“Good morning, Lorraine,” I said, keeping my voice low so Delphine wouldn’t hear me while she made breakfast.
“Elle? Well, good morning. How are you, hun?”
“Uhm, I’m all right. Do you think I could come in today? Pick up a few hours?”
There was a slight pause on the other end of the line, and when Lorraine spoke again, her voice was concerned.
“Sweetheart, are you having money issues?”
“No, no, no,” I said quickly. “It’s not that. I wanted to get out of the house for a bit.”
“Okay,” Lorraine said, but I could hear from the tone of her voice that she didn’t quite believe me. “We actually could use your help. The new embroidery machines arrived. They got here almost a week early. They’re heavy as all hell. We could use those muscles of yours. I’m sure the other girls would be happy for the assistance.”
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes,” I said, blurting the words out in a rush. “Thanks, Lorraine.”
“All right. See you soon, dear.”
Hopping out of bed, I dressed as quickly as I could, and headed for the front door.
“Where are you going?” Delphine asked. “I made pancakes and bacon.”
Shit.
Pausing at the door, I turned to my old nanny. Strange. Even now that we were simply friends and roommates, I still thought of her as my nanny sometimes.
“Sorry,” I said. “Lorraine called me.” A white lie. “The embroidery machines she ordered came early. She asked if Icould help move them into the shop and get the old ones out to the dumpsters. I said I would.”
“Oh,” Delphine said, her shoulders sagging. “I thought we’d have breakfast together.” She gave me that same piercing gaze she used to give me when I was younger and had done something I shouldn’t. “Maybe talk about this mysterious weekend away that you had?”
Striding over, I grabbed a single pancake, stuffed some bacon in the middle, and folded it over like a sandwich.
“Thanks for breakfast,” I said, taking a bite and heading for the door.
“Uh-huh,” Delphine said bitterly as I left the apartment.
When I arrived at the shop, I found it a hive of activity. The delivery guys had left the huge crates containing the industrial embroidery machines out on the front curb. A couple of the girls armed with hammers and screwdrivers were trying to pry the wooden sides of the crate open to get to the machines-all while customers were coming and going, and regular folks were trying to make their way down the sidewalk.
“Wow,” I said as I walked up. “These are big.”
Tabitha and Miranda both worked full-time for Lorraine and were usually sweet and jovial, but they were looking frazzled as they worked on the boxes.
Tabitha waved a hammer at the crate. “That jackass dumped them here. Didn’t even bother to offer to take them around back or anything. Ugh.”
“Here, let me help,” I said, taking the hammer from her.
I outweighed both women by at least thirty pounds and towered over them by four inches or more. That, along with my enhanced strength, allowed me to make quick work of prying the nails from the crate. Within ten minutes, I had both crates open and helped the women haul them to the back of the store.
“Elle,” Miranda said. “I wish my husband was as strong as you. He can barely get the lid off a pickle jar.”
“Yeah,” I muttered. “I’m a big girl.”
Miranda and Tabitha both looked at me in confusion.
“Are you all right?” Miranda asked.
“I’m fine,” I said, heaving a piece of wood from the crates into the dumpster.
“Okay, then,” she said.
As I helped reorganize the store and the back workroom with the new machines, the other members of the staff kept trying to banter with me. It was something I typically thrived in. I loved the funny back-and-forth, the dirty jokes, the sarcastic remarks, the silliness. Today, I wasn’t in the mood. Every few seconds, an image of Aurelius’s face flashed across my mind and sent me back down the rabbit hole.
Mostly, I was angry at myself. I’d let my guard down for one whole day and fell for the guy. What was I, some cliché out of a rom-com? I’d known full well who he was, what he was, yet I still allowed it to happen. There was no fucking chance that Prince Aurelius Decimus, heir to the dragon throne, would ever want to date a broken wolf shifter. Regardless of their individual views on me not being able to shift, I was still a wolf. My family and theirs were, and always had been, at each other’s throats.
It was silly and stupid of me to think anything different might have happened. Hell, he hadn’t even given me a real kiss when he left. Maybe I’d imagined all of it. He was probably only nice to me because his friends had snatched me up. There’d been no connection there, just a prince who felt bad for me. A prince who’d pitied me.
Great.
“Elle, dear?”
Flinching, I turned and looked at Lorraine, gripping the broom tightly. I’d come here to sweep up after bringing the new machines in, but I hadn’t gotten much of anything done.
“Yeah?” I said, hurrying to do a semblance of sweeping.
“Come talk to me,” she said, waving for me to join her in her office.
After closing the door to give us some privacy, Lorraine sat on the edge of her desk.
“What’s the matter, sweetheart? You don’t seem to be your usual self. First you ask to come in on your day off, then you sort of move around here like a robot. The others have noticed how off you seem too.”
I looked down at my feet, toes scraping at the carpet. “I’m a little down. That’s all.”
Lorraine put a hand on my arm, her thin fingers cool on my skin.
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