Kiss of a Dragon(28)

She pointed to the office he had just checked out. “There’s no back door, okay? I’m not sneaking off. I just need to have a chat with my friend. Privately.”

He frowned. “I don’t think—”

But she was already hauling an indignant Rachel across the threshold. “Watch the front door!”

“Alright, but—”

She shut the door, cutting off his protest.

“Hey!” Rachel complained. “You can’t bring an extreme hottie like that into the office and not expect—”

“He’s not the guy for you, Rach.”

She gave a longing look at the door. “He is definitely the guy for me. At least once. Maybe twice, if he’s really good.”

Arabella sighed. The last thing Rachel needed was another man in her life. She made a practice of leaving them before they could leave her, and somehow that translated into a string of unstable guys, orbiting her life like meteors just waiting to crash down and destroy everything. Although a tumble in the sheets with Cinaed would be a hundred-fold improvement over Rachel’s typical loser boyfriends. The last guy stole half the contents of Rachel’s meager apartment when he cleared out. Even that was better than the ones who took more than just her things. The ones who hurt her.

“Hey,” Arabella said, soft enough that Rachel whipped her attention back to her. “Do you trust me? Because I’m looking out for you with this.”

“What exactly is this?” she asked gesturing to the door. “I’m mean, holy hotness on a stick, Ari—where did you get these guys? And why are you suddenly having beefcake for security? Where’s the money coming from for that?”

Rachel was her partner in the business… so to speak. They’d grown up in foster care together, only Arabella aged out first. She managed to work her way through college and lucked into a scholarship for law school. Rachel, on the other hand, had always been a magnet for bad men and bad luck. When they finally reconnected, Rachel was one step away from being one of the junkies that stumbled around the alleyways outside the office. Arabella had convinced her to go back to school by hiring her as a receptionist. The truth was they both needed each other. And Rachel had literally saved her life when she had no one else to count on. She was the only family Arabella had.

In spite of Arabella’s promise to Lucian, there was no way she could keep all this secret from Rachel. She would figure it out when the money came in anyway.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Arabella said. “These guys aren’t human.”

Rachel scrunched up her face. Then she leaned forward and pressed the back of her hand to Arabella’s cheek. “Are you still sick, hon? Cuz those men are the finest specimens of man meat I’ve seen in…” She drifted off with the dead serious look on Arabella’s face. “Oh wait. You mean, like, literally…” She gasped and covered her mouth with both hands. “No way!” she said, but it came out muffled. Then she dropped her hands, but her mouth was still gaping. “Are you saying those guys are the sexy wolf-shifters I’ve been seeing on the news?”

Not exactly. But that would work as a lie. And Arabella needed a cover story that would work for now—at least until she was done with this business with Lucian. She would explain everything later when Cinaed wouldn’t overhear from the other room.

“Can you keep a secret?” she asked.

But her best friend was already leaping to conclusions. “Yes!” She fist-pumped the air. “I’ve heard those shifters are hot as sin, I just never thought I’d see one in real life!” She flicked looks back and forth between Arabella and the door. “Wait… they’re totally into human females, right?”

Well, she got that right. “Yeah, pretty much.”

“Where did you find them?” She inched toward the door like she was going to sneak out and jump Cinaed right there in the office.

Arabella caught her arm and yanked her back. “Rachel! You can’t just… look, they’re helping me out, okay? Lucian fought off a guy who attacked me—turns out he was a shifter, too. Rival gangs.”

That brought Rachel up short. If there was one thing she’d had too much personal experience with, it was men on the wrong side of the law taking out their frustrations with their fists. Sometimes on her. “They’re in the gangs?”

“Yeah.” She was spinning the lies fast and furious now. “There’s some kind of dispute between them, and I somehow landed in the middle. I have to lie low for a while. I’m staying at a safehouse Lucian has.” A flush of heat went through her when she thought about going back to Lucian’s lair with him after he banged this other girl. After Sandra was hopefully falling hard in love with him. It twisted Arabella’s head around so much—she needed this girl to fall in love with Lucian, but she also simultaneously, inexplicably, dreaded the talk afterward. About what to do next. About how to get Sandra to take this crazy leap into being his mate.