by Zoe Chant
“You’ll have to try harder than that.”
“Really? Because you haven’t touched your meal yet.”
She was right. He was holding his fork, but that was as far as he had got. And not because she was putting him off.
His chest felt as though it was about to burst. The crawling emptiness, the constant feeling that something was missing from his life—he’d been a fool not to see it for what it was. He’d missed Olly like she was a part of him.
And now that he had her back, he wasn’t going to let anything take her away from him.
“I’d be happy to take it off your hands,” Olly suggested innocently.
Jackson grinned and cut into the succulent pork belly. “Try the vegetables before you start stealing my food.”
The look Olly gave her vegetables was exceptionally owlish. Jackson snorted into his beer.
“All right…” She nibbled gingerly at a string bean.
“What do you think?”
Olly’s mouth twisted. “Maybe my bad old habits weren’t all bad.”
Jackson tried one. The string bean was lightly steamed, and crunched perfectly between his teeth with a hint of salted butter. “Tastes fine to me.”
Olly took another mouthful. There was a distinct lack of crunch. She grimaced.
“Let me try that.” Jackson tested a forkful of beans from Olly’s plate. They were practically goo.
He forced himself to swallow them. “You did ask for everything well cooked.”
“I think this is what put me off greens in the first place.” Olly made a face.
“You or your owl?”
“Mommy, why does that lady have an owl?”
Olly’s went completely still. She stared at Jackson, a hint of panic in her expression.
A little girl sitting at the next table had turned around in her seat and was gazing wide-eyed at them both. “Why do you have an owl?” she asked Olly.
“Because she’s a witch,” Jackson declared easily. He reached across the table and took Olly’s hand again. She gripped his fingers fiercely. “Like in Harry Potter.”
“Mommy, can I be a witch and have an owl? For Christmas?”
Jackson squeezed Olly’s hand. She made a phew face and moved her chair around the table until she was sitting next to him. She pressed her face against his shoulder and groaned.
“Maybe I should go back to freaking out about things before I do them,” she muttered into his shoulder.
Jackson wrapped one arm around her. “You’re not going to put the whole shifter world in danger of discovery just because a little girl heard you talking about an owl.”
“Hmm.”
“She’ll go away thinking you’re a witch, and her parents will go away thinking you’re a crazy person.”
“Hmm.” Olly sounded both satisfied and extremely unsatisfied at the same time.
Jackson rested his chin on the top of her head. “We wouldn’t have this problem if I was a shifter.”
Olly tensed. If he hadn’t been holding her, he didn’t know if he would have felt it, but there was no way he would have missed the frustration in her voice.
“No, we would have a worse problem. Trust me, two or more people sitting staring at nothing and saying nothing is way weirder than talking about having some animal living inside you.” She breathed out heavily. “As someone who has spent a lot of her life sitting staring at nothing and saying nothing all by myself, I know what I’m talking about.”
She raised her head and looked directly into his eyes. “Stop wishing you could change.”
Jackson frowned. Olly’s gaze sliced straight through to his innermost fears. He felt like a rat in a lab. Is this what she’s avoiding when she says she doesn’t like being looked at? “I don’t—”
“I love you just the way you are.”
She kissed him. Her words had been urgent, almost angry, but her lips were soft and warm. Jackson pulled her close, tension easing from his body as she melted against him.
“Mommy, ewwww, look at those people!”
Olly pulled away, cheeks burning. “I just thought of another benefit my usual table has.”
“A tad bit more privacy?”
She groaned and closed her eyes. “Something like that.” She was about to say something else when a group of tourists pushed through the courtyard doors.
Jackson scanned them absently. Half-a-dozen men in their late twenties or early thirties; friends or colleagues on a pre-Christmas getaway, he guessed. He looked back at Olly.
Her eyes were still tightly closed.
“We can ask to move tables,” he told her, but she shook her head.
“It’s fine. I can—” She sighed and cracked one eye open. “I’ll just make sure I keep all my attention on you,” she said, and pecked him on the lips. “You and all this food.”
“Glad to hear you’ve got your priorities straight.” He was beginning to put the pieces together. His chest felt tender, hollow and full at the same time.
“True. I should have said the food first.”
She wrinkled her nose at him in a mischievous grin and turned back to her meal. Jackson realized he was hesitating, and forced himself to do the same.
Olly caught him up on the local news as they finished their meals. Jackson was surprised at how much he’d missed—and how much he regretted missing it. He’d though being the human deputy in a town half-populated by shifters had been more frustration than it was worth, but he had to admit, it had had its good sides.
He watched Olly’s face light up as she talked. “…visitors kept complaining about things going missing. Jewelry, mostly. No one wanted to blame the hellhound boys, but the new guy suspected them. He kept them all in lockup overnight. Meaghan was pissed, especially when things still went missing while they were in the cells.”
“Walls can’t keep hellhound shifters in,” Jackson pointed out.
“Yeah, but Stringer was watching them, too. They didn’t go anywhere all night and stuff still went missing.”
“Jewelry.” Jackson sighed and chuckled. “It was the Heartwell kids, wasn’t it?” Dragon shifters, gold. It made sense.
Olly snorted. “Congrats, you just figured out in less than a minute what took Stringer weeks.”
“I can’t say I think much of my replacement.”
“Well, he’s not based in town like you were. He lives down in Hutton and only comes up when there’s a problem.”
“But with the number of visitors Pine Valley gets, the town needs someone around to keep an eye on—” Jackson shook his head. “I’m telling you what you already know. Again.”
“We need someone who can catch problems as they happen.”
“Even if he’s not a shifter?”
Olly narrowed her eyes. “Stringer’s a shifter. It doesn’t make him any better at his job. Or anything that requires thinking more than half a step ahead.”
“Now you’re just trying to make me jealous.”
It was a joke, but Olly went pale. Her eyes stayed fixed on his, but…
Jackson’s jaw tightened. She wasn’t looking at him, so much as she was not looking at anything else. Or anyone else.
He caught hold of the feeling rising in his chest and shoved it back down.
Olly had chosen him. He couldn’t let his own fear, his own weakness, ruin that. He needed to stop thinking up problems where there weren’t any.
And he needed to stop making problems. What had he been thinking, inviting her out to dinner?
He picked up her hand and kissed it. “Want to get out of here?”
19
Olly
Olly relaxed as soon as she was in Jackson’s truck. Too much, perhaps. She slipped off the seat down into the footwell.
Jackson raised his eyebrows at her as he got into the driver’s seat. “I didn’t think you had that much to drink,” he deadpanned.
“I just need a minute.”
Jackson nodded as he put the truck into gear. “A minu
te out of everyone’s sight, or a minute with everyone else out of sight?”
Olly pressed one hand against her stomach. It was still in knots from dinner. “You noticed?”
He nodded, and she sighed and dropped her head into her hands. “I just—” Don’t want to hurt you, ever again.
Even with her head in her hands she could feel Jackson’s eyes on her. Warm and gentle.
“Changed things up a bit too fast?”
Olly bit her tongue. “Yeah. That’s it.”
She rubbed her forehead. Her owl had been silent all evening. Silent and smug and determinedly looking no further than her next forkful of food.
She was relieved it was supporting her, and hollowed out by the effort it was taking her owl not to peer at everything and everyone that moved in the restaurant.
“Going out for dinner was a mistake,” she muttered. “I mean—not going out with you, but…”
She swallowed hard. You aren’t going to tell him anything’s wrong. Remember? If he knows what’s worrying you it’ll only hurt him. She swallowed again but the lump in her throat stayed exactly where it was.
“Those beans were a mistake, for sure,” Jackson said lightly. “You ready to go?
Olly sat up, careful not to look out the window, and pulled on her seatbelt. Her eye caught on something on the dash. “You’re kidding me. That’s still there?”
Jackson swore and reached over. She slapped his hand away, laughing. “You haven’t cleaned your truck in a year?”
“I vacuum!”
“You couldn’t vacuum up a fruit sticker?”
She picked it off and rolled it between her fingers. “I can’t believe you convinced me to eat a whole bucket of… what were they? Nectarines?”
“I don’t recall much convincing being required.”
“Of course you needed to convince me. Nectarines are fruit.”
“Delicious fruit.” Jackson pulled onto the road. Olly kept her attention on him, and not on anything or anyone outside the truck, but she still couldn’t read what his expression meant as the skin around his eyes creased. “You know, you keep saying you give in to your owl too much, but I don’t remember things that way. You were always owlish, sure, but you were—are—a woman, too.” His cheeks darkened. “I mean, I didn’t have to convince you to eat fruit.”
Olly kept rolling the sticker between her finger and thumb. He was right. He hadn’t had to convince her to eat the nectarines, same as she used to be able to go into a building without circling it a half-dozen times first. Once, sure. That was sensible. But over and over until she’d wasted the whole evening?
Her stomach twisted as she looked back on the last twelve months. She’d been so terrified about getting things wrong, and for what?
The worst had already happened.
Jackson being back in her life was the second chance she never thought she’d get. She couldn’t let it go to waste.
“We didn’t have dessert at Hannah’s,” she said, putting the rolled-up sticker in her pocket and reaching out to take Jackson’s hand. “I think I still have some cookies leftover at home. Want to come over?”
Jackson’s gaze heated up. “For dessert?”
“To start with.”
She watched him roll the idea around in his mind. “I have a better idea,” he said at last. “Let’s get that dessert and go for a drive.”
Olly lived on the edge of town. Not like Meaghan and Caine, off tucked away further along the valley, but on the last street before the rows of houses and streetlights gave way to forest. She used to think it was perfect—a shifter living on the balance point between the wild outdoors and civilization.
Except life wasn’t that tidy. If she was going to avoid ever accidentally locking eyes with her real mate, she’d have to get as far away from town as possible.
When are you planning to talk to him about that, again? her owl sniffed.
She was still carefully not answering when she got back into the truck, box of chocolate cookies clutched against her chest. She’d glimpsed her neighbor as she locked her front door, and that had been fine because she knew him already and, therefore, knew he was not her mate, until she remembered he had family to stay for the holiday, and she hadn’t met his brother yet—
She shook her head. This was ridiculous. She knew most of the people in town; in fact, she’d known them her whole life. And she couldn’t work her tourist job if she was constantly terrified of meeting her mate every time she met someone new. It would be like the hellhounds, but worse.
She was going to have to trust that things would work out for the best. If she and Jackson were going to do this, they had to be strong enough to weather anything.
She’d had enough of running and hiding. She wasn’t going to scurry into her own home and hide there like she was under attack.
“Got them. Where to next?” She sounded breathless even to her own ears.
“Back into the wild,” Jackson said, and her heart leaped. It was as though he’d read her mind. Out of town, into the woods.
…Okay, maybe she wasn’t quite ready to apply her newfound resolve yet.
“Perfect,” she said.
“Don’t get your hopes up.” Classic Jackson.
She looked at him sidelong. “What’s the plan? The one I’m not meant to get my hopes up about.”
There it was—a thread of secret, prideful pleasure in the corners of his mouth. “You’ll see when we get there—”
Her heart jumped unpleasantly. Owlishly fast.
“—and I’m sure you’ll pick up all the clues you need along the way.”
Tension melted out of her. Of course Jackson isn’t going to spring something on me with no warning.
He smiled at her in the rear-view mirror and handed her a thermos. “Can you check for me if this is still warm?”
The scent of hot chocolate filled the air as Olly unscrewed the top. Chocolate and cinnamon with a hint of pepper. Memories stirred in the back of her mind.
“You went shopping? This smells like that fancy stuff from Mr. Bell’s store.” She took a sip. “Yep, definitely is.”
She closed her eyes briefly, remembering that afternoon in the sun. This had to be a clue.
Jackson cleared his throat.
“I thought you’d like it more than the instant coffee packets that’ve been sitting in the glove box since June,” he said, turning onto a side-street. Olly kept as good an eye on their route as she could while being careful not to accidentally look at anyone outside the car.
“What happened in June?” she asked absently.
Jackson chuckled. “My Ma came to visit and said if I didn’t get myself a proper coffee machine she’d disown me.”
They were heading out of town. Olly relaxed. Another clue, and one that told her that her suspicions about the chocolate had been correct.
“At least someone in your family has good taste.”
“You haven’t asked me why I never threw the old instant packets out.”
Olly narrowed her eyes. “And now I don’t want to.”
“Aw, that’s no fun. How am I meant to gross you out saying I just suck on the packets dry if you’re not going to ask?”
“Oh, gross! Instant coffee is foul. Normal coffee is bad enough, but instant isn’t even… I mean, what is it? Tiny burned, dissolvable crumbs? I don’t trust it.”
“You trust dissolvable chocolate.”
“That’s sugar. It’s different.” Except – she hadn’t had hot chocolate all winter. The chocolatey goodness wafting up from the thermos was making her mouth water. How had she forgotten how much she liked it?
Jackson chuckled. “Good to know some things haven’t changed. Maybe you should get your hopes up after all.”
They drove until the road was pitted with potholes and snow started piling up on the road where the plows had given up trying. The lights of the town were so far away that the stars above blazed in their full glory.
Olly knew exactl
y where they were. Warmth unfurled inside her and she grazed Jackson’s arm with the backs of her knuckles to get his attention.
“It’s not going to be as pleasant an evening as last time,” she said teasingly.
“No?” Jackson’s eyes were laughing. “Why would you say that?”
“There wasn’t a foot of snow on the ground, for a start.”
“We’ll just have to stay off the ground then.”
Jackson flashed her a tight, shy smile and jumped out of the truck. His boots crunched in the snow as he walked around the back and pulled the tarp of the truck bed.
Olly watched through the rear window. “Oh, for…” The warmth inside her wriggled happily at what had been hiding under the tarp.
“Ta-dah!” Jackson struck a pose—for about the smallest smidgen of a second imaginable, before he dropped his arms and thrust his hands into his pocket, his wide grin becoming a bashful smile. Olly blinked. Just for a moment, he’d seemed very… not-Jackson.
But that moment was over, and the shy pride beaming from his eyes was all him. Olly slipped out of the passenger seat and went to him. The night air bit at the exposed skin on her cheeks and she buried her chin deeper into coat’s fur lining, which did nothing to hide her own delighted smile.
“I can’t believe you went to all this trouble!”
Jackson had transformed the skirted truck bed into a picnic station that rivaled the Puppy Express stops. Piles of cushions and blankets turned the hard metal edges of the bed into a cozy nook, and after he swore under his breath and fiddled with something taped to one of the sides, fairy lights started to glitter.
“No fireflies this time of year,” Jackson muttered. He helped her up into the truck bed and she let him, even though she could have easily done it herself. The pressure of his hand in hers, the other steadying her at the waist, made her feel solid and grounded.
Olly sank down on one of the cushions. The summer before last—the last summer Jackson had spent in Pine Valley—they’d had a picnic on this part of the mountain. There was meant to be a whole group of them, but what with one thing and another, by mid-afternoon it had only been her and Jackson left. They’d piled everyone’s rugs and cushions into one marvelous nest and feasted on the remains of the picnic food until neither of them could move.