by Anya Nowlan
She spun around so fast that she almost fell face-first off the ladder, but she made it look like a semi-graceful leap instead. Score one for being a shifter.
“I’m coming,” Christine said, dusting some imaginary imperfections out of her casual outfit of jeans and a big yellow cardigan.
“Wouldn’t want to keep your audience waiting, I presume,” Finn grumbled good-naturedly.
Christine let out a little breath that she hadn’t been aware she’d been holding onto. Instead of being awkward around her, he was behaving as if nothing had happened last night, and that served her just fine. Other than a couple of glances she noticed during the day, lingering a little too long on her, everything seemed as it had been the day before.
They bickered and argued fervently, both throwing endless perfectly good rationalizations into the mix, until one of them folded, threw up their arms and gave up on trying to convince the other. Until they moved to the next problem, of course.
Christine couldn’t help but love the dynamic.
He was giving her more pushback than she would have imagined any ‘mere’ foreman daring to do when talking to a client, but Finn didn’t see her as any better, or worse than himself. He functioned in a world of facts and rationality, and that was just fine with Christine, who’d become far too accustomed to Cisco’s flavor of reason.
Which was that everyone needed to agree with him, or they were wrong.
It was sometime during lunch, a luxury she’d learned to have after the first couple of days when she’d neglected to eat during the day and ended up almost collapsing as soon as evening rolled around, when she found herself sitting side by side with Jayce on the back porch.
“Coffee?” he asked, offering a plastic cup to her.
“Thank you!” she said, somewhat surprised.
So far, the rest of the crew had been keeping their distance. Going so far as to vacate the room at times when she blazed in with obvious intentions to stay longer than it took to walk through it. The fact that one of the guys on the crew, other than Finn that was, came to share a meal with her… It was nothing short of miraculous.
“So how are you enjoying our little home here?” Jayce asked in a conversational manner, taking a big bite out of his sandwich as Christine slurped the piping hot coffee.
He must have caught her staring at the mountains again. She didn’t miss any chance at doing so. Especially today, where her thoughts were a mess as jumbled as they ever could be.
“I love it,” she said, and it came out sounding as earnest as she hoped it would.
It wasn’t a lie. She really did love it here. The fresh air, the closeness of nature… though she hadn’t dared venture into the wilderness, she definitely felt the pull. Her shifter side had never been so contented.
Though part of that was probably Finn’s ‘fault’.
“Yeah? You going to stay here a lot?” Jayce continued, hiking a thumb at the house.
“I hope so. But probably not,” Christine admitted.
“Oh. Big city life, huh?”
“Something like that.”
“Well, if you ask me, this life beats that life by a mile.”
“Do you have a decent base of comparison?” she asked, sounding maybe a little too haughty for her own liking.
Jayce simply grinned wide, leaning back to rest against one of the pillars of the porch railing.
“I was a Wall Street trader for nine years before I came to Shifter Grove.”
Christine almost spat out her coffee, and the bite of the sandwich she’d just taken. She looked at him with surprise and Jayce chuckled, obviously pleased with her reaction.
“Yup, that’s the reaction I usually get,” he said, nodding appreciatively.
“You went from trading on Wall Street to putting in drywall and sawing roof beams?” she asked incredulously.
“Between you and me, you have a PhD, four MBAs, a lawyer, a college professor and at least two former pro athletes on this crew. So I’m not even that special. Hell, look at Finn.”
“What about him?” Christine queried immediately, her heart racing a little.
It seemed impossible to get any information out of Finn about Finn, so any tidbit she could get from someone else was worth its weight in gold.
Well, at least it would be to a woman who wanted to know more about him… Which Christine definitely wasn’t.
Right?
She ignored the immediate “Wrong!” that rung in her head.
“He used to be in the military. Ex-Navy. I’m not sure but I think he used to be a SEAL.”
Jayce shrugged, likely not noticing the look on Christine’s face as she took that information in. While she’d thought Finn to be ‘just’ a very good foreman, the private look into Finn’s past put it all into a different kind of context.
No wonder men follow him so easily… He knows what it takes to lead. So why is he here?
“So what I’m getting at is that you have a lot of impressive shifters together here. And the main reason they’re doing what they’re doing is because they wanted a change. Hell, that’s what I needed. Being cooped up in the concrete jungle? I was losing my mind.”
Jayce shook his head as he fished a packet of cigarettes out of his pocket. He offered Christine one but she declined. Luckily, she’d never gotten into the habit.
“No, thanks,” she said softly.
Jayce lit his and took a deep drag, a far-away look in his eyes.
“Yeah, it’s a good place to be, you know. Surrounded by your own kind… Not only that, though. I like the vibe here.”
“The vibe?” Christine asked.
Though she’d driven through Shifter Grove on her way to the site, and she’d gone there a couple of times to pick up food or grab a late dinner, she’d mostly been too preoccupied or just plain exhausted to notice the town much. Perhaps that had been a mistake.
“The whole you can be whatever you want to be thing. It sounds really Disney, but that’s what Shifter Grove has in spades. Everyone’s got something in their past they’d rather not, so they come here and start with a clean slate. No background noise, no mess, no prejudices. So you can be a roofer if you don’t want to rob people blind on Wall Street.”
Jayce gave her a wink and Christine smiled slightly.
Even with the kind of baggage I have? she wondered to herself.
“I’m not sure if I’m cut out to be a roofer,” she admitted, drawing a chuckle out of Jayce.
“Well, maybe tiling is more your thing, then.”
“Maybe,” Christine said.
They finished their lunch, and Jayce his cigarette, but the conversation veered down random paths. Christine was too distracted by mental images of Finn in uniform, and Jayce, bless him, liked the sound of his own voice. That was just fine with Christine.
When he got up, he gave her a small salute.
“Gotta go earn my daily living. We have a new boss lady on set and I hear she’s a real pain.”
He gave her a wink and ran off before she could hurl anything at him for that, but Christine was smiling. Maybe the spirit of Shifter Grove was getting into her, or maybe it was something else, but she was feeling a lot more at peace than she expected to be half a day after kissing a man who was not her fiancé.
A phone call she’d receive later that night would only make it worse.
8
Finn
As evening rolled in, Finn caught himself listening intently to the noises outside. He couldn’t fool himself, he knew what he was hoping for.
A particular sound of a tortured red car, so he could swoop outside and have an in for a conversation starter.
Instead, he got nothing but blissful silence, which scraped at his ears like a first-year violinist recital.
You could just go and talk to her, he told himself, slicking his tongue over his teeth and running a hand through his hair.
The thought alone made his palms a little clammy. It was one thing arguing with her about w
ork and everything that went with it.
It was an entirely different matter talking to the woman who had taken his heart and his mind with it about whether or not them kissing one another the night before was the worst idea in the history of the world.
While his heart and his bear said it was, in fact, the best idea in the world, his rational side told him something entirely different. Something that he had a hard time dealing with.
He’d kissed a woman promised to someone else. And at the same time, he was convinced now that this woman was meant to be with him.
Those two notions couldn’t really coincide in the same universe, as far as Finn was concerned.
After another half an hour of stewing, and eating a dinner that tasted blander than spaghetti made out of cardboard, Finn couldn’t deal with his anxious energy anymore. He got up and marched out of the trailer into the chilly evening, his breath rising in plumes before him the moment he stepped out.
The light was on in the house, in the room that Christine had commandeered, so he made a beeline for the back door. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say to her, or if he could utter anything at all, but spirits willing, he was going to try.
“Where you going, stranger?” a soft voice asked as he pounded across the porch, nearly making him jump up out of surprise.
“Woman, you almost gave me a heart attack,” he said, finding Christine sitting on the railing, curled up in a corner that would let her rest her back against the wall, staring out into the distance.
Not that he needed any more confirmation on her being a shifter, but now he was convinced she had to be a predator of some sort. Only they could remain as damn invisible as she just had.
“You’re easily scared,” she said with a laugh, and Finn shrugged his wide shoulders.
He could count the things that had caught him off-guard on the fingers of his right hand. Christine was definitely one of them, and she’d done it in more ways than one.
“Let’s call it tactical unawareness instead, alright?” he put forth, shucking his hands into his pockets.
His eyes got used to the dark and he could see that she wasn’t wearing a jacket. It wasn’t deathly cold outside, but definitely cold enough not to indulge in a prolonged sit-down without the appropriate gear. Her face was shrouded in shadows from the roof and the angle at which she was to the house, but Finn got the distinct feeling that not everything was alright.
He couldn’t quite put his finger on what that was, though, and wrote it off as his unsettled mind playing tricks on him.
“Whatever makes you sleep better at night,” Christine said.
Finn got the distinct feeling that this notion was not solely designated for his personal consideration.
“Everything alright?” he asked, before he could stop himself.
Of course it wasn’t, and that was why he’d sought to talk to her. But for the first time in his life, he’d found himself unsure under fire. And she wasn’t even really shooting at him.
Somehow dodging literal bullets seemed a lot easier than handling this delicate, infuriating, complex woman in a way that he felt was fair to both him and her.
“Everything’s fine,” she said, though her tone would beg to differ.
Christine kept staring at the nighttime view with all the stubbornness that he’d come to expect from her. Instead of poking her to reveal what it was that she was hiding, he took up a spot next to her, leaning against the wall and staying standing.
“It’s a clear night out,” he said after a while, taking in a deep breath that turned to near ice as he exhaled.
“It is,” she agreed.
He could sense her shaking slightly, her arms wrapped around her body. All he wanted to do was to reach out and pull her into his warmth. The reasonable side of his brain told him that it would be a horrible idea and only serve to push her further from him.
It was the latter, not the former that kept him from doing just that.
Racking his brain to find a way to break through her self-imposed prison of defiance without the help of copious amounts of whiskey, a thought came to Finn.
It’s probably worth a shot, he mused to himself.
Anything was better than waiting long enough that Christine would be too frozen to put up a fight when he would finally be forced to pick her up and cart her into some warmth before frostbite set in.
“Christine. How about we go on an adventure?”
It wasn’t a question as much as it was a statement. Knowing that she would object, he grabbed her by the hand and pulled her along, making her scramble off the railing and follow him down the steps.
“Hey! Don’t you think you should discuss this adventure with me before trying to make me go on one?” she protested.
He didn’t listen, though. She was squeezing his hand back instead of trying to yank hers out of his grasp, and that was all the encouragement that he needed.
“We’d be arguing the whole night and no one has time for that,” he said simply, slogging through the thick snow and acting as sort of a personal snowplow for Christine, who lingered behind him as he made them a path to the edge of the forest.
He stopped when they reached the first row of trees. From there on, the snow wouldn’t be so thick. Finally, he was convinced that they were far enough that he could catch the swift little minx if she thought to run, so he could let go of her hand and usher her to stand next to him.
“What are you implying here, Finn?” she asked tentatively.
When he looked down at her, Finn was taken aback by the very obvious streaks of recently dried tears on her face that he hadn’t seen before in the shadows. She’d been crying and his heart twisted, thinking he’d brought her any discomfort or sadness.
“I’m implying that you need to let your hair down, Christine,” he said, finding his words before his brain could offer alternative questions.
Like “Please tell me I can kill someone who isn’t me for making you cry.”
He got a feeling it wouldn’t be appreciated if he pointed it out that he knew she’d been… well, going through something, for lack of a better term.
“And how do you suppose I do that? By freezing to death in the snow?” she asked, her teeth clattering.
“No, by doing this.”
Finn stepped forward and finally gave into the urge that had been pounding inside of him for days. He tended to go for a run every night, but his bear had been reluctant to leave Christine alone, and Finn had been easily convinced. Now, however, he hoped that she would join him.
The shift took over him easily and he heard Christine gasp as his body warped under the light of the moon and stars. His thick, muscular body seemed to elongate and grow larger and larger, until he dropped on all fours just as long claws bore into the snow. His body was covered in brown fur, thick and downy, but rough enough to protect him from the weather.
His maw was long and his teeth sharp as hell and as he fell into the shift, the first thing he did was let out a roar that rattled through the secluded patch of forest. There was no answer.
He turned, finding Christine looking at him with the same kind of wonderment she’d reserved for the mountains before. Stepping closer, he nudged her hand slightly with his wet nose.
Christine smiled and Finn could feel himself relaxing as she closed her eyes and shook her head, but not in an action that told him his request had been denied.
“You drive a hard bargain, Finn Themps,” she said, both of them knowing that he did, in fact, not.
Not in this case, anyway. With this woman, a step too far would definitely be a step back, and he didn’t want to mess up what little goodwill he had going for himself.
So Finn was practically holding his breath when he felt the tell-tale shimmer of change in the air. A low grumble of approval fought out of his throat as Christine closed her eyes and then spread her fingers slightly, before rolling her hands into tight little fists. The change took over her and all Finn could do was sit back an
d watch.
Finally, a little bit of the puzzle falling into place.
He’d figured she must have been a cat of some sort, if she weren’t something even more agile, but what she really was he hadn’t been expecting. Her body seemed to warp only slightly in size, staying mostly the same rough size it was before. The coat that grew on her was soft and dappled, browns and whites and greys all together.
The thing he noticed the most was the way her fists expanded and when she touched down on all fours, her paws nearly rivaled his in size, though they were mostly because of the wealth of fur on them. She stretched as her transformation was complete, looking completely pleased and like it had been a long, long time since she got to do that last.
Finn figured it was probably true. He’d definitely gotten a certain vibe of apprehension from her about letting go.
Before Finn could be done with his admiration of his companion, the small, but incredibly fast feline took off, the little tuft of a tail of the lynx the last thing Finn noticed.
Of course it would have to be a race.
9
Christine
Christine hadn’t felt this free in… well, she couldn’t even name when, exactly. All she knew was that it had been a long time and her lynx was not amused by the amount of time she’d been forced to stay locked up within Christine.
Well, the lynx was free now, and Christine had no intentions of locking the cat up again. At least not until she was all run out.
The snow plumed around her every time her feet touched down. She heaved in the scents of the forest and the mountains in the background greedily, her senses so much sharper now that she was in her animal form.
Every now and then, when she heard Finn getting too close, she would trick the bear by zig-zagging through the snow and then clambering up the nearest tree, where she would gain ground on him by going through the treetops. While Finn could certainly climb as well, he would be no match against a lynx in the prime of her life.