Crave: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (Blood Moon, Texas Shifters Series Book 2)

by Kat Kinney

  I bit back a curse. This was why we didn’t do this, why despite the fact that Dallas texted me at 2 a.m. just to have someone to yell at when the Cowboys lost, had his produce guy put me on speed dial, and texted me so many times when he was cooking I’d had to upgrade to a higher data plan just for the twenty variations of pineapple salsa he’d sent me in the past week alone, I’d never wanted to talk about the four years he was away. He’d already been hurt enough. I swiped at my eyes, but not fast enough. Dallas drew a raw breath.

  “Just—” He clawed a hand through his hair. “Will you answer me one thing? I have to know—”

  I gripped the edge of the counter, gutted by the rasp in his voice and wishing more than anything that we could have gone back to the easy snark and banter that had gotten us through every day for the past five years.

  But this was Dallas, the person I went to when my mom’s panic attacks kept me up all night and there was literally no one else in the world who understood that in the morning I just needed a chest to cry on, arms to hold me, and zero questions asked. Dallas, who sent an extra-large platter of beef ribs, coleslaw and crispy French fries across the street once a month like clockwork when he knew I was starting my period. Dallas, who once drove three hours with me on Black Friday just to go to my favorite baking supply store down in Austin that sold these completely adorable silicone whisks in crazy whimsical shapes that I hoarded the way cute baby dragons did chocolate gold foil-wrapped coins. And didn’t even make fun of me for being a total girl.

  Okay, much.

  And as I watched his face twist as though he were being stabbed, it felt like that knife was passing through me, too.

  “Did you love my brother?”

  I took in the sharp, too-beautiful downward turn of his mouth, the hard resignation in his eyes, and knew whatever answer I gave, it wasn’t going to matter. Some wounds you could scar over, but never truly heal.

  “You should go,” I said quietly, digging my teeth into my lip before I could say the rest. That we had nearly destroyed each other once before. And I wasn’t sure I could survive pain like that again.

  He cursed under his breath, but a second later, the bell over the door jingled, a rush of icy November air swirling through the room as I began to silently cry.

  3

  Dallas

  THE SUNDAY BEFORE THANKSGIVING dawned with a winter storm warning in effect for the Texas Hill Country, and skies that were the stormy gray of eyes I was doing my damnedest not to think about. After sending half a dozen apology texts to Lacey—that she ignored—I turned off my phone just to keep myself from smashing it. We hadn’t talked in two days, which was forty-six hours and twelve minutes longer than our longest fight on record since I came back from Calgary (my chicken was not dry and she was a total shit stirrer.)

  Not that I was counting.

  My office in back of The Spoke had oversized leather couches and a distressed oak coffee table that came in handy at our biweekly team leader meetings. The butter yellow orchid I’d had the misfortune of winning at the last school carnival and fundraiser shivered on the corner of a desk I rarely used next to a stack of purchase orders. One more thing I needed to do. Behind Saffron (because of course Lacey had named the damn thing the moment she saw it, ensuring I couldn’t kill it), a wall of windows faced out over Main Street. Directly towards Blair’s. Lowering my head, I pulled out my phone.

  Me: I was a douche. Let’s talk beef ribs. I’m thinking a year’s supply.

  Me: Plus that bleu cheese macaroni you loved last month.

  Me: bacon-emoji

  Me: I’m sorry.

  BabyGotBake: Awkward is not a good color on us. Sorry I didn’t answer before. I needed time to think. Can you come over later?

  Me: When?

  BabyGotBake: Tonight. And I still want my mac & bleu.

  Stripping down, I cranked the water in the shower over to death wish and stepped under the spray, reaching for the shampoo—

  —and got a palmful of vanilla-coconut bodywash.

  Here’s the thing about a good prank. You had to find that line. Aim too low and there was no impact, like that time Lacey left a box of her coconut macaroons, which she and everyone else in Lindley County knew I had a not-so-secret weakness for, up at the hostess station in a Blair’s box with a big silver bow. As if I couldn’t smell she’d laced them with enough ground-up ghost peppers to take out half my staff.

  Course, she wound up winning that round because what was I supposed to do, admit in front of the handful of humans working that night that I had freaky werewolf spidey-senses and could smell she’d tried to poison me? You think ghost peppers are bad, try them with a nose a hundred times more sensitive than a human’s.

  But filling my Old Spice bottle with her bodywash so I had to go around the rest of the day marked as her bitch?

  Freaking. Epic.

  Lathering up, I started scrubbing. Images from two nights earlier in the bakery forced their way into my head. I leaned back under the spray and shook out my hair, remembering the way her teeth had dug into my lip, that kiss, the first one we’d shared in almost ten years utterly shredding me inside.

  This doesn’t have to mean anything.

  Yeah. Except no way was I going to be her second choice lay. I’d run naked and barefoot through two miles of prickly pear before serving as Emo’s relief pitcher. We could just go back to pretending our middle of the night hookup hadn’t happened. Fine by me.

  Except now I had freaking wood.

  I braced an arm against the shower wall. It was crazy, the idea of a do-over. I’d dated other women over the years, even liked one or two of them. Nothing ever stuck. When you couldn’t get your head out of the past and away from the one girl who could kick your ass at pool and tell you honestly your cobb salad was about as original as the one they were selling at the chain restaurant down the street (which, ouch—and she was so right), moving on was about like trying to drive off with your tow-strap hitched to the side of a barn.

  I let my head fall back, hand shuttling faster. For one dark, forbidden moment, I allowed myself to picture Lacey Blair spread out over my bed, naked and flushed with need, her skin caressed by my high-thread-count sheets as I kissed my way down to the juncture of her thighs. I released a tight growl, remembering how her fingers had twisted into my hair as she sucked at my tongue, pulling until it hurt, until pleasure and pain were so deliciously knotted I could barely breathe for the aching bolts of heat pulsing through my dick. Raw, unfiltered moonlight had streamed in from an open window out on the street, calling my feral side to the surface and heightening every sensation to a roar. I was amped up, wild from the moon’s power burning in my blood, and so aroused I could hardly breathe for the need to be inside her.

  And when Lacey leaned back, pulling me over her on the countertop, baring her throat to me in a gesture of utter submission, I thought I would burst from my skin. She was trembling with arousal, breath coming in rapid pants, and it had taken every ounce of my control to cage the monster inside me, the beast that needed to bite her, mark her, fuck her right then and there—

  The door to the bathroom flew open. Cursing, I covered myself.

  “What the hell, Dallas.”

  Smacking off the water, I reached for a towel. Clouds of steam billowed between us. “We gotta stop meeting like this, sweetheart.”

  “Like I haven’t seen it all on every pack hunt.”

  I brushed past her, going for my clothes. “Nice to know you’ve been taking notes.”

  Twin spots of color appeared on her cheeks. With a growl, she slapped a paper bag against the center of my chest. It was pretty much your standard waxed pastry bag number. Wheat-brown with cocoa-colored writing.

  Blair’s, you’ll love the size of our éclairs.

  Turns out if you did a quick internet search, there were one or two shots of the world’s favorite cream-filled pastry you probably didn’t want to pass around in church.

  “It’s on, Caldw
ell.”

  “Guess that means you didn’t find the regular bags in the cupboard behind the sink—”

  “Oh, I found them,” she called, heading for the door. “Your note was so conveniently tucked beneath the tenth bag.”

  “If you didn’t read them, chances are no one else did either.”

  “You should probably have someone taste your food.”

  I bit back a grin. “Can we talk?”

  “Tonight. Brody has me out on patrol.”

  Half an hour later I pushed my way through the kitchen to the sound of pots clanging. My team was hard at work getting ready for us to open for the lunch crowd by eleven, the prep guys whipping up the sides we made fresh every day. You couldn’t have Texas-style barbeque without fluffy potato salad with celery and dill, beans slow cooked in brown sugar and applewood smoked bacon, and coleslaw made with green cabbage, carrots and our homemade mayonnaise that people raved about in their online reviews.

  Since I liked keeping things original, we also changed out our menu daily with a variety of special-order sides. Think beer-battered okra, baked macaroni made with bleu cheese and bacon crumbles, and August’s favorite, green bean casserole with fried onions and water chestnuts to give it a little extra crunch.

  I went to this fancy barbeque joint once up in Fort Worth. Leather Chairs. Fancy custom wood counters. The works. These guys even had their logo stamped onto every plate. And, oh yeah. One small detail. The food sucked. At The Rusty Spoke, we had bench-style seating out on the patio with fans swirling overhead, or your choice of a booth or a table if you wanted to eat inside, but in the tradition of the best state barbeque pits, your order was served up hot and fresh on butcher paper that you carried over to your table in a crate. Every cent you paid went into slow-smoked meat, sides my team and I made every day by hand, fresh desserts, and our signature sauce. I learned how to cook from my mom. And guess what? None of it depended on the plate.

  Back when I was a kid, she and I used to get up early every Saturday morning to make breakfast together. While I mixed pancake batter, she’d dice the onions, peppers and tomatoes. Eventually the rest of my brothers would shuffle in, sleepy and in pajamas, lured by the smell of pancakes topped with fresh strawberries and bananas, crisp applewood bacon, and migas with eggs, fried tortilla strips, and cheese. But somehow even when the kitchen grew chaotic and you could barely hear over River and August bickering, those mornings always felt like they belonged to just the two of us. Some people spent half their life figuring out what it was they wanted to do. I’d always known I was meant to be in a kitchen, my hands smelling of cilantro, cinnamon and dill, a thousand flavors at my fingertips the same way an artist might wield a brush. There was no better feeling in the world than seeing someone appreciate a meal you made with your own two hands.

  Good smoking was all about prep, timing and careful temperature control throughout the cooking process. Knowing what kind of wood, aged the perfect amount, went best with what cut of meat was as much an art form as a science. There were four of us on staff who usually manned the smokers, and while the other guys were on a rotating schedule that made sure no one had to pull any doubles, on my nights, I pretty much just skipped sleep.

  “Hey, man.” Javier, one of my managers and a transfer from the North Austin pack, stuck his head around the corner. “Brody’s on his way over.”

  “For frack’s sake,” I mumbled, powering up my phone, which, sure enough, was about to explode from all the missed calls.

  “Think he wanted to set up catering for Thursday.”

  “No freaking way. We’re booked solid. My brothers have to learn they can’t just call up here at the last second and expect us to drop everything.”

  “Uh huh.” Javier smirked. “You gonna tell him?”

  I flipped him off, going back to my phone. A selfie of me and Lacey from one of our Sunday barbeques immediately filled the screen. No surprise, I was in my Cowboys apron, and she had on a sky-blue apron with a pair of cartoon lemon and limes that said squeeze me. She was laughing at something I’d said seconds before, swiping a strand of hair off her face, and there was no denying she was absolutely, freaking gorgeous. At twenty-six, she still had that slender runner’s figure. The ponytail was gone in favor of this super-short, edgy cut with side-swept bangs that West said made her look like Jennifer Lawrence. Which, yeah okay, I could see it. Pair smoky gray eyes with those killer cheekbones and she was a complete knockout.

  Who’d wanted a bright, shiny future with my brother. Just not with me.

  Not bothering with the messages even though, crap, one was from my mom and I’d forgotten to call her back yesterday, I scrolled through the texts.

  Brody: Where the hell are you?

  Brody: Pick up your g-d phone.

  August: Damn. Looks like I got short straw, so…

  Me: That’s what she said.

  August: Suck it, bro. Headcount is looking like 30 for Thursday. Brody said just the usual. You need anything else?

  WTF? Throwing on a blue puffer vest over my white Henley, I dialed Brody, which yeah, I’d been avoiding. My oldest brother sang tenor in the church choir every week, had once managed to scare his own dog under the bed for two hours when August switched karaoke tracks from Jason Aldean to the Spice Girls on game night (the word forfeit was so not in his vocabulary), and could be a total hard-ass like our dad when he put his mind to it.

  “Where the hell have you been?” he barked by way of greeting. I rolled my eyes. Like he and most of my family hadn’t been ghosting me the past three weeks.

  “Dude. Stalker is not a good look on you.”

  There was the sound of a car door slamming and then my brother growled into the phone, “Lemme see if I’ve got this straight. You’re pissed at all of us because you got drunk and dropped your phone in the can. You’ve spent the past month sulking because no one bailed on Ethan’s wedding to comb the streets downtown looking for you. And now when people are worried they can’t get a hold of you, you’re bitching about that, too? You want to know what Dad would tell you if he were here?”

  Yeah, right before I ate a mouthful of gravel smothered in tabasco sauce. Climbing into my SUV, I pinched the bridge of my nose, feeling a headache coming on.

  “What’s up?”

  “Got Ethan and Hayden’s formal mating Thursday. Her induction into the pack is afterwards. You gonna pull your head out of your ass and show up this time?”

  I mentally flipped my oldest brother off. “Thursday’s Thanksgiving.”

  Cranking the engine, I switched things over to hands-free. Stark gray clouds blanketed the sky, the temperature hovering close to freezing. I rolled the tension from my shoulders, watching clumps of sleet streak across the windshield as I pulled out onto the highway towards my parents’ property west of town.

  Central Texas loved to play roulette with the weather this time of year, offering up weeks of mild temperatures and sunshine followed by wicked cold fronts where ice and an occasional inch or two of snow shut down the highways and overpasses. Unlike up in Calgary where life cheerily went on despite the harshest of blizzards, the Texas method of dealing with any dip in temperature below thirty-five was to storm your local HEB and stockpile canned goods like the four horsemen of the apocalypse had just tweeted FEMA to order us all down into the bunker.

  Just how we rolled, y’all.

  “Yeah. And I’m in charge of the lunar calendar.” There was a pause, followed by the crackle of static while Brody called something in to dispatch. “Only got a second here. We sent out invitations to heads of some of the neighboring packs we’re on better terms with, mostly as a courtesy.”

  That was standard. Most likely, none of them would show up, but in the event they did, it was a chance to strengthen alliances.

  “Yeah, we’re pretty much booked up for catering slots that week, so—”

  “Guillermo’s coming.”

  “Shut the—” I didn’t realize I’d hit the brakes until some jerk
honked and peeled out around me. Cursing, I pulled off onto the shoulder. “Are you kidding me? Why the f—?”

  “Listen—”

  “No, you listen. Are you out of your mind? Mom—”

  “Didn’t want him around,” Brody said curtly. “Neither did Dad. Not while we were growing up. He’s manipulative as hell and more powerful than just about any shifter alive, and we were young and impressionable. But the situation’s changed. Dad’s missing. Next week will be seventeen months he’s been gone. River’s off working for the Council—”

  “I get it.” A gust of wind slammed into the side of my SUV, rocking it back and forth. This was going to be one hell of a winter storm. Shaking my head, I pulled back onto the worn two-lane road.

  “We’re weaker. This is the wrong time to isolate ourselves.” Brody paused. “There’s more going on, but I need to tell you in person. Did August text you yet with a headcount?”

  I rolled my eyes. But it wasn’t like I was going to tell my brothers to hold a dinner for the Southern Territorial Council, responsible for governing every werewolf across the central southern United States, catered by some fast food joint with cold fries to go around. Because, classy. Not that West wouldn’t have been down for it. Pretty sure the only home-cooked meal he ate every week was the one I made for him on Sunday afternoons.

  “I’m on it,” I said, ending the call.

  My brothers could make fun all they wanted. And yeah, I’d flushed my phone. So sue me, dickheads. But every time it counted, really counted—

  A scream knifed through the pack bond, carving a fissure straight down the middle of my chest.

  Lacey.

  Her panic slammed into me again, a white-hot bolt of lightning that sent my wolf roaring to the surface. Black spots yawned open in my field of vision, the gray stretch of highway in front of me narrowing to a pencil-thin strip of road. I gripped the wheel and turned into the skid, fighting to keep from swerving off into the grass.

  A kaleidoscope of blurry images slammed into my brain. Swirling sky. Flashing blades. Two twitchy, emaciated figures. Bared fangs. I snarled. Vamps. If they touched her—