by S. E. Babin
Her face fell.
I grinned at her. “And becoming an apprentice.”
The woman’s gaze met mine. “Really?”
“Yup. I’ve been thinking about hiring someone. I’m getting pretty busy. But I also need someone good with numbers.”
She shoved my business card down her bra. “I will definitely call you. Definitely. What was your name?”
An annoyed sigh came from behind me. “Archer,” Sterling Luna said. “Your devil hair is hard to miss.”
“Hey, dickhead,” the barista said.
A bark of laughter escaped me as I turned to face my sometimes nemesis. “Seems you make friends everywhere you go.”
“It’s a gift.” He flipped the barista off good-naturedly and rattled off his coffee order. “What are you two plotting?”
“World domination,” the barista said. “None ya. My business with Archer is my business alone.”
“It’s Maron, actually,” I interjected.
“I like Archer better,” said the barista.
I almost argued that I was going to be her boss but something stopped me. She seemed tough on the outside, but I wondered if there was a sensitive gooey middle. “And you?” I asked as she made Sterling a drink with enough sugar to last him through a winter’s hibernation.
“Me what?” she asked.
“Your name?”
“Nat,” she said.
“Short for Natalie?”
“Short for Nat,” she said, and that was the end of that.
“Alright, Nat. Remember me.”
The pretty, scary barista gave me a wink and I wondered if I’d just made a terrible mistake. I stepped away from the kiosk to allow Sterling to pay, but I waited for him a few feet away. When he finished, he headed right to me. “What is it? Why are you here? Have you come to torture me just for fun now?” he asked.
I counted to ten and tried to remember why I'd come. Sterling was a genuine pain in the ass.
Alas, counting to ten didn't help.
"Torture you?" I asked softly.
"Yes. Me." Sterling sipped his coffee. He seemed like he was truly aggravated.
I scoffed at him in outrage and poked him in the chest. "You dated me under false pretenses. You hate redheads and you have no desire to fall in love with someone."
"I'm in love with Cherry." He said it so deadpan and toneless that I had to laugh.
"Oh yeah?"
"Yes. Very much so."
My shoulders shook with laughter. "You haven't denied going out with me under false pretenses."
"I'm not going to," he said quietly. "My parents wanted me to get married. I didn't want to."
"So you're getting married anyway?"
Sterling took me by the arm and led me away from the crowd. I noticed two men grinning at us as I let him lead me. "Do you know them?" I asked.
"Never saw them before in my life," Sterling snapped. One of them, the one with nut brown skin, gave me a little wave and a wink. I awkwardly waved back just before Sterling pushed my hand down.
"Yes, I'm getting married anyway. I have to."
I rolled my eyes and was about to step away when he grabbed my hand. "Wait," he pleaded.
"No one has to get married, Sterling. Why don't you just tell me the truth?"
"Because the truth makes me sound like a terrible person."
"Gosh. Color me surprised," I said.
"Archer."
"Luna." I shook my arm out of his grap. "This is ridiculous."
A calculating look came over his face. "You never answered why you were here."
"For the truth. You've known that woman for less than three weeks and two weeks ago, you wanted to make out with me in a dark room in public."
Heat began to color his cheeks. "It was the moon cycle, I'm afraid."
"Liar. The full moon is next week."
"What do you want me to say, Archer?"
I sipped my coffee and stared a moment before I finally spoke the truth. "There's something between us. I'm not sure what it is. But it's there. So I'm here to ask you why you don't want anything to do with it. With this. Whatever it is. Why Cherry?"
Sterling moved a step closer to me. "I don't want a wife."
"Okay. I'm not asking you to marry me."
"But aren't you? Isn't that why Portia is setting you up?"
I nodded. "Of course. But I don't need to get married right away."
"But I never want to."
I threw my free hand up in the air. "Then why are you getting married right now?"
"Because if I don't, my parents plan to enforce an arranged marriage to someone in Italy."
I sighed and looked up at the ceiling. "Why are you marrying her, Sterling?"
He tilted my chin to look at him. "Because she won't get involved in my life. She just wants someone to take care of her."
The confession made me want to sink to my knees. "This is what you want?"
"I want freedom. She's the best bet for it."
"This is insane."
Sterling didn't argue. "There is something between us, Archer. But I'm not going to see what it is. I can't afford to."
"One date," I blurted.
He blinked at me. "What?"
"Go out on one date with me and then you can decide."
"I've already decided. I can't go out with you. I'm already engaged."
"As a friend. We won't even call it a date. You can tell Cherry."
"I am not going to tell my fiancee that I'm going out with another woman."
"Cherry is Elsa with less of a personality and more ice. I'll bet you twenty dollars she won't care. She's egotistical enough to know she has you. After all, it's all over the papers." I gave him a winning smile that felt slightly crazy. This was crazy. I wanted answers, and now I had them. This was a desperate Hail Mary. I had a feeling Sterling knew what I had suspected. He was just choosing to ignore it.
"Archer," Sterling said. He ran a hand through his hair. His eyes were gleaming, losing control of the wolf. "You really are a crazy person."
"What do you have to lose?" I asked him.
"Pretty much everything. Why are you doing this?"
I poked him in the chest again. "Portia set me up on five dates. One of those was supposed to be my soul mate. Don't pretend you don't know why I'm here."
"So Dimitri wasn't all what he was cracked up to be?" Sterling smirked, and I wanted to smack him.
"Dimitri is just fine. I'm sure our engagement pictures won't be nearly as awkward as yours are."
His eyes flashed at me. We stood there for a long moment staring at each other before he let out a long breath.
"I can't."
"You won't."
"You're right. I won't. It's madness."
I stepped in closer to him, my face tilted up. "You're scared." I traced a finger down his strong jaw and placed it on his lips. "We both know what this is. You're a coward if you don't give it a chance."
Sterling shut his eyes. His nostrils flared, and I felt his body heat increase. He was about to lose it. I stood on my tiptoes and placed a kiss on his jaw. Sterling shuddered against me.
"Goodbye, Sterling Luna." With one last caress against his face, I trailed my fingers down to his chest, turned around, and walked away. If I looked back, I was going to lose it.
I looked straight ahead all the way out the door, my head high and my spine straight. I'd been rejected a lot in my life but never in such a harsh way.
Sterling Luna was my soulmate and he knew it.
He just didn't care.
Fifteen
Sterling
"Dude. You are a first rate idiot," my brother said. I hadn't even bothered going back in to drink coffee with my friends. I headed out the back way and went straight to Copper's house. My brother opened the door without saying a word, headed straight to the cabinet and pulled a bottle of whiskey out. "You let her go, didn't you?"
"You knew?"
Copper snorted as he poured us both
a generous amount. "My brother would never marry a woman named Cherry Blossom. Moira might not be familiar with her, but we've had brushes with that family in my business for years. They're crazy, the entire lot of them."
My brother was a banker downtown. He handled a lot of big accounts. Copper was good at it but he hated every second of it. Something told me if he ever fessed up about the herbalist he was seeing, he'd also be making some big career changes.
"She's anemic," I told Copper. He burst out laughing. "And she eats fish twice a week. Honestly, the entire thing is bonkers."
"Why in the hell are you so resistant to the other one. The one you really want?" Copper asked.
I tilted back the whiskey and it was gone in a single swallow. "Because she's terrifying," I admitted. "And she has red hair."
Copper groaned. "The only one weirded out by red hair is you."
"I'm not weirded out by it anymore. It suits her. In a horrible sort of way."
"I'm assuming you saw her this morning?"
I nodded. "She came asking a lot of questions. About me. Cherry. She wanted to know why I was marrying her when we had something."
"Do you have something?" Copper asked.
"Besides mutual hatred and a five-alarm attraction?"
"Bro, that's how some of the greatest love affairs have started. Don't knock hatred. It's too close to love and is often mistaken for the other."
I poured myself another drink and headed over to the living room. "Grab the bottle," I told Copper before I sank down onto one of the recliners. I'd always loved his house. It was a comfortable, homey place.
"Tell me about your girl," I told him.
Copper paused just as he was about to sit. "What girl?" he asked, a nonchalant note in his tone that told me I'd hit the jackpot.
"I followed you a couple of times. Saw you heading into the house of that pretty herbalist. I also noticed you not coming out for several hours."
A tic started in his jaw. "I should punch you for following me."
"And yet I've kept your secret. I would think that deserves a reward."
"We aren't talking about me."
"Tell me about her, and I'll tell you about Maron."
"Maron, huh?" Copper eyed me over the rim of his glass. "Alright, screw it." He tilted his glass back and thought for a minute. "She's smart."
"Gorgeous, too," I said. And she was. Long blonde hair and pretty green eyes. Lean and in shape, but she dressed like she was from the seventies.
"Yeah, but that isn't what made me fall for her. She cares about things. People. Events. Everything. The townspeople shunned her because she isn't a true supe."
That sounded like Midnight Cove. It was a good town, but it had a lot of problems. Even people who were true supes ended up on the wrong side of the people sometimes. Helen being a classic example. I'd heard stories about the necromancer. Everyone was freaked out by her. It had calmed down since she married that gardener. People were way too scared of him to screw with her anymore. Plus, when they needed her, they had no choice but to swallow down their prejudices. She was the only one here with the power to raise the dead. Helen had mad job security.
I nodded at my brother to continue.
"There was a kid down at the bank. His family was trying to secure a loan to pay for cancer treatment in the human world. His mom is a witch and his dad is human. The poor kid got most of the human DNA and not enough of the good witch DNA to shake it off. The medical bills were up in the millions by the time I saw them. By then, there was nothing I could do for them." Copper shook his head as he thought about the story. "There was an herbalist a friend of mine had told me about. Said there wasn't much she couldn't cure. I knew it was a long shot, but I asked his parents for permission to take him there after I denied the loan. They were desperate by then. So I loaded the kid up in my truck and practically blew down the door of the herbalist's house. He was close to the end." He smiled as he remembered which made me smile. My brother had tumbled down the well of love and was stuck there, that was for sure. "She flung open the door wearing nothing but sleep shorts and a tank top and cursed me up one side and down the other." Copper chuckled. "Until she realized what I was holding. Harry opened the door, ushered me in, and spent the entire day and half the night working on him."
"Harry?" I echoed.
"Short for Harriet. She threatened to cut off my balls if I ever called her Harriet."
And Harry was better? I laughed. "I'd like to meet her one day."
Copper shrugged. "One day. Until then, I'll cut off your balls if you tell anyone about her."
"You don't have to worry about me."
"Tell me about this Maron," he asked.
"I made a deal with Portia," I said.
Copper sat up straighter. "That is never wise, bro."
"Tell me about it. After Portia approached me and tried to set me up, I told her I'd only go out with two women. I didn’t realize one of them would be my soulmate. I had a request which she begrudgingly filled."
"Let me guess. Cherry?"
"Not specifically Cherry," I admitted. "But someone with her characteristics."
"You mean someone plastic enough to be posed however you want her to be?"
"I'm not proud of it."
"You shouldn't be," Copper said. "So I'm assuming you tried to blow the date once you met Maron because you knew she wasn't the one you wanted?"
"In a nutshell."
"And how did that go?"
I laughed. "Honestly? Not well. We fought for half the date, but the second half we talked. A lot."
"You left bothered, didn't you?"
"I did, but not enough to worry about it. But I ran into her again when I was out with Cherry. She was on a date as well. I might have behaved a little... boorishly."
"Do tell," Copper said. He poured us both some more whiskey.
"I might have accosted her on the way into the bathroom."
"I'd love to know how our Maron took that."
"She shoved me into the wall."
Copper slapped his knee and chortled. "So what prompted the meeting today?"
"Maron saw the wedding announcement in the paper.'
My brother winced. "You are so smooth, Sterling."
"Yeah. She asked me for one chance. Just one. If it didn't work, she wouldn't stand in the way of me marrying Cherry."
A long groan came from my brother. "Please tell me you didn't say no."
I stayed silent.
"Oh man. Maron is right. You are an idiot."
"If I do this, I risk my wedding to Cherry."
My brother looked up at the ceiling. "Why are you so stubbornly set on this path?"
"Because I don't want to be tied down," I snapped.
"Marriage is being tied down. It's just what it is. But the difference with your soulmate is that you don't mind. You want to be tied down because then you know that you're bonded. You know the other person is never going to break your heart." Copper set his glass down on the table. "Listen. I can smell the bond all over you now. If Mom and Dad, and heaven forbid Moira, meet Cherry, which they will because uh yeah, you're getting married, they are going to know Cherry isn't the one for you. Do you honestly think Mom will let you go through with this?"
"She's a vamp, Copper."
My brother's gaze snapped to mine. "Excuse me?"
"A vampire."
"No."
"Yep." I sighed. "We can't have children."
"Mom is going to lose it."
"It doesn't matter. I'm marrying Cherry."
"Do you want children?"
"Not now," I admitted, "but eventually, yes."
"Something will change by then," Copper said. "It has to."
I shook my head. "Portia seems to know something but it's too risky. If for some horrible reason I married Maron and she became pregnant before the laws were changed, we'd have to run."
"Dude. This blows."
"Yeah."
"So this is why you're so resistant
."
I shook my head. "Not entirely. It's a reason but not the main one. I wish I were that noble. Cherry is easier. I like my freedom too much."
"I had no idea you were such an asshole," Copper said before he stood up and headed to the kitchen.
"Neither did I," I muttered to myself.
Sixteen
Maron
I cried all the way home, but as soon as I pulled into the driveway, I dried my tears, squared my shoulders, and vowed to move on from this. I'd have to call Dimitri and call it off. I didn't know how into me he was especially since all he did was kiss me. That was it. He never pressed forward with anything else. But I still owed it to him to talk to him.
I was about to step out of the car when I noticed a woman sitting on my front porch. She was the absolute last person I wanted to talk to. What was worse? Not finding your soul mate during your lifetime or finding him and realizing he was a cowardly chicken who only wanted to take the easy way in life? We had obstacles, yes. I was a vamp. He was a wolf. We could date but never have children. It was a definite problem. When I really thought about it, though, I thought the universe wouldn't be so cruel as to make two people soulmates and never give them the opportunity to be parents.
I headed up the steps.
Portia stood up. I unlocked the door and left it open for her to follow me in. She didn't say a word until she was sitting in my kitchen. "Got anything to drink?" she asked.
Wordlessly, I reached for a bottle of wine and opened it. I poured us both a generous amount and pushed a glass over to her.
"Hundred percent track record, huh?" I asked.
Her generous lips twisted to the side. "Used to be," she quipped as she took a large swig.
"Sorry about that. I tried."
"I know you did." She reached into her purse and produced a hair tie. With an effortless twist, she'd piled her hair into a messy bun. "Men. They suck." Portia held her glass up and clinked it against mine.
"He's an idiot," I proclaimed.
"Definitely. And who in the world actually marries a woman named Cherry Blossom?"
A giggle escaped from me. "Sterling Luna," I said. "Soon to be Sterling Blossom because he's a cowardly bitch."
