Chapter Three

Della was in her office when the call came in. Perhaps calling it an 'office' was a little ambitious; in reality, it was the second bedroom of her townhouse, crammed full of paperwork and discarded ideas she'd had the wherewithal to put on paper if not to carry out, usually after a glass or three of wine. There was a bed somewhere under the scattered papers, but it had slowly been overcome in her attempt to keep relatively clear the enormous wooden desk where she spent so many of the limited hours that she wasn't in the Youth and Community Department's main building where she worked.

The problem with bringing a significant amount of her paperwork-dense job home with her, as well as sitting on the Council of Witches as voice to express the opinion of the younger members of her own coven, for which there was a lot of paper-based prep work that needed doing, was that she alone was responsible for, she suspected, the destruction of literally thousands of trees. Not to mention the fact that once she'd discarded something into the morass of paperwork on the bed and floor of the room, finding it again was often more of a challenge than solving the issue for which she needed the paperwork in the first place.

She was considering whether she should use whatever part of this weekend she could spare from work to make a start on organizing this room, at least as much as was physically possible, when the phone rang. She glanced at the screen, presuming it would be some sort of coven business needing her input—which, unfortunately, being one of the only government employees in the coven, seemed to be a steadily increasing occurrence—but the number wasn't one she recognized. She glanced at the clock, only partly surprised to see that it was approaching eight o'clock at night, and hesitantly lifted the phone to her ear.

"Della Greenbranch," she answered.

There was a brief silence from the other end.

"Hello?"

The caller cleared their throat. "Della, hi. My name's Leo Tyler. We, um, met at the meeting about the youth programs the other night." His voice was harsh, and it shot her right back to the moment he'd wound his fingers into her hair—a move that she would have considered unacceptable from someone she'd only just met if it hadn't felt so goddamn right—and his words sliding into her bloodstream and sending her internal temperature skyrocketing. You smell like pure sex, and I can't get my damn mind off what you taste like underneath this tease of a dress. How long it's been since you were properly satisfied. How long it'll be before you let me get my mouth between your thighs and redefine whatever you used to think 'satisfied' meant. Just the sound of that dark, deep voice coming through the phone, sounding, if she didn't know better, almost kind of… hesitant, was enough to send her heart rate into overdrive and centre her throbbing pulse directly between her legs. Just where he'd, what, threatened? Offered? Promised? To put his mouth.

"I remember you," Della said, cursing herself when the slight shake of her voice revealed just how clearly she remembered their sudden, unexpected and unbelievably erotic interaction. She tamped down on the urge to clear her own throat, worried that it would give away the nerves suddenly coiling in her stomach at the prospect of speaking to this man again. Would he whisper more filth in her ear even if they were just talking on the phone? Was that just something he did? Or was she a special case, the desperate attraction he claimed to have to her an honest and, dare she hope, unusual occurrence?

"Delphinia. Della." Leo heaved in a deep breath, and she pictured him dragging a hand over his eyes. "Look, I owe you an apology. Accosting you like that the other night… I had no right to do that. To speak to you like that. I'm…" There was a pause, as though he was gathering himself. "I want to apologize."

"Apologize?" Della's mouth said, without permission from her brain. "You're seriously calling me at eight at night for the express purpose of apologizing for holding me by the hair and telling me you wanted to put your mouth between my thighs?"

"Not exactly," he hedged. "I mean, it would have been earlier, but it's proven particularly difficult to get the phone number of a government employee, even when it's her work number."

"That's on purpose," Della said, pleased to hear herself sounding even slightly authoritative. After the media storm following the Dane debacle, she'd gone to some effort to make herself difficult for strangers to contact; it was good to hear that it had been effective. She added, "You know, it's partly to stop strange men from ringing me after hours."

"Good," Leo said. "You shouldn't ever have to deal with something like that." He seemed to notice the hypocrisy of his statement after he'd said it, and added, "Without a good reason, I mean. I mean… was there a lot of that, that you had to deal with?"

"Enough," Della said succinctly. "After the first time I appeared on TV, I had to change my number. Lots of men, human and supernatural both, seem to think that just because you care about kids, you're desperate to make an effort to have theirs."

From the other end of the phone came a sound that sounded almost like… had he just growled?

"Now why would you tell me that, when I'm trying to be a gentleman here?" Leo asked. "How can I think straight about apologizing to you when you've got me halfway between jealous and furious?"

"You asked," Della protested helplessly, then steeled herself. "And who said I needed you to apologize anyway? The way you talked to me the other night, I-I didn't mind it. I liked it." The last sentence was so quiet, it was halfway to a whisper.

The noise he made this time was less of a growl and more of a hum of pleasure, the kind of sound she'd expect from a man—from a werewolf—if she was running her fingers over his heated skin. "Ah, Della," he said, and his voice was even darker than before. "I can't have this conversation over the phone, where I can't see your eyes, where I don't have your scent all around me. I called just to say sorry, just to ask if we could start over, but it doesn't sound like you want that, do you, sweetheart?"

"Not—not if it means you never talk to me like that again," Della said softly, wondering where the abject hell her brain had gone, saying things like that to a man she didn't even know. This wasn't a warlock from her coven chasing her to give him a shot, somewhat pre-vetted by their association through the coven. This was an unfamiliar werewolf from a pack that was notorious for keeping to itself—its Beta, no less. He might be an asshole, or abusive, or drunk on his own power and assuming it would be enough to get him under her skirt with minimal additional effort. An impression she was hardly refuting with her lust-drunk mumblings.

"Let me take you out to dinner," Leo said. "I'll talk to you like that all night if you want. We can scandalize the waiters and give them a good story to tell in the back."

"Leo—" Della said but was interrupted by his pleasure-hum again.

"Yes, gorgeous, keep saying my name. I'll have you screaming it if you'll let me."

"Leo!" Della said, trying to ignore the hot pulse thrumming between her legs, the way her nipples had puckered to tight points. "I'm trying to tell you something."

"Go ahead," he said, but his voice still held that deep-as-the-ocean tone to it, like every word she'd said was pulsing in his bloodstream as much as his were in hers.

"I'm… busy. At the moment. Very," Della managed around the rush of heat that came at the thought of him being as affected as she was. "I have a lot going on, I don't have a lot of nights off. So, if you want to go out, it'll have to be tomorrow night, or else not until the night after the next meeting."

"Tomorrow night," Leo said, and you would have thought she'd handed him a plate of gold nuggets at his tone at her agreement. "That's fine. I don't care what I have on, I'll clear it. Tomorrow will work just fine."

"I don't want to be a bother," Della said.

"Never," he interrupted. "Don't say that. Don't even think it. You could never be. Just—text me your address so I know where to pick you up."

"Oh, I don't think so," Della said, her sense of self-preservation finally making a belated appearance. "Tell me where you want to go and I'll meet you there. I like your filthy mouth just fine, but I'm not about to tell you where I live before we've even gone on a date, Leo Tyler."

He seemed to heave in a breath on the other end of the phone. "That's good. That's sensible. I-I'm glad you're being safe, even with me." The timbre of his voice dropped again, and she knew she was in for it. "But if you do ever decide to show me where you live, Della Greenbranch, the offer's open for me to show you just how much more I can make you like my filthy mouth."

Della's breath whooshed out of her in a rush. "Are you like this with everyone you're attracted to?" she blurted. "So dirty before you've even decided if you have enough in common to like each other?"

There was a long pause on the other end, and Della realized she was gripping the phone so tightly her fingers were aching.

"No," Leo said eventually. "Never before."

They were both quiet for a long moment, and she heard his slow, steady breathing on the other end of the line.

"Leo," Della said, knowing full well she was just saying it because of his response before, but unable to stop herself. "I have to… I have to go. I have a grant application to finish tonight. Just text me when and where to meet you tomorrow, all right? Now that you've tracked down my number."

He huffed out a quiet laugh. "What time works for you?"

"Any time after six is fine. I-I'll make it work."

"I'll text you," Leo said. "Sleep well, Delphinia."

"Good night, Leo," Della managed and, after a long beat of just listening to him breathe, hung up the phone.

Her hand fell into her lap as though the bones in her arm had suddenly disintegrated. The heat running through her body was like someone had dosed her with some sort of arousal juice, at about ten times the maximum recommended dose. She hadn't even laid eyes on the man tonight, and somehow, he still had her as worked up as if her nerves had been connected to live wires. Without conscious instruction from her brain, her thighs were clenching together and relaxing in an unfamiliar rhythm, as though she was desperate to feel something between them. And she was. She'd never had such as intense reaction to a man before, the sense that if she didn't somehow get closer to him, she might just cease to exist. The draw between them was like a string connected below her belly button, and it was tugging, tugging on her in a strange pull towards this man she barely even knew. If talking to him—the way he spoke to her—hadn't felt so strangely, incredibly right, the whole thing would have been an order of magnitude or two more disturbing. As it was, she was unnerved, sure, but not enough to stop her from meeting him tomorrow night.

Knowing this would mean she stayed up until the early hours of the morning to finish her grant application, she picked up her phone again and dialed one of the few people she knew would always accept a call from her, even at this time.

Magnolia answered after only two rings. "Della! You caught me at exactly the right time. I'm just on my way home from my shift." Maggie was a nurse at the local hospital but, though she often finished late at night, insisted that she didn't need a car; public transport was just fine to get her to and from work. If she'd been a supernatural, it might have bothered Della less, but as it was, she insisted on casting protective spells over the diminutive human at least every few months.

"Mags," she said, "hold on to your scrubs, all right? Something very weird has happened…"