by Amelia Jade
“Your dinner, miss?”
“I already ordered,” Cole said as she looked over at him.
Forcing a laugh, she ordered the veal and pasta that had been so delicious last time she came.
“Ahhh,” Cole said from across her, finally speaking again. She had begun to wonder if he was lapsing back into the typical shifter attitude of brooding and being imposing. So many of them sat in a chair and seemed to look past the world in front of them, their oversized bodies driving off any thoughts of striking up conversation with them.
“Good beer?” she asked tentatively.
“Not bad,” he mused. “Nowhere near as good as Ferro’s, but still, not bad. I’m glad someone else in town is getting into brewing their own drink now. It’ll be good for them.”
“Ferro? Where’s that?”
Cole laughed. Red flared at the corners of her vision until she realized he wasn’t laughing directly at her.
What is going on with you? The entire afternoon you had a blast, but now, because you almost lock lips with him and a waiter makes an honest mistake, you’re trying to find every reason to hate him?
She knew it was the truth, but there was nothing Trestin could do to change the way she felt. Fear held that power over someone, and right now, she recognized that it held full sway over her. That was why she needed to go home. To her safe place.
“Ferro is a person, actually,” Cole said with a smile. “He’s the owner of The Tongue & Flame pub out on the west side of town.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of that place. Never been there though.”
“You need to go. I’ll take you sometime,” he said helpfully, smiling at her.
“Mm-hmm,” she said noncommittally, taking another sip of her water.
She could sense the confusion in Cole, along with a sliver of anger. He was doing his best to hold it in, but some of it was leaking through. Not that there was any reason to blame him for the emotional change. It was all her fault, she knew that, because it was nothing new to her.
By the time their food was served, she was cringing hard to herself as the silence grew louder between them. Thankfully Cole seemed to pick up on it, and the two of them wolfed their food down faster than was necessary, as if in a race to see who could be done first.
“I’d like you to take me home now,” she said after the bill was paid. Her tone was polite, but firm.
“Sure, sure,” Cole said, standing up. He paused midway. “Home? Don’t you have a car at work you want to pick up?”
“I got a ride today, actually,” she admitted, although she now wished she had driven, because Cole was about to find out where she lived.
“Did I do something wrong?” he asked later, following her directions toward the north end of town as they sat in his truck.
“No,” she said with a sigh. There was no sense in lying, and besides, she owed him at least a little bit of the truth. “It’s not you at all. I’m just...” she trailed off, unsure of what to say.
“I understand,” Cole said dully as he pulled up in front of her trailer.
The past few hours had to have been some of the longest, most painful, and awkward of her entire life she thought, trying to ignore the hurt in his voice. Hurt that she had caused, by trying to pretend like her past hadn’t happened. At least he hadn’t said anything about the shitty trailer that she lived in.
“Fuck,” she said out of nowhere, the curse slipping out past her carefully constructed guard. Feeling embarrassed, she slammed her hand on the dash and all but flung herself from the truck.
“Trestin, wait!”
She ignored him, heading straight for her door, keys in hand.
A massive steel-like hand closed around her arm, spinning her around.
“What the—”
The protest died as Cole pressed his mouth to hers. She reacted automatically, without thinking, and melted into the kiss, molding her body to his as warmth enveloped her in a comforting cocoon of bliss. He felt great. He tasted great. And best of all, a small corner of her mind noted as her lips parted, he’s using just the right amount of tongue.
A hand snaked behind her, picking her up as if she weighed nothing, which Trestin knew—after working at a restaurant for three years—was not the case. A moment later her back slammed against the aluminum siding of her trailer, the rattle she was sure was loud enough to alert some of her neighbors.
Fuck it. He felt so good. Her entire body was awakening to his touch, begging her to let him explore it fully. To strip clothing from her body piece by slow piece, to let his fingers and lips go wherever they wished. The hunger between her legs promised great and pleasurable moments if she would only let it loose.
Trestin was thinking about it too. Until his hand cupped one of her breasts. He was gentle and light, but it broke through the cloud of heat in her head.
“No,” she said, pulling back from him, pushing Cole away as hard as she could.
Chapter Three
Cole
He stepped back more in surprise than because of the force of her shove.
“Please go.”
There was no give in that command.
A range of emotions ran through Cole, from sadness, to anger, and finally, to resentment. A sullen disappointment. Not at the way it ended, he thought as he turned to leave. But at the way he had been unable to control himself.
It was his bear that he was unable to control, he admitted to himself, angry that he had allowed it to so thoroughly dupe him into believing that Trestin actually wanted him to do what he had done. To walk up to her and force her into the situation by not giving her an option. Just taking what his bear felt she was asking for.
He pulled the truck door closed behind him, but even though he pulled hard, it didn’t close anywhere near satisfyingly hard enough. A finger jabbed at the push-button start, one of the few fancy bits of technology he had come to actually approve of.
Angrily he threw the transmission into reverse and gunned it back onto the gravel road that ran past her trailer. His headlights bathed Trestin in a glow of soft yellow light as she stood still, watching him go.
He couldn’t fault her for wanting him to leave. Despite the response to his kiss, which had been fiery and passionate, she had given him absolutely no sign that it was wanted. What had happened was likely no more than instinct for her, and as soon as she had realized what was going on, her brain had clicked into gear and told him to get the hell out.
With a cry, he slammed his fist into the steering wheel.
“You idiot,” he snarled at himself as he turned out of the trailer park entrance and onto the asphalt road that would take him back to Ridgeback Lodge, his home.
But instead of taking a simple left, he wrenched the wheel hard and gunned the gas. The big V-8 engine responded and slewed the truck around with a screech of rubber until he was pointed directly back the way he had come.
“Unacceptable,” he told himself, the mass of metal picking up speed as it flew back down the gravel road.
The truck slid to a halt, gravel flying everywhere. Cole opened his door, a beeping sound letting him know that he was leaving the engine running without the keys nearby. Pushing everything else from his mind, he strode up to the door, where Trestin waited behind a screen.
“I told you to leave,” she said.
He could smell her unease. Her fear. The actions he had taken this evening had resulted in her coming to fear him. That hit him hard—a blow he knew he might never recover from—but he still forged ahead, walking straight up to the screen until they were only a foot apart.
“I’m sorry,” he said, his voice an octave lower than normal, the deep timbre of it a true expression of his feelings.
Trestin didn’t say anything, and simply looked at him.
“I regret,” he tried again, “what I did earlier. I mean,” he fumbled awkwardly, “I don’t regret it, that it was bad. Because it wasn’t. I regret that my actions that led up to it, that forced you into the situatio
n,” he said, recovering his poise slightly. He had wanted to keep this serious, and even in that, he had failed.
“Thank you,” she said after a moment, when it became clear he was done.
“I am sorry, Trestin, if I scared you the way I came back here. But I had to do it before I got any second thoughts. I needed to apologize to you, to try and make it right. Otherwise I would not sleep well tonight.”
“I understand,” she said quietly. “Thank you for having the courage to apologize.”
His shoulders slumped when she didn’t say anything more. Not that he had expected her to, however. In fact, it would have been well within her rights for her to finish up with telling him to get the fuck off her property. So it was at least a good sign that she wasn’t doing that. Which meant, he thought, that it would be wise not to wear out her patience.
“I’ll be going now,” he mumbled, turning to leave. Each step of the way, his unnatural hearing waited for a sound, a noise, anything from her, that would tell him to stay, so that they could talk about what was going on with them.
But all he heard was the slow, measured breathing behind him.
This time as he drove away he didn’t turn back.
It was time to go home.
***
What Cole needed now was a beer.
Thankfully, Ridgeback Lodge had plenty. He pulled up in front of the dilapidated old motel, thankful that the darkness of the evening hid the worst of its condition from him.
The Ridgebacks had made lots of progress in restoring the place, especially now that Emma was around to ensure they continued to work on it, but it was still in desperate need of a facelift. The priority had been getting the rooms in livable condition for the seven bears.
They had almost accomplished that until Garrett, his Alpha, had found a mate, and decided that if women were to live amongst them, then more room would be necessary. So had begun the process of knocking out walls to join two rooms together. Although Garrett was the only one with a mate at that point, everyone was going to get a double room, just in case. Which meant, however, that another seven rooms had needed to be redone first.
Cole had been evicted from his room next to Garrett and stowed in the guest room as work began. So at the moment he barely had a place to stay either. Not what he wanted to be dealing with after his afternoon.
Striding through the common room and out the back, he made a beeline for the fridge set into a covered outdoor food area.
“Jesus, Cole, you look like shit,” Darren, another of the Ridgebacks, and not one of his closest friends, said. He and another bear were sitting on wooden Adirondack chairs around a fire that was well into the embers stage.
“Yeah. What the hell happened? Another rejection?” Joel taunted, well aware that just the week before Cole had been rejected by a bear-shifter groupie for being too small.
Cole snapped.
“Oh shit!” Darren yelled, scrambling to get out of the way.
His amber-brown colored bear erupted from within as Cole charged at the other shifter.
Joel, surprised at the violence of the response, took a moment to react. He was still a bear shifter who had grown up in Origin, however, and was no stranger to fights. Even as Cole leapt at him, swinging a paw savagely at his face, a smoke-gray bear ripped from his skin and rolled out of the way.
He couldn’t escape the next one, however, and Cole’s next swat connect solidly with Joel’s shoulder, opening several gaping wounds as his opponent howled in agony just before his own swipe ripped across Cole’s stomach. Fire erupted along his belly, but he pushed it to the side, rearing up on his hind legs and slamming down on the slightly larger bear he had pinned for the moment.
Cole managed to enjoy the squeal of pain. The next thing he knew though, he was flying through the air, chairs shattering like kindling beneath him as his bear rolled through the fire and out the other side, away from the motel.
Although Cole was larger than any wild bear in existence, he looked almost tiny next to the bear that had hit him unsuspectingly from the side. He should have submitted. That was what was normally done.
But Cole’s bear took over, launching him in an attack at the intruder. He collided with the very dark brown bear, using the full force of his weight to take the other one down. Cole may have been the smallest of the Ridgebacks, but he was still an extremely large moving mass. If he used that size to its full advantage, it would be very hard for any bear to stay on its feet as he hit them.
Using his body like a wrecking ball, he rebounded from the newcomer and lunged once more at Joel, one of his paws slamming him up against a tree, breaking his foe’s left forearm. He roared in victory as Joel went down, stunned and hurt by the sudden onslaught of ferocity. It was more than the bears normally dealt with in their fights.
His cry was short-lived, however, because the other bear had recovered and took him down with a paw to the back of his head. Hard. Then he reached down with his jaws and snapped Cole’s arm like it was a twig. Cole lay there, stunned by the pain, while the other bear shifted back, a reproving glare on his face before he turned and walked out of his line of vision.
Closing his eyes, Cole shifted back, taking control of his bear, harnessing its violent desires and showing it who was boss.
For now.
He didn’t like the look in the other bear’s face, but he had come to expect it lately, as he had come to expect the contempt. He and Evan had been close, insomuch as an Alpha becomes friends with the low-ranking bears in a crew. That was before things had changed. Before the fight that had resulted in so much death, and the formation of the Ridgebacks. Before Evan was stripped of his Alpha status by the Kedyn brothers, who owned the entire valley. Who paid them well to mine the mountains nearby. There was no arguing with them.
But Evan had, and eventually Cole had decided that he’d had enough of it. So although he still wasn’t completely fond of Garrett, he had developed a grudging mutual respect to the point that he no longer obeyed Evan, or cared about his outbursts. In fact, he saw it as a matter of time before Garrett ended Evan, once and for all.
“You broke my fucking arm,” Joel said, cradling his arm as Evan set the bone. The other shifter grunted and grimaced as Evan pulled on it, allowing it to set normally, so that he could maintain full use of the arm. It would take a few hours to be completely healed, but he would be able to use it again in half an hour or so.
“And Evan broke mine, just to spite me,” he snarled back, not in the mood for anyone’s pity.
“Well, maybe you shouldn’t have been such an asshole over one little comment,” Corey, the Ridgebacks’ third, said as he came over to help Cole set his own arm.
“Ow,” he said dully as the larger shifter pulled on the bone in the same manner Evan had just done to Joel.
“A thank you would be nice,” the third said, steel edging into his voice.
“Thank you,” he said, meaning every word of it. One of every miner’s biggest fears was becoming so injured that he couldn’t work the mines anymore. They healed so quickly, that broken bones could often be fused incorrectly, resulting in limps and other issues. Any injury like that was, in effect, a death sentence for any shifter. They weren’t fit to do anything else; the mines were already their last chance.
“What the hell was that all about?” Corey pressed as Evan gave Cole one last glance before storming off, leaving Joel to get up on his own.
“He had it coming,” he spat, not wanting to delve into what had happened to him earlier in the day with Trestin.
“Bullshit,” Corey said, not backing down. “This is the third fight in the past handful of days. That’s not like you, Cole. Something’s bothering you.”
“Yeah, you,” he said, getting up and pushing past Corey, who let him go.
Walking away he shook his head, angry with himself once more.
It was like this, with him. He would go months, if not years now, without any issues. But it would always come back. The fla
re-ups would start. The agitation, the anxiety. They were followed by an awakening of desires, a need for women.
Soon the dreams would follow.
***
Cole awoke with a start, gasping for air as he clawed at his neck.
There was nothing there.
He scrambled to push himself until his back was solidly against the wall. He looked around, but the door was still closed, the windows still shut. With a sense of dread, he tore his gaze to the sheets.
A sigh of relief escaped him as he realized that it was okay. This time, at least, he wouldn’t have any explaining to do. Still, he did his best not to panic as he realized that it was all coming around again. The dreams had started once more.
His phone started beeping.
Cole cringed at just how high he jumped at the sudden noise, his cheeks burning slightly with embarrassment, even if there was no one around to see it. Reaching for the phone on his side table, he went to swipe the alarm off. But when his now wide-awake eyes glanced at it, he re-read the name of the alarm with a jolt.
Right! Today was Emma’s birthday.
The night before, after his arm was healed, he had snuck the present into his room, made much easier now that he was at the far end of the renovated part of the motel from the room Emma shared with Garrett. It had been then that he had realized old newspapers were going to make horrible wrapping paper.
Inspiration had struck though, saving the day he thought, remembering how in a fit of genius the night before he had decided to use old wallpaper from the motel. Emma had commented more than once about how much she hated it. It would be a perfect way to wrap her gift.
Now, carrying the slender but insanely—to his mind—expensive brush, he made his way over to her room. There were sounds coming from their room, but Cole didn’t care. The two of them were always fucking these days. Everyone heard them, and nobody cared about interrupting them anymore. In fact, sometimes the other Ridgebacks had made it into a game of just how long they should wait before knocking on the door.
