She and Hers

1 - A Witch and a Human

Chiara

He smiles when he offers his shirt to Tommy's obnoxious little disaster of a brat. It's a sweet, genuine smile that wrinkles the corners of his dramatically-beautiful blue eyes and reveals the flash of picture-perfect white teeth.

There is a part of me (a very large part) that wishes it weren't so breathtaking for this particular occasion.

Tommy's daughter, Vanessa, is an utter, unredeemable brat. She scoffed at Hanna for handing her a soda (what was she expecting, champagne at ten in the morning?), then proceeded to spill the can all over herself and the thirty-thousand dollar carpet in my lobby. Purposefully. All this in the space of the first three minutes, she and Tommy walked through the door.

I'm not heartless. I am a cold bitch, I'll admit that, but I have compassion. I checked Tommy's profile on our coven black pages to see if maybe his brat has some sort of trauma or disability. There was nothing there, but sometimes we miss things in our extensive background searches. Then I saw the smug shit-eating smirk on the seventeen-year-old drago's face when Hanna became flustered at the mess.

Wretched, infantile brat.

When Sam walked into the lobby, pushing his cart of cleaning supplies, my magic perked up and honed in on the man. I can't help but be protective of the tattooed, tall, well-endowed wolf shifter whose heart is as big as my forty-story skyscraper.

I didn't believe anyone could be this good. How is it even possible? Especially with the one significant blip I did find; a girl when he was much younger who was sexually abused by her wolf pack. Sam was part of it, but our search revealed that he played a very unwitting role in it all. After he left the pack, it seems that his every step was made to make up for that youthful boneheadedness, but I was still skeptical considering his work with the ahem-top-secret-ahem unit of killers hunting down evil psychopaths and sex traffickers.

Even being here, a janitor for my coven, is part of his self-imposed redemption. A single dad with a daughter who isn't his blood relative working a menial job in a witch coven isn't very redeeming, except that it's all his cover. Not the daughter. Hanna, hired as my front-desk secretary when her dad joined us, is very real. Sam is genuinely an excellent father.

The janitor role is complete bullshit, though.

He's a spy. So is Hanna. The ahem-top-secret-ahem highly-specialized black ops all-wolf unit is spying on us. On the coven. On me. The wolves are just as suspicious of me as I am of them. Life is ironic that way.

"He's gorgeous, huh?" warm lips feather a soft kiss against the back of my neck. I toss Holden a smile over my shoulder. "And sweet. I told you so," he teases me, his dark eyes a warm caress that grows even warmer when we watch Sam hold his own against the horror show in the lobby as she throws a toddler-worthy tantrum about the soda on her shoes. Club soda. The nasty, spoiled little wretch.

My smile turns into a grimace. "Can you blame me? I would never have thought a dominant wolf could be anything but a misogynistic ass."

The girl doesn't want Sam's shirt. She's complaining that Hanna should go out and buy her a new one or that the cost of it should come from Hanna's paycheck. My magic swells, as annoyed as I am by her obvious disdain for a working man's shirt as I am by her assumption that my assistant is at her beck and call. Hanna owes this girl precisely nothing.

Sam's shirt isn't even a typical uniform. As soon as I decided to hire Sam as my floor's maintenance man, I changed the uniform to silky white button-ups and casual khaki or black pants. He looks like a million bucks, washing my floors and changing my trash cans. His shirts cost three-hundred dollars a piece, so it's not a stretch to imagine him in the boardroom instead of cleaning the mop sink.