by T. S. Joyce
“You should’ve worn the pajamas.”
“Why?”
“Because what am I going to do with a city slickin’ woman who couldn’t handle one day out in the woods? Hmm? You’re too pretty. This is a waste of time.”
Aurora wrenched her voice up an octave. “You think I’m too pretty?”
“That’s the only thing you heard? Really?”
“It’s your first compliment to me. I’m going to reward you by buying your first beer.” She held a finger up. “Oh, garçon,” she called in a fancy accent. “One of your best IPA’s please.”
“My name is Gary,” the bartender said.
“I’m not drinking that shit. Give me something cheap,” Moore told him. “Probably get this one a fuckin’ cosmo or something.”
She wanted to deny that she liked cosmos, but they were delicious. “That works, thank you.” She offered Moore and empty smile. “What shall we talk about, lover?”
He rolled his eyes closed and sighed heavily. When he opened them again, his voice turned super-growly as he gritted out, “Do you like animals?”
“Love them.”
“What kinds of animals?”
“Baby ducks, baby pandas, baby seahorses, baby turtles, baby puppies, and baby donkeys.”
“None of those are predator animals.”
“Pretty sure seahorses eat seaweed, so the seaweed would disagree with you.”
Moore pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes again for a few moments. Fine with her, now was her chance to adjust her top again. Dang thing kept sliding everywhere and hiding her best assets. Or should she say…breast assets. Ha.
Gary brought over their drinks and said, “Might as well take your order, too. Sherry found herself a new boyfriend at table six and you’ll be waiting all night for her to serve you.” He pointed his pen at a pretty redhead who was leaning on the wall next to a four-top of good old boys.
“Go on, get it girl,” Aurora murmured.
Gary gave her an empty smile. “Maybe not on the job though.”
“I’ll have the Big Country Dinner with extra gravy on my chicken fried steak. Oh, and a side of turnip greens. And fried okra.”
Moore was almost, almost smiling. Well, his lips twitched and that was close enough. “You came to a steak place to get that?” he asked.
“It’s steak that’s fried. And I’m spiraling from my breakup, stop judging me.”
“Your break up from that dude you were in here with last week?” Gary asked.
Aww, she was memorable!
“Pretty sure he banged a girl in the bathroom on your date.”
Aurora scrunched up her face. “What?”
“Yeah, he and some blonde took up the bathroom for twenty minutes and came out a minute apart.”
“Oh.” Gross. “Well, I wondered why he was taking so long to call his mom outside. That’s…unattractive.”
“She has great taste in men,” Moore deadpanned, the jerk.
Aurora took a pull of her drink, then muttered sarcastically, “Clearly I’ve upgraded.”
Gary snorted rudely, and then took Moore’s order.
“Who orders three steaks and no sides?” she asked him.
“Thought this was a no judgment dinner.” He leaned back in his chair and stretched his long leg out. Geez, they reached all the way past her. Was his daddy a telephone pole? “Besides, there’s no way you’ll eat all of yours. I’ll have plenty of sides to eat.”
“We’re already sharing food? That’s date-number-two stuff.”
“Look, the internet said girls like to talk about themselves, so let’s do that until the food gets here.”
“Do what?” she asked.
He gestured to her. “Talk about yourself. One, two, three, go.” He was so frowny.
“Uh okay, it all started the day my mom and dad were real horny, and then I was a little zygote—”
“Never mind, let’s just sit here in silence.”
“Okay, okay. Let’s see. My name is Aurora Azalea Shelton, I’m thirty-five years old, never been married, but have had lots of boyfriends. I’ll just give you all my red flags at once so we can get the shock out of the way. The good Lord knows I’ve tried to find the man of my dreams. No kids, not even one. I have lots of baggage and trust issues and am a stage-five clinger who needs constant attention and reassurance. I don’t like when boys sleep with other girls in bathrooms on our second date,” she admitted, flicking her fingers toward the restroom. “I’m the owner of Azalea’s Interior Décor, and have a passion for making people’s living spaces into something that makes them excited to come home to. Probably should’ve set up my business in a town that cares about interior décor. Favorite smell: French toast in the morning. Favorite color: lavender with cream edges. Favorite bird: woodpecker because it has two words for wiener in the name. Favorite feeling: coming home after a long day and taking my bra off. Favorite hobbies: knitting, watching military reunion videos until I cry, antique shopping, and overthinking.” Aurora grinned. “Now you go.”
Moore was just staring at her. Just…staring. Not a muscle moved, not a hair wafted in the restaurant breeze blowing from the AC vent above them, not an eye twitched.
Maybe she broke him. “Want to take a sip of your beer?”
He nodded jerkily and then tipped the bottle up and downed the whole thing.
“Nicely done. Now your turn. Tell me about you.”
“Uuuuuh.” His voice sounded very growly. “My name is Moore and I’m overwhelmed with the number of words you just said in a row.”
“You can do better than that. What’s your birth sign?”
“My birth sign?”
“When is your birthday?”
“April 9th.”
“An Aries. Nice. Feisty, grrrr.”
“I don’t know what’s happening,” he muttered.
“Tell me more about yourself so I can decide if I like you or not.”
“I’m living in a nightmare,” he muttered so softly under his breath, she almost missed it. She liked grumpy men though. Always had. The grumpies were cute. “I’m Moore and I live in the mountains.”
She waited but apparently the was the whole spiel. “Okay, what do you do for work?”
“Make furniture.”
“Oooh! A woodworker. That’s hot. What kind of furniture?”
“The kind you sit on.”
She giggled. “Okay, so chairs. Do you have any pictures of your work?”
He blinked slowly and pulled out his phone. She’d never seen a man look so baffled by his life as he pulled up a picture and slid his phone across the table.
The picture was of the inside of a nice barn, and rows of rocking chairs were lined against a back wall. And front-and-center, on a sawdust-peppered table, was a set of four dining chairs made from rustic wood. “Oh my gosh! Moore!”
He startled at the volume of her voice. “What?”
“These are incredible! I have clients who would die for these kinds of unique pieces.”
“I don’t need your clients. All those pieces are spoken for.”
“So you’re good at the sales part of it, too!”
“Fuck no. I would eat everyone if I had to do customer service. I have a middle man from Salt Lake who sends an eighteen-wheeler and a check to my place at the end of every month, and he jacks my prices up and sells the pieces to stores or independent buyers. I don’t care how much they have to pay. I only care that my buyer gives me the price I set. Can we…”
“Can we what?”
“Can we just sit here for a minute. This is a lot of talking.”
“Aaah, a quiet man. So mysterious. I like it.” She zipped her lips and sipped on her cosmo and counted in her head. One, two, three, four…
He only made it to second number fifty-three before he said, “I’m thirty-five also, and I like being alone, my favorite smell: gasoline at the pump. Favorite color: black. Favorite bird: anything but a crow. Favorite feeling: a succ
essful hunt. Favorite hobbies: hunting.”
“Oh, I know how to make venison jerky. What do you hunt?”
Moore answered simply, “Everything.”
Huh. He wasn’t alone in these parts. They were a small town surrounded by mountains. Hunting season was a big deal.
“Where did you learn to make venison jerky?” he asked.
“My dad. He was the best at meat. Which is a weird brag, but he used to enter in those barbecue competitions all over the US, and he would bring me. He had a team and a trailer with his logo and sponsors and everything. Now he just cooks for holidays, but back in his prime? Whoooo, boy, you have never tasted better meat.”
After that, he was quiet for a couple minutes, but that was okay. Aurora was starting to figure out his pace. He liked to talk, and then take breaks to process before he went back to talking again. She focused on the delicious meal Gary set in front of her while he mulled over what she’d told him.
And just as she suspected he would, he took his time in silence, then asked her a question. “Are your parents still together?”
“Yep! Forty-nine years strong! They met when they were kids, which is probably part of my problem,” she admitted, sawing into her fried steak.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
She dipped her bite in gravy and shoved it in her maw. A few chews later and she said, “I grew up watching this incredible love story. They are soul mates. Best friends. Do everything together, but they met when they were kids, and I grew up thinking that’s how it was supposed to be. You meet another kid and fall in love and live your whole lives together. And when that didn’t happen, I thought something was wrong with me, and I searched more desperately, and put up with more bullshit than I should’ve from men, and I stayed in relationships that wasted my time too long and too often. I probably missed my soulmate by sticking with dipshits I had no business giving thirty-four chances to.”
Moore snorted.
Aurora swallowed her delicious bite. “What about you? Are your parents still together?”
“Parents are dead.”
“Both of them?” she asked in shock.
“Yup. And you can stop feeling sorry for me or them. They are exactly where they are supposed to be.”
“Moore! You’re an orphan. That’s a tragic story. How did they die?”
“Bear attack,” he said simply.
“Oh my gosh! They got eaten by a bear?”
Moore looked disgusted. “No bear would want to eat them. Evil has a taste.”
She didn’t understand. “You didn’t like your parents?”
Moore swallowed down a bite of steak and studied her. “I don’t like many things.”
“What do you like?”
“My cabin. My mountain. My work. My quiet life. Those are the things that I’ve depended on. Those are the things that make sense.”
“You didn’t list any people,” she said softly.
“People let you down.” He lowered his attention to his dinner and got quiet again.
“Yes, people let you down,” she said after a couple minutes of silence, “But it’s up to you to build the relationships you want. Oh…” She grinned in surprise at herself. “Oh that was good. I should be a therapist! I’m writing that in the notes of my phone.” She dragged her phone out of her oversize purse and started a new notes section. “People,” she muttered out loud as she talked, “Let you down, but it’s up to you to keep building the relationships you want. Period. Save.” She looked up at him. “What’s your social media handle? I’ll send you a copy of this so you can go back a year from now when you are thinking about that hot girl you took out to the Steak Shack, and you can read this and be reminded of my genius and depth.”
“Social media is for social people.”
“Mmmmm, disagree. Social media is also for non-social people who like to hole up in their houses and post about their house plants and pet stick bugs.”
“I just have a phone number,” he growled out.
“Gimme them digits.”
He frowned at her for a long time. Frowned and chewed, and chewed and frowned. And then at last, he recited his number. It had a sixty-nine in it, haha.
She texted him a screenshot of her genius quote and also a meme of a cat leaping at someone’s face with it’s claws out that said, me when someone interrupts my reading time.
He responded with a text that said, Humans are weird, but that was okay, because humans really were weird. And also blobfishes and goblin sharks and walruses. The whole world was weird, really. And now she had his number, since he’d texted her back.
“I’m going to text you weird memes all the time now, okay?” she asked.
“Please don’t.”
Send. She’d already sent him three she’d saved, and then sat there with a plastered smile on her face as he sighed and looked at the little presents on his phone screen.
“Shoot. Me,” he muttered.
He definitely liked her. Aurora raised her fingers to Gary. “He wants you to shoot us. Two shots. Your cheapest whiskey, garçon.”
And then Gary and Moore donned matching sad faces, and she giggled because tonight had turned out to be so unexpected. She didn’t even remember Bathroom-Diddler-What’s-His-Nuts anymore.
Now, she had a new crush.
Screw her three-month plan for self-care.
It was time to make Moore fall madly in love with her.
Chapter Three
Moore was exhausted. How could a couple hours with a human female drain him this entirely?
He sagged onto his couch and tossed his keys on the table.
Who in their right mind considered a seahorse to be a predator? If she found out what he was, she would run for the hills.
Maybe he should show her early on. She’d shared her red flags, which were many, but his major red flag was that he turned into a grizzly bear and wanted to annihilate everything. Should he tell her he was only using her to build a bond so he could be powerful enough to murder his brothers? Probably should save that for date number three.
Oh God, he was actually considering another date with the creature. She talked a lot. A. Lot.
How did his brothers tolerate this? Human women glued eyelashes to their eyelids. Glued them. With glue.
He couldn’t even muster the energy to start a fire in the fireplace. He just stared at the pile of ashes inside of it. That wasn’t like him. Moore survived by routine. Every day was the same. It had to be for a monster. Any deviation made him want to change into his bear and cause chaos. Not tonight though. Tonight, his bear sat silent inside of him, thinking about the girl. His skin wasn’t even tingling for a change, like it usually did this time every day. The animal wasn’t clawing to escape him, or forcing his way out of him. He was just…still.
The woman had talked him into exhaustion, clearly.
Huh. That was kind of nice. This…just sitting here in his home, not needing to do anything, just existing. Just relaxing.
Did seahorses really eat seaweed? Her parents were still together. They were the opposite of his parents. What would she do if she knew he killed his mom and dad? Moore sat up and cracked his knuckles. Would a human ever be able to understand the reasons why he’d had to do it? A tiny part of him wanted her to understand. Stupid. That kind of hope was stupid.
He clasped his hands hard and shook his head. This was just a means to an end of his brothers. He just needed the bond from her, not to get curious about her feelings and reactions. She was a human. She was a rebellion. She was a way for him to break the rules like his brothers had done and punish them with the results.
Caw, caw, caw.
Chills lifted on his forearms. God, he hated the cries of the crows. Especially that one.
He slid his glare to the window.
Fuckin’ Krome. Nothing he ever did would get the crows off their backs.
Moore stood and made his way to the door, threw it open to find Krome in his human skin. Bear shifte
rs were magic. Crow shifters were dark magic. They changed straight from crows to fully clothed humans, and back again like the transformation didn’t hurt at all.
Krome was leaning on the railing of Moore’s porch, rubbing the tingles out of his hands. He had dark hair, and eyes as black as pitch to match that soul of his.
“You have some nuts to show up in my territory. What do you want?” Moore demanded. The bear remained silent inside of him. Watchful and silent.
“You have one of ours,” Krome said simply.
“Look around, you fuckstick. I don’t have anything that belongs to you.”
“Bricken has paired up with Trinity. Her son is ours.”
Moore’s laugh echoed through his woods, and in a flash, he was on Krome, fueled by the anger he always had such abundant access to. His fingers closed around the crow king’s neck and he snarled out his warning. “Come on my property with your bullshit again, and I’ll pop that head right off your neck. Understand?”
Krome’s smile was dark and empty. And in a moment, he blurred from out of Moore’s grasp into the middle of the snowy yard.
“You keep racking up debts to me,” Krome said. “Your threats rack up more. Your brothers broke the rules. You haven’t killed them yet. You’re breaking the rules. This pact was the only reason you are allowed to stay in our territory.”
“It’s our territory, too.”
“For two generations. Our history here stretches back a millennium. Squatters, we can tolerate, but invaders? The deal was no reproducing. You agreed to that. You also agreed you would end anyone who broke the rules, and yet your brothers are still breathing. Now, I’m losing my patience. Our young are treasured, and rare. I can’t have one of your kind raising Tucker. Bricken is in my way. Aux is getting in my way. You’re in my way. You can follow through with our deal, or I can kill them for you. I’ll take their mates with them though, and I know what a softie you really are. You are human sympathizer. That’s why you killed your parents, right, Moore? To protect the sad little creatures in town? Trinity and Gwen will bleed, and you’ll have it on your hands. Your brothers will die either way. You do it humanely and fast, or we’ll do it.” Krome’s eyes flashed with hatred. “And we will drag it out and include their mates. We will make sure you live with the knowledge of what broken promises to the Crow Blooded will do. You made a promise.”