Page 162 of Golden Eagle

Sasha put glasses of water in front of them, and Mia reached for hers with a grateful “thanks,” taking long pulls straight from the rim of the glass. Someone who understood the importance of hydration. An athlete, Sasha thought, when he paired that small fact with her slender, muscular build. He thought Val had said something about a farm – about horses.

“Sasha,” Val said, swinging his gaze to him, eyes wide with yet more excitement. “Come dance with us!”

His first, unconscious response wasyes. A pulse of purely physical anticipation; a quick urge for mindless joy. He wanted to dance, heloveddancing – but Nikita wasn’t a dancer, and dancing with strangers had long since lost any appeal for him. It always started out fine, but then his partner, man or woman, coquettish or brusque, would put a hand on him, a pointed touch, wanting more, and his blood would run cold. He didn’t want to be groped by someone whose name he didn’t even know; didn’t want to put that kind of trust in someone who wasn’t pack. Whom he didn’t love.

Val smiled at him now, not the knife-edged, in-control, calculated smile that he’d shown to Nikita in the pub last night, but something true and joyful that drove home how young he really looked. He smiled, and Sasha did love him, differently than he loved Nikita, yes, but there was trust, and it was mutual, and Sasha wanted to danceso badlyit shocked him.

But he said, “Oh, um. My shift…” He pointed to the bar behind him, a weak gesture.

Val wasn’t deterred in the slightest. “Oh, come now. This is my first time dancing as a free man, and you’re going to deny me?”

“Careful,” Mia said, dryly, “he’s shameless.”

“Darling,” Val chided, sweetly, and somehow dialed his smile up another notch, his blue, blue eyes crinkling. “Sasha. Sweetheart. Come dance.”

“If you can say no, you’re stronger than me,” Mia said with a snort of laughter.

“My shift,” Sasha protested again, weakly.

“Have you had your break yet?” Mia asked.

He hadn’t. And he was due for one. He met Val’s gaze, and his last bit of resistance crumbled. “Okay. I’ll clock out.”

“Excellent.”

“You guys go ahead,” Mia told them, when Sasha had found someone to cover him and came out from behind the bar. “I need a break.”

“We’ll miss you, darling,” Val told her, but he took Sasha’s hand, and towed him to the dance floor, to the kaleidoscope of light and sound and flailing arms.

~*~

There was a lull in the door traffic every night between nine and ten, when most of the first wave was already inside, and the second wave of younger, rowdier patrons hadn’t pre-gamed and come out yet. Marco came out to swap places with Nikita. “Some asshole needs bouncing out of the VIP lounge.” The guys had long since grown used to the unlikely truth that, though Nikita wasn’t the largest of them, he was the best at tossing out unruly patrons.

He nodded, and moved inside, and tried very hard not to think about the fact that Val was in here, where Sasha was, while he’d been standing out on the sidewalk for hours. It wasn’t as if they’d been spending time together: Sasha was at his post behind the bar, and it was a busy night. The most they could have socialized was trading a few comments across the bar, and that was while Sasha was fielding customer after customer. There was no change for any kind of…intimacy.

He hated himself a little for even thinking the word. He was being an idiot.

When he got to the lounge, one of the waitresses told him – voice tremulous with nerves, rattled from dealing with the jerk who’d apparently been throwing drinks and making drunken threats – that his prey had gone to the bar. He turned around and headed that way, firmly not thinking any more idiotic thoughts along the way.

Until he got there, and found Val’s mate, Mia, sitting alone, drinking water, with Sasha nowhere to be found.

All thoughts about the drunk patron evaporated. He went right up to Mia – charged, really, he would acknowledge later, when he had enough distance from the moment to feel properly ashamed – and said, “Where are they?” Didn’t say,barked.

She started, but recovered quickly, expression smoothing as she set her glass down and turned to him. She’d had a quick spike of panic, that flash of natural fear that he wouldn’t blame any woman for feeling with a man was being a dick to her. But then it was like she remembered that she was far from vulnerable.

She looked at him calmly, and for the first time since he’d met her last night, he glimpsed a flash of steel beneath what he’d thought was a pretty, but blank exterior. She reminded him, in that moment, startingly, of Katya. Of Trina. Brimming with possibilities.

“They’re dancing,” she said. And then, after a pause just long enough to be pointed, “I take it you don’t like that.”

He glanced toward the dance floor, and found them right away. They were the two most beautiful creatures there, magnetic and glittering.

Sasha had taken his hair down, a platinum halo flaring around his head, reflecting the purple, blue, white lights that panned back and forth overhead, slender as a knife in his fitted, dark clothes, hands pale and splayed overhead. He danced like someone who’d broken out of a harness; like someone leashed who’d finally cut the bonds that held him tethered. Wild, and free, and uninhibited. Young, and careless, and joyous, his mouth open, laughing, saying something as Val moved into his space, head thrown back, eyes shut as he smiled wide.

Nikita thought anyone could have looked at him then and known he was a wolf, or at least a wild thing, something animal and unknowable. Something that shifted with the tides and the rhythms of the earth, that belonged beneath a harvest moon, pawprints on fresh snow; the sighing of the wind through pine boughs.

And then there was Val. His hips rolled like a courtesan’s, like someone who knew how to inspire lust, and who’d exercised that power flagrantly. The line of his throat, the flash of hipbones above his waistband, the way his arms found the rhythm and the way his hair moved as if stirred by an invisible breeze, hair that was a lure, a weapon – every tiny movement was erotic. If Sasha looked like flying, then Val looked like fucking, and the worst part? They looked so beautifultogether.

Val caught Sasha by the waist, lifted him, spun him – Sasha laughing, delighted, hands on Val’s shoulders – then set him down and reeled him out, like they were swing dancing. Where had Val even learned that? Maybe Sasha had taught him; Sasha had always loved dancing…

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