by Selena Scott
“But the rest of it,” she continued, “doesn’t make a lick of sense to me.”
Seth sighed, his smile fading. He looked down and frowned. Somehow, when he’d uncrossed her arms, he’d ended up lacing fingers with hers. They held hands, creating a circle, a protected area between the two of them where the rest of the world was not invited. “Maybe, would you just trust me when I tell you that I wouldn’t be good for you?”
“Would you trust me to make that decision on my own once I have all the information?”
They stared at one another, neither of them backing down, but not dropping their hands either.
“So, we have an impasse, huh?” he asked eventually.
“Appears that way. Seth, I’m awesome and you’re awesome. I’m sure you’ve got your shit to deal with, we all do. I’m certainly not perfect. But whatever your secret, scary baggage is, I don’t think it needs to mean that this thing between us is dead in the water. Let it float for a little bit, see where it goes. If you start being bad for me, don’t you think I’d recognize that? Don’t you think I’d be capable of making the hard decisions when the time comes?”
Well, when she put it like that… Seth blinked. He’d never quite thought of it that way before. That maybe it was a little misogynistic to assume that he knew what was better for her than she did. Because Sarah was one of the most outwardly capable people he’d ever met. She just wasn’t fragile. He had a lot to learn about her, but she just didn’t seem like someone who let life beat her down.
But then reels of the local news that he and his brothers had been watching played in his head. Interviews with locals about the ‘shifter problem’. He’d seen the hatred that people had for shifters. He knew that most of the general public thought that shifters should be rounded up and registered, interned in camps where they’d be subject to study and chained up when they got too rowdy. He didn’t think that Sarah would feel that way, but who was he to guess about something like that? Something that important?
No matter how much he wanted to, no matter how tempting she made it, he couldn’t fold on this issue. Her life could be on the line, his brothers’ lives. It wasn’t worth it.
“Sarah… I can’t.” He dropped her hands. “You don’t understand. This is what’s best for everyone involved. I swear. You have to trust me on this. I have to step back.”
She pursed her lips again and cocked her head to one side. “I suppose that’s your right.”
He blinked at her, surprised that she didn’t have more to say on the issue.
“Just like it’s my right,” she continued, “to try and convince you otherwise.”
“What?” he asked, alarmed.
She stepped forward and took him by the elbow. He stared down at her as she bustled him through the house straight out to her front porch.
“Sarah—”
“No, no,” she told him, reaching forward and straightening the collar of the shirt she’d just tugged out of place with all her bustling. “No more protesting. You’ve said your piece. Now, I’m just gonna see if I can’t change your mind.”
“Sarah—” This time, it wasn’t her words that cut him off, it was her lips. She went up on her tiptoes and pressed her mouth to his, her hands firmly on the back of his neck. Absolutely zero percent of Seth fought the moment. He’d wasted all his arguing energy on words, and now his body had nothing left. His hands came up, flat against her back, and he held her flush against him, his head bent down to hers. She was a good seven inches shorter than he was, but still up on her tiptoes, their thighs were pressed flat together and her hipbones knocked into his.
Then she stepped back and broke away from the kiss. It had been a hot band of heat between them, like static shock, and had barely lasted long enough for him to get a taste of her. His eyes fluttered open to see her standing two feet away from him, framed in her doorway, smirking at him.
He looked down at his dumb hands which were hanging in the air, as if he were still reaching for her. He dropped his hands and shoved them into his pockets.
He cleared his throat, felt the gravel in his voice still and cleared it again. “Obviously there’s heat between us, Sarah. That’s not the point.”
“I agree,” she told him matter-of-factly. “The point is that I’m gonna be the one courting you, Seth. And you can just take your time and get used to the idea.” She smiled at him in a straightforward way, almost nothing flirtatious about it.
And then she closed the door in his face.
He stared at the door, noticing that it needed a new paint job, but not much else penetrated the fog that had just suspended all his thinking parts.
“I just came over to deliver the turkey chili,” he said to no one, scratching at the back of his head.
***
Bauer sat his creaking bones down at Elizabeth’s breakfast table and tried not to fall face first into the steaming cup of coffee she slid over to him.
“Not sleeping well?” she asked after a moment, buttering some toast and then sliding a plate of that over to him as well.
He was tempted to just grunt an answer at her and then inhale the toast. Before he’d come to stay at Elizabeth’s, it had been over three years since he’d had butter. It was still an incredible delicacy to him. Everything on this table and in this house seemed an incredible delicacy to him.
Instead of grunting, he took a gulp of coffee and sat up a little straighter. “I never sleep well. But that’s not why I’m tired.”
She raised a knowing eyebrow, a sly smile on her face. “You’re getting some aches and pains attempting to keep up with the whippersnappers?”
Bauer chuffed out a laugh. “When did I get so old?”
“About twenty years ago,” she responded drily.
Bauer knew she’d been watching his work with the boys from the house. They were mostly spending time in the backyard, as it was private property and perfectly secluded.
“Why are you making them work out so much?” she asked after a minute. “All three of them are strong boys already.”
Bauer finished a piece of toast in two large bites and she rose up to grab the bowl of scrambled eggs she’d already made. The woman was a goddess.
“It’s not about muscles,” he said after a minute, trying to figure out a way to explain it. “It’s more about the way you use those muscles. Your boys, they live two completely separate lives. One as humans and one as wolves. And they do it in two completely separate bodies. But they’re never going to gain any control if they treat it like that. They need to feel their human when they’re in wolf form. And they need to feel their wolf when they’re in human form.”
She considered that for a long time, staring into the depths of her coffee. “So, all this working out you’ve got them doing… it’s to retrain their bodies to be more wolf-like?”
He nodded. That was a fair enough assessment.
He polished off his eggs and then more of his toast. She pushed the bowl of fruit salad toward him and he tried not to grimace. She was always pushing fruits and vegetables on him. As a rule, he didn’t reject food, but he preferred carbs and protein over a bowl of fruit. She eyed him as if she knew exactly what he was thinking, and he took a few scoops onto his plate.
He looked at her, looking out the window over the rim of her coffee cup, and decided that since she’d asked him a few questions, it was probably fair play to ask a few of his own.
“Your boys… they’re adopted?”
Her eyes snapped to his and he saw a lifetime of suspicion and defensiveness that lived there. After a moment, she dropped her eyes to her coffee. “Yes.”
He pushed his luck. “Are they related to one another?”
“Seth and Raphael are identical twins.” Her tone said that he was an idiot.
He chuffed a laugh again. “Yes. I figured that much out. I meant Jackson. Is he related to the twins?”
Elizabeth paused, her eyes darting to the stairs. Ever since her sons had found out about Bauer, at
least one of them had slept the night over at her house. Usually Jackson.
“No. He’s not. He’s the son of my best friend. She and his father died when we were young. Left Jackson to me. I don’t know if she even knew that his father was a shifter. It was… quite a surprise when I discovered Jackson’s heritage one full moon when he was about two and half years old.”
She chuckled, so Bauer did too, but he could only imagine how terrifying that must have been for her. A young, single mother with a child who most of the world would fear and hate. A child who would certainly be taken away if she gave away his secret.
“I moved out here almost immediately. From Jersey. Bought this place with some money my folks had left me.”
“So, how did Seth and Raphael come to be a part of your life?”
“The twins were in the foster care system as babies. They’d been abandoned. I’ll never know for sure why, exactly, but my guess is that their mother didn’t know their father was a shifter until after she was pregnant. I imagine that the idea of raising two shifter children was too much for her. Maybe she was faced with doing it alone. Anyways. They were about a year and a half when I met them. About a year away from shifting for the first time. They were with a different foster family, who didn’t know a thing about them. And they were at a playground about three miles from here. I’d taken Jackson there to play.”
Elizabeth was lost in the memory, her arms crossed over her chest and her eyes focused into her past. The morning sun was lighting her up from one side.
“I was reading a book on a bench and Jackson came up to me and said, ‘Mom, you see those boys? They’re wolves, too.’”
Bauer leaned forward. “Wow. I’ve heard of that before. Children being able to scent out their own kind of shifter.”
She nodded. “I guess it’s a survival thing. Especially in pack animals. Jackson told me that it faded as he got older. He can’t do it anymore. But he sure did it that morning.”
“What happened then?”
“I—very carefully—spoke with who I thought were their parents. But really, it was two very overworked foster parents. They’d thought they were willing to care for multiples, but Seth and Raph were proving them wrong.” Elizabeth laughed. “They were certainly rambunctious.”
“How’d you get them here?”
“I took Jackson and went to an adoption agency that afternoon, started the process. Now, you can’t just say, I saw two kids on the playground and now I want them. That’s horribly creepy. No, but I said that I was hoping for toddlers, multiples were okay. Also, that I was willing to foster as well. And not three weeks later, I got the call that two very… energetic toddlers were looking for a new placement, it hadn’t worked out at their old place, and would I take them?”
“Wow.”
“Yeah. I just fostered them at first, but got the adoption paperwork started right away. They bonded to Jacks immediately and that helped everything along.”
“I’ll bet he was like another parent to them.”
Elizabeth nodded. “Immediately. He’s always been torn between whether he’s their big brother or their father.”
They were quiet for a while again, Bauer still picking at his fruit salad. He wanted to tell her that he was going to do right by her boys. Right by her.
But an old, familiar restlessness rolled through his body. A paranoia. The feeling that he was being chased and it was only a matter of time before he got caught again. He rose up from the table without another word. And though it made him feel rude, he simply turned away and strode out into the cool morning air.
***
Across town, Sarah sat at breakfast with Kaya and Nat.
“I thought Raphael was supposed to join us,” Sarah said to them, signaling to the waitress for another glass of orange juice.
“So did I,” Nat said with a shrug. “Normally, I’d say he was probably still snoozing on top of whatever warm body he took home last night, but I’m not sure he’s doing that much these days.”
“Really?” Kaya asked skeptically. “You think he’s hanging up his hat?”
“His player hat?” Sarah supplied helpfully.
“More like his player fedora,” Nat cut in.
“How about we call a spade a spade and decide that if Raphael is wearing any sort of ‘player’s hat’ it’s definitely a beret,” Kaya said decisively. The women burst out laughing, picturing messy, cheesy, flirty Raphael bumming around town in a beret.
“Well, that got weird,” Nat said, wiping a tear from her eye. “And I’m not sure if he’s changing his ways or what. All I know is those boys have been spending a weird amount of time together. Way more than usual. And always at their mom’s. The last few times I’ve stopped by over there, they’ve all been there.”
“Me too,” Kaya agreed thoughtfully.
“They like to spend time together, that’s not weird… right?” Sarah asked. Being the only daughter of a megalomaniac father didn’t exactly teach her the ways of large, functional families.
“Well, I guess not,” Nat said thoughtfully. “But typically, the only time they’re all together is on the fu—oof!”
Sarah looked between the sisters, certain that Kaya had just kicked Nat in the shin. Sarah chose not to say anything about it. Apparently, everybody had secrets around here and Sarah wasn’t out here trying to shine a light on all of them. She wasn’t a detective. She just wanted one thing: a chance with Seth. Anything else wasn’t something she figured she needed to get to the bottom of.
“It just seems like they’re hanging out a lot more than usual, is all,” Kaya said, swiftly trying to cover up her sister’s apparent slip of the tongue.
“I wonder why?”
Kaya shrugged. “Maybe they’ve finally staged an intervention for Jackson’s grumpy ass.”
Nat choked on her water, laughing. “The intervention being for what? His foul mood?”
“His brooding looks,” Kaya shot back.
“He does have a hell of a tragic Shakespearian thing going on,” Sarah said thoughtfully, smiling at the waitress as she set down their breakfast plates and extra drinks.
“For no good reason,” Kaya muttered.
As the waitress cleared away, Sarah leaned in, trading half her hash browns for half of Nat’s pancakes, the way they’d previously decided on. “What do you mean for no good reason?” she asked Kaya.
“I mean the man is such a miserable mope for no good reason at all. He’s got a thriving vet practice, a family who loves him, friends who care about him,” she sniffed, “he’s not terrible to look at, plenty of women want to date him. But he grumps around town, always looking like he’s got a hot poker shoved up his ass—”
“Anyone I know?” said a deep voice from the left of their table.
As a person who’d had her worst professional and athletic miseries broadcast all over the entire world in slow-motion, high-def torture, Sarah was not someone who ever really wished she was recording a moment. She preferred to live in the present, letting her memory do the work.
But she really, really wished she’d had her phone out to record the face that Kaya made when she realized that the man speaking to them was Jackson, and he’d most likely just heard every single word she’d just said about him.
“Jackson!” Nat squeaked.
Kaya still looked like she’d accidentally swallowed an entire hardboiled egg and was doing her best to choke it down.
Sarah decided to throw her new friends a bone. “What brings you here on this lovely morning?” she asked him with a pleasant, innocent smile on her face.
He held up a paper bag in his hands. “Just picking up breakfast before I head into the clinic.”
“You’re working today?” Nat asked, with a little nervous smile.
He nodded.
“Everything all right with Raphael?” Nat asked after a beat, when it was clear that Jackson was in no hurry to fill in the lulls of the conversation. “He was supposed to meet us for breakfast.�
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Jackson’s face clouded for a moment before he cleared it away back into the mostly neutral, slightly broody expression he so favored. “We had a long night, the three of us. He probably slept through his alarm.”
As if he couldn’t help it, like he’d been fighting against a magnetic pull and was finally overcome by the gravity of it, his eyes slid slowly over to Kaya. But her head was bent as she pushed the food around her plate and she didn’t notice.
A small postulation formed in the back of Sarah’s head right at the same moment that Jackson shifted back on his feet. She was certain that he was going to leave. And she wondered if, maybe, it would be better for certain members of this breakfast table if he stayed for a little while instead. She figured she might as well kill two birds with one stone. Get some much-needed information from him and get him to hang out for a minute as well.
“Jackson, how should I get your brother to date me?” Sarah asked, point-blank, shoving a mouthful of pancakes into her mouth. “Seth, not Raph.”
Sarah could feel the surprise of the sisters emanating from across the table at her question, but if Jackson was surprised, he kept his face quite impassive. He just eyed Sarah for a moment with those dark eyes, that serious expression, and she got the impression she was undergoing a test of some kind. Finally, his dark gaze flicked to meet hers.
“I… wouldn’t be the right person to ask about that.”
She almost rolled her eyes. What was it with this family and all their evasive frickin’ answers to every single question? She took another bite of pancakes. “Why? Because you don’t date?”
A small smile quirked his lips at her audacity, but his eyes stayed carefully neutral. “I thought we were talking about Seth, not me.”
He was good, this one. “You have any time before you have to be at work?” she asked, nudging out the chair next to her with one foot.
Jackson looked down at the chair, then at the other women at the table, then at his watch.
Once again, Sarah could sense the complete surprise of the other two women when he set his food down on the table and sat down, unpacking his breakfast.