by Selena Scott
“Oh. Jackson!” said their waitress, as she came buzzing back over to the table at warp speed. “I didn’t realize you were staying. You want some coffee?”
“That’d be great, Chrissy. Just bl—”
“Just black. I know. Coming right up!”
It was a wonder Chrissy didn’t lose a contact lens with how fast she was blinking her eyelashes in Jackson’s direction. Sarah caught the tail end of Kaya’s epic eye roll as she surveyed the situation.
“Well, Jackson,” Nat said, leaning forward, friendly as ever. “This is such a treat! I can’t remember the last time we’ve spent time together without your buffers—I mean, brothers around.”
Nat, obviously mortified by her slip of the tongue, leaned over her plate and shoved some food in her mouth.
Jackson merely smirked again, as if he understood exactly what Nat had been trying so hard not to say.
Sarah tried to put the pieces together. She’d thought that the three Durant brothers were all friendly with the Chalk sisters. But as Sarah surmised from the table full of vibes zinging around, Jackson wasn’t quite as friendly as his younger two brothers. Sarah had never seen Natalie quite so nervous, and had definitely never seen Kaya so quiet.
“That’s probably because it’s never happened before,” Jackson said in a quiet voice, slicing neatly into what looked like an egg white omelette, no cheese, tomatoes and onions, with a side of wilted spinach.
Sarah grimaced at his food, leaning forward. “Ugh. No offense, but just looking at your breakfast is giving me Olympic training flashbacks.”
He turned his head to her and for the first time, she read a spark of interest in his expression. “I forgot you’re an Olympian.”
He nodded politely when Chrissy dropped off his coffee, almost spilling it over the edge in her excitement at serving him.
“Former Olympian,” Sarah corrected Jackson.
“You ate that for breakfast while you were training?” Nat asked.
Sarah nodded. “That or something like it. Protein-heavy meals. Lean, no carbs.”
“But…” Kaya frowned. “You need to eat carbs when you’re burning so many calories.” Sarah knew that Kaya had just graduated undergrad with a degree in nutrition.
Sarah cleared her throat, unsure what to say. She shouldn’t have brought this up. She had come a long way in the last seven weeks, but she was nowhere near being over the trauma her father had inflicted on her. And now she was about half a step away from having to either explain it or lie about it. She really didn’t want to do either.
“Um…” she cleared her throat.
“Seth mentioned you run a lot,” Jackson cut in.
It surprised Sarah, because it almost felt as if he’d sensed her discomfort and cut in to help her out. Not something she would have guessed he’d do before this very moment. But she had to admit, she didn’t have a good handle on who he was. Probably because he was so damn private.
“Yup. I do six to fourteen miles a few times a week. Depends on how I feel.”
“What?” Nat’s mouth dropped straight open. “I knew you were athletic, but jeez louise. That’s like… amazing.”
Sarah laughed. “I’m used to being active. I go nuts without it.”
“Me too, actually,” Jackson said. “If I don’t run at least every other day, I get what my mother refers to as ‘ants in my pants.’”
Natalie and Sarah laughed but Kaya just sort of stared at him, a frown on her face. “I didn’t know you were a runner.”
Something flickered across Jackson’s face as he absorbed her first words directly to him, but it shuttered down and he shrugged off her words, as if to say ‘why would you?’ “Yeah. Track in high school and college.”
He turned away from Kaya and back to Sarah. “You ever run the Mesa trail?”
“Yup. Kicks my ass every time. A lot of elevation on that trail.”
“Do you run it out and back?”
She nodded. “That’s usually my fourteen-mile loop.”
Jackson’s eyebrows raised, clearly impressed, then they furrowed down again. “Are you running it alone?”
She shrugged. “What other maniac wants to do that?”
“I will,” Jackson said, shocking the shit out of everyone at the table. “You shouldn’t be running it alone. Even if you have a phone, reception’s not always great. If you were to twist an ankle or something…” He shook his head, like he didn’t even want to consider that. Sarah found herself unexpectedly touched by his concern for her.
A little befuddled, she asked the first question that came into her mind. “Can you even run that far?”
His eyes widened in surprise and he chuckled, low in his throat. The sound was deep and quiet, but nonetheless, both the Chalk sisters jolted in their chairs when they heard him make it. It was like it had never even occurred to either of them that he could laugh.
“Yeah. I can.” Jackson picked up his mug of coffee and, in a practiced move, swallowed down the remaining balance. “All right, I really have to get going now.”
Sarah looked down and saw that he’d devoured his food, though with such polite grace that she’d barely noticed. “Early appointment?”
“Yup. I’m seeing a Saint Bernard with a bad case of arthritis.” He stood, waved goodbye to Chrissy across the restaurant and placed his hands on the back of the chair. “It was nice to see you ladies, but it’s time for me and the hot poker up my ass to get across town.”
Kaya’s cheeks went bright pink but her eyes flamed with what looked like a challenge. Nat and Sarah merely laughed, though, which softened the lines around Jackson’s mouth.
“Bye, Jackson.”
“Bye.” And then he was striding across the restaurant and was gone.
All at once, all three women just sort of relaxed, like they’d just unzipped themselves from some extremely constricting clothing.
“Holy CRAP,” Natalie stage-whispered across the table to Sarah. “You got Jackson Durant to sit down and eat breakfast with us.”
“You got him to laugh,” Kaya added, a complicated expression on her face.
“My first impression of him was that he was kind of a killjoy, but I actually kind of like the guy. He seems sweet,” Sarah said, swallowing the rest of her orange juice.
Kaya waited a beat, but she still spoke too fast to be strictly casual. “But it’s Seth that you’re into… right?”
Sarah hid her smile behind one more monstrous bite of hash browns before she pushed her plate away. Something told her that Kaya was waiting for her answer with bated breath.
“Yup. I have a crush on Seth.” A thought occurred to her and Sarah bit her lip. “Is… that weird for you guys? Sorry, maybe I shouldn’t be so blunt about this before. I’ve never really had female friends before. And I’ve definitely never had a crush on one of those female friends’ best buddies from forever ago. Oh, jeez, I didn’t even stop to think that maybe one of you had feelings for him, too. I don’t mean to step on anybody’s toes! Maybe I shou—”
“Sweetie,” Nat said, leaning across the table and gripping Sarah’s forearm, a very bright smile on her face. “You’re doing great. You haven’t stepped on anybody’s toes. And besides, you should always tell your friends the truth, even if it steps on somebody’s toes. And I can’t speak for my sister, but I do not have feelings for Seth Durant.”
Kaya’s face immediately pinched down into a little sourpuss. “Me either. Yikes. I mean, he’s hot. And so sweet. And generous. But I don’t think I could ever have the hots for someone who matches their socks to their underwear.”
“See?” Sarah said, laughing. “And here I am thinking that’s just about the cutest thing I’ve ever seen.”
“He’s all yours, sister,” Kaya said with a wave of her hand.
“Who, Jackson Durant?” Chrissy, the waitress, asked as she came back to clear her plate. “Is he on the market again?”
Kaya scowled. “That’s not who we were talking about. And to
my knowledge, Jackson was never off the market.”
Chrissy waved a hand in the air. “Oh, don’t be silly. You know he hasn’t been dating since he came back from California. Shame, too. He used to be an awful lot of fun.”
Squinting at her, Sarah could see that the girlish-looking Chrissy had a few lines around her eyes and mouth, and probably was closer to Jackson’s age than Kaya’s.
“Did you used to date him?” Nat asked curiously.
“Nothing serious. Just a few dates here and there in high school.” Chrissy sighed dramatically, her eyes blurring a bit. “But trust me. A girl doesn’t forget a thing like that.”
Chrissy floated away with their trays and Sarah quickly threw some cash on the table, figuring they needed to get the hell out of there before Kaya drop-kicked the waitress.
“Anyways, yes, I like Seth. And I’m almost positive that he likes me.”
“He does,” Natalie said with a decisive nod of her head. “He talks about you all the time. He doesn’t really do that with other girls.”
“That’s true,” Kaya said thoughtfully.
“Do you guys have any ideas on why he might be hanging back, though?” Sarah asked as they left the restaurant and started toward their cars.
“Hanging back, how?” Nat asked, making a wistful little sound at a sundress in a shop window that they passed.
“He says that he’s not relationship material. That he wants to be with me but he can’t. He says that in a world where he was inherently different we’d be together. What the hell does that mean?”
Kaya and Nat exchanged the kind of eye contact that told Sarah they knew exactly what it meant.
Eventually, Natalie spoke up. “The Durants are a… complicated bunch.”
“Oh my God,” Kaya said, and Sarah and Nat turned around to see her staring at some flyers tacked up on a telephone pole. They were brightly colored and stapled to nearly every inch.
Sarah backed up, noting that all the color had abruptly leached out of Kaya’s face. Kaya lunged forward and started ripping the flyers off the pole and shoving them immediately into the trash can next to it.
“Kaya!” Nat said, obviously surprised at her sister’s actions.
Sarah just bent down and picked up one of the flyers that had slipped from Kaya’s hand and drifted, like a leaf, to Sarah’s feet.
It was a flyer advertising a meeting that would take place in two nights. “Citizens Taking Action Against Rogue and Unregistered Shifters,” Sarah read, the blood draining from her face as she noted that the crest underneath the wording was two sawed-off shotguns crossed over one another. “That’s disgusting.”
She immediately followed Kaya’s lead and ripped off the highest ones that the other woman couldn’t reach. When the pole was bare and all three women were breathing rather hard, Sarah became aware of Nat’s eyes on her.
“You don’t support this kind of thing either, huh?” Nat said quietly.
Sarah’s brow furrowed. “Of course not. I’m one hundred percent against shifter discrimination. The idea that human beings should be registered and rounded up? Don’t people realize what happens to shifters in those camps? They’re imprisoned and tortured. Sterilized, even. No. I think vigilante groups like this are built on fear. I would never, ever support something like that.”
Nat and Kaya’s eyes were big by the time Sarah finished speaking.
“You speak like this is… personal to you,” Kaya said carefully. It was a bold question because the sisters didn’t know for sure that Sarah wasn’t a shifter. And Sarah didn’t know whether or not the sisters were shifters. And to share information like that could be deadly. But Sarah had an easy answer.
“One of my closest friends I made in the first Olympics I participated in was a shifter. He was outed during his medal ceremony.”
“Oh my gosh,” Nat said, her eyes filling with tears and one hand going over her mouth. “I remember that. It was so awful.”
Sarah nodded, taking a deep, calming breath. Her heart started to race and tears pricked at the backs of her eyes the way they always did whenever she thought of this.
“What was his name again?” Kaya asked.
“Simon Lau. He was a good friend and a good person. He died in a shifter camp a year and a half after the authorities dragged him off the podium.”
Sarah scowled down the street at the other flyered poles. “I’m gonna get to work on those ones, too.”
She stalked off down the block, feeling her friends’ eyes on her back the whole time.
CHAPTER TEN
Seth hadn’t heard from Sarah in two days. He knew he should be relieved. The sooner she gave up on pursuing him, the sooner he didn’t have to worry about her welfare as much. But the thing was, she’d told him she was gunning for him and he’d kind of expected her to follow through.
Maybe she changed her mind, he thought as he pulled his aching, but clean, body out of the shower. Maybe his warnings had sat heavy in her mind and she’d decided he was just enough of a whacko to be better left alone.
He certainly felt like a whacko at the moment.
Every day Bauer had been putting Seth and his brothers through their paces. His methods for teaching them how to control the shift were a mixture of meditation, hodgepodge kung fu, calisthenics, sparring, and worst of all, acting like their shifter animal while they were in human form.
If he never crawled on all fours, sniffing pine needles in the forest again, it would be too soon.
Seth was a fit guy, but every muscle in his body hurt, and what was even worse, his brain felt like fifty pounds of packing peanuts that had been compressed down inside his skull. Bauer was throwing all manner of philosophical mumbo jumbo at the brothers. And maybe it wouldn’t be so bad if Seth didn’t feel a wild urgency to download it all immediately. As far as he was concerned, the sooner he got this under control, the better. But in the meantime, he was utterly shredded.
Seth dragged a towel over his hair and pulled on the clothes he’d ironed and laid out on the bed before his shower.
He was hungry. Which probably meant that Sarah was hungry, too. It was dinner time. And he knew that if she didn’t have a better option, she was just as likely to dip goldfish crackers in peanut butter until her stomach stopped growling. Somehow, in that lovely, weird, interesting mind of hers, she called this a good meal.
He’d given her space the last two days, because he hadn’t wanted to encourage her. But encouragement or not, two days was just too long to go without seeing her. He would make some dinner nice and quickly, and then he’d drop it off, maybe exchange hellos and then he’d come home and catch up on some of the work he owed a few clients. Couldn’t be easier.
He made a quick red sauce and tossed it with penne, making some salad and garlic bread on the side. Not the most gourmet meal he’d ever made, but still, it was food.
He was just toeing into his shoes when he saw a familiar black jeep pull into Sarah’s driveway. What the hell was Jackson doing at her house?
Maybe it wasn’t Jackson. Maybe she knew someone else with the same car.
Nope. Two seconds later, Sarah was swinging out of the passenger seat and Jackson was swinging out of the driver’s seat. They walked up the pathway side by side.
Seth’s grip on the Tupperware in his hands tightened as he watched them through squinted eyes from his front porch.
It wouldn’t have been so bad, or weird, he supposed, except that Jackson walked her up her front steps and then laughed at something Sarah said. He laughed.
Jackson. Laughed.
Seth’s grip was now in danger of hairline cracking the glass Tupperware. A million scenarios played out in his head, each one seedier than the last. They ran into each other in the grocery store, were overtaken by a heretofore overlooked sexual chemistry, spent the next nine hours screwing each other’s brains out. Or maybe it was the library. Or the gym.
Or arguably worse, maybe his brother had gotten Sarah’s number that one night at
the bar—the only time that Seth knew for sure they’d ever met one another—and they’d been texting ever since. Getting to know one another. While her infatuation with Seth had burned hot and quick and died, her infatuation with Jackson had been on slow burn.
Jackson and Sarah high-fived and Jackson bounded off the porch toward his car. Seth’s head cocked to one side as he watched. A high five? Not exactly the way one ended a hot date.
Jackson jumped into his jeep and pulled out of the driveway, driving as fast as usual. It had always been his brother’s single concession to danger. Jackson caught sight of Seth on his porch and honked his horn as he drove away. During a different time in their lives, Jackson might have stopped to chat with his brother, but with all this shifter training they were going through, they were already spending way too much time together.
Seth bounced on his toes for a second as he watched his brother drive away and then decided that he’d already made the damn food so he might as well drop it off.
He jogged across their quiet street and into Sarah’s house.
“Sarah!”
“Kitchen!” she shouted back.
He strode into her kitchen to see her standing behind the open fridge door, her head tipped back, guzzling orange juice straight from the carton. She was a deeper tan than two days ago and her hair was matted and dark against her head with sweat. All except for those honey gold flyaways that framed her face. He loved that. It made her look like she was electric with energy. And so lovely. Like a golden crown for a princess.
“Hi!” she said, a sweet, chipper note in her voice that told of her very good mood. “I was gonna come see you after my shower.”
Seth filed away that information, unsure if it ruffled or soothed his feathers. He decided to just out and ask what he’d come here to ask. “Why was Jackson dropping you offffff…fug?”
Seth’s words dribbled and splatted out of his mouth as Sarah closed the fridge door and he realized that she wasn’t in a tank top, she was in a sports bra and some high-waisted sporty underwear.
