As he drove, he caught fleeting expressions of worry on her face when she thought he wasn’t looking. He couldn’t think of anything else to do but feed her and hope she’d tell him what was bothering her.
At the diner, Aurelio steered them to a small, two-person booth toward the back and told him their meals were on the house because Chance had helped the night before. Moira protested that she hadn’t done anything, and she’d wanted to repay Aurelio’s kindness, but he wouldn’t hear of it.
“That was the best trout I’ve ever had.” She pushed her plate away. “How was your Carnivore’s Delight pizza?”
“Good.” He’d never ordered off the tourist menu before, but Su Yen was a true genius in the kitchen.
Chance was glad Moira didn’t suffer from the odd human female affliction of trying to impress him with how little she ate. She’d ordered a full dinner and cleaned her plate, and enjoyed the surprise delivery of lemon meringue pie with obvious relish. Her little moans of pleasure went straight to his groin, leaving him hard and aching in jeans that had become too tight from the moment they sat down and he’d gotten a nose full of her delectable scent. The essence of her called to his blood.
Moira looked more relaxed than she’d been before, but her right eye blinked a little too often, like something irritated it. He noticed that it happened whenever her subtle magic flared, and it belatedly occurred to him that her magic was fighting the town spells and charms that hid the true world of magic from her. No wonder his woman was exhausted. Except she wasn’t his, yet.
“Do you believe in magic?” he asked as casually as he could, before he lost his nerve.
“Like the song? The one that was playing when we walked in?” She smiled, then looked thoughtful. “I don’t believe in the woo-woo stuff like the town pushes, or like Mr. Maxen’s customers talk about. But I believe in mundane magic. The smell of bacon, or the design of a spider web, or meeting someone you connect with right away, as if you’ve always known them, you just forgot for a moment.” She blushed and looked away, then met his gaze again with a vulnerable, hopeful look. “I feel like that with you. I know it sounds crazy. I promise I’m not a stalker.”
He admired her bravery more than anything. He reached across the table to capture her fingers and give them a quick squeeze. “I feel that, too.” She didn’t know the half of it, but it gave him hope that he wasn’t going there by himself. He gave her a teasing smile. “I am a stocker, though. Night shift.”
She got the joke a heartbeat later and laughed. “You’re a punny man.” She folded her napkin into a neat rectangle and placed it on the table. “What about you? Do you believe in magic?”
His tactical error hit him hard. If he said he didn’t, he’d be lying to his mate, and if he said he did, he’d be alienating her. “Some kinds,” he temporized. “Uh, what time is it?”
“Eight thirty-five, according to the diner’s clock. What time do you have to be at work?”
“Nine,” he answered automatically. Except he didn’t, because he’d resigned the night before, and had to be out of his apartment in two days. Great. Nothing impressed a woman like being both jobless and homeless.
“We’d better get going, then, so you aren’t late.” She stood and slipped her backpack onto her shoulders. He’d noticed she unconsciously touched it often, like a talisman.
They stopped by the counter to thank Aurelio, then headed toward his truck. He couldn’t resist slipping his hand into hers as they walked. She smiled and squeezed his fingers. “Thanks for dinner and driving.”
“My pleasure.” He let her into the truck, then got in and started it. “Back to Tinsel’s?”
“Yes, please.” She stuffed her hoodie into her backpack, then wrapped her arms around it in her lap and rested her chin on it as he pulled into traffic, or what passed for it in Kotoyeesinay. She looked forlorn.
His simple-minded beast ordered him to find and kill whatever was making their mate unhappy. “Maybe it’s none of my business, but is something wrong?”
She straightened up for a moment and smoothed her expression, then seemed to give up the pretense and slumped again. “I really like you, and I don’t want to scare you away or anything, but my life is, well, complicated.” She sighed and looked down at her backpack. “This crazy man named Witzer has been after me for three years. Not just cyberstalking, but actually sending people to take me to him. He’s obsessed. He found me reading tarot cards at a Renaissance fair, and wants me to use my supposed ’magical gifts’ to find out secrets about his enemies and predict the future for his business deals. I keep moving, cutting all ties, but he keeps finding me.” Her arms tightened around her backpack. “This past winter, I thought I’d finally lost him for good, but six days ago, he found me, and I had to run again. He’s willing to hurt people to get to me. Last year, they kidnapped and beat up the woman I shared a hostel room with in Vancouver. The news said it was ‘drunk frat boys,’ and the woman got a big settlement, but I think it was Witzer’s goons, mistaking her for me.”
Chance took a deep, centering breath, trying to calm the growling beast in his head. “That’s why you take your backpack everywhere. It’s your ‘go’ bag. That’s why you need your car up and running.”
She nodded, a look of relief crossing her face. Ordinary folks probably found her story hard to believe, but magical people knew that kind of trouble all too well. “He’s textbook obsessive-compulsive, but he’s old money and buy-his-own-country rich, and the police think I’m the one who’s delusional. I think if he actually gets his hands on me, I’ll never be free again.” She shifted in her seat. “Luckily for me, I used my biological mother’s name at the Ren fair, because it would have embarrassed my foster father to have his engineer coworkers find out about my summer job as a pretend fortune teller. Witzer doesn’t know my legal name, so he never figured out where my foster parents live, or he’d have used them as leverage.” She fidgeted with one of the backpack’s zipper pulls. “It’s not the life I would have chosen, but it hasn’t been horrible up till now.”
He glanced at her. “What changed?” He was suddenly uneasy about her answer, afraid she meant her attraction to him, but he needed to hear it.
She was silent for so long that his shoulder muscles started cramping from the tension. “I think something’s wrong with my head.” Her voice was small and scared.
“What makes you think so?” He hoped he sounded supportive, rather than terrified at the thought his mate could be dying before he had time to fall in love with her.
“I keep seeing flashes out of the corner of my eyes, like something’s coming at me, or flickering just out of view, but there’s nothing there. It started last night when we left the diner, but it’s gotten progressively worse. Today in the store, I kept seeing... impossible things. Mostly in the mirrors. A talking bear with a Russian accent. A vampire, right out of a romance novel. A pair of young ravens instead of boys. Even Mr. Maxen, looking like a Tolkien elf, like the movies, only charcoal gray and prettier. A nineteenth-century oil painting that kept slowly changing. And when I ran into you tonight, you had amber eyes like a...” She trailed off, then shook her head. “I’ve always had a lively imagination, but even when I was little, I could always tell the difference between things I made up and the real world.” She closed her eyes and rubbed her temples. “If I have a tumor or something, it could be pushing on parts of my brain, making me hallucinate. I don’t have money or insurance. I can’t even afford to get tested, much less treated.”
She didn’t smell sick, and his nose was superb at detecting such things. He suspected her innate magic was working around her learned skepticism and eroding the effect of the elven charms. They were never meant to hide anything from magical people.
His human relief warred with his beast’s howling at her tangible despair. It was a wonder he could hear himself think. With shaky hands, he pulled the truck into the first available parking space on the side of the street, but left the engine running for t
he air conditioning. “Could I hold you for a minute?”
She looked up at him and sighed. “I’d like that.”
He slid out from under the steering wheel toward her and opened his arms. She dropped her backpack to slump into his embrace, and he wrapped himself around her. His T-shirt dampened with her silent tears and warm breath. The feel of her, the smell of her, swamped his human thoughts. It was all he could do to stop his beast from voicing its purring pleasure at finally holding their mate.
“Sorry about your shirt,” she mumbled.
He suspected no one had held her in a long time. “You can always cry with me.” He rocked her slowly. She was strong and soft and fit perfectly in his arms.
She snuggled in closer and he stroked her hair. She needed someone much better with people and with words, someone who knew how to ease her into understanding, but right now, he was all she had.
“Was this Witzer guy your boyfriend?” That was his possessive beast asking.
A shudder went through her. “Hell, no. He’s got twin sons older than me, and he’s a major creeper.” He did his best to hide his relief as she detailed the man’s bizarre job offer and escalating salary and benefits offers, and the subsequent pursuit all over the country. “I take jobs for cash and make random choices on where to move next, but I think he has a security company tracking me, and eventually, they will find me. I’m probably just paranoid, but I think he wants to own me, like an expensive car, or an exotic pet.”
“You’re not paranoid,” he murmured, "you’re smart.” The man sounded like a collector. Scary cautionary tales about collectors were a part of non-human lore the world over. Fortunately, most collectors knew better than to come anywhere near Kotoyeesinay, unless they had a death wish. Too many of the founding elves, fairies, witches, and shifters had unhappy personal history with them.
He wanted to pull her into his lap, but he didn’t want her to discover how much she aroused him. She wasn’t ready for that, even though he could smell the undercurrent of desire from her, too. “Maybe you really do have magic, just not the kind Witzer thinks. Maybe your magic told you what he really wants, and is what has kept you one step ahead of him for three years.”
She gave a shaky laugh. “That would be fitting justice.” She gave his chest a pat, then straightened up to give him a searching look. “You really believe that, don’t you?”
After a moment, he nodded. “I do.” He had a hard enough road to be with his mate as it was, without lying to her. He’d seen other shifters lose human mates over less. “I think it’s like a sixth sense, one you didn’t know you had. It’s been operating without you knowing, and now you have to learn to use it, so it works when you want it to.”
She smiled wistfully. “I’d have loved to have heard that when I was twelve.” After a moment, she shook her head minutely. “It’s a nice thought, but—"
A loud thump of something hitting the passenger door startled them both.
Moira looked out the window. “Huh. Not something you often see in the summer.”
When he leaned closer to look, he saw Tinsel’s red-and-gold sleigh—the one he’d built and painted—resting against the truck’s passenger door.
“What does it look like to you?” he asked cautiously, not sure what the sleigh’s protective illusion spell would show her.
“An old-fashioned miniature sleigh, with ice runners and everything. Looks like the one I saw on Tinsel’s porch. I thought it was just decoration.” She turned to him. “I’ll call her and ask if hers is missing.” She pulled out her cellphone.
He hid a sigh, knowing his what-are-the-odds luck was flaring again. “If she’d like, we can take it back in my truck.”
Moira pulled out a card from her chest pocket, then held it out to him. “Tinsel gave me her number and yours, but she didn’t mark which was which.”
“The bottom one’s mine.” Tinsel’s matchmaker streak had often annoyed him, but if it prompted Moira to call him, he’d send Tinsel a rum-soaked fruitcake every year on that date.
He would have unashamedly used his superior hearing to listen to both sides of the conversation, but he didn’t have to because she put it on her phone’s tinny speaker. It seemed a certain group of miscreant wolf boys had attempted a joy ride, only to have the sleigh dump them in the neighbor’s swimming pool, then fly off down the street.
“The sleigh went looking for someone it could trust,” explained Tinsel.
“Er, lucky it found us, then,” said Moira. Her indulgent smile said she was humoring an old woman’s fancy. “We’ll bring it right now, so Chance isn’t late for work.”
Tinsel thanked them and disconnected.
Chance approached the sleigh cautiously, in case its defensive magic thought he was another thief, but fortunately, it docilely allowed him to pull it back from Moira’s door so she could get out. It took both of them to lift the bulky sleigh into the bed of his truck. The illusion spell made her see wheels where there were none, but didn’t hide the tingle from the magic that ran it. She attributed it to a minor short in the non-existent electrics.
“I take it,” she said, wiping her hands on her jeans, “that the Wolf boys are known troublemakers in this town.” She laughed. “Their parents must be on everyone’s speed dial.”
He didn’t correct her impression that it was just one family named Wolf. The local population of wolf shifters thrived in Kotoyeesinay, so it could have been the pups from one or more of a dozen different families. It was more a sin of omission, but he felt as guilty as if he’d lied to her.
At Tinsel’s, Moira helped him carry the sleigh up to the porch. She was even stronger than she looked, which had both him and his beast purring inside. Especially when she explained she’d gotten a lot of exercise working on a dairy farm. His beast liked steak.
He was getting used to her subtle magic that sparked at odd moments, but he couldn’t tell what it was doing, other than fighting to be free of the town illusions. A witch might be able to figure it out, but he didn’t know very many people in town, owing to his loner nature, so he didn’t know who to ask, or more importantly, who Moira would believe. It occurred to him that Iolo Maxen at Turn of the Cards was a unique dywylled elf who could handle any metal, loved technology, and specialized in repairing magical devices. Chance had done some fine woodwork repair on a magical spice cabinet, and liked him. Since she already knew Iolo, maybe the old elf could figure out what Moira’s magic was and help ease her into the truth.
He ignored his beast’s demand to scoop her into his arms and ravish her on the porch swing, and settled for politely slipping his hand into hers. His beast chuffed in vindication when she immediately drew him into a full-press embrace. He didn’t even try to stop himself from meeting her upturned face halfway and kissing her like she was the only woman on earth. To him, she was.
Their tongues twined like soft, questing vines, sending his heart thumping and the sound of hers racing. Her little moan of pleasure went straight to his groin and hardened him in seconds. He sternly reminded himself that humans liked things slow, and started to angle his hips away, but she grabbed his ass with both hands and pulled him tightly against her muscular stomach. “I like knowing you want me as much as I want you,” she breathed, nibbling along his jawline and down his neck.
“How could I not?” he asked, skimming his hands down her back to memorize the feel of her curves. “You’re perfect.” He nuzzled behind her ear to fill his nose with her unique and addicting scent, as complex as curry, with hints of cream, cardamom, and melting snow.
A distant chime sounded more than once. It took a moment for him to identify it as the huge grandfather clock inside the entryway of Tinsel’s home.
“Oh, hell, my timing sucks.” Moira pulled back to look up at him. “I’ve made you late for work.”
He started to deny it, but then he’d have to explain that he didn’t have a job anymore, and then he’d have to explain why he didn’t have a job, and then… he swallowed
. “I’ll, uhm, be okay. I’ll make up the time tomorrow.”
The only thing that made it possible for him to release her was that she looked just as reluctant to let go of him. He unashamedly adjusted his pants to ease his rock-hard dick into a more comfortable position. She gave him a sultry smile and smoothed her blouse, revealing the firmly pointed tips of her nipples, visible even through her bra. He swallowed again.
“Could we see each other again tomorrow?” she asked. Her tone was casual, but her expression was a mix of longing and trepidation. Her bravery humbled the man in him, and made his beast confident she’d be an excellent defender of his cubs.
“Yes,” he said firmly, giving her no reason to doubt him. “I’ll come find you after work.”
She smiled wider. “I get off at–”
The front door opened, revealing a beaming Tinsel. “Oh good, you got Blitzen back to his proper home.” She pointed to the sleigh. “Those wolf boys better be careful what they wish for in the next few months. I’ll be adding security… ” She peered up at him, then looked at Moira. “Oh, did I interrupt something delightfully steamy?” She waggled her eyebrows suggestively at them both. “Carry on, then.” She shut the door.
Moira laughed out loud. “Everyone in this town is crazy.”
“Ah-hem.” Chance cleared his throat loudly and gave her a mock affronted look.
“Yes, you’re crazy, too, and so am I.” She waved toward the street. “Go to work, or I’ll drag you upstairs to the Lost Princess bedroom so you can find me, and then you’ll really be late for work, and your boss will fire you.”
He gave her a mock salute. “Tomorrow,” he promised, then turned and walked briskly away, before he followed her in like a hungry stray.
It had been too long since he’d let his beast out, and now, he was paying the price with his lack of control. His beast didn’t like civilization or daylight, so tonight after it cooled off, he would visit the familiar peaks and let his beast run and hunt for a while, to get it out of his system. He’d start telling Moira the truth tomorrow.
Shift of Destiny: Ice Age Shifters Book 2 Page 5