A Werewolf's Valentine: BBW Wolf Shifter Paranormal Romance (2 page)

The door opened, bringing in a blast of cold, rainy wind. McKenzi set the pot down on the burner and gladly moved to intercept the new customers and get them seated with menus.

By the time she was done with that, a new set of arrivals came in the door. At the same time the last of the coffee drinkers all looked at their watches and exclaimed
where did the time go
? They paid and moved out so that McKenzi and Amelia, who had been on duty since 11:30, could clear the tables and reset them. The dinner rush was on.

At 6:30, just when they would have had to begin taking names, the rush abated. As Amelia untied her apron, she said quickly, “The only table I have left is Twelve. Here’s his ticket. Have a good one, Kenz.”

“See ya,” McKenzi said, as Amelia shoved her tips into her purse, pulled on her raincoat, and headed for the door.

All during the dinner rush, McKenzi had been aware of the lone guy still at that table in the corner, like he gave off invisible heat rays. She kept expecting him to get up to pay and leave, and she’d tried to position herself so she could get a good look at what was going on below that tee shirt. After all, a girl gets her entertainment where she can, right?

But now Amelia was gone, everybody was eating and talking, and Mrs. Nixon didn’t let the wait staff slap down tickets, as she felt it was rude. The customer had to indicate they were leaving—and they might always want something else. The rule was to go ask, “Would you like something else?”

McKenzi headed for Table Twelve, braced for the effect of those amazing gray eyes, and said, “Would you like something else?”

His perfect mouth—with little shadows at the corners, just like Spike when he was about to snark at Angel—curved, and McKenzi felt it, rather than heard it,
Yeah. You.

Or maybe she just she wished she’d heard it, she thought as she took in the chiseled cheekbones, the clean line of his jaw, the set of his shoulders in that leather coat.

“One more, please,” he said, looking down at his cup. “For the road.”

His looking down released her, and she could move, and speak, again. “Coming right up,” she  . . . squeaked.

Geez, this was like being thrown back to ninth grade, and her discovery that real boys—like Luke Morton of the glorious long eyelashes—definitely had the edge on TV crushes.

She fetched the coffee and poured. What could she say?
Nothing embarrassing, nothing embarrassing,
“Hey, if you’re heading up Highway 1, it can be tough at night. Especially with all this rain. Mud slides. Take it slow.”

“Thanks for the warning,” he said. His voice was low and slow, whisky and gunpowder.

Nobody had a
right
to be that sexy.

He thanked her for the coffee, then said, “What do you do for fun around here?”

“Strip poker.” It was out before she knew she was even talking.
Oh, that wasn’t embarrassing!

His eyes widened, his eyebrows—a shade darker than his hair—lifted a little in the middle, then his eyes narrowed. “I guess I walked into that one.”

“No,” she said on an outward breath, for she had seen no hint of snobbery or ass-hat attitude in his face, or heard it in his voice. “No, you didn’t. Oh, yeah, we hear it a lot, especially from the hipsters driving between the Bay Area and L.A. who think they are just too cool to live, but you were totally not that guy. I’m a blurter. I blurt things. Like, um, now.”

Aaaaand there was the radioactive blush again, as if she really were back in ninth grade, and Luke Morton had sneered down at her from the pinnacle of his senior privilege.

Except Luke had never, ever been a hundredth this hot.

“Mac-KENNN-zee,” a familiar voice yodeled from another table. “Melissa’s ready for her bread pudding!”

McKenzi jolted. How long had she been standing there? “Coming, Pam,” McKenzi said as she scuttled to Table Six, where a local family celebrating their eldest daughter’s birthday sat with empty plates. “Bread pudding, Melissa?” McKenzi chirped and gave them her brightest smile. “How about the rest of you kids? Pam? Bill?”

She got the birthday girl her bread pudding with a candle, sang with the rest of the family, fetched the food for Table Three, then did a fast coffee round, all while feeling the heat of Twelve’s gaze. Or maybe it was her own heat pulling her back there.

When the tables were all content she turned his way, wondering if she were wearing roller skates, his ten-on-the-Richter-scale sexiness would zoom her straight over there without her moving a muscle. Because that was some powerful magnetism.

“McKenzi,” he said slowly—her name had never sounded so hot. “I knew one once.”

“I’m not surprised,” she said. “At least I didn’t get stuck with Ashley. Which is a great name, but there were nine in my class alone. And when you consider fewer than five hundred kids in the entire school . . .” She shrugged, aware she was blurting—again. “What’s yours?”

“West,” he said.

“Okay, don’t know anyone with that as a first name.”

“It’s my last name,” West said. “Weston. Got shortened when I was a kid.”

The door opened to customers, busy shaking out their umbrellas and exclaiming about the rain pouring down. McKenzi went to get them settled, and afterward, seeing everyone was busy with their food, she made her way back to West. After all, he was a customer, too.

“Can you sit down and join me?” he asked.

McKenzi grinned. “My boss is pretty laid back, but I’m the only wait staff on the floor.”

He was turning his coffee mug around and around in his fingers. He had fine hands, she noticed. Though one was scarred across the top, a slash that disappeared up his wrist into the leather sleeve. “I have to admit, I’m still back at strip poker,” he said in that low growl of a voice.

McKenzi gulped to hide the surge of heat Down South, and smothered a laugh. “Gotta have something to do out here in the sticks.”

“Did you grow up here?”

“Yep.”

“Must have been  . . .” He left the sentence open, as if he’d said too much, and lifted one leather-covered shoulder.

“Boring? Predictable?” she said.

He grinned as he shook his head, and deep dimples appeared on either side of that kissable mouth. “Not if you play strip poker for fun.” He laughed softly, and her toes curled inside her shoes. He went on, “Of course I guess it would depend on who you played with.”

“So for instance, if three guys showed up right now, poked their heads through that door, and said, hey, we need a fourth . . .?”

This time both shoulders twitched in a faint shrug. “Don’t happen to swing that way. But if you had a couple of sisters—no. Sorry. That sounded way better in my head.”

He winced, and she laughed with him. She liked how easy he was. Hot, well-spoken . . . could he possibly be lonely? No guy this amazing could possibly be lonely. He was just waiting out the latest band of rain before driving on to his no-doubt glamorous life. Maybe her intense reaction to him was due to the fact that Upson Downs’ pickings were actually getting kind of slim. Most of the guys her age had paired off, and she wasn’t attracted to the just-hitting-college set. Too many of them she’d babysat.

“I get off at midnight,” she said suddenly.

His head tipped slightly, and his eyes seemed to darken, or maybe it was a trick of the light. “Is that an invitation?” he asked. “Just making sure.” He spoke low, in that smoky voice that made her thighs squeeze together.

Hey, if it turned out he was a perv or an axe-murderer, she could shift to her cat self and be out the window in a flash. Of course that would leave him in her room, but Sheriff Odom could take care of that.

“I’ve got a deck of cards,” she whispered.

Two

West

When he was especially cold and hungry, there were nights when West didn’t care if he lived or died.

Once daylight arrived, and he’d managed to scavenge a meal and curl up somewhere in relative safety long enough for a sleep, he refused to give in to whoever had catapulted him from his vaguely remembered pack into a world of loneliness and hurt. There were days, especially when he’d gone too long without food, when the only thought that kept him going was this: if he punched his ticket, They would win.

After a lifetime’s futile search for his pack, he still didn’t know who They were. But with every cell of his body, he didn’t want Them to win.

And once in a while, survival had benefits, even if they never lasted. Like today.

Two days ago, he’d been in wolf form, sniffing around a promising trash can beside an old shed. An old woman with dark skin and hair more silver than his had come outside her isolated house, slipping and sliding in the mud as she struggled to fetch fire logs from the shed. He’d shifted out of his wolf, put on his clothes, and walked up to her, saying, “I’ll sing for a meal.”

She’d peered at him, asked him to repeat himself, then said, “I’m too deaf to hear singing. But if you’ll stack me this firewood up on the porch wheres I can reach it, I’ll share my dinner with you.”

He’d done better than that, carrying a week’s logs up onto her dry porch, then splitting the bigger pieces down with the axe he found in the shed. While he worked, she told him that her son couldn’t get up the road because it had washed out, and she wasn’t getting any spryer, but at eighty-seven, she was lucky to be on her pins. As he worked he listened to the slow cadence of her words, hearing the musical drawl of Kentucky, the harsher consonants of a childhood in the Dust Bowl, and the clipped sentences of a woman who had worked with her hands all her long life.

By the time they’d sat down at her little table, with canned corned beef and hash scrupulously split down the middle, he’d had her song forming in his head. When he’d scraped the last bits off the plate, she’d surprised him by offering him a wrinkled twenty.

“Take it,” she said, with quiet dignity. “You did an honest day’s work, and you should get an honest day’s pay.”

He’d thanked her, tucked the twenty into his jeans, then left the house. Beyond the shed he’d rolled his clothes up, shifted, and began his run north.

And so here he was two days later, having just now enjoyed that rarity, a hot meal, and a brown-eyed woman with a thousand possible melodies twining around her curves and lilting in her voice, hit him right between the eyes with “Strip poker.”

He expected any moment to wake up and find himself curled in some cave, wet and crawling with fleas, because he did not believe in miracles. But he kept sitting there, and talking to her, and hoping she’d come back so he could memorize another detail about her for the thrumming melody he could feel forming down deep in his gut.

Then sure enough, reality clipped over in squeaky shoes after McKenzi went away for the third time. It was the gray-haired boss lady, who said, “Can McKenzi get you anything more, sir?”

In other words,
Pay up and take off
.

He took the twenty out of his pocket, left it on the table, and walked out. The cold hit him, making him shrug tighter into his jacket. At least he was warm, his belly full. He stood under the restaurant’s slanted awning as the passing storm dripped, and sniffed the wind.

His blunted human senses only registered pure, rain-scrubbed air carrying the sharp scent of wood smoke, and a hint of brine from the sea half a mile away. His wolf had scented not just animals, but shifters, all over the hills. Maybe he had dreamed that, too. The second day without food he could get somewhat light-headed.

He had several hours before midnight. Assuming McKenzi had meant what she said. Maybe she had a boyfriend who’d show up, or she’d just tell him to get lost. He should keep running. He’d planned to keep running, even though he’d given up trying to find his pack many years before. They were gone—either dead or just dispersed. His search had become a quest for something he couldn’t name, or maybe he ran because he’d always run, it was habit. It was easy.

A skinny, one-eyed coyote shifter he’d saved from a boozed-up gang of rednecks outside of Morro Bay had bragged about how he’d heard that Marin County was full of rich people, who had rich people trash. If a guy couldn’t find work as a human, maybe he could survive as a wolf.

That seemed as good a new destination as any, West had thought. So he’d hunted down a couple of fat rabbits and left them for the kid, who’d been too beat up by those rednecks to run.

So here he was, a new town, another verse in the song of his life. Marin could wait another day.

He gazed from the darkness inside the golden windows of the restaurant, to where McKenzi stood at the stainless steel divider between the restaurant and the cook. She was different from the women he’d met so far, though it was hard to pin down why, and he knew he’d be running words and notes through his head until he found the ones that captured her heart-shaped face, dominated by big brown eyes and a lot of glossy, curly brown hair, and her laughing voice that scorned Valentine’s Day.

It had been her voice that first caught his ear, a note of pure gold in it—a bit of laughter, and earth and fire. From what he saw under that god-awful apron, there was a whole chorus waiting, a hymn to curves. During his long rambles he’d encountered all kinds of women, some predatory, some troubled, some young, some old. He sang to them if they wanted music. If they wanted to share some heat, he was ready for that, and then he’d move on.

But this woman, he could feel powerful music all around her, just waiting to be gathered up and spun into song. Could be it wasn’t for him, but he had to stay—he had to find out.

So he made his way around back. The town only seemed to have one main street, with a scattering of houses here and there on both sides, stretching up into the hills. With the speed of long practice he found an old bicycle shed and shucked his clothes. He’d devised a way to roll them up tight with his belt, which he carried in his jaws when he traveled as a wolf.

Right now he wanted to explore—check the place out. Learn what he could, so nothing would take him by surprise.

He found a dry spot to hide his clothes, shifted, and set out to do a roam. He didn’t get very far before the rain started up again, but not before he caught the scent of a variety of animals criss-crossing around and behind the restaurant and the nearby buildings. The rain began coming down in sheets, so he stayed near the main street, finding yet more animal trails—animals that usually did not run together, or even cross one another’s territory. Yet in spite of the wet, many of these tracks were quite fresh.

He made his way back to his shed, where he shifted back to his human self. The bitter cold closed in. He dressed quickly, then waited with the patience of long habit until the big clock on the church tower at the top of the street indicated midnight straight up.

He stepped around to the back of the restaurant—and she was there, outlined in gold from the outside lights.

“West?” she said, blinking into the darkness.

“I’m here.” He stepped out of the shadows, ready for—anything.

“Okay. How do you want to do this? Follow me, or . . .”

“I don’t have a car,” he said.

“You don’t? How’d you get here? Greyhound?”

He made a noise that could have meant anything. He hated lying, except for survival, and this was not a survival situation. He didn’t want to lie to
her.

“What the hell,” she said. “Hop in.” She indicated a rattletrap VW. He got into the passenger seat, and she fired it up.

“I live at the top of the hill right behind us,” she said. “In the summer we could walk right up, but now, I’m afraid we’d need a canoe. If canoes could go up, that is.” She turned off the main street and shifted down to climb a steep street. “So where you from?”

“All over,” he said.

“What do you do?”

“Write songs,” he said.

“Do you sing? Play an instrument?”

“I sing them, and when I can get some, play any kind of strings. They’re hard to hold onto.”

“Okay,” she said, and then shot him a quick look that heated him up again, made it hard to think. “I’m done with my third degree. Your turn.”

He said, “So what are reasons 1-1,456?”
McKenzi, McKenzi, McKenzi
, he was thinking: was that a sexy name, or did she make it sexy with that power of hers?

“Reasons what?”

“That Valentine’s Day sucks,” he said. “You were right on the other side of that divider thing, expressing what I think. I wonder if our reasons are the same.”

“You want all my reasons why Valentine’s Day totally sucks rocks?”

“Yep.”

“It’s fake,” she said.

“Yep.”

“And commercial.”

“Yep.”

“And sets up totally impossible expectations.” Her voice hitched a half-note higher.

“No argument here.”

“And it results in pink aprons that ought to be number one on fashion hit lists,” she said in an airy voice, as if she was determined to keep things easy, but he sensed a river of feeling beneath. “Along with glittery crepe paper, cards with bad art and worse rhymes, annoying commercials, and . . .”

Her voice had begun to sharpen, as if those emotions were getting their way in spite of her. But she stopped there, and shrugged. Then she pulled up in a parking space above a couple of small rooftops that seemed to belong to cottages, and parked.

The headlights caught a curtain of silver before she shut them off, and they got out of the car. She didn’t speak as they splashed down rainy steps to the small porch of the nearest cottage. She opened the door—unlocked. This was that kind of town? Amazement washed through him, followed by warmth and regret and then envy, cold as the rain. Did she know what she had?

Then she turned on the lights, and they looked at one another. Without that ugly pink apron hiding her, she was  . . . poetry in motion, everywhere a generous arc, with an angle here and there as grace notes: the hint of collarbone peeking above the neck of her damp tee, the square pockets of her jeans drawing the eye to the extravagant curve of her hips. He realized he was staring, and shifted his gaze away—

And stood there in a quiet kind of shock.

There wasn’t much furniture, and the little he saw seemed old, comfortably shabby, with a TV next to an old-fashioned CD player. It was the inner two walls that drew his eye. Spreading from one to the other was a mural of the little town, divided by its main street, only stylized, with the ocean gleaming between the two slopes, whales dancing under the sun far out to sea. And in the town, everywhere, little animals doing people things. A whole community of them.

“Wow,” he breathed.

“You like?” McKenzi’s mouth curved. “My sister painted that.”

He liked it so much it almost made him dizzy, though maybe that was the effect of her powerful proximity.

The clink of glass startled him, and he found her moving about in a tiny kitchen. “Here, this’ll warm you up—I notice you’re wet.”

She pressed a glass into his hand, with an inch of brown liquid in it and heady fumes rising off it. She clinked hers to his, and he drank whatever it was—and discovered the burn of really good scotch. Fiery heat slid smooth as silk all the way down.

He turned to her, to find her pretty mouth curving, her pupils huge. “So, the deck of cards,” she said. “Wanna play?”