by Sable Sylvan
“Hello? What’s going on up there?” asked Sabine.
“It doesn’t fit,” said Addy.
“It doesn’t fit? Like heck it doesn’t fit,” said Sabine. “What’s wrong? Is it too tight?”
“I can’t reach the zipper,” said Addy.
“Is that all?” said Sabine. “That’s normal. Come on out. Let’s see it.”
“Okay, one second,” said Addy.
Addy adjusted herself in the mirror and put on the heels carefully. They were not easy to walk in at all.
She walked out to the balcony, holding the dress together in the back.
“How’s it look?” asked Addy.
“I can’t tell until it’s zipped up properly,” said Sabine before she clapped her hands. “Sage! Zip her up!”
Addy turned. Sage had been in the other dressing room, and he had managed to get dressed on his own. He was wearing a suit, black, with a charcoal black shirt and an ash gray square and tie, with black leather shoes…and he was looking at her like he had never seen a woman before. Addy frowned. Why did he have to make this more difficult than it had to be?
“Do you mind,” said Addy, because it wasn’t a question, as she turned away from Sage.
“Not at all,” whispered Sage as he zipped the zipper up Addy’s back slowly, in one go. The only thing Addy could hear was the purr of Sage’s deep, sexy voice and the metallic sound of the zipper. She felt the hot breath of Sage’s voice on the back of her neck as the cold metal of the zipper touched her back.
“You two done making out up there?” asked Sabine.
Addy turned, but Sage didn’t move. She was facing him, or rather, his chest. She looked up. Sage was looking down at her, his brilliant blue eyes meeting hers. He had a five-o-clock shadow and looked like he had no business dressing in a suit that nice.
“Down the stairs,” said Sabine. “You know the drill.”
“Ladies first,” said Sage, motioning toward the stairs.
Addy walked toward the stairs carefully. As she tried to go down a step, she had to grab the banister for support.
“Ugh, really?” asked Sabine. “Okay. Sage, help her down the stairs.”
Before Addy knew what was happening, Sage had a hand on the small of her back, where his hand had been just moments before when he was helping her with the zipper. His grip on her was firm, and he had his other arm free.
“Take it one step at a time,” said Sage. “I’ve got you.” Sage moved his hand to Addy’s waist, making it even harder for her to concentrate on what she was supposed to be doing.
Addy made her way down the stairs carefully, but as she neared the end, she started to slip.
Before Addy could hit the stairs, Sage had pulled her up and into his arms, her back against his left arm, her legs under his right arm. Her arms instinctively wrapped around his firm left upper arm. Sage carried Addy down the stairs and gently put her down on the ground.
“Okay, so the heels are a no,” said Sabine. “Mirror.”
Martha rolled over a mirror and Addy looked at herself. She was wearing a dress that made the first dress she’d tried on look like garbage. This dress was black, the lining red, and the lace overlay of the dress a charred ashy color with magma-colored rhinestones peeking out. That made her look red hot.
“Okay, so that’s a good look for you,” said Sabine.
Addy looked at the other person in the mirror. Sage wasn’t looking at himself. He was also looking at her. Was the mirror playing tricks on her eyes, or was she holding Sage’s hand? She looked down and to the left. Her hand was firmly nestled in Sage’s. She pulled, and it came loose.
“Sage, you and Addy both look good in that black and gray combo, very chic,” said Sabine. “Thanks. You two make a handsome couple.”
“Oh, we’re not a…” started Addy, but she interrupted herself with a vision of herself and Sage wearing those same clothes somewhere else, perhaps a ball, another engagement party, perhaps their own? She shook her head. No way. No frikkin’ way. That wasn’t going to happen.
“Oh, well, you can see why I naturally assumed,” said Sabine. “My apologies.”
Addy pulled away from Sage but it was too late. She could wriggle out of his grip, but she could never wiggle out of the grip that he had on her imagination and Addy wasn’t sure if she wanted to. Sabine had judged all the things that Addy had tried on that day harshly but fairly, so maybe Sabine was right when she said Addy and Sage looked good together. The only question was, could they feel right together…and would Addy give herself a chance to find out?
Sneak Peek: “The Matchstick Grill”
My dear readers,
A special sneak peek of the fourth book in this series, “The Matchstick Grill”, is coming up next. “The Matchstick Grill” and the rest of the books from “The Feminine Mesquite” series are already available on Amazon!
Get your official “The Feminine Mesquite” hot sauces and teas now! You can find all these items and more on www.shopsablesylvan.com !
Love this book? Join the Sable Sylvan ARC (advance reader copy) team today! Learn more about it here:
https://www.sablesylvan.com/sablesylvanarcteam/
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Yours,
Sable Sylvan
Recipe for a successful restaurant:
1. A workaholic BBW with a hand on her hips and sass on her lips
2. A know it all polar bear shifter who can't resist spicy food or spicy women
3. A pinch of BDSM
4. The best dang BBQ in the tri-county area
The school year is over but it sure as heck ain't summer vacation...
Herb and Alice are paying for their siblings' educations in exchange for them putting in the work to make The Feminine Mesquite, their hot sauce company, a success. They weren't joking. Their siblings come to Fallowedirt and are put to work, and that includes Cayenne 'Kai' Quincy and Basil Scoville. Their assignment: set up the first restaurant in the company's portfolio, as a way to feature their sauces. The only problem is, the only thing that Kai and Basil can agree on is that there is an undeniable attraction between them.
Can Fate strike up a match between Kai and Basil? Or are they going to be left in the cold?
Kai knows the people of Fallowedirt like she knows her curves, and if she knows one thing, it's that Texans love their BBQ and their BBWs, not scant plates food in weird bubbles and foam, or stick thin women. Kai shares that passion but the question is, does Basil? The Norwegian polar bear shifter doesn't know this town like she does, and his ideas are as awful as his body is alluring.
He wants to give her his meat sword, literally...
Nordic shifter Basil Scoville is the delta of his polar clan, but that doesn't mean he is any less of a Viking than his older siblings. After all, he is a Scoville, and he has traveled the reaches of the earth to sample its spices and its women...but he has never had anything as spicy as Kai or the cayenne garlic sauce their siblings are busy brewing. The sauce can be bottled, but can Basil bottle up his feelings for the curvy, sassy, charismatic BBW? Basil is in Texas to work, not play, but, you know what they say about all work and no play....
Can they handle the heat, or do they need to get out of the kitchen?
Worldly Basil can't understand how Cayenne can't appreciate his taste for the exotic. Cayenne can't get it into Basil's thick polar bear skull that the people of Bright Star County don't want wagyu beef and Iberian ham. The opening night of the restaurant is a bust, but, can they salvage the company's reputation, as well as the chemistry between them? Will the restaurant get a five star review, or is this relationship going to earn two big thumbs down?
Bear Buns: Denver. It was a club unlike any other, well, e
xcept for the original club back in Seattle. The large building was brightly lit and stood out against the downtown area of Denver. As the gaggle of curvy women and bear shifters in Cayenne Quincy’s group oohed and aahed over the pageantry, which even the usually possessive polar bear shifters could appreciate, Cayenne was more concerned with how the sexy shifters maintained the club, rather than how they maintained their firm physiques. A hospitality major who had just completed her sophomore year of college, she was interested in how any business in the hospitality sector operated, although her specialty was restaurant management. Plus, by spending her time admiring the inner workings of the club, she could get away from the one man in the group she couldn’t stand: Basil Scoville.
Basil. He was tall, blond, with blue eyes, like a typical polar bear shifter. While his older brother Herb had taken to flannel shirts and practical blue jeans like a pig to mud, and his older brothers Clove and Sage were wearing what their girlfriends had picked out, Basil had a style all his own. He was wearing designer clothing to a frikkin’ strip club, a male strip club. He was walking and talking with Cayenne’s sisters with the confidence of an alpha male, even though he was the future delta of the Scoville Polar Clan…which is why Cayenne couldn’t escape him.
It had been such a wild year. At the end of the last summer, Cayenne’s eldest sister, Alice, had been confronted by the eldest Scoville polar, Herbert ‘Herb’ Scoville, the alpha of the Scoville Polar Clan. What the heck had the Norwegian polar wanted with a curvy, sassy girl who was Texan through and through? Well, according to Herb, his grandfather, Morten Scoville, had been the victim of intellectual property theft by none other than their paternal grandfather, Elijah Quincy…and Herb and his brothers had confronted Alice with this accusation at the reading of Elijah’s will. After all, it was at the reading of the will that Alice inherited their grandfather’s small hot sauce company, The Quincy Hot Sauce Company.
Herb and Alice started as rivals but ended up having a literal Cinderella story. It turned out that they’d met years before and been separated, looking for one another for years. How come they didn’t recognize each other at first sight? Well, they’d met at a masquerade party. Neither one of them had seen the other’s face and Alice had been wearing a perfume that masked her scent. Fate gave that couple a second chance because Alice had challenged Herb to a cook-off, winner takes all (takes all the recipes), and they had tied for first…so Herb had leveraged that into a date with Alice, where he could show her how he felt about her. Once they came clean about their apprehensions, they realized that they were the missing pieces of each other’s lives that they had spent so long looking for. Herb proposed, and that should’ve been the end of it.
However, Fate had more in store for the Quincy Sisters and the Scoville Brothers…and so did Alice and Herb. Herb had bought a manor on the outskirts of town, revamped it and renamed it the Mesquite Manor, and Alice had renamed the hot sauce company The Feminine Mesquite. She retained full ownership of it but promised each of the Quincy Sisters their share if they helped the company become a success, and Herb had promised his brothers their shares of their inheritance if they put in the hard work to help his fated mate’s company become a success.
That winter, Cayenne’s second eldest sister, Abigail, had come home for winter break to work on her thesis, which meant that while Cayenne and her younger sister, Savina, as well as the middle sibling, Addison, had been put to work in The Feminine Mesquite’s store on Fallowedirt’s Main Street, Abby got to hang out with none other than Clove Scoville, the future beta of the Scoville Clan, the second eldest brother. Of course, Fate had made a match of them as well, and the beauty had managed to soothe the savage beast. They were also engaged to be married, but Fate wasn’t satisfied quite yet.
Addison had gone abroad, to England, to study at the prestigious Bonimolean University, where she had kept company with Clove and Sage Scoville. Mace had done something to be kept home that semester, and Basil had been studying abroad in Brazil, so Addison took Herb’s old room, as Mace had taken his things home to Oslo for the semester. Addison was the quiet, bookish sister, who was always daydreaming about something, but Sage, the gamma of the Scoville Clan, the middle sibling and the one with a bad boy rock star vibe, had awoken an inner fire in the sleeping beauty that Cayenne had to admit was refreshing. She had never seen her sister so happy and so full of life. If Sage was responsible for her happiness and willing to put away his alternative clothes for an evening and wear a tailored suit just to make her happy, then he had Cayenne’s approval.
Of course, each sister was a fated mate for their polar bear match, and they had all gotten engaged. There was to be a grand triple wedding at the end of the summer, and Cayenne knew that the eldest siblings were gunning to add a fourth and fifth couple to the wedding. Cayenne scoffed as she thought about their intention. Addison had more than hinted that she thought that Cayenne would be hooked up with Basil by the end of the summer, but Cayenne had told her no way, no how. After all, Cayenne might look cute and girly, but she was the hardest working of the Scoville Sisters. The only reason she even wore ‘fancy’ business casual clothes daily was that she had internships during the school year that she had to run to after class. Basil was different. He was carefree and had probably never done a frikkin’ day of hard work in his life.
Cayenne looked over to Basil. Who the heck wore a fancy suit to a strip club, especially a male strip club? Herb was dressed casually, as was Clove, and Cayenne would give Sage a pass for wearing a suit because it wasn’t his usual style and she knew he was wearing it because Addison thought he looked absolutely ‘ravishing’ (her words, not Cayenne’s) in a suit. Cayenne rolled her eyes, but Basil had spotted her out of the corner of his eye…and out of the corner of her eye, she saw him making his way over to her.
Cayenne resisted the urge to sigh. After all, she wasn’t just a hospitality major. She was a Southern girl with manners, like her maternal grandma Barbara. It wouldn’t do to be rude, even to a gentleman she didn’t fancy. Cayenne pretended to be examining one of the gaudy posters that lined the walkway to Bear Buns.
“Hey, Kai,” said Basil, using Cayenne’s nickname.
“Hello, Basil,” said Cayenne. “Are you enjoying yourself?”
“Believe it or not, yes,” said Basil. “I haven’t seen a male strip show before. I heard they’re good dancers. It’s not just going to be a meat market…or I guess, a mate market.”
“Ha-ha,” said Cayenne, forcing herself to laugh at the corny joke. “You know, I’m sure that Abigail wouldn’t mind if you went back to the hotel.”
“And miss her graduation party? I wouldn’t miss that for all the world,” said Basil. “Isn’t it funny to think that Addison will be graduating next year? So will Sage. Do you think that you’ll fly over to England to make the graduation?”
“Of course, I will,” said Cayenne. “She’s my sister.” Her inner Southern belle was reading Basil like a library book. What the heck did he mean, ‘do you think you’ll fly over to make the graduation’? Of course, she would. Why was Basil asking such stupid questions?
“I just didn’t know if you’d be busy or get out of school on time,” said Basil. “But of course you’d go. How do you like the menus?”
“The menus?” asked Cayenne.
“The menus,” said Basil, motioning over the posters. Each poster had a pair of shirtless men on it, and underneath, their shifts. The mate marks on the men had been removed with some photo editing software to keep things mysterious.
“Oh, I guess they are sort of like a menu, aren’t they,” admitted Cayenne. “I didn’t think of them that way.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be specializing in restaurant management?” teased Basil.
“Whatever,” said Cayenne. “I think the ‘menus’ are a little cheesy, don’t you?”
“Hey, go big or go home, right?” asked Basil. “It’s like peacocking.”
“Peacocking?” asked Cayenne.
&nbs
p; “Peacocking is when a guy does something that’s visually outstanding to attract a mate,” said Basil. “Shifters do it a lot. After all, all the dancers at Bear Buns are looking for mates.”
“They are?” asked Cayenne.
“Yeah, it’s a huge thing,” said Basil. “Bear Buns started as a club in Seattle that had a touring show called ‘The Twelve Dancing Bears.’ There were six sets of two bears each. Each set of bears knew they were looking to share a fated mate. What better way to find a fated mate than to show off your mate mark every night to hundreds of women, hoping one of them might be the one? I don’t think I could ever do that, share my fated mate, but Fate works in mysterious ways.”
“That sounds crazy,” said Cayenne.
“It does,” agreed Basil. “But humans and shifters both do crazy things for love.”
“Basil, Kai, come on,” called Abigail. “We need to get our seats!”
“Thanks for filling me in,” said Cayenne, before she walked toward her sister. She’d let herself get roped into another talk with Basil. Of course, know-it-all Basil knew all about a frikkin’ male strip club. ‘Well-traveled,’ her butt. More like ‘has lots of free time and free money to do whatever he wants’.
Cayenne took in the splendor of Bear Buns as she entered the club with her sister. Strip clubs weren’t her thing because they were usually seedy and kinda sad…but it seemed like it must be impossible to be sad at a place like Bear Buns. It was like a theme park for horny women. There were cardboard cutouts of the dancers that people could take pictures with, as well as actual dancers putting on shows in the halls. The entire club was very well-lit, but it wasn’t bright enough to be glaringly bright, uncomfortable to the patrons and unflattering for the dancers. There was even a merch store where one could buy totes, chocolates, shirts, and other goodies with Bear Buns logos, as well as posters of the dancers.
They walked into the main hall, a performance hall, and were led to a special VIP section behind forest green velvet ropes. Their table was large, made of hardwood, and had a pole in the center of it. There was a private bar in the VIP section, and after they had been seated, fresh mimosas were brought to the table. The table had a special chair for Abigail that was graduation themed, and she was given a black rhinestone graduation cap and sash. The VIP treatment was truly VIP, and not just a metaphor for illicit activity. Cayenne had studied luxury hotels, and this rivaled even the best of luxury hotels. It was obvious that the shifters that ran Bear Buns spared no expense in pampering their future fated mates.
