Buck Naked

by Evangeline Anderson

  There was no time for breakfast either, but it wouldn’t have mattered if she had all the time in the world. She hadn’t wanted to bring perishables on the long move up from Florida so the only food in the house was an ancient dusty box of Count Chocula breakfast cereal and a pack of Gatorade gum. Both items looked like they had been left over from the late seventies or early eighties, which was presumably the last time the cabin had been inhabited.

  Sadie fully intended to go by the only grocery store in town—which happened to be a Piggly Wiggly—and do a full shop to stock up later. But for now, she was focused on her first day of work.

  Going to the closet, she pulled out a modest business skirt and jacket combination. It might be overkill for her first day on the job but she wanted to look nice.

  She frowned as she tried on a bra that no longer fit exactly right. Well, maybe Samantha was right and her body was just reacting favorably to her recent divorce from her ex. Maybe it was a—What did you call it? One of those things that happened to your body because of your mind? Oh right—maybe it was a psychosomatic reaction to getting away from Jeff.

  Deep down, she had doubts about that but she refused to let them bother her. After all, she was looking and feeling better—why complain? Better to just try to make a normal life and routine for herself in Cougarville.

  “No drama, no trauma, no craziness. Nothing but smooth sailing from here on out, Sadie,” she said, addressing her image in the mirror as she finished getting dressed.

  Though she didn’t know it, she had never been more wrong in her life.

  Two

  Mathis Blackwell let out an irritated growl as he stomped back to his cabin and dumped the load of firewood he’d been carrying onto the neatly stacked pile on his front porch. Goddamnit—why couldn’t he get the image of his new neighbor out of his head?

  He snorted. Like she was a real neighbor and not just a plant by Keller. The leader of the local Den was getting too fucking big for his britches lately but this was a completely unexpected tactic.

  The cabin next to his land had been vacant for years—since before he’d bought the land, built his own cabin, and moved in. It had been held in trust by some unknown person who didn’t seem likely to ever appear, which was just the way Mathis liked it. The empty cabin and nonexistent neighbor had been one of the main selling points—the reason he’d bought his property in the first place, ten years ago after his mate had died.

  Mathis winced. The thought of Kathleen was still painful, even after all this time. Remembering her was like poking a half-healed wound with a sharp stick. Some might say it was his own fault—that he never allowed the wound to heal. But his kind mated for life and he wasn’t about to forget his wife and his love for her just because she’d been gone for a while.

  Which was one reason he was so pissed off about the show his neighbor had been putting on that morning. Damn it, he didn’t need to be thinking about that when his love had died with Kathleen.

  Unbidden, his mind showed him the scene that was burned into his brain. His new neighbor’s full, lush curves and the long dark hair that fell in a rippling waterfall down to the small of her back . . . her big brown eyes . . . the way she’d been cupping her full breasts, almost like she was offering them . . .

  He shook his head, trying unsuccessfully to push the image away. This was it—the last straw. Keller had been angling for a fight for a long time, trying to find a way to annex Mathis’s land, which bordered the other Alpha’s hunting grounds. But this . . . this was a really low blow.

  Mathis had always stoically ignored the other male’s goading, no matter how Keller needled him. Bucks were patient and slow to anger, unlike the yowling Cats overrunning the town. But damn it, this was too much. Planting a Juvie in the cabin right beside Mathis’s land to antagonize him was going a step too far.

  At first he’d thought he could ignore her. And the two times she’d tried to speak to him, that was exactly what he had done. Just turned his head and kept on walking, even when she called his name.

  Which was probably what had made her decide to put on that little “display” this morning. Just remembering it made his cock throb angrily in his jeans, like a clenched fist.

  Probably wasn’t her idea. Keller probably put her up to it.

  The little Juvie had probably told the other Alpha she was getting nowhere with Mathis, so Keller had told her to step up her game. Hence the little peep show, just at the time when he gathered firewood every morning.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse. It was only days until the full moon and worse, it was early autumn.

  Rutting season.

  Well, it’s not going to work. With angry movements, Mathis stripped off his jacket and stomped to clean his boots before walking into the snug bachelor cabin he’d built with his own hands. I don’t care how gorgeous she is—no fuckin’ Juvie is gonna mess with my head.

  He walked through the living room and kitchen and headed straight for the bathroom with its huge soaking tub and stone walls. The tub in particular came in handy. Nights when he changed were always strenuous—Shifting was painful and hard on the muscles. Come sunrise after he cantered home, he liked to draw a steaming hot bath and soak until he felt like himself again.

  But it wasn’t a bath he was after now. Going to the medicine cabinet, Mathis opened it and took out a brown bottle half filled with gel capsules containing a green and brown powder. He dry swallowed one and then, after considering a moment, took another.

  There—that should take care of business.

  He leaned against the sink and waited for the anti-rut meds to work. Fiona ShadowTree, Cougarville’s resident pharmacist slash medicine woman, made them in her compounding pharmacy over on Main Street. The woman was half Irish, half Cherokee, and all witch, if you believed the rumors.

  Mathis didn’t. Fiona might be a little mysterious at times but she was a damn fine pharmacist—the meds she’d made him had never failed. Not in the ten years since his Kathleen had died had he gone into rut. And he didn’t intend to break his record now.

  Unfortunately, his cock had other ideas. An hour later, it was still hard, distracting him from the work he was trying to do on the latest project in his woodworking studio. It was a custom-built rocking chair and the order was due soon—he had to get it done. But his damn libido kept distracting him.

  Mathis laid down his tools and stared at his crotch, frowning. Fiona’s medicine had never failed him before. In fact, it usually took only about ten minutes to work. What the hell was going on?

  He went back to the medicine chest and looked at the plain brown bottle. Well, these were left over from last season. Maybe they’d lost their effectiveness.

  Only that had never happened before. What if they weren’t going to work this time? Fiona had warned him repeatedly about flouting the will of Lady Moon but Mathis had always ignored her—he didn’t believe in that mystical mumbo jumbo. Sure, a lot of Shifters believed there was a higher power—usually connected to the moon—that watched over them but he’d never seen any evidence of such an entity.

  If there was a Lady Moon, where had she been when his Kathleen got sick? When the doctors couldn’t save her? Where was the miracle he’d begged and prayed for? The moment his mate had died, any faith he’d ever had had died with her.

  And I’m not going to start being superstitious now. Mathis shoved the pills back. It’s that damn Juvie—she’s the reason I’m having this fucking problem.

  He thought of her again—her firm, high breasts and long brown hair. And most of all, the enticing scent that wafted from her cabin to his, calling to him like a genie let out of its bottle, promising to grant his every sexual wish. God, it was fucking indecent the way she paraded around, letting her scent out in public like that. And it was only getting worse—stronger as the full moon got nearer.

  It was enough to drive any male crazy, and it was all Keller’s fault.

  Well, if it didn’t let up, Keller was going to
get the fight he’d been spoiling for. The Cat had better beware. Giant Elk might be herbivores and thus slower to anger than carnivore Shifters, but once you got one roused, you were calling down the wrath of God on yourself. Or at least, the wrath of a nine-foot-tall, fifteen-hundred-pound Buck. Add razor-sharp hooves and a twelve-foot rack of antlers into the equation and you had a threat not even the most intrepid predator would care to face.

  As Mathis threw another log on the fire and watched the sparks fly upward, he swore to himself that Keller was going to be sorry he’d pulled this move.

  Very fucking sorry indeed.

  Three

  Work was dead—completely dead. Sadie didn’t have a single customer the entire morning.

  Around lunchtime, she threw down her pen and stood up from the small wooden desk that had come with the office. She was more than willing to work through lunch if there was any work to do, but since no one was there she decided to go out and get some fresh air.

  Opening the glass door—which she had paid to have painted with BECKER ACCOUNTING in elegant, businesslike script—she stepped out into the crisp fall afternoon.

  It was a gorgeous day—cold enough to make her nose tingle but with a cloudless blue sky overhead and plenty of golden sunshine pouring down. The kind of day you never got in hot, sticky Tampa, Sadie mused. It made her want to stroll down the street, breathing in the deliciously chilly air while she explored her new town—not that there was much to explore.

  Sadie had used some of her divorce settlement to rent a tiny office space in downtown Cougarville on Main Street for her new one-woman accounting firm. It sounded prestigious until you realized that Main Street was nothing more than a two-lane road with a single traffic light.

  The road was lined with quaint small-town businesses—a diner called the Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy; the Sweet Stems Florist shop; the Friendly Bean coffeehouse; a compounding pharmacy called the Cougarville Chemist; Fox’s Auto Body Repair (YOU BROKE IT—WE CAN FIX IT! proclaimed their sign); and a tattoo parlor called Bad Decisions.

  This last business seemed a little out of place among the picturesque shops but it was near the end of Main Street, right beside a bar and grill called the Cougar’s Den.

  Sadie was intrigued by the Cougar’s Den, which looked more like a biker bar than a small-town local tavern, but not quite intrigued enough to venture in. She’d seen some pretty rough-looking types going through the bar’s dead-black door—somehow it didn’t look like a safe place for a woman alone. Or a place a middle-aged woman would want to hang out, for that matter.

  Not that she felt middle-aged anymore. At this moment, standing in the chilly, bright autumn day and breathing in the crisp, clean air, Sadie felt better than she had in years.

  Her lower back had bothered her since her early thirties, when she’d tried to lift something too heavy and had gotten a bulging disk for her pains. She’d also begun to develop bursitis in her right shoulder in the past few years and she had one creaky knee that was always stiff. But now these nagging aches and pains, which had been with her so long she’d begun to take them as a matter of course, were suddenly gone.

  It was weird—almost as weird as the way her body seemed to be firming up and the way she was losing her wrinkles and gray hair. But Sadie felt so good—so alive and energized and young and free—that she couldn’t find it in herself to be worried. She couldn’t remember feeling this good since college—way back before she’d met Jeff.

  Even the fact that she’d had no customers on her first day couldn’t dampen her mood. So what if she didn’t have any customers? She would damn well go and get some. Surely there must be one or two businesses up and down Main Street that could use the services of an accountant.

  Ducking back into her office, Sadie put on her coat and grabbed her purse and a stack of freshly printed business cards. Then she put out the little BACK SOON sign she’d bought at the hardware store and locked up to go explore Cougarville.

  “I tell you, they’re not working anymore! I took twice the recommended dosage and they’re not doing a damn thing.” Mathis slapped the bottle of green-and-brown pills down on the counter of the Cougarville Chemist and glared at the proprietor.

  Fiona ShadowTree was a woman of indeterminate age with a cable of thick auburn hair shot through with skeins of the purest silver—not white and not salt-and-pepper—silver. As usual she was wearing a colorful flowing caftan under her white smock coat and enough silver and turquoise jewelry for five women.

  On anyone else it might have looked odd, but Fiona had a certain gravitas about her—maybe it was her large dark eyes or the way she carried herself—her chin held high and her narrow shoulders straight and proud. For whatever reason, the look that would have screamed “crazy vagrant cat lady” on anyone else made Fiona look ancient and wise—like a gypsy princess or the medicine woman of some lost tribe.

  Now she turned those large dark eyes up to Mathis and shook her head.

  “I’ve told you over and over, my darling, you cannot circumvent the will of Lady Moon forever. I can make you a new batch of medicine but I doubt it will work if she doesn’t will it. Shifters are rare enough as it is without one of her finest Alphas withholding his seed.”

  Mathis rolled his eyes. He liked and respected Fiona but sometimes the mystical way she talked really got under his skin.

  “Look, I’m not ‘withholding my seed’—I’m just trying to keep my urges in check. Damn it, Fiona, you know why I don’t want to go into rut.”

  “Yes—you wish to abstain in order to preserve the memory of your lovely mate, gone these ten years. But Mathis, you’ve had time to grieve her many moons over now.”

  “It’s not just that and you know it,” he protested. “I wouldn’t be able to form a life-bond with another female. I’ve had my shot—it’s over and done.”

  She shook her head thoughtfully. “I don’t think so, Mathis—your mating with your beloved Kathleen was of a very short duration. I wouldn’t be surprised if you have a chance to form another bond, sometime in the near future. In fact, I think this rut is Lady Moon’s way of telling you she wants to grant you a second chance at love.”

  “Even if I believed in all that Lady Moon mumbo jumbo, who would I find?” he growled and for some reason the image of the tempting little Juvie next door flashed before his eyes. He pushed it irritably away. “Cougarville is tiny and all the female Shifters and Shifter-sympathizers are taken,” he pointed out.

  “Are they?” Fiona gave him a penetrating stare, which made him look away uncomfortably.

  “Well . . . yes.” He raked a hand through his rough black hair. “If I wanted to get mated again I’d have to go out and find some outside female. Then I’d either have to lie to her about being a Shifter, or explain what I am and hope she doesn’t think I’m crazy. Which, let’s be honest, almost anyone who doesn’t know about us would.”

  “There are those among the non-Shifters who are believers.”

  “Right. Mostly Goth girls who want to believe in vampires and werewolves and any other damn paranormal thing they think can get them off. I’m not interested in dating some freak. And even if I could find a female who’d take me as I am, it’s not like I could pass on the Shifter Gene,” Mathis pointed out. “You know only females who have the Gene and have gone through Rejuvenation can bear Shifter babies.”

  “And you’re certain there are no Rejuvenated females you might set your sights on?”

  She lifted her eyebrows and looked past him, out the plate-glass window of her shop, which proclaimed COUGARVILLE CHEMIST in red block letters.

  “None that I—” Mathis turned around to see whom she was staring at and the words died on his lips. Coming into the shop was his new neighbor.

  The bell over the door jingled and then she was there, her cheeks pink and her brown eyes bright from the nippy air outside. Her long dark hair seemed to crackle with life and her hourglass figure, wrapped in a snug navy peacoat, was enough to make his palm
s itch to cup her curves.

  But it wasn’t the way she looked that got to him—it was the way she smelled. Her scent—that ripe, devastatingly feminine fragrance of a female going through Rejuvenation—suddenly filled the air of the small pharmacy. A gust of wind blew through the door as it swung shut behind her, carrying the maddening fragrance straight to Mathis’s nose.

  He was instantly and painfully hard.

  “Hi there,” his neighbor started, her eyes fixed on Fiona. “I’m Sadie Becker and I—” Then she saw Mathis and the bright smile on her lovely face flickered. “Oh, um . . .” Her pink cheeks grew absolutely red and he could hear her heartbeat start to pick up.

  Wait a minute—how can I hear her heartbeat? Shouldn’t be this attuned to her—I don’t even know her.

  Which was how he wanted to keep it. But Fiona was already motioning for the Juvie to come in.

  “Hello, my dear! I’ve never seen your face before. Are you new in town or just visiting?”

  “I’m new.” The Juvie bit her lip uncertainly. “But if this is a private consultation I can just go. I didn’t mean to interrupt.”

  “Nonsense! Come in at once so I can get to know you. I’m Fiona ShadowTree,” Fiona said, beckoning eagerly to her.

  The Juvie—Sadie, she said her name was Sadie, Mathis thought—took another hesitant step into the somewhat cluttered pharmacy.

  Fiona mixed Western, Eastern, and holistic medicine liberally so there was always a menagerie of mismatched items on her shelves. There were healing crystals and dream-catchers alongside the extra-strength Tylenol and the Pepto-Bismol. Packets of dried herbs from China and Taiwan shared shelf space with NyQuil and Robitussin. Knee braces were right beside neti pots. But of course, all of that was just extra. What the Shifters came to Cougarville Chemist for was Fiona’s expertly compounded medicines, tinctures, salves, and serums formulated to their specific needs.