Maya’s face flooded with heat. She was a grown adult woman. She had navigated drunk clientele, aggressive bouncers, and three a.m. subway rides alone. She had once talked her way out of a parking ticket using nothing but confidence and the strategic deploynt of eye contact.
And she had just told a billionaire that he was really tall like it was a revelation.
"I ant..." She stopped. Regrouped. Tried again. "Good morning. The estate is beautiful. I was just....we were just...Lora was showing around."
"I hope you’re finding everything comfortable," Damian said, and his voice was doing that thing again....that resonance that seed to bypass her ears and go directly to so primitive part of her brain that was apparently very impressed by deep authoritative voices.
"Very comfortable," Maya managed. "The towel rack is heated."
Why was she talking about the towel rack? Why was that the thing her mouth had decided to say?
Damian’s three percent amusent ticked up to approximately four. "I’ll pass your complints to the facilities staff."
"Please do," Maya said, with a dignity she absolutely did not feel.
He moved to step past them, clearly intending to continue wherever he’d been going, and Maya exhaled a silent breath of relief. She’d survived. Barely, and with minimal dignity intact, but she’d survived.
Then Damian paused, looking back at her with an expression that had shifted from politely amused to sothing more genuine. "Eve ntioned you worked together before she ca here. That you’ve been friends for several years."
"We t at...." Maya caught herself. Rembered that she wasn’t sure how much Damian knew about Eve’s forr job, or how much Eve wanted shared. ".....work. Yeah. She’s one of the best people I know."
Sothing in Damian’s expression softened in a way that transford his face—just briefly, just a fraction, but enough to give Maya a glimpse of the man behind the intimidating alpha exterior. "She is," he agreed quietly. "One of the best I’ve known too."
The sincerity in those words was absolute. No performance, no charm offensive, no careful social managent. Just a man saying sothing true about soone he loved.
Maya felt her defensiveness....the protective instinct she’d been carrying on Eve’s behalf since arriving....ease slightly. Whatever else was complicated about this situation, that had been real.
"Take care of her," Maya said, surprising herself with her own directness. "She doesn’t always ask for help when she needs it. She’ll push through things that would break most people and then act like it was nothing. Soone needs to watch for that."
Damian’s eyes t hers with an intensity that made Maya fight the urge to step back. "We know," he said simply. "We do."
A beat of loaded silence.
Then: "Enjoy your morning, Miss Maya."
And he continued down the corridor, unhurried and completely in command of every molecule of space he occupied.
Maya watched him go, then turned to Lora, who had been standing very still and very quietly throughout this entire exchange.
"Is he always like that?" Maya asked.
"Alpha Damian? Yes," Lora confird. "Quite consistently."
"How does anyone function around him on a daily basis?"
Lora considered this with the thoughtfulness of soone who had clearly asked herself the sa question. "You get used to it," she said. "Sowhat."
"Does it get less...." Maya gestured vaguely in the direction Damian had disappeared. "...overwhelming?"
"Also sowhat," Lora said.
Maya took a breath, straightened her jacket, and reminded herself that she was a confident adult woman who was not intimidated by beautiful people. She had once served drinks to actual celebrities without losing her composure.
Damian Blackwood was just a very tall, very handso, very intensely magnetic man who happened to be in love with her best friend. That was fine. That was completely manageable.
"Okay," Maya said. "Where were we? The gardens, right?"
"The gardens," Lora confird, and they continued down the corridor.
The east wing gardens were extraordinary.
They spread across a generous expanse behind the estate’s right side, designed with the kind of intentional beauty that took decades to cultivate. Stone pathways wound between flower beds that sohow managed to look both carefully curated and completely natural. Ancient trees provided canopy over benches and small clearings. A fountain at the center sent water in arching streams that caught the morning light.
Maya stood at the entrance to the garden and just breathed for a mont. After the intensity of the interior....the art, the architecture, the Damian experience...the fresh air and open space felt like relief.
"This is incredible," she said to Lora.
"The Alpha’s grandfather designed it," Lora said. "It took about thirty years to reach its current state."
They walked the pathways for a while, Maya asking questions about the plants she didn’t recognize, Lora answering with quiet knowledge. The morning was cool but pleasant, the kind of early spring weather that felt like a promise.
Maya was almost relaxed.
Almost.
They made their way back inside through the east wing entrance.....a side door that led into a corridor connecting the garden to the main interior. The hallway was quieter than the main corridors, lined with frad photographs rather than paintings.
Maya slowed, looking at them with curiosity. They were estate photos....the grounds in different seasons, the house across different decades. Formal portraits of stern-looking people she didn’t recognize. And among them, more recent photos.....the brothers at various ages, in various settings.
She stopped at one that showed all three of them, clearly taken within the last few years. They were outdoors sowhere wild and elevated.....mountains, maybe.....dressed practically, the landscape spread behind them. They weren’t posing formally, just standing together, and the ease between them was evident even in a photograph.
Damian on the left, all controlled authority even in a casual setting. Damon on the right, grinning with an edge that was all wildness barely contained. And Silas in the center, the calst of them, watching sothing in the distance with those dark eyes that saw everything.
Three extraordinarily beautiful, deeply unusual n who were sohow, impossibly, in love with her best friend.
Eve, you absolute chaos magnet, Maya thought with deep affection.
"We should head back toward the main house," Lora said gently. "Lunch will be...."
She stopped.
Because around the corner at the far end of the corridor ca a sound....footsteps, asured and deliberate....and then Raphael appeared.
Maya had not yet t Eve’s uncle.
She had heard about him from Eve over breakfast the previous day.....heard the emotion in Eve’s voice when she talked about him, the wonder and the complicated joy of discovering she had living family. But she hadn’t seen him.
She was entirely unprepared.
He was....
He was....
Maya’s brain, confronted with Raphael Seraphim in full morning light, moving with the unhurried grace of soone who had existed long enough that he never needed to rush, perford an orderly shutdown of all non-essential functions.
He was wearing dark trousers and a deep burgundy shirt, his silver-dark hair falling loose past his jaw. His amber eyes....exactly like Eve’s, she registered distantly...caught her imdiately, assessing and warm and ancient all at once.
The energy he radiated was.....
It was....
It was like standing next to a power source. Like being in the imdiate vicinity of sothing that operated on a completely different scale than regular people. The air seed to thicken around him, seem charged with sothing that Maya’s body responded to on a cellular level she didn’t have language for.
Her heart rate doubled. Her skin prickled. Her mouth went dry.
And he was still fifteen feet away.
"Good morning," Raphael said, his voice rolling through the corridor with effortless resonance. His eyes moved to Lora first....polite acknowledgnt....then back to Maya. "You must be Eve’s friend. I’m Raphael. Her uncle."
He smiled.
It was a devastating smile. Warm and slightly wicked and completely, devastatingly intentional.
Maya opened her mouth.
Then, from the other end of the corridor, a door opened.
And Damian stepped back into the hallway.
He’d apparently forgotten sothing....he was holding a docunt he must have retrieved....and he nearly walked past them before he registered the small group assembled in the corridor. He stopped, looked at Raphael, looked at Maya, and opened his mouth to say sothing.
The combined energy of both of them hit Maya simultaneously.
Alpha wolf and ancient incubus, standing in the sa corridor, their presences overlapping and compounding into sothing that was objectively too much for any reasonable human nervous system to process without warning.
Raphael’s eyes widened slightly as he recognized what was about to happen. "Oh....."
Damian had just enough ti to register the particular expression on Maya’s face....the one that ant her eyes were glazing over, her knees were buckling, her body making a unilateral executive decision about consciousness....and he moved.
He crossed the distance between them in three long strides and caught her as she dropped, one arm around her shoulders, the other catching her knees before she hit the floor.
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