He glanced up as I walked in, the sun pouring through the window highlighting the few threads of silver in his dark hair. Blake and I had both inherited our coloring from our blonde mother, although I’d inherited, or perhaps copied, my father’s dress sense: we’d managed to wear practically identical charcoal gray suits this morning. A deep frown scored lines between his brows and bracketed the corners of his mouth.
“Your judgment is clearly even less reliable than I’d thought,” he said after I’d stood there uncomfortably for a long moment. “Mating without my consent or even my knowledge? And mating someone without any pedigree, any advantage to the family? You’ll break this bond at once. Prescott is already preparing for the ritual.”
That didn’t surprise me in the least, even though he clearly meant it to blindside me. The night before, my father had taken me by surprise and at a disadvantage.
He’d obviously planned to have the same high ground this morning.
But I’d also planned for this eventuality, long before I ever set that first fateful meeting with Dimitri. And I might be a coward and something of a pushover when it came to my family, but I’d successfully completed a hundred business negotiations with clients at least as aggressive as my father.
Sometimes, the best defense was a good offense. And if I took a deep breath, I could feel my bond to Dimitri in the back of my soul, linking me to his uncompromising strength. If I focused on that, I could do this.
“Certainly, if you want to cause an immense scandal and make me completely unmateable in the future,” I said as calmly as I could, even though my heart tripped in an unsteady rhythm, my breathing following along. “Everyone’s going to think I’m damaged goods. There could be rumors. About my health, for example.” My father flinched slightly at the wordhealth, and I had to force myself not to show any triumph. A hit, a palpable hit! “Not to mention, you know how Jerry and Melissa feel about bonding for life.”
Our two oldest and most hidebound board members had very strong feelings about upholding werewolf traditions. Without some unforgiveable transgression—and their list of what qualified for that would be limited to things like murdering someone else in the pack—bond-breaking rituals were anathema to them. And a lot of our clients were on the same page. My father had spent most of his life building up a network of stuffy, stick-in-the-mud shifters with whom he primarily did business.
And now it could bite him in the ass, with my blessing.
His face had grown darker and darker, a vein pulsing in his temple. He stood, leaning his fists on the desk, obviously wanting to intimidate me with his size.
For the first time, it didn’t work so well. Yeah, he could physically dominate me if he wanted to.
But Dimitri had made him blink first last night. My father wasn’t invincible.
“You’re nothing without me, without this family, without this company,” my father said, his voice thick with rage. “If you and your trailer trash alpha want to live happily ever after, be my guest. You can leave your employee badge with security on your way out.”
That was a bluff, and I knew it, and he had to know I knew it. My confidence soared.
“I’m sure Anderson Electric will be thrilled to have their account manager replaced in the middle of their biggest project with us. Maybe Blake could take over? No, wait. He’s in Key West maxing out every credit card he can get his hands on.”
That vein went nuclear, bulging enough to be visible from space. A sudden spike of real worry pierced my bubble of giddy joy at finally,finallysaying some of the things I’d had trembling on the tip of my tongue for years. Was I going to give him that stroke his doctor had been warning us about?
Anyway, I’d pushed him as far as possible, and then some. I had to compromise now. Dial it back, give him an out. Make it possible for him to save some face while he gave me what I wanted and what we both knew had to be inevitable.
“Of course I wouldn’t be working with Anderson if you hadn’t taught me everything I know,” I said, in a more conciliatory tone. Humble, even though it made me sick to my stomach. “But they want a Castelli on their account. Of course they do. You’ve made our name synonymous with high-quality solutions. That’s why they came to us in the first place.”
They’d come to us in the first place because I’d aggressively courted their business and gotten us the account.
But details.
A little of the color had faded out of my father’s violently flushed face, and he hadn’t exploded yet. Okay, I was on the right track.
“Dimitri may not be the kind of man you’d pictured for me, but he’s a real alpha.” I bit my lip, choosing my words carefully. What I said next would either sell it, or completely ruin my chances of getting out of this conversation with what I wanted. “You saw how he stood up to you last night, even though he was obviously intimidated by you. Most other alphas, you roll right over them. Isn’t that the kind of alpha you want guiding me as I take the next steps in my career? As I spend more time representing the Castelli pack in public?”
It nearly made me vomit describing Dimitri’s role in my life as “guiding me,” but I could see my words having the desired effect. My father went from furious to thoughtful while I spoke, still angry but starting to calm.
I had to go for the killing stroke. My father couldn’t supervise me all the time, even though he desperately wanted to. He needed a younger Castelli here, carrying on the family legacy; he also needed an alpha presence to satisfy his narrow-minded idea of what the family legacy ought to be. And we both knew Blake would never step up.
“I think Dimitri would be willing to spend time with me here at the company, bolstering me in negotiations and keeping an eye on my decision-making,” I went on, my belly clenching tighter and tighter. If it was possible to humiliate myself more deeply, I didn’t want to know about it. But this was why I’d formed this plan. And I waswinning, I could feel it. “He’s my alpha. Having him by my side day to day would only make me and the company stronger.”
I stopped while I was hopefully ahead, letting that sink in for a minute.
Without mentioning Hensley’s or any of the complications that would arise from that eventually, I knew it had to be at the forefront of his mind. Other than me, he didn’t have an option to take over from him when that became necessary.
And if I could let him make it look to the board, and to our clients, and to himself, like it had been at least kind of his own idea…
“Your mother and I will host the two of you tomorrow, at our home, along with the Sandovals,” he said at last, and my breath caught as I stopped myself from letting out the gusty exhale my lungs wanted to release. The Sandovals were Jerry, his wife, their daughter, and her mate, a stuffed-shirt lawyer who played golf with Blake sometimes. All of them were a tough crowd to please. “If he manages to behave himself decently, I’ll consider allowing you to remain mated to him. But I don’t have a lot of faith in his ability to do that.”
I had total faith in Dimitri’s ability to behave decently, but his ability to behave to their picky, snobbish standard? Not so much. My chest clenched.
