“You’re Cinderella in this scenario,princess. If I’m the rich one. You’re the one with the bags full of new clothes.”
I finally cleared the last row of trash cans and made it into the more open space of the mall proper, and Dimitri fell into step beside me. A glance up at him showed me a crooked grin and gleaming eyes.
“That makes you the fairy godmother, actually. Maybe you should drop this analogy while you’re only a little bit behind.”
My face burning, I opened my mouth to let out any one, or maybe several, of the scathing retorts that popped into my head. But then I turned, meaning to look him in the eyes while I told him what I thought of him.
And the urge to continue arguing withered away. His smile looked genuine. Amused, and not necessarily at my expense, either. Like he’d been enjoying bantering with me rather than using it as a way to put me down, as I’d assumed.
He’d had me on the defensive since I first walked into that bar and saw him there waiting for me. Maybe I’d been on the defensive before I even met him, expecting the same kind of contempt and dismissal I received from my family and many of my colleagues on a daily basis. Alphas looked down on me; that was the way of the world.
Maybe I needed to get out more.
I stopped in my tracks, Dimitri coming to a halt beside me, and cocked my head and examined him, trying to see him objectively rather than through the lens of insecurity and anxiety and fear.
“What?” he demanded. “Do I have something on my face?”
He’d had that honestly pretty nice smile on his face, until me staring at him weirdly had wiped it away.
We could be allies, rather than unwilling, adversarial co-conspirators. And maybe all I had to do to bring that about was…stop being adversarial.
Jesus. Could it possibly be that easy? Just trust him? Try to relax a little for once?
This time, when I sucked in as much oxygen as I could hold, my lungs filled all the way, and the tension flowed in waves all the way down to my toes, down and out.
“Are you really going to help me?” I asked, trying not to sound pitiful and needy, but…yeah, not really succeeding. My voice had a plaintive note to it that took my blush to surface-of-the-sun levels. “I mean, you’re going to do your best, right? Good-faith effort?”
The furrow between Dimitri’s brows smoothed out somewhat, and that smile came back. Not all the way, but a hint of it at the corners of his mouth and in the softened light in his gray eyes.
“I’d like to,” he said, a lot more gently than I expected. Or possibly deserved. “I already told you, if I’m paid to do a job, I do the job. Period.”
Trust. It had to be a leap of faith, right? Maybe hewouldcatch me when I fell. And I’d never know if I didn’t give him the opportunity to prove it.
I smiled up at him in return, my facial muscles protesting. Yeah, I could probably stand to smile a little more in general.
“The pack has a shaman. Maybe I can get him to enchant some lizards, or something. If that’d give you a better Cinderella experience. I’m afraid that’s outside of my capabilities, but part of management is delegation, right?”
Dimitri’s full-throated, head-thrown-back laugh hit me like a flash grenade, leaving me blinking and rocking back on my heels. How could a man like this have a laugh likethat? Warm and deep and infectious, making my sad attempt at a smile widen into something real.
He grinned down at me, eyes bright. “I’ll give the enchanted lizards a pass, thanks. But look, if I’m Cinderella, you’re right. I need one pair of new shoes to go with the suits. One pair of shoes, one belt, and then we’re out of this fucking mall before I crawl out of my own skin. Deal?”
Well, that was a meeting-me-halfway peace offering if ever I’d heard one. More than halfway, even. A genuine concession.
“One pair of shoes, one belt. And we can go to the department store that’s on the way out to the car.” It gave me almost physical pain to suggest that, rather than insisting on backtracking to the much preferable upscale haberdashery at the other end of the mall, but when Dimitri nodded in obvious relief, his smile sticking around…worth it.
“I won’t argue, even if they look dumb,” Dimitri said.
I shoved down the brief flare of annoyance. Dumb? Good taste was never dumb. But he was trying, dammit.
When we turned and set off for the store, the atmosphere between us was practically friendly.
Chapter 5
Point of View
My sense of ease had drained away completely by the time I unlocked the front door of my house and awkwardly ushered Dimitri inside.
“So. This is home,” I said, pushing the door shut behind him with an echoing click.
