The Wolf Auction

Chapter 18

[Blake’s POV]

Nine-fourteen p.m. The building emptied hours ago, the office door is closed, and Bailee Reed is three feet away annotating a partnership agreement like she was born for it. I've read clause eleven four times because she rolled her sleeves up and I discovered freckles on her forearms.

This is what my Ivy League education has been reduced to—freckle cartography conducted under fluorescent lighting.

"Clause twenty-two contradicts clause nine." She taps the page without looking up, pen caught between her teeth. "Arbitration window can't be thirty days and sixty simultaneously—pick one."

"They're banking on nobody reading past page twelve." I lean back, watching gold flicker through her irises—frustration shifts them richer, and I've catalogued this stupidly and desperately. "Most opposing counsel don't."

"Most opposing counsel aren't being paid in ginger tea and desperation." She scribbles in the margin with handwriting that could be mistaken for a seismograph reading. "Yours is either incompetent or hoping you are."

"Neither—they're testing our attention." I pull the file toward me, because redirecting my focus requires physical intervention. "Now they know."

"You're welcome." The pen clicks against her teeth twice, and my jaw does something I'll be denying in perpetuity. "Should I invoice separately for catching errors, or is that bundled into the assistant package?"

"Bundled. The gratitude, however, bills hourly." My mouth shifts one millimetre—the tectonic equivalent of a lesser man's standing ovation.

"Generous." She flips a page. "I'll expect retroactive payment for every clause I've saved you from since Monday."

"Submit it in writing." I match her tone. "Legal requires documentation—company policy."

"How convenient that Legal is you." She glances up, and that gold flickers again—brighter this time, amused. "No conflict of interest there."

Her scent has changed. I've tracked the shift for weeks with the precision of a man who knows precision is his last structural barrier against something ungovernable. Underneath the amber—warmer, sweeter, a thread my wolf follows with a certainty that locks my jaw shut.

"Show me the indemnity provision." I angle the screen between us—professional, controlled, a man in total command of his faculties. Nobody audit me.

She leans in, shoulder an inch from mine, and her fingernail traces the text. "Here—the liability cap. And here—" Three pages forward. "Force majeure eats it alive."

"That's correct." The admission exits before my internal review process can catch it, and her eyes snap to mine with open disbelief.

"I'm sorry—could you repeat that?" Mock-solemn, head tilted. "I need to verify the acoustics. Blake Wallace, conceding a point."

"Don't push your luck." My arm rests along the back of her chair—not touching, a quarter-inch of deliberate nothing that my wolf treats as a personal insult. "Flag the conflict and we'll redline tomorrow."

"I could redline it now." She turns to argue, and the rotation brings her face inches from mine. Three inches of superheated oxygen between her mouth and my jaw, and every molecule of it detonates simultaneously.

Neither of us moves. Her lips part, and my gaze drops to them for one unforgivable half-second—a lapse in thirty years of constructed self-governance. Her pupils blow wide in a response she can't fabricate.

"Water." She shoves the chair backward, wheels shrieking across tile like a fire alarm. "I need—there's a kitchen—water exists there, theoretically."

"Down the hall, left past conference B." My voice comes out level because I manufacture it that way—no seams, no structural tells. "Take your time."

She bolts. The office exhales, thinning to something survivable, and I sit in the wreckage of three inches inflicting more damage than any breach of contract in my career.

My phone goes to my hand—not for messages, but because my fingers need a task that isn't gripping the arm of her empty chair. A man requires hobbies.

She returns with two glasses and a composure so aggressively casual it constitutes perjury. "You look dehydrated. The air quality in this office should be prosecuted."

"I'll add it to my caseload." I drink, watching her over the rim reassemble herself. "Somewhere between the Kellerman merger and atmospheric crimes."

"Prioritise. The air is an active threat." She drops into her chair, pulling the contract closer like a shield. "Kellerman will survive another day."

"I'll restructure the docket." The corner of my mouth commits a minor betrayal. "Pro bono, given the severity."

"Your generosity is staggering." She uncaps her pen with a flourish conveying the precise opposite of gratitude. "Truly, Blake. The philanthropy."

We fall back into the work. Forty minutes—her arguing clause structure, me pretending my entire nervous system isn't calibrated to the inch between our arms. Her lower lip catches between her teeth over a difficult provision, and gold flares in her eyes.

Her hand drifts to her stomach three times. Unconscious, protective, pressing through fabric to something underneath—something my wolf identified weeks before my brain conceded the translation.

"The liquidated damages clause is a trap." She circles the figure with her pen. "Two point four million for early termination—that's not a penalty, it's a hostage negotiation."

"It's a ceiling disguised as a floor." I watch her handwriting carve through the margin. "They want the number to terrify, not to hold."

"So every clause in this agreement is performing." She sets the pen down, eyes lifting. "Nothing means what it says."

"Everything means what it says—just not what the other side thinks it says." My voice drops half a register without my authorisation. "That's the craft."

"And what does this say?" She's not looking at the contract anymore. Her hand rests on the page between us, fingertips inches from mine, and the question has outgrown the document entirely.

"More than either of us has filed." The air thickens to something the ventilation system was not engineered to address.

"I should go." She stacks files briskly, pen behind her ear. "Spencer's board prep is at eight, and I prefer to arrive with functional cognition."

"Goodnight, Bailee." I keep my eyes on the contract, my voice on its leash, my hands precisely where they are.

She reaches for her bag. My phone screen dims in my hand—the timing coincidental, the angle surgical. In my peripheral vision, I watch her pick up my water glass, wrap it in a napkin with fingers that tremble just enough to confirm everything, and slide it into her bag.

She thinks I'm reading a notification. I am not. I watch the entire operation and say absolutely nothing, because watching her work a problem is the most compelling thing I've witnessed in a decade of high-stakes litigation.

"Goodnight, Blake." She stands, bag against her hip, my DNA tucked inside it. "Try not to bill the building for overtime."

"No promises." The door opens, holds for one breath, then clicks shut behind her with a finality that settles into the room uncomfortably.

My chair creaks backward. My mouth shifts—not a smile, but something underneath one, private and deeply precise. She's running a paternity test none of us are supposed to know about, stealing glasses with shaking hands—the only play a woman with no power has ever had.

One line to Spencer, typed against the dark screen: It's working. Send. I pocket the phone and find clause twenty-two like I never left it.

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