Page 16 of Witchwolf

It seemed Igarashi, at least, knew the difference between a translator and an interpreter, but that wasn’t going to help here, since I thought Jax was probably talking about having already hired me. And heck, I technically wasn’t either of those things, even if I was capable of serving as either on a small scale.

The man smiled at us, and Jax introduced Jillian and then looked at me for a second, like maybe I was to introduce myself. Or maybe like he thought the people from Igarashi already knew me.

“And this is my assistant, Dakota Morris,” Jillian said, smiling and holding her hand out to Igarashi.

Interesting. Assistant? My office was right next to hers, but assistant was definitely not my job title. Still, the man had said he didn’t want a translator, and he clearly didn’t need an interpreter, so I simply smiled and stuck my hand out to shake with him.

“Igarashi Jiro,” he introduced himself.

When our hands touched, I had the momentary urge to leap back, because every part of me felt as though he were lunging toward me, but... he wasn’t moving at all. So I covered it up, smiling and shaking his hand, burying my discomfort deep and ignoring it.

He seemed satisfied enough, so I assumed I hadn’t done anything outwardly strange. Jillian, on the other hand, gave me a mildly concerned expression when she turned her back on him and took me down next to Jax to take our seats. I gave her a smile and tried to pretend nothing was wrong.

But... nothing was wrong. Right? She let it go, thankfully, so I just sat in the chair she pointed me at and waited.

Jiro was the only person on Igarashi’s side who spoke up as they began, the others continuing to sit there, stiff and formal and uncomfortable, staring at their counterparts. A few of the Crescent people were uncomfortable with this, like that fellow Kent, who’d gone for coffee, but Jax took it in stride.

He was actually... well, he was back to the smoothly confident sexy bastard he’d been last night. Like he was in charge of the room and he fucking knew it.

When they truly got down to business and started trading papers around the table, the people from Igarashi only spoke among themselves. And only in Japanese, not a single word of English.

That was... frankly, I didn’t think insulting covered it. From a people who were usually quite concerned with good manners, as my experience with the Japanese told me they were, this was downright rude. I tried not to look at them, because the moment I did, the game would be up. It helped that initially, there was a lot of “this is the file you need,” and “no, it’s that one.”

But then, when Jax asked Igarashi a question about an alteration they had made to one paper, one of them made a sour face and whispered, “This is what happens when you try to make a deal with beasts.”

Beneath the table, I clenched my hands into fists, while trying to stay entirely impassive. The woman sitting next to Igarashi, perhaps the most starched and proper of the lot, turned and stared at the man who’d said it until he ducked his head, muttering, “Sorry, Ms. Igarashi.”

Ahh, so she was also a member of the family that owned the company. At least she was against outright insulting people, even if she didn’t seem to care about plain old rudeness.

Still, the others looked more amused than bothered, and the man who’d been speaking was just smiling as though nothing untoward had happened at all. He was explaining the rationale behind the change to Jax, something I couldn’t begin to follow, but that I suspected was entirely bullshit anyway.

These people had no respect for Crescent at all, and the entire merger needed to be rethought, in my humble opinion. You should never work this closely with people who didn’t respect you simply as human beings.

The meeting wrapped up after long, interminable hours that turned out to be only forty-five minutes, and the Igarashi people stood as one, turning and marching out as though they were a military formation, their leader stopping long enough to shake Jax’s hand and say that he looked forward to the next few weeks of negotiations.

For a long, awkward moment after they left, the room was silent.

Then of course, as I was prone to doing, I stuck my ass right in the middle of things. “They’re assholes and you should reconsider working with them.”

Everyone turned and stared at me, a few of them open-mouthed.

I scowled. “Oh, come on. They wouldn’t even deign to speak to you. Every one of them knew English. They were responding to what you said to each other.” I pointed to a seat in the middle. “And that one called you all beasts.Beasts. Seriously, guys, that’s fucked up.”

6

Jax

Well, the day wasn’t going how I’d envisioned it.

When I’d woken up that morning, I’d have been pretty damn eager to meet up with Dakota again. It wasn’tpossible, given how unlikely a mage was to walk into Howl twice, and how I hadn’t asked for his phone number. I half suspected that if our paths ever did cross, he’d shrink and make a hasty escape. It was one thing for a mage to use a wolf; an entirely different thing to become friends. Rare was the mage who cared so little for their people’s conventions that they were willing to get close to us.

There was only one mage I’d consider a friend, and the idea of crossing her scared the hell out of me.

So there I was, in a room full of mages, entirely out of my depth, and rendered even less competent by Dakota—though I wasn’t entirely sure if he’d left me unbalanced by putting me in my place, or simply by showing up in the conference room that morning.

In either case, I managed to hold my shit together long enough to get through the meeting, and I didn’t think it was a complete disaster. It’d been awkward, but what else had I expected?

Then, Dakota told us what we missed.

---