by Zoe Chant
“Got a lot of complaints, doesn’t she,” Gran crooned. “I feel you, baby.”
Then Gran was stalking back through the kitchen muttering something about tuna fish and gone.
“What’s a mate?” Jamie hissed again, and Devon was keenly aware of everyone’s attention returning to them.
19
Jamie wasn’t as angry as she was pretending to be anymore; she was just numb and disappointed. Angry was just a familiar mask for not sure what to do.
It wasn’t really like she didn’t understand why Devon—why everyone!—had kept the secret. Being a shapeshifter, able to change into an animal at will, was the stuff of movies that didn’t end well. A lot of people would undoubtedly assume they were monsters. They’d probably end up in laboratories.
She just felt…so stupid. Like she should have figured it out a long time ago. Like everyone was in on the secret but her. Like her whole life was a lie. Like thinking her dad was a dead war hero.
And Devon was still keeping something from her, his face full of conflict.
Well, she could make it really easy for him. “You know what, I don’t care. I told you that the one thing I couldn’t stand was secrets. You blew this one, lynx boy.”
Everyone was watching them in horrified fascination and Jamie hated the pity more than the lies.
She turned away, running into a chair, and shoved it hard away from her as she fled the cafe filled with people she thought she knew.
“Don’t follow me!” she shouted back, and she slammed the door behind her as hard as she could.
She broke into a run, just in case Devon chose to follow anyway, and she ran until she was out of breath and out of anger and out of care and her legs felt rubbery from shock and betrayal.
She was blocks away, in the park she’d taken Devon to, the park where she’d found Andrea, naked and with a sprained shoulder.
Which totally made sense for someone who could shift into an animal, but not take their clothes with them.
She fell to her knees in the frozen grass off the jogging path and rolled over onto her back, staring up through the leafless trees at the steel-gray November sky.
Shapeshifters.
Shifters.
Other memories came back to her.
The exotic animal sightings that she’d always dismissed as too much liquor or not enough sense; Stanley was not the most reliable of witnesses.
The unusual strength and quickness of people who had no right to be strong and quick.
Dean, caught talking about shifters. Jamie had thought he was referring to a group of manual-shift car enthusiasts and wondered why he’d gotten so cagey about it when she interrupted the conversation.
And she’d never once seen Gran at the same time as her cat.
It wasn’t that she was angry about it, or didn’t understand the steps everyone had to take to hide it.
It was that her chest felt exactly like it had when she found out that the father she had been bragging about was completely fictional.
And the very worst of it was that everyone else already knew.
The cold from the ground beneath her seemed to seep up through her coat and around all the little gaps. She pulled her hat down further over her ears and drew her arms around herself, but she knew that most of the chill was inside of her.
She lay there, thinking in circles, until her toes started to ache from the cold. Finally, she got up and walked slowly back to the fire station.
“Devon was by looking for you,” Turner greeted her. He was sitting at the table, and he put down the book he’d been reading to give Jamie a long, appraising look. “He seemed worried.”
“He doesn’t need to worry about me,” Jamie said defensively. “I can take care of myself.”
Turner was quiet, and Jamie could feel the skepticism from him.
“Are you...” she couldn’t quite bring herself to say it out loud. “One of them?”
Turner’s brow crinkled in confusion. “One of who?”
“One of what, is more like it,” Jamie said angrily.
Turner looked at her blankly.
Temper flared beyond retrieval, Jamie snapped, “Oh for…are you a shapeshifter, too?”
Turner’s face softened in understanding. “Ah…” he said unhelpfully. “That explains it.”
“What explains it?” Jamie demanded. “Explains what?”
Turner gave a half-shrug. “Devon should tell you.”
“Yeah, he should!” Jamie shouted, despite telling herself she shouldn’t. “But he didn’t! Nobody does! I’m always the last one to know! I should know these things!” She hated the tears that sprang into her eyes.
They both knew she wasn’t really talking about Devon.
“You want a cup of coffee?” Turner offered.
Jamie wanted to break something, or turn around and run again. Instead, she pulled off her coat and stuffed her hat into a sleeve. “Yeah,” she said, feeling full of defeat.
Turner set up the pot and started the drip while she hung up her jacket and tried to surreptitiously wipe her face.
“It wasn’t your fault,” Turner said, when he set the cup down in front of her.
“I know,” Jamie said, taking a sip. “I know.”
But knowing was much different than believing.
Jamie wasn’t sure if she was glad that Turner had never been much of a conversationalist, or not. He gave good speeches at school, when required to, but he was a lot better at just listening.
She didn’t feel like talking.
They sat in silence through the entire cup of coffee, not quite looking at each other.
She wasn’t sure how long they would have pretended to drink from empty cups if there hadn’t been a knock at the door.
Devon.
Jamie told herself it was just logic that told her who it was, not a tingling certainty that it was him.
“Well, I’d best be getting home,” Turner said swiftly, rising and dumping his coffee cup on the counter instead of washing it the way he normally would. He was pulling on his coat as he opened the door for Devon. “I’m just leaving.”
Devon stepped in and Turner vanished behind him, much more swiftly than a man of his size ought to be able to.
It occurred to Jamie that Turner had never actually answered the question about whether or not he was a shifter.
Jamie remained in her chair, looking thoughtfully at Devon.
“I tried to call you,” Devon said.
“I had my phone turned off,” Jamie told him.
“Oh, good,” Devon said inanely. “I mean, because I thought maybe the battery had died again, or...something.”
“No, you fixed it,” Jamie said. “It works fine now.”
“Can we talk?” Devon asked nervously.
“Yeah,” Jamie said. “You want some coffee?”
Devon shook his head and shrugged out of his coat. “I don’t want coffee,” he said firmly. “I want you.”
He had a piece of paper in his hand, and when he sat down opposite from her, he slid it across the table.
“What’s this?” Jamie asked. It was too small to be a letter of apology or a poem.
“That’s your dad’s phone number.”
20
Devon was watching Jamie’s face when she took the paper slowly, like she couldn’t help herself.
A hundred different emotions crossed her face in the space of a few heartbeats: surprise, grief, anger, gratitude, confusion, and pain.
“You...said you wanted to know.”
She stared at the paper a moment, then glared at him. “You should have told me.”
Devon guessed that he wasn’t talking about her dad’s number.
“I should have,” he admitted. “I should have told you everything from the very beginning. Complicated didn’t start to cover it, and I had to protect my sister as well as my secrets, but you’re my mate and I should have trusted you.”
“What’s a...mate?” she whispered
.
Devon had to laugh then, even in the face of her distress, because it all seemed so clear and easy at last.
“It’s like destiny or fate, but more. A mate is the person who completes a shifter. The perfect match. The other half. The happy ever after and the love at first sight.”
“This isn’t a fairy tale,” Jamie hissed. She was hunched over, her shoulders rolled forward defensively.
“It’s more complicated than a fairy tale,” Devon agreed. “But if you set me three impossible tasks, I’d do them for you.”
Jamie almost smiled. “You really would, wouldn’t you.”
“In a heartbeat,” Devon said honestly. “When I met you, I knew you were the one. My...lynx...recognized you and made it clear that I couldn’t let you get away. Ever.”
Her smile faded. “What am I supposed to do with this?” she asked, looking down at the slip of paper in her hands.
Devon thought she meant more than the phone number, but that was the easiest place to start.
“Whatever you want,” he said promptly. “You don’t have to call him, I just thought you should have it. If you want, we can invite him for Thanksgiving dinner. I know you don’t like to plan that far ahead, but...you could. If you wanted.”
“Did you hack into some government database to get this information? Devon Maynard, Private Investigator?”
Devon chuckled. “No hacking necessary; there’s a lot of information in public records if you know where to look. Marta knew his name, I could figure it out from there. That’s his work number. He’s an accountant in Des Moines. He drives a better car than me.”
“Well, if he was going to be a deadbeat, he could have at least passed on the genetic knack for math,” Jamie joked stiffly. She folded the paper in her hands, then folded it again.
“You’re pretty good at invoicing,” Devon reminded her. “And you should at least let him tell you his side of the story.”
“Why’d you do this?” she asked.
“You made me think a lot...about family. And I thought you’d want to know. And I’d want to know.” Devon swallowed. “Jamie, I want you to be my family. Whatever you come with, however you are. You and me and Abby.”
Jamie was still folding the paper, as tiny as it would go.
“I thought I’d start looking for a new house,” Devon said, jumping off the deep end. “A place big enough for three of us.”
The paper slipped from Jamie’s fingers and unfolded.
“What are you suggesting, that we buy a house together?” She sounded outraged.
“We could get married,” Devon said desperately, his lynx anxious in his head. He was making an utter hash of this. “I mean, I’d like to. Jamie, you’re my mate. I love you like crazy, and I want to be with you forever.”
“People say forever all the time,” Jamie protested. “They never mean it.”
“I mean it,” Devon said fiercely. “I mean always, and I mean forever, and I mean you and me, and I will do whatever I have to do to make that happen.”
Jamie stared at him until he felt uncomfortable.
“I can get a ring, if you want to do this right,” he added more quietly. “It won’t be a surprise, but we can go to the park, or Gran’s, where we met, and I’ll get down on one knee and stammer a lot.” Should he do that now? he wondered. He certainly had the stammering part down.
She was still unhelpfully quiet.
“We could do a courthouse thing in Madison if you don’t want a big deal,” Devon suggested.
Still, she didn’t say anything.
“Or we don’t have to get married, if you think that’s an antique requirement of the patriarchal establishment or whatever,” Devon floundered. “I’d just...really like it.”
“You want to live here?” Jamie asked at last.
“Green Valley, Alaska, it doesn’t matter to me.”
“What about Abby?”
Devon paused. “We’re a team,” he said cautiously.
“Don’t look so stricken,” Jamie said, with a hint of her usual spice. “I’m not going to ask you to choose between us. I was thinking I’d winter over in Green Valley anyway, though the wildfire season doesn’t strictly follow the school year, you know. And we’d have to see what Abby wanted to do.”
Relief flooded through him, and his lynx capered in his head. “I like the idea of Alaska,” he said eagerly. “My lynx would love having real wilderness to get out in.”
Jamie gave a dry laugh. “Your lynx. Is it like a different person inside of you? Does it talk?”
“Too much, sometimes,” Devon said wryly.
“My boyfriend has voices in his head,” Jamie said with a sigh.
Devon thought that it was an excellent sign if she was calling him her boyfriend, even if she hadn’t answered the question about getting married. He smiled across the table hopefully and Jamie frowned.
“Show me,” she challenged.
Devon had expected that, and he stood up and walked to the door and locked it before coming around to her side of the table. He started to pull his sweater off over his head.
“All the naked people,” Jamie muttered, scooting her chair back so that she was facing him. “I didn’t bring any dollar bills.”
“You can tip me in other ways,” Devon suggested with a slow smile.
“You are getting better at that invoicing thing,” Jamie said with grudging approval.
Devon put his sweater on the table and started to slip out of his pants.
“Slower!” Jamie suggested. “I’m not over being mad at you, but you’re still hot.”
Obediently, Devon slowed, sliding his zipper down one link at a time. He had only the vaguest idea of how strip-teases worked, but he was willing to try.
21
Jamie felt like she’d gone through every emotion it was possible to feel. Devon had pissed her off, proposed to her, tracked down her deadbeat dad, promised to follow her to Alaska...and now he was giving her a blushing strip-tease to the best of his considerable abilities.
There was no soundtrack, but neither of them needed one. Devon was absolutely gorgeous, with his rippling muscles and big arms and those amazing planes leading down into the pants he was slowly removing.
“Boom chicka yeah…” he said, his ears charmingly pink.
The humor didn’t dampen Jamie’s ardor, and as his pants slipped past his cock, it was clear that it hadn’t harmed his, either.
He was the whole package...he was funny, he was brave, and he was loyal.
And he was hers.
Jamie didn’t know how much she believed in mates, but she knew that there was something amazing between them. Something special.
Something...true.
He was her family now, and that was as exciting as the idea of shifters was, now that she had gotten past her fury.
His pants were off now, with one little skip as he nearly lost his balance pulling them off his ankle, and Jamie rose to her feet.
She came up close to him, loving the hiss he gave as she closed her hand around his shaft.
“You...ah...wanted to see my l-lynx,” he stuttered.
“That can wait,” Jamie told him, using her other hand to trace down his chest. “I’m thinking that make-up sex may be in order first.”
“Make-up sex?” Devon repeated with a groan.
“It was our first big fight,” Jamie explained. “I’ll let you check it off the list.”
“It was on the list?”
“No, but I’ll add it.” She stood on her toes to nibble his earlobe and he groaned and the muscles under her hands strained. Though one of them wasn’t technically a muscle.
Then Devon growled, and she wondered how she’d never noticed how animal his growl could be. He bent and picked her up, not bothering to hide how impossibly easy it was for him, and she let her arms slide up around his neck.
He went at once for the stairs.
“Keys!” Jamie reminded him breathlessly.
They
paused at her coat to fish her keys from her pocket and then he was carrying her up the stairs like they were returning from a wedding, but considerably more awkward because she nearly fell out of his arms unlocking the door.
Then he was tossing her, laughing, onto the bed and shutting the door behind her and she was struggling out of her clothing as fast as she could because she didn’t want anything between them, not one scrap of clothing, not one secret.
“I love you,” he said, kissing her neck as he returned to hamper the removal of one last pant leg. “I love you.”
Three little words. Words Jamie thought she’d never hear and that she’d certainly never believe.
They made her impossibly wet, and impossibly weak.
And she believed him, beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt.
She felt safe in his arms, safe and loved and sheltered.
He’d always been able to spark her desire, from the very first startled glance he’d given her. But now he set her on fire, and she wasn’t afraid of his fire. He wasn’t wildfire or house fire…he was hearth fire. He was home.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and drew him closer, wrapping her legs around him as he drove into her.
They coupled slowly, at first, savoring the closeness and kisses, then fell irresistibly into a whirlwind of need and desire, frantic for friction and touch. When she found her climax, he followed quickly, desperate and gentle.
“I love you,” Jamie said, because it was true, and she didn’t want secrets.
He gave a noise of delight and wrapped her tight in his arms. “I love you,” he told her.
Jamie felt a rush of pleasure every bit as keen as the physical pleasure had been, and they lay, tangled together, until she fell asleep.
22
Jamie woke up with a lynx.
He was purring, his plush sides rising and falling in a hypnotic rhythm.
She was curled around him, feeling blissfully comfortable. He was warmer and softer than anything she’d ever felt before. She squeezed, and was shocked by how much of him was fur.