Longing for Wolves (Shifter Country Wolves Book 5)

Longing for Wolves: Shifter Country Wolves #5
 

Copyright © 2016 Roxie Noir

All rights reserved.

Longing

for

Wolves

Shifter Country Wolves #5

Roxie Noir

This is a work of fiction.
 

Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner.
 

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

Excerpt

“Thanks for helping,” she said. “If you guys hadn’t been there, I probably would have just set everything on fire and walked away.”

“It’s good we were there, because that’s a terrible plan,” Calder said solemnly.

“It never would have caught with the burst pipe,” added Sam.

“True,” she said, and sighed. Then she shook herself, just a little, and remembered her manners.

“I’ve got some experimental cupcakes,” she said. “You guys want one?”

“Of course we want cupcakes,” Calder said.

Annika went to the table and opened a box, pulling out three cupcakes.

“What makes them experimental?” Sam asked. “They just look like chocolate.”

“They’re a little weird inside,” said Annika, already undoing the wrapper of one. “You’re not allergic to peanuts, right?”

“Nope,” said Calder, taking a huge bite and getting chocolate frosting on his face. “Hey, peanut butter,” he said, his mouth full.

“I told you,” Annika said, nibbling at the edge of hers. She was so wound up that she wasn’t even hungry, despite usually being her own biggest fan.

For a few moments, they just ate cupcakes. Calder scarfed his, while Sam and Annika ate slower.

“You’re covered in frosting,” Sam pointed out to Calder. He was only halfway through his own cupcake.

“Sorry, I got excited,” he said.

Annika tossed him the paper towels, and he tore one off, wiping his face off.

“You finishing that?” he asked Sam.

“Yes,” said Sam. “Stop looking at it.”

Calder reached out and swiped a fingerful of frosting from Sam’s cupcake, but before he could get it into his mouth, Sam grabbed his wrist. Calder just laughed.

“I tried,” he said.

Sam stuck Calder’s finger in his mouth and sucked the frosting off, and something changed in Calder’s face. It was something small, something that Annika couldn’t exactly identify, but it was
there
.

Annika swallowed.

I wouldn’t mind watching that again
, she thought.

“Is
that
what happens when I steal frosting?” Calder said. His voice lowered, his deep blue eyes glinting.

Sam shoved the last quarter of the cupcake into his mouth, and Calder laughed again. Annika kept nibbling,
way
more interested in what was happening in front of her than in chocolate frosting.

“There’s a lady present,” Sam said, and winked at Annika.

“Don’t mind me,” she said quickly. “There’s about a gallon of frosting in the fridge if you’re interested.”

And you can lick it off each other all night
, she thought.

“Is that what you’re into?” Calder teased, turning toward her. He leaned against the counter on the opposite side of her kitchen, only a couple of feet away. “Was your
real
hangup that you’re a frost-o-philiac, and you need to watch people lick icing off of things to get off?”

“I wish,” said Annika. “I own a bakery, so my days would be a nonstop
orgy
.”

“I don’t think it was the frosting,” Sam said. He slid an arm around Calder’s waist.

Nope
, thought Annika, her pulse speeding up.

“You think she’s finally getting the triad thing?” Calder asked.

“I get triads,” she said, feeling a little defensive.

“Are you sure?” Sam asked. “I know a way to find out.”

“And
you
said we had to take it slow with her,” Calder teased his mate.

“She got nervous telling me you’d hit on her,” Sam said.

“Weird,” Calder said, and winked at her. “But adorable.”

“Oh, come on,” Annika said. “I’m not
that
bad.”

She swallowed hard. She felt like she couldn’t quite breathe right, like there was
something
about to happen that she could barely wait for.

“Hey,” Sam said, his voice getting low and gravelly. “Kiss me.”

Calder turned his head so their faces were an inch apart.

“But
she’s
watching,” he said. His hand found the bottom of Sam’s shirt and he wound his fingers around it, revealing an inch of Sam’s hipbone.

Annika had completely forgotten about the bakery.

Chapter One

Calder

Rustvale
,
the sign over the highway read. A white arrow pointed to the narrow exit ramp that cut between the huge evergreens and then disappeared.

You don’t have to go
, Calder thought to himself.
Just ride past. No one will ever know you were this close. You could make Yreka by nightfall, maybe even the Oregon border.

Ever since he’d left Big Sur that morning, there had been a cold fist squeezing his heart. It hadn’t let up for a second. Not that Calder had been expecting for it to stop.
 

He’d been expecting it to tighten and tighten, the closer he got to home.

It had.
 

He took a deep breath and flexed his fingers quickly from the handlebars of his motorcycle, letting the seventy-five-mile-per-hour wind stream between his knuckles.

You came this whole way
, he told himself.
Don’t back out now.

Calder leaned into the exit, peeling off of the freeway. At the bottom of the ramp he came to a stop on a two-lane road, sunlight flickering between the massive trees that dominated this part of Cascadia. The only cars were the ones up above on the freeway overpass, and through his helmet he could hear them hum and swish along.

There was only one sign of civilization, a Shell gas station. Calder looked at it suspiciously, flexing his hands, cold and worn out with the vibration of his machine.

That used to be something else
, he thought.
Some mom-and-pop joint.

Is this where I dumped a whole bottle of Coke on Greta’s head in the parking lot?

Parts of the memory were blurry. He hadn’t been more than eight or nine, and Greta had been little. She had done
something
to deserve getting a whole Coke dumped on her, but Calder could only remember how furious he’d been at his little sister, not whatever it was she’d done.

He remembered the spanking he’d gotten behind the gas station itself with crystal clarity, though. His father had taken care of that while his mother tried to wash Greta off in the gas station’s bathroom. Ingrid, the middle child, had simply stayed in the car and read her book, wanting no part of her siblings’ squabbles.

Calder smiled, still flexing his hands, straightening one long leg at a time. He hadn’t meant to ride for nine hours straight, only stopping to pee and get gas, but nothing else had held any appeal today.

For a moment, the hand on his heart loosened its grip as he remembered his little sister, furious face dripping with soda. A quarter century later, it was funny.

It’s a wonder that my parents never left us in a box on the doorstep of some orphanage,
he thought.
We probably deserved it.

He wondered if Greta remembered having the soda dumped on her, and whether
she
remembered what she’d done.

Is that the sort of thing I can bring up in a Man of Honor speech?
Calder thought. He wrapped his fingers around the handlebars of his bike again.

I’m delusional if I think I’m going to be in the wedding party. I think you’re supposed to show up more than a couple of days in advance for that.

The fist clenched around his chest again, even tighter than before, at the reminder of where he was going and who was going to be there. Calder made a fist and rubbed his chest through his leather jacket. In front of him, the onramp for Interstate 5 beckoned. It would be so easy to get back on, ride into Oregon...

Then he shook his head. He squeezed the clutch and eased the bike forward, past the gas station where he’d tormented his little sister, and on toward the town he’d called home.

It got worse.
 

Once, not long after he’d left Rustvale, Calder had decided to join a motorcycle gang. As part of his initiation, they’d wanted him to handle a drug handoff: he gave a pallet of guns to a bunch of men in camouflage, way out in the desert, and they gave him a duffel bag of cocaine.

That had been less nerve wracking than this. Afterwards he’d quickly decided that even though he rode a bike, the motorcycle gang life wasn’t for him, so he’d ridden off in the middle of the night.

But now he wished he could trade places, exchange a hundred guns for a ton of coke. A thousand.

Rustvale hadn’t changed at all. Main Street looked exactly the same, down to the flowers in the planters dotting the sidewalk. Calder rode at a snail’s pace behind a minivan, the noise of his motorcycle echoing off the brick and wood buildings, making everyone’s heads turn to look at him.

He began to wish he’d taken another route to Greta’s place as he looked into the faces of the people who turned to look at him. The fist squeezed so tight that he could barely breathe, and he was gladder than ever for the helmet covering his face.

The minivan stopped at a crosswalk, and Calder nearly hit their rear bumper. It took all his self-control not to swerve around the van, dodge oncoming traffic, and speed out of town as fast as he could to where no one would look at him.

On the sidewalk, a tall man with chin-length brown hair was looking into a window, his back to Calder.

Calder stopped. The minivan moved forward slowly, but he didn’t. He was completely frozen, every muscle locked into place.

It was him. It
had
to be him, it looked just like him from behind.
He
still lived in Rustvale, after all, or at least that was what Greta said.

A car honked behind Calder, but the sound didn’t even register.

The man turned. Calder held his breath.

It wasn’t him.

The car behind Calder honked again and he heard it this time, gunned his engine forward a block, feeling the blood rush into his face.
 

Until he reached Greta’s street, he kept his eyes locked on the minivan’s license plate, then turned and parked in front of the Tooth & Claw.

Even though his whole body screamed with the desire to get off his bike, Calder took a moment, his helmet still on.

You thought just because you were gone, everything would change?
You thought that without you, the bricks would crumble? The asphalt might split, the wood might rot?

He almost wished that the town
had
crumbled. Being here, in the early evening, early summer, made it feel like he’d just gotten off of work at the bookstore, and now he was getting on his bike, heading out of town to the cabin that he and Sam had built, where the three of them had lived.

Being in Rustvale made it feel like the last seven years hadn’t happened.

There
it was, the wave of longing so strong it almost felt like nausea, and Calder closed his eyes inside his helmet, willing it away.

Just the wedding and you can leave again
, he told himself.
Four days. Go to Greta’s, do what she says, attend the wedding, be on your way. Maybe you won’t even cross paths with him.

Calder finally looked up and took his helmet off. On the sidewalk, a kid stared and pointed as he parked his bike, and Calder couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows. Really? In a wolf town, a motorcycle was news?

He ran a hand through his half-wild hair, knowing that no amount of finger-combing was going to undo nine hours in a helmet. Then he looked at himself in his bike’s side-view mirror and made a face.

I need a haircut
, he thought.
 

Finally Calder stepped off his bike, grabbed his backpack that held most of his worldly possessions, and walked into Greta’s bar.

As he stood in the door, Calder tried to remember what it had been before. Another bar, maybe? Or was this where that terrible, stuffy restaurant had been, the one that felt like a relic from the 1950s, with specials on meatloaf or liver and onions?

Whichever it was, it looked better now. Solid wood bar, pool tables, and a row of booths in the back. At seven on a Tuesday, it was pretty empty. Just two men drinking beers at the far end of the bar and a couple playing pool.
 

There was no one behind the bar, but in front of the beer taps sat a plate of brownies, and Calder’s stomach growled. He hadn’t eaten since... breakfast, maybe?
 

That couldn’t be right. He’d eaten breakfast on the coast that morning, at a diner that looked over the bluffs and onto the crashing waves. The food had been bad and overpriced, but the view was worth it.