Page 17 of Strawberry Moon

I shook off the question, as I always had to when it lodged in my mind. There were no answers. I would never understand how such a horror had been perpetrated by mostly well-intentioned people, who had no idea what damage they were doing.

The fact remained, would always remain, that no one should ever be able to do what my grandfather had done without people noticing. And whatever else I did or didn’t do, I needed to make sure there were protections in place so that no one ever could again.

Maybe I would somehow, magically, be able to do that by working with the board of Sterling, but the more they hesitated, the more I doubted it. More likely, I suspected I would have to look to the government for more oversight.

Every businessman or professor who’d ever tried to teach me anything about running a company had a chill as I thought that, I was sure. One of the richest men alive looking for government oversight to limit the power of big business. What a nightmare.

Businessmen weren’t afraid of Batman or the government—they were afraid of people like me. People like them who grew consciences.

Anyway, the lab. Just a small place, with all the tools I needed to do my work, and it was right there in Arlington, a handful of miles from my grandfather’s house.

There was even a little break room with a fridge and couch, and...

Well, I wasn’t going to tell anyone, but I’d been sleeping there more often than I’d been sleeping at the house. The lab was clean, and not just in that way a lab had to be. It was clean of wrongdoing—it had never been used to try to murder an entire species. Had never belonged to someone who had.

I’d just managed to drag myself into the lab, phone in hand and looking through the notes I’d taken from Ford’s reactions, when I realized something I’d been avoiding thinking about for a while.

I sat down on the soft brown sofa in the break room, closed my notes, and opened the phone app.

My lawyer answered on the first ring. “What can I do for you today, Mr. Sterling.”

“I want to sell the house in Alexandria. And the one in New York. And Los Angeles.” I sighed and shook my head, then let it fall back against the sofa. “All of them, John. I want to sell all the houses. Why the hell does a person need a dozen houses?”

“Couldn’t tell you, if I’m being honest,” he told me, his voice chipper. “I do pretty well with just the one. Is there one you want to keep, or are you looking at buying a new place?”

Buying a new place. Because that was what people like me did. They threw away a dozen perfectly good fucking mansions and just bought a new one. “I haven’t decided yet. I’ll get my stuff out of the house in Alexandria and you can just... I don’t care what anyone does with any of it. Grandfather never put personal things in them. They’re all mausoleums. Full of expensive art and furniture that’s not intended to be used.”

“Rich people like that,” he answered, over the sound of a keyboard clacking on his end of the line. “Okay, I’ve got an agent for the Alexandria house. I’ll give her a call and see what she can do. You’re sure on this, Archer? You want to lose all the houses?”

“I do.”

He signed off, happily going off to do the bidding of his corporate overlord. Okay, no, he was a nice guy, and I shouldn’t think that way about him. Me, though? I was about to sell a few hundred millions of dollars’ worth of houses. It was funny, to think of the heir to the Sterling fortune being willfully without a home, living on a couch in a lab.

But I didn’t need a giant, echoing mansion in Alexandria.

I needed to get to work on my synthetic pheromones, and refine the formula.

Maybe instead of worrying about the scents, I should start with a pheromone formula I knew did what we needed it to, regardless of how awful and sharp it smelled, then find a way to cover it. If I couldn’t make the fake pheromones calm the angry alphas, we were sunk before we started.

But how would I even properly test it? Get Ford McKesson good and pissed at me, and see if the stinky stuff kept him from tearing my head off? Yup. That sounded like a great plan.

13

Ford

Archer Sterling was playing by the rules, so there was no damn reason for my shoulders to be so fucking tense.

The day before, he’d called my cell up and asked if I had time to smell some samples, asked if he could come out to the farm. He was running everything through me first, before exposing Cliff or any other testy alpha in my pack.

And still, my wolf was on edge, waiting for the sound of his car coming up the dirt road that led off the old country highway to the farmhouse. My ears were pricked for Archer’s approach.

“Something on your mind, Ford?” Ridge straightened up from crouching near the incubator in the barn where he was turning eggs. Our hens were producers, and only every once in a while did one of the girls get it in her head to brood. Mostly, we relied on incubators, turning the warmed eggs by hand three times a day to make sure they hatched okay.

I huffed, putting my hands on either side of the incubator and pushing to my feet. This batch looked all right so far, and we should have some new chicks in a couple weeks.

It’d be good to have some little ones around on the farm again, and Ridge had promised the local elementary school they could come out for a field trip once they’d hatched.

“Archer’s coming out to the farm today,” I admitted, hunching my shoulders in and stuffing my thumbs under my belt.

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