by Hattie Hunt
He rolled his eyes and slid the other milkshake towards himself. “I don’t see what is wrong with a toucan. They fly, and they live in the tropics.” He picked up his own cherry, gripping it between his teeth and pulling out the stem without ceremony. “But, I guess Emma isn’t a fan of rainbows and happiness.”
She laughed incredulously at him. “What?”
He ignored her. “How about…” Mason tapped his spoon on the table, mimicking deep thought. “A vulture. Practical, utilitarian flight machine.”
“Who preys on dead and dying animals. Pass.” Emma flicked her ponytail and batted her eyelids. “I am thinking something majestic.”
“Peacock?”
Emma snorted and laughed through a mouthful of whipped cream. Then her phone buzzed. Suppressing her irritation, she pulled it out of her pocket and the momentary uptick in her mood spiraled back into dismal territory. Hey. Everything okay? Where are you?
Emma stared at the message. It was Jordan. Her best friend. Yet, she didn’t want to talk to him. If she talked to Jordan, she had to have the real conversations. They had to discuss things. He would comfort her, of course. But, she didn’t want comfort. She wanted… laughter. When was the last time she’d laughed at something without it feeling forced? She’d laughed more times in one morning than she had in two months. It felt good. And it was all because of Mason. The idiot shifter who had walked into her mundane bakery and damn near blew the cover off the entire shifter community.
Emma slid her phone back into her pocket without responding. She looked up to find Mason watching her, his intense green eyes crinkled in concern and question. He didn’t voice anything out loud, just waited, fingers toying with the stem of a cherry.
They sat in silence for a few moments, Emma staring into her milkshake, Mason stirring the whipped cream into his.
It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence. Instead, it was strangely companionable, and Emma marveled at how easy it was to sit across from this man that she barely knew and feel such a thing. Joking around had a way of connecting through the stranger-danger gap, but now Emma didn’t feel like joking. She plucked the last cherry off the top of her milkshake and stirred the rest of it up.
Mason tapped either a bad song or a coded message on the table with his fingertips.
She smiled to herself. “I would be a golden eagle, if I could.”
Mason looked up.
Emma fell into his eyes, something catching just under her ribcage in a flutter. The green of his eyes glowed, accented by the presence of his spirit animal.
Mal stirred in response, coming forward into her own eyes. He growled a gentle approval and fell back.
“Eagles are majestic,” Mason said, his voice reflecting the more serious tone of hers. He held her gaze, milkshake forgotten.
Emma didn’t want to look away. Something between them shifted.
The change hit Emma square in the chest. Suddenly, she wanted to tell him everything, despite her protests. The easy laughter that had been so close to the surface with Mason drifted further away, pulling back and tucking away for safe keeping. Laughter was dangerous. It made her forget. Took her away. Let her just… be.
Emma forced herself to look down at her milkshake, spiraling the white into the pink ice cream with a spoon. Her phone buzzed again in her pocket. Not a text this time, a call. She really should answer.
Closing her eyes, Emma drew in a deep breath, willing the phone to stop buzzing. She wouldn’t reject the call. If she did, Jordan would know that she was ignoring him. For now, she could have just left her phone in her car.
“Someone is really trying to get a hold of you,” Mason said, pushing away his half empty milkshake. “You’re sure everything’s okay?”
“I’ll talk to him later. It’s just… clan politics.” Emma continued to play with her milkshake, though she didn’t drink any more of it.
“Clan politics?” Mason looked generally interested, leaned forward, elbows on the table. His thick rimmed glasses tilted a little to one side on the bridge of his nose.
“Didn’t you have a clan or a pack or whatever back—” Emma waved her hand vaguely in one direction. “Back wherever you came from. Where was that, again?”
“DC.” Mason shrugged and shook his head.
“Like, the east coast? What the hell brought you clear out here?” She looked at him incredulously. Emma had grown up in this area, and she had also never left it. Despite dreams of the east coast metropolitan scene. Seattle was decent, but New York? DC? Boston?
“You’ve never been?”
“It is one of my more distressing failings.”
Mason laughed. “Well, if that’s the worst of it, I think we’ll be okay. Cities are overrated anyway.”
“I’d like to decide that on my own, thanks.” Emma pushed aside her milkshake and mimicked Mason’s posture, elbows on the table, leaning forward. He made her feel excited about life. “So. Why did you move here?”
“My parents. They wanted to retire here.”
Emma perked up that the mention of his parents. “You’re sure you aren’t a rat?”
“Only if rats have a sleeper gene that mutates fur into quills.”
“Porcupine!” Emma slammed her hands down on the table, and the few other people in the restaurant turned to look at her and Mason. She blushed immediately, and then hunched over the table, pulling herself closer to him. “You’re a goddamn porcupine.”
Mason cleared his throat. “Very, um, DL of you.”
“DL?”
“Down low. Did you grow up in the woods or something?”
Emma jerked up an eyebrow. “Um… bear?”
Mason laughed and the looked around the room and then leaned in conspiratorially. “Maybe we should get out of here. We wouldn’t want to, you know, blow our cover.”
As if on cue, the waitress returned with their check. Mason swiped it off the table before Emma could protest and handed it back to the waitress with is card.
“Are you a gentleman, Mason Covey?” Because she hadn’t met too many of those. She’d always been the one in charge of everything from planning the day to paying for outings. This one small thing was… refreshing.
The smile he gave her was almost coy, if men could be coy. “When it suits me.”
The phone buzzed in Emma’s pocket again. What would make him stop calling? She looked up once at Mason and winced an apology. “I need to take this.”
“Sure.”
Emma slipped out the door to the diner and paced across the parking lot to her car. She had let the call ring out again. In her mind, she could see Jordan sitting back in their apartment, half bear and pacing across the floor rattling the fixtures with each step. He was going to be pissed.
Tapping the shortcut on her home screen, Emma unlocked her car and tossed her purse inside. The phone barely rang once.
“Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for hours.” Jordan’s voice growled, his bear coming through uncharacteristically.
“Chill out, Jordan. I am fine. What’s going on?”
“Cheryl is what’s going on.”
Emma’s stomach fell. Of course, it was Cheryl. Hadn’t she done enough today? “More than the way she called off the wedding? Because I was dealing with that.” Mostly.
“Can you come home, please? We really need to talk.”
Mason stepped out of the diner, looking around for Emma. She waved, and as he saw her, his face lit up. He jogged across the parking lot towards her.
“Emma?” Jordan asked in her ear.
What was she supposed to do? Oh, she knew the answer to that. “Yeah. I’ll be home in twenty, okay?” Because she was a dutiful daughter and always did what she was supposed to.
Jordan hung up without answering. What was going on?
“Everything good?” Mason leaned casually against Emma’s car, cocking a sideways smile at her in a totally Danny Zuko move. He only needed the leather jacket and a cigarette. And
something other than Emma’s Toyota Corolla to lean against. But, the image still made Emma smile.
She shrugged, tucking her phone into her back pocket. “Clan shit. I’m gonna have to take off.” Disappointment twinged in her stomach as she said it. What was it about Mason?
“I’ve never been part of a clan or a pack. Is it always like this?”
Emma leaned against the car beside him. “Not usually. This week has been… a little rough. I’ll leave it at that.”
“Well, I have an unbiased ear if you ever want to vent. I’m sorry you have to go. Though, I suppose, now that you’ve figured out what I am, we don’t have anything left to talk about.”
“Porcupine.” She chuckled. She’d never even heard of a porcupine shifter before. “Really?”
Mason bowed dramatically. “At your service.”
“I’ll remember that when a need a new pen.”
“Or a needle. Or a boot scrubber. Whichever.”
Emma snorted. “Boot scrubber?”
“What? The quills get the dirt out of the cracks.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Emma straightened, arching her back in a long stretch and then tightening her pony tail. She looked at Mason, debated for half a second, and then said, “I’m trying out a new cookie recipe at the bakery tomorrow. You could taste test, if you want.”
He smiled, green eyes sparkling in the dim light. “Deal.”
Emma thought she might have seen the tips of his hair harden into spikes. But it could have been a trick of the light.
Oh, for hell’s sake. What was she doing?
8
The lights were on in the apartment, but the shades were drawn. Emma tended to be the vampire at home, drapes pulled tight, blocking out the sun. Jordan was the opposite. First thing in the morning, he opened every shade in the house, except the one in Emma’s room. At least he had that much of a sense of self preservation. She still had a habit of forgetting the shades were bound to be open when she went from her room to the bathroom in her underwear. Not that she minded, really. She was a shifter, and naked or mostly naked were just a part of life. The neighbors didn’t know that, though.
Emma turned off the ignition and gripped the steering wheel with two hands, drawing in a deep breath, trying to ground herself before she walked into whatever was waiting upstairs. Jordan’s panic could be any number of things. The way Cheryl had broken off the wedding. The way it had been pegged on Emma. The fact that she had been ignoring him all day. She couldn’t think of many other things, but where Cheryl was concerned, it really could be anything.
The thing that bothered Emma the most about the current situation, aside from the refreshed feelings of unwarranted shame that came with being labeled a slut, was the fact that she seemed to be finding out everything secondhand.
Emma and Cheryl didn’t exactly get along, but Cheryl was still… her mother. The relation seemed suddenly foreign. When had Emma stopped thinking of Cheryl as Mama? The idea gave her pause. She hadn’t even realized it had changed in her mind.
The curtain twitched in the apartment, breaking off Emma’s train of thought. Right. Jordan. New, Cheryl-induced crisis. Sighing, Emma went upstairs.
She pulled her keys out of her pocket, but before she could unlock the door, it opened, and Jordan pulled her into a strong-armed hug. “Gods, Em. Where have you been?”
“Jordan, I can’t breathe,” Emma sputtered into his chest.
He pulled back, but kept his hands on her shoulders. “You’re okay?”
Emma dropped her purse on the hook by the door.
Jordan’s hand followed her as she moved, sliding down to the small of her back, like he was afraid of breaking contact.
What the hell was going on with him? He’d never been clingy before. “Perfectly fine. What the hell is going on with you? You’re a wreck.”
“You haven’t heard?”
Oh, great. Now what? “Obviously.”
“Fuck.” Jordan ran his free hand through his hair, exhaling a long breath.
Emma looked sideways at him, her chest twinging in anxiety at the expletive. “Jordan Baker! Now I know something’s wrong.” She separated herself from him and pointed to the couch. “Spill.” The twisted ball of anxiety hollowed to dread.
Jordan didn’t say anything. He sat down, propped his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his hands.
“Jordan, what did she do?”
“Em… I… fuck.” He didn’t look at her. Didn’t raise his head.
What the hell was going on? How could Emma have possibly missed whatever had turned Jordan into this mess? It was so… not Jordan. Emma stopped pacing and sat down next to him, looping an arm through his and leaning her head onto his shoulder. “Jordan, ’would you just talk to me? Use your words.”
“Emma, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
“I can’t help with that if you don’t tell me what happened.”
Jordan gripped his fingers into his shaggy blonde hair, tugging it in fists of frustration. “She named me successor.”
Emma blinked. Once. Twice. Then as the words finally sank in, she shot off the couch, her shoulders bulking as Mal raged to the surface. “She did what?”
She should have seen this coming. Cheryl wanted someone she could control. And that was one thing Emma had proved over and over. She didn’t want to be controlled.
Her shirt tightened, threatening to rip under the expanding pressure of her grizzly fur and muscles. She growled, a low, long, dangerous sound and the fur along her shoulders stood on end.
Jordan stood, hands in front of himself, his own bear coming forward, not in offense, but in mediation. “Emma, we have downstairs neighbors.”
“I don’t give a fuck about the neighbors.” It was taking all she had to not bear-out completely, and even so, her nails were lengthening, sharpening. That fucking woman. Of all the things—Emma couldn’t think straight. Thoughts whirled around in her brain like bullets, ricocheting off one another.
Jordan took a step forward, hands still raised. “Em. You need to calm down.”
She snarled in his direction.
Mal rode her anger, and together, they were one giant ball of inconsolable rage. She needed to break something. Bite something. Scream, snarl, growl at the top of her lungs.
Jordan reached towards her.
She nearly took his hand off.
“Use your head, Emma. Dammit, we don’t need the Sisterhood involved because you can’t keep yourself under control.”
Emma looked at him, shoulders taught, neck aching from the tension in her stance. She closed her eyes. Pushed Mal back, not all the way, but enough that he wasn’t bursting from her. Breathed. She deflated. Jordan was right.
But, that fucking woman.
Stitches on her shirt popped under her left ear. Calm. She needed to be calm.
Jordan stepped forward again, closing the gap between them and gripping her forearms with bear strength.
Emma opened her eyes into his and started counting.
One. Breathe.
Two. Breathe.
She could see the fear in his eyes, floating just behind the amber glow of his bear’s eyes. She was freaking out, sure. But, she wasn’t the only one.
Three. Breathe.
Releasing an exaggerated breath, Emma let the tension flow out of her, raising her arms to mirror Jordan’s grip. Their foreheads fell together, and their breaths synced.
In. Out.
In. Out.
Mal trembled, and then faded back, and the pressure beneath Emma’s skin lessened. He wouldn’t come out. He knew the rules as well as she did.
“Sorry,” she whispered.
“No harm, no foul.”
Emma pulled away and retreated to the couch. “Okay. Now, tell me everything.”
Jordan sighed, but joined her. He was trying to keep it together, Emma knew. For her, if for nothing else. What was Cheryl thinking, making him her successor?
“She
called a meeting while you were at the school. Only the majors, except for me. You should have been there, but she wouldn’t wait. I don’t think she wanted to.” Jordan raked his hands through his hair again, and several strands flipped back down onto his forehead in rebellion.
“Cheryl knew I couldn’t be. She probably planned it that way.” Emma’s voice came across sharper than she intended, her anger still simmering within arm’s reach.
“She’d already announced the wedding being called off. Late last night.”
Emma’s gut twisted.
Jordan stared at the floor, his voice barely audible. “She said you’d cheated on me. Disgraced her as a mother. Me as her…” He trailed off, and Emma thought she could see his hands trembling. “As her son.”
“But you aren’t her son. Brett and Joe are her sons.” And she’d tried to kill one and banished the other.
“You don’t have to tell me, Emma. But dammit, she raised me.”
Emma settled for a nod, not trusting herself to say anything else.
“Anyway, that was last night. I didn’t hear until this morning after it started spreading around.”
“Frank and Evan knew. Evan called me a slut at the field day,” she said through clenched teeth. It shouldn’t piss her off so much, but it did. They were supposed to look up to her, but, how could they?
Jordan nodded. “Then this morning, at the meeting, I fucked up, Em. I was there, ready to defend your honor, call her bullshit. Before I could do anything, she dropped this on me. In front of everybody. I couldn’t—” He shook his head. “I froze. And then, she forced her will on me.”
Which was what an alpha could do, and what made Emma an alpha. It wasn’t strength. It was the ability to force her will on others, which wasn’t something she did on a whim.
“I had no choice. She didn’t give me one. I tried to explain that you hadn’t cheated on me, that we had decided together that we weren’t getting married. No one would listen.”
“That bitch.” Emma clenched her hands into fists, nails digging into her skin.
“I don’t think anyone expected it.” Jordan risked a glance at her and quickly looked away.
