by Abigail Owen
She jumped up. “I’ll get us both some.”
“So why no Christmas decorations?” he asked as she sat back down.
Maybe the wrong question, given the way she wrinkled her nose and carefully set the glasses down. “I’m allergic to Christmas trees.”
“So, get a fake one. I seem to remember you love Christmas.”
She reached over and tweaked his fork to be at a ninety-degree angle to the table…and avoided his gaze. “You mean the only time of year when we sit in front of dead trees and eat candy out of socks? No thanks.”
Closer, but still not the real reason. Why was she avoiding answering? There had to be more. He kept his gaze steady and sat in silence, waiting her out.
Which only earned him an adorable frown that made him think of small, feisty kittens. “God, you’re annoying,” she muttered.
Cade barked a laugh. “Most people don’t tell me that to my face.”
She rolled her eyes. “If you can’t tell, I don’t like a ton of clutter. Christmas decorations are…” She paused, seeming to search for a word.
“Cluttered?” he offered.
She shrugged. “Yup. When people ask me what I put on my Christmas list, I want to tell them that it would be awesome if, instead of leaving presents, Santa washed and dried his cookie plate, did a load of laundry, and vacuumed the house for me.”
The words were delivered with dry self-deprecation, but the wariness in her gaze told him she wasn’t quite as casual about this as she wanted him to believe.
Cade nodded. “Fair enough.”
Her shoulders dropped a hair and she scooped a bite into her mouth. A beam of satisfaction warmed him through to the core. He’d said the right thing. For once.
Now if he could just keep from stepping on his painfully hard dick the rest of dinner, maybe he could build on this progress. Maybe he could also find a way for her to have Christmas without the chaos that she seemed so dead set to remove from her life.
5
SHYLA
The rhythmic thunk, thunk, thunk outside was starting to get addictive. Or maybe having Cade around was what she was leaning into. Lulling her into a false sense of security.
Three days.
Three days in which he would show up in the morning. She worked inside and he worked outside. Every evening she’d distract herself from thoughts of jumping him and demanding he rid her of the new kind of tension riding her body. Instead, she’d make him dinner. The last two nights he’d go to his truck and then show up in the kitchen with some kind of Christmassy something or other for her, insisting that he was her own personal elf.
The first night had been fruitcake. She still couldn’t get over that. The man had brought her fruitcake, which they’d had after dinner. That had just been a warmup. The next night, he’d insisted on stringing white lights across her patio covering. He’d done it with such perfect precision, that not even the OCD in her could find fault, which was why she’d given up on lights years ago.
I wonder what tonight will bring?
But it wasn’t the gifts or the help that had her buzzing with anticipation. They’d talk. For a long while, as though they’d never been apart.
He’d tell her funny stories about his first shift, and being in a wolf pack, and life in a city pack. Not that Denver was a huge city by any standards, but anything was bigger than Holly Hill. She’d told him about trying to go to college, but getting homesick and finishing online, about her freelance business, and her family, and funny stories about people around town they both knew.
And every night after dinner, he left.
Each time he did, the tension would return in a wave. The need to check every inch of the house. To relock every lock on every door and window. To reset her alarm even more than usual. To make sure her Henry shotgun, a Christmas present from Sean a few years before, was loaded. To take the phones into the bedroom with her, so no one could call her from her own phone and tell her they were in the house with her.
The feeling went away, or at least lessened, when Cade was around.
Silence resounded outside and Shyla glanced at her clock. Not even lunch time. Had he finally worked his way down to the pipes?
Getting up, she made her way to the kitchen to check out the window. At first she saw only Cade. It must’ve been warmer today, because he’d taken off his shirt, and she gave a silent gasp, remembering to hush the noise of it, at the sight of several scars. Were those from the night she found him? Or from something else?
Suddenly he moved, and she realized he was talking to someone. Leaning closer to the window, she caught sight of two other men.
Wolf shifters. They had to be.
Those bands of tension that had disappeared lately cinched up around her ribs, squeezing the hell out of her lungs.
Based on Cade’s serious expression and the way he gripped the handle of his pick, he wasn’t too happy with the conversation. One of the men with sandy colored hair, broader and taller than Cade, but thicker too, gestured at the house.
In a knee jerk reaction, Shyla stepped back from the window. What did pack business have to do with her? Did they object to his helping her with the pipes situation? Why would they care?
Her breathing hitched, lungs getting tighter at the thought of wolves focusing on her in any way, and Shyla gripped the countertop, counting to slow down her breathing, force her lungs to function to her beat until the spots stopped dancing in front of her eyes.
After another few words, the two men tromped off into the woods, where she assumed they shifted. What did they do with their clothes when running around like that? Sean said shifting was done naked.
Cade stared after their departing forms. Even from this distance she could see his jaw working. Whatever they’d said, they’d pissed him off.
Then he gave his head a shake and jumped into the hole he’d made, about waist-high on him by now, and went to work. Shyla took her cue and did the same, returning to her office with her mind spinning. Working on a graphic for a women’s magazine about self-protection in the home should be right up her freaking alley. She should be able to come up with this one in her sleep, but the ideas weren’t flowing.
She was staring at a screen that showed the raw images she had been playing with in the last hour, mind miles away, or, more accurately, in her yard with a certain wolf shifter, when the sound of her backdoor opening reached her about two seconds after the beep of her alarm system.
“It’s me,” Cade’s voice reached her before her anxiety had a chance to get a grip. But he said it as he sailed past her office door on silent feet and out the front door, after the click of all her locks.
Curious, Shyla followed him, opening the front door to find him at the street. Turning on the water maybe? Sure enough, a few seconds later he trekked back her way, paused to take his boots off and leave them on her front porch and went straight to the kitchen sink. With a twist of the knob, water gushed from the spout, clean and easy.
Shyla gasped and rushed forward to stick her hand in the running water. “Really?”
“I found a small leak. An easy fix once I got down to the pipe.”
She turned the water off and lifted her head, suddenly aware of how close he stood. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
That twinkle came into his eyes, the one that was starting to make her secretly smile instead of instantly frown. “I have a couple of ideas.”
She plunked one hand on her hip. “Any I’m going to actually like?”
“I’m damn sure you’ll enjoy any one of them.” He winked, and suddenly he was her sixteen-year-old tormentor, constantly teasing her, and she was a fourteen-year-old with a serious crush, wanting to be more than teased.
“That’s very interesting, but I find most men fall flat on promises.”
Grin spreading, he opened his mouth with a comeback, but cut off when she raised her hand.
“Please don’t say something like you’re not most men. I hope you’re more creative
than that.”
Cade snapped his mouth shut with an audible clack, then blushed. The big man who every high school girl had crushed on, actually blushed and ran a hand around the back of his neck. “I’ll work on my creativity,” he drawled.
If anything, her crush that had never really waned settled a little deeper. Turning into something that would be harder to get over when he left.
“I do have something for you though.” Here came Christmas. Again, eyebrows raised, she followed him to the front door, then frowned as he pulled something covered by a black trash bag out of the bed of his truck and carried it inside. Something shaped like a tree. Something that tinkled and clinked as he moved.
After locking the door behind him, she followed him into her sitting room, where he stood whatever was in the bag on the coffee table. Carefully, like he was handling the most precious thing in the world, he pulled the bag upward, gently unhooking it when it got snagged on whatever was inside. Then, with a flourish, he stood back to reveal a Christmas tree.
Of sorts.
Obviously handmade, the decoration was built from aspen branches of various lengths stacked on top of each other and fanned out to form the shape of a tree. The entire thing sat on an aspen base and sported a golden star on top. Several simple gold ornaments swung from the branches, catching the light from the fire she always had lit in here.
Inside Shyla, everything stopped for a heartbeat before adrenaline pulsed her blood back to life in a rush.
“You made me a tree?” she said slowly.
He crossed his arms and gave a proud nod. “It’s Christmas Eve. You need a tree for Santa to put your presents under tonight.”
He’d made her a tree so she could have presents?
“Look,” he pointed when she didn’t say anything. “It doesn’t have any needles to fall on the floor, and I checked with your mom. You’re not allergic to aspen. It’s not big or, um, cluttery.”
Shock steeling her words, Shyla bent over to inspect it more closely, finding that he’d taken the time to seal the spots where he’d sawed the branch or trimmed smaller ends off. It had obviously started as one long, skinny branch.
“I don’t know what to say,” she murmured, then reached out and tweaked the tree so that the star was at a right angle to the room and the square coffee table.
Would throwing her arms around his neck and begging him to make love to her right here on the thin and uncomfortable carpet be too much? She cast a glance at the well-worn leather couch. That would be more comfortable.
“I believe thank you is traditional,” he teased.
Shyla straightened and turned to face him, then stepped in close, going up on tiptoe and putting a hand on his chest to balance. Only his cheek was still too far away to reach. “You’re too tall. Bend down, please.”
Lips twitching, he did as she asked, and she placed a soft, lingering kiss against the scruff-roughened skin of his cheek. “Thank you.”
Intense blue eyes glittered back at her. She couldn’t be the only one feeling this, could she? He had to be able to hear her heart beating against the cage of her chest. Sure, she’d been a little standoffish when he’d showed up, but couldn’t he tell that the last few days had made some kind of difference? Or maybe he didn’t want her. Not really.
In his mind, maybe she was still his friend’s little sister whom he liked to annoy.
The tension climbed until vibrations were practically spilling off of her, but he still didn’t make a move. That soft kiss from the first day almost was relegated to stuff of myth.
With a reluctance that was turning into an ache, Shyla stepped back. “Dinner? It should be about ready.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond before she walked away, headed to the kitchen.
“Why not?” she thought he muttered behind her. “None of my other appetites are going to be satisfied.”
Only she must’ve heard wrong. He’d had plenty of time to make a move.
6
CADE
Cade watched Shyla walk away and barely kept from tackling her to the ground and saying the hell with dinner, he’d eat her instead.
At this rate, he was going to be in a permanent state of raging arousal before his mate acknowledged the tension between them for what it was and asked him to do something about it or made a move herself.
Instead, she kept letting the tension hang between them, building to a screaming pitch. He could’ve made a move, but he needed her to do the asking, or she’d never accept it when he told her that, for him, she would become his life. His center.
She had been for all these years, though he hadn’t let himself dwell on the fact or both he and his wolf might’ve snapped.
Humans, in his experience, were wary of words like forever. Cynical, thanks to their own shitty instincts when it came to mating, they found it hard to believe that shifters’ instincts were a hell of a lot better at this part of life.
He could be patient. For her, he could be anything she needed, despite the fact that his dick and his wolf were on the verge of exploding.
“Who were those two men you were talking to earlier?” She asked as she checked the crockpot that had been simmering on her counter all day.
A new tension, not a good one, tightened his hands into fists. “They were from my pack.”
“I didn’t recognize them.”
And in a small town like Holly Hill, everyone knew everyone, regardless of species. To work out the anger bubbling back to the surface, he moved to her cabinets to pull out plates to set the table. “My Denver pack.”
“I see…” She gathered salad makings from the fridge and got started washing the veggies. “Why did they seem angry?”
Cade paused, hand holding a fork floating above the table as he considered how much to share. The trouble was, if she was going to choose him—really choose him—she needed all the facts. “They’re here to back my play for alpha.”
Silence greeted that statement.
He turned to find her carrying the salad to the table. “Can you bring the other two dishes?” she asked. As though he hadn’t just said something huge.
Impatience scratching at his skin, Cade held his tongue. He even remembered to put the dishes down in order of largest to smallest. Otherwise, she’d rearrange them. Normally, he’d tease her by putting them out of order, but he wasn’t in a teasing mood.
In silence, they sat and served themselves.
In three short days, this had become his favorite part. Sitting with her and catching up on each other’s lives. Making her blush when he stared a little too long. Trying to make her laugh and teasing her by moving the saltshaker out of place just to watch her tweak it back to the right spot. The woman had a serious thing for orderliness. And counting in threes. He still wasn’t sure when that had happened yet. Or why? If there was a reason.
“So…you want to be alpha?” she asked softly.
He blew out a long breath, like he’d been waiting to rise to the surface to breathe again. “It’s my blood right. I should have taken over as alpha on my twenty-first birthday.”
“But you were at college,” she murmured, more to herself. Then lifted her steady gaze to him. “Why didn’t you come back then?”
“Intelligence from within the pack indicated that it would be a bloody fight to wrest control from my uncle, and support wouldn’t be with an uneducated, untested youth.”
“Therefore, the apprentice thing.” Not a question.
Cade nodded. “He’d driven me out of town for a reason, to keep his position as alpha permanent, rather than temporary until I came of age. However, all reports I received said he was running the pack without issue. A bit of a dictator, maybe too harsh with other shifter groups nearby, but the pack wasn’t suffering.”
“But now he’s dead, and the position of alpha is open.” She pushed the roast beef around on her plate. “And you’ve been training to be alpha in Denver.”
Cade smiled. His mate was quick. “Yes.”<
br />
“But you have to fight for it?” He could practically see the wheels turning in her mind, then her gaze sharpened. “Keith. Your cousin. He’s claiming he’s alpha?”
“I always did like how smart you are.”
He went to shovel a bite onto his fork, but she leaned forward and put her hand over his. “I never liked him, but do you have to fight?”
He frowned over the first bit. Keith had gone to school with them, but he’d been a bit younger. “Only if he forces the issue. The pack will only respect an alpha strong enough to take and keep the position.”
Worry pulled her mouth into a frown, and he reached out to tip her chin up, making her look at him. “I’m bigger, stronger, and he’s never seen me fight. But I grew up watching him fight. I’ll be okay.”
“Promise me you won’t kill him,” she whispered.
Damn. His little human really didn’t understand his kind. “I promise. No killing.” He crooked a grin. “Maybe a little maiming.”
She fell silent and they both finished their dinner, though ever sense of his was focused on her. He hardly tasted the roast beef. Still quiet, she brought out a pan of brownies…and a ruler.
Cade couldn’t hold a straight face. “Are you going to punish the brownies?” he asked. “What’d they ever do to you?”
She tossed him a prim look. “No, smartass. I’m going to make them Christmas tree shaped.” Then offered a shy smile. “I saw it online. I thought…you might like it.”
His wolf gave a satisfied little rumble in his head. Their mate was doing this for them. Something Christmasy. She was also allowing them to see a vulnerability, not hiding her need for precision as she lined the ruler up and used it to cut precise lines.
“See?” she scooted the pan over.
Plain brownies—which did smell delicious—cut into the shapes of pine trees. No embellishments, no clutter, but she’d made an effort. Rather than yank her into his lap and claim her mouth as his, he forced a laugh. “I can practically hear Santa’s sleigh now.”
