only got one shot at the ball.
I had nothing from my desk to pack, and exactly fifteen minutes later I stepped out of the elevator that opened onto the executive suite. Immediately my ears picked up the gentle hiss of the white-noise machines, which were the only method of screening voices from the inner offices from sharp werewolf ears. I could not imagine what kind of business Noel Duprey could be conducting here that would require that kind of secrecy.
The woman at the receptionist’s desk was human, and I knew her. I had that much in common with Michael St. Clare—I found it very easy to make friends with humans, even though members of my own kind considered me standoffish and strange.
“Hi, Sara,” I said as I approached the desk. I lowered my voice a little, knowing that it wouldn’t matter how loudly I spoke with the white-noise machines running. “Any idea what’s going on?”
Sara shook her head, short brown curls bouncing, though her eyes were bright with excitement. “I think they swept the place for bugs, though.” And she giggled at the face I made. “The electronic kind, not the crawly kind. And Mr. Stillman was highly upset to be put out of his office, which is now your office by the way. Are you being promoted?”
I was impressed…and a little intimidated. Greg Stillman was head of an entire department.
I said, “Um, I don’t think so. More like temporarily reassigned.”
She gave another bouncy nod of her head, as though that confirmed what she’d suspected. “Well, Mr. Gorgeous in there has got everybody jumping around like their tails are on fire and from what I can gather, he’s not telling anyone what’s going on. Even Georgette doesn’t know.”
Georgette was the private secretary to Paul Esteban, Sr., vice president in charge of the entire division.
“Who is he, anyway?” Sara wanted to know.
“Mr. Gorgeous?” I couldn’t prevent a grin. I rather liked that nickname. “He’s the new CEO.”
“Of Clare de Lune?”
“Of the entire St. Clare Corporation.”
“Whoa.” Now Sara looked impressed. “I guess we’d better act sharp then.”
“I guess.”
“By the way, he wanted to—”
The door across the room swung open and Noel Duprey stood there, larger than life and twice as gorgeous, a ferocious frown on his face. “Ms. St. Clare,” he said. He had a powerful voice; it practically rang across the room. “If you can spare a moment?”
“See you as soon as you arrived,” Sara concluded quickly and, shrinking down a little in her chair, turned back to her computer screen.
Before the angry visage of the future leader of our people, I would have liked to shrink down, too. I was not human, though, and had no choice but to square my shoulders and precede Noel into his office.
His office was actually the executive conference room. It smelled richly of Earl Grey tea, walnut oil furniture polish and Noel. A faint trace of human sweat lingered in the air from the movers who had been engaged in transforming the space from conference room to office, as well as the aroma of old ash from the fireplace, and copy paper, and the subtle machine scent of a small computer…and Noel. Snow melting on wool. Highly polished leather. Silk. The color of sunshine which was his hair. Power, authority, refinement, maleness. The essence of Noel. It permeated every surface, tantalized every sense. I thought irrelevantly that if we could bottle that scent, we would rule the planet.
Pale blue damask draperies were swept back from the floor-to-ceiling windows, flooding the room with brilliant, snow-reflected sunlight. In one corner of the enormous room stood two small damask-upholstered chairs, in the other, a mahogany and brass grandfather clock. In the center of the wall was a glass china cabinet displaying a collection of Spode ceramic ware; flanking it were two Rothko paintings. The room was elegant, airy and, at present, so empty it echoed.
The thick rose carpeting bore the indentation marks of an enormous table and twelve chairs, though how they had been dismantled and moved so quickly I couldn’t begin to guess. Noel’s briefcase was open on the floor in front of the two small chairs; a cup of tea and his laptop computer rested on the marble hearth of the fireplace, which was dark and cold-looking. Apparently he had been too busy sending the staff into a frenzy to think of ordering office furniture, or even of lighting a fire.
“I love what you’ve done with the place,” I murmured, glancing around.
He ignored me, and walked across the room to the two chairs. “Come and sit down. I’ve called a meeting for two o’clock, and we have a lot to discuss before then. You might want to inform your human friends, by the way, that the white-noise screen only works one way. From inside this office I can hear everything that goes on outside.”
I had noticed the absence of the white noise the minute I entered the office, of course, but I hadn’t registered its significance until now. So, he had heard the comment about Mr. Gorgeous. I wondered whether he had been flattered or offended and decided, from the expression on his face, that it was the latter. I was disappointed. I had expected, for some reason, that my idol would have had more of a sense of humor.
I said, “You’re spying on them? Why?”
“That’s one of the things we have to discuss.”
He picked up his laptop from the hearth and sat down with it in one of the chairs, tapping on the keyboard. I followed him slowly, listening to the sounds from outside the room that were no longer screened from my sensitive ears.
“It’s not just humans,” I observed, “but werewolves, too. Why would you want to spy on your own team? Unless you enjoy hearing Stillman whine about how badly he’s being treated. It’s not as though I asked for his office, you know, and I really don’t need any more enemies here.”
Noel looked up in surprise. “You can hear him?”
“Can’t you?”
“But he’s in the cafeteria. That’s six floors away.”
I thought it best not to respond to that. I had always known that my hearing was above average, even for a werewolf, but thought it best not to advertise the fact. There were some advantages to being consistently under-estimated by one’s co-workers—and enemies—and I had not yet decided which one Noel was.
He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. Then he said abruptly, “There is a traitor in our midst. Over the past four months, the formulas for five new Clare de Lune products have ended up in the hands of the competition. We believe the leak is coming from this office.”
My knees folded and I sank heavily to the chair, staring at him. “Tango and Cobalt,” I said softly. “I wondered why they were pulled at the last minute.”
Again he looked surprised, but his tone was brisk and matter-of-fact. “Just so. Sanibel beat us to the market by three weeks with both of them.”
My eyes grew wider, betraying my own astonishment—and horror. Sanibel! Jason Robesieur handled the Sanibel account. Jason, with whom I regularly lunched; Jason, who less than an hour ago had offered me a job…
I was beginning to understand
