The Baby Shift: Montana
Shifter Babies Of America 47
Becca Fanning
Copyright © 2019 by Becca Fanning
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
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Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Also by Becca Fanning
Chapter 1
Fleetwood Mac was blaring out of the speakers in Mandy Johnson’s 1985 Chevy pickup truck and she was singing along to an album she knew so well, the lyrics were practically etched into her brains. Up above, the sun was clear and bright in the early morning sky, casting a warm glow on the arm Mandy had propped on her window frame tapping to the beat of “Dreams.”
She loved early summer days like this, before the arid heat of the Montana summer truly set in, and it was still comfortable to have the truck windows open and a long-sleeve t-shirt on. She also loved this time of the morning, when her truck was one of only a few driving up 27th street, passing by the still quiet office buildings that would eventually be filled with toiling workers.
The reason she’d moved back to Montana was to savor these quiet, peaceful morning moments. Well, that and to care for her mother. Now that her mom’s cancer was finally in remission, Mandy was able to—for the first time since moving back over a year ago—truly appreciate the beauty of her hometown.
As she pulled into the parking lot of the building where the farmer’s market was housed, Mandy let the rest of the song play out before she shut off the ignition. The music echoed in the empty parking lot, which meant she was free to bust out lip-syncing skills that she’d spent a lifetime perfecting. If your voice was as bad as hers, you had to lip-sync.
“Thunder only happens when it’s raining,” she mouthed, using her travel coffee cup as a microphone. She snapped her fingers to the beat, moving side to side and letting the music completely overtake her.
She was so involved in her musical stylings that she didn’t notice the man standing outside her window, arms crossed, looking at her quizzically. Not until the song ended, and he abruptly burst into applause that had her screeching in surprise.
“Nicely done. I’d say you give the band a run for their money,” he told her, his mouth turned up in a teasing smile. A smile that Mandy recognized. A smile that, in fact, Mandy had spent a good portion of her adolescence dreaming about.
Because that smile belonged to Christopher Perez, her brother’s best friend and the object of a teenage crush so profound, and unrequited, that it still made Mandy cringe when she thought about it. Which, of course, she was doing now, as she cracked her car door open, wincing slightly when the familiar squeak rang out in the pregnant silence. Mandy walked toward Christopher and hugged him, because that was what you did when you hadn’t seen a childhood friend/crush/the-man-who-unknowingly-broke-your-heart-and-ruined-you-for-all-other-men in ten years.
“Mandy Johnson!” he said as he rubbed her back in a way that Mandy knew he meant as friendly, but which her traitorous body took as an invitation to get all tingly and warm with uninvited lust. “How long has it been? What’re you doing back here in Billings?”
“Tony didn’t tell you?” Mandy asked, pulling away from him, more as an act of self-preservation than wanting to end the hug. She’d happily stay wrapped in Chris Perez’s arms until the end of time, but she knew that was a recipe for disaster. It only made her want things she couldn’t have.
“Nope. Haven’t seen him much, to be honest,” Chris said, scrubbing his hand over the top of his head. It was his nervous tic, something he’d been doing since they were kids.
“Yeah, well, that’s what happens when you suddenly become the father of triplets,” Mandy said, shrugging. Her brother and his wife had been expecting their first child last year, but halfway through the pregnancy, two other little babies had appeared on the ultrasound screen. Tony and Emma took the surprise in stride and became amazing parents, but still…so many diapers…So many bottles. Mandy never failed to be amazed when she walked into their house and saw the sheer mess that three babies could create.
“Exactly. I stop over when I can, but he’s honestly so harried with those kids that I think he’d forget his own name if the boiler suit he wears at the garage didn’t have it sewed on.”
Mandy laughed at that, but of course, it wasn’t her normal laugh. No, what came out of her mouth was a truly mortifying snort so loud and long that, after it ended, she wanted nothing so much as to evaporate into the earth and become part of the water cycle.
Thankfully, Chris didn’t comment on it; instead, he continued the conversation and allowed her to recover from the embarrassment. It was, after all, one in a long line of embarrassing things she’d done in his presence over the years. Hence the unrequited nature of her crush.
“So, what brings you to the Downtown Alliance at,” he paused, looking at the small Casio watch on his wrist that Mandy knew he’d been wearing since eighth grade, “six fifty five in the morning?”
“I have a stall here,” Mandy told him, “at the farmer’s market.”
“No way! What’re you selling?” Chris asked.
“Handmade soaps and lotions. And some face masks. Candles, eventually.”
“Oh yeah, that makes sense. You studied chemistry, right? And weren’t you working for that beauty company in Vermont before you came here?”
Mandy was shocked. How did Chris know so much about the last ten years of her life? Had Tony told him?
“Uh, yeah, that’s right,” she said, nodding slowly. “I quit that job when my mom got sick. I’ve been taking care of her for the past year, but now that she’s better, I can focus on my business.”
“That’s awesome. I always knew you’d be doing something cool. You were always doing weird experiments in your parents’ kitchen, and my sister still raves about that bath bomb you made her when she got shingles. Says she wants some for her kids when they get chickenpox.”
“Oh! Well, I can totally make her some. Give me her address, and I’ll send some over.” Mandy wasn’t focusing on the words coming out of her mouth, but rather on the thoughts speeding through her head. Chris remembered her doing experiments? He and his sister had discussed her bath bombs? Was she the only person in the world to gain true excitement from the idea of someone delighting in her adolescent soap creations?
“Cool! She’d love that.” Chris smiled as he slid his hands into the pockets of his jeans. Mandy noticed this, of course, because her eyes happened to be trained on his crotch at that moment.
Chris followed her line of vision, glancing down at the fly of his jeans before looking back up to meet her eyes. The look he gave her was mischievous and wicked and a thousand other adjectives that made Mandy’s cheeks heat with blush so pink she could practically feel the color as it darkened.
Mandy turned around abruptly and stalked to the bed of her truck, where all her supplies for her stall where laid out neatly under a tarp she’d bought the day before at Home Depot.
“Need any help setting up?” Chris asked, following her and coming to stand just behind her as she undid the zip ties from the tarp and gingerly lifted it up. Mandy didn’t hear him. She was too filled with nervous anticipation as she undid the tarp, worried that all her supplies had been thrown around, despite her careful driving and the smooth, empty roads.
She breathed an audible sigh of relief when she
looked and saw that all of her carefully packed plastic containers were still upright, exactly as she’d packed them an hour ago. None of her body washes had spilled, and the few candles she’d made in time for the market didn’t look as though the wax had melted or dented.
Taking her phone out of her pocket, she scanned her eyes down the checklist she’d made before leaving her new apartment that morning. Boxes, check, table and chair, check, awning, check.
“Mandy?” Chris repeated, and Mandy looked up to find him still standing next to her.
“Sorry, what did you say?” she asked, squinting at the sunlight that was shining down on them, making it look like Chris had a halo surrounded his beautiful sandy blonde hair. He had always been a golden boy, she quipped to herself, laughing silently at her own joke.
“I asked if you needed help. And what are you laughing at?” Chris asked, looking at her like she might be a little unhinged.
“Nothing. I’m not laughing at anything. And yeah, I’d love some help,” she said, before realizing something.
“Wait. Why are you here?” she asked, backtracking when she realized how rude that sounded. “I mean, why are you at the alliance so early? It’s normally just sellers that are here hours before the market.”
“I know,” Chris said, nodding. “I run the market.”
“Wait. What?” Mandy asked, confused. Last she’d heard from Tony, Chris was helping his dad on the farm, tending fields of golden wheat that they then sold to major cereal companies. When had that changed?
“Yup. Took the position over from one of my buddies last year. I run it with a board, so it’s not me alone, but I do a lot of the grunt work.”
“Wow. Must be a pretty big change from farming,” Mandy said, turning back to the truck because she couldn’t handle the satisfied grin on Chris’ face. She knew it was because he was talking about a job he loved, but damn, his smile did things to her. Hit her in all her tingly places.
“I’ll fill you in while we set up. Come on. I can show you where your stall is,” Chris said, grabbing the tent poles and awning that Mandy had purchased the week before. The awning had her company name, Wolf Lady Soap, along with a moon and a silhouette of a wolf’s head over top of it. Her best friend from Vermont, Mallory, had designed it. Mandy loved the logo, partly for the beautiful font and illustration and partly because it was a tongue-in-cheek nod to her inner wolf, a part of herself she so rarely connected with these days.
Gathering up two boxes of soaps, Mandy followed Chris through the parking lot and into the larger lot next door, where a smattering of sellers were beginning to set up their wares.
As they arranged Mandy’s stand, they chatted. Mandy found out that Chris had quit farming after his dad decided to sell the land to a small organic wheat farmer. She’d also found out that Chris had split up with his girlfriend of five years, a frustratingly nice, pretty woman named Eileen, who Mandy did her best to avoid at the annual neighborhood Christmas party.
“Why did you break up?” Mandy asked, trying her best to sound casual, and the answer to that question wasn’t one she was waiting on with bated breath.
“I wanted to settle down, and she didn’t. Said she hadn’t seen enough of the world yet, hadn’t sowed her wild oats. And I get it. We met when she was twenty-one, just out of college. She’s been a schoolteacher in the district since then, and I think she was getting bored of midwestern life. I hope she finds what she’s looking for. She’s a good person, you know?”
Mandy nodded because she agreed that, yes, Eileen was a good person. But she was also nodding to mask the inner celebration happening in her head because, for the first time in her entire adult life, Chris Perez was single. And if he was the head of the market, she was going to be seeing a lot more of him.
Maybe this summer won’t be so bad. Mandy set out the last of her candles.
Chapter 2
Three weeks later, Chris followed Mandy to her truck and wondered how he’d been so stupid all these years.
He’d seen Mandy at least once a year for the last decade at the neighborhood Christmas party, when she was back west visiting her parents, and he’d never given her more than a friendly smile and a few minutes of small talk before returning to his group of friends, Tony being among them.
Mandy had, to him, always been nothing but his best friend’s little sister. A gap-toothed girl who liked making exploding potions in her parents’ kitchen. An awkward adolescent with frizzy hair, and her nose stuck in one of those Twilight books. She hadn’t warranted a second glance, hadn’t warranted more than a few seconds of thought.
But Chris had been overlooking her. That was clear. While he’d had his head stuck up his ass, Mandy had transformed from a girl into a woman. And not just any woman, either, but the one of his dreams. The mate of his dreams, if he was being honest with himself.
Because it was clear now that Eileen hadn’t been his mate. She’d never given him the kind of fluttery feelings that Mandy did whenever her eyes locked with Chris’. He could feel her presence in every cell of his body, and he knew, from what Tony had told him, that was how your mate was supposed to make you feel.
Chris was a little confused as to why these feelings about Mandy only appeared all of a sudden when he’d known the woman his whole life, but werewolf mating was complicated and dictated by pheromones and chemicals and a whole host of other things that he didn’t understand. The important thing was that it had happened, and now, Chris needed to figure out what to do about it.
The first plan of action was, of course, to ask Mandy out. Get to know her. See if she was feeling it, too. It often took longer with werewolf females, and he didn’t want to rush her. Sure, at thirty, he was ready for marriage, kids, the whole shebang, but he was ready to wait if that was what was best for Mandy. He wanted her to be happy. That was all he wanted.
Walking behind her now, his arms weighed down with three boxes of her soap products, Chris took in Mandy, her beauty. It didn’t matter what she wore, how tired or awake she was. She was beautiful, always. He couldn’t wait to tell her that.
Today her long brown hair was done up in Princess Leia-style braids. Her tanned, freckled face was bare of makeup, and she was clad in a denim short-dress-overall thing that showed off her strong legs and shapely calves.
Chris could see the hint of her strong arms as she carried the boxes, the muscles toned from making her soap each week and carting it to various markets. Her business was doing so well that she actually had to hire an assistant to help with the orders and was planning on getting a storefront within the next six months.
And despite how busy she’d become, Chris knew for a fact that Mandy still checked in on her mom almost every single day, cooking her dinner or going for evening walks with her despite Sue Johnson’s adamant assertions that she “didn’t need no help.”
Basically, Mandy was amazing, and Chris and his pheromones were assholes for taking so long to realize it. But it was something he planned to make up for, just as soon as he figured out how to ask her out.
His thoughts were interrupted, however, when Mandy called to him from over her shoulder as she reached the truck. “I’m gonna head back for the last few things. Left the candles out, and I think the incense sticks are back there, too.”
Chris nodded as he looked around. The parking lot was nearly empty. The market had ended an hour ago, and he’d had offered to help her pack up, as he had almost every Saturday for the last three weeks. He wasn’t technically supposed to show favoritism to any one particular stall, but love required that a few rules be broken, and for Mandy, he was more than willing to break them.
He caught up to her, pushing his boxes into the bed of the truck and trying not to be too obvious as he leaned into Mandy for a whiff of her scent. Peppermint, eucalyptus, and coconut oil. Refreshing and intoxicating and so, so addictive.
“Here, take my keys, and you can meet me out front. I’ll just be a minute, and it saves me a trip.” Mandy was fishing her
key ring out of one of the front pockets of her overalls and handing them to Chris.
Their fingers brushed as she dropped the keys into his hands. Chris was so overcome by the feel of her warmth against him, that he didn’t even notice her leave. He didn’t even look up to watch her go. Her touch, like the woman herself, was pure magic.
Chris adjusted the boxes in the truck bed, closed the tailgate, and then hopped into the driver’s seat. He maneuvered carefully through the parking lot, dodging the occasional straggler still packing up their stand, then made a left out onto a side street that bordered the lot where the farmers’ market itself was held.
He could see Mandy gathering the last few little boxes from her stand and folding up her chair and decided to turn on the radio while he waited. Amy Winehouse’s “I Heard Love is Blind” came on the radio, and Chris started humming along. Eileen had gone through an Amy phase a few years ago, and he knew all the songs by heart. They were pretty good, some of them a little jazzy for his taste, but this one had always been his favorite.
Chris leaned his head back on the headrest behind him and got lost in the music. It was a romantic song, and it got Chris thinking again of just how he was going to ask Mandy out. Dinner? Drinks? A movie? No, definitely not a movie. He wouldn’t get to talk to her, and that was the main point of the whole thing. To get to know her. To start their relationship off on the right foot.
He was mentally ticking off his favorite restaurants trying to figure out which one was the perfect mix of good food, casual atmosphere, and a location central enough that perhaps they could go for a walk afterward when Chris looked up and saw that Mandy was no longer alone at her stall.
Her arms were full of the last few boxes of soap and incense, and leaning in toward her to kiss her cheek was a tall, lean guy with gelled black hair and tattoos coiling down his arms and up his neck. The kiss he placed on Mandy’s cheek lasted way longer than it should have, in Chris’s opinion, but Mandy didn’t look uncomfortable. If anything, she looked like she was enjoying the guy’s company. She was blushing, and Chris could see her head tilt back and a laugh escape that perfect mouth of hers as the guy said something to her.
The Baby Shift- Montana Page 1