Page 4 of Act of Command

Alice eased up alongside her. “The blond hunk?”

“Yes.”

“Tell your vagina to stand down. I think he’s probably a new professor or something. Not your blind date. But if I’m wrong, you are so doing that.”

“Oh yes. For sure,” said Mae, still staring in the direction of the hot guy. He looked familiar, but she couldn’t place him. “Can I just skip the date and go out with that guy instead? I bet he’d be great in bed.”

“Earth to formerly-sexually-repressed-girl,” said Alice, waving a hand in Mae’s face. “Pod people took you, didn’t they? Where is my virgin?”

“She’s lusting after some random guy,” responded Mae before facing forward.

Alice stared harder in the direction of the man. “I can’t believe I’m going to encourage your strange obsession with a sculpture, but that guy looks a lot like your Greek god statue with the lion.”

Mae gasped, realizing her friend was right. The man did look like her sculpture.

“Think he’s hung the same?” asked Alice, ruining the moment.

“Alice, really.”

“What? Legit question.”

Mae groaned. “I need to go back to the apartment. Before you think it’s to bail, I forgot deodorant and the blond is making me so hot that I noticed.”

“Totally hopeless. Let’s get your pits covered and then we need to get you to your date.”

Chapter Two

Captain Corbin Jones held a bouquet of wildflowers in one hand and his phone in the other. He was behind on paperwork and trying to walk and scan read at the same time. The documents had been sitting in his inbox for nearly a week as it was. He didn’t have time to go on a blind date, and he certainly had no inclination to be on one. Blind dates were for men who couldn’t get a woman. Not for him. He could land any woman he wanted. He’d been considered quite a catch throughout his lifetime and had gone through certain periods when he paid more attention to his sex life—the last big burst being in the 1920s. He was still fond of jazz and gin. A perfect pairing. Sure, his pick-up lines needed work as they were somewhat antiquated, but he could blend when need be and he got by. The roaring twenties weren’t that long ago, were they?

He nearly tripped as he thought about how long ago his last dating high period was. He blinked. “Your last rush coincided with the advent of sliced bread.”

He cringed, hoping his teammates didn’t figure that tidbit out. They’d never let him hear the end of it. It wouldn’t matter that he’d not had the time to date. He’d told his mother as much. That was of no importance to her, who, even at his age, still managed to scare him. She may be in London, thousands of miles away from him, but that was no matter—the woman could still make him listen as if he were but a boy, rather than the leader of his own special operatives team and hundreds of years old. She had that effect on a lot of men, so he didn’t take it to heart. His father was a proud lion-shifter and alpha in his own right, but next to his mother, his father was merely a cuddly teddy bear. She came from a long line of lion shifters herself, but lacked the ability to shift forms, as was often the case with female shifters. That didn’t stop her from putting the fear of the gods into those around her.

There was simply no way out of the blind date. At least, not unless a crisis at work came about. It seemed wrong to hope for one, but secretly he did. So far, it was just a mass of paperwork that he was behind on. Nothing pressing enough to convince his mother he didn’t need to be fixed up—again. Not one of her past attempts had stuck. He’d only fucked a couple of them. His mother’s taste in women she thought would work for him was that poor, to say the very least.

He sighed, his thumb scrolling down the document on his phone display. It was a briefing of another Paranormal Security and Intelligence (PSI) mission. It was not one his team had been on, but rather one with intel in connection to a group of very bad men Corbin’s team had recently begun tracking. Lately it seemed everything tied back to the Corporation.

He really and truly was starting to hate them.

He glanced up to be sure he wasn’t about to walk into anything and then continued reading. He felt out of place on the university grounds. He was far too old to be there, but then again, he was far too old for most everything—including his date. Looking at him, none would guess he was more than thirty at most. A perk of being immortal. As a lion-shifter he had heightened senses and drew upon them as he walked while reading, using them to smell and listen for anything that may be in his path.

All he could smell was the group of young men gathered off to one side of the common area, tossing around a football. He snorted in derision, failing to see what the American version had to do with feet, apart from a designated kicker coming out at what seemed random to him. His preference was definitely for European football—at least it required the actual use of one’s feet coming into contact with the ball.

Most called him British as he was born and bred in England, but the truth was, he was English. He had neither the time nor inclination to explain the difference to his American friends. And he was pretty sure that, outside of England, the rest of the United Kingdom spent far too much time with their sheep.

Corbin paused in reading the report and opened the screen holding a map of the campus. He glanced up, long enough to see he was indeed headed in the right direction, and then stopped as a scent caught his attention. Honey, cinnamon and vanilla filled his head, making his cat shove upwards, towards the surface. He had to take a deep breath and focus to keep from doing something incredibly foolish, like partially shifting forms in public where anyone could see him. Clutching the flowers tighter, he felt some of the stems give under the pressure of his hand. He turned, trying to find the source of the smell. He knew without a shadow of a doubt that the owner was female. There were so many women walking on the campus that he couldn’t zero in on the owner of the scent. He just knew that it was from the other direction—not the way he was headed.

Not his date for the evening.

Mae Bertelot, the daughter of one of his mother’s friends, was his dinner date. When his mother had pushed for him to agree to the date, he’d tried to point out the extreme age difference between himself and the young woman. She was, from his mother’s accounts, a fifth-year senior, studying fine arts. By his guesstimate that put her around the age of twenty-two, maybe twenty-three. He hoped. Anything younger and he’d spend the evening feeling like the sleazebag he was shaping up to be. Those men who trolled bars looking to pick up younger women always set his teeth on edge. His mother was doing her best to lump him in the mix.

He sighed.

Colette Corbin meant well. She always did.

Hence, him walking on a campus, with flowers, dressed for an evening out, while he really just wanted to be catching up on paperwork. He wasn’t a monk. Far from it. He liked sex. What red-blooded male didn’t? He was just too busy to bother with all the things associated with it—the wining, the dining, the romance aspect. And he wasn’t much into women who charged, who didn’t require those necessities.

He caught sight of another group of young men, this one gathered near a bench, talking and carrying on, seeming to have fun. They were all dressed in snug-fitting polo shirts with baggy shorts and leather slip-on shoes. Corbin paused and glanced down at himself. Was he dressed wrong to go on a date with a woman who was still at university? His fellow teammates liked to joke that Corbin reminded them of an underwear model. Frankly, he didn’t see it.

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