“Now we hunt for real,” Kann said, letting his lion rumble in his chest.
Tor
Every moment gone from the bar was torture, but he had to make sure Dawn was secure for tonight. That meant the windows needed to be boarded up. Liam and Ryder would likely stay again.
He was staying upstairs with her tonight. It would be difficult not to touch her, but he could manage. His tiger would be more content closer to her than not.
Tor loaded up the lumber he’d purchased into the back of his truck from the stack behind the Jenkins’ Hardware and Grocery store. It was solid and fresh. That along with the paint Liam had asked for to cover up the scorch marks on the ceiling, should go a long way until glass could be ordered in from Fairbanks and the windows replaced.
A few minutes later he was pulling into the lot in front of The Watering Hole. Several people were milling around the front. Some were just talking. Others were inside helping, scrubbing tables and sweeping up glass and debris.
Most of them greeted him by name. Tor waved and smiled, thanking each person as he passed them. He set up inside the dining room closest to the first window and started lining up boards. Before he could leave to get more from his truck, several guys came inside carrying the rest of the lumber. The paint. His tool belt and a toolbox of their own.
“Hey, Tor!” Connie chirped, bringing up the rear with two gallons of paint in each hand. She dropped them near the bar and then disappeared outside, probably to go upstairs and check on Dawn.
One of the guys carrying lumber was Matthew Hatcher, the deputy here in Mystery and a victim of Raish’s bite—making him like Tara, a Reylean wolf. The guy, about Tor’s age put the two-by-fours down and stretched out a hand. He’d opted out of moving into the group cabin, but Tor had spent enough time with him and introduced him to Knox and Ryder so he’d have support in town when he needed it. It had also helped tremendously from time to time having an inside man in the sheriff’s department.
Tor shook. “Thanks for showing up.”
“I heard they came after Lars’ granddaughter hard. When I got here, I couldn’t believe how bad it was. You know Hollister’s never been violent toward the town before. Not ever.”
Tor stifled a growl. “Well, they are now.”
“I know. It’s just odd though.”
Tor worked quickly with Matthew to bring a table closer to the window to brace the boards against so he could saw them to length. The guys on Penny’s construction team had let him borrow a circular saw.
Liam was ordering people around with paintbrushes and brooms like he’d hired them.
The broken furniture had already been cleared out.
Tor smiled at the way this town had shown up for Dawn. She was an outsider, but her grandfather had been a landmark member of the town and they weren’t going to let Hollister ruin her or their favorite bar.
“She looks better than she did before the fire,” Liam said, standing next to Tor and surveying the freshly painted, swept, and ready to open for the evening bar.
“Except for the windows,” Tor said, waving his hand at the ready-for-battle windows. He and Matthew had made them solid. Nothing was getting through, but they did give the place an apocalyptic feel.
“I called a guy I know up in Fairbanks. He said he could have new glass to us in a couple of days.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Ready to cook?”
Tor snorted. “I’ve been ready. You’re the one that kept putting me off, old man.”
“Shut it,” Liam said, his tone sharp, but amused. He walked behind the bar and pulled down a bottle of whiskey. “A round for the volunteers,” he said, letting his voice boom through the dining room.
A whoop went up from everyone inside. There was clapping. Saluting. Lars had been an army vet, just like Liam. He had a lot of memorabilia on the wall behind the bar. He had been loved by the town and they were going to make sure The Watering Hole felt their loyalty and Dawn along with it. She was going to be surprised when she finally saw this place cleaned up and running like it should be.
Matthew reappeared at Tor’s side. “I put all your tools in the cab of your truck.”
“Thanks, man,” Tor said, shaking the deputy’s hand. “Heard anything from the sheriff about the guys?”
Matthew shook his head and rubbed his hands through his floppy brown hair. “Not a thing. But I’m going to be super honest. The sheriff didn’t act like it was a big deal when he found out about the vandalism.”
Tor’s claws pushed at the tips of his fingers and his mouth ached where his fangs wanted to descend. The sheriff in Mystery was a joke that no one wanted to acknowledge. This report was just further proof that he was a placeholder and never going to act in the best interest of the town.
“Where does that leave you?”
“Doing the best I can to protect this town without pissing him off enough to fire me,” Matthew said, his tone carrying a hint of defeat. “You let me know if you see them again. And feel free to chase them off yourself if given the opportunity to do so without any witnesses.”
“Very good,” Tor said, satisfied with the deputy’s answer. “I’m off to the kitchen, thank you again for your help this afternoon.”
“You cook?”
Tor flashed a wide grin. “You should stay and see.”
“I think I might. The uncooked mac and cheese at my place doesn’t sound nearly as appetizing as some nice greasy bar food. What’s the plan?”
“Give me a few minutes to get everything fired up and going. No particular menu tonight, it’s going to be whatever’s available in the cooler.”
Tor left the deputy and went through the swinging door to the kitchen, flipped on the lights, and inhaled deeply. This was his chance.
A chance to impress Liam. A chance to show how good he was. A chance to prove to himself he could be a line cook at all. He’d done almost all the cooking with Naomi over the last few months for the Tribe. She’d grown up with a huge family and one of her cousins had a diner where she’d worked every summer.
Between that and binge watching the food network save-the-bar show.
He had this.
“Onion rings. Chicken fried steak with gravy,” Liam shouted through the open pass thru between the back of the bar and the kitchen.
“Got it!” Tor shouted back. He tossed the rings into the fryer and dropped that basket. Then battered a waiting pounded out chicken breast and put it in another fryer.
The first hour had been chaotic, but it hadn’t taken long for Tor to find his rhythm in the big empty kitchen. They were serving three choices tonight—waffles, onion rings, and chicken fried chicken with gravy. Surprisingly the waffles had been quite popular.
Tomorrow he needed to put in a grocery order. The cooler was more than a little low on food.
The scent of the oil changed slightly. Tor pulled the onion rings, plated them on a paper-lined red plastic basket and set them on the counter behind Liam.
The chicken fried chicken had just another minute to cook to golden perfection.
He sniffed the air again and walked over to the waffle iron and opened it. He plated a waffle, sliced a couple pats of butter and poured a generous helping of syrup over the divinely smelling baked good then put the plate on the pass thru before returning to the fryer to the chicken.
What he needed to play with was a breakfast menu along with the regular bar offerings. A lot of the miners who came in the evenings had worked twelve-hour shifts and had jumped at the opportunity to have breakfast.
10
Dawn
Dawn looked up, the scent of chicken fried chicken and gravy filled the air and she couldn’t think of anything else she wanted at that moment.
“Courtesy of the amazing cook downstairs,” Ava said, sliding the takeout containers onto the kitchen counter. “Considering what happened today, that place is packed.”
“That’s probably why it’s packed,” Connie said, hopping up from
her place on the couch next to Dawn.
Dawn got up and followed her to the kitchen. “It smells amazing.”
“I’ve heard rumors from Katherine when he volunteered at the MCC for Thursday night meals, but I never had a chance to actually taste something he’s made,” Ava said, grabbing a box for herself. She opened it and breathed in deeply.
Connie handed Dawn a box and then took one for herself. She popped open the lid and her mouth watered. The chicken fried chicken was a perfect golden brown. The gravy was in a little to-go cup and steaming up the lid. She opened it and poured it over the gloriously crunch batter coating the chicken.
The girls dug out forks and knives and dug in.
Less than ten minutes later they were all laying sprawled on the couch and recliner patting their stomachs and groaning softly.
“I could eat another, but then I’d have a food baby popping up right here,” Connie said, groaning softly.
Ava snort laughed and shook her head. “It wasn’t a rumor.”
Dawn smiled and climbed from her spot on the couch. “His ability to cook was not a rumor. That was probably the best chicken fried chicken I’ve ever had. It was perfectly crispy, and the chicken was still juicy. I seriously want more, but I think I might die.”
She filled a glass from the cabinet with water and leaned against the counter staring at the wasteland of empty take-out containers. She sipped the water slowly and sighed with contentment.
As much as she had enjoyed the company and the conversation, her head and her body ached. She wanted to go to bed, but she couldn’t get over the idea that as soon as she closed her eyes, something bad was going to happen.
Which was logically ridiculous. The bar was full of people downstairs. Connie and Ava were in her apartment. Ava had already promised to stay the night again, no matter what. And once the bar closed, Ryder was also going to sleep on her couch again.
Didn’t matter though. Every time she thought about going to sleep, her nerves tingled, and her adrenaline spiked, and her heart raced, thumping against her ribs so hard it felt like they would crack all over again. Her stomach twisted just enough to make her worry all the food she’d just enjoyed would come rushing back up.
“Hey, you’re doing that thing again,” Ava said, getting up from the recliner and joining Dawn in the kitchen. “Breathe.”
Dawn reached to put the empty glass down on the counter. “I know. It comes and goes and right now it’s here with a vengeance.” Her hand was shaking so hard the glass banged against the counter.
Ava took it from her hand and put it down for her before she broke it.
“I have a thought.” Connie said, hopping up from the couch. “I’ll be right back.” She disappeared down the inside stairwell, leaving Dawn on the verge of hyperventilating or puking. Or both.
“Why did she leave?” she asked, through choppy breaths.
Ava smiled and rubbed a hand gently up and down Dawn’s back. “I have a pretty good guess, but let’s wait and see.”
“I should probably look for something to take to settle my stomach.” Dawn moved slowly through the kitchen opening and closing cabinets. The only thing she came up with was an old half-full bottle of aspirin.
Tears threatened to overwhelm her. She didn’t want to cry in front of Ava or Connie or anyone. She should be fine. She shouldn’t be this worried. She was being paranoid.
The stairwell door flew open and her heart jumped like a startled chicken into her throat, clucking and squawking and damn near laying an egg right then and there.
She couldn’t breathe. Spots clouded her vision.
“Dawn.”
She heard his voice a moment before his arms wrapped around her in an embrace she couldn’t deny made her feel instantly safer.
His hands moved slowly up and down her back. His breath warmed her neck where he had bent to whisper in her ear. He pulled her tighter. Not uncomfortably tight, just enough so that she didn’t have to rely on her own two trembling legs to stay upright.
She couldn’t decipher what he was saying. But his tone was soothing. Just his voice allowed her lungs to relax and finally suck in a desperately needed breath.
Connie and Ava were talking quietly in the background, but she couldn’t tell what they were saying either.
Tor was hugging her. He had left the kitchen and come upstairs. That’d been where Connie went. She’d brought Tor. Why did he make her feel so good?
Dawn’s brain started to churn questions out as the anxiety attack started to fade away. He’d left the kitchen. No one was cooking. Everything would burn. And then there was the fact that he smelled amazing. Like fresh food and forest and just a hint of sweat. It was comforting in a weird way. She didn’t want him to go, to leave her again, but he couldn’t stay up here and she needed to pull herself together and stop acting like the boogeyman was going to jump through the door at any given moment. She was being selfish.
The bar needed him more than she did. And he’d already done so much. She knew he and his friends and a dozen people from town had worked all day to make sure the bar was able to open up tonight. And from the jovial sounds filtering up from the stairwell at the back of the living room, the place had to be packed.
Which should make her feel better. Safer. No one was going to come near the bar while it was full of people.
“I’m okay. You can go. I just—”
“Shhh, you’re not okay, but you’re getting there. Your heart-rate is slowly going down, but I can still hear your brain.” His voice was soft and even and soothing. He kept dragging his hands up and down her back in a repeating pattern that gave her body something to count on.
She knew what was coming. She knew where his hands would go next. She took another breath and then another and another. Each one was progressively easier than the last.
“You can’t hear my brain,” she said, her voice barely more than a whisper.
“How do you know?” he asked, his tone teasing and lighter than before.
“Did the girls leave?” Dawn asked, just realizing she couldn’t hear Connie and Ava any longer.
“Nope. We’re here, hon,” Connie said. Dawn tracked her voice to the couch. “Tor, why don’t you see if you can get her calm enough to lay down?”
“No. I don’t want to lay down. I can’t. They’ll come back!” She sucked in a breath, fighting against the rising tide rushing in to drown her once again. “No. No. No.” She wrestled against Tor’s arms, but he didn’t let her go. Instead he scooped her up completely and walked her into the bedroom.
“I’m right here. I’m not leaving you.”
“You can’t stay. You have to go back downstairs. I can’t sleep. I can’t. Don’t leave me!” Dawn could hear the unreasonableness in her voice, but she couldn’t stop the words from tumbling out.
She was begging a stranger not to leave her bedroom.
Granted he was a man she was attracted to, but still. This was a crisis. People were trying to chase her out of town. Hurt her. Possibly kill her. Who knows what would’ve happened if her fantasy tiger and wolf hadn’t stepped in to save her the other night?
“I’m not leaving. I told Liam the kitchen was closed as soon as Connie came to get me.” He sat on the bed, still holding her against his chest. Her legs were draped over his lap. And he was still hugging her tight, not giving her room to wrestle herself free.
She didn’t want to be free of his arms, not really, but she couldn’t seem to stop fighting. She wanted to run and not run at the same time. But something deep on an instinctual level made her cling to him, made her draw comfort from his touch, from his voice, even just his presence in the room gave her a peace she’d hadn’t been able to find all day.
“I’m sorry, I…I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
“It’s called a panic attack, sweetie,” Connie said, her voice closer now.
Dawn peered over Tor’s shoulder up at the take-charge paramedic.
“Give yourself some gr
ace. You’ve been through more in the last—” Connie stopped and started counting on her fingers. “I’m not even sure how many hours you’ve been here, but it hasn’t been long.”
Dawn sat up straighter in Tor’s lap and pushed a little, but he didn’t let her go. If she’d been in a flirting mood, she totally would’ve teased him about his hands-on approach. As it stood, she mostly just felt better with his hands on than his hands off. He was calming.
There wasn’t anything she could do on her own. He was the one and only reason the panic attack was subsiding.
“I want to tell you all I’m fine, that I don’t need a babysitter,” Dawn said, her tone soft and resigned.
“And we would say, nonsense, friend. We’ve got your back,” Ava said, stepping up into the threshold of the bedroom door to stand next to Connie.
“Why are you risking getting attacked for me? You know those guys are going to try again. I know those guys are going to try again. I’m not fooling myself into thinking that I’m safe.” She took a deep breath and leaned her head against Tor’s chest.
In and out. In and out. Control the breathing. Her heart was racing again. She could feel the panic rising like a dam about to burst.
In and out. In and out.
“I’ve taken on my fair share of cowardly humans. These assholes who grabbed you and then vandalized the bar are no different. Plus, now we have extra security in the bar,” Ava said, flashing a quick grin. “Ryder will be back up here this evening too. So between Tor and Ryder and me, you’re good.”
“Are you ex-military like Liam?”
Tor nodded. “That’s a good way to describe it.”
“They’re not kidding. You’re in the safest hands with these three. And if they need more friends, they have them to call. Just please stay in bed as much as you can and actually try to get some rest. I’ve got to get to bed you guys. I need to check in at the clinic and then head home, but I’ll swing by tomorrow and check on you.” Connie stepped back from the doorway and disappeared from view. “Ava,” she called just a half a moment later when the other woman still hadn’t moved.
All's Were That Ends Were: Soulmate Shifters World (Soulmate Shifters in Mystery, Alaska Book 6) Page 8
