by Kayla Wolf
Not that he minded the tourists, of course. There was something refreshing about having humans around—they were so fast-paced, so energetic and enthusiastic. He’d hated the idea, initially, when their leader Lachlan had proposed it. He’d been its most vehement opposition, arguing night after night that it was a terrible idea, that it would threaten their safety, endanger the fragile peace they’d managed to build down here. But so far, so good. They’d had their fair share of danger, of course, but that came with the territory. Shifters had an uneasy peace with one another at the best of time … and their little community had a troubled recent history. He lingered by the mirror, his eyes tracing the faint scars that still decorated his torso. He might have looked like a human in his early thirties, but looks could be deceiving. Those scars were more than half a century old.
A slight shiver ran down his spine as he headed for the kitchen, shaking his head a little to clear it of those thoughts. Harvey didn’t often let his mind stray back to that awful day, the battle they’d waged against the wolf pack, once their closest allies, who’d turned on them. He knew the scars of that betrayal, that fight, ran a lot deeper than what showed on his skin. He’d been tense and paranoid ever since, channeling that trauma into an obsession with security, with keeping his community safe. But over the last few years, he’d been doing his best to try to chill out a little. It had been an ongoing struggle—after all, keeping everyone on the peninsula safe was an important job. But he was proud of the balance he’d managed to strike between being relaxed most of the time and still being vigilant about threats to his community and to the guests they welcomed to stay with them.
Unfortunately, he realized as he stared blankly into his nearly-empty refrigerator, that vigilance didn’t extend to keeping himself fed. There was almost nothing to eat. He managed to find a couple of slices of bread buried in the back of the freezer, and he wrinkled his nose as he stuck them in the toaster, realizing he was also out of eggs, bacon, jelly, and pretty much anything you’d put on a piece of toast.
Well, it was his day off. And the weather was beautiful. Why not head into town to pick up some groceries?
So it was that he was on the road within half an hour, grinning to himself as he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel to the music on the radio. He never got tired of this place. It had been half a century they’d been living here, and it had changed a lot—especially down at the tip of the peninsula, where their settlement and eco-resort-style cottages were built. But the drive up the peninsula to the mainland remained beautifully wild and untouched. He still remembered making their way down here the first time, back when the road had been dirt and not bitumen, when they’d made do with tents for weeks before they started the task of building their houses. It was amazing how far they’d come.
And it wasn’t just the place that had changed, he thought with a fond smile. This solo grocery trip—it was new. Back in the old days, the six of them—he and his closest friends, the dragons he’d traveled with for years before they’d settled down—used to go on weekly grocery trips together, sharing the drive. But one by one, his friends had found their soulmates, and now, it was just Harvey making the weekly trip to the store for himself. It felt odd, running his own household. Back when it was just him and the guys, he’d never noticed his singledom—never really felt like a bachelor. But now that all of his friends had settled down to run households with their mates (and, in a few cases, their children!), he was beginning to feel like the settlement’s eccentric old man.
He liked his own company, though. And he was truly happy for his friends. Meeting your soulmate … well, it was something that every shifter had some kind of opinion about. For Harvey, it had never been high on his list of priorities. His life’s purpose was keeping his community safe and intact—the idea of having a life partner had just never entered into the picture. But now that everyone but him had found the woman of their dreams … well, he was beginning to wonder whether it would ever be his turn. He’d found himself lingering when he met their guests, wondering whether one of them might set his heart alight ... but no luck. None of his friends could agree on what it actually felt like to meet your soulmate, but they all agreed that he’d know it when it happened.
If it happened, he thought with a sigh, rolling the window down to let the early fall breeze toy with his chestnut hair. Maybe some dragons never did meet their soulmates. Maybe he was destined to wind up alone. There were worse fates, he supposed. At least he had this beautiful place to grow old in. And at least he had his friends around him.
The nearest grocery store was an hour or so away, and it was midmorning by the time he climbed out of his car in the parking lot, appreciating the chance to stretch his legs. It wasn’t technically the closest grocery store, but he and the other dragons made a habit of changing their regular haunts every ten years or so to avoid raising suspicions. The thing about dragons was that they didn’t age. Humans weren’t especially observant, but in small towns like this one, store staff tended to get to know their customers. The rotation had been Harvey’s idea—he had a spreadsheet on his computer to keep track of which stores they’d been visiting and for how long. Paranoia, maybe, but it gave him peace of mind to know that they weren’t likely to start getting curious questions about just what the secret to their youth was.
It was a Saturday, he realized bleakly as he headed into the grocery store. He couldn’t have picked a busier time to shop. Bracing himself against the inevitable deluge of loud families, he grabbed a cart and headed in, giving the frazzled-looking staff a quick smile as he moved through. A few years ago, this would have made him impatient and frustrated. But now … well, now he was more than capable of being chill. Harvey gathered up his necessities and made his way to the checkout, his mind already on getting home and cooking up a more satisfying meal than the paltry pieces of toast he’d made that morning.
He headed out, arms full of shopping bags. And maybe it was the distraction of planning his lunch or the hunger gnawing at his belly, but before he could react, he found himself crashing headlong into a woman with long, dark hair who uttered a shocked little yelp, her own grocery bags cascading to the ground.
”Shoot! I’m so sorry,” the woman gasped. He’d all but knocked her to the ground—she was kneeling over her dropped groceries, the broad-brimmed hat on her head hiding her face from him.
”My fault, my fault completely,” he said quickly, popping his own groceries down on a nearby bench before returning to help with hers. She looked up at him with a puzzled but grateful smile—and he fought hard to control his surprise. Bright silver eyes—the unmistakable eyes of a wolf. He felt old instincts kicking in, fought hard to control them even as he hesitated over the woman’s spilled groceries. He’d never gotten on well with wolves. Even when he and his friends had traveled with a nomad pack, there had been something about them that made him uneasy. It was an ancestral thing. For all of history—and dragons had long, long histories—wolves and dragons had been at odds. Conflicts, wars, distrust, and deceit—fragile alliances like theirs were always the exception rather than the rule … and always, always ended in tragedy.
He shook himself hard, trying to yank his mind away from that dark path. This woman was in her mid-twenties at the most. She wasn’t responsible for any of the scars on his body, the darkness in his past. She was just a woman who was trying to do her grocery shopping. A beautiful woman, he couldn’t help but notice as she pushed a long braid of straight, dark hair out of her face. Incredibly beautiful. They both rose to their feet, their arms full of groceries, and she thanked him in a low voice, her mind clearly elsewhere. She’d recognized what he was, too. But they were in a crowded, human place—neither of them could address it. Instead, he cleared his throat, surprised to hear words tumbling out of his mouth before he knew what he was saying.
”Let me help you with these—”
”Oh, thank you, but I’ll be fine—” One of her grocery bags had split, and she was juggling
a carton of eggs and a pint of milk, trying to fit them into the remaining bags. He reached out to take them from her, narrowly avoiding another fall, and she flashed him a grateful smile that seemed to shoot right to his core. “Actually, if you wouldn’t mind helping me get them to my car, that would be wonderful—”
”It’s the least I can do, given that I’m the one who nearly knocked you down,” he pointed out. She flashed him another one of those smiles. Strange—there was something apologetic about her demeanor, as though she was the one at fault here. “I’m Harvey, by the way.”
A flash of something in those silver eyes. Fear? Apprehension? Was it because he was a dragon? Fair enough—with all the resentment and suspicion dragons felt for wolves, he wouldn’t be surprised if there was a similar attitude on the other side. But she managed another smile as they walked across the crowded parking lot towards a beat-up looking pickup truck that she pointed out as being hers.
“I’m Lori.”
”Good to meet you. Are you new to the area? I haven’t seen you around.” Was that creepy of him to ask? For some reason, he wanted this wolf to think well of him.
She hesitated a little. “I—sort of, yeah.” She opened the truck and started packing the groceries away quickly, taking them from his arms with a quick smile. “Thanks for—helping.”
”Sorry for knocking you over,” he said shrugging. She looked up at him for a long moment, curiosity on her face underneath the apprehension, and he realized with a jolt that her expression seemed to betray a little of what he was feeling. A combination of suspicion … and an attraction to her that he just couldn’t ignore. What was going on? He’d seen beautiful women before—he and his friends ran a beachside resort, it was a regular occurrence for him to stumble across modelesque women in bikinis, sunbathing on the beach. How was it that this woman, in jeans and a T-shirt, was making him feel so … drawn to her? Why was he feeling the strongest urge to lean in close to her, and why did he get the strongest sense that she was fighting the urge to do the same?
It was Lori that broke the spell, clearing her throat and looking down at the pavement beneath their feet. Shocked at how completely he’d lost control of his mind for a moment there, he took a quick step back, feeling a strange urge to shake his head like a dog shaking water off its back. What was going on with him? Was he really this badly affected by not eating a proper breakfast? Or was it something else? Something about this wolf, who was waving a friendly—if hasty—goodbye to him and climbing into the driver’s side of her truck?
”Don’t forget your groceries,” she said through the window, giving him one final smile before she put the car in gear and headed for the exit. Harvey jumped, realizing he’d left his groceries on the bench by the store—and then she was gone, leaving him standing alone in the parking lot and feeling like his insides had been completely rearranged. Why had meeting Lori hit him so hard that he’d forgotten what he was doing here? Hastily, he strode across the parking lot to retrieve his groceries, feeling uncharacteristically shaken up.
The feeling didn’t ease up as he drove back toward the peninsula, his groceries (safe, even after their brief adventure alone on the bench) sitting on the back seat. He kept shaking his head as though that would clear it—but it didn’t seem to be getting Lori off his mind. As he turned down the road that headed off the mainland and down the peninsula, he even thought he spotted a wolf bounding through the thick trees. Ridiculous, he thought, blinking hard. No wolf would dare set foot on the peninsula these days—not knowing the history there. He just had wolves on the brain for some reason.
Harvey didn’t like that. Didn’t like the idea that meeting some random woman could disrupt his mind, make his eyes start playing tricks on him. Who was she, anyway? Some stranger. He’d forget her soon enough—she was just like any of the holidaymakers that came to northern California for their holidays then disappeared. But as he drove, he found himself wishing he’d learned more about her. Found out where she was staying, maybe gotten her phone number, met up with her again sometime when neither of them had a car full of groceries to think about …
Harvey frowned as he drove down the long road home, unable to dismiss the thoughts of Lori that kept crowding around his usually calm mind. What was it about this woman that had struck him so hard?
And how the hell did he make it stop?
Chapter 3 - Lori
“Lori! Read the princess one again.”
Lori sighed, pushing her long black braid over her shoulder. It had been a long day preparing for her trip to the peninsula, and she’d been quietly hoping that she was going to get a reprieve from storytelling duty. But it seemed there was no rest for the wicked. When she’d left home, years ago, she’d still been reading to her little brother Jack every night. Jack was ten now, too old for stories. But Bella wasn’t.
Her mom had been pregnant with Bella when she’d left—it had been part of what had finally triggered her to leave, the impending arrival of a new baby. She’d begun to panic when her mother had announced that they were to have a new addition to the family, to the pack, because she knew what it meant for her. More work. Getting up in the middle of the night to tend the baby, caring for it all day, sewing new clothes, not to mention keeping track of the older kids. She’d been almost twenty years old and already feeling completely burned out on motherhood. So she’d slipped away before the baby was born, found herself in a big city … Well, at least she’d missed the diaper stage. She’d always hated changing diapers.
And Bella was a delight. It wasn’t the little girl’s fault that her older sister was so exhausted by caring for her little siblings, for all of the pack’s children … she was a bright-eyed little wolf pup who was already developing a whimsical sense of humor. She was sitting up in bed now, her shoulder-length black hair still in the pigtails she insisted on sporting each day, and Lori gave her an absent smile as she pulled the requested book from the shelf. Her parents had told Bella all about her older sister as she was growing up, and they’d sent Lori plenty of updates about how the little girl was growing—so although they’d only met properly a few weeks ago, Lori already felt as close to her littlest sister as she did to her other siblings
Bella was lucky to have her own room. It wouldn’t be the case for long, from what Lori had heard at dinner. It seemed that one of the families who’d joined the pack had a few young ones themselves, and with living space being at a premium, it was likely that some of the children would come to live in their family farmhouse. More work, Lori thought bleakly. When exactly had she signed up to be the nanny for the whole pack? There had to be almost a dozen children now, including her three siblings. And her parents seemed all too willing to volunteer her services in taking care of them all. They’d never asked her whether she wanted to be a nanny all her life. When she’d been younger, she’d hoped that when she grew up, found a mate, and had children of her own, she’d be off the hook for taking care of the other children of the pack. But now, she had her doubts. It was enough to turn her off the idea of having children altogether.
She bit her lip, thinking of Los Angeles. Thinking of the man she’d met, the life she’d almost fallen into, the terrible mistakes she’d made …
“Lori!”
”Fine, fine.” She sat on the edge of the bed, the favored book in her lap. It was Bella’s favorite, for some reason—even though it didn’t have any words in it. Just a series of pictures of a princess going about her day in a castle. Every time she ‘read’ it to Bella, Lori made up a new story about the princess … about what she was thinking, what she was doing, what her future held. Maybe that was why it was Bella’s favorite. It was always changing.
”Once upon a time, there was a princess who lived in a big tall tower,” she started. The first picture in the book was of a looming castle, with the princess peering out of the window at the top. Bella tapped solemnly on the princess’s face. “That’s right, there she is. The princess was a little sad,” she continued, improvising a
s she went. “She’d been living in the castle her whole life, with her mother and father—“
”The king and queen,” Bella interjected gravely. The little girl had become an expert on royalty.
”Yes, the king and queen. The princess was very tired … she had lots of chores to do every day, and she was bored of being in the castle all the time. She wanted to go out, to ride around on a horse, to meet the subjects of her kingdom and live a life that wasn’t controlled by her parents.”
Bella peered at the picture book with wide eyes. This wasn’t at all how the story usually went.
”One day, the princess left the castle. While she was there, she met a handsome prince.” Bella nodded. A handsome prince usually featured in these stories—one of the pages was a huge illustration of a man in gleaming silver armor on the back of a beautiful chestnut horse, so he tended to be a main character. “The princess thought he was so interesting and exciting … he wasn’t like anyone she’d ever met. He suggested that she come and live in his castle instead of her parents’, and she agreed straight away. It sounded like a wonderful castle, and the handsome prince promised that nobody would make her do any chores there.”
Bella giggled. “Like feeding the chickens!” At five, her own chore list wasn’t too long yet.
”Exactly. The prince promised she wouldn’t have to feed the chicken. But the prince lied.” Lori sighed, turning the page. The story was beginning to diverge from the images a little, but Bella wasn’t looking at the pages. “For a little while, the princess loved living in the prince’s castle. But slowly, he began to change. He was less and less nice to her—he didn’t want to go riding with her anymore, and he complained that she never helped around the castle. Before too long, she had the same amount of chores as she had at her old castle … and she missed her family, too.”