“I have Zev on it just in case,” Iver promised. He was the math man of our claw. “Between him and Brad it will work out.” My heartbeat was slowing. Maybe this sounded worse than it was. Please let it sound worse than it is. “Go—get laid.” And just like that, best friend Iver was back being...Iver.
“Not gonna happen.” Even if I had the time or the energy, I’d already pissed the guy off, and on top of that, I swept out when I was supposed to be chomping on meat and chatting to him.
But I didn’t have the time or the energy, as much as my now-stirring dick just at the thought of it disagreed.
“Then go and eat meat.”
“Fine.” I started out of the alley.
“You know if we needed you, I’d be asking you to come back.” I did know that. It didn’t mean part of me felt guilty for going back in there and eating a ton of meat and cheese bread.
“I know, but fuck you for texting me while I was already here.” Because really? What had he been thinking? He knew me from before our first shifts, ha had to know this would completely derail any chance at a decent date.
“I’m a crappy Beta.”
“No—you’re a good Beta, the friend part is the debatable bit.”
I slipped the phone back into my pocket and was determined to engage with the guy so we could salvage what was left of the date and possibly offer a peace treaty.
I barely sat down and offered him one when Zev was already texting me. So much for salvaging the date enough to have him leave without hating me.
5
Corey
I had to admit the food was sensational. As it was my first time at a traditional Brazilian steakhouse, I was fascinated with the red and green card system. Green meant keep the food coming and red was the signal to stop because you couldn’t eat another bite.
It wasn’t the place for a vegetarian. I sampled the finest cuts of beef, lamb, and pork, along with yummy cheesy breads, polenta, and other dishes I couldn’t name. I was thankful when a salad appeared and I finally admitted defeat and put up my red card.
The ambiance and service were top notch. But I gave the person sitting opposite me a huge thumbs down. We were two people eating a meal together but we shared nothing. In between toting up figures and making calls, Bryce had scarfed down the food. He can’t have tasted it and he barely chewed it. I did a search on the phone for the Heimlich maneuver to refresh my memory in case the steak got stuck in his throat.
If I thought it was bad at the beginning, it’d gone downhill since then. Bryce had spent the entire time on his phone or getting up to take a phone call or staring at his phone waiting for someone to get back to him. He was rude as fuck, and any time I tried to ask a question about him or even the food, he all but growled at me.
Bryce was such an inconsiderate asshole, not only to me but to the other restaurant patrons, and the people on the other end of his phone. At one point the person at the next table mumbled about Bryce being a lousy date because he wasn’t paying me any attention. Thank you!
We’d hardly spoken other than comments about the meal from me. He grunted in response to my praise of the food, but now I was bloated and wishing I could undo my belt, I was beyond caring what he thought of me. “Can I ask why you arranged a date when you’re obviously busy and not in the mood to chat and be, you know… vaguely human?”
His head snapped up and his dark, red-rimmed eyes, narrowed. That last word had been a challenge, hoping he’d put down the damn phone, apologize, and engage in a meaningful conversation. His piercing gaze pinned me to the chair much as the tip of a sword would have against my chest. Flustered, I picked up my drink and gulped, and the now-flat beer trickled over my throat, wetting my shirt.
“You know nothing about me or what I’m dealing with,” he snarled.
“You’re right.” I tossed my napkin on the table. “And I don’t need to, because you’ve shown me who you are and it’s not pretty.” I fumbled for my wallet, thankful the meal was an all-you-can-eat situation for a fixed price but disappointed I was missing out on dessert. “Thanks for not only wasting my time, asshole, but making me feel this small.” I extended two fingers so he’d get the point. “I didn’t have high expectations for tonight, but I wasn’t prepared to be ignored and disrespected.”
Blood drained from his face at my words but he didn’t respond. How could he? Other than apologizing, there was nothing he could say.
After leaving money for my meal plus a generous tip, I flounced out of the restaurant, before he could witness my eyes filling with tears. I’d always wanted to flounce but imagined it’d be after putting someone in their place, whereas I doubted my words made a dent in the alpha’s ego and suspected he cared not a jot about anyone but himself.
Sitting in the car with my head on the steering wheel, my joke about hiring a plane for aerial advertising to show Gabe I’d been right was just sad. Fuck that guy! I didn’t deserve to be treated that way. And I stank of spilled beer and I’d be reminded of this disastrous date whenever I drank the stuff in future.
It was probably a good thing I didn’t know where the app developer lived or I might have done something I regret. I hadn’t participated in many college pranks, and when I had they were childish ones. Toilet papering the guy’s house wouldn’t get the message across about how pissed I was. But I could put my experience in writing in the hope Bryce would be bumped off Love and Hate.
Grabbing the phone to call my best friend, my gaze rested on the app. It was mocking me sitting on the screen all proud and sassy. So I deleted it. No more apps. No matchmaking. No going out with friends of friends. I was done with dating. Maybe Brad and Gabe would let me move into their guest house when I became too old to live by myself.
I made it home, and unusual for me, I had no energy to wash my shirt, just ripped off my clothes and tumbled into bed. But I must have woken every thirty minutes and it wasn’t because I hadn’t put my clothes in the laundry hamper.
While I’d tossed and turned, there’d been an assault on my senses. Weird images of teeth intruded into my nightmares. Not human chompers but long jagged ones, dripping with saliva while the air was laced with a pungent aroma. A throaty growl resonated in my ears throughout the night along with the related taste of Brazilian barbecue. But it was the fingers trailing over my cheeks that had me gasping and sitting up, convinced there was someone in the room.
But despite the freaky nightmares, I was hard. Painfully so because… and this was distressing to admit… I’d been imagining the asshole taking me on that restaurant table after everyone else went home. The light had been dimmed and he’d stripped my clothes off and swallowed my cock, making me come more than once before undressing and fucking me against a wall.
Being turned on by fantasy Bryce and not being able to get the guy out of my head was humiliating. He’d treated me like something to be scraped off his shoe, and here I was being aroused by him. Fuck my subconscious! Fantasy Bryce didn’t exist.
By five a.m. with my sheets drenched in sweat and slick and the pillows at opposite ends of the room, I gave up on sleep. I put on a load of washing and made myself coffee. Gabe had sent a message after I got home but I ignored it. I always answered his texts so he probably didn’t sleep either, assuming I was enjoying a night of passion.
Last night, anger had fueled me, but in the bleak hours before dawn, I was just sad. And broken. The phone buzzed, and without glancing at the display, I knew it was Gabe. No one else would text in the early hours. I’d better put him out of his misery and I didn’t have the energy to text.
I steeled myself not to cry but my voice wavered when Gabe’s excited, “Give me the deets,” was relayed through the phone.
“It was beyond bad.”
“I’m coming over.”
While I waited for Gabe to arrive, my fingers scrolled through my favorite sites but stopped at a news flash of a strange sighting in the forest outside town! Apparently, one of the local zoo’s big cats had escaped. I peer
ed at the dark shape on the screen and made out a pair of eyes glowing in the darkness. Is that a… panther?
6
Bryce
Heading into bear territory always had my panther on edge. Today, when it was about something that could be the end of my claw’s stability? Now it was even worse.
Ever since the tax fiasco was piled on top of the eminent domain shit, my panther had been barely containable, and a few times, not even that. I’d had him rip through me in the middle of the night and woke up needing new sheets and new pajamas.
Even as a teen, I’d not been so on edge with him, and that was when no shifter could control their animal.
I drove up and parked around back, wanting the fresh air to fill my nose and possibly calm my panther down enough to focus on the meeting at hand and not keeping my skin.
Mate.
He would not freaking stop that. We’d been fine being celibate since I’d taken over as Alpha, but all of a sudden he was randy as hell, pushing me to go find a mate. It wasn’t going to happen. I had enough other shit on my plate—an entire claw’s worth.
I walked straight to Brad’s office, completely skipping any pretense of formality. I couldn’t be bothered. At least with Brad in the room, my panther would calm down enough to allow me to think—probably.
Brad’s bear held more power than any I’d worked with, not that I’d done a lot of business with bears. Our claw focused on small business ventures, the majority of our income coming from jobs in the human realm or our fiber arts, ones we held onto through the generations. From baskets to lace to jewelry, we had a steady—but not bountiful—flow of income.
I raised my hand to knock and he called for me to come in.
“What’s the good news?” I asked, closing the door behind me.
“The great news is that the tax situation has been rectified.” My jaw dropped and a huge weight rolled off of me.
“Please say that again...slowly.” I walked over to his seating area and collapsed in the armchair. We weren’t about to be bankrupt.
“The tax situation has been rectified and not the way I had expected it to.” He took a seat across from me. “I figured we would need to fight based on never putting things in writing claiming you were not allowing others on the land, therefore, not asking for the lesser tax rate.”
“And instead?”
“Instead the town has an exclusion for this land that goes back from the start of income taxes being varied in that way.” He handed me a folder. “I’ve never seen anything like it, but then again, I wasn’t looking. Not sure how your ancestors did it, but consider the problem dealt with.” He leaned back in his chair all proud of himself, and rightfully so.
“You think someone called them to trigger the taxation issue in the first place? It was weird that it happened now.”
“At first...yes, but it coincided with a new computer system that combined records, including the photos that had only been buried in a file system until recently, so I’m siding with fucked-up timing.” He leaned in and scented me.
“What the fuck? You have a mate, Brad,” and there he was scenting me like...like...I didn’t even know.
“Chill your butt. I was trying to figure out why your panther was so close to the surface, not looking for a piece of ass. Puh-lease. You’ve seen my mate, why would I sniff around the likes of you?”
“I don’t know. Sorry.” The irrationality of the moment slammed into me. Shifters scent—maybe not like that, but they do. My reaction was not logical, only amplifying my worry over my damn panther. “My panther—the stress of this all has been too much.”
Understatement of the freaking decade.
“Your panther shouldn’t give a shit about taxes.”
“Maybe it’s about losing his land then—I don’t know. He has been barely controllable since I got the call about the taxes, though. Maybe he is secretly wanting to be an accountant,” I snapped.
“Wait—it started then? When you got word you owed back taxes?”
“Not right then,” I tried to think back to that night. It had been after I got home from the restaurant and I tried to get some sleep, not that sleep came. “After I left and things really settled in, I guess.”
“Left? Where were you?”
“I had a date at the Brazilian place.” Great. Now he was going to want to talk about that cluster of an outing. That poor human even tried to get me to leave, but my stupid desire to not owe Iver anything had me subjecting him to a horrible evening. He even paid for his meal. What kind of alpha does that?
“It isn’t the taxes or even the land that had your panther’s butt in a twist.” Was that a smirk. Surely Brad wasn’t smirking at my distress, or was he? I really didn’t know him that well, the claw not needing a lot of legal guidance until recently. “Let me guess, your panther keeps saying ‘mate’ and ‘claim’ and things like that.” Oh yeah, that was a smirk.
“Yeah. How do you know?”
“Because you were in contact with your mate.” It came out of his lips like a bonafide fact. How would he even know if I didn’t? No. There was no mate there. A hot guy? Sure, probably more than one. But my mate? Hardly.
“I didn’t sc—” Scent. Of course I didn’t scent anything—annatto. “Ohhh—why does that food have to taste so good?” Stupid Brazilian food had to be cat nip to my panther, all protein and goodness. “So now what?” If I had met my mate, I needed to find him. My panther wouldn’t give up. That wasn’t how our beasts were wired.
Mate.
Point proven. “Do I go shake down the waiters to see who there was or was not a shifter and hunt them all down?” Because I was oddly not opposed to the idea. Now that he had put a name to what was wrong with me and my panther agreed, I was in fix-it mode. Screw it if I wasn’t looking for a mate or even wanting one, it was way better to find the one I missed than live like this.
“No one said it has to be a shifter.” His comment took me aback. Could my mate be a human? I mean, it could happen and panthers didn’t discriminate against species. Damn that annatto making everyone smell the same.
“I just hunt them all down, then.” I had to play detective. It was reservation-only so if I bribed the maître’d I could get the info. Everyone paid with a card these days...except my date didn’t. He threw cash on the table and left, but he was one guy among many. Chances were my mate used plastic.
“You have no idea who?” I shook my head. I hadn’t really paid attention to anyone or anything except my phone. “No one there caught your fancy?”
Caught my fancy? No. My date had been hot enough to stir my cock even with his looks of disgust at my behavior. Shit—could he—he had—
“It was my date,” I blurted out.
Mate. Claim mate.
“Good.” He stood up. “Go call him and ask him out again.” Because it was as easy as that. And really, had it been a traditional date it would’ve been. Of course if it had been traditional I’d have scented him when we first met and asked to meet up again. Or skipped the whole thing depending on how things went.
“It’s not that easy.”
“Why—did you act like an alphahole?” I totally had, but that wasn’t the issue. If only my life could ever be that simple.
“No. It was a date from that app Love and Hate and I don’t even know his name.” Even though I was pretty sure he gave it to me. Could I have fucked up the night any more than I had?
“Then go on there and ask him out again.” He walked around to his desk, reaching it just as a little alarm started to ring. “Quitting time.” Did he really have an alarm to tell him to go home? Maybe that was what mating was like? Going home being just as important as getting to work on time.
“My Beta set it up,” I confessed, making things even more embarrassing than they already were.
“I’d laugh but…”
“Hold that thought.” I shot Iver a text, and as Brad was regaling me with tales of his mating, while simultaneously walking me out, a mes
sage came back:
Sorry. His account is gone.
Fuck.
7
Corey
I wandered around my apartment fluffing up cushions, moving a vase an inch to the right, aligning my shoes on the rack, and cleaning out the fridge even though I’d done that icky job a few days before. It was the first day of my annual leave and originally I’d booked two weeks at a beach resort. Sun, sand, and hopefully sex had been my plan, but I’d cancelled at the last minute.
I felt like crap. Most holiday takers caught nasty tropical diseases during or after being on vacation. Perhaps I was the first person to get one before going away. They could put me in the record books. My mind went to which shirt and tie I’d wear for the scientific journal photos.
The days stretched ahead of me as I lay on the couch and studied the ceiling. It was all that damned alpha’s fault. I’d gone over and over our non-date ‘date’ and each time I rushed to take my blood pressure, convinced that thinking about that ass would cause me to stroke out.
The beeping of my phone disturbed my irrational thoughts. Gabe!
Brad’s away on a work trip for the night. Wanna come over? I miss you and so does Ursula. Tonight we can eat pizza in bed in our PJs and watch crappy TV.
A night with my best friend and goddaughter. Perfect. Sounds good. I’ll bring a bottle of wine. No, make that plural. Bottles.
After shoving things in a bag, I headed out, wanting to get out of my lonely apartment and my bleak headspace. When I arrived, Gabe was feeding Ursula. She banged her plastic spoon on the highchair tray splashing food over her clothes, a huge grin on her face.
“Someone’s excited to see you.” Gabe’s welcoming smile was like coming home.
Matched To His Panther Page 3