by T. S. Joyce
That’s why she was moving away from here. No future, no one to settle down with.
As her thoughts buzzed around the move preparations, Alana gathered his pastry into a small to-go box and poured his coffee. She looked at the name on the cup and called out, “Pen…is.” She narrowed her eyes at the Pen15, which definitely looked like the word ‘penis,’ and snorted. Well-played, Sexy Yeti. “Penis,” she muttered again louder with a glare for him. His face cracked into a grin. He definitely had good teeth and a good smile. Number five, check.
As he approached from his booth, he told her, “You should add great sense of humor to your fuck-list.”
Her mouth fell open at his crassness. “It is not a fuck-list. This is what I want in a long term relationship, not a one-night-stand.”
Unable to handle the look of at that awful burn on his arm a second longer, she pulled the first-aid kit out from under the counter and rifled through it. “And furthermore, I’m not like that. I don’t just…you know…sleep with men and move on with my life the next day. Sex means something big to me.” She slapped the small tube of burn cream onto the counter. Alana wanted to stay offended, but Sexy Yeti’s face went completely slack as he stared down at the medicine. And when he looked back at her, his eyes looked strange. A different color almost. There was a moment of such raw vulnerability there, it made her feel off-balance. Alana rested her palms on the counter so she wouldn’t sway on her feet.
“Ask him out!” Bradford demanded from where he sat with the Senior Seven.
“Bradford,” Alana groused, “I told you a dozen times you can’t take your teeth out and leave them on the table for the other customers to see!”
“I would say ‘no,’” Sexy Yeti said.
His words stung, as if someone had spiked a volleyball directly into her face. In a whisper, she said, “I didn’t ask, but why would you say no? Is it the way I look?” The scar always caught men off guard, and it sucked that it was hindering this one’s opinion of her, too.
The man shook his head slowly, eyes locked on hers. And then he pointed to her list, to number fourteen. Not a shifter. Now his eyes were definitely a different color. More of a muddy greenish gold than blue, and he smelled different—like fur.
“Because,” he murmured, “even if I was looking for a mate, which I’m not, we aren’t compatible.” Something unfathomable flashed through his eyes, and a soft growling sound emanated from him.
They both froze, locked in each other’s gazes.
He blinked hard, his blond brows furrowing, and in a rush, he pulled something from his pocket and set it on the counter with a soft click. It was a rusty old paperclip. “Thanks for the medicine.” He stuck the tube of burn cream into his back pocket, gathered his coffee and pastry, and left her café without a single look back.
She’d always found the ding of the bell above the door so pretty, but now it rang hollowly as the loneliest sound in the world.
Chapter Three
Aaron threw his leg over the seat of his bike and turned it on, revved the engine. His heartrate was pounding too fast, but why? And why the hell had he given that woman his lucky paperclip? Baffled, he cocked his head and watched her through the window of Alana’s Coffee & Sweets. Her nametag had read Alana, so she must be the owner. The woman had piled her dark curls up on top of her head, but a few wisps had escaped, framing her heart-shaped face with pretty chestnut-brown highlights. She had curves for days, big tits, perfect ass, and that hourglass shape that drove his boner wild.
He’d been shocked when she’d asked if he didn’t like the way she looked. Was she insane? She had dark, soft-looking skin his fingers had itched to touch. Her animated doe-brown eyes and dark lashes had made it hard for him to look anywhere else. Her lips were full and colored with a pretty, glossy pink, and her bright smile had rocked him to the core. It was a little crooked from some old injury she’d healed from. Yeah, she had a deep and obvious scar that ran from beneath her nose through the left side of her lip, but who the fuck was he to judge? He’d had his neck ripped out by Aric a couple months back. Alana had stared at the scars on his neck when he’d walked into her coffee shop, so she knew he bore old injuries, too.
That woman in there was the most striking human being he’d ever seen.
Aaron pulled the pastry from the box and shoved the entire raspberry roll into his mouth. He liked how direct she’d been with him, asking him straight out if her appearance bothered him. Hell no. He’d almost pointed to his inflated dick pressing against his pants as proof, but she didn’t need to get attached, and neither did he.
He wasn’t the mating kind, and that list she’d written out said they weren’t a match.
Aaron felt strange without his lucky paperclip in his pocket, but he didn’t regret giving it to her. In fact, his bear was humming in satisfaction, which made no damned sense. He’d been so riled up after that fire with Aric, but one little conversation with Alana, and he was feeling calm again? Huh.
Aaron’s arm hurt like hell, and for a moment, he considered using the burn cream Alana had given to him. But she’d swapped that for his paperclip and he wanted to keep it as his new lucky charm instead. She would probably throw away his paperclip, but he had to be okay with that. It was done.
Aaron took a long swig of the hot coffee, ignoring the burn.
He should tell her his name… No. Aaron shook his head and pulled his jacket on for the ride back to Harper’s Mountains. He ran molten hot, but it was late November, and the Smoky Mountains where he’d recently moved got bitter cold sometimes, especially at the higher elevation.
He cast Alana one last glance as she refilled coffee cups for the seniors with a big smile on her lips. So fucking beautiful. He chugged the rest of the coffee and tossed the empty cup into the wastebasket next to his parking spot. Shaking his head hard to rid his bear of the instinct to go back in there, Aaron hit the throttle and blasted out onto Main Street. A selfish part of him hoped she heard the throaty rumble of his motorcycle and watched him leave, but for the life of him, he couldn’t figure out why. He’d shut her down for a reason. His life was a freaking tornado right now.
A soft, easy-going woman like Alana would get eaten up by a man like him.
Giving her the paperclip had been okay, but he’d been right not to give her his name.
As he weaved his way on the back roads toward the mountain range on which the Bloodrunner Dragon had settled, dawn lit up the cloudy sky. He hadn’t stopped in the coffee shop because he was hungry, but was stalling instead. Wyatt had been challenging him for Second in the Bloodrunner Crew. Not his fault—Wyatt’s bear was a brawler like his was. But it didn’t help anything if he came home riled up. It would set Wyatt off.
Before he’d talked to Alana, Aaron had felt like his skin belonged to Bear. He’d been searching desperately for something to calm his animal in the early morning hour right after he got off his shift, and the inviting glow of Alana’s Coffee & Sweets had lit up the sleeping Main Street.
The sign was dilapidated and some of the lightbulbs behind the letters had burned out. Inside, the tile floors had been cracked, and the walls a bland shade of eggshell white. She’d hung colorful pictures on the walls, but not even those could distract from the water-damaged ceiling tiles near the door or the shoddy wainscoting that had been installed. She probably rented the building and wasn’t allowed to make many changes. He could do a lot for the place.
Aaron shook his head hard again. Stop it. She didn’t need his help to fix up her shop. That woman was perfectly capable of taking care of herself.
The café was right down the road from the station, and damn it all, as much as he wanted to convince himself she wasn’t a big deal, he was already plotting ways to go back after every shift and fuel up on coffee and boners before his trip back to Harper’s Mountains. Pathetic.
The coffee wasn’t half bad, but it was Alana’s animated eyes and crooked smile that had thoroughly distracted him from the verbal reaming he’d
taken from Chief. “You can’t kill your co-workers,” and yada, yada. Aaron had stopped himself from staking Aric with the wooden handle of his ax, so really, Chief should be giving him a damn trophy for his self-control, not giving him a speech about how he’d hired Aaron because of his family name, and how he needed to live up to expectations. The Kellers were Fire Bears with a well-known honorable name in their Breckenridge community and around the world. They were the origin—the first to come out as shifters to the public over twenty-five years ago. For a long time, Aaron had been part of the chaos that surrounded those uncertain times, working in the same firehouse with his father, Cody Keller, and two uncles, Boone and Dade. Aaron had lived in the shadow of his name, and apparently that shadow stretched all the way to Bryson City, North Carolina.
He didn’t regret moving here to be a part of Harper’s crew, but damn it was hard figuring out how he fit in.
Pulling through the gate of Harper’s land gave him a warm sensation like it always did. No matter what was going on in the firehouse, this place felt like home. Maybe it was the people here, the Bloodrunner Crew he was a part of, or maybe it was the land itself. Maybe it was the first cabin he passed with the lopsided house number 1010 beside the door. Or maybe it was that he’d pledged his fealty to Harper Keller, one of the last Bloodrunner Dragons. The invisible thread that linked them had been pulled taut during his shift at the station, but it loosened as he made his way past 1010. He was bound to Harper now and always felt better around his alpha.
Farther up the dirt road on the right, there was a double cabin sharing a roof, but separated by a breezeway in the middle. Weston Novak and Ryder Croy were probably still asleep in their beds. Aaron drove slowly up to the last cabin, the smallest. His humble abode. His bear settled even more when he parked his bike next to his old truck under the metal awning he’d installed. On snow-days, he would have to give up his bike, but it wouldn’t be as bad as in Breckenridge where snow reigned in the winter months.
He had two days to recover and find his center again before his next twenty-four-hour shift at the station, and he planned to use that time to work on his cabin. The old creaky shack had barely been livable when he’d moved in last month, and he needed to make it weatherproof for the oncoming winter.
The first thing he did was turn on the heat. His little two-bedroom house was just as cold inside as it was outside right now. Since his arm felt like he was holding a hot poker against it, Aaron pulled the giant first aid kit out from under the bathroom sink and rummaged around in it for some pain relief. Shifter healing was one of the perks of having the inner animal, but burns were rough. They were slower to heal and most of them scarred. Yet another mark from Aric. Someday, he was going to kill that mother fucker. He was biding his time now, sure, but someday, someway, he was going to drive wood through that vamp’s chest cavity and piss on his ashes.
“Knock, knock,” Harper said softly as she rapped her knuckles on his bathroom door.
He startled and let off a warning snarl. “Dammit, Harper, you can’t just barge in here. What if I wasn’t decent?”
“I’ve seen your dick every time you’ve shifted since we were practically zygotes. Calm your balls, man.” Her eyes, one brown, one blue with a long pupil, pooled with worry. “What happened?”
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he murmured, the same answer he always gave her. Talking about what happened on his fire shifts never made him feel better. The faster he pushed everything out of his mind, the better for Bear.
The long, low rumble of Harper’s dragon vibrated the bathroom as he cleaned the wound under cold water. “I could order you,” she ground out.
“But you wouldn’t because you’re better than that.”
“Alphas make orders all the time, Aaron. Don’t act like me caring is me being weak.”
He inhaled, then blew out an irritated sound. “Aric has mind control abilities.”
“What,” Harper drawled out. “You’re shitting me.”
“I shit you not. He made a woman tell me her baby was still in a burning house, and then he was in my mind telling me…” He made a ticking sound behind his teeth and winced as he slathered his burn with medicine from the kit. “Forget it.”
“Telling you what?” Harper lowered the lid on the toilet and took a seat on the porcelain thrown. His queen. “Tell me now, or I’ll bug you all day.”
“Don’t you have better stuff to—”
“No, Aaron! I don’t. My job comes second to you and the boys. It’s different for me now, and I’m going through all these protective instincts I have no idea how to control, so spill it or I’ll make it my mission to pry it from you.”
“He was telling me to kill you.”
Harper’s mouth dropped open. “W-what?”
“Yeah. He can control what the animal inside of me says. In Bear’s voice and everything. And for a second…for a second, it felt like a real good idea. He told me I should kill you and take alpha.”
“Jesus.”
“Jesus has nothing to do with Aric, Harper. Should I quit? He’s been working night shifts at the station for years and has seniority. What do you want me to do?”
“Firefighting is your livelihood. If you give it up, what will you do?”
Flounder. Spiral. Lose his purpose. But Harper didn’t need to know how much leaving his career would demolish him, so he shrugged and leaned against the counter, eyes passive like he didn’t care either way.
Harper knew him, though, and her sense of awareness had heightened since she’d become alpha. She bit her bottom lip and then told him, “Don’t quit. You aren’t a runner, and Aric doesn’t own Bryson City.”
Aaron snorted. “Just Asheville.”
“Bullshit,” Harper said, looking none-too-impressed. “He is king of one coven of eight vamps, not a million. They’re small-time. Find a way to work with him, Aaron. You need some kind of tentative alliance. Aric won’t convince you to hurt me. He can’t. You’re stronger than him.”
As she made her way to the door, Aaron hoped with everything he had that she was right, because hurting Harper would be like ripping his own heart out.
“Oh,” she said, turning at the door. “Wyatt needs another fight.”
Aaron groaned and rocked his head back. “He can have Second, Harper. I just got him back as a friend. I don’t want us to keep bleeding each other.”
“Look, I get it. I do. But this is how new crews work, and both of your bears need to establish a pecking order. Right now, you two are both dominant enough to run your own crews. You wanted under me, so this is the gig. You fight, you establish a Second, and then we move on.” Her eyes softened as she leaned on the doorframe. “Look, Wyatt’s bear is struggling. He’s used to being alone, and his control is slipping. I really think it’s because of the crew being unsettled still. It feels too chaotic for him. It’s hard for me to watch him go through this.”
“Because you love him?”
“Yeah. I love him more than anything. And I love you, you big dumb oaf, and I don’t care who is my Second so long as it gets worked out, okay?”
As he’d been watching Harper and Wyatt for the last few weeks, something inside of him had been shifting. He’d never wanted anything serious with anyone, but maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if a mate could help him feel settled, like Alana had done in her coffee shop.
Maybe a fight would distract him from the confusion surrounding the pretty woman with the crooked smile. “Fine,” Aaron muttered to Harper. He tossed the unused bandages back into the first aid kit and pulled his shirt off as he followed his alpha outside because, apparently, he wasn’t done fighting for the day.
Alana’s kindness had been wasted on a beast. Aaron had felt the effects of her thoughtful burn cream gesture for less than an hour before Bear was ready to rip out of his skin and brawl again.
Chapter Four
Alana marked out number fourteen on the dream man list. Pursing her lips in concentration, she carefully
and completely blacked it out with a permanent marker, then folded the paper and tucked it in her back pocket.
Snatching the basket of pastries off the end of the counter, she strode for the door, turned the hands on her clock sign to say be back in fifteen minutes, and made her way into the crisp winter weather outside. A few stores down, she gave a friendly wave to Fiona Cooper and her daughter who were walking along the sidewalk across the street.
“Hey, Alana!” Fiona called. “How’s business?”
“Just fine,” she lied. Business had never boomed for the coffee shop. In fact, to rent the space and keep up with her bills, she was barely breaking even every month. She’d had all these ideas for her café. Pretty paint colors, a mural on the back wall, chandeliers instead of the crappy, rusty lighting fixtures her landlord insisted on keeping for sentimental reasons. She wanted wood flooring and better display cases for her pastries and an updated kitchen in the back, but all that took money. She’d emptied her savings on startup costs two years ago, and if she was perfectly honest, Alana was disappointed she hadn’t made enough profit to fix it up yet. She’d had all these plans, all these to-do lists, but all those dreams had circled the toilet when she’d failed to make enough to keep the place afloat long-term. She loved the café. It had made her feel brave for starting a business, and her heart belonged in between those four walls. But now she felt like a huge failure that she hadn’t been able to do more for her café. That was the pitfall of starting a niche business in a small town. Not enough customers to sustain shops like hers.
Her heels clacking on the concrete, Alana ducked into the giant open garage door of the fire station. She’d never been in here before, but there were three men cleaning the bright red fire engine that shone in the hanger. And one of those men was none other than the Sexy Yeti she’d met the other day. She’d known he would be here since she’d watched the firehouse for the past three days, waiting for him to show up on his Harley. And this morning, her stalking had been rewarded with the deep rumble of his bike echoing off the early morning Main Street.