Mal did not sleep well, despite the luxurious bed and its billion thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, and he lay in them long after the sun rose, trying to make sense of everything.
His thoughts kept returning to the betrayal and anger that had bloomed in Scarlet’s face when she realized who he was, and the soft, yearning laughter that fiery look had replaced.
She was so beautiful, so powerful. Those green eyes, that glossy hair that no photograph did justice to... He longed to see if she tasted as potent as she felt, to bury his fingers in her hair, to lay her down and claim her.
She is ours, his dragon rumbled, but Mal remembered the fury in her face and knew that it was more complicated than that.
Mal was not used to second-guessing his methods or questioning his own decisions, but he found himself thinking over every interaction they’d ever had. Had he done her as wrong as she was clearly convinced he had?
He rolled out of the bed and stalked to the desk where he’d left a folder open the night before.
The top photo was a candid, close-up shot of a beautiful woman with candy-red hair wearing a crown of deep green holly.
Scarlet Stanson.
His mate.
She was smiling in this photo, as she was not in so many of her others.
Mal frowned thoughtfully in return.
He understood people, especially shifters. He knew how they worked and what made them tick. After more decades than he cared to admit as a lawyer, he could predict what they would do under pressure with eerie accuracy, and he used that knowledge to his advantage.
But he didn’t understand Scarlet Stanson.
He shuffled back to an older photograph, faded with age. It was another Christmas shot; a pine tree in the background was draped in old fashioned lights and tinsel. Scarlet’s hair, nut brown, was swept up in exactly the same bun and she looked like someone had surprised her.
Last night hadn’t been the first time she’d surprised him.
She had failed at every turn to fall into the patterns he had expected of her, bucked his expectations and thwarted his plans.
And she wasn’t just a small problem.
The island was never meant to have been developed. Alistair Beehag’s private compound was bad enough, but a resort? And not just a quiet, garden variety resort. Beehag’s partner, Lord Aaric Lyons, had built a luxury resort designed just for shifters.
Mal had been glad when Lyons vanished and the resort stalled out before he had to interfere. He spent a few years working his way into the Beehag family as their lawyer and was as alarmed as they were when Scarlet Stanson mysteriously reappeared. She had brilliant red hair but didn’t look a year older and she pointed out the language in a binding contract for lease that even he could not find loopholes in. Within a year, she had the resort opened for business.
Still, he thought he had time. Decades even, and Mal had always excelled at the long game.
So he waited for her to fail on her own and was surprised when she didn’t. She collected a fascinating array of skilled staff, finished the half-built resort in remarkable time, and courted in a chef who could have cooked in the finest restaurants anywhere in the world.
When Alistair Beehag’s atrocious shifter collection—a terrible zoo where shifters were forced to remain in their animal form—had been uncovered and the prisoners released, Mal had been furious and had nearly taken the opportunity to rid himself of all the problems on the island at once.
But Scarlet unexpectedly took in all the refugees from Beehag’s menagerie, before Mal could step in. Mal had been so shocked by the act that he put the rest of his plans on hold, sparing the resort until he saw how the chips fell out.
It was a stunningly poor business move. The resort had barely begun to establish itself, and yet she’d chosen to run her finances—Mal had access to all of them—dangerously into the red in an act of pointless charity. She tied up dozens of rooms that could otherwise have been booked for people who would never be in a position to repay her and hemorrhaged thousands of dollars a day to feed them, clothe them, and send them back to their old lives when they were ready.
None of them were important people, none of them had connections that would serve her. She’d done it, as far as Mal could tell, completely selflessly. She was too smart not to realize how thin she’d stretched herself, even if she appeared to keep the true depths of her debts—already considerable—secret from the staff.
And she didn’t give up.
Instead, she hooked a contract for a male shifter beauty pageant, with impressive and flattering media coverage, and business boomed. She even managed to host one of the highest profile shifter weddings in decades.
Mal picked up the newest edition of Night Shift, a glossy shifter gossip magazine and had to smile wryly at the splashy cover. A giant cave bear and a leopard were facing off and a distraught bride in the background wearing pounds of jewelry was wringing her hands. Guests were fleeing and potted plants were toppling.
Scarlet didn’t feature much in the photos; she was a blurry, bright-haired figure in the background at most, but Mal had gotten several first-hand accounts of the tawdry event. The wedding had dissolved into chaos, the bride had run away with a waiter, and Scarlet had shared choice words with the mother of the bride publicly, quoted in damning detail within the article. The lawsuit that had been filed against the resort was a veritable tome of complaint; a copy of it sat on his desk next to the folder.
Mal almost felt guilty for his part in the pandemonium.