by Jessie Lane
His throat clogged with emotion, and his next words came out gruff. “I’m going to miss you, Pearl.”
Her face lit up with a bittersweet smile. “I’m going to miss you, too, boy. Now, give your grandma a kiss good-bye.”
Chapter Ten
Eighteen hours.
That’s how long Ezrah had been on the road as he raced from his great-grandmother Pearl’s place in Oklahoma back to Deals Gap, North Carolina, stopping only long enough to fill his gas tank, empty his personal tank, and occasionally get a quick bite to eat. Besides stopping in a motel to take a short nap after his conversation with Pearl, he hadn’t wasted a second of time trying to get back to Kinks. He had broken every speed limit and driven through the night to get here as fast as he possibly could.
Eighteen hours on the road was a lot of time to think about what his great-grandmother had told him, what she had sacrificed for both him and his family. And that was pretty much everything when one truly thought about it.
Pearl had put her life on perpetual standby, waiting for the day she could see her ancestors happy. It had taken her three generations, but now Ezrah finally had the chance to put the old woman to peace while also finding a different sort of peace for himself. Therefore, as he pulled into the Dark Moon bar’s parking lot, he took a deep breath to steady himself.
This was it: the first step on the way to making things right, not just for himself, but for Kinks and Pearl, too. He only hoped his mate would forgive him for leaving her the way he had.
Climbing off his motorcycle, Ezrah made his way to the front door and … stopped dead in his tracks at what he found posted there.
WANTED:
LONE WOLF
Brown skin, blue eyes, and covered in tattoos.
Drives a motorcycle.
Last seen leaving Dark Moon Bar with a very stupid woman.
If you see a wolf matching this description, kick him in the balls, knock him the hell out, and then contact me!
Kinks
aka, Chrissy Leroy
Below the message was a hand drawn picture that Ezrah guessed was supposed to be him. The reason he wasn’t quite sure was because it was basically a stick figure drawn in brown crayon with bright blue eyes, standing in front of a bicycle. It was safe to say Kinks wasn’t an artist.
Okay, so perhaps making things right with his mate wasn’t going to be as easy as Ezrah had hoped. The wanted poster was pretty good evidence that he had pissed Kinks off. The poster did give him a piece of information he hadn’t known about her before, though: her name.
Chrissy Leroy.
It suited her, but Kinks suited her more.
Pushing the door open, he walked into the bar and right up to the bartender who was already giving him a death glare. The moment Ezrah was two feet from him, the bartender pointed past him toward the door.
“Get the hell out. We don’t serve your kind here.”
My kind? What the fuck?
A red haze of anger washed over Ezrah. Sure, he had experienced prejudice in many different forms in his life. He was of mixed heritage with a Cherokee, African-American, and Caucasian background. There was also the fact that he was a hybrid mutt crossed between a wolf, human and a witch.
That being said, he had never expected to experience any sort of prejudice about either of those things in the neutral territory.
“What exactly about my kind do you have a problem with, bub?” The words were growled through clenched teeth as he did his best to keep his wolf from bursting free.
The bartender gave him a look like he was the dumbest man on the planet. “Seriously? You think I got a problem with the color of your skin or whatever you’re made up of? Get real,” he scoffed. “What I got a problem with is the kind of guy who knocks a girl up then leaves her high and dry.”
For the second time in two days, Ezrah was too shocked to speak. A cricket chirped from somewhere in the bar loudly enough to alert the whole neighborhood with as quiet as the rest of the bar had fallen.
When he was finally able to make his voice work again, the only two words he could get out were, “Knocked up?”
The bartender crossed his arms over his chest and shook his head in dismay. “Yeah, man. Knocked up. Prego. Baby on board. Bun in the oven. How many different ways you want me to tell you? I can’t believe you did that to Kinks and then bailed on her.”
“But I didn’t know she was pregnant!” Ezrah roared back.
A huge, calculating grin spread across the other man’s face. “So what are you going to do about it, man?”
Get what’s ours, the wolf snarled in his head, telling Ezrah unequivocally that there would be no turning back, no running away. Not this time.
Turning on his booted heel, Ezrah stomped out of the bar and raced back to his bike. Revving the engine, he raced down the little dirt road until he hit the clawed up pine tree that had new, vicious claw marks in it. Ezrah was definitely going to have to keep his kitten’s claws away from his hide until he could calm her down.
Screeching the bike to a halt, he parked, turned it off, and then climbed off on shaky legs. Then he raced up to Kink’s cabin’s front door and had his hand up, about to knock on the wood, when the door flew open.
The first thing he saw was Kink’s beautiful, angry face.
The second thing he saw was her swinging something at his face.
After that, all Ezrah saw was the back of his eyelids.
~~~
Of all the nerve!
Chrissy couldn’t believe that mangy wolf had shown up on her doorstep out of the blue. It didn’t matter that she had happened to be looking for him; the least he could have done was look a little remorseful.
As she stood over her mate’s unconscious body, holding the frying pan she had knocked him out with, Chrissy pictured the way he had been smiling at her once she had opened the door.
How dare he look so happy to see her!
Here she had been, sitting around, crying her eyes out for the last two days, and what had he been doing? Joyriding?
Okay, so maybe she had only been crying for a day and a half, but that was because she had spent half a day typing up that wanted poster, complete with a squiggly hand-drawn image of him.
Now that she had him here, Chrissy wasn’t quite sure what she wanted to do with him. Sure, she had gone with her first choice of slapping him silly with her cookware, but now what was she going to do? To be honest, part of her hadn’t expected the wolf to come back at all.
The last day of imagining a lifetime of raising a cub by herself had been utterly depressing. That didn’t mean she was ready for him to come prancing back into her life as if he hadn’t hurt her. So what was a girl to do when she had her unborn baby’s daddy knocked the hell out on her doorstep?
An idea started to form in her head, and Chrissy giggled. If she was going to do it, then she had to hurry up before her wolf woke up from his little frying pan induced nap.
Chapter Eleven
Holy shit, his head hurt.
Groaning, Ezrah brought his hands up to make sure his head was still attached to the rest of his body. It hurt so badly he was afraid it might be damn near decapitated. What in the hell had he gotten into that hurt this damn badly?
When his hands reached the top of his head, they didn’t touch smooth skin. Rather, his fingertips got stuck in a gummy substance. What the hell?
Moving his fingers down from the top of his head, he realized he was covered in a tacky substance and something else … something soft, downy, and ticklish.
Grabbing one of the offending articles, Ezrah brought the object in front of his face and finally opened his eyes. Feathers. Why in the world was he holding a feather? And where had it come from?
An uneasy feeling washed over him. He looked down at the rest of his body, only to gasp in horror. He was covered from head to toe in fucking feathers!
Looking at his surroundings, Ezrah saw he was lying on the ground in front of Kink’s cabin door. Th
at was when the snippet of memory of Kinks opening the door and hitting him with something ran through his mind.
Growling in anger, Ezrah slowly stood up, feeling a little woozy. He looked down at his boots, and he felt like his head might explode. Not just because it hurt from being hit with God only knew what, but also because he was pretty sure his blood pressure was shooting through the roof.
Damn the woman! She had covered him in honey and feathers!
Looking back at her closed cabin door, Ezrah brought his fist up and then slammed it down so hard he made a dent in the wood as he roared, “KINKS! Open this damn door, woman.”
There was no answer, so Ezrah beat the door again, bellowing her name over and over again.
Finally, the door whipped open, and there stood Kinks with a pissed off look on her face. “What?”
“Have you lost your mind, woman?”
She looked him over from head to toe and then shrugged. “Nope. It’s right where I left it, in my head. What’s your problem?”
Ezrah was so angry he started sputtering. “Wh-What’s my problem? Did you just really ask me what my fucking problem is?”
Kinks widened her eyes, giving him an I’m-totally-innocent look. “I have no idea why you’re yelling at me like this. It’s not very nice.”
He pointed a finger at his feather-covered chest. “And this is nice, Kinks? Covering me in honey and feathers?”
She gave him another shrug as she brought her hand up, inspecting her fingernails. “A chicken should look like a chicken. I didn’t think it was very fair that you looked like a wolf, so I fixed it.”
Closing his eyes and pinching the bridge of his nose, Ezrah felt his anger melt away. It was damn hard to stay mad at the woman when she had a good reason to be upset with him. Kinks was absolutely right. He had run out on her like the biggest chicken this world had ever seen. Who was he to get upset with his mate after that?
Ezrah looked Kinks straight in the eye, dropping his hand back to his side. “You’re right. I was an ass, and I’m sorry. Tell me what I can do to prove to you just how sorry I really am.”
Kinks crossed her arms over her chest. “Tell me why you left in the first place.”
Ezrah pursed his lips then nodded. That was a reasonable question considering his actions.
Waving toward the interior of her house, he asked, “Can we go inside and talk, then?”
“Nope.”
He raised his eyebrows and asked, “No?”
Kinks shook her head. “Nope. If you want to talk, then you can stand right there, chicken man. If you don’t like that”—she pointed behind him—“there’s the road. You can hit it again and never come back.”
Ouch. It looked like he might be in for a lifetime of ball busting.
Crossing his own arms over his chest, he braced his legs to get comfortable before conceding to her demands. “I ran because what you made me feel scared the shit out of me. I hadn’t felt emotion like that since my mother was still alive, and that was when I was young. So instead of staying here and figuring things out, I left.”
She snorted in disgust and looked away. “Figures.”
Ezrah stepped closer to her so they were almost touching and waited until she looked at him again.
“I’m sorry, Kinks. I mean that. The moment I figured out who you were to me, I came racing back here. You want to lay it all out there to be real? I didn’t have to come back. I could have kept running, never acknowledging what was between us.” He hated being blunt like that, waving the possibility that he might not have come back, but it was the only way he knew how to make her realize he was here because he wanted to be.
For the first time since she had spoken to him, vulnerability flash in her eyes, and Kinks started to look uncertain.
She looked down at her feet and kicked at the ground. “So, you came back. What’s that mean, wolf?”
Wolf. That word told him exactly what the first step needed to be.
Holding his hand out in invitation, he put it all out there. “We start with names. Mine is Ezrah. What’s yours?”
His mate stared at his hand hesitantly, as if she wasn’t sure she should take that leap of faith. Ezrah held his breath, hoping she would give him that chance. And just when he didn’t think she would meet him halfway, she placed her hand in his and squeezed it warmly.
“My name is Chrissy.”
A big smile spread across his face. He wouldn’t have stopped it even if he could. “Why do they call you Kinks?”
The left side of her mouth tipped up. “Because of the type of hybrid I am: cougar and lynx mix.”
Ezrah laughed at the cleverness. “What do you say we go inside and get to know each other better, Kinks? Maybe I can talk you in to giving me a chance to prove I can be a decent mate.”
Chrissy’s eyes sparkled in happiness, making Ezrah’s heart squeeze in an unfamiliar way that wasn’t altogether unpleasant. His wolf was content beyond belief just from being near the woman, and his human half had never felt so centered in his life. Suddenly, the years ahead looked promising, and he couldn’t wait to live them with his mate.
Kinks went to step back in the cabin so he could come in, but Ezrah used his lightning fast reflexes to grab her around the back of the neck, hauling her body into his own. Taking her by surprise, Ezrah crashed his lips down on Chrissy’s, kissing her in a tender way he had never bothered to try with anyone else.
The feeling of her soft lips moving against his own made his heart beat faster and a flood of sensations bombard him. This time, he wasn’t scared, though. He was going to bask in this new glow his mate was bestowing on him and ask for more. If it always felt this good, he wasn’t sure he would ever get enough of Chrissy.
Breathless from their kiss, they pulled away to stare into each other’s eyes, silent for long seconds. He didn’t know what she thought about in that moment, but he was thinking she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
His mate, being the feisty, little thing she was, wrinkled her nose and groaned, “Ew, I’m sticky now.”
Since she was now covered in the very honey she had dumped all over him, Ezrah couldn’t help laughing. He had a feeling his mate was going to keep life very interesting.
Epilogue
One year later …
“Want me to hold the baby so you can eat, son?”
Ezrah beamed at his mate’s mother and shook his head. “I appreciate the offer, but I’m not ready to let her go yet.”
The older lynx shifter sighed yet smiled back. “You can’t hog my granddaughter forever, Ezrah.”
He shifted on the patio chair, making sure his little girl’s head was supported as she snoozed away. “I won’t hog her all day. Just give me a few more minutes, and then I promise I’ll let you hold her.” He winked at Mrs. Leroy, causing her to blush.
A soft tap on his shoulder made Ezrah look up and behind him. His mate stood there, giving him a look.
“Stop flirting with my mother.”
She might sound like all snarls, but he knew there was no real heat behind those words. His mate’s family liked to joke and play around all the time. It had taken Ezrah a while to get used to it, but now he wouldn’t change his new family for anything. He loved them unconditionally, and they loved him in return.
“Can’t help it, baby. I’m surrounded by beautiful women.” He gave Kinks a big smile that she returned playfully.
She ran a hand lovingly over his hair. “Well, when you put it that way …” Leaning down, she kissed him lightly on the lips before walking back into her parents’ house. Mrs. Leroy had walked back in the house before Kinks, so now it was just him and his daughter sitting on the back deck, enjoying the pristine nature around them.
Looking down at his little girl, he traced one of his roughened fingers over her plump, little cheek and thought about the last year.
Kinks had let him stay in Deals Gap so they could get to know each other. Most shifters would jump into their mating f
eet first, but she had seemed to understand that Ezrah needed to take things at a slower pace. As a result, he had dated his mate, wooing her slowly, falling in love with her quickly. He had even made himself wait for Kinks to tell him she was pregnant, which happened on their third date.
Could he have told her Bhric had let it slip the day he had returned? Yeah, but it had been more important to him that Kinks knew he was there because he wanted to be with her, not because he knew she was pregnant with his child.
It was his sole priority to prove that he cared for Kinks as much as he cared about his child. Even though he was unused to showing affection, he had somehow accomplished the impossible and proven to his mate that he loved her. He had also told her the truth about everything: his past, his family all the way back to his great-grandparents, and the road he had traveled that had brought him to Kinks.
His mate was a good woman with a generous soul and took him for exactly who he was: quirks, past, and all. They had even exchanged mate bites a couple of months before their adorable little hybrid cub was born.
Staring at her tan skin and black hair, Ezrah took a deep breath and inhaled her scent again, noting the mix of his wolf and her mother’s cat. It would be interesting to see who she took after when it was time to shift. But, in the end, it didn’t really matter. She was his little girl, and he loved her no matter who or what she was.
The baby squirmed in his arms, making him smile again. At only a little over three months old, there were times Ezrah swore she was already as feisty as her mother.
Bringing his daughter closer to his face, he kissed her forehead, grateful for the life he had now. “Daddy loves you, little Pearl.” Then he looked up at the sky and wondered if his great-grandmother was able to see her namesake from whatever cloud she was sitting on in the afterlife. Ezrah certainly hoped so.
About the Author
Jessie Lane is a best-selling author of Paranormal and Contemporary Romance, as well as, Upper YA Paranormal Romance/Fantasy.