The Baby Shift: Kansas
Shifter Babies Of America 29
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
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Also by Becca Fanning
Chapter 1
“And I told him he couldn’t have another extension. I’d already given him two despite the fact that I know his grandmother can’t possibly have died for the second time this semester.” Rachel Hayworth rolled her eyes and took a sip of her coffee. “Seriously, what is up with the freshmen this year?”
Joel McManus nodded and gave a lackluster laugh. He wasn’t listening to Rachel. Though he enjoyed the chance to bitch about his students as much as the next professor, at the moment, his attention was entirely fixed on Keira Jetson, the department’s newest visiting professor.
Five years his senior and with accolades coming out of her ears, including a Ph.D. from Oxford, multiple research trips to far-flung locales like Myanmar and New Caledonia, and most recently, a fellowship with National Geographic, Dr. Jetson boasted not only brains but beauty. Tall and athletic, she had black hair wore bluntly chopped just above her shoulders and eyes so piercing behind her glasses, they took Joel’s breath away.
“She’s perfect…” Joel breathed, his eyes glued to the woman as she sauntered over to the coffee machine to refill her thermos.
“Geez, Joel, you’re not ogling her again, are you? You’re going to freak her out if you keep that up,” Rachel said, rolling her eyes. “Besides, I heard she has a boyfriend back in England. Some big-shot philosophy professor at Cambridge who has dinner with Prince Harry and Meghan or something.”
Joel tore his eyes away from Keira and looked over at his best friend. “I don’t believe it. Not until I’ve seen him with my own eyes. Until then, he doesn’t exist.”
Rachel shook her head and stood up from her chair. “Fine. Live in your delusions. I have a 3:00 to teach, and then we’re meeting Greyson for margaritas, and you can tell him all about your obsession.”
“It’s not an obsession! It’s a curiosity. Tell me you don’t find her fascinating, too,” Joel whispered, worried that Keira might overhear them. She was fifteen feet away and had headphones in, but you could never be too careful.
“Of course, I think she’s fascinating,” Rachel said, setting her coffee cup down on the table next to her and bringing her backpack onto the chair. “I find any woman who can battle her way to the top of her field, a STEM field no less is extremely worth looking into.”
“The difference,” Rachel continued as she riffled through her bag, looking for the badge that would let her into the Liberal Arts building next door, “is that I don’t want to sleep with her. Which makes it a lot easier for me to be in her orbit.”
Joel sighed, slumping deeper into his chair. “If only I were so lucky…”
Rachel snorted. “You look pathetic,” she said, eyeing Joel and shaking her head. “Get your bearbrain out of your ass and perk up. I’m sure your 3:30 lab is going to need a lot of energy. You’ve got Henderson in there, right? The one who lit the chem lab on fire last year during finals?”
Joel nodded, ignoring the jib, though he wished Rachel wouldn’t say it, and other bear-related insults, so loud. He might be “out” about being a shifter, but that didn’t mean every professor in the room needed to know about his ursine nature. “Yes, but I’ve been assured a summer in Colorado helping to put out forest fires has cured him of his pyromaniac tendencies. Apparently, he now respects fire as ‘a beautiful element with destructive capabilities.’”
“Well, keep the extinguisher nearby just in case,” Rachel said, patting Joel on the back as she left the teacher’s lounge. Joel waved her off and went back to staring at Keira, wondering just what was going on inside that big, beautiful brain of hers. He had the overwhelming instinct to go over and smell her, nuzzle her neck and take a deep inhale of her scent, letting his body memorize it so he’d always be sure exactly where she was in proximity to him.
But, considering they had only met once, that might be a little bit weird.
“Bloody fucking hell, could the coffee here get any worse?” was the thought currently running through Keira’s head as she took a tentative sip of the brew from her thermos. This was her third day at the University of Kansas, and she had yet to manage to find a decent cup of coffee. She’d tried the kiosk in the library (too weak); she’d checked out the coffee shop frequented by freshman (too complex—everything was either a frappucino or a mochaccino or some sort of sickly sweet latte). She’d even stooped so low as to try Starbucks this morning, but the brew had been so strong she felt like she was drinking tar.
The jetlag was taking far longer than normal to go away, and Keira desperately needed a jolt for her meeting with the department head in an hour. They were meant to be talking about what events and projects she, as the visiting professor in the Department of Geography and Atmospheric Sciences, would put into action.
So far, Keira’s answer was “none.” She hated the bullshit that came along with positions in academia. All she wanted to do was teach and do her research, but no, in addition to those activities, which already took up a good sixty hours of her supposedly forty-hour work week, she was also expected to plan projects and head group studies and discussions about a range of topics she couldn’t care less about.
“Sodding Greg and his sodding ego that sodding made him break up with me,” she muttered into her coffee. She never would have taken this job if her boyfriend hadn’t broken up with her.
They were supposed to be working together at Cambridge, going on long walks by the river and spending their weekends cozying up in the perfect apartment she’d found for them through a friend of a friend.
But instead, Greg had broken up with her a week before she was supposed to move to Cambridge, which meant Keira had been forced to take the job here. Her bottom-of-the-barrel choice, the only school still interested in hearing from her after she’d dismissed all the other offers in favor of Cambridge. And now, to her utter shock and amazement, here she was in Kansas. The middle of America and as far as Keira was concerned, the least interesting bit.
Taking another sip and trying not to wince, she leaned against the faux-granite counter of the teacher’s lounge and looked about the room. She’d been introduced to most of the department on the first day when they’d all gone out for drinks after work. Everyone was amiable enough, but only a few of them had struck her as people she could be friends with. One woman, Rachel Hayworth, was a brilliant scholar in her field, working on subterranean geysers in the great American plains. Keira had been following her work religiously for the last few years and couldn’t wait to get her alone so she could pick her brain.
The other was Joel McManus, who happened to be sitting directly in Keira’s line of vision. A fairly new professor who’d gotten his Ph.D. only a few years ago, Joel technically straddled two departments: Geography and Atmospheric Science, and Geology. Keira wasn’t entirely sure what his research subject was, but his kind smile and honest face made her feel like perhaps not every American academic she met was quite so grumbly and overworked as the department’s head, Alex Gaines.
“Jetson!�
� a voice said, causing Keira to tear the earbuds out of her ears and look up. And there he was, the man himself. Dr. Alex Gaines in all his disheveled, scatter-brained glory.
Keira turned toward Alex and tried not to groan audibly. Alex reminded her of all the old dons at Oxford she’d been forced to study under during her master’s degree, the ones who hadn’t cleaned their offices since the Cold War and couldn’t be bothered with any discussion of the real world when what was going on in their field was obviously so much more important. All of them wore sweaters with moth holes in them and smelled vaguely like her grandma’s tea cozies.
“Hi Alex. How are you doing?” Keira said, grinning widely at him to hide her disdain.
“Oh well, you know, only two days in and already swamped with work! I tell ya, this job gets harder and harder every year. Makes me wish I’d just taken that research fellowship out in Colorado when they offered it to me last year.…”
Keira knew for a fact, from the fevered whispers of her tablemates at drinks the other night, that Alex had, in fact, been offered that fellowship ten years ago. Time was flexible in his cluttered mind.
“Indeed. Yes,” she said, taking a sip of her coffee. She’d done it because she couldn’t think of what else to say and was rewarded with a sip that was somehow even more bitter than the last.
“Are you ready to meet?” Alex asked, patting his pockets as though he was looking for something. “I had a post-it on my wall that said we were meeting here. Now, where has it gone,” he muttered, turning out his pockets and sifting through balled up pieces of paper that all seemed to be receipts from the university bookstore.
“Now? I thought we were meeting in an hour,” Keira said, barely keeping herself from shouting. She wasn’t even awake, let alone prepared. Christ, this place was going to do her head in. Between the bad coffee and the crappy boss, Keira wasn’t sure how she was going to last a semester, let alone two.
“Was it 10:00 or 11:00? The ink on my note was pretty smudged.…” Alex said, trailing off as he once again shoved his hands into his pockets looking for the offending post-it. When he came up blank, he looked up at Keira, sighed, and said, “Well, are you free now?”
Keira took a fortifying sip of her disgusting coffee, looked at the man and smiled. “Sure. I’m free.” Stupid fucking Greg. If it weren’t for him, none of this would be happening.
Chapter 2
“I’ll see you tomorrow!” Rachel yelled at Joel above the din of the crowded restaurant.
It was Thirsty Thursday at Juanita’s, a Mexican restaurant in downtown Lawrence, and Joel had just spent the last two hours getting well and truly trashed with Rachel and her boyfriend, Greyson, on half-priced mango margaritas. Joel had lost count of the number of frozen, tequila-laced beverages in his system, but he knew that however many he’d drink had been too many.
He could barely walk in a straight line as he exited out the door the restaurant and made his way down the streets crowded with college kids enjoying the late fall chill, and he knew he’d gone above and beyond in the TMI department with Rachel and Grey, spilling his whole heart out on the table as he noshed on nachos and guacamole.
. “Jesus, you’ve got it bad,” Greyson had said, and in response, Joel had just groaned and signaled for another drink.
He might be lean for a werebear, but Joel liked to think he had the tolerance of his brawnier buddies. Last time he’d visited his best friend Sam Brooks in Texas, he’d drunk him under the table, and had, in fact, been the one to carry Sam to bed after he passed out from one too many shots of Sambuca.
But not even his tolerance was a match for the double shots of tequila Juanita had slipped him after that point, reasoning that “a face that sad deserves some extra Cuervo,” and now, as a result, Joel had to grab onto a nearby light pole to steady himself as the world around him began to spin faster and faster, the lights and cars and sounds blurring into a mishmash that made him sick to his stomach.
Only five minutes to your apartment. You can keep it together until then, Joel told himself, closing and opening his eyes to check that it was in fact him, and not the world itself, that was tilting further than normal. Nope, just him.
Joel was just pep-talking himself into pushing off the pole and continuing home when his cell phone pinged with a new notification.
Grunting, he fished the phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen, wincing as the blue light assaulted his retinas. Forgot to put it on night mode, he muttered, trying and failing to navigate over to the brightness setting.
The notification dinged again, telling Joel that he had a new email. The clock on his phone told him it was past ten o’clock, aka far too late to be dealing with work bullshit, and if it was an email, it was definitely work bullshit, so Joel tried to swipe the message off his screen.
However, his clumsy thumbs succeeded only in opening the message. Joel scanned his eyes over the words, the letters blurring slightly.
“ATTN ALL PROFESSORS” the beginning of the email began, and then it went on to say a bunch of bullshit about new procedures within the department that Joel couldn’t give a flying fuck about. He scrolled to the end of the email and saw that, of course, the message had been penned by none other than Dr. Alex Gaines, world’s most boring man.
Joel rolled his eyes, preparing to exit out of the message when he saw a name on the CC list that caught his eye. Keira’s name followed by her email.
Don’t do it, he muttered to himself, even as he clicked on the address and his phone automatically opened a new blank email. It’s just a crush, she’s out of your league, and besides that, you’re a werebear.
Jack was fairly certain the last thing Dr. Keira Jetson wanted to do was get involved with someone like him, someone who had gone into his field only because it allowed him to justify all the time he spent in the great outdoors “doing research,” aka roaming around looking like Smokey the Bear, but his fingers didn’t seem to get the message. He couldn’t control them as they flew across the keyboard of his iPhone, the words flying from his brain to the box faster than his drunk mind could process. And before he could stop himself, before he could even think about the repercussions, he hit send.
As the message floated out into the world, traveling across time and space and kilobits to land in Keira’s inbox, Jack pocketed his phone and resumed walking to his apartment, his mind already forgetting the gravity of the letters he’d just put to screen. His drunk brain allowed him to live in blissful ignorance for another twelve hours before his world completely exploded.
Keira’s phone dinged from where it was sitting on her countertop next to the chopping board of finely diced spring onions (or scallions as the Americans called them). She was singing to the Amy Winehouse song blasting from her Bluetooth speakers, and keeping a careful eye on the dumplings she was currently boiling for soup and didn’t even hear her phone go off at first.
It was beaming the music to her Bluetooth speakers, and she’d left it on the table, under a pile of mail where she couldn’t easily grab it and navigate over to Greg’s Facebook page, as was becoming her bad habit.
But then it did that annoying thing where it pinged again, reminding her that she was ignoring what was no doubt an ass-numbingly boring email from someone she didn’t want to talk to, but because there was also the smallest chance it might be from someone she liked, Keira turned around, and spoon still in hand, slid the pile of circulars to the side and picked up her phone. She looked at the screen, and barely glancing at the notification, clicked on it.
She had no idea what she was opening, and therefore was not prepared and nearly dropped the device into the pot of soup boiling beneath her when her eyes focused in on the message.
“I want you,” it said. Three simple words, eight letters, yet in them held a whirlwind of feeling. Keira set the wooden spoon down, turned the heat off the pot of simmering dumplings and slumped into the stool next to the butcher’s block that served as her counter.
She scann
ed the email again, looking for any other words, but nothing, not even a name, graced the blank white space.
She knew who it was from though; Joel McManus obviously hadn’t been trying to stay anonymous, since his university email was right at the top, [email protected]. He hadn’t signed his name, but she doubted it could be from anyone else unless his email account had been hacked. But even if it had been, why would the hacker have emailed her?
Keira wondered if this counted as a booty call, then snorted, because that would be a first for her. No one had ever looked at her and thought “yeah, that’s the bird I want to text when I’m drunk at 3:00 a.m. and looking for a warm body.”
And misogynistic as it was, a part of Keira warmed knowing that maybe, Joel did think of her that way.
As she continued looking at her phone, Keira pictured Joel, his short dark brown hair, scruffy five o’clock shadow, lean runner’s build. He always seemed to be smiling or laughing about something, and he didn’t strike Keira as someone who took himself too seriously.
Keira hadn’t thought of him in any sort of sexual way when their eyes met that first night at the department meeting, but then again, she’d been even more jetlagged than she was now, as well as still feeling acutely heartbroken. She’d checked her Facebook account just before arriving at the bar to meet the rest of the department to find a picture of Greg and his new girlfriend, a former student in his morning lectures who he had sworn was just “an admirer,” on the beach in Croatia.
They were smiling so hard, it looked like their cheeks hurt with the effort of it, and Keira had had a good, ten-minute cry on her couch, letting her tears dot the screen of her phone as she systematically went through all her social media accounts and deleted and blocked Greg from every single one.
The Baby Shift- Kansas Page 1
