by Moxie North
Pacific Northwest Weres:
Cougar’s Victory
By Moxie North
“Will you stay tonight with me? Please, sweetness?” he asked between kisses.
Effie had no intention of moving away from the sexy man on top of her. No way, no how.
“I’ll stay, but there better be pancakes in the morning. I get very cranky without my morning carbs,” she warned.
“Duly noted,” he growled and kissed her hard again. Sliding his hands down he reached for both of her hands and drew them above her head. He wrapped her fingers around the slats in the headboard.
Dax Hayes knew what it meant to be the Alpha of a cougar pack. He also knew that his responsibilities to family were his first priority. But Dax wanted more. He’d been around a long time and he simply wanted to find his One. His one true mate to start a family with. A temporary break and a fresh start was just what he needed.
Life had a way of kicking you when you were down. At least that’s what Effie Parks had come to believe. Growing up with a mother in jail and foster parents who weren’t cruel, but weren’t kind, left her fighting for every scrap of happiness. She didn’t ask for much, her needs were simple. Until she met Dax.
Do opposites attract or are some hurdles, human and shifter, too big to overcome?
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Kindle Edition
Table of Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Prologue
Effie Parks could hear her mother pounding on the Plexiglas window that had separated them during their conversation. Effie always hated visiting her mom at the prison. Years of humiliating trips arranged by foster care to see her mom. Cold sterile rooms with awkward cartoon characters painted on the walls. The prison’s attempt at trying to make the room look friendly instead of what it was, a cinderblock room where the tables and chairs were screwed to the ground.
Having your mom serving thirty years for drug smuggling and gun charges was not something you would bring up at slumber parties. Not that she had ever been invited to any. She was that kid. The one with the hand-me-down clothes and the generic, donated backpack. The one that bounced schools every time her foster family decided they didn’t want to deal with her anymore.
Effie tried not to be difficult. She was quiet mostly, having learned at home the more she disappeared the more she could avoid the losers and lowlifes her mother always allowed in their house. Seedy guys that smelled bad, drank a lot, and would pass out after shooting up or snorting something off a mirror on the table.
As she got older, Effie realized that she was totally on her own. If she was hungry she found food. If she was dirty she’d take a bath. And if she really needed something, she knew to steal the money when her mom was unconscious. She had done the best she could in elementary school. It was easier to blend in, little kids often had old clothes and dirty faces. But everything changed one night when men dressed all in black, broke down their door. Effie remembered hearing loud noises and angry voices yelling. ‘Police, everyone down!’ She’d hid under her blankets until they were ripped back and she was staring down the barrel of an assault rifle. The man above her had a vest on that read ATF.
After that she vaguely remembered going to a large facility with lots of other kids. They’d cleaned her up, fed her, and given her clean clothes. She’d refused to talk for a week. She was too scared to even realize what was happening. Slowly when it was clear her mom wasn’t getting out of jail anytime soon, her social worker started talking to her about foster care.
Her first foster family had a ton of kids. She was put into a room with two sets of bunk beds and three other girls. She at least got to stay in her school, but it was clear her teachers had heard of the change in her living arrangements. They started treating her differently. She was always clever and her teachers encouraged her to do well. Now they seemed to look at her with pity and focused their attention on other kids. It’s like they knew she was a lost cause.
She knew as soon as she hit eighteen she was going to be on her own. No family, at least none that her mother had ever shared with her or even friends to turn to. Her mom didn’t have friends and the neighbors were thrilled when the police had booted them out of their rundown house.
Effie’s rebellious streak grew as she hit the teenage years. She tried punk, then goth, nothing seemed to fit. Her foster families were never thrilled with her destruction of their bathrooms in her various attempts at dying her hair some crazy color.
Attempting to find an armor that would protect her, had her sporting jet black hair and metal studded clothes in the eighth grade. That didn’t fit as deep down she wasn’t really a depressed person. She was a realist that life generally sucked and hoping for more than that was a waste of time. Over the summer she learned about punk, loud music, spiked hair and a general disillusionment with the ‘establishment’.
Effie’s last attempt to separate herself in high school was her rave period. She traded her punk clothes for fuzzy boots and neon colored fishnets. The parties were great, but the lure of drugs and alcohol was something she fought to keep her distance from. She’d seen what happens when you let that addiction into your life.
When she was sixteen she was moved for the fifth and final time, to a lovely couple, who were in their sixties, Mark and Claire. They had been empty nesters for years and wanted to help older kids transition out of the foster system. They were a godsend. Mark and Claire were the ones that gave Effie a direction and much needed affection. She had always loved to draw. It was her only outlet in an often violent and lonely world. They encouraged her to expand her skills. Helping her to apply for scholarships to an art institute and most importantly, helping Effie to legally have her last name changed.
She had always hated her name. Buckley. In her small town in eastern Washington the name Elvira Buckley was synonymous with white trash. Everyone knew who her mother was and what she was willing to do for attention, a hit, a mattress to sleep on. Effie knew moving forward she needed to cut ties with the woman that gave birth to her, but was never a mother.
That was also the year she met Cassidy. Cassie was a foster kid that had been in the system longer than she had. She had lots of blood family, but none of them were fit to take care of her. They met at a summer camp for foster kids and their friendship was sealed in mosquito bites and s’mores. Before Cassie, Effie had been totally alo
ne. Now Cassie was her family.
The banging was fading behind her. She was sure her mother was still screaming she was an ungrateful whore and any other terrible name she could think of. This was the last time Effie Buckley would be visiting her mother. She was eighteen today and the second she walked out of the doors to the prison she was Effie Parks, graphic artist and bad mama-jama.
Chapter 1
Flick.
The cork from the wine bottle that Dax Hayes was drinking out of spun on the table. The aromatic wine had soaked into the cork and was now swirling back into the air. He’d worked himself through a full bottle as he sat in his rented house in Clark. A small town in the eastern part of Washington state. Dax had been in this depressing little house for the last six months. Getting a new vineyard up and running was more work than he’d expected.
He wasn’t opposed to hard work, he’d been working since his parents could get him into the fields. Enjoying the job wasn’t the problem, maybe it was the loneliness he wasn’t prepared for. He thought getting away from his pack and family was what he wanted. He never realized being away would tear at his heart a little more every day.
Growing up in a family that grew grapes and made wine only prepared Dax for the business side. Not the boredom of waiting for everything that had to happen first. When he was born, his parents had already established their business. Sebastian and Lilibeth Hayes were from old successful families and building a wine empire was an easy plan for them.
Now Dax wanted something of his own. He also needed a break from the demands of being the Alpha of his family pack. He’d taken over from his father when he came of age. Leading a cougar pack like theirs was pretty easy.
They were an old pack with many generations and rarely had any problems where Dax needed to intercede. But there was still the understanding that he was responsible for the health and well-being of each member. The past few decades had been more than monotonous. Wine was easy, the grapes grew, you harvested them, and then waited.
The biggest excitement they’d had was a few years ago when an employee set fire to one of the fields. The man was distraught after losing his brother in a tragic accident. They later found out the accident was the result of the employee seeing Dax and his brothers shifting one night before a run. When the man had found out about his family he had been scared enough to hide in a large piece of equipment that ultimately killed him.
Unaware that the sibling of the man had also had found out they were shifters, the situation escalated, then spread to Washington State and the Rochon family, a clan of bear shifters that ran timber on the Olympic Peninsula. Although the perpetrator had been dealt with and his sister Mackenzie had gotten a mate out of the deal, life was still pretty quiet.
At fifty-one, Dax had seen a lot. Being a cougar shifter allowed him to age slower than humans. He didn’t look a day over thirty-five. He was tall, six-foot-two, and strongly muscled. Like the rest of his family they were all statuesque, as his mother would say. Golden blond hair that would translate into tawny colored coats on their cats.
As soon as Dax moved to Washington he’d headed to a local hair salon and had his hair dyed dark. His mother would be horrified, but Dax was trying to find another version of himself, another identity away from his family.
Dax’s cougar was exactly like him. Bold, confident and very sure of himself. They were in perfect symbiosis. They made a decision, they planned, and executed. They also agreed that they were lonely. After years of his mother’s matchmaking, Dax had met plenty of women, but never The One. That one true mate destined for him alone. Sex was, well, just sex. It was like pizza, even bad pizza was still good. But not great.
“Mmm….pizza,” Dax said aloud.
Looking around the bland room, the beige rented furniture making everything seem bleak. He’d been looking for a home, but hadn’t had much luck. The vineyard was small but had excellent soil. The previous owners had built it as a small retirement investment. Now they were no longer able to run it and were more than happy to sell it to Dax for their full asking price. Originally a farm that grew potatoes and wheat, it came with 20 acres of planted vines and 40 additional acres that had been sitting fallow for years. Dax saw potential.
“Potential for a catastrophic failure,” he mumbled to himself.
Maybe he shouldn’t have drunk the entire bottle on an empty stomach. Or maybe his melancholy was more about homesickness. He’d been alone setting up the business by himself. He’d only managed a few trips to visit his sister Mackenzie. She was due to pop out Dax’s first niece or nephew any day.
He was keeping his fingers crossed that the baby would take after his sister and be a cougar. Not that he wouldn’t love a little bear cub to spoil, but his mom would be over the moon if their genetics dominated.
“To the future!” he saluted the empty room.
He really shouldn’t be such a sad sack. Maybe he should just call and talk to his dad. That usually was a good pep talk. The chance that his mother would answer kept him from making that call. Dax let a shudder roll over him. He loved his mother, thought she was a great, strong, opinionated lady. But she was not thrilled with his move away from the family.
She thought it was a betrayal leaving them all alone with his two younger brothers Everett and Stryker to handle the business and their sixty or so employees. She never missed the opportunity to share her disappointment in Dax’s decision to move.
But this year’s crop at the little mom and pop vineyard was going to be good. The other acres were prepped for planting. It would take a few years to reap the benefits from them but those too looked promising. His first run was going to be small, but with his expertise, he hoped to make it a sought after bottle.
Speaking of bottle, he needed to get his marketing up and running, he thought. He was going to use his family’s PR company but then looked around his small community and thought to spread the wealth a little bit. Knowing he wanted this vineyard to be a new face for their business he Googled “graphic design” and it gave him two listings close to his zip code.
Victorygurl Designs had an amazing website. Modern and hip, the portfolio was just what he was looking for. This was a chance to refresh the Hayes Family Vineyards with a new look for a new winery. He’d sent off an email before opening the bottle of wine. Hopefully the designer would get back to him with great ideas. Wanting to see what kind of artistic ability they had with minimal direction, Dax asked that they think of the winery concept, keep it local and make sure it was modern. That was it. From the website, he expected big things.
Chapter 2
“Who ate the last of the cheesy poofs?”
Effie rolled her eyes hearing Cassie bellow from the kitchen. Not that Cass needed to yell, their apartment, if you could call it that, was the size of a shoebox. Okay, maybe not a shoebox, possibly a toaster oven. Wait, how big was a toaster oven? Effie had no clue, toaster ovens were a luxury item in her world. Food came out of boxes that were tossed into a microwave. That was the extent of her culinary prowess.
Any money she made went to hair products and kick-ass clothes. She had a bit of an addiction. Luckily her amazing computer that she worked on from home was a gift from her last foster parents. Once a month she still had dinner with them even though she’d moved out five years ago. They were the only other constant in her life outside of her BFF.
But it took money to keep her hair dyed the inkiest of blacks. And her penchant for nice red lipstick meant funds were always running low. Not that the tiny studio apartment her and Cassie rented from their sleazy landlord was worth any money at all. The girls were sure this closet was probably against about a million building violations, but it was in a building with a business below and no real neighbors.
Sure their apartment tended to smell like cooking grease and bacon most of the time. But having a greasy spoon downstairs with an owner that liked them meant they usually didn’t go hungry.
Effie and Cass had managed to cover most of the f
aded paint and water stained walls with posters and band flyers. They were liberal with the application of air fresheners and incense to mask the general dankness of the place. For two single girls, barely scraping together a living, it beat the alternatives.
“You ate them, and you know it! Don’t try to blame that on me. Your orange fingers are evidence of your crimes. You’ve been caught orange handed,” Effie yelled back.
Flopping onto their broke down couch that they had found abandoned on a street corner with a free sign, Cassie let out a dramatic sigh. “Let’s go do something,” she moaned.
“I can’t and you know it. This is a potential real life client. Which means real life money, you know the kind that buys cheesy poofs and those little pizza roll things you like so much,” Effie reminded Cassie.
“Hhmph, well, they are delicious. But I don’t have a shift at the shop until tonight. Stupid Bryan is covering cause they didn’t have any appointments scheduled until later.”
Cassie worked as a receptionist at a tattoo parlor. It was a nice one, the kind with fancy furniture and didn’t smell like old biker guy. Plus the guys at the shop were awesome and always gave Effie and Cass a discount. Effie got her first tattoo the same week she visited her mother for the last time. It was a week of firsts.
The broken heart on her shoulder reminded her that she only had herself to rely on. Her destiny was whatever she made it to be. The following years she’d added to her collection. Whenever something moved her or she wanted to celebrate a milestone she added to her ink.
She had a hand drawn abstract design she’d made herself running up her bicep. That she got after she completed her first year in art school. It was free form and had all the colors of the rainbow.
There was the black crow that she had put on her shoulder blade that reminded her of the four months she slept in her car and a noisy crow would wake her up early in the morning. The little bastard would sit on the power line above her car and caw so loud she’d bury her head to try and get a few more hours of sleep.