“I don’t know, you’re just all loosened up,” he said, shaking his shoulders out. She watched him suck a bit of sauce from his finger and did not appreciate the way her cheeks burned.
“It’s not like I’m a tightass or anything,” she said, raising her eyebrows.
“No,” he said quickly. “You’re definitely not. I just meant, you know, how you perceive somebody on a first impression and then you get to know them, and they physically start to look different to you?”
“I’ve known you a day,” she said, laughing.
“Yeah.” He grabbed a fork and started mixing up his Pad Thai. “But it’s been a very long day.”
“Yeah,” she said. She took a breath and said, “You’re not so bad, Gunner.”
Gunner grinned at that so widely she almost regretted saying it. “You’re not so bad yourself, boss.”
Chapter Nine: Delilah
Delilah sat on a bench in Ghirardelli Square, eating a taco, peering over her shades at the people walking past. She had not had a taco since her mortal human life. She felt like this one was better than she remembered tacos tasting and wondered if inhabiting an angelic form of herself made tacos taste better when she was interrupted by Katz, the angelic agent who watched over her missions.
“What’re you doing all the way over here?” Katz said, sitting down next to her. He did not look as cheerful as he normally did. He pointed south. “Isn’t WellDrop a few miles that way?”
Delilah nodded and swallowed the bite of taco. “Yeah, but those idiots are already so into each other, I thought I’d do a little sightseeing.” Katz looked wary at that and Delilah shrugged. “No, really! I thought this mission was going to be hard. Wolf shifter and a fox shifter and all that, but the sparks are flying left and right. And Oracle isn’t seeing any threats on the horizon. My theory is, once they’re really in a relationship, then it might get dicey. Naysayers and whatnot. Meg’s pack might be trouble.”
“Okay…” Katz said doubtfully. “But I might remind you that Oracle has been screwing up a lot upstairs.” He pointed upwards which signified the Angelic Dimension, even though the place wasn’t actually in space but in another state of being.
“Eh, I know, but it wasn’t working perfectly on my first mission and that went fine. More or less.” Delilah smiled beatifically. “I was gonna get some chocolates in a minute. You wanna come with? Maybe check out Pier 39?”
Katz chortled at that and pushed a short dreadlock behind his ear. “I would, honestly. But I have other cases I have to look after. But...look, be careful, Delilah. If I were you, I wouldn’t let the mission out of my sight for too long. Not when you can’t really count on Oracle.”
“Alright, alright,” Delilah said, sighing. “I got it.”
“I guess you got it then!” Katz smiled in a way that made Delilah slightly suspicious.
“I do.”
“Then I’ll be on my way,” he said, throwing her a little salute. “I’ll see you when I see you.”
“Okay…” Delilah watched him walk away and glanced at her Oracle. Megan was fine. She was at home and she had a whole other day of working closely with Gunner scheduled for tomorrow. Gunner was fine, safe at his place. She saw no threats to them anywhere according to Oracle. Sure, it had been glitchy lately, but it had never missed anything big. “He’s trying to make me paranoid,” Delilah muttered and shook her head. “Nice try, Katz.”
It had been a week and the prospective lovebirds were getting along swimmingly and growing closer all the time. She could’ve done something to shove them into bed together but she trusted her instincts on this one. A slightly slower burn might be better this time.
She sat back, relaxed and finished the rest of her taco. She thought maybe she’d take in Alcatraz if she had some extra time the next day.
Chapter Ten: Gunner
“Gunner, this is John.” Bryan nodded at the new guy who was lanky and had a drawn look about him, like maybe he was coming back from a particularly rough period in his life.
They were standing around the coffee bar. Gunner shook the guy’s hand and fought the reflexive grimace at the sensation of a fishy feeling palm. He didn’t quite trust people with weird, weak handshakes. Megan had shaken his hand like it was a warning. He’d liked that about her.
“Gunner Dylan,” he said, smiling curtly.
John’s gaze flitted about the room like he was taking a measure of the place. He rubbed his neck and nodded. He also smelled weird to Gunner’s shifter senses. He wasn’t a shifter, Gunner was sure, but there was magic about him. Sometimes humans with unrealized magical potential smelled like that. His scent was a little metallic and weird. The guy had a story, whoever he was. Gunner thought he’d keep his distance if possible. He was settling in at WellDrop. He didn’t want any new troublemakers ruining it for him.
“John’s our new admin guy,” Bryan went on as he stirred his coffee. “Incoming and outgoing mail, filing, supplies, that kind of thing. If you need anything, John’s your man.”
“Cool, cool,” Gunner said. “Nice to meet you.”
“Yep.” John nodded once. That was the most he said. He said nothing else in the next two minutes of Gunner standing there, so Gunner talked to Bryan instead before slipping away back to his office.
Weirdo, Gunner decided.
Back in his office, Gunner sipped his coffee and checked his Outlook. He had three emails from Megan. One was to ask him if he and Bryan had posted on the job sites for the delivery driver jobs. Gunner replied that they had. The second email was to say nevermind, she’d just talked to Bryan about it.
The third email just said: This day is 500 hours long. Save me.
Gunner felt his heart do a stupid fluttering thing in his chest. In the two weeks since he’d started, he was getting on very well with Megan, better than he’d ever imagined; so well, he kept thinking of her once he’d left work and smiling to himself. That wasn’t to mention the number of times he’d jacked off thinking about her. But this was the first time she’d sent him an email that was personal and off the cuff. She was talking to him like a friend. He chewed on his lip and considered how to reply.
He ended up sending her a gif of a frustrated Captain Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. She responded immediately with a gif of Captain Kirk. The thread went on, their emails bouncing back and forth every once in a while as they worked until much later in the day when he sent her a particularly funny one that had nothing to do with Star Trek and heard her shriek the laughter from her office across the floor.
He smiled to himself. Oh, he was getting to like her way too much. He knew this already because, having been inspired by his conversation with Megan about modern shifter life, he’d reached out to his pack. They had been so scattered lately, all of them pretty successful tech types and always busy, except for the surfer alpha. They just got together every once in a while to run through the woods and then hang out for a bit at Gunner’s cabin.
His packmates had all been enthusiastic to hang out. Everybody seemed to have the same 21st-century shifter problem of not giving their wolves enough time. So they’d gone out to Muir and run for hours, wrestled around and hunted for rabbit. They’d stayed up late into the evening and thrown back some beers and talked business.
Then they’d started talking relationships.
It had been two weeks he’d known Megan and while that was nothing to a human, to a shifter you sometimes didn’t need more than a day to know you’d found your mate.
Not that he thought Megan was his mate or anything, because that would have been impossible. Because she was a fox. Working with a fox was one thing, but the idea of romance was impossible. It was more that, if she had not been a fox, he might have been totally convinced already that they were perfect for each other. It was getting to be confusing what his heart was telling him versus what he’d always been told.
The guys were all talking about their mates or attempts at finding one and Gunner had been spaced out th
inking of Megan Flannery, the fox shifter.
“Somebody got you distracted, Gunner?” One of his packmates, Owen, was leering at him.
“Oh, no,” he said, shrugging. “I mean there’s this one hot girl who’s...interesting. But it’s nothing.”
He didn’t know why he’d had to go admitting that much. He wasn’t about to tell them he was getting a crush on a fucking fox shifter. But they’d teased him for the next hour. He’d had to invent a woman. He said it was the receptionist at work. He hadn’t even told them he’d left Likt, though luckily, they did not ask. He was worried about somebody finding out that foxes owned WellDrop and it coming back on him. Eventually, he assumed, it would get out. But he didn’t want to deal with it before he had to.
Interesting, Gunner thought now as the hot girl in question leaned in his doorway at six o’clock.
Meg was wearing tight black jeans and a tank top. It had been running too warm in the office and they hadn’t fixed the AC yet. The sight of her subtle curves and bare shoulders and glimpse of cleavage wasn’t making Gunner any less warm. She was wearing that dark lipstick of hers too. She looked like a vixen.
Foxy indeed, he thought.
He wondered if she was doing that on purpose. Was she dressing for him? Had she refreshed her lipstick before coming in to talk to him? They were alone in the office again. She often stayed later than everyone else and he was especially busy until the launch. Most of the time they ended up staying longer than they needed, laughing and chatting about nothing in the empty building.
“You’re still here,” Meg said, hovering in his doorway. She said it as if they weren’t usually both still there into the evening.
“Launch in a week,” he said, before rolling his eyes at himself. It was all they were talking about lately. Of course, she knew that. “I mean...you know that.”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. “Yep. I know that.”
He abruptly realized that Megan was standing there without any real reason other than that she seemed to want to be near him. He smiled slyly and stood, slowly coming around the desk. He’d shed his jacket and tie and rolled up his sleeves and now he leaned, half sitting against the desk to face her.
“Hey, foxy lady,” he said. “You need somethin’? Or are you just here for the view?” He motioned toward himself and was delighted when she grinned while rolling her eyes.
“I just wanted to stretch my legs,” she said. “You cocky bastard.”
“Uh huh,” he said, standing up straight. “I could stretch your legs for ya.”
Megan shook her head but smiled in that way that he knew meant she was enjoying herself. “You’re ridiculous.”
“You like it.” He meant it lightly. He wasn’t really trying to do anything other than keep her there talking to him and flirting with no real intention because everything in him demanded it.
She paused and then said, “Maybe.”
He had not expected anything serious but she’d acknowledged it now. It was out there. And suddenly the temperature rose a few more degrees and he realized how closely they were standing. He realized too that if he leaned forward just a few inches he would feel what it was like to kiss that darkly-lipsticked mouth. He’d become used to her foxy scent already. He liked it. It blew his mind how much he liked it. It was making him dizzy now as he felt the puff of her breath on his neck.
“Meg-”
“I should go!” Her voice was much too high. She spun away from him, running her hands through her hair and said, “See you tomorrow!” And then she was gone.
He stood for a moment and let his eyes slip shut, basking in the scent she had left behind her, imagining that the moment had gone very differently.
Chapter Eleven: Megan
“What’s with you?” Lane said
Megan poked at her omelet. She’d vowed to go with egg whites and kale and it was not doing much for her. She leaned on her elbow and frowned at her own reflection in the glass of their breakfast table. Their condo had four bedrooms and it overlooked the bay. It had a patio on the balcony big enough for brunches. They’d planned to throw all their company parties at the condo. The place had cost a couple of million dollars but all of them came from at least some money and they’d felt comfortable investing in it.
“Nothing’s with me,” Meg said. “You ever think about moving out of the city?”
Lane looked gobsmacked, which was fair, as Megan had never signaled a desire to move out of the city herself. “No! I love living here.”
“It’s so far from the woods,” Megan said, poking at the kale with her fork. She wished there was a mouse in that omelet. Although it would certainly taste better if she were shifted. Or muskrat. She hadn’t had muskrat in years. “Wouldn’t it be nice to live close to the woods? Go running whenever you feel like it? You know, once things are up and running, I bet I could work from home.”
“You could definitely work from home but since when do you want to live in the woods?”
“Just near the woods.”
“I think you’re just stressed out because of the launch,” Lane said.
The launch was that very day. The app was going live at noon and then, hopefully, they’d start getting local orders for deliveries of self-care goods. Their offsite warehouse, just a few blocks away, was all stocked up.
“I’m not stressed out, actually,” she said, smiling a little. She wasn’t stressed out because she had Gunner on her team and Gunner had been a superstar at putting her staff together. For all his bravado he didn’t even act like a peacock about it, really, once he was in it. He just did his job well and knew it. At this point, his cockiness was mostly to tease her. She didn’t hate that.
“You’ve been distracted though…”
She just shook her head and sipped her coffee. “I don’t think so.”
Lane stared at her and said, “Meg, do you have a crush on the wolf?”
“What? Gunner? No!” Her voice had gone up absurdly high. Lying high. Also, she was pretty sure she was bright red.
“Oh my God.” Lane clapped a hand to her face. “Lane, are you kidding me? First, you hire him-”
“Bryan hired him. And I’m not talking about this.” She stood to clear her uneaten omelet. “I’m a professional and Gunner’s a professional and a wolf and I’m well aware of that and nothing is going on. So just...shut up!”
“Oh God, you really like him.”
Briefly, Megan wondered at Lane’s surprise. Had she even seen Gunner? The guy had movie-star good looks and the confidence that went with them. He was also charming and fun to talk to and already knew what she liked with her sandwiches. She supposed she’d already forgotten how much of an anathema wolves were supposed to be to foxes. That had happened awfully quickly.
“I’ll admit, I’m attracted. A little bit.” She shrugged. “But nothing’s going to happen.”
Though it could have, she thought. It could have when she’d hovered in his office after hours just to be near him, and to smell that bit of cologne mixed with that wolfishness which she now found absurdly sexy, and to see those biceps flexing beneath his shirt sleeves.
“Ugh. Gross.” Lane made a face and Meg felt legitimately offended on Gunner’s behalf.
“It’s not gross. Jesus, Lane. He’s a person. We’re both shifters. Grow the hell up.”
With that, she shoved her leftover omelet in the fridge and grabbed her to-go mug full of coffee and her bag, and went to work. Alone.
By the first coffee break, Lane had come to Megan’s office to apologize, just as Megan was about to go find Lane and apologize for perhaps overreacting.
“I don’t know,” Lane said, sighing. “Maybe you didn’t overreact.” They’d closed the door so nobody could hear their business. Although Jan and Naomi had quickly picked up on the tension that morning. “I mean, it’s weird, like I’ve never really thought about the wolf thing. I just accepted it. But then when you start thinking about it...I can’t just hold being a wolf against Gunner
when he hasn’t done anything. I mean, there hasn’t even been a real skirmish between the clans in how long?”
“I don’t know, twenty years?” Meg guessed. “Nothing big anyway. It’s almost like a cold war.”
“Yeah.” Lane said. “Now I feel like I’ve just been really narrow-minded.”
“Well, I was fully ready to let him go on his first day,” Meg admitted. “‘Til I got this weird call from the Chamber of Commerce. Made me feel guilty for even thinking about it. Thank God that stopped me though. He’s great!”
“He is,” Lane said, tittering. “And I have to admit, he is pretty hot.”
“He’s crazy hot!” Meg said, throwing up her hands.
Lane laughed and said, “Okay okay, but having said that… There really isn’t anything going on, right?”
“Of course not-”
“I’m not saying that because of my own hang-ups or anything, but you know if the clans got wind of it…”
“No, I know,” Meg murmured, looking down at her hands.
She had maybe fantasized about something real happening between her and Gunner a few dozen times already. But she tried not to think about the potential consequences, it being a fantasy, anyway.
“It would be chaos,” Lane said. “I mean, maybe that’s not fair. But they’d come after you. They’d ostracize you from the clan. At best. They might freaking kill Gunner. I mean working together is one thing. Everybody’s so tangled up together in the human world now, it’s probably inevitable, but mating...”
A chill ran up her spine at the thought of Gunner getting hurt because of her silly crush. “There’s nothing going on between us,” Meg said, looking Lane in the eye. “I promise. On my word as the alpha.”
“Alright, alright.” Lane squeezed her shoulders. “No need to get so dramatic. Listen, how about a run tonight? Celebrate the launch?” She checked her watch. “Which is in two hours!”
“Yes!” Megan clapped her hands. Out on the floor, everyone was bustling around doing last-minute tasks to prepare for the launch of the app. “That sounds great! Wow, I don’t even have anything to do right now. It’s running like a well-oiled machine already.”
Starcrossed Shifters Page 6
