by Holley Trent
“Email them to me, please. And, um…could you…do something else for me?”
“Anything.” Dana laughed. “Well, within reason.”
“Yeah, you’ve done so much for me.”
“And I’ll do so much more if you let me.”
Eric approached carrying a letter-sized sheet of white paper and wearing a frown. “Tried to negotiate a partial refund, but the most he would give me was some coupons for our next stay.”
“Which are worth the cost of the paper they’re printed on.”
He grunted and opened the RV door. “You coming?”
“In a moment. I just need to ask Dana something.”
He narrowed his eyes at her, his curiosity pressing at her as if it was a sentient thing itself, but he didn’t press. “We’re gonna have to find someplace with coffee once we get on the road. Or a grocery store so we could make our own. We need something stronger than what’s stocked in the RV.”
“We’ll find someplace.”
He nodded and climbed in, pulling the door closed behind him.
Clearing her throat, she put the phone back to her ear. “Sorry. Um. Oh! How did your consultation with the fertility specialist go?”
“Don’t change the subject. What’d you want to ask me?”
“It’s silly. Never mind.”
“Tell me. If it was weighing on your mind enough to ask, you should ask. You’re the one who always tells us to get things off our chests, so don’t start clamming up now. We’ll think you’re a hypocrite.”
Maria groaned. Busted.
Soon enough, everyone would know she was a huge hypocrite. “Okay. I need you to dig up one more number. It might be easier than the other one. I haven’t tried to look. Haven’t wanted to before now.”
“I’ve got pen and pad to write it down. Who is it?”
“My mother’s parents. I don’t know much about them, and that’s driving me to distraction lately. I want to know where the lies end and the truth starts.”
Dana was quiet for a while. So quiet that Maria pulled her phone away from her ear to look at the screen and make sure they were still connected. It was a miracle she was able to get a signal at all given the tree density of the area.
“Dana?”
“I’ll find you anything you want, but I just gonna know, why now? You’ve never talked to us about this stuff.”
Maria pulled in a long breath and let it out though her mouth. Maybe the easy response would have been “It’s complicated,” but the truthful one was “Because Eric.” He was rattling all the skeletons in her closet, and the only way for her to snatch them away from him and silence the noise was to clear them out once and for all.
“I’m tired of carrying around all the confusion,” she said quietly. “I want to know what’s what.”
And who I am.
That was something the other Shrews didn’t have a problem with. They all had identities. They knew who they were and where they came from. Maria was a nomad with a hippie mother and father whose mail only caught up to him four times per year.
“Give me some names,” Dana said.
Maria raked her hand through her hair and closed her eyes tight. “I don’t know if I know them. I’m not completely convinced my mother’s last name was Weisz. It just doesn’t feel right. Something’s not right.”
“You would know better than anyone. How about this? I’ll take a look at the information about your mother on your birth certificate and work backward from there.”
“Don’t spend a lot of time on it. If you have other things you need to be—”
“If it’s important to you, it’s the most important thing in the world to me right now.”
“Thank you.” The words came out sounding choked, which was so unlike Maria. She wasn’t especially emotive. Everyone knew her to be calm and level in most circumstances.
Everyone except Eric, anyway.
She was tired of holding herself together for everyone else’s sakes when the truth was that she’d been an explosion waiting to happen since twelve or thirteen. Protecting other people’s feelings at the expense of her own was nearly as exhausting as anything she could do to her body.
“And I’ll tell you about my appointment later,” Dana said softly. “The lady didn’t tell me what I wanted to hear, and I need some time to digest it.”
“Everything okay?”
“Everything’s the same, which isn’t what I need right now. I need a miracle.”
“You’ll get your baby, Dana. One way or another.”
“I know. It’s hard to be patient, though. Why can’t some things just be easy?”
“You make everything seem easy.”
“You’re full of shit, but I love you anyway. Check in when you get to that location Tamara sent you, okay?”
“All right. Bye.”
Maria disconnected and opened the RV door, already bringing up the GPS app on her phone. She locked the door, settled her bag behind the driver’s seat, and glanced back at Marty and the kids.
Marty was pawing through the refrigerator with the kids looking on. He muttered something about carnivores needing meat and then handed each kid a yogurt cup.
“We’ll get a hot meal as soon as we can stop,” Eric called back from the passenger seat. He was slumped low into it with one hand covering his face.
Maria sank into the driver’s seat, moved it up several inches, and pulled the seatbelt across her body without taking her gaze from Eric.
She’d been so angry with him months ago when he bemoaned being just an innkeeper while everyone else in his circle had important things to do that made differences.
She hadn’t known why she was angry—simply that she was.
But now, the mental fog was clearing and she was starting to make sense of herself. She’d been angry because he’d had something that his family had built. It wasn’t just a home, but an opportunity for prosperity. That lodge was a connection to his loved ones and a place for gathering. His job was important—feeding people and housing them for as long as they were there, making them feel safe and comfortable. His grandparents had given him a gift. His job was stable. She craved stability more than anything, and he didn’t seem to understand how good he had it.
She stabbed the key into the ignition and tightened her fingers around the steering wheel. “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, isn’t it?” she asked low.
Eric dropped his hands from his bloodshot eyes. “What’d you say?”
“Just, um.” She shook her head and let down the parking brake. “Never mind. Ignore me.”
“As if that were so easy.”
She hoped it wasn’t. It scared her to admit it to herself, but she didn’t want to be ignored. At least, not by him. She could take or leave most other folks.
CHAPTER TWELVE
“This is the last of the yogurt,” Maria muttered as she settled into the RV’s passenger seat.
Eric glanced up at her from the map he was studying and laughed at her little pout. “Waiting on Tamara to give us the go-ahead to get out of this thing.”
They were so close to a pancake house that Eric could already taste all that sausage, bacon, and ham. He was gonna tell them to just keep it coming until he told them to stop, and if they looked at him funny, he wouldn’t give a shit. A Bear needed food—especially one who was recovering from a non-moon shift and who was also trying to tamp down his inner beast’s increasingly demanding urges for him to bend his woman over and fuck her.
Because that was exactly what they needed at the moment.
He looked back into the darkened sleeping space of the RV and saw Marty sprawled on the pullout near the kitchenette and the kids piled onto the bed in the back. Marty snored, Gabe growled in his sleep, and Nina talked back to whoever was in her dreams.
“Must drive Keely nuts,” he said.
“You make plenty of noise in your sleep, too.” Maria put her bare feet up on the dashboard and dipped her
spoon into the yogurt cup.
“Yeah? What kind of noise?”
“Lots of grunts. I was starting to wonder if you were fighting in your dream.”
He pinched the bridge of his nose and scooted down a little lower in the driver’s seat. There hadn’t been any fighting in his dreams. Lots of fucking, though. He’d woken up with his cock hard as a brick and probably the only reason Maria hadn’t noticed it was because she was too busy concentrating on driving. They’d been somewhere in Western New York, and still were…just no longer in a known Bear territory.
Apparently, that had been intentional on the parts of Bryan and Tamara. More Tamara than Bryan, though. Tamara’s brothers knew things about the other groups in the country because knowing was a part of their jobs as guns-for-hire. Bears didn’t enter Coyote territory. The Coyotes were too organized. Apparently, even Gene wouldn’t tangle with them.
“Send Tamara a message and ask when we can get out of this thing,” he said, stomach growling.
“I already did. I’m waiting on her response. It’s two a.m. I bet she’s snoring, too, in a Bear pile with Bryan.”
Maria’s phone buzzed. “Ooh.” She snatched it out of the cup holder and squinted at the bright display. Then she cringed. “Okay, she says the Coyotes know we’re here.”
“I’m taking that to be a bad thing.”
“Well, no. She asked them in advance for them to give us some leeway in case we had to arc through here. They’re not worried about you or the kids.”
“Just Marty.”
“Yeah.” She worked her thumb over the phone display and scrunched her mouth to one side.
So cute. He wanted to pull her down to the floor and cuddle her until she didn’t realize he was actually fucking her. He groaned and rolled his eyes at himself.
Keep it together, Falk.
“Okay. They say that as long as we don’t let Marty go anywhere on his own, they won’t hassle us. They don’t want any problems, but they know the Ursus keep their promises, and Dana’s reputation for being on the right side of things precedes her.”
“So we can eat?”
“Yes. We can go eat.”
“Thank fuck. Wake the kids.” Eric started the RV and moved it into the restaurant’s parking lot, thinking lascivious thoughts about bacon. His vegetarian sidekick was probably going to have a rollicking good time watching four Bears break their fasts.
Maria smoothed down Nina’s hair as they crossed the lot, and said, “I’m so hungry that I might even consider eating some sausage my—”
She didn’t get the words out, because at the threat surrounding them she sprung to action, as did Eric. They put their backs to each other and put the kids between them.
He grabbed petrified Marty by the shirt and pulled him close.
The three leather-clad men flanked them, one wearing a dangerous smirk Eric didn’t like the looks of. Power radiated off him like steam from a sauna.
Shifter.
The smirking guy laughed. “Hey, chill. Settle down, kids. We aren’t gonna hurt ya.” He reached in and held out a hand to Eric. “Jim West. I’m the Coyote alpha. We figured we’d join you for dinner. Uh.” He furrowed his brow and cringed. “Or…breakfast. Whatever.”
“J-join us?” Marty asked tremulously.
Jim shrugged. “We just left the bar. Pancakes go a long way in combating alcohol poisoning, in my experience.” He rocked back on his boot heels and shoved his hands into his pockets. “Plus, I figured you could tell us a little more about what Gene’s up to, too. He’s stayed out of my territory so far, but I don’t trust him. I don’t like surprises, and if I know anything about him, it’s that he’s good at surprising folks.”
“That’s true,” Maria said. “We’ll tell you what we know. It’s pretty convoluted.”
“Sounds like shifter life in general. Come on.” Jim canted his shaggy head toward the door. “Maybe we can talk them into brewing the coffee at a strength that’s actually detectable.”
Eric didn’t move, and neither did Maria. She was probably as skeptical of the sudden arrival as him. “How long had you been waiting around and watching our RV?” Eric asked.
Jim snorted. “Not long. Told you, we just left the bar.” He wriggled his dark, thick eyebrows. “Didn’t need to watch you. The guy who owns that parking lot you were lurking in is a Coyote. In fact, Coyotes own about half this town. You couldn’t swing a cat”—he pointed to the kids—“don’t go around swinging cats, kids. It’s just a saying, get me?”
Gabe and Nina swapped perplexed looks.
“Anyway, you can’t swing a cat without hitting a Coyote around here. I think we’re probably the most densely populated group in the country. Note that I didn’t say most populated—just the most densely populated in a given space. Works to our advantage, I guess.” He shrugged and got moving toward the door. “Unfortunately, a Coyote doesn’t own this place, so we’ve got absolutely no clout here.”
Jim held the door open and waved them all in. “After you. After you.”
Eric looked down at Maria whose expression was full of, “Ohhhh-kay.”
He gave her shoulder a squeeze, and whispered, “Yeah?” She would have known if something was emotionally off about the guy or if he was up to anything malicious, even if she couldn’t quite discern what.
“Yeah. It’s all right.”
Eric brought up the rear just to make sure Marty didn’t get any suddenly stupid ideas like fleeing or otherwise arousing their hosts’ annoyance.
Grumbling all the while, the hostess pushed together some tables and tossed some menus onto it before walking away.
“Excuse the hell out of us for interrupting your navel-gazing, lady,” Jim muttered.
Maria and Marty flanked the kids and sat along one side of the table, Jim took one end, Eric took the other, and Jim’s buddies sat on the other long edge with their backs to the room.
“Okay, this is crowded. We’re sitting four-to-two.” Maria sidled around the table and plopped into the seat between the large men. Her forehead furrowed as she studied the menu, and the Coyotes studied her.
Eric cleared his throat and cracked his knuckles.
Jim snorted again as the waiter arrived.
“Ugh, not you again,” the waiter said with an exasperated expulsion of air.
“My money’s as good as anyone else’s, and legally obtained, too. That’s more than I can say for some folks.”
“You threatened to rough me up last time.”
“Because you threatened to spit in my food.”
“I did not!”
Jim’s lieutenants soundly objected.
The waiter grimaced. “Maybe I did. I don’t know. I forget stuff. I’m sure I had a good reason to say it, but I really wouldn’t do it.”
“Then why say it?”
“Because you were being difficult!”
“Whatever happened to the customer is always right?”
“That only pertains to things that are actually on the menu. You can’t come in here and order stuff we haven’t had on the menu for six months and then get pissy when I say we don’t have it.”
“I didn’t get pissy. I merely asked if you could ask the cook if the ingredients for it were still back there. Certainly the cashier could ring up the items a la carte.”
The waiter huffed.
Jim set his gaze on Maria. “You wouldn’t think it would be so hard to get corned beef hash in a restaurant that serves breakfast all day, right?”
“No, you wouldn’t think,” she conceded.
“Can we get some coffee?” Eric asked.
Jim seemed like the kind of guy who’d belabor a point to death, and if Eric didn’t get some food soon, he was going to start chewing the table. “Fresh coffee, please? And if possible, can you brew it dark? I don’t know if you’re using pre-measured discs or scooping, but either way, please double the grounds and maybe bring a pot of hot water for anyone at the table who can’t tolerate it at that stren
gth and needs to dilute it.”
The waiter turned slowly to Eric, his eyebrows inching up more and more the longer he stared. “Oh, hello. Who are you?”
“Just a visitor.”
The waiter clucked his tongue and shook his head. “And already tangled up in this bunch? That’s a nice welcome to the town, for sure. I’ll get your coffee, handsome.” He waved dismissively at everyone else at the table. “The rest of youse guys can figure out what you want to eat.”
He strutted away, and four pairs of eyes turned to Eric. The other three pairs belonged to the kids who were distracted by menus and by Marty who was imploring the kids to eat something substantial from the adult menu.
He likes those kids.
With her fist propping up the side of her head, Maria cleared her throat and narrowed her eyes at Eric.
“What?” he asked.
“Obviously the cranky waiter has taken a shine to you.”
“I have that effect on people sometimes. It’s the Falk charm.” He turned the menu page and his stomach gave a lurch upon his sighting of the pile of carbs and whipped cream presented in the featured meal’s image.
“I’m familiar with the Falk charm,” Maria said. “Remember, your sister is my frequent partner and we were roommates up until recently.”
“So you know how we roll.”
There was a platter with an entire ham steak. He was skeptical about how it’d be prepared that far north, and being a consummate Southerner, he liked his prepared a certain way, but his inner bear was way less picky about that shit than the man part of him was.
“Astrid’s so-called charm includes such delightful interpersonal relationship-building strategies as dropping a knife point-end down on the foot of guy who gets too close to her back.”
“Mmm, I like the sound of her,” one of Jim’s buds said.
Eric somehow managed to tamp down a growl.
Maria waved a dismissive hand at him. “Oh, she’s married, and to a guy she’s never once beaten up. Sorry, guys.”
“Well, darn.” Jim put his elbows on the table and twined his fingers. “What about you?”
“What about me?”