His jaw tightened, and the remains of that smile evaporated. “I’ll tell you what you want to know if you give me a straight answer on something else,” he said. “Why me? I asked you yesterday. You didn’t answer, except to tell me you weren’t planning on trying to have me killed. You had more notes there,” and he nodded at the pad of paper, “about how I need to behave. Dress. Present myself. I’m not what you’re looking for. And I’m not crazy about beingMy Fair Lady, or whatever.”
A sudden vision of Pechorin wearing one of those flower-feather-monstrosity hats Audrey Hepburn had on in the movie assailed me, and I choked on a laugh, coughing into my fist, eyes watering. “Sorry, sorry, fuck,” I gasped, as he frowned at me, brows drawing together like a gathering thunderstorm. “Sorry,” I said more soberly. “Look. I’m more attractive than Rex Harrison, at least, right?”
He stared at me blankly. “Who?”
Well, so much for lightening the mood with a little humor.
“The actor fromMy Fair—how do you know the movie without—okay, never mind, Christ. Pechorin, I don’t give a fuck how you dress or behave when we’re alone, but you need to fit the role in public for this to work. I’m trying to get the job of CEO. You’ll need to look and act like the kind of man who’d be mated to one. An alpha who’d inspire confidence in a bunch of stuffy werewolf executives.”
He leaned forward, resting his forearms on the table and fixing me with an intense, penetrating gaze. That bastard, using my own practiced strong-negotiator posture on me! But something lurked in the depths of those eyes that made me…ashamed, of all things. Something that could see all the way to the cowardly, jealous, bitter person I was deep down.
I hated feeling like that.
“What?” I snapped. “It’s a perfectly reasonable requirement. This is what I need. And I’m guessing you’re wondering why I’d pick you when I could find a different alpha with the right background without too much trouble?”
He nodded.
The way he watched me, so quietly unyielding in his determination to get me to explain myself, made my fingers twitch with the urge to fidget. I couldn’t quite meet his eyes.
“Someone like that, with the pedigree my family would want, would take over for real. Push me out. He’d get promoted in my place. No one’s going to expect or want you to become the CEO, because aside from the knot, you don’t have any qualifications. You just need to be polished enough that we won’t be a laughingstock. You’re supposed to prop me up, remember? That’s the whole point.”
After a beat, he said, “Sure, I guess it is.” Pechorin leaned back again, in the same position he’d occupied before—but with tension in the set of his shoulders and in his massive frame. “So. Spiffed up but not competition. That’s what you’re looking for? Wear a suit, but not as well as you do. Don’t get in any fights, but growl when necessary. Big, dumb, and polite. That about it?”
Agreeing with him felt more insulting than I could justify. The irony, of course, being that he was far from dumb. And trying to sugarcoat the truth—that yes, I wanted big, dumb, and polite, with a limited amount of growling available as necessary—would only be condescending. And hence even more insulting.
Oddly, I realized I wasn’t worried that he’d hurt me if I pissed him off. Not anymore. That had clearly been an error in judgment too, even if it’d been a rational error to make. I’d spent enough time around alphas to know when violence might be imminent, and except for my moment of paranoia the night before in the parking lot, he hadn’t set off any alarm bells in that regard.
I just didn’t want to insult him. We’d be mated.
Jesus fucking Christ, we’d bemated, and whatever tone we set now would be what I’d have to live with in private for who knew how long. Months, at least. Maybe years.
But I’d hesitated too long, losing my chance either to be honest or to be tactful, or hopefully even both.
Pechorin’s mouth quirked in a humorless half smile. “Yeah, that’s what I thought.”
Shit. “Look, Pechorin—”
“Might want to get used to calling me Dimitri,Brook. If you’re planning to convince all your snobby relatives that you mated me because you fell in love, or something. I guess you could fall back on telling them you’re with me for my knot. Maybe they’d believe that. After all, that seems to be all they care about, so why wouldn’t you?”
Yeah. Yeah, they probably would believe that, since they thought any guy who took a knot was weak, and they thought I was weak, so connect the dots. They’d held out hope for a while that maybe I’d mate with a woman and produce some alpha offspring, be useful by proxy, but I had no intention of risking passing on Hensley’s to any non-alpha children—and now that they’d finally accepted that women weren’t my thing, they’d pivoted to trying to push an alpha on me.
But taking a knot wasn’t my thing, either. I enjoyed topping, dammit. I hadn’t been lying when I told Pechorin that.
Fuck. Not Pechorin; Dimitri.
“Yeah, maybe they would,” I said, my voice rasping in my throat. So I probably deserved his sarcasm-bordering-on-mockery, but that didn’t make it any more pleasant. Less, actually. “And you’re right. We need to get more comfortable with each other, or at least act like it. Dimitri. Am I pronouncing it right?”
His eyes flared with alpha gold for a second, and he shifted in his chair. “Close enough,” he said, as roughly as I’d spoken myself.
Had it made him angry, hearing me use his first name? Since I had the feeling he didn’t like me much? I wasn’t going to ask, especially since it’d been his damn idea. My name on his lips had given me an odd little shiver, as if the intimacy of it heralded further, less welcome, intimacy to come. Maybe he’d had the same issue. Knotting me couldn’t possibly be worse from his side of the equation, could it? I knew I’d be overjoyed if I were on the other side of this instead of knowing that every second brought me closer to bending over for this harsh, sardonic alpha I didn’t know and had to force myself to trust.
“I’ll try to get better with the pronunciation,” I replied at last, flailing for something, anything to say. “Sound more natural.”
He shrugged. “No one but me’s going to know the difference. I doubt it matters that much.”
A heavy silence fell.
I broke it with, “I still need to know what trouble you’re in, Dimitri. Who’s going to come calling? Do they need to be paid off too? And don’t try to leave anything out, please. I looked into your antecedents. I know you have at least three packs on your tail, figuratively if not literally.”
