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the bar, he had intended to confront her about what she had said. He needed to find out what she knew about that night. But when he approached her, he could smell the heat of her arousal. It drew out his wolf in such a way that he had just barely been able to keep control of it. He took a risk and a gamble. He had gone in for the kill, and when she hadn’t pushed him away, he knew that he was lost. He was going to have her, and he was going to have her now.
    There was a limo at the curb, and he saw Cal standing there. Cal was their best security guard and was the designated driver for all of the special events that required the presence of an Urban Dweller. Tony trusted Cal implicitly. He knew that Cal would always have his back and also would keep his nose out of his business.
    Cal opened the limo’s back door for them. Tony ushered Maggie inside, still a bit surprised that she wasn’t putting up a single ounce of fight. He sensed that she was feisty, and the fact that she had been so confident in her approach and accusation of him was astounding. It made him recall their interplay in the courtroom.
    The details had come back to him as he been standing at the podium giving the speech. He had delivered a similar kind of speech so many times over the years that it came like second nature to him. He barely had to do any recalling of the words at all. They just came out delivered in his standard way, modified appropriately for the crowd and the event, and the crowd seemed to eat it up. It was what he was used to.
    But his attention had been pulled to the woman at the back of the room. She had watched him for a period of time and had a calculating look on her face, as if she was sizing him up. Tony wasn’t used to being approached in that way by anyone, much less a petite assistant DA that he could probably snap in half with barely a thought. There were shifters, humans, and larger men who would cower in his presence. But this woman seemed to have no qualms about going toe to toe with him.
    He remembered that day in the courtroom again. It had been for a case a couple of years ago, and it was a small case for him. He barely even remembered the defendant. He had been a boy who had been going through the transition and had gotten into trouble because he had attacked a neighbor inadvertently. Tony’s testimony had been what the defense had said swayed the jury. He just told the truth. During a time of transition, if shifters don’t take extra precautions to ensure that they don’t do anything to the people around them, it isn’t uncommon for them to lose control and injure someone else. More than anything, they were lucky if they didn’t kill them.
    The thing was, for humans, the adolescent years weren’t marked by a similar kind of violence. It was harder for them to understand. That was why the defense had made sure that there were at least a few shifters on the jury. They all intuitively understood what Tony was saying. The fact that it was backed up by science also helped.
    But Maggie had been ruthless in her cross-examination. First, she had tried to discredit him. That was the part that he should have remembered before she said anything at the benefit. She had made a big deal out of the fact that the field of shifter psychology hadn’t existed before he quite literally wrote the book on it. Now there were programs across the country, and people were being certified every day in not just human psychological behavior but also shifter psychology, so that they could be therapist for shifters. So, she had tried to throw doubt on the fact that Tony was nothing more than a charlatan who was creating pseudo-science to be able to back up his arguments.
    When that didn’t quite work out for her, then she had attacked his theory. She had used the comparison of human adolescence to shifter adolescents. She had brought up three cases where human teenagers had exhibited similar violence. And, in those cases, the people who had