EUAN: Outback Shifters #3

by Chant, Zoe

  “Yeah. They did.” He paused, wondering if he could bring himself to ask Brooke how big of an arse she thought he’d made of himself. It might be good to get a woman’s perspective, after all. He cleared his throat. “Brooke –”

  “If you’re going to ask me whether I think Delilah might be willing to give you a second chance, then the only person who can answer that question is her,” Brooke said, cutting him off. After a moment, her face softened. “The best you can do is try.”

  Euan nodded, hoping she was right. It had been a while since he’d allowed himself to feel hopeful about anything, and the warmth of it kindling in his stomach felt unfamiliar and strange.

  The best I can do is try.

  Chapter 5

  Delilah woke with a gasp, her heart thumping in her chest.

  What was that?! And more to the point, where am I?!

  It felt like the bed – no, the whole room – had suddenly shaken, jerking her out of the deep sleep she’d been drifting into. They occasionally had earth tremors in Sydney, but they were rare enough that it seemed more likely her sleeping mind was just playing tricks on her. But it still didn’t answer her second question at all, since this definitely wasn’t her crowded little studio apartment, filled with piles of canvasses, art supplies, and drop sheets.

  Sitting bolt upright in bed and shoving her fringe back off her face, Delilah stared around her, wide-eyed, at the bare, featureless walls of the room, and then down at the gray blanket that covered her legs. She didn’t recognize the clothes she was wearing either – a white t-shirt with TRAINING ACADEMY stamped in black letters over the chest.

  Frowning, she pulled at it, her heart still racing, until finally the details of the day before began to filter back to her.

  The man in the alley. Who turned into a glitterbomb. And so I turned tail and ran, and just happened to bump into the man of my freakin’ dreams.

  Delilah shook her head.

  Well, no. That wasn’t quite correct, she had to admit.

  The man of her freakin’ dreams probably would have wanted to spend more time with her than Euan apparently did.

  She unclenched her fists, staring down at them.

  Despite the fact the whole thing seemed like it should have been a dream, Delilah knew it hadn’t been.

  She wasn’t stupid. She realized that Robb and Brooke – and by extension, Euan – were probably just as interested in having her stay here so they could keep an eye on her as they were in keeping her safe from whatever it was out there that the Glitter Man had been trying to warn her about.

  Well, perhaps they’re not wrong about that, Delilah thought, flexing her fingers. To be honest, I kind of want someone to be keeping an eye on me too.

  Her stomach clenched as she thought over everything that had happened last night. It still didn’t seem quite real – like she’d somehow stepped over an invisible threshold, and now she was in a different world where these kinds of things happened to people like her.

  I’m just an ordinary person! Delilah thought desperately. Or I was, anyway. And I kind of liked it like that!

  Taking a deep breath, Delilah decided that, regardless of who or what she’d been until yesterday, she was going to have to come to grips with things sooner rather than later.

  I did always want a little more adventure in my life, she thought, a smile twitching at her lips almost despite herself. But is this the kind of adventure I meant?

  She didn’t have time to ponder that question further, as the sound of a knock on her bedroom door jerked her out of her reverie.

  “Just a sec!” she called out, jumping out of the bed and hastily trying to arrange the sheets into some semblance of order. She looked down at what she was wearing, and decided that it passed to be seen in, despite the fact she’d just slept in it – it had clearly been made for someone a lot taller than she was, and the hem of the t-shirt dropped past her waist, and the shorts to her knees.

  “Okay! I’m decent! You can come in!”

  Delilah had been expecting Brooke – she’d been so nice to her yesterday, obviously doing her best to help her feel as at home as possible as she’d shown her around the place where she’d be sleeping, asking if there was anything she needed, or whether she could answer any questions Delilah had. At the time, Delilah’s head had been spinning enough that she’d decided any Q&A sessions could wait until she’d had time to digest all the stuff she’d already found out.

  Now, however, she thought she could just about deal with a little more information. Things like So, you turn into a skink – does that mean you need to, like, bask for energy? And Are people just born as shifters, or can you become one? And So the kangaroo guy said that shifters are different from werewolves… does that mean werewolves exist then too? And So… about Euan, is he single?

  She shook her head, trying to scrub that last one from her mind and grimacing at herself.

  High school’s over, Delilah! Time to grow out of your bad boy phase!

  She was still telling herself that when the door to the room opened. Delilah looked up, readying her smile for Brooke so she could at least seem like she was in control of herself, only to find it frozen halfway as Euan came through the door instead.

  “I hope I didn’t wake you,” he said after an awkward pause in which she stared at him with what was almost certainly an idiotic rictus grin on her face, while his muscular shoulders filled the doorway.

  “I – no,” Delilah eventually managed to get out. “No, I’ve been up for a few minutes.”

  Euan frowned a little. “Did the earth tremor wake you up?”

  Delilah blinked in surprise. “Was there an earth tremor? A real one? I thought I’d just dreamed that.”

  Euan shook his head. “No – that was real. It shook up the desks pretty badly upstairs, but that’s about it. It wasn’t too bad.” He swallowed, his eyes darting quickly to the rumpled bed before resting on her face again. “Do you have a moment to talk? Or would you prefer to have breakfast first?”

  Talk? Delilah thought, blinking – before her stomach gave an embarrassingly loud grumble, and she remembered that she’d flopped into bed without her dinner – or even her gelati, since that’d ended up all over Euan’s chest. Eating had been about the furthest thing from her mind back then, but now she was feeling the backlash of it.

  “That kind of sounds like a vote for breakfast,” Euan said, his voice quiet, and Delilah couldn’t help her embarrassed laugh.

  “Uh, probably,” she said. “But we can talk over breakfast, if you like?”

  Euan hesitated, then nodded. “If you’d prefer that. Did Brooke show you where the kitchens on this floor are?”

  “Yep. I can find my own way there,” Delilah said, hoping that was true. She’d been feeling kind of overwhelmed and tired at the time Brooke had given her the tour, after all.

  Again, Euan hesitated. “Okay. I’ll meet you there then. Take your time. There’s no rush.”

  And with that, he nodded firmly and exited, closing the door gently behind him.

  Delilah couldn’t help but stare after him for a long moment.

  She hadn’t been expecting to see him again so soon – if at all. He’d been pretty adamant last night about not being her bodyguard, after all.

  Could he have changed his mind?

  Delilah knew she should really have a shower, but her curiosity to know what Euan wanted to talk to her about was eating her alive. Giving her armpits a quick sniff, she decided she could probably pass, and yanked the t-shirt she’d slept in off over her head, replacing it with the shirt and baggy jumper she’d been wearing yesterday. Brooke had given her some clean, plastic-wrapped underpants, and she tore them out of the packaging before pulling on her track pants and hurrying into the private bathroom adjoining the bedroom to splash her face with some cold water.

  I am… really not in a glamorous state, Delilah thought as she stood looking at herself in the mirror. She made an effort to arrange her hair into something
– though whether it actually did any good or not was up for debate – before deciding that it was a bit late now to try to doll herself up. Euan would just have to take her as she was.

  The first thing she smelled when she opened the bedroom door and went out into the hallway was –

  Is that… bacon?!

  Delilah felt like a character in one of those old cartoons, floating along above the floor, carried by the scent of delicious food.

  She didn’t think her mouth had ever literally watered before, but that’s what it was doing as she followed her nose all the way to the kitchen area Brooke had shown her last night, telling her it was for Agency workers who sometimes needed to stay here overnight, or for interstate and overseas visitors whose sensitive work meant they couldn’t always stay in hotels.

  Stepping into the room, Delilah saw what she thought had to be the best thing she’d ever seen in her life – top three at the very least – which was Euan, a white apron over his shirt and jeans, standing in front of the stovetop with spatula in hand, tending to a frying pan full of sizzling bacon and eggs.

  “Oh my God,” Delilah muttered, gazing at him. “Good morning.”

  She knew from experience she wasn’t always at her best in the mornings until she’d had a cup of strong, black coffee with two sugars. Still, she didn’t usually just let stuff drop out of her mouth like that. She had just begun to let herself believe Euan hadn’t heard her, but then he turned around, giving her a nod.

  “I forgot to ask what you’d like,” he said. “If this is no good, I can make something else.”

  “No, no, bacon is very good,” Delilah said, as her stomach gave a ravenous growl. “Do you guys have coffee here?”

  Euan gave a nod toward a line of tables by the back wall. “It’s brewing over there. Sugar’s there too.”

  Euan might have been a man of few words, but all of them were exactly the ones Delilah wanted to hear right now. She settled herself down in a chair with a contented sigh. The coffee smelled like heaven when she poured it, before heaping in the sugar and stirring it in.

  Oh boy. I needed that, she thought as she sipped it, still scalding hot, from the mug. Hopefully now she’d be able to conduct herself in a civilized manner.

  Or, she thought, feeling her eyes widening as she looked up to see Euan approaching the table, a plate heaped with bacon, eggs and toast in his hand, maybe I could just faceplant into my breakfast like an untrained puppy. That works too.

  Euan set the plate down in front of her, looking down at it doubtfully. “I thought you might be hungry, but now that I look at it, it seems like kind of a lot.”

  “That is absolutely no problem, let me assure you. Right now, this feels like it’d hardly be enough. And you know what they say,” she said as she picked up her knife and fork, “in times of trouble, you’ve got to keep your strength up. And this –” she gestured vaguely around the room with her knife “– would probably qualify, right?”

  Euan frowned a little, watching as she sawed into an especially crispy bit of bacon. Delilah loved the crispy bits.

  “I feel like we might have gotten off on the wrong foot yesterday,” Euan said, before shaking his head slightly. “No – that’s not what I meant. I meant I might have gotten off on the wrong foot.”

  Delilah paused in chewing her bacon – which was amazing – and glanced up at him. True, he hadn’t exactly been friendly last night, but, she realized, she had been unwittingly pressing on what was obviously a pretty sore spot for him. She could still remember the expression of utter anguish in his eyes when he’d told her he couldn’t shift into his animal form – and, more unsettlingly, the flash of pain that had surged through her chest, as if, just for a moment, his pain had been her pain too.

  She may not have understood everything about shifters right now – though last night had been a pretty steep learning curve – but she understood that.

  Swallowing, Delilah shook her head.

  “Sorry. I realize I was getting kind of pushy about it. I just – I just thought –” What did I think? All she could really remember was how drawn she’d been to Euan, for reasons she couldn’t quite put into words.

  Euan blinked, staring at her. “No – there’s no need for you to apologize. What I meant was that I should have agreed to protect you when you asked me.”

  “Oh,” was all Delilah could think of to say. “You mean –”

  “Yes. I mean I’ll come to the party with you this afternoon.”

  Delilah strained her hearing to make out any trace of humor in his voice, but there was nothing. He didn’t seem particularly aware of the fact that what he’d just said sounded kind of funny, actually – but then, it also didn’t mean he was making fun of her or being ironic. He just continued to look at her, his dark brown eyes steady and sincere, as if he’d just made her the most solemn promise of his life.

  “It’s a kids’ party, you know,” Delilah said after a moment. “With face painting and fairy bread and chocolate crackles. It’s not going to be like, a fancy soiree or anything like that.”

  Euan shrugged. “I’m not sure I’d fit in at a fancy soiree. It’s not my scene.”

  No, probably not, Delilah thought to herself, allowing her eyes to drift down over the broadness of his shoulders. For starters, your biceps would probably rip right through the tux.

  “I just wanted you to be aware,” she said, instead of literally any of the thoughts that were running through her head right now. “You know those things can get pretty rowdy – but I can promise you some excellent fairy bread as made by me.”

  Strangely enough, that did seem to interest him, if the flicker in his eyes was anything to go by. “I’m not much of a sweet tooth, but I’ll give it a go,” he said. “So. Where’s this party being held?”

  “My sister’s place,” Delilah said, as she started up on her bacon and eggs again. “It’s… hmm. Well, have you ever been to Bradleys Head Lighthouse?”

  Euan nodded. “Not for a while, but I’ve been.”

  “Well, you know how if you look south to Point Piper and squint a little, you can kind of see a big white blob, pretty much right on the waterline?”

  Surprise showed plainly on Euan’s face. “Your sister lives there?”

  “No,” Delilah said, shaking her head. “But she lives pretty much right next door to there.”

  “Right. So I can assume it’s a fancy party, then. Even if it’s not a soiree.”

  Delilah bit her lip. “Yeah – kind of. My sister’s… kind of trying a new angle for her blog, like a ‘getting back to basics’ kind of thing. You know, the kind of basics you can only get if you have a huge amount of money.”

  Euan shook his head, holding his hands up. “Your sister has a blog?”

  Hooo boy. This is getting complicated, Delilah thought. She really didn’t want to put Euan off, when he’d only just agreed to bodyguard for her! What if it went against shifter code to have your photo on the internet?

  Or never mind shifter code – what about secret agent code?!

  “Yeah, she runs a lifestyle blog,” Delilah explained, trying to pick her words carefully. “It’s… pretty well known, if you’re into that kind of thing. But you don’t really look like the kind of guy who’d be interested in little write-ups of The Ten Best Places to Get Your Nails Done in Vaucluse – Tell Them I Sent You and Get a Discounted Pedi for the Low Low Price of Seven Hundred Dollars.”

  Euan shook his head. “Hmm. No. That doesn’t sound like me.”

  “I can definitely tell her not to put your photo on it, if that’d be a problem,” Delilah said quickly. “I don’t even want mine on there. But I don’t think I have quite the, uh, aesthetic she’s looking for anyway.”

  “Aesthetic?” Euan asked, frowning.

  Delilah did her best to laugh lightly, while waving a hand at her scruffy fringe, her baggy t-shirt, and her track pants.

  Not to mention the metric asston of bacon I’m wolfing down.

  “W
ell, you know – I hear neutrals are back in a big way this year, but I have yet to hear anything about trackies and only getting your hair cut once a year. And actually I haven’t heard anything about neutrals either, I made that up. I wouldn’t know what’s in this year. Or any year.”

  A smile flickered across Euan’s face. “Well, that makes two of us. But you look amazing just as you are.”

  Delilah glanced up at him, surprise widening her eyes. Did he just say I look amazing?

  She kind of doubted that – not out of any false modesty, but just because she hadn’t really had a chance to give herself a scrub in the shower yet, and, like it or not, she was wearing her oldest track pants. Delilah knew she could clean up okay, but aside from when she was at work and looking presentable was a professional requirement, she’d just never had the will for it – not to mention the money.

  “Well. Um. Thank you,” she said, before biting her lip. “I don’t really hear that all that often. Not when your older sister has always been the glamor puss in the family, anyway.”

  Euan cocked his head slightly, and Delilah watched his Adam’s apple bob as he swallowed – almost as if he was nervous.

  “Well, I know about your sister now. But you haven’t told me what you do.”

  “Oh, well – it’s… it’s nothing much. I work part-time at an art gallery. It pays the bills.”

  “It sounds like you don’t really love it, though,” Euan said after a moment.

  “Oh no – I do, in a lot of ways,” Delilah said quickly. “I get to work with art, which is what I’ve always wanted to do. And the number of people who can make a living off their own is very small. I’m lucky just to have a job in a gallery at all.”

  “You paint, then?” Euan asked.

  He’s… kind of sharp, Delilah thought. Or maybe he was just really listening to what she was saying.

  “I… well, at the moment, it’s just a hobby, since I don’t really sell anything,” Delilah said, feeling embarrassment creeping up her throat. “It’s a dream I might one day. But it’s like I said – you gotta be lucky.”