by Anya Nowlan
“This is really good coffee!” she commented, not even trying to hide her honest surprise at it.
“I know, right?” Jax replied with a smirk. “Almost makes it worth moving out of civilization.”
“Almost,” Alice echoed with a warped grin, the word having become far too familiar as of late.
“So, how are we going to play this?” Jax asked as the plates of burgers, a meal clearly made for a grown-ass shifter and not any regular human, was set down before them. “Do we do the whole ‘My name is Jax and I come from a world of wealthy misery’ or do we pretend none of this is happening and try to cringe through the next two weeks?”
“How about neither?” Alice asked, shoving her fork into the meal before her. “How about we just chat and see where that takes us.”
As much as she wanted to despise Jax for what his family was doing to hers, she couldn’t really bring herself to do it. He was too… nice. For a mountain of muscles and tendons that could rip her head off at any point if he so chose, anyway. But that maybe just added to his boyish charm, or whatever.
I need a drink, she thought with a sigh, catching herself going smoothly off the deep end.
“I think I’m going to need a drink for this,” Jax said, making Alice do a double-take as she looked up at him.
“Whoa there. Quit it with the mind reading.”
“What?” he asked, furrowing his brow in slight confusion and looking all the more cute for it.
Oh, it was going to be so difficult to hate him, wasn’t it? Impossible, really.
“Nothing. But I’ll take it as a resounding ‘yes.’ So husband-to-be, tell me, what poor choices in life have brought you to this place and time that we find ourselves in?”
She busied herself with the burger and fries as Jax swallowed his mouthful, a look of mirthful calm settling on his gorgeous features. He had that rugged, mountain man kind of look about him. Like she’d expect him to be working as a lumberjack somewhere instead of as a hockey star, but she figured both required a certain earthly quality to a man to really play off nicely.
“Poor choices? I don’t think my situation’s too bad right now. Do you?” he asked, but the query sounded like he wasn’t really vying for an answer on it. She might have blushed a little, but only a little! “Anyway, my dad came to my last game at the regionals. Sat me down, told me he has cancer and that the only thing I can do to make it easier on him is to do as he says, as usual. And that’s what brought you here.”
He shrugged his shoulders and Alice could swear she heard a mountain changing its bearings somewhere in the distance.
“And that’s okay with you? Getting married like that to someone you don’t even know?”
“Well, I intend to get to know you by then, but the old man has a year left, he said. Odds are he will smoothly forget about us after the ceremony and the rest of the nonsense I’m sure he put in the prenup won’t even come into play. It seemed like the least I could do to give him some peace and ensure the same for myself. I can see how you might think differently,” he offered, not an ounce of spite or that rich-boy huff in his voice that Alice had come so accustomed to hearing when dealing with Darmuth Inc.’s partners and employees. “But in the shifter world, this sort of stuff used to be pretty… common.”
His gray eyes seemed to be more subdued, the twinkle dulling a little. It was an odd thing to hear that shifters, or at least polar bears, had been so used to getting simply married off to whoever the family thought best. While human society had come to accept shifters around them, a lot of their inner workings and culture was still a mystery, and Alice suspected that it was so because the shifters wanted it that way, not for any other reason.
She couldn’t blame them. Sometimes, she wished some of the things humans did would just be wiped from the collective memory as well.
“You’re right, I do think it’s sort of odd,” Alice agreed mildly, poking at her French fries and suddenly feeling a lot less hungry.
She couldn’t preach though. Wasn’t she sitting across from him now, vouching her life to him without making it seem like it was that big of a deal? Clearly if it was difficult for a shifter to stomach with the fitting traditional heritage, then it should have been absolutely abhorrent to Alice. Yet she did not find herself feeling this way and that troubled her.
“So what’s your excuse then?” Jax asked, giving her a pointed look that made her wriggle uncomfortably in her seat. “Why are you here instead of driving toward the Mexican border in the attempts of evading my father’s will? Though if you’re planning that, take me along. Always did like the Gulf.”
He grinned his easy smile and Alice couldn’t help but matching it with one of her own. He was charming, this dastardly heir to a billion-dollar fortune turned hockey hunk. Just thinking of him like that made her squirm uncomfortably in her seat. He was a tad too perfect in that sense. And he even seemed to have all his own teeth. That bastard.
“Don’t I fit the bill of a crazed Jax Darmuth fan, willing to do anything to get close to you?” she asked with a waggled brow, making him laugh.
“Not quite, no.”
It was a deep, hearty sound and it seemed to resonate through her in the most delectable way, making her core pulse in response. When he was serious, he looked like he could pile-drive through solid walls and take out half a city with a single blow, but when he laughed… he was damn near dreamy. Alice had to put some honest effort into not sighing wistfully.
I wonder what he looks like when he’s all hot and bothered…
She could feel the makings of a crimson blush creep up her neck, making her clear her throat and go for another sip of coffee to steel her nerves, or what was left of them anyway.
“My excuse? Well. I assume your father told you that my dad has worked for you guys for nearly forever, right?”
“Andrew Wilcox? Yeah, I remember the name. He might have been at a birthday party of mine once that my parents threw in some misguided sense of celebration.”
“That’s the one. I bet he drank you out of house and home too,” Alice added with a snort, though she regretted the words immediately.
No matter what kind of issues she had with her father, bashing him in front of his employer’s son was not proper. Even if she was supposed to marry the man in a few weeks or months.
“Anyway,” she continued. “He’s been stealing from you guys for a few years, as it turns out. He likes horses more than he likes staying out of jail, I guess. My mom passed a few years ago and I think this took him from a Sunday drunk and occasional gambler to an addict. We didn’t notice before it was too late, and here I am.”
She spread her hands with a weak, sad smile that felt even more pained when she saw the look of pity that crossed over Jax’s features. She didn’t want his pity. She had plenty of that on her own. Spearing another French fry on her fork, she popped it into her mouth and tried to will away the silence that fell over their little dinner party.
“So you’re working off your father’s debt? That’s commendable. I’m sorry you’ve been… forced into this,” Jax said, and to his credit, he sounded legitimately truthful.
Another point in his favor on the whole “not a jerk” scale thing.
“No more than you have, Jax,” she admitted, and that was as much the truth as anything else.
That lingering silence took over again as they ate for a while, avoiding one another’s gazes and seemingly stewing in their personal misgivings about the situation created by their respective fathers. While Alice had come to Idaho fully expecting to meet a self-involved, rude, werebear billionaire, the man she was sitting across from now seemed almost… casual, homey. Like he hadn’t been brought up surrounded by personal helicopters and maid service and jet skis.
He was nice. And cute. And hot. And emotionally vested in their joint sanity.
Wasn’t that just the worst?
She bit her lip a fraction of a second before Jax’s big, warm paw reached over and grabbed her ar
m gently, making her meet his eyes again.
“Hey, how about I propose this. We’ll both do our best to get through this intact, on both sides. We won’t make it awkward on one another. You have a parent to save and I have one to appease and it is pretty obvious we both want what is best for them. It doesn’t have to be at our own expense, right? No expectations, no forced weirdness. Let’s see how it goes and move from there. Deal?”
Alice’s heart practically melted listening to him. She caught herself nodding before any conscious thought had filtered through the haze of appreciation she had for the solid, stable man before her, who seemed to be far more in charge of his emotions about the whole ordeal than she was.
“Deal.”
So now, the fun part could start, right?
CHAPTER FIVE
Alice
The first day in Shifter Grove had passed bloodlessly enough, with Alice settling in at the Hamiltons and getting some time to decompress after her rather surprising conversation with Jax. It was odd to come into something expecting one thing and then to find the result absolutely different.
Jax Darmuth didn’t suck as much as she would have perhaps expected him to. In fact, he was damn near adorable and that was practically unbearable, really. So when he’d asked her out for drinks the next evening with his team, she’d gladly said yes.
Surprisingly enough, even while standing in a pack of twenty or so hot, sexy, rowdy hockey players, Alice’s gaze kept trailing to Jax and resting on his features quite happily. He sure was something to look at and despite better judgment, the mild-mannered accountant from New Hampshire felt herself becoming more and more at ease in his presence. Worrying? Yes. Definitely.
But also sort of fun.
“So you mean to tell me that you seriously think the New Jersey Carnivores can beat us? With their track record? I can’t believe this! And this is the woman I’m set to marry!” Jax joked, though the conversation remained between the two of them as they’d found a table at Austin’s Texas, the only bar in town, that was a little bit away from the long table traditionally set up for the hockey players.
Alice found herself not at all bothered by the somewhat forced intimacy. Another surprising turn of events!
“Please, you barely eked through the Mountain Lions. The Carnivores will make minced meat out of you in that final game,” she scoffed wryly.
The Carnivores and the Shovelers had played four games out of five and they were neck and neck so far. The last game was going to be held in Shifter Grove in a week and a half and while the rest of the country seemed to be buzzing about it relentlessly, Shifter Grove seemed to barely be aware of it at all.
The players could come down to the bar, grab a beer, and have a few words with their local friends, and no media frenzy followed. They worked out, they prepared and they plotted, but it was all without the usual hysteria that followed games like that. The Shifter Grove natives had made it very clear that only a choice few reporters would be allowed into town at any one time and if anyone became a nuisance, they’d quickly find themselves on the receiving end of a trespassing violation.
It worked out in several ways. Not only were the Shovelers a bit of a shrouded enigma now because the town was so small that any stranger stuck out like a sore thumb, so the Carnivores couldn’t actually spy on what they were doing for prep, but it also kept the players calmer and more focused. With a group of Alpha shifter athletes, that was no small feat.
“Guess I’ll have to prove you wrong then,” Jax said with a chuckle, leaning back in his seat and taking a sip of his beer, though Alice could feel his gaze on her.
It still made her a little bit uncomfortable, but not strictly in a bad way. More like the “Oh my God, Jax Darmuth is looking at me like he wants to eat me up!” kind of way. It wasn’t an unpleasant feeling, being on the receiving end of his that kind of attention, and though she had pledged to keep her head squarely on her shoulders, it seemed to be getting more and more difficult to actually stick to that promise.
They’d been chatting over drinks for a few hours now and made some probing, slightly stumbling plans for spending some time together. Mostly, both of them still seemed to be trying to figure each other out, being cautions around one another, which was oddly comforting to Alice. She’d half-expected to get ravaged by the sex bear upon arrival—which sounded less and less horrible by the second—or get ignored by him completely. So far, neither assumption had turned out to be true.
“So if you think we’re so damn underprepared, how about we make it interesting, huh?” Jax started, cocking his brow in that teasing way that he had. “I’d like to propose a wager!”
“A wager?” Alice echoed. “What could you possibly wrangle out of me that your father already hasn’t?” she asked, keeping her tone light.
Jax smiled, thankfully enough not taking the jab at his family as one directed at him. She liked that about him, the slightly, but not overly self-deprecating sense of humor and the fact that despite the silver spoon that had been firmly placed in his mouth since birth, he made a valiant effort to be his own man. There was something very commendable about that, especially to the daughter of a man who seemed to have majored in how to mess with his kids’ lives in the negative way.
“Oh, you’d be surprised,” Jax said with a wink that was bordering on lewd, which got Alice’s heart beating twice as fast.
She was about to shoot back with some sort of a clever remark that was only partially shrouded in a blush when her phone rang in her pocket. Alice frowned for a moment, as if that ringing couldn’t possibly come from her pocket.
It was almost true. She hadn’t gotten a call to come through since she arrived in Shifter Grove, the cell reception being legendarily bad, though the general assumption was that the founders kept it like that on purpose. Warren, the de facto leader, hadn’t said anything for or against it in ages, apparently.
“Do you need to take that?” Jax asked, giving her puppy dog eyes mixed with a smirk that made her almost want to ignore the call and just stay at the table.
“I think so,” she said, almost tipping over the chair as she got up, taking her phone out. “Just a sec.”
She excused herself, catching the phone on the fifth ring, though there was no caller ID. Alice frowned but accepted anyway, walking toward the front door and then stepping out into the snowy evening, though she kept glancing back at Jax almost without noticing that she was doing it.
“This is Alice,” she said, wrapping her free arm around herself for warmth.
“Hello, Alice. I’m a friend of your father’s. You can call me Joe,” a voice responded, somewhat muddled, but the tone of it alone sent a quick chill down her spine that seemed to have nothing to do with the temperature.
“Hey, Joe. What can I do for you?” Alice asked, confusion setting in with a note of dread.
“You can listen and shut up,” he snarled, making that very clear feeling of dread spread further in Alice’s veins. “So, daddy’s little girl. Here’s the deal. Andrew owes us six hundred thousand dollars. He promised to pay up, but so far he hasn’t and we get the feeling that he doesn’t intend to. But a little birdie told me that you’re going to be Jax Darmuth’s new wifey and as far as I know, he has exactly the kind of cash we need.”
“I—” Alice started, only to get immediately cut off.
“Shut the fuck up and listen. You can get me the money your father owes, or you can say goodbye to Daddy. I’ll give you until that big game in Shifter Grove. Yeah, don’t think I don’t know where you are. Hell, I might be looking at you right now.”
The way he laughed made Alice’s breath catch in her throat and she looked to either side of herself quickly, seeing nothing but gloomy streets devoid of other people.
“I’ll come to Shifter Grove and bring a few of my boys. I’ll be waiting for that cash, honey. Or Daddy Dearest will be just an unpleasant, distant memory to you soon enough.”
Then, the line clicked and there was no one o
n anymore. Alice took the phone from her ear and looked at it numbly, trying to figure out what the hell she was supposed to feel like after something like that.
I could never gouge Jax like that, she thought, pain welling in her chest.
She looked at her phone again, deciding to call her father and demand to know if he had any idea who those guys were or how they knew about her being in Shifter Grove, but there was no reception again. She crushed her fist around the damn cellphone and shoved it into her back pocket, turning around and heading back into the warmth of the packed bar.
Things had to go from bad to worse, didn’t they?
CHAPTER SIX
Jax
Jax couldn’t help himself. Whenever he got the chance, he would glance at the stands, if only to make sure that Alice was still there. Whenever she caught him staring at her, she’d make a face at him and it had gone from cute to awkward to super cute. He wouldn’t stop grinning and there was a damn pep in his step, or skate as it were, which made for some rather cheerful takedowns on the ice.
“The hell has gotten into you?” Heath Locklear queried, glowering at Jax as the polar bear helped the sniper up off the ground. “Some delicacy would be expected, all right? The Carnivores are going to pull me to pieces anyway. I’d like to make it to the last game without my own team mangling me, okay?”
“All right,” Jax said blithely, smirking at his friend and the number one goal hound the team had.
“You didn’t answer my question though,” Heath commented as they skated back to their spots, having been assigned to opposing practice teams for some drills that seemed to end up with a lot more guys on their backs on the ice now that the important game was so close.