Chapter Two

Petra was usually good at keeping her mind on her work, even when there were other things going on. She had a lot of practice forcing her other concerns to the side during business hours and focusing on work, rather than the other things fighting for her attention. Right now, she was covering some of Della's tasks—the afterschool program she was putting together to integrate young people from different species, help them get to know each other, and encourage them to finish high school. It involved navigating the complex interrelationships between not only the different species that lived in Mystic City—witches and warlocks, werewolves, vampires, and humans—but also between their packs and covens. If they were going to make it work, they needed lots of groups to sign up and ways to keep the young ones from bringing arguments the older members of their packs might have into whatever space they found to bring them together.

Having fourteen-year-olds fighting over the disagreements of their elders was not the way Della wanted these programs run. So, for starters, she was running information sessions to try to get the elders from each group on-side, so they'd encourage their young ones to be willing to work with other packs to make the program a success.

Petra had been putting together another of these sessions all morning. There would be input from representatives of different groups and a question-and-answer session, and she'd been working on it for several hours before she decided to take a lunch break. Her favourite sandwich shop was just a few blocks away, and she figured the fresh air would be as good for her as the food.

Plus, it would give her a break from trying to shove the memory of that undeniable scent out of her brain so she could concentrate. Emmett, something in her seemed to be whispering every ten seconds, even when she was trying to focus on Della's project. Something in her brain was desperate to spend time thinking about him, about the way it had felt when he pushed up against her, his lips on her skin, the intensity of his scent as she pressed her body against his.

She'd made stupid decisions before about males, as probably every female had in their youth. After her experience with Regan, she'd decided she wanted a future that was… well… reliable. She wanted the partner she could rely on to come home very night, to help care for their pups, to build a life with that was durable and comfortable.

The flashy-exciting-overwhelming-attraction thing only ever developed into something that made her question herself and eventually fell apart. So, while Emmett O'Neill's scent might be reaching out to her and trying to drag her underneath him with the strength of an army, Petra was determined to stay strong. A man like that wasn't the kind of person she could build the sort of life she wanted with, so no matter how hard the attraction was pulling her toward him, making her think about him almost continuously, she wasn't going to succumb to it. She was going to be strong and eventually find someone who would build that reliable, predicable life with her.

She was in the line for the counter at the sandwich shop, almost at the front, when the scent hit her. Rich, intoxicating… familiar. Emmett. He was here. The things she knew about him flashed through her head. He was Alpha Leo's friend, he looked like a Calvin Klein model lost on his way to a cover shoot, he had a dirty mouth that had made her entire body tremble. He had pinned her to the wall and said he wanted to know if she tasted as good as she smelled to him. He'd probably used that line on a dozen other females, she reminded herself, and made every one of them melt the way she wanted to. He smelled like… like the ocean, but better, richer, deeper, more. His scent rolled over her like a wave, making her eyes want to roll back in her head and raising goosebumps on her skin.

She could hardly concentrate enough to get her sandwich, barely managing the kind of conversation she usually had with the staff who recognized her from her regular patronage, and by the time she turned around, he was there. He looked hesitant for some reason, like he couldn't tell the effect his mere scent had on her, let alone the dirty talk that he must have practiced more than she wanted to think about for it to flow out of him so smoothly.

"Petra," he said, almost like he couldn't believe she was there. He breathed in deeply, and she wondered for a moment whether he was steadying himself before she remembered his comment that she smelled as good to him as he did to her. A rush of satisfaction flowed through her that this visceral draw wasn't just a one-sided attraction to a painfully good-looking man.

"Emmett," she managed to say. "What are you doing here?"

"I work around the corner," he said. "Samson Event Management, on Rockford Street. Do you—"

"The Youth and Community building is just down by the park," she said. "The big one with the metal fence."

"Oh, I've walked past it before," Emmett said.

"Sir, are you ready to order?" the woman behind the counter asked him.

"Um," Emmett said. "Sorry, Petra, will you wait a second?"

"Sure," she said, wondering why she was agreeing, and sat down at an empty table by the window. She had a book in her bag that she'd been planning on reading while she ate, so she got it out and was a few pages in by the time he returned, sandwich in hand. He hesitated, then put his hand on the back of the chair across from her. "Do you mind if I—"

At that moment, she would have agreed to strip down to her underwear and dance in front of the shop's entire clientele if it got her more time in the presence of his scent. "Sure, go for it."

He settled himself across from her and looked down at his sandwich like he'd never seen one before, before starting to unwrap it. "What are you reading?"

"Just a book my sister recommended," she said, tucking it back into her bag. "She likes a lot of weird stuff, though, so I wasn't sure if it'd be good, but it's okay."

"Older or younger?"

"Younger. Almost five years. She's completely nuts, but I love her to pieces."

"What makes you say she's nuts?" Emmett asked.

"She's a counsellor, and she has a lot of strange suggestions about how to deal with stress sometimes," Petra said, smiling as she remembered Francesca's suggestion of eating large amounts of coriander to increase one's distress tolerance. "She's also always jumping on some new cause or other, so in total I think she supports about twenty different movements at the moment. She's got a good heart; she just doesn't have much self-restraint."

"Do you have other siblings?" he asked. "Sorry, I'm an only child. I'm curious. Tell me if I'm asking too many questions."

"Nope, just the two of us." She looked at him through slightly narrowed eyes as each of them took a bite of their sandwiches, chewed, swallowed. "Why are you worried about asking too many questions?" she asked after the silence had dragged on long enough to start getting awkward.

Emmett definitely looked like the question, if not the silence, had made him uncomfortable. "Look, Petra." He took in a deep breath. "I was hoping to do this somewhere other than a sandwich shop, but I guess you work with what you've got, right?" He shot her a heart-stopping smile. No wonder this man works in event management, Petra thought. No one could refuse him anything when he shoots them that smile. The events would practically organize themselves.

"Hoping to do what?" Petra asked tentatively, her sandwich all but forgotten.

"I was inappropriate with you," Emmett said, with the air of someone admitting a mortal sin. "In the hospital, I didn't treat you with the respect you deserved. I was… explicit in a way you hadn't given me permission to be. And I owe you an apology for that. Just because you smell incredible to me, doesn't mean I have any right to say the kinds of things to you that I did that day."

For a long moment, Petra just stared at him. "Emmett," she said eventually, "it wasn't a problem."

He blinked at her, looking confused. "It wasn't?"

"No," Petra said, wondering how else she could explain this. "Not at all. I-I liked it." She could feel herself blushing. The way he looked, the humiliation and hope mixing on his face, had her barriers collapsing until she was being completely honest in a way she would never have imagined being in the middle of a sandwich shop. "I'm sorry," she said, "I know you probably get that all the time, but your scent is amazing, to me, as well. You're not… you're not the only one struggling with this."

"But you left," Emmett said, as though he couldn't believe what she was saying, "That day, in the hospital. I would have cut off one of my hands to keep you with me that day, but the minute your Alpha came out, you were out of there."

"I don't think you realize what kind of impact you have," Petra said, the strange drive toward complete honesty still possessing her. "You and your reputation. You're Emmett O'Neill. Half my friends have spent a night with you. I wasn't just going to fall under your spell like them, Emmett. No matter," she drew in a deep breath, "how incredible you smell. So, I had to leave, or I would have."

"You're my mate," Emmett said. Immediately, his eyes widened like someone had smacked him in the face, like he really hadn't intended to say those words.

Petra laughed. "Emmett. Mates are a story we tell children to keep them well-behaved and looking out for their perfect partner. Everyone knows that."

"That's what I thought too," Emmett said slowly. "Until Leo met Della. Until I had to watch him going through being mated to a woman who couldn't feel the same thing. This is how the most popular version of that story goes, Petra; you meet someone, and their scent is like nothing you've ever come across before. It's incredible. Irresistible. So, you spend more time with them, more and more time, just to get more of that scent, until eventually you realize you're a good match for each other, and you're attracted to each other, and," he shrugged with a somewhat desperate-looking grin, "then comes the part we don't tell the children at story time." The grin morphed into something slightly more real-looking. "Our other best friend, Raj, works at Mystic City Library. He's been going through the texts for any mention of mating and what it's supposed to be like since Leo met Della. He's also completely intolerable now because he's so thrilled that he was right about them being mated, but that's a story for another time," he added. "What I'm trying to tell you, Petra is that I think you might be my mate. That's why you smell so irresistible to me. And if the same is true of how I smell to you… maybe there's a chance I'm yours as well."

"You're being ridiculous," Petra said, returning to her sandwich, but at the same time she got a lungful of his scent again, and a voice in the back of her head said, Is he? Is it possible he's right?

"I don't think I am," Emmett protested. "If you want, I could talk to Raj and see if he'd come and present all the evidence that he's compiled that points to this exact situation—well, you know, minus the sandwich shop." He cracked a smile and took a deep breath. "Look, Petra, I'm not trying to tell you I'm going to force you to become my partner. I just think there might be a force behind us being drawn to each other so strongly, or at least, as strongly as I'm being drawn to you. I think there's an explanation for the fact that we smell so good to each other, even if the explanation is pretty much just 'magic'. And I'd like to get to know you better. No pressure, no expectations. I'm pretty much just begging to find a way to get to smell you again, and yes, I recognize how creepy that sounds."

"Pretty creepy," Petra agreed with a laugh, as though she hadn't been on the verge of the same thing herself. What the hell was she thinking? That she should join the endless list of Emmett O'Neill's conquests, and that she'd be able to happily bid him farewell whenever he decided he was done with her?

She looked up at him across the table, wondering how much of what he was saying could possibly be true. Obviously the whole "mating" thing was bullshit, a fable they told children to help them sleep. But the idea that there might be magic involved in the way their scents appealed to each other… she didn't have the kind of evidence she'd need to completely refute that.

She didn't want to join the list of Emmett's used-and-discarded girls, although none of them ever seemed to bear him any ill will afterwards. The part that made it more complicated was she kind of wanted to get to know this guy, and not just because she would have dropped in at the vampires' blood donation center if it meant she got to spend more time with his scent. So creepy. Still, she couldn't help how incredible he smelled to her. It was… unnatural. So, he must be right, at least a little. There must be some kind of magic behind the way they were being drawn together. And maybe if she found a way to break the spell, she'd stop feeling this immense draw to learn inconsequential things about him, like what his favorite color was and what he liked about his work.

It wasn't like he smelled like this to everyone, right? Otherwise, he'd never be able to get away from the crowds of shellshocked—smell-shocked—admirers. He'd start riots. It wouldn't be a case of him being able to seduce whichever girl at the pub he set his eye on, the way the rumors suggested that he could; every woman in there, and probably a good chunk of the men, would have gravitated toward him like he had some kind of magnetic draw if he smelled to them the way he did to Petra.

So, this must be unusual. Unique, even, if he'd never experienced it before, either. There was something going on, some kind of magic at work, that was magnetizing them to one another via scent. Almost unconsciously, she took a deep breath in, filling her lungs with the smell of him. It sent a red-hot shiver through her body, like someone had just run claws down her spine.

Clearly, Emmett noticed the shudder passing through her. He dropped his sandwich and reached out for her. "Are you all right?"

"What?" Petra stammered. "Yes. Fine. I'm fine." She took a bite of her sandwich, chewed slowly, and swallowed. "Look, Emmett. I agree with you, there's something magical going on here. I don't necessarily think it's the myth of mates being brought to life just for us, but I agree there's something unusual happening, some kind of magic that's pulling us together. So, what I'm thinking is perhaps the best idea is for us to combine forces and work together to find out what it is and go from there." She took a sip of her water, keeping her eyes fixed on the male across the table.

"Great idea," Emmett said, barely a moment after the words had passed her lips. "If we can work out what's going on, maybe we can find a way to understand it. To help any of the others if it happens to them."

"Exactly," Petra said, grinning at the ease of his agreement. The words she hadn't spoken, the ones hovering in the back of her mind, flashed across the tip of her tongue, and before she could stop herself, she was saying them. "And then, maybe, if we understand what makes it happen properly, we can find a way to switch it off."

Emotions flashed across Emmett's face so fast that she couldn't get a proper read on them. Hurt, longing, curiosity, a kind of want so extreme, it looked almost painful? Still, he was only silent for the briefest of seconds before he nodded. "You're right. Maybe we can."

"Great," Petra said with a smile, then caught sight of her watch. "Oh, hell. I'd better get back to the office."

"Wait," Emmett said, a hand shooting out to land on her forearm as she went to stand. Something that felt like a jolt of electricity went through her at his touch, and their eyes flicked up at the same moment, both of their gazes wide-eyed, glinting silver, and dare she think it, confused. "I was just going to ask for your number," Emmett said, breaking the silence after a moment that stretched far beyond politeness. "So, we can organize a time to start looking into this. I'll ask Raj to get some books together, and maybe we can go through them sometime."

Petra tugged back her arm to fetch her phone out of her bag, missing his touch on her skin immediately. This was absurd. How could she be having such an intense response to him? She didn't even know the guy.

Petra had never really believed in love at first sight, or even, really, strong attraction at first sight. She was much more likely to find someone attractive after she got to know them, to understand what made them tick and the ways their brain worked. The last two males she'd dated more than briefly had been men who worked in similar areas of government to her own, jobs she could really relate to, with strong family backgrounds and friends she got along with. Sure, she liked Emmett's friend Leo well enough, but beyond that, she really didn't know him. She had practically no knowledge of his background, beyond the fact that he was a close friend of the new Blue Crescent Alpha and an only child, and he worked in event management. And all that, she had found out here with him today. That was it, wasn't it? So why hadn't she been able to get him out of her head for days now? It was so unlike her, it was unsettling.

They swapped numbers, and Petra rewrapped the last of her sandwich and was almost unsurprised when Emmett stood too. He'd eaten barely more than she had, and he nearly left the rest of his food behind until she reminded him it was there.

"Right," he said with a self-deprecating laugh, collecting it and tucking in both their chairs. "Of course. Sorry, thinking about other things."

Was his mind already far away from their meeting? Maybe trying to work out what was dragging them together, since they both seemed to be feeling this draw? Or maybe, Petra thought, he was already thinking about other things. Maybe she was much less important in his head than he already seemed to be becoming in hers.

He guided her from the crowded shop with a hand on her lower back that sent tingles through her entire body. For a moment, she resented the layers of clothing between their skin, then realized what she was thinking and forced the thought from her head. Petra Dalman was not a take-a-man-to-bed-on-the-first-date kind of female, she reminded herself, regardless of how strongly she seemed to be physically responding to this one.

They paused together outside the shop, silent for a brief moment as their eyes met.

"I'm going that way," Petra managed after a minute, gesturing past him toward the council building. "I think you're the other way. Rockford Street, right?"

"Right, of course," Emmett said, but he didn't move out of her way. "Petra," he started.

"Emmett," she began at the exact same moment.

They paused, both smiling awkwardly.

"After you," she said, trying not to be obvious about the fact that she was taking the opportunity, as long as they were still in each other's presence, to breathe in his scent again.

"Can I take you out to dinner?" he asked, the words coming out of him in a rush, almost as though he wasn't sure how to say them. "Those things I said, outside Della's hospital room… I hope you know I meant them. Whether or not there's magic involved in this, Petra, I want to spend more time with you. We can use the time to talk about how to manage what's going on here, or something else, something completely unrelated. But, Petra, I want you, and I want to spend more time with you. So, I hope you'll give me a chance to prove that I'm more than just a male with a scent that, I don't know, appeals to you."

Appeals to you. The understatement of the phrase almost made her laugh. But the opportunity to spend more time around Emmett, more time breathing in the incredible sweet-seafoam scent of him, let alone the pull that seemed to be doing its best to magnetize her body to his… she didn't know how to turn that down. Before she could think it through, before she could analyze the wisdom of agreeing to what effectively amounted to a date with this man, she was nodding. "All right. Just dinner, all right?"

"I would never assume anything else," he said with that grin that heated her blood.

"I'll have to look at my calendar," she added, hedging now just a moment too late. "Work out when I have a night free."

"Text me," he said. "I don't want to make you late back to work."

The smile she sent him was a little shy, a little grateful. Why was she feeling like this toward a man she didn't even know? She took another lungful of his scent and before she knew what she was doing, reached out a hand to shake his.

He looked slightly surprised, which was nothing to the tidal wave of embarrassment sweeping through her, but she managed to hold her hand steady as he shook it, even as warmth spread through her entire body in the wake of the embarrassment from the place where his bare skin touched hers. From the combination of the two feelings rushing through her, breathing had become slightly difficult, so she shot him another smile and said, "I will. I'll speak to you soon, Emmett," then stepped around him to make her way back to the Youth and Community building.

"Soon," she heard him say in confirmation as she walked away.

She'd made it two blocks before she stopped and leaned her forehead against the bricks of the building she was passing and fought the urge to beat her head against it and hopefully gain some sense in the process. First, she gave the man her phone number, then she agreed to what seriously looked like a date, even if she was trying to shield it in her head behind the intention to discuss what they were going to do about their situation. Then she shook his hand? What in the name of all the gods was she trying to do, make herself look so foolish that he stopped wanting to spend time around her? Something in her clenched in horror at the very idea. No, judging by that harsh visceral reaction, she definitely didn't want to drive Emmett O'Neill away with her social ineptitude. She needed to clean up her act, though, or else it might not matter whether she wanted it. If she kept shaking the man's hand when they parted, he'd probably decide she was too weird to keep spending time around, no matter how good she smelled to him.

She ducked her head to her shoulder and sniffed, trying to find any hint of whatever it was that was drawing him so powerfully. Nope, she smelled the same as she always had, a hint of the perfume she'd put on this morning, mixed with the freshly printed paper scent that always clung to her after a day in the office.

The office. She glanced down at her watch, and her eyes widened when she noticed the time. She had no time for existential crises; she was already late back from lunch, and there were piles of work to do this afternoon with Della out.

Of course, being busy all afternoon didn't stop her from catching herself—not just once, but regularly—staring into space and reliving the way his hand had felt against her back as he guided her out of the shop, the need that had rolled through her body. Emmett had said this was what happened between Della and Leo, this sharp attraction dragging them together. How on earth had Della gotten anything done if she'd been feeling this the whole time she and Leo had been flirting? It was like Petra was standing in a strong riptide, and it was trying to drag her out to sea. She was swimming against it as hard as she could, but she was aware that she only had so much power, and eventually, if she couldn't free herself from the rip, she might have to allow it to drag her into the waves.

And the worst part was part of her wanted to know what it was like to be carried out to sea.