Wolves at the Door - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,4

even as another car, a middle-aged lady sedan, pulled up and the woman I was sure had to be the settlement officer got out with a folder of paperwork.

“Helena, tell me what’s going on, and quickly,” Graham said. “Did you do something to that girl?”

“Why would you think I did something to her?”

He scratched his own freshly shaved, perfectly regal jawline. “I don’t know. ’Habsburg chin’ is a very strange insult, the sort of thing you say to someone you know.”

“We don’t have time. She’s buying our house.”

“And we definitely don’t have enough money to beat her,” he said. “So what are our options?”

I sighed.

Chapter Three

Graham

“Royalty? That explains a lot about you,” I said, grinning at Helena in a way I hoped didn’t come off as lascivious. She certainly didn’t have a chin worth insulting. Her chin was pert, just like her nose and her boobs, and I was trying very hard not to think about how much I wanted to touch them, as I had not seen her in weeks.

“I mean, barely,” she said with a sigh. “We left Europe hundreds of years ago, and it’s only on my mother’s side.”

“So that’s why you were a bitch to her in high school.”

“I didn’t want to be! I feel terrible about it. In fact, I wanted to be friends with her, but my ‘friends’—” She did air quotes. “Even my own sisters told me I needed to cut her from my social circle.”

“I’m starting to imagine your school looked like a Jane Austen movie.”

“You wouldn’t be far off, honestly. The skirts were just a little shorter. So the whole trauma followed me home over the holidays too. Just one of many reasons I am working for myself now, doing a job that my parents would never approve of.”

“I think I like you even more now.” I watched Billie moving in on the settlement officer. “But we definitely have a problem. Let me talk to her. You wait here.”

“Ooh…uh…okay.” I detected jealousy in her darting eyes, and I relished it.

She probably thought I was going to work my masculine wiles on her rival. It was tempting, but I had only known I was a demon for a month or so. Before that, I thought I just had a higher calling to help people.

I was within striking distance of my life’s dream to win a national political office, moving from the Pennsylvania state house to the House of Representatives, when Helena came into my life like a bomb, destroying everything I knew. Politics came natural to demons because we fed on the admiration of humans, and the votes came naturally to me because I was an incubus and my constituents literally couldn’t resist me.

I felt like I was cheating. I wasn’t getting votes because of anything I’d done. I was getting them because I was a demon. I’d had no idea.

And in my district, my opponent was actually a pretty decent guy, a veteran who owned a locally beloved restaurant.

Two weeks before the election, my campaign was falling apart. Calls from my campaign manager were going ignored. I skipped out on two fundraisers. I was failing everyone who believed in me.

One thing I did know how to do thanks to my years in politics was to smooth things over. “Hi, Billie,” I said, approaching her before she could walk into the offices as the settlement officer nodded at her like, whenever you’re ready. “It seems we all got off on the wrong foot. I’m Graham Capello. Greenwood Manor was the home of my grandfather’s dear friend Deveraux, and I made an offer on it because I really want to see it restored.” This was a lie, and I hoped she couldn’t tell.

“Graham Capello…” Billie looked me over with suspicion and intrigue. Despite her aggression toward Helena, I got the feeling she had a caramel-soft core. She was a girl who had taken knocks all her life by the sound of it, but she had innocence in her eyes. Men intimidated her, I thought. She stayed away, hiding behind red curls and an attitude that was really just a front. “You’re…you’re some kind of demon, aren’t you?”

“I come to you in the spirit of fair business,” I said, hoping not to get into that.

She bared her small teeth like a cornered animal, her face turning red. “An incubus, aren’t you? I ain’t messing with an incubus!” She was getting flustered, bringing out a thicker accent. “Helena sent you over here to seduce me