Jaxson(17)
She leaned back, disappointed.
He couldn’t help sneaking a look at his phone. He was just checking the time, he told himself. But he also noticed there were no messages from Olivia.
Olivia stared at the mess of files on her computer. She’d only been at Riverwise for two days; she couldn’t undo months of disastrous accounting in that short amount of time. She knew that, but it was still frustrating. Just deciphering the complex filing system that Jared River used to store receipts for office expenses was like figuring out the Rosetta stone with only two languages. And the reimbursements for the other pack members? Filed completely at random as far as she could tell. Half were scanned and stuffed into electronic folders, while the other half filled a cardboard legal box. And some were duplicates, which just made everything worse.
Olivia sighed. It was late, and her eyes were starting to cross. She should go home and start over in the morning. She needed a fresh mind to tackle the mountainous task of organizing Riverwise’s business into something halfway logical. But she knew exactly why she had stayed at the office way past when the rest of the pack had left—Jaxson River was on a date with a hot redhead, and that image would just fester in her mind if she went home to her empty apartment. There was nothing to distract her there, not the way a thousand misfiled receipts in the office could do.
So she buried herself in paperwork and tried not to think about her gorgeous shifter boss bringing home a hot female wolf to see if they had “chemistry.” Or maybe gazing deep into her eyes and finding his soul mate there.
Olivia groaned. Who was she kidding? Even the office accounting mess couldn’t keep her focused. She ran her hands over her face, rubbed the blurriness from her eyes, then clicked through to the folder she’d put together on the three female shifters Jaxson would be dating.
For a year.
She didn’t know why that bothered her so much—it was literally her job to find him a mate. And she wholeheartedly wanted him to find happiness; there was way too much sadness in those gorgeous blue eyes. But there was a small, selfish part of her that simply squirmed at the thought of him putting his hands on another woman.
As if he would ever put his hands on her.
She was plump, only moderately attractive, and most importantly… not a wolf. Even if Jaxson, for some reason, missed all those rather important details, there could never be anything more than a hot kiss in an alleyway between them. Because she was half-witch, and eventually that would come out. Jaxson’s work was high-end cyber security, for god’s sake. He would find out what happened to her parents if he bothered to look. And he was too smart not to look.
Olivia sighed and clicked open the file for Morrigan North, the female shifter from the Northern pack. Of the three contenders, Olivia liked her the least. She was all wrong for Jaxson, at least on paper. Her MBA project was a long dissertation on how to pull companies out of bankruptcy and reorganize them for maximum efficiency. Olivia supposed it was useful for a law firm like Northern Peaks, but it sounded like dry legal wrangling to her. And quasi-sleazy business speak as well.
The second candidate wasn’t much better—Thea from the Blue Mountain pack was a brown-haired accountant and the least attractive of the three. Although, to be honest, all three were ridiculously good looking. Must be the shifter gene—Olivia noticed every shifter in the office, which was the vast majority of employees at Riverwise, was supernaturally hot. She’d spent the entire first day staring at her feet in order not to gape at the bulging biceps and powerfully-built rear-ends of the Riverwise staff. The women were gorgeous, too, but only a couple of them were shifters. Jaxson was right about female wolves being relatively rare, at least in the office.
Which made it all the more unusual for three female shifters to be competing to be Jaxson’s mate. But that didn’t surprise her at all—he was brilliant and funny and panty-meltingly hot. His time in the SEALs only made him more swoon-worthy. And he was a natural alpha—commander for his unit in the Navy and now CEO of Riverwise as a civilian. Olivia had created a file on him in the course of her match-making, and it just highlighted how much Jaxson had to offer a mate. A mate who would definitely not be her. In spite of that obvious fact, she couldn’t help wanting him every time he stepped into her office. It wasn’t her fault—he was all alpha, with a natural ease that would be irresistible to any female. And she’d grown to simply like him as well. He was funny and kind and…
Olivia sighed. She had to stop crushing on her boss. She flipped through the files again.
The third shifter hoping to become Mrs. Jaxson River was the one Olivia both admired the most and feared would be The One for Jaxson. Terra was a raven-haired beauty with soulful dark eyes. An artist with a wild streak, she spent most of her teens roaming the streets of Seattle and taking pictures of the homeless or other denizens of the street. She had just turned twenty-one, and she was already one of the city’s up-and-coming artists, with three gallery exhibitions this year alone. And her pictures were good. Olivia had checked them out online, and they somehow brought out the bright inner light of even the darkest, dingiest corners of the city.