Timber Wolf (Virtue Shifters Book 1)

by Zoe Chant

  A kernel of anger flared deep in Jake's chest. He took a careful breath, trying not to let it blaze out of control as he asked, carefully, "Did he hurt you?"

  She glanced up, then back down at her glass, but shook her head no. "No, not physically. Not even verbally, exactly. He was...gas-lighty. I kind of got to where I just...I thought I couldn't do stuff without him. Like I wasn't good enough at things." She swirled the water in her glass, lips compressed. "Except I guess he wasn't the totally controlling kind of gas-lighter, just...a jerk, I guess, because he was furious when I got pregnant, though, like I'd planned it to get at his vast fortune." She looked up again, a spark of humor in her eyes and in the twist of her mouth as she dropped her voice into a movie trailer narrator's tone. "Spoiler: he did not have a vast fortune.

  "Anyway," she said in her regular voice, "we split up. So obviously he wasn't into totally controlling me, because he didn't want anything to do with me or Noah. Which was fine, I didn't want anything to do with him, either, but then he kept coming around, once every six or eight months, I guess. Just often enough to make me uncomfortable, you know? So I couldn't quite move on. He didn't even want to actually see Noah or anything. He just wanted to make me twitchy."

  We should have bitten him, Jake's wolf said, and Jake couldn't really find fault with the statement.

  "Even before I inherited the house I'd filed for termination of his parental rights since he's literally never met Noah, but you know how those things are." She glanced up again, saw from Jake's expression that he didn't, and half smiled. "Difficult," she supplied. "It's hard, even if it's a clear case of abandonment. Judges don't like ruling against biological parents. Anyway, the point of all this is I...I don't really think he's dangerous, but would you...I'd..." She exhaled, muttered, "Jeez," and looked up to meet his eyes with determination.

  "I know I'm asking a lot, but would you maybe mind staying in the house until I get rid of him?"

  She kept talking—"It's ridiculous, asking somebody if they'd rather sleep in a house than a barn, but I don't even have an extra bed in the house right now, the parlor side just isn't sleep-in-able yet, and I know it's weird because I know all you want to do is help out building around here and I still haven't even been able to pay you hardly anything and—?"

  All Jake heard, though, was that Mabs needed him. All he knew was that the very idea filled him with joy. It didn't even matter why she needed him, although he and his wolf were in full agreement that the opportunity to bite her ex couldn't be passed up. She needed him. Him. Jake Rowly.

  No one had needed him in a long, long time.

  She was obviously embarrassed by the very idea, though, and had just about talked herself out of it before Jake said, "I'd be glad to!"

  "What?" Her voice went faint. "Really?"

  "Really. What are friends for?"

  His wolf, hopelessly, said, Friends?, and, with the sense of giving up, decided to take a nap.

  Mabs's gaze flickered to her water glass and back. "Running ex-boyfriends and pushy realtors off?"

  "Without a doubt." Jake smiled and Mabs's shoulders dropped visibly.

  "Thanks. I guess...tomorrow? I can get a bed of some kind for the dining room? Would that be okay?"

  "Mabs, if you want, I can sleep in here tonight." Jake didn't want to sound too eager, but he didn't want her to keep herself awake with worry all night, either. "I—"

  "But the couch in the living room isn't long enough for you..." Mabs sounded unhappy, but he couldn't help the increasing size of his...smile.

  "I'm a wolf, Mabs. I can curl up in front of your door, or even on the porch, if you want. I'm not going to get cold or uncomfortable."

  Mabs opened her mouth and closed it again, nonplussed. "I can't ask you to do that."

  "You're not," Jake pointed out, genuinely cheerful. "I volunteered. Honestly, give me a fluffy rug and I'm great."

  "A flu...Are you out there sleeping in the barn as a wolf?" Mabs cracked up suddenly, giggles overwhelming whatever worries she had. "Have I been one early morning away from discovering my carpenter is a... timber wolf ?"

  Jake started protesting, "No, no," to her first question before the second was finished, and was caught off-guard by a guffaw that made Mabs leap forward and clap a hand over his mouth. Jake looked guiltily toward the stairs, but Noah didn't complain, and Mabs sat back down again, steadying the water glass she'd nearly knocked over.

  Then they were both suddenly laughing again, tears of amusement sparkling in Mabs's eyes. "Timber wolf," she said in a whisper this time. "I'm pretty funny."

  "You are." Jake's grin was so broad it hurt. "I never thought of me that way before, but yeah, I guess I am. I'll stay," he promised. "I'll sleep at the front door. Mabs?"

  "Yeah?" She met his eyes, and Jake had to remind himself for the hundredth time that she hadn't hired him for anything other than house repairs. Not that he'd want to have been hired for most of the other things he had in mind, but...that wasn't the point.

  The point was, "I'm glad you asked. I'm glad I can help you out."

  "I'm glad you told me your secret." Mabs wrinkled her nose, which was so cute it brought Jake all the way back around to feeling like catching her in his arms and kissing her really would be an awfully good idea. "I would have asked you to stay in the house anyway, but having a giant wolf-man i—"

  "I'm not a wolf-man!" Jake did his best Lon-Cheney-as-Wolf-Man pose and Mabs shook with laughter again. "Shapeshifter," he told her, grinning. "I'm a shapeshifter. Big difference."

  "Okay, shapeshifter. I can see I'm going to have to learn a whole new vocabulary here. So having a giant wolf shapeshifter in the house is even more...protecty...than having just a big tall strong handsome man around, so...thank you."

  "Oh, so I'm handsome now?" Jake couldn't have been happier at the confession if he'd tried. She thinks I'm handsome!

  His wolf rolled its eyes and otherwise ignored him as Mabs wrinkled her nose again and said, "I guess you'll do, yeah," as she rose from the table. "Look, Jake, we probably have a million things to talk about regarding the house and Brent and, I don't know, shapeshifters, but I'm bushed. I'm gonna go to bed. Are you sure about this?"

  Rather than answer with words, Jake shifted into his wolf form as he stood, and went to lean heavily against Mabs's hip. She hesitated, then curled her fingers in his ruff before kneeling to wrap her arms around his shoulders and bury her face in his fur. He heard her muffled, "Thank you," in his bones, and trotted to the bottom of the stairs behind her, then curled up at their foot, his nose pointed attentively toward the front door.

  The memory of that hug kept him warm all night.

  SIXTEEN

  Jake was human again by the time Mabs came downstairs, Noah in tow, the next morning. He waved them off and Mabs, getting Noah into his car seat on the almost-frosty morning, wondered at her ability to adapt to her carpenter being a shapeshifting wolf as if it was nothing particularly unusual. Somehow, though, it seemed perfectly in keeping with Jake's slightly solitary nature, and she suddenly wondered if Sarah knew. She'd called him a lone wolf, but then, that was just a thing people said. It didn't mean anything.

  Unless it did.

  "Hey, Noah?" Her son was involved in a library book, and made a vaguely interested noise response. "Probably we shouldn't tell anybody about Mr. Rowly turning into a big dog, okay?"

  "Okay, Mommy." He turned the page, and Mabs couldn't help chuckling. Maybe taking shapeshifters in stride was a family trait. There were probably worse traits to have.

  Like Brent Mitchell's decision to hunt them down. Mabs made a face at the road and put that thought out of her mind for the moment, since there wasn't anything she could really do about it, and Jake was home keeping the house safe.

  She dropped Noah off at the library, muttered, "So much," to Sarah's query of, "Anything new?", and hurried off to work before she could satisfy the librarian's curiosity. The diner was quiet enough at first to let her fret over Brent's reappeara
nce, although as the day got busier she was able to let it slip to the back of her mind.

  She'd pretty well forgotten about him until her shift was over and she walked out of the diner to find Brent Mitchell waiting for her in the parking lot.

  Her heart lurched, and she remembered how it used to be that it would lurch with excitement at seeing him. He was still as good-looking as ever, not as tall as Jake, not as well-built, not as...not as anything as Jake Rowly, really. And she could see the meanness around his mouth now in a way she hadn't been able to when she was younger. Now, his presence made her heart clench with dread.

  Mabs was surprised at how much she wanted Jake at her side, all of a sudden. Not even to bluster and threaten Brent. Just to be there. Since he wasn't, she just sighed. It was warmer out than it had been that morning. Her breath didn't turn to steam on the air, which was kind of too bad. She might have felt like a dragon, and dragons could no doubt face down ex-boyfriends with ease. "What do you want, Brent?"

  "I wanted to know where my family had gone. You look good, Mabs."

  "Oh my God." Mabs cast her gaze upward, as if seeking strength from the gathering clouds. "We're not your family. If we were I'd have seen you more than six times since I got pregnant."

  He took a few lazy steps closer, like a predator. Mabs's stomach clenched, even though it was daylight and there was a diner full of friends less than a dozen feet behind her. "Aw. c'mon, babe, you know that isn't true. What a crazy thing to say."

  A knot of anger formed itself in Mabs's chest. "God, you said that to me all the time. 'What a crazy thing to say'. I don't say crazy things, Brent. I trust myself now, even though you spent so much time trying to make sure I didn't."

  His gaze shifted and he almost visibly shifted gears. "Then maybe it's time for me to make amends. What the hell are you doing out at that farm, baby? What the hell was that animal I saw with Noah? Hey, he's a good-looking kid, isn't he? Looks like his daddy."

  "What do you really want, Brent? You can't possibly be here to play family, but even if you are, I don't want to anymore. That ship sailed."

  "Yeah? You got some other guy up there at that farm? Or did you just leave my son alone with a dangerous animal? What was that, a friggin' wolf ?"

  Mabs stared at him flatly. "You mean Wolf? Yes. That's his name."

  "You have a wolf named Wolf? I thought you thought you were smart. Oh. I guess the kid named it. I guess he's not all that smart."

  Anger pulled Mabs's mouth into a sharp smile. "Well, you're the one who said he's his daddy's son." He hadn't actually said that, but it was close enough to land the hit, and Brent flushed with anger while Mabs shook her head. "He's plenty smart, Brent. He's just a kid. They're pretty literal a lot of the time. Which you might know if you'd spent any time with him. But you haven't, and you're not gonna now. Go back to the city. Whatever reasons you're here aren't good enough."

  "That's not how it's going to work, Mabs. We're gonna work this out."

  "Dude. Oh my God. That's not how relationships work. Now go the hell home before I call the cops on you for harassment."

  "Nobody's going to arrest me."

  "Maybe not in the city, but there's not a lot around here for the cops to do, Brent. You'd give them something to talk about. Just...go. I don't want to see you again." Mabs sighed. Even more, she didn't want to go to the library to pick Noah up until Brent was gone.

  "You gotta introduce him to me, Mabs. My own kid didn't even know who I was."

  "Well, that's not my damn fault, Brent. Just...go. I gotta get back to work." She turned and went back into the building, hating the retreat but not seeing much choice.

  Her boss, Ross Collins, was leaning on the counter and had clearly been watching them through the window. "Everything okay, Mabs?"

  "Noah's deadbeat dad. I don't want him to know where Noah is right now. Or at all." She took her phone out to text Sarah, explaining she was running late, and a couple seconds later it buzzed with an acknowledgment. In the meantime Ross texted something, too, and Mabs sat down in the back with a soda while customers came in and out. "Is he still out there?" she asked after a while.

  Just as she did, a police vehicle's siren went woop woop ! and Ross stuck his head into the back to grin. "Not anymore. I called in a complaint about a loiterer. Don't worry, Mabs. We've got your back."

  Mabs said, "Thank you," with a whole lot of emotion behind it, and once Brent had been run off, collected Noah, and went home to Jake with a sense of relief.

  * * *

  She saw him before they even got home, up on the roof, continuing the work he'd been doing the day before. A bubble of happiness rose in her and she waved as she got out of the car, smiled foolishly when he waved back, and got Noah out of his car seat feeling much better than she had just a minute earlier. She called, "Don't go anywhere," to the carpenter.

  He shouted, "I won't!" back and Mabs was still smiling as she went into the house to get Noah a snack. He sat at the kitchen table with it, pretending he wasn't going to share with Wolf, as Mabs went out to climb the ladder leaning against the buttery roof and stood at the top of it, watching Jake finish nailing a shingle down before saying, "Did Brent come out here again today?"

  Jake shook his head, taking several small nails out of his mouth so he could speak. "No. Did you have trouble with him?"

  "He came to my work."

  Somehow he went from being an interested friend to a worried protector. If he was in his wolf form, Mabs thought, his hackles would rise. "Do you need me to come in and hang around? I don't want him making your life harder, Mabs." For a moment her heart rose, the idea that Jake cared that much helping her mood enormously. Then he said, "You've already got a lot going on with work and Noah and the house and now your classes. Last thing you need is somebody hanging around making it worse."

  "I think my job has my back," she said, wishing she had an excuse to have him come hang out, anyway. "My boss called the cops on the stranger loitering in the parking lot."

  Jake's smile flashed. "Ross is a good guy. Good. I'm glad. How's Noah?"

  "Fine. I just want to keep Brent away from him if I can."

  "I'll watch him, if you want to leave him home because Brent's in town."

  "Babysitting, carpentry, cooking. Is there anything you don't do, Jake Rowly?"

  "I'd say windows, but..." He gestured toward the newly re-framed windows in the wing below them, and Mabs smiled.

  "I'm gonna go make dinner. You gonna join us?"

  "I'd love to." He eyed the stretch of roof he was looking on. "About how long, do you figure?"

  "Half an hour or so?"

  "Okay. I can probably get this section done, if I don't screw around. See you in a bit?"

  Mabs nodded and went back down the ladder to cook, feeling better for no obvious reason. Dinner came together quickly, with Jake coming in only a few minutes late, having finished shingling and stapling vapor barrier plastic down. "In case the weather changes," he said as he washed his hands. "We've been lucky so far, but at some point the luck's gonna break."

  * * *

  It broke eight hours later.

  Mabs didn't even know what had awakened her: a crash, too loud and also somehow too dull to possibly be Noah. She still jerked out of bed and ran to his room, finding him sprawled unconscious across the bed with Wolf, who wasn't supposed to be on the bed. Heart hammering with relief, she flicked the curtains of his windows open, checking to see if something had fallen outside.

  Something had.

  Snow.

  Lots and lots of snow. Inches of it, at least. It piled on the trees and fences, glowing dimly with light reflected from the single streetlight on her stretch of the main road. Mabs stared at it, disbelieving, then heard Jake's footsteps on the stairs and left Noah's room to meet him.

  He was barefoot, in a white t-shirt and plaid sleeping pants, and cold was blowing in from somewhere. Mabs blinked at his outfit, too surprised to think about the snow for a moment. "You chang
e into pajamas to sleep?"

  He looked at himself, and back at her, his eyebrows crinkled in confusion. "Don't most people?"

  "I guess, but I thought you were sleeping as a wolf, and your clothes change with you, so I guess I...I dunno. I guess I didn't think about you changing to sleep."

  "Ah." Jake's shoulders shook with contained laughter. "I spent a summer when I was about nine working under logic kind of like that. I figured if I just slept as a wolf then it somehow made it okay to be wearing the same clothes the next day. It took Mom a while to notice, but when she did I got read the riot act and dumped in the bath. Including my shoes. So now I change clothes to sleep in, even if I'm sleeping as a wolf."

  "Oh my God. Kids are so gross."

  "They really are." Jake exhaled, his breath suddenly visible in the air. "I'm afraid to open the bedroom doors."

  "I don't know if you looked outside. It snowed," Mabs said grimly. "So we kind of have to, though, don't we?" Three of the upstairs bedrooms were over the parlor half of the house, two on the house's front and one large one overlooking the back garden. A hall separated them. Mabs edged down that hall, nervously pushing one of the front bedrooms' doors open. She didn't know what to expect under the best of circumstances, having barely even looked into the rooms since moving in.

  It looked fine. She frowned, glanced at Jake, and went down the hall to check the other front bedroom, then opened the door to the larger back bedroom. Everything looked normal, for the value of 'normal' that involved rooms having gone untouched for decades. She exchanged another glance with Jake as she came back to the upstairs landing, and they both looked up.

  "I haven't been in the attic," Mabs said warily. "I'm not sure how to get in the attic." That wasn't entirely true. There was an entrance...door, or whatever the appropriate term for a covered hole in a ceiling was, at the far end of the hall. A cord dangled down from it, but Mabs wasn't even tall enough to reach it, which had been a pretty great excuse for not even bothering to look up there.