by Selena Scott
Raphael stroked her hair and kissed her forehead.
“Natalie,” he whispered.
“Hmmm.” She was drifting into dream land.
“When you wake up, I’m going to ask you to marry me.”
“That… sounds perfect,” she answered, and was gone, into sleep, leaving him with a smile on his face.
***
“How is she?” Jackson asked as soon as Raphael came back into the waiting room.
The rest of the family was down in the cafeteria, getting late night coffee and snacks to bolster everyone’s mood. Raphael had passed off the chair next to Natalie’s bed to Kaya and right now he just wanted to face plant into a vat of coffee.
“Happy, blame-free, being sweet to me.” Raphael shook his head. “I can’t believe she can even look at me.”
“Raph, what happened was not your fault. It was a good plan. It was not your fault that he was a psycho who should not have had a gun. And it was certainly not your fault that the cops got lost in the woods and were ten minutes late.”
“I should never have put her in danger like that.”
Jackson sighed and yanked his brother down to sit next to him. “You want to know something I’ve had a tough-ass time learning over the last few years?”
Raphael nodded.
“That taking care of your loved ones is not the same as keeping them out of harm’s way at all costs. It’s not possible to protect them every moment of the day. I learned that by basically pushing you and Seth out of my life with all this shifter hatred.” He lowered his voice on the ‘s’ word. “Trust me. Keeping Natalie in bubble wrap isn’t the path to loving her right. Fighting for our life, your home, that’s the path to loving her right. And that’s what you did tonight. You ran to her. You put your body between hers and harm. You didn’t leave her. Even when we both told you to. You were a good mate tonight, Raph.”
It deeply affected Raphael to hear his brother say that to him. His brother who’d been so critical of any relationships. Whose dream was for Raph and Seth to hide themselves so effectively that no one would ever find them. Who had had a damn tough time accepting all the changes that had been happening to their family. Who, in many ways, was like a father to Raphael.
“Thanks,” Raph whispered, pulling Jackson into a hug. “Thank you.”
A moment later, the family came back, arms bursting with food and drinks. Seth and Sarah sat on one side of Raph, Elizabeth sat down across from them.
Moments later, Bauer came in, looking supremely uncomfortable under the bright hospital lights. He shuffled to the seat next to Elizabeth and dropped down into it.
Apparently Bauer had changed his mind about twenty miles from the house. He’d turned and jogged back the entire way. He’d made it back just in time to save Natalie’s life.
Bauer claimed he had apologies to dole out to each and every one of them for leaving, but in Raph’s book, they were more than square.
Raph watched Bauer’s head bob with fatigue. He watched Seth and Sarah split a protein bar. He sipped coffee and watched Jackson’s head nearly fall off his shoulders as he watched Kaya walk from one end of the hall to the other so that she could report that Natalie was soundly sleeping and they should all go home.
Raphael hugged every one of them goodbye, assuring Kaya that he’d stay. He watched as his big, lopsided, makeshift, growing family filed out of the waiting room.
And then he turned and went into Natalie’s room where he sat down on the chair next to her, took her hand, and settled in for the night.
Then, and only then, did he feel complete.
The End
A Mate for Jackson
CHAPTER ONE
Surprisingly, Jackson Durant actually loved Christmastime. Eleven months out of the year, he was kind of a tightly wound grinch. But once his mother started putting out the same cracked, lopsided decorations she’d been putting out for decades, something lightened in Jackson’s heart and stayed light until New Years.
He couldn’t exactly explain it, considering he was 38 and single—the only single brother left in his family—and it wasn’t like his family had huge, elaborate Christmas traditions to look forward to. They simply got together on Christmas Eve and slept over at his mother’s house, and then exchanged gifts on Christmas morning while his mother pumped Mannheim Steamroller through the house and shoved cinnamon buns down everyone’s throats.
Not exactly a life-changing tradition. But he loved it all the same.
It was only two weeks until Christmas and his mother had all the decorations up already. It was an hour after their weekly family Sunday dinner and everyone had migrated from the dining room into the living room. For once, Jackson wasn’t on call at his veterinary practice, so he balanced a dark beer on one knee while he tipped his head back and closed his eyes, letting the blinking lights from his mother’s gaudy Christmas tree play over his closed eyelids.
Jackson listened on and off to his twin brothers, Seth and Raphael, tell a story about their new landscaping client. Jackson listened as Raphael’s girlfriend, Natalie, announced she was going to put everyone’s names in a hat for a Secret Santa exchange. Jackson, dozing slightly now, listened as Sarah, Seth’s wife, talked about the training she’d started undergoing—she was attempting to qualify for the summer Olympics in her sport of archery. His mother chimed in here and there to all the conversations.
There were two other people in the room, besides Jackson, who were utterly silent, however.
On Jackson’s right was Bauer, his mother’s sixty-year-old boarder and something of a mentor for the Durant boys. He was even more quiet than Jackson usually was. He’d only come into their makeshift family a few years ago, but it was already hard to imagine the group without him.
And then, of course, there was the other silent person in the group, the one whose every tiny movement and adjustment Jackson was doing everything he could to pretend he wasn’t constantly aware of. She lounged like an exotic cat across the huge armchair closest to the fire in the hearth. Kaya Chalk. Natalie’s little sister and the thorn in Jackson’s heart for years. She was painfully lodged within him and nothing he’d ever done had been able to work himself free of her.
Kaya was the youngest person in the room, having just celebrated her 25th birthday. She was also the only person in the room who kind of… glowed. Okay. Maybe that was just in Jackson’s lovesick imagination, but anyone would have had to admit that the firelight played tantalizingly over her honey blonde hair and tan skin.
He’d known Kaya since she was a kid, but then he’d left town for college and veterinary school and by the time he’d come back in his early thirties, she’d blossomed into the most desirable woman on planet Jackson. It was chemical or something. Yes, she was physically stunning—she turned heads everywhere she went, even in slouchy sweatpants and a baseball cap. But it was more than that. He was drawn to her on what felt like an elemental level. Like her cells were yins and his cells were yangs. Or something like that.
For most of the years that he’d been back and denying himself the woman who was almost fourteen years younger than he, she’d always been on her best behavior around him. The two of them weren’t friendly, exactly, and they never really had been. For a long time, she’d watched him just like he watched her. Whether she’d liked him or not, he’d never known, but he was certain that she was at least aware of him.
He hadn’t been able to stand her eyes on him, knowing that he’d never be able to have her. So, he’d mucked it all up, intentionally, some time ago. And now he was pretty sure she couldn’t care less about him. She was no longer wide-eyed and aware every time he came into a room. Nope. She was utterly at ease as she almost completely ignored him. Part of him wished that she would ignore him completely, then that at least would show that he still affected her in some way.
Nope. She seemed utterly unaffected by his presence and he’d been introduced to a new side of her. The… soupy side of her. She always seemed to be lo
unged across something like an Egyptian Queen. More often than not, she was dozing or just listening to the conversation around her with her eyes closed. Gone was the girl who’d nervously eyed him like a black cat. Arrived was the girl he now watched eat an entire slice of pizza with her eyes closed, laying on her back in front of the fire, one of her feet bouncing up and down to a song only she could hear.
She was utterly and completely unconcerned with Jackson’s presence now and her relaxed demeanor only proved it.
Jackson, on the other hand, had been formally introduced to Soupy Kaya and it, unfortunately, only made him love her more. He loved her slouchy, sleepy style. He loved that she could fall asleep in about ten seconds flat. He loved that the entire room would think she’d been asleep for an hour, but then she’d sit up and chime in, obviously having listened the entire time and not missed a trick.
What a weirdo she was.
Jackson pressed his eyelids closed even tighter. God, he wanted her.
“So, we’ll drive up on the 18th, spend a few days, the girls will stay at the resort, and the boys will head to the cabin on the 22nd. We can all meet back here for the 24th and for Christmas.”
Jackson’s eyes sprung open at Seth’s voice. He looked around at his family, who, with the exception of Bauer and Kaya, were all plugging dates and times into their phone calendars.
“Wait, what’s going on?” Jackson asked, looking around.
“We’re planning that ski trip up north,” Seth said, still typing on his phone. “You said you could come, remember?”
Jackson frowned. “I said I might be able to come. And that was before I agreed to switch schedules with JP.”
JP was the other vet at Jackson’s veterinary clinic and probably his only friend outside of his family. She was an older lady who had zero tolerance for what she viewed as Jackson’s crappy attitude and spent a great deal of their friendship attempting to get him to live a little. She’d been appalled that he’d agreed to be on call on New Year’s Eve and had forced him to switch schedules with her so that he could go out and get laid at least once in the new year—her words, not his. Little had she known it would mean missing a trip with his family.
“Shit. Really? You can’t come?” Raphael asked, his eyes filled with disappointment. Though Raphael and Seth were twins, they had pretty different personalities. Seth showed his love and affection for his family by organizing things like this ski trip. Raphael showed his love and affection through too-tight hugs and sloppy cheek kisses and being really, really bummed when you couldn’t come on the ski trip.
“Yeah. Can’t come.”
“I can’t come either,” Kaya chimed in, her eyes closed and one finger twirling a lock of her messy hair. Jackson allowed himself half a second to glance at her golden loveliness and then made his eyes skitter away and stare at the Christmas tree so he wouldn’t get sucked into the vortex of Kaya.
“What?” her sister chirped. Natalie was just as much as a bleeding heart as Raphael was. And just as messy, too. Sometimes Jackson wondered how the couple ever got anything done. How Nat and Raph managed to wade through not only their copious emotions, but the knee-deep pile of unfolded laundry and half-read magazines that were constantly scattered around their house.
“Yeah, I have to work up through the 21st.” Kaya opened her eyes and sat up and Jackson couldn’t help but follow the movement with his eyes. Her hair was up in two messy buns on her head and she tucked her oversized sweater over her knees so she looked like a little ball of woman. He bet it was warm inside her sweater. He bet it smelled freaking amazing in there. Like flowers and fresh bread and oh shit people were talking to him and he was fantasizing about the inside of Kaya’s sweater.
“Uh, sorry. What?”
“You’re still going to meet us for the full moon, though, right?”
His brothers and Bauer spent every full moon at a cabin about two hours north of Boulder that was tucked ridiculously far back into the mountains.
The Durant brothers needed… privacy on a full moon.
Jackson didn’t always join his brothers at the cabin on a full moon. There were times he just spent it in his own basement. But that was depressing and reclusive and just because he was depriving himself of Kaya didn’t mean he had to deprive himself of his family as well.
“Yeah. I’ll drive up on the morning of the 22nd and meet you all there.”
“I guess I could drive up to the resort on the 22nd, early morning,” Kaya suggested, her eyes closed again. “That way I could spend the day there with the girls and then we can all carpool back on Christmas eve.”
“Oh, good!” Elizabeth, Jackson’s mother, chimed in. Natalie and Kaya had been in and around her home since they were very little girls and she viewed them as daughters. Any extra time she could get with them she relished.
“That’s better than nothing,” Natalie conceded. “I feel like I never see you anymore.”
Natalie and Kaya had grown up in the same house, then moved out together the day Kaya turned eighteen. They’d shared an apartment up until last year when Natalie had finally moved in with Raphael and Kaya had downsized to a studio apartment that she could better afford.
Kaya opened her eyes and smiled, tipping her head backward on the armrest to see her sister. “Nat, we literally see each other every day.”
Nat pouted out her bottom lip. “It’s not enough!”
Jackson, though he had his best disinterested look pasted across his face, inwardly agreed with Natalie. Seeing Kaya once a day was not enough. He knew that for a fact, being as they worked in the same complex and he did see her, from afar, every day. He worked at the vet’s clinic at one end and she at the wellness clinic at the other end.
He saw her almost every day, heading in or out of work, and it wasn’t enough. He wanted more. He’d wanted more for years, and for years he’d punished himself for the impulse.
She was not his to want, and she never would be.
***
“The peanut butter crackers are on me,” a deep voice said from behind Kaya as it came up her turn at the gas station checkout.
She’d already paid for her gas at the kiosk and she’d just popped in to the store for a quick snack to get her through the rest of her drive up to the resort. It was two days before Christmas.
Kaya turned to see who was offering to pay for her snack.
It was a man, of course, late twenties, a wide, bro-ish smile on his face and no coat on. She resisted the urge to narrow her eyes at him. It was damn near twenty degrees outside and he’d foregone a coat? Men were such freaks.
At this point in her life, Kaya knew better than to argue with the man over who got to buy her seventy-five-cent peanut butter crackers. She’d learned the path of least resistance. All she had to do was smile and say a very sweet thank you and then, usually, most men let her skedaddle away. If she argued about paying for them for herself, or didn’t say thank you, she was liable to get called a bitch. Which… sucked. But it was also just the way the world was and Kaya played by the rules even if she didn’t even pretend to understand them.
She knew she was a pretty girl, but right now she wore her hair stuffed under a horribly knitted red cap—thanks to Natalie’s newest hobby—no makeup, a scarf that was about six feet long and three feet wide, an old wool coat, leggings, and an unattractive pair of hiking boots. Why in God’s name was this man trying to start up something with her? She looked like the child of winter’s frumpy cousin.
“Oh. Thanks!” she said brightly, even though she thought it was weird to buy someone peanut butter crackers. “Merry Christmas!”
She gave a bright wave and braced herself for the biting cold of the gas station parking lot.
“Wait up!”
Kaya sighed. She was halfway across the lot when the peanut butter bro caught up to her.
“Hey, I’m Will.”
“Hi, Will,” she said as she kept on walking.
“Pretty cold out, huh?”
“Mmhmm.”
“Headed anywhere interesting?”
“Just to the gates of hell to visit my uncle for Christmas.”
“What was that?”
“Oh, nothing.” She sighed again and stood at the door of her car. She didn’t want to linger. “It was nice to meet you.”
She slid quickly into her car and locked the door behind her.
He knocked on her window. “Can I, uh, get your number? Seeing as it’s Christmas and all?”
Seriously, that was such a weird way of asking, but it was not, by far, the weirdest way she’d ever been asked.
“Um. Sure.” She rolled down her window a crack and gave him her number before she waved and got back on the road.
As she drove away, she looked at him in the rearview mirror. He actually was pretty cute. Spiky blond hair and a nice body. He was probably going to be pretty disappointed when he realized that she’d given him the number for the local free STD testing service. It was a number she’d memorized for this purpose quite a long time ago and was the only number she ever gave out when a man asked for hers.
She put her wipers on as the snow began to fall a little harder. It wasn’t supposed to really dump until this evening, but apparently, the storm clouds that had rolled in off the mountains were getting a little impatient.
It wasn’t that Kaya got a kick out of being standoffish with men, it was that she really didn’t know how to be any other way. They simply didn’t excite her.
She wasn’t gay, she’d deduced that much. But she just wasn’t someone who enjoyed flirting with men. She’d dated a guy for a few months last year. And she’d enjoyed kissing him. That was instinctual enough. But his company had begun to grate on her and so had his desperation. They’d kiss for an hour before she eventually got bored. But for him, it seemed that kissing her only revved him up even further. If their desire for one another was on some sort of line graph, his line always ended up in the clouds and hers ended up near her shoes.
