by Anthology
“Aye, Donna, I love ya too.”
Epilogue
Green Vallis Annual Winter Skate
Over a thousand sparkling holiday lights arched over the stretch of frozen creek to welcome the townsfolk as they skated through MacGregor land. Donna had been wrong. Her new-old family didn’t think they were better than the townsfolk. They simply needed to protect their magick from prying eyes. After remembering her own experience at the hands of the witch hunters, she could appreciate their need to keep mortals unaware.
Donna lifted her new camera as another couple skated across the end of the course. Unfortunately, when she’d had her little entranced episode in the forest, her instinct had been to hide the camera like it was Malina. The camera did not survive the puddle she’d mindlessly shoved it in.
The skating couple smiled at her and waved up to where she stood on a platform. Considering how rich her family was, she didn’t need to worry about money. And yet she felt some thrill in knowing this year she’d be selling a lot of skate pictures, thanks to the lovely set up.
The creek decorations had been carefully planned by Cait. They were a perfect progression of colors from white to blue to green to red and then white again. At the end hung giant lighted snowflakes.
Fergus wrapped his arms around her from behind. The unmistakable press of his interest molded against her hip as he leaned into her. “I think ya took enough. Let’s go sneak away to bed.”
“After everyone is done skating,” Donna answered, taking another shot.
“We can’t after,” Fergus grumbled. He kissed her neck, sending tiny shivers of desire over her. She knew instantly he was trying to use his magick to heighten her physical desire for him. It was working. The sensation shot straight down to settle between her legs.
“And why is that?” she whispered, turning in his embrace.
“MacGregor challenge.” He grinned like a mischievous child. “We’re going to skate the course naked.”
“You know, I should probably worry about how much you all seem to enjoy being naked.” Donna let her hand skim down to cup his ass. “It’s a good thing you look so wonderful doing it.”
“Hey, did you get us?” an irritated woman shouted.
Donna blinked, letting go of Fergus’s ass as she turned back to the creek. Grumpy Mrs. Callister stood on the ice with her thirty-something daughter, Grace.
Automatically, she lifted her camera.
“Aye,” Fergus answered before Donna could take the picture. “And it was a lovely vision, lassie.”
Mrs. Callister simpered and smiled at the compliment. The two ladies skated off before Donna could take the shot.
“You’re lucky I lost the Elspeth jealous streak,” Donna said.
“I’m lucky because I found ya twice.” Fergus lifted her hand and slid a gold band onto her finger. “I know we technically did this already a lifetime ago, but what do ya say? Marry me again, my heart, in this lifetime?”
“Yes, Gus.” Donna sniffed back happy tears. “I’ll marry you in this life, and the next, and the next and the…wait. Can I take that back? You’d better not be giving me any other lifetimes. I like this one. If anything happens to me, with your spell casting, you’ll end up keeping your promise by getting married to a donkey.”
“Quiet your tongue.” He kissed her to silence her teasing. Skating townsfolk began to cheer loudly below them. Donna laughed against his mouth but had no intention of stopping what they were doing. Ever.
The End
About Michelle M. Pillow
NYT & USAT Bestseller Michelle M. Pillow is a multi-published author writing in many fiction genres including the Bestselling Shifter series Dragon Lords and Lords of the Var. Michelle loves to travel and try new things, whether it's a paranormal investigation of an old Vaudeville Theatre or climbing Mayan temples in Belize. If you enjoyed this story, visit her online to read more Warlock MacGregor books. MichellePillow.com
Baby It’s Cold Out Bear by T. S. Joyce
All she wants for Christmas is a sexy bear shifter.
Emry Mason doesn’t expect to be pulled out of an icy ditch by a registered bear shifter, and she certainly doesn’t expect her rescuer to be as alluring as Graylan Young. He’s rented a room at the house she lives in, and with every growly encounter, he’s laying claim to her heart. But Graylan isn’t much for the festive season, and to win Emry over, she has one rule. Must love the holidays. Graylan is only in town for a little while before his inner animal will demand he move on. But when he meets Emry, his life is turned upside down. Not only is she beguiling and different from every woman he’s ever met, but she has him wishing he could ignore his nomadic instincts. He might not be into the holidays, but suddenly all he wants for Christmas is to settle down with the woman he’s falling for.
1
Emry Mason gasped as the back end of her car fishtailed over the ice on the deserted road. Struggling to regain control, she gripped the steering wheel and eased the brake, slowing the car.
The road to the room she rented from Helena Parks was the worst in this kind of white-out weather. Her windshield wipers worked double-time, clearing the snowflakes from the front window. Not that it helped much. She still couldn’t see more than ten feet in front of her.
Too bad the snowplows didn’t work this far outside of Breckenridge. Right now, the team was probably scrambling to keep the roads off Main Street viable, leaving the country cabins to fend for themselves. Not that Helena’s house was a cabin. More of a sprawling Victorian-style home that had been remodeled to take in tenants after her husband had passed a few years back.
“Mother trucker,” Emry muttered as her back tires took off on their own against the black ice again. A few more inches of snow, and she would get better traction, but right now, it was like driving on soaped-up glass.
Her cell rang the happy notes of “Jingle Bell Rock” from the seat beside her. Emry debated not answering it, but if it was Helena telling her to bring home something from the grocery store before the big storm hit, she needed to turn around and head back to town.
“Hello?” she answered, not taking her eyes from the road for one second.
“Emry, where are you?”
“About a mile away from home, why? Do you need me to go back and get something from town?”
“No, no, don’t turn around. I need to tell you something.” Helena’s voice sounded small and uncertain, as it always did, tugging at Emry’s heart. The woman had been through so much.
“What’s wrong?”
“You know how I’ve been searching for a new tenant to fill the empty room across the hall from yours?”
“Yeah.”
“I found one, but he’s… Emry I might have done something daft.”
“What do you mean? It’s great that you found someone to occupy that space.” Lord knows Helena could use the extra income, and it would decrease the amount of rent Emry was currently paying to make up for the empty flat.
“He’s dangerous.”
“Dangerous?” The word whipped from her throat as the car skidded sideways, then straightened again.
“He’s one of those…bear shifters,” she said low. “I wanted to tell you before you came home so you could be wary.”
“Wait, how do you know he is one of them?”
“Well, his eyes glow like a demon’s, and he was up-front about it. He’s one of the registered ones. He said no one else had a room available to rent in town, but he has steady work and has promised to do the repairs around the house for free. And I need the money, sugar.”
A bear shifter? There was a crew of bear shifters that lived in town who were involved in the community. Four firefighting brothers and their families, and decent men as far as she’d been able to tell. But they’d only come out with their existence last year, and so far, only a handful of other bear shifters had registered publicly like the government now required. The Breck Crew was one thing. Their family name been a part of this town for generat
ions. The thought of a new bear shifter ran goose bumps up Emry’s arms despite the heavy winter jacket warming her.
“It’s okay. I know you need the rent. And thank you for warning me. That would’ve been shocking to run into him without a heads up— Aaah!” she screamed as she jerked the wheel, narrowly missing a heavily furred fox that dashed across the road.
The phone fell from her hand as her tires spun out, turning her car sideways. She jerked the wheel and tried to turn into the skid as she’d learned in Driver’s Ed, but nothing she did helped. Her foot pumping the brake didn’t slow her at all as the nose of her car angled toward a deep ditch beside the road.
Too late to save herself, she threw her arms over her face as she was catapulted off the icy street. Her stomach dipped as her car went airborne for a moment as she hit a small lip and skidded into the ditch. Her shoulder hit the window as the car came to a hard stop in a snowbank.
Chest heaving, Emry grabbed the wheel and stared at her window, completely covered in white. “Oh my gosh, oh my gosh,” she chanted, eyes burning with tears.
A soft hum sounded as her windshield wipers fought against the drift across her window.
“Helena!” she cried, reaching for the phone that had fallen on the floorboard near the passenger seat. “Hello, Helena? Are you still there?”
“Sugar, what happened? Are you okay?” Helena sounded as frantic as Emry felt.
“I’ve gone off the road into the ditch. I’m covered in snow. Hang on, I’ll check if I have traction.” She hit the gas, but her car didn’t move an inch. When she pressed her foot down again, her back end sank. “I’m stuck!” she cried, panic seizing her throat.
Stuck with a blizzard on the way in below freezing temperatures.
Her phone beeped, and she swallowed a sob. “I’m about to run out of battery. What should I do? Should I try to get back to the road and flag down help?”
“No, just stay where you are. I’m going to get help.”
Emry shook her head sadly. Helena was sweet to offer, but the woman hadn’t been past her front porch in three years. She’d stopped living when her husband passed and now couldn’t get over her anxiety enough to leave her house. “Helena, I don’t know if anyone will be able to come get me from town before the storm hits.”
“Emry, just…don’t go anywhere, don’t get out of the car. I’ll get help to you. I promise.”
Emry’s phone clicked to silence, and she stared in horror as her screen went dark. The battery was dead. Now her only hope of rescue was a woman who was utterly homebound.
She was completely screwed.
Perhaps if she tried to open the door… It was a long shot, but maybe someone would come down this road. With a grunt, she pushed as hard as she could on the door, but it didn’t budge. She scooted over the console and tried the passenger door with the same results—strained muscles and a scratchy throat from grunting.
She crawled back to the driver’s side again and swallowed the suffocating fear that clawed up the back of her throat. Think, think, think. She could dig her way out! Such desperate thoughts, but she rolled down the window, collapsing a heavy mound of snow into her lap. Shit-cicles, that was an awful idea. She rolled up the window and dusted the snow off her as best she could.
Staring at the white wall in front of her, she grasped the wheel in a death grip and tried to think of anything to get her out of this dire situation, but all that came to mind was an acute and gnawing hunger. Was it already growing colder in here? She was going to starve and freeze, and what an awful way to die.
Panic seized her again, and she dumped the contents of her purse with a strangled cry, then rifled through its contents until her fingers brushed the shiny package of a lone granola bar. Like a deranged squirrel with a nut, she tore into that sucker and gulped it down.
And after she’d licked the last chocolate chip smear off her finger, she looked at the empty package and hated herself. What was wrong with her? That was an amateur survival move if she’d ever seen one. It hadn’t been ten minutes since her crash and, out of sheer panic, she’d just inhaled the only food she possessed.
When her car groaned and rocked sideways, Emry startled so badly, she dropped her granola wrapper between her seat and the console.
“Crap,” she muttered. It must’ve been the snow settling over her beloved little hatchback to better suffocate her. Was the air already growing thinner? She sucked in a deep breath as she reached for the wrapper. If she was going to die out here, she didn’t want whoever found her to think she was a slob. At least she’d worn her pretty panties for the autopsy. “I don’t want to die,” she groaned, just to hear her own voice in the void.
“You aren’t going to die,” a man’s muffled tone sounded from somewhere beside the passenger’s door.
Great. Hallucinations already.
A gloved hand wiped a thick layer of snow from the windshield and Emry screeched.
“Are you okay?” the man asked. He was blurry through the remaining smears of snowflakes across the front window, but she could make out a heavy jacket hood over his hair and a scarf covering the lower part of his face. His eyes however, glowing ice blue and inhuman, made it quite clear who Helena had sent to rescue her.
A muscle under his eye twitched as she sat frozen like a snowball against her seat, trapped in his glare.
His unsettling gaze raked over her chest and lap, bringing a strange, warm sensation to her veins where they’d been chilled before.
Was he checking her out? He was totally checking her out.
“Put on your seatbelt.” His voice came out hard and less than amused.
Oh.
“Okay,” she said in a mousier voice than she’d intended. After clearing her throat, she tried again. “Give me a second.”
Fingers trembling, she pulled the belt over her lap and chest, then clicked it into place. Then she attempted to smile at him through the window, but her teeth were chattering. Her face froze in a grimace when she noticed he wasn’t leaning against her car anymore.
“Put it in neutral,” he called from somewhere behind the car.
When she did, the metal frame of her ride groaned, and the car lurched forward. Stunned, Emry held onto the steering wheel for dear life as she was pushed jerkily up the steep embankment and back onto the road.
Gads, that bear shifter was strong. And for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out if that kind of brawn was sexy or terrifying as hell. He probably harbored big, hunky muscles under that jacket of his, but at the same time, he could also probably squish her head like a grape if he felt so inclined.
She rocked to a stop, facing home in the correct lane, as if she hadn’t slid off the road at all.
The man strode up next to her window and gestured for her to roll it down.
But…she felt safe with a door between them. Stop being a wiener. With a plastered smile, she rolled down her window. “Thanks for pushing me out of the ditch, roomie.”
Her attempt at levity was stomped out like a roach when the giant man leaned down and rested his giant hand on the window. His gloves had to be size Titan. “I’m not your roomie. I’ll be living temporarily across the hall from you, and I work odd hours so you won’t have to see me much.”
A pang of disappointment zinged through her as she tried to imagine what he looked like without the hood and scarf across his face. He was probably all scarred up from having bear-fights or something.
“Great. Well, just the same, thanks for saving me. I’m Emry.”
The man’s eyes tightened as he stared at her lips. Okay, now he was totally checking her out. Was he going to kiss her? Did she want him to?
He reached into her car and brushed his gloved finger across her cheek. “Is that chocolate?”
Mortification heated her face as she lifted the empty granola bar package in her withered grip. “I thought I was going to starve to death.”
The man’s shoulders hunched as he snorted a laugh.
Anger blazed through her. “Don’t be mean. I was traumatized.”
“Clearly.” The man pointed up the road at a jacked-up white SUV with chains on its enormous tires and a snow plow attached to the front. “Why don’t you follow me to the house and I’ll help you unload all of that”—he glared at the boxes overflowing with holiday lights, ornaments, wreaths, and garland—“crap.”
Her mouth fell open with the offended sound that wrenched from her throat. “Holiday decorations are not crap.”
He arched a dark eyebrow and strode off for his SUV. Rude.
“Hey, I introduced myself. What am I supposed to call you?”
“Call me whatever you want to,” he barked over his shoulder with a half-hearted wave.
Scrunching up her angry face, she hit the gas and skidded to a stop near his ride. “Okay, Norman. So nice to meet you, but I won’t be needing your help carrying in all of my crap. Have a fan-fuckin-tastic day.”
“Norman?” he asked. His deep voice was muffled behind the scarf as he turned toward her, his hands hooked on his hips.
“Poindexter?”
His eyes lost the spark of humor he’d had when he’d laughed at her for eating the granola bar. “Stop it.”
“Garth, Pickles, Douglas Flanigan Toadshorts—”
“Graylan,” he said with a deep frown. “My name’s Graylan Young.”
“Are all bear shifters grumpy like you?”
When a feral sound rumbled through his chest, Emry squeaked and rolled up her window, then eased onto the gas.
“He just growled at me,” she said on a breath, watching him disappear into the storm in her rearview mirror.
And for the second time since she’d met him, she didn’t know whether to be terrified or turned on.
