by Ever Coming
Table of Contents
Copyright
Etienne
Tansy
Epilogue: Tansy
Copyright
The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of a copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by fines and federal imprisonment.
Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in, or encourage, the electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright 2017 Ever Coming and Lila Grey
Editor Wizards in Publishing
Cover design by Fantasia Frog Designs
Published by Wizards in Publishing
Etienne
Deep in the heart of the Louisiana bayou lurks danger … and love.
Welcome to Shotgun Row, far away from Mardi Gras and the French Quarter. Down here, gators aren’t the most terrifying thing to prowl the shadows, hunting their next prey.
And some of them turn back to humans when the tourists aren’t looking.
None of them have found a mate. Their beasts are too fierce. Their manners too gnarly. Their rush to violence too vengeful and swift.
Then Tansy moves into town, taking over her grandmother’s bakery. Etienne knows there’s something special about this latest addition to the motley crew of Shotgun Row. And he’s determined to learn everything he can about her, no matter what it takes.
This gator-shifter might have just found his match.
Shotgun Row
Etienne
There’s nothing like waking up pissed off. Really. I mean there’s nothing like it. It gives me a boost coffee just can’t handle. Coming out of my cold sleep wasn’t easy, but anger did me just fine.
I stepped out of my shotgun shack on stilts onto a porch over the swamp and took in a deep breath through my nose. Nothing smelled off, except Justice’s idea of breakfast roasting over the fire near the common place. From the stench, he must’ve caught a coon the night before. Nasty-tasting things. Didn’t smell like he took the time to remove the fur, either—the beast.
The murky water was still beneath my walkway that led to the land. All was well in my little corner of Shotgun Row.
My stomach grumbled under my tan button-down shirt as my feet hit the muddy bank. The polyester always felt like a foreign skin. I reveled in the moment I got home and could take it off. It itched the fuck out of me.
“Come on, Roy. Let’s get to work.” I jumped into my old truck and flipped on Roy Orbison on the radio. Food was on my mind as I waved at the boys on my way out of the bayou and into Juneau. I was right. Justice didn’t remove the fur. As I passed, I saw him in the distance, digging into the damned carcass like Smeagol—looked like the som-bitch was still squirming.
It took me a half hour to get to town. Nothing was the same since Marie passed. Nothing. The air smelled different. The cars drove a little slower. There was no red neon sign as I entered town, telling me there were hot donuts.
“What the fuck?” I turned down ole Roy, not wanting him to distract me as I came out of the row of trees and onto Goliath Street. Up ahead, a red siren sign was lit. The words ‘Hot Fresh Donuts’ flashed, calling me in. No matter who you were, fresh hot donuts were everyone’s crack.
I looked around for the crowd of people in shock. What if Marie had come back from the dead? Wouldn’t be so strange around here. Maybe the woman had some Voodoo tricks up her sleeve.
Rocks and dirt flew up as I parked in front like I owned the place.
“Hey!” A woman came out from the front door with fury on her face. “You mind? I’ve got customers who want to taste breakfast, not dirt. Got it?” Her hands were on a pair of curvy hips I bet led to an equally grab-worthy ass. Her Yankee accent hurt my ears. I reached up to them and then checked my fingers for blood. She spoke nasally as fuck.
Hoity Toity as fuck, too.
“You sound like her,” I said, shutting the door to my truck and walking toward her, ignoring her little temper tantrum. She obviously didn’t know who she was speaking to. “The words, not the accent. Marie was Coonass as grits.”
“I bet so. She raised me after my mom died. You coming in for breakfast, or you just here to make a ruckus?”
A ruckus. No one around here said ruckus, and her shrill tone made me grind my jaw back and forth.
I doubted very seriously Marie had raised this girl. If she had, she would’ve taught her a few manners.
“I’m here for breakfast if anything’s edible.” I muttered the last part under my breath. No need in making enemies just because she was being a pain in my ass.
“Come on in, then. I’m waiting for someone.”
I attempted to go in after her, to hold the door open like a good man should, but she insisted on me going in first.
Yeah, she definitely wasn’t from around here.
“Morning, Etienne,” the whole place seemed to say in unison.
“Morning, everyone. Any good?” I asked, sparing a glance at the new person in Marie’s bakery who was pushing her fiery-red curls from her face as she came back in from trying to scold me outside.
I didn’t care who was making the donuts; the place would always be Marie’s.
They all “mmed” and nodded with their mouths stuffed. I was usually the first, or one of the first, to know when a newcomer came to town. Why was this one kept a secret?
“I’ll have a plain glazed. Cup of coffee. Please, ma’am.”
The little spitfire, no taller than five foot was in front of me now, leaning over the counter, giving me a good look at all her pastries.
“You have two different colored eyes,” the woman said out of nowhere. I still didn’t fucking know her name, which was a real problem. My gator growled inside me. The rat bastard wanted to know her name, too—and a whole lot more about her. Inhaling deeply, I took in her scent. Mostly because she was a newcomer and I needed to memorize her scent, and a little because I wanted to know what she smelled like beneath the sugar and the cinnamon—except all I smelled was more sugar, cinnamon, and a hint of vanilla. She smelled like a cozy winter or her grandmother’s cookies.
“You don’t say.” Shit. I couldn’t help myself from saying snarky things to this female.
“I do say. She says you come in every morning.”
“Says?”
Her face fell. I was doing it again.
“Said. Sorry. It hasn’t been long enough. I still talk about her like she’s here. Let me get your order.”
She bent down to retrieve my donut then swung around to pour a cup of coffee. It wasn’t my regular cup, but it would do. And I was right about the grab-worthy ass.
“Oh.” She looked at the cup. “Sorry. This isn’t your regular. I’ll get it right tomorrow.”
Marie must’ve told her about my cup, too. “Still tastes the same, I suppose. What’s your name?”
“Tansy.” She did a little curtsy, the smart-ass.
Tansy moved on down the counter and smiled at all the right times, but there was a sadness in her eyes—and a bit of sass in her walk—and she was beautiful as all get out. I looked down the aisle at the display case. Some things were different, like the new colored donut glazes, but some were just the same.
“Anything else you’d like?” she asked, a little more sw
eetly this time. My beast growled inside at the thickness of her insincerity.
“Nope. One and done. How much do I owe you?” I reached for my wallet and waited.
She looked surprised. “Oh, um, nothing. Meemaw said you eat for free. She said you had already earned everything you could eat in a lifetime.”
I hadn’t. Not yet, anyway.
I smiled and nodded. “She told me to protect you. Not you, but whoever took over this place after she was gone. She made me promise. So, if you need anything or…”
Her fist was back on her hip again, and damn it all if I didn’t want her fist to be my hand, kneading the curve there. A blush the color of the setting sun on the bayou flamed in her cheeks and at the tops of her ears. Damn, her blush was sexy.
“I don’t need anything from anyone—especially your kind.”
My kind? Did she know? My stomach flipped, thinking Marie had given away my secret. I didn’t even know if Marie knew my secret. She’d alluded to it once or twice but hadn’t outright said it.
“My kind?”
“Yeah, you. Male, men, boys. I don’t need the kind of help I’m sure you’re offering.”
For some damned reason, I took the chance to wink at her. When the fuck did I start winking? “I made your Meemaw a promise, and I intend to keep it. You call if you need anything and, if you don’t, I still kept up my end. Here.” I slammed a five-dollar bill on the counter with a little too much force, causing her to jump back. “Keep the change, Tansy.”
Tansy
“Arggggg.” I couldn’t believe the asseryness oozing off of that man. What was it? Eti rhymes with yeti, which made all kinds of sense in my anger. After all, he was ginormous and had those eyes that weren’t quite right and not even because of their color. Something sat just beneath them. Something dark.
And what was with everyone in this stupid place knowing him? Three deep breaths later, he was out of the lot, and I was able to regain some sense of rational thinking. What was it about the man got him under my skin so easily? It wasn’t his sexy smirk, because I was all done with men, especially men who thought they were in control. Never again with that crap.
Grabbing the five dollar bill, I gave Gina a quick excuse for my leaving her alone to fend for herself as the morning crowd slowed. Meemaw had some explaining to do. It was no surprise to see her ethereal self, standing by the sink with a cat-that-swallowed-the-canary smile slapped across her face.
“Yeti boy is nothing like what you said he would be.” I watched as she opened her mouth to correct me on his name and then immediately snapped it shut again. She knew when I was this riled up, correcting me would only make it worse.
“You made him sound like this old man who took a liking to you. Seriously, the man is huge and not much older than me.”
“And hawter than Hades.” She fanned her face with her hand while raising and lowering her eyebrows, which looked ridonkulous on a woman her age and exponentially more so on a dead one.
Growing up, I hated my gift of seeing the dead. Now that I’d lost Meemaw, I finally started to appreciate it as the gift it was. It gave me extra time to come to terms with her death and figure out how to keep her bakery going, which was far more important to her than it was to me. It saddened me that she was stuck here, but she swore it was of her choosing, and fighting with Meemaw was never a productive endeavor.
“Please, Meemaw, like I have time for that.” I mean, I did have time since I knew nobody here and the bakery, while hard work, was only open through lunch. That didn’t mean I was looking at his smexy rear as he left. Not much, anyway.
“And what was with the money?” That part made no sense to me. If someone says no cost, you don’t give them double the normal amount. That accomplishes nothing at all. “I thought he was all free all the time. Did you set me up to be the fool on purpose?”
I cringed at my words. Of course she hadn’t. She might have been setting me up for a plethora of other reasons, but not that.
“You, my sweet girl, have never been a fool,” she lied, but that was neither here nor there. It was a mistake I never planned to make again. “That northern boy was a manipulator who took advantage of you. You need to forgive yourself and start moving on, or you will find yourself alone.”
In hindsight, she was right. Dante left so many clues along the way. Clues I chose to ignore because hormones and sweet words and bein’ a damn fool.
“You’re the last one to be talking about moving on, Meemaw. You have been dead for a month now.” I hated to push her out of this realm. I loved having her here, but from what I had gathered over the years of seeing and hearing far too many dead folks, if you stayed too long, you never moved on, and I didn’t wish that on anyone, especially my Meemaw. “I love having you here and all, but be real. There’s a better place for you than haunting your bakery.”
“Sweet thang, I am exactly where I want to be for the moment, and you might not realize it, but so are you.”
“Where I want to be is in Paris, but that’s not gonna be a thing,” I mumbled like a spoiled bratikins. It wasn’t Meemaw’s fault. It wasn’t even Dante’s, not truly. I made the bad choices that got me kicked out of school and shut the door to Paris. Shit, if I had gone to Paris, I wouldn’t have been here when Meemaw needed me. Bratikins McSelfish needed to be my new name.
“You belong here, in the bayou.”
“Says the woman who grew up in Baton Rouge.” Not that it was much different than here. Meemaw sacrificed a lot to come up north and take care of me when my mom got sick and passed. Ma never stuck around afterward, meaning she was in a better place. But as a twelve-year-old kid, I just wanted my mom. Meemaw filled her shoes in all ways, but she never filled the void my mom’s death left. It was only after I went to school that she came back down here and now here I was.
“To find myself here, where I belonged.” She pulled me from my downward spiral of sad. My emotions were all over the map today. I needed to get a grasp so I didn’t yell at more customers the way I had Yeti Boy.
“Now cut it out, buttercup. You have customers who need serving, and I need to teach you my secret recipe for making meringues in this humidity. Mrs. Robertson orders them every year for her husband’s birthday, giving you a week to get it right.”
Leave it to Meemaw to bring the conversation back to her baby, the bakery or, as she liked to call it, the heart of Juneau.
“I know how to make meringues. I was top in my class, you know.” I stuck my tongue out for good measure.
“I see teaching you is going to be amusing.” She was beginning to fade. She’d been doing that more and more lately, and I didn’t like it. I liked it when she looked almost real enough to touch. I needed to learn more about this gift and embrace it fully because I was walking blind, and years of trying to suppress it and ignore it had accomplished nada.
“Tansy.” Gina’s voice echoed from the front.
“I’m needed. Go bother someone else until cookie time.” I shooed her away with my hand teasingly.
“Ha, as if only it were that simple.” She faded, going where, I had no idea. One day I’d get brave enough to ask her. For now, I needed to go sling some king-nuts or change register tape or whatever Gina needed. I threw the five-dollar bill into an empty sugar jar before going to help Gina. No way was I spending that money. Yeti Boy wasn’t going to buy me.
Etienne
I sat in my office longer than necessary, staring at the computer. Something shady was going on around here. People in this town knew when everyone farted, and gossip was their favorite pastime.
So why didn’t anyone know a woman named Tansy, Marie’s granddaughter, would pick up from wherever in the fuck she came from and come down to Juneau so soon after the woman’s death and just take over like nothing ever happened.
“You plannin’ on going out to patrol, or should I put on another pot of coffee? By the way, you look like shit.”
Bruno wasn’t my kind, and listening to him pissed me off
beyond reason. But he was my boss, so I guess I had to pay attention.
“I’m going. I was just going to run a background check on Marie’s granddaughter.”
His chuckle seemed to be aimed at me and my gator growled inside me, wanting to clamp down on his black-bear ass and swallow him whole.
“No need, Eti. I’ve already done my homework. She’s squeaky clean. Plus”—he rubbed his beer gut a little—“she’s fine as fuck, too. Might have to get me a little of her.”
He couldn’t even see his dick for his bloated gut, and he was thinking about trying to nail the woman who made donuts for a living? Classic.
“If you say so. She’s got a little attitude, though. Might bite right down on you.”
One of his eyebrows cocked up. “Attitude is what we bears like. Oh, and someone said they heard noises down by Shotgun Row last night. Would that be your boys?”
I stood and straightened my shirt, halfway paying attention to the brute.
“Wasn’t my boys. Callum said he heard one of those swamp tours getting a little too close for comfort, so he jumped from bank to bank in front of the boat. Scared the ever-loving shit out of them.”
When I looked up, he was trying to pretend like he wasn’t picking his nose right in front of me. Bears weren’t nasty animals as a rule, but he was one of a kind.
“Good, good. Let’s keep those tourists where they belong.”
Clearing my throat, I adjusted my gun at my hip. “Yeah, except the fine ones who make cakes.”
“Watch your mouth, Eti.”
“Yes, sir.”
I couldn’t get out of the office fast enough.
I hadn’t been on the road more than twenty minutes when I saw Tansy Pansy walking down the street in a teal dress. It wasn’t the one she was wearing this morning. There was only one main drag in the town of Juneau, so anywhere she had to go was probably close.
