by Grey, Aspen
The beauty of the sky was like a cherry on top of a perfect ice cream sundae that had been made especially for us. But none of this had been given to us. It had been my dream, and with Sawyer’s help and the support from my mates, I’d been able to turn it into a reality. From sous-chef to business owner. From single male (who thought he was an omega) to alpha head of a family—father.
Sawyer had realized his dream of branching out from his practice and stepping into something new. His mates, Max and Elijah, were frequent visitors of both locations, not only to visit their father’s businesses, but because they loved the food. Everyone did! We’d even had a fantastic review from some YouTuber named “Taco-Tasting Tim,” who gave us a five out of five tacos rating, which was very rare. Most people only got a four.
“Doesn’t feel real,” I said with a warm sigh as I watched Sid hook up the trailer to his truck and get ready to take it away. “Does it?”
“Shit yeah, it does!” Sawyer laughed. “All the work we put into this thing?”
“I know, I know,” I agreed. “I just—sometimes I wake up with my mates and my kids and I just can’t believe that this is my life.”
“Preaching to the choir, my man,” Sawyer nodded. “I’m right there with you.”
“See you guys later!” Sid waved from his truck as he pulled off.
“See ya tomorrow!” I called after him.
“I gotta be getting home too,” Sawyer told me, shaking my hand. “I’m sure we’ll be by in the next few days for some grub.”
“Look forward to it,” I told him.
We parted ways and I got in my car and started the drive home, thinking the entire way about our future plans. We were earning enough money now that we’d be able to afford a new place soon, and if we expanded to a third location as well, La Jolla was looking like more and more of a possibility.
Not yet, I thought. But one day.
I made it home without any real traffic issues and opened the door to find my beautiful family in the living room waiting for me.
“Daddy!” Eric’s voice greeted me as I stepped inside.
“Dada!” Shane cried out. They were both so good on their feet already and raced over to me with their arms outstretched.
“Hey!” I cried out as I knelt down as they leapt into my arms. It was the best part of my day, seeing their smiling faces and the love they had for me as their father. My career was incredible and I had such a sense of achievement from what I did, but nothing warmed my heart more than knowing that I was providing for my family and raising two unbelievable children.
“How have you two been today?”
“Great, daddy!” Eric giggled. “How are you!?”
“I’m great! I can’t believe how big you two are getting!”
“You saw us this—this morning!” Shane laughed as though I’d just said something silly—which of course I had. I just couldn’t help it. When I got around them, my strong alpha exterior seemed to melt away. I pictured Leonidas in that movie 300 after he was sparring with his son—tough one second and then loving the next. I guess that’s how I was hoping I could be with them.
“How’s the new truck?” Billy asked, coming over to me for a kiss.
“Fantastic,” I said happily. “Sid’s killing it.”
“Knew he would,” Tommy said. “Maybe soon you can start working on truck number three?”
“And get us that nice place on the beach,” I winked.
I lifted both of my sons into my arms as they giggled and squealed and clung to me like little spider monkeys, and walked with them into the kitchen where I could smell Billy had already started cooking. It was one of his stews, chicken it looked like tonight, which would inevitably require a little finesse from me before it was served, but just the fact that he made an effort was enough for me—and he was getting better at his own cooking too.
Every day was a blessing. A gift. I was doing what I wanted to be doing, growing my business into everything I’d imagined, and watching my family prosper in a home filled with love.
Billy had actually started to make efforts to find his father, Joseph, as well and see how he was doing and if it would be possible to get him off the streets. Helping addicts was hard, sometimes damned near impossible, but I think as Billy’s life got more and more stable, he started to believe that there was hope. I was on his side, of course, being as supportive as possible, but couldn’t help but worry for him. If anything harmed my Billy or my Tommy…
“Daddy, you want to help me finish off the stew?” Billy asked predictably. I smiled knowingly over at Tommy and stepped up to the enormous pot and took a smell.
“Maybe a little more thyme,” I suggested.
“Ah! I knew it was missing something!”
We fell into our routine with ease. I helped Billy with the finishing touches as Tommy set the table and got the kids seated and poured them their drinks. Sometimes I felt like I’d been transported into a romance novel or movie or something and had to remind myself that this was my life and I wasn’t just going to wake up tomorrow as a single guy wishing there was more to his life.
I’d grown. I’d found my fated mates. I’d built a business, a home and a life for all of us and it was real.
This is your life, I thought as I sat down for dinner with my family. And it’s perfect.
Scent of the Author
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Book 5 -Three Ways to Destiny
Contents
1. Ollie
2. Sid
3. Arthur
4. Ollie
5. Sid
6. Arthur
7. Ollie
8. Arthur
9. Ollie
10. Sid
11. Ollie
12. Sid
13. Arthur
14. Ollie
15. Sid
16. Arthur
17. Ollie
18. Sid
19. Arthur
20. Ollie
21. Sid
22. Arthur
23. Ollie
24. Sid
25. Arthur
26. Ollie
27. Sid
28. Ollie
29. Ollie
30. Sid
Epilogue
Scent of the Author
Chapter One
Ollie
Friday night at The White Swallow in Pacific Beach and it was absolute mayhem. There were countless scents of countless alphas swirling around the cramped gay bar as a bachelor party of crazed, horny panther shifter bros hooted and hollered their asses off celebrating for one of them.
“Get him some sweet new omega ass before the wedding!”
“Hey, kid!” the douche was shouting in my direction. “Turn the lights off! It’s not cheating if the lights are off!”
“It’s not cheating if it’s a threesome!”
“It’s not cheating if you don’t admit to it!”
“It’s not cheating if you’re on a boat! Anybody got a boat?”
“It’s not cheating if you don’t make eye contact!” Someone roared. “Hit it from the back, big boy!”
Everyone cheered, raising their glasses and beers high into the air, spilling alcohol everywhere that I’d have to mop up later when everyone was gone.
“Big boy” was a bearded alpha named Troy, from what I could tell, who was missing at least two front teeth and looked like he probably played hockey. He was absolutely jacked, but beyond that was pretty repulsive. I was anything but interested in any of them, especially considering that all night the entire crew had been treating me like a piece of meat who’d been hired for their entertainment.
“You see the ass on this guy, Troy?” one of them said as I made my way through the throng with a tray of fresh beers. “Shit, g
oddamn!”
“I like that blond hair! Looks like cupid all grown up!”
“I think he might be here to try and discourage you from your marital vows!”
“Hands off, bitch,” another growled, tickling the back of my neck as I passed. “This one’s mine.”
“Hey!” I snapped as I began to unload their bottles onto the table. “I’m nobody’s, okay!”
“Ooooooh!” the group jeered in unison, putting their hands over their mouths like a bunch of goofy middle school boys who’d just told their first dirty joke. “And he’s got spunk!”
(For the film buffs out there, I felt a little bit like Spider in the movie Goodfellas—before Joe Pesci shot him, of course!)
“He could use some spunk!”
“Look at the size of him too! He can’t be more than five-foot-four!”
“Anyone need a spinner?!”
“Jesus Christ,” I grumbled as I took the empties, loaded them up onto the tray and made my way back over to the bar to seek refuge in the back room for at least a few minutes before the dickheads needed me again.
“Baby got back!” one of them called.
As an omega shifter, I 100 percent understood what good-looking human women went through when they went out and were around a bunch of testosterone-filled, booze-accelerated men with delusions of grandeur when it came to them getting lucky.
None of those guys had a chance with me, but it didn’t matter to them. They either a) thought they did or b) knew they didn’t, but didn’t care as it was all just part of their little “manly” game. I sighed heavily as I set down the tray behind the bar and put a hand up to Rusty, the old man who owned the bar, to cut him off at the pass.
“Five minutes,” I told him as I kicked open the door to the back room and stepped through.
Lord save me, I thought sarcastically as I leaned against the wall and took a deep breath. The air was stale and smelled of booze and dampness, but it was a welcome change from the overpowering stench of too many alpha scents out in the main bar area. I mean—as an omega—who doesn’t love the sweet smell of a sexy alpha? But when the smell is an alpha you aren’t into, and what’s worse, there’s a whole group of them, it can be a bit much. There was one area I envied humans.
Of course, I guess the humans still wore all kinds of stinky colognes and when too many of those got together the effect was similar, but shifter scents had a completely different effect than cologne had on humans.
The right shifter scent could tell you volumes about the man standing in front of you. You knew immediately if he was an alpha, beta or omega, whether that omega was in heat, whether the alpha’s scent was attractive to you, which of course was a good indicator of whether or not he would be attractive to you, and then of course there was one more thing that a shifter’s scent could tell you—if you believed in that sort of thing.
The right scent could tell you if you’d met your fated-mate.
No one really knew how to explain fated-mates, and many shifters were skeptical of the whole thing, but if you believed certain couples, they’d tell you it was definitely real.
I was one of those skeptics. The idea that you could meet someone who was meant for you seemed preposterous. People were just people and love was something we made up to tell ourselves that the person we’d decided to be in a relationship with was special, when in reality we were just two idiots seeking refuge in each other from the hardships of the world.
“Fuck you,” I said to myself. “You fucking pessimist.”
I grabbed my water bottle from the three-legged table that was propped up against the wall to keep it from falling and took a sip. The old piece of cobbled-together wood was like a metaphor for me and my life, and I hated the old thing. It was barely surviving, just like me.
Both of my fathers were put in jail when I was seventeen years old for robbing a convenience store. I mean—seriously? They’d both gotten their hands on a couple of pistols, gotten high on who-knows-what and then decided to go get paid. They’d been caught, of course, and it was a goddamn miracle that the cops hadn’t blown them away, but somehow they’d managed to survive and had been thrown in jail for nine years. That was three years ago.
Since then, I’d been on my own, working odd jobs to make ends meet, but a high school dropout in San Diego doesn’t have a whole lot of earning potential, and I was this close to being out on the streets when I’d found this job. It was hard and the pay was shit, but Rusty let me live upstairs in the attic/storeroom, which meant I didn’t have to pay rent and I could bank all my earnings. Of course, it also meant that I was pretty much on call whenever he needed me.
Rusty was like an old saloon owner out of a cowboy movie. Sixty-five years old, also a panther shifter alpha, a bit of a silver fox (if that metaphor could apply to panthers) and in fantastic shape for his age. He was still single, and as far as I knew, had always been and had no desire to change that. For a guy his age, he still pulled a lot of ass, young ass too. He’d probably go to his grave with a cigar in one hand and a tight omega booty in the other.
“I ain’t paying you to daydream, Olsters,” he said as he stepped through the door and stood in front of me.
“You ain’t paying me to be abused either, old man,” I replied, giving it right back to him.
“Abuse?” he chuckled. “They love ya! Can you blame ‘em?”
“If that’s what being loved is like, I’m not interested.”
“Still the cynic, eh?” he replied, taking a wet rag and wiping my face. Despite Rusty’s brusque behavior, he still had his moments. “Don’t you worry, boy. You’ll find your Romeo one day.”
“Not tonight, Rust,” I replied. “Not tonight.”
Chapter Two
Sid
“Sorry, folks, but these will be the last orders!” I shouted from the truck, using my hand to motion to the cutoff in the line of hungry beachgoers. The people who wouldn’t be getting their tacos tonight groaned. “I’m sorry. We’re selling out again tonight, but we’ll be back tomorrow!”
An elderly human couple, obviously tourists, groaned and turned away and headed back towards the beach and the setting sun as Clyde and I worked on the remaining orders.
It was just another incredibly busy, incredibly successful day at my taco truck, Taco-Climax which I was in charge of on a day-to-day basis as the head chef. The chain was owned and managed by my good friend, Garrett, who’d been my old boss at Taco-Gasms, the first truck he’d opened after leaving his old job.
He’d taken me on as a sous-chef and when he and Sawyer, his financier, decided to expand, I was the first in line for the next truck. It was a lot of hard work, but it was my passion and allowed me to be in charge of my own life.
I set up every day in Pacific Beach on Mission and worked from brunch to sundown, with a pretty steady line all day. I had an apartment not too far away, a few blocks from the beach, and everything was good. Well, almost everything. I still needed a mate.
But finding one in San Diego had proven to be pretty difficult. There were plenty of omegas around, but a lot of them were pretty vapid and had nothing to offer other than a tight hole for the night. At twenty-five, that sounds great to a lot of people, but I was growing tired of the party life and hookup culture—I wanted more, and so far, “more” had been eluding me.
A lot of people would think that a guy like me, with “daddy issues,” would only want to be a big man-whore and run around the city with his dick out, slamming every dime-piece omega he could get his hands on. But that wasn’t the case. Just because I only ever knew one of my fathers, Jeremy, an anti-social loner living in the woods in New Hampshire who I hadn’t spoken to in years, that didn’t mean that I didn’t want a family.
“You got those two fish tacos going, Clyde?” I asked.
“No prob, Bob,” he replied as he always did. I joined him and we both bent over the stove as we filled the last orders.
“No prob, Sid,” I corrected him.
“Nah, doesn’t have the same ring to it,” he chuckled as he covered the two fish portions with a lid to expedite the cooking process.
“But it has the advantage of actually being my name.”
“Yeah, but what rhymes with Sid?” he asked.
“Kid?” I suggested. “Bid? Rid?”
“No kiddin’, Siddin?” Clyde smirked. “How’s that work?”
“How about, ‘yes, boss?’” I suggested, returning the smirk. “Let’s try that one on for size.”
“Nah,” he replied, shaking his head. “I don’t need to try it. I already know I don’t like it.”
“The same way you already knew you liked cock without trying?”
“Sure is,” he laughed. “I mean—did you need to try?”
“Nah,” I mocked. “Some things you just know.”
I hadn’t intended to say something that came out so deep, but it ended up striking a bit of a chord inside me.
Some things you just know…
It made me think. Would I know the one when I found him? Would I know my mate when he stood in front of me? Did I believe in things like true love and fated-mates, or was I destined to wallow through the hollow hordes of San Diego omegas who failed to set my soul on fire?
I sure hope not.
Together, Clyde and I worked like an experienced pit crew and managed to get through all the remaining orders in no time, and it wasn’t long before we were packing up the truck so I could take it home for the night. The city didn’t like you leaving food trucks unattended on the streets overnight, and I didn’t want to risk it being broken into either.