by Zoe Chant
The door opened to customers, busy shaking out their umbrellas and exclaiming about the rain pouring down. McKenzi went to get them settled, and afterward, seeing everyone was busy with their food, she made her way back to West. After all, he was a customer, too.
“Can you sit down and join me?” he asked.
McKenzi grinned. “My boss is pretty laid back, but I’m the only wait staff on the floor.”
He was turning his coffee mug around and around in his fingers. He had fine hands, she noticed. Though one was scarred across the top, a slash that disappeared up his wrist into the leather sleeve. “I have to admit, I’m still back at strip poker,” he said in that low growl of a voice.
McKenzi gulped to hide the surge of heat Down South, and smothered a laugh. “Gotta have something to do out here in the sticks.”
“Did you grow up here?”
“Yep.”
“Must have been . . .” He left the sentence open, as if he’d said too much, and lifted one leather-covered shoulder.
“Boring? Predictable?” she said.
He grinned as he shook his head, and deep dimples appeared on either side of that kissable mouth. “Not if you play strip poker for fun.” He laughed softly, and her toes curled inside her shoes. He went on, “Of course I guess it would depend on who you played with.”
“So for instance, if three guys showed up right now, poked their heads through that door, and said, hey, we need a fourth . . .?”
This time both shoulders twitched in a faint shrug. “Don’t happen to swing that way. But if you had a couple of sisters—no. Sorry. That sounded way better in my head.”
He winced, and she laughed with him. She liked how easy he was. Hot, well-spoken . . . could he possibly be lonely? No guy this amazing could possibly be lonely. He was just waiting out the latest band of rain before driving on to his no-doubt glamorous life. Maybe her intense reaction to him was due to the fact that Upson Downs’ pickings were actually getting kind of slim. Most of the guys her age had paired off, and she wasn’t attracted to the just-hitting-college set. Too many of them she’d babysat.
“I get off at midnight,” she said suddenly.
His head tipped slightly, and his eyes seemed to darken, or maybe it was a trick of the light. “Is that an invitation?” he asked. “Just making sure.” He spoke low, in that smoky voice that made her thighs squeeze together.
Hey, if it turned out he was a perv or an axe-murderer, she could shift to her cat self and be out the window in a flash. Of course that would leave him in her room, but Sheriff Odom could take care of that.
“I’ve got a deck of cards,” she whispered.
Two
West
When he was especially cold and hungry, there were nights when West didn’t care if he lived or died.
Once daylight arrived, and he’d managed to scavenge a meal and curl up somewhere in relative safety long enough for a sleep, he refused to give in to whoever had catapulted him from his vaguely remembered pack into a world of loneliness and hurt. There were days, especially when he’d gone too long without food, when the only thought that kept him going was this: if he punched his ticket, They would win.
After a lifetime’s futile search for his pack, he still didn’t know who They were. But with every cell of his body, he didn’t want Them to win.
And once in a while, survival had benefits, even if they never lasted. Like today.
Two days ago, he’d been in wolf form, sniffing around a promising trash can beside an old shed. An old woman with dark skin and hair more silver than his had come outside her isolated house, slipping and sliding in the mud as she struggled to fetch fire logs from the shed. He’d shifted out of his wolf, put on his clothes, and walked up to her, saying, “I’ll sing for a meal.”
She’d peered at him, asked him to repeat himself, then said, “I’m too deaf to hear singing. But if you’ll stack me this firewood up on the porch wheres I can reach it, I’ll share my dinner with you.”
He’d done better than that, carrying a week’s logs up onto her dry porch, then splitting the bigger pieces down with the axe he found in the shed. While he worked, she told him that her son couldn’t get up the road because it had washed out, and she wasn’t getting any spryer, but at eighty-seven, she was lucky to be on her pins. As he worked he listened to the slow cadence of her words, hearing the musical drawl of Kentucky, the harsher consonants of a childhood in the Dust Bowl, and the clipped sentences of a woman who had worked with her hands all her long life.
By the time they’d sat down at her little table, with canned corned beef and hash scrupulously split down the middle, he’d had her song forming in his head. When he’d scraped the last bits off the plate, she’d surprised him by offering him a wrinkled twenty.
“Take it,” she said, with quiet dignity. “You did an honest day’s work, and you should get an honest day’s pay.”
He’d thanked her, tucked the twenty into his jeans, then left the house. Beyond the shed he’d rolled his clothes up, shifted, and began his run north.
And so here he was two days later, having just now enjoyed that rarity, a hot meal, and a brown-eyed woman with a thousand possible melodies twining around her curves and lilting in her voice, hit him right between the eyes with “Strip poker.”
He expected any moment to wake up and find himself curled in some cave, wet and crawling with fleas, because he did not believe in miracles. But he kept sitting there, and talking to her, and hoping she’d come back so he could memorize another detail about her for the thrumming melody he could feel forming down deep in his gut.
Then sure enough, reality clipped over in squeaky shoes after McKenzi went away for the third time. It was the gray-haired boss lady, who said, “Can McKenzi get you anything more, sir?”
In other words, Pay up and take off.
He took the twenty out of his pocket, left it on the table, and walked out. The cold hit him, making him shrug tighter into his jacket. At least he was warm, his belly full. He stood under the restaurant’s slanted awning as the passing storm dripped, and sniffed the wind.
His blunted human senses only registered pure, rain-scrubbed air carrying the sharp scent of wood smoke, and a hint of brine from the sea half a mile away. His wolf had scented not just animals, but shifters, all over the hills. Maybe he had dreamed that, too. The second day without food he could get somewhat light-headed.
He had several hours before midnight. Assuming McKenzi had meant what she said. Maybe she had a boyfriend who’d show up, or she’d just tell him to get lost. He should keep running. He’d planned to keep running, even though he’d given up trying to find his pack many years before. They were gone—either dead or just dispersed. His search had become a quest for something he couldn’t name, or maybe he ran because he’d always run, it was habit. It was easy.
A skinny, one-eyed coyote shifter he’d saved from a boozed-up gang of rednecks outside of Morro Bay had bragged about how he’d heard that Marin County was full of rich people, who had rich people trash. If a guy couldn’t find work as a human, maybe he could survive as a wolf.
That seemed as good a new destination as any, West had thought. So he’d hunted down a couple of fat rabbits and left them for the kid, who’d been too beat up by those rednecks to run.
So here he was, a new town, another verse in the song of his life. Marin could wait another day.
He gazed from the darkness inside the golden windows of the restaurant, to where McKenzi stood at the stainless steel divider between the restaurant and the cook. She was different from the women he’d met so far, though it was hard to pin down why, and he knew he’d be running words and notes through his head until he found the ones that captured her heart-shaped face, dominated by big brown eyes and a lot of glossy, curly brown hair, and her laughing voice that scorned Valentine’s Day.
It had been her voice that first caught his ear, a note of pure gold in it—a bit of laughter, and earth and fire. From what he saw
under that god-awful apron, there was a whole chorus waiting, a hymn to curves. During his long rambles he’d encountered all kinds of women, some predatory, some troubled, some young, some old. He sang to them if they wanted music. If they wanted to share some heat, he was ready for that, and then he’d move on.
But this woman, he could feel powerful music all around her, just waiting to be gathered up and spun into song. Could be it wasn’t for him, but he had to stay—he had to find out.
So he made his way around back. The town only seemed to have one main street, with a scattering of houses here and there on both sides, stretching up into the hills. With the speed of long practice he found an old bicycle shed and shucked his clothes. He’d devised a way to roll them up tight with his belt, which he carried in his jaws when he traveled as a wolf.
Right now he wanted to explore—check the place out. Learn what he could, so nothing would take him by surprise.
He found a dry spot to hide his clothes, shifted, and set out to do a roam. He didn’t get very far before the rain started up again, but not before he caught the scent of a variety of animals criss-crossing around and behind the restaurant and the nearby buildings. The rain began coming down in sheets, so he stayed near the main street, finding yet more animal trails—animals that usually did not run together, or even cross one another’s territory. Yet in spite of the wet, many of these tracks were quite fresh.
He made his way back to his shed, where he shifted back to his human self. The bitter cold closed in. He dressed quickly, then waited with the patience of long habit until the big clock on the church tower at the top of the street indicated midnight straight up.
He stepped around to the back of the restaurant—and she was there, outlined in gold from the outside lights.
“West?” she said, blinking into the darkness.
“I’m here.” He stepped out of the shadows, ready for—anything.
“Okay. How do you want to do this? Follow me, or . . .”
“I don’t have a car,” he said.
“You don’t? How’d you get here? Greyhound?”
He made a noise that could have meant anything. He hated lying, except for survival, and this was not a survival situation. He didn’t want to lie to her.
“What the hell,” she said. “Hop in.” She indicated a rattletrap VW. He got into the passenger seat, and she fired it up.
“I live at the top of the hill right behind us,” she said. “In the summer we could walk right up, but now, I’m afraid we’d need a canoe. If canoes could go up, that is.” She turned off the main street and shifted down to climb a steep street. “So where you from?”
“All over,” he said.
“What do you do?”
“Write songs,” he said.
“Do you sing? Play an instrument?”
“I sing them, and when I can get some, play any kind of strings. They’re hard to hold onto.”
“Okay,” she said, and then shot him a quick look that heated him up again, made it hard to think. “I’m done with my third degree. Your turn.”
He said, “So what are reasons 1-1,456?” McKenzi, McKenzi, McKenzi, he was thinking: was that a sexy name, or did she make it sexy with that power of hers?
“Reasons what?”
“That Valentine’s Day sucks,” he said. “You were right on the other side of that divider thing, expressing what I think. I wonder if our reasons are the same.”
“You want all my reasons why Valentine’s Day totally sucks rocks?”
“Yep.”
“It’s fake,” she said.
“Yep.”
“And commercial.”
“Yep.”
“And sets up totally impossible expectations.” Her voice hitched a half-note higher.
“No argument here.”
“And it results in pink aprons that ought to be number one on fashion hit lists,” she said in an airy voice, as if she was determined to keep things easy, but he sensed a river of feeling beneath. “Along with glittery crepe paper, cards with bad art and worse rhymes, annoying commercials, and . . .”
Her voice had begun to sharpen, as if those emotions were getting their way in spite of her. But she stopped there, and shrugged. Then she pulled up in a parking space above a couple of small rooftops that seemed to belong to cottages, and parked.
The headlights caught a curtain of silver before she shut them off, and they got out of the car. She didn’t speak as they splashed down rainy steps to the small porch of the nearest cottage. She opened the door—unlocked. This was that kind of town? Amazement washed through him, followed by warmth and regret and then envy, cold as the rain. Did she know what she had?
Then she turned on the lights, and they looked at one another. Without that ugly pink apron hiding her, she was . . . poetry in motion, everywhere a generous arc, with an angle here and there as grace notes: the hint of collarbone peeking above the neck of her damp tee, the square pockets of her jeans drawing the eye to the extravagant curve of her hips. He realized he was staring, and shifted his gaze away—
And stood there in a quiet kind of shock.
There wasn’t much furniture, and the little he saw seemed old, comfortably shabby, with a TV next to an old-fashioned CD player. It was the inner two walls that drew his eye. Spreading from one to the other was a mural of the little town, divided by its main street, only stylized, with the ocean gleaming between the two slopes, whales dancing under the sun far out to sea. And in the town, everywhere, little animals doing people things. A whole community of them.
“Wow,” he breathed.
“You like?” McKenzi’s mouth curved. “My sister painted that.”
He liked it so much it almost made him dizzy, though maybe that was the effect of her powerful proximity.
The clink of glass startled him, and he found her moving about in a tiny kitchen. “Here, this’ll warm you up—I notice you’re wet.”
She pressed a glass into his hand, with an inch of brown liquid in it and heady fumes rising off it. She clinked hers to his, and he drank whatever it was—and discovered the burn of really good scotch. Fiery heat slid smooth as silk all the way down.
He turned to her, to find her pretty mouth curving, her pupils huge. “So, the deck of cards,” she said. “Wanna play?”
Three
McKenzi
When McKenzi’s sister had painted the double-wall mural as a birthday surprise, it had never occurred to her that it would end up being a kind of test.
Guys who sneered at Kesley’s art had proved to be pretty much 100% douches, so she’d gotten into the habit of offering them something to drink, then getting rid of them before things got any farther. If they thought she was blowing hot and cold, too bad. There were few buzzkills worse than guys with superiority issues.
But West stood there as if transfixed, which gave her a chance to really check him out, from the silvery glinting raindrops in his pale hair to the badass leather coat to his worn old jeans that molded long, strong legs. She would have thought he’d wear kickass combat boots, but his feet were encased in the lightest of deck shoes that looked as if he’d walked a couple thousand miles in them.
As the scotch warmed her, heightening the powerful beat of fire that seemed to simmer around him, she relished the prickle of anticipation along her nerves as she opened the little drawer in her lamp table, and pulled out an old pack of cards.
She set the scotch bottle on the low table, and sat cross-legged on the floor. She felt his gaze scorching slowly down her length as he sank down on the opposite side of the table. She poured out another finger of scotch for them both, then brought out the deck of cards, enjoying the way his gray eyes watched her hands.
“What style of poker?” she asked as she shuffled and snapped.
“Your house, your call,” he said, and that sexy Spike mouth curved up. “I’m sure to like whatever you choose.”
“Five card draw, high, winner picks the item of clothing?”
“Good by me.”
Wow, that voice. “If I win, will you sing for me? I happen to have a banjo in the closet—my uncle used to be part of a band.”
His smile sent heat right down to her core. “I’d like to sing for you.”
Okay, this was going to be fun. “I’ll deal, so you can pick the first ante.”
“Make it easy,” he said with a rueful curve to those entrancing lips. “Shoes. Mine got a mite wet. Wouldn’t mind losing ‘em right off.”
She grinned back, dealt two hands, and they each looked at them. “Stand pat?” she asked.
He dipped his head in a short nod that drew her eye to the beautiful line of his chin beneath glinting stubble. “In or out?” he said, as she was wondering how that stubble would feel along her thighs.
“In,” she croaked.
He laid out his cards—his two nines beat her dead hand. She kicked off her shoes, lifted her glass and toasted him, wondering if he could see the heat pouring off her. They both drank, and he took up the cards to shuffle.
“You go ahead,” he said. “Since I picked the first ante.”
“Coats,” she said, and licked her lips.
He stiffened a little, as if his breath caught. Then he dipped his head again, the blond a little darker where the raindrops had melted into dampness in his hair. She held out a hand. “Wait.”
He stilled like a startled prey animal. She was already on her feet. She dashed into the kitchen and returned with a couple of thick candles, and watched him relax and smile.
She lit the candles and set them at either end of the table, then turned out the lights.
Oh, yes. In that glow he looked like a mussed up angel contemplating his first sin.
He dealt, and she muttered in her head, please, please, please—and looked down at two jacks. This time, she asked for three cards—and got another jack. He also drew three cards.
“In,” he asked, “or out.”
“In,” she said, and laid out her cards.
His smile was sweet as he put down two tens . . . and she breathed, “Hah.”
