Even then, she’d worried. If she screwed up the specs for a platform or a structural support failed, people might die. The stress had grown more intense with every project. When a major consulting firm had floated an offer for her small shop, she’d taken the money and run, thinking all her problems were over.
Wrong.
Her skills and education hadn’t helped her deal with her encounter with Owen White. She hadn’t been brave enough to tell Erin about it because she’d worried that doing so would make her look like a gullible fool. After years of being the smartest person in the room, she was now without a job or calling to order her days. She felt dumb as a beach rock and about as valuable.
The high strangeness with Owen hadn’t helped.
Her attempts to find out if there was any link between him and the Lost Legacy Preserve, a corporation that seemed to own nearly everything in the surrounding community, had lead to exactly nothing. If the guy was hiding, he did it well.
If he wasn’t real or if her sexy encounter with him had been some super-real hallucination, then she was in more trouble than she wanted to believe. Since she didn’t know where to even start with that line of thinking, she ignored it.
Reality and math had always been her best friends.
After turning over in her mind for the last ten days every moment she’d spent with Owen, she hadn’t retrieved her memories of the missing time from the period after she’d exited the ice cream shop with Lilith to when she’d awakened naked in a hotel room bed.
She hadn’t been drinking that day, and she was reasonably sure ice cream was neither a downer nor an aphrodisiac. The only physiological effect she blamed on ice cream (besides getting fatter) was pure bliss.
The smart thing would be to forget about Owen and go back to her life. She wouldn’t be the first woman to have a one-night stand, and despite a few bizarre twists to said hookup, that’s what it had been.
The weirdness also didn’t change the fact that Owen knew her name.
Contact information was a Google-search away.
If he’d wanted to see her again, he knew how to find her.
The last ten days? Crickets.
But she couldn’t forget that he’d also told her to find him. Apparently, in order to do that she must figure out his real name.
Like he was Rumpelstiltskin.
She shook her head. That was bullshit, and she was better off forgetting him.
The server Erin had flagged arrived, tray on her hip and pen poised.
Tasha pointed at Erin’s luscious pink cocktail. “I’ll have one of those, but make it a double.”
Erin high-fived her, and they both laughed. Instead of dying away naturally, Erin’s laugh dragged out, echoed higher, going shrill. Her eyes flashed in the dim light. Tasha could have sworn she saw something floating over Erin’s shoulder, as if she wore a foggy, cashmere scarf tied around her neck with the ends fluttering in an otherworldly wind. She blinked and then it was gone. But still, Erin laughed, and the sound made Tasha’s skin crawl.
The woman on the other side of Erin told a joke. Erin’s laugh rolled on, but the eerie pitch faded slowly.
Right, okay. Back to reality.
Back to keeping her mind firmly in the track of What’s Important.
When her drink arrived, Tasha swirled the glass, watching the alcoholic pinkness go round and round. If she’d conducted her business life the way she had her personal life, she’d be living in a box under a bridge right now instead of relishing a healthy bank account. For some inexplicable reason, she acted as if love would only enter her life when the planets aligned.
Fuck. That.
She lifted her glass. “I propose a toast.” The six raised their glasses. “Here’s to women who make decisions. Here’s to women who don’t sit around waiting for the menfolk to tell them what to do.”
“Unless it’s in bed!” Erin chimed.
“Here’s to perfect futures that are perfect simply because we created them!”
“In bed!”
As she brought her glass to her lips, an intricate knot of red lines bloomed on the inside of her wrist.
“Fuck,” Remy said at the same moment Owen spotted Tasha. “We need to get out of here.”
Both men slid out of the booth, hugging the side wall as they made their way toward the front of the bar. The side doors were locked, and the only way out took them perilously close to Tasha’s table.
Then the crowd standing near the door shifted, blocking their path as people made way for someone…or something. Owen held up a clenched fist. Remy halted behind him.
“Too late,” Owen whispered.
He watched as humans stumbled to get out of the way of Gideon Black and the two big weres flanking him. The humans deserved his pity. They had no idea what had just walked in out of the night and likely felt anxiety and an abrupt, but irrational urge to run like hell. An alpha as powerful as the leader of the Pacific Range pack tended to have that effect on the unsuspecting.