the position. And there is honor in service to a greater cause. But I wanted something that was mine. Separating from the Pack would give me the chance to figure out what that something would be.”

“Makes sense.” Separating with us was about the only way a shapeshifter could leave the Pack and still reside in Atlanta.

“When I bought shares in the Guild, Curran and I became partners in an enterprise. ‘Partners’ being the key word here. We’re equal. We’re streamlining the Guild, hammering it into shape, and it’s working. Our gig load has been steadily growing by five to ten percent each month.”

He leaned forward, alert, his eyes bright and focused. “This is something that’s mine.”

I nodded.

“I like my work. I love the house I live in. I take care of Christopher. According to my mother, I’ve been a wild card in every relationship I’ve ever tried, always looking for someone to ground me, so being a caretaker is good for me. The point is, I finally enjoy my life, Kate. I don’t want this to stop.”