Boardroom Bastard

“Alistair, my heart bleeds for you,” I said, leaning back and resting my bespoke Oxfords on the antique mahogany desk. “It really does. I’m practically weeping here.”

“Michael, be reasonable,” Alistair’s voice trembled through the speakerphone from his incredibly stuffy law firm in Mayfair. “A five-hundred-million-pound acquisition isn’t something you sign on a Tuesday morning without a board review. My clients need forty-eight hours.”

I checked my Patek Philippe watch. “You have forty-eight seconds. And if you waste thirty of them crying about it, that’s on you.”

“We need to consult the regulators—”

“The regulators are currently having an extended, tax-payer funded lunch at a mediocre bistro in Chelsea, Alistair. By the time they finish their crème brûlée, your client’s logistics firm will have hemorrhaged enough capital to trigger a margin call. At which point, I will buy the wreckage for the price of a used Ford Focus and turn their headquarters into an exclusive car park.” I flashed a grin at the empty boardroom. “I don’t do charity. Thirty seconds left.”

Through the premium speaker, my ears picked up the frantic, erratic thump-thump-thump of the old man’s heart. I could even hear the microscopic friction of his sweat-slicked palm sliding down his telephone receiver. Let’s not pussyfoot around here, I am a werewolf. The alpha of alphas. Deep down, my inner wolf stretched its legs, thoroughly amused by the human drama.

“Thirty-two million,” Alistair croaked, his spirit entirely broken. “That’s our bottom line for the secondary assets.”

“Twenty-five. And I’m docking another million for the emotional labour of having this conversation with you.” I lowered my feet to the floor, smoothing the front of my charcoal pinstripe suit jacket. “Ten seconds. Sign the digital contract, or I will use the capital to buy a yacht and name it Alistair’s Tears.”

A suffocating pause stretched over the line.

“Fine,” the lawyer whispered. “The digital signature is authorized.”

“An absolute pleasure,” I drawled, cutting the call with a flick of my finger.

I took a slow, entirely self-satisfied sip of coffee. God, I loved London. It was a beautiful, sterile, hyper-controlled playground. No ancient pack politics, no savaging backpackers lost on dismal country moors, no howling at the moon. Just pure, unadulterated, beautifully predictable human greed.

There was a nervous knock at the soundproofed double doors of my office.

“Come in Marcus!” I shouted.

Marcus, my Chief Operating Officer—and unfortunately, my pack Beta—practically fell into the room. The scent of his panic quite ruined the olfactory aesthetic of my expensive wood-scented candles.

“Michael, we have a breach,” Marcus gasped, holding a tablet like it was a live grenade.

“Marcus, if you’ve scratched the parquet flooring with those cheap rubber-soled shoes again, I’m demoting you to the basement accounts,” I said, adjusting my tie in the reflection of the glass wall. “What could possibly be important enough to interrupt my morning victory lap?”

“The Financial Conduct Authority. They’ve just authorized an emergency, unannounced forensic audit on our Northern real estate holding companies. The lead investigator is downstairs in the lobby right now.”

My thumb froze against my collar. The trademark casual smirk remained plastered on my face, but my jaw locked. The Northern holdings. If a human accountant actually started untangling those balances, they wouldn’t just find a bit of creative tax avoidance. They’d find a literal pack of apex predators hiding in the corporate registry.

“An unannounced audit?” I asked, my voice dropping its smooth London veneer, a sharp edge of my native Northern iron cutting through the pretense. “Who pulled that trigger?”

“An anonymous tip-off from Vanguard Investments,” Marcus muttered. “The Southern Alpha’s trying to flush us out, Michael. If they freeze those accounts—”

“They won’t.” I stood up, buttoning my jacket. The untouchable corporate fixer was back online. “Deploy the legal team. Throw a wall of injunctions and red tape at them. I will handle the investigator myself. Humans are remarkably easy to manage once you find out whose particular mid-life crisis is driving them.”

I strode toward the private elevator lobby, practicing my most terrifying, unblinking staring contest in the polished chrome panels. Ten minutes in a room with me, and most human executives were sobbing into their handkerchiefs. I was entirely bulletproof.

The glass doors to the lobby slid open with a soft, mechanical hiss.

And then, my brain entirely short-circuited.

A violent, catastrophic wave of scent crashed through the synthetic, air-conditioned environment. It was a dizzying, electric shock of vanilla, rain-slicked concrete, and pure, intoxicating heat.

The sensory spike pierced straight through my skull, striking an ancient, primal nerve in my DNA that had been dead since the day I was born. My blood turned to absolute, agonizing fire.

Beneath my shirt, my chest heaved. The Silver-Back—the massive, feral beast I kept chained beneath my performative, arrogant facade—violently tore itself awake. It slammed against the cages of my mind, roaring with a terrifying strength that made my knees tremble, screaming a single, deafening command:

MATE. CLAIM HER.

My fingers gripped the edge of a marble pillar so hard the stone microscopically cracked under my fingernails. My irises violently fought to flash a bright, predatory amber. No, my inner broker panicked, his massive ego screaming in terror.

No, absolutely not! A fated mate? Biology? I am a bachelor! I am a capitalist icon! I am not letting a hormonal glitch ruin my perfect lifestyle!

I closed my eyes for a fraction of a second, attempting to summon the cold, ruthless corporate machine that usually kept me tethered. But the scent was a physical weight, wrapping around my throat, forcing my gaze toward the center of the room. I needed to breathe, but breathing only filled my lungs with her. Every cell in my body was suddenly straining toward a complete stranger, demanding I drop to all fours and claim what the universe had apparently decided belonged to me.

Get a grip, Green, I snarled at myself internally. She’s a civil servant. You don’t do civil servants.

“Mr. Green?” a sharp, elegant upper-class voice cut through the roaring chaos of my racing pulse.

I forced my head up, my vision blurring, fighting to keep from shifting right on the Italian rug.

Standing in the center of my pristine lobby was a young woman in her late twenties. Her blonde hair was pinned up in a flawless corporate updo, exposing the pale, tempting curve of her neck. She wore a tailored navy blazer that yelled first-class honors from Oxford, but the rigid professionalism of the fabric couldn’t quite mask the devastatingly feminine silhouette underneath. She held a leather folio against her magnificent chest like an inadequate shield, looking at me with a gaze that was completely steady, fiercely intelligent, and utterly unimpressed by my presence.

She was an auditor with hips that curved like an hourglass, a mouth made for sin, and eyes that held the cold, analytical precision of a firing squad. She looked at my white-knuckled grip on the pillar, then slowly raised her eyebrows, her expression shifting into a look of pure, patronizing amusement.

She wasn’t intimidated. She was bored. By me.

A dangerous, entirely inappropriate thrill shot straight down my spine. The performative bastard in me wanted to ruin that perfect, icy composure just to see what kind of fire was hiding beneath the Oxford diction. She was a lethal threat to everything my family hid. She was the enemy’s chosen weapon. And according to my wolf, she was the only woman who would ever own me.

She stepped forward, her heels clicking with agonizing slowness against the polished floor. She extended a slender, manicured hand toward me, entirely unaware that she was walking directly into a predator’s den.

“I’m Florence Thorne,” she said, her voice crisp and entirely professional, though a faint, mocking smirk played at the corner of her lips. “Lead forensic auditor. We need to talk about your Northern accounts.”

My gods. What a woman!