Page 51 of The Forbidden Wolf

“So you…?” I waited for him to fill in the blank.

“Saved it? Yes.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Sebastian, did you buy the Principal Theater?”

He turned his palms up as if that were obvious and not the slightest bit insane. I backed away from him, touching the string of diamonds circling my neck like a collar. This building… on this block… I couldn’t even imagine what that must have cost. Millions. Probably tens of millions. Maybe even hundreds. I didn’t keep up with New York real estate. I just knew whatever the cost, it was far too much to spend on a first date. He could have won me over for less than twenty dollars two blocks down.

“Why would you do that?” I whispered.

“Because I lo—” He stopped and lifted his chin. “Because I’d been looking for an investment property for quite some time, and I was coming to take a look at it the night we met. Afterward, it felt like kismet. So I bought it… for you. It’s in your name, Elyse. Not just named after you.” His eyelids fluttered rapidly almost as if he were fighting back tears. “It still needs a tremendous amount of work to be restored to its former glory. I thought it might be something we could do together.” He looked down at his shiny black shoes. “While we get to know each other well enough to… do everything else expected of us.”

I ran my hand over my face, not caring what had become of Ruby’s perfect makeover. I didn’t know if I believed him or not. It seemed just as likely that he’d seen me drooling over it before the other wolves attacked and gotten the bright idea to buy it for me afterward. But it didn’t really matter now, did it? Either way, I owned a movie theater. And I could choose to view it as a big blue diamond dragging me under into a life I never wanted, or I could just…own a freakin’ movie theater.

My heart hummed with possibilities. I could hire Charlie to manage, get her out of that dead end coffee shop. Evan could be our IT guy. I was pretty sure Jayla would want to stick with becoming a doctor after all the work she’d put it in so far, but she could come watch movies. I could come watch movies. New movies. Old movies. Whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Did I really even care if that came with an implicit sexual quid pro quo? I’d been willing to mate with Blaze just to keep sneaking out once or twice a week. This deal was considerably better. All around.

I lifted my glamorous skirt—purposefully flashing some thigh through the slit, and moved toward the gilded doors and the bug-eyed teenage pups. Sebastian didn’t budge. I glanced back over my shoulder and subtly lifted my elbow for him to take.

Grinning, he bounded to my side and swiftly locked his arm with mine. This time, instead of grasping his wrist, I reached up and clutched his bicep. He shivered, and I knew right then that he would absolutely make that helpless, shell-shocked squinty face when I was through with him. But it wouldn’t be tonight.

“Did I finally do something right?” he asked quietly. Earnestly.

“You cannot buy my love, Sebastian,” I said as we crossed the threshold into the foyer where the warm air was practically dripping with butter. “Don’t ever try it again.”

“But?” He lifted his eyebrows.

I smiled up at him. “But I would sell my soul for movie popcorn.”

Chapter Twenty

It wouldn’t be my first kiss. That honor—or chore—had gone to Evan on the first movie night following my eighteenth birthday. I had developed a bit of a complex around the topic due to a steady diet of 90s teen movies, which all seemed to suggest I might as well be dead if I didn’t hurry up and smush my lips against someone else’s.

With some playful urging from Jayla and Charlie, Evan had obliged my desperate request for about five close-mouthed seconds. I learned very little from the experience other than that Evan possessed very little range as an actor, but my lips hadn’t shriveled up and fallen off from neglect, so I guess I should be grateful. Judging from Sebastian’s furtive glances in their direction, I probably wouldn’t have gotten my own movie theater without them.

He sat beside me in the center of the fifth row of red velvet seats with his right ankle resting on his left knee. His right hand gripped his angled right knee, and his polished left shoe bounced irritatingly close to the light blue fabric covering my own right knee. I had never been so aware of where so many body parts were in relation to each other. And none more so than his left arm.

It perched on the well-worn wooden divider between our seats, clearly itching to reach over into my lap and take my hand. I wasn’t entirely opposed to the idea, but then what? Together they wouldn’t fit on the narrow armrest, so either they would have to hang out right there in my lap or move the party over to his lap and… nope. No way. Not happening.

I kept my sweaty palms plastered to the sides of my jumbo popcorn bucket and my eyes glued to the screen towering in front of us. If I looked too closely at any one area for long, I could see where the years of neglect had taken their toll, but it’s vast height and breadth made it unnecessary to look at any one area for long. It must have been three or four times as big as the one at the Last Century Cinema, and it needed to be because, in addition to three sections of ground-level seating, there was a steep balcony behind us and rounded opera boxes perched atop the golden columns lining the walls.

My theater looked almost exactly as it had in all my Last Action Hero-fueled fantasies, though thankfully, not quite as badly in need of repair. The plush red seats seemed to have been refurbished at some point this century, but a pervasive musty odor spoke of their need for deep cleaning. According to Sebastian, the projection technology would need to be updated before we let the general public in, but his team had gotten what had been left behind up and running well enough for our purposes. Or so he said. We’d been waiting ten minutes for it to start already.

Growling, Sebastian twisted in his seat to glare up at the booth. He threw his hands up with big New Yorker vibes and then turned back around, scowling. “I’ll be glad when we can hire humans who know what they’re doing instead of our own idiot serv—”

“Don’t,” I said firmly. “It’s unbecoming of a gentlewolf.”

Sebastian blinked. “Beg your pardon?”

“Speaking rudely to or about the servants.” I shook my head. “They make your life easy. Why make theirs hard?”

“It doesn’t make my life easy when they continually screw up.”

“I could say the same about you.”

His eyes widened, and his jaw clenched. “I thought we agreed I’d done something right.”

“You did something cool,” I said. “Now you’re doing something uncool. So just cool it.”

Sebastian’s brow furrowed with seemingly genuine confusion. “But if they’ve done something wrong—”

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