Reign: A Royal Military Romance (32 page)

Miles’s jacket was warm and comforting, and in a few minutes, Delilah had stopped shivering, finally warming up. She put her arms through it, remembering again how much
bigger
he was than her, how her fingertips didn’t even reach the ends of the jacket’s arms, how she could have practically worn the thing as a dress.

She sneaked another look at his arm, the tattoo still peeking out. It didn’t look faded yet, still fresh and black. He’d gotten officially initiated, then, into the inner circle sworn to put pack above all else.

“I heard your dad died,” Miles said, suddenly.

“He did,” said Delilah. “That’s why I’m back. I gotta clean out his house, deal with all of his —“ she paused. Now didn’t seem like the right time to lay into her father like she really wanted to.
Speak no ill of the dead
and all that, even if she’d thought she was finally free of his mess, only for it to come back on her after his death. “Affairs,” she finished. “I have to deal with his affairs.”

“That’s gotta be hard,” he said. “Just you, no siblings.”

“I’m hoping it won’t take too long,” she said. “A week, maybe?”

“The clinic is always looking for doctors,” Miles said, his face half-teasing. “Especially ones who understand the most common condition in Fjords,” he said.

That
brought a smile to her face. The most common condition, of course, was bear-shifter-itis, and it was an open secret that a good two thirds of the town had it. That was half the problem: combine the strange politics of shifters with their archaic social structures with the insularity of small towns, and things got stifling, fast.

Delilah wasn’t moving back, not ever.

“How’s Nathan?” she asked, trying to change the subject.

Something in Miles’s manner shifted, and Delilah sensed that she’d gotten too close to something.

“He’s doing okay,” Miles said. “He’s not at college anymore, but I think he’s gonna get his life together.”

“He still living with your parents?”

“Yeah. They threaten to kick him out once a week, but it’ll never happen.”

“How are they doing?”

“They’re fine,” Miles shrugged. “Dad and Roy are still thick as thieves.”

Delilah just nodded. She’d always been afraid of Miles’s dad. Nothing had been proven, but when she and Miles were twelve or so, the police had been interested in him for a murder further north. They never pinned anything on him, but she’d always suspected that he traded dirty work with another pack. After all, sometimes shifters who were causing problems up and disappeared.

Every so often, Delilah heard stories of bear shifter packs who weren’t so bloody and violent, where the pack was run more democratically and not just according to the whims of the man with the most brute force strength, but she’d never seen it in practice, not even in California.

Not that she’d known any shifters in California. It had been lonely, driving into Marin every weekend to shift, taking the long trip to the Sierras every month or so for a good, long weekend in her other form. She’d missed gallivanting around with other shifters, wrestling and fishing and doing all the bear stuff she loved. What she hadn’t missed were the brutal pack politics, the wild misogyny, or the long Alaska winters.

One of the officers on the scene came over to the two of them, Miles standing there in just his t-shirt, Delilah with her arms inside his jacket, wrapped tightly around her.

“Miles,” he said, nodding.

“Steve,” Miles said.

Officer Steve wrote something down on his notepad, then turned to Delilah.

“Name?” he asked.

The questioning didn’t take too long since it was so obvious what had happened: Larry had drunkenly run a red light and nearly killed someone. Ten other witnesses had seen the whole thing, and Larry was getting a breathalyzer test in the ambulance as they spoke.

When Officer Steve was finished, he put his notebook away on his belt and looked from Miles to Delilah, uncertainly.

“She’s cool,” Miles said.

“I know it’s a lot to ask,” Officer Steve said. “But the law really ought to take care of this one, Miles.”

“I know, Steve,” Miles said. He rested his thumbs in his belt loops and looked down at the pavement. Delilah felt her heart skip a single beat at something in his movement — it was just so familiar, and so....
sexy
. “I’ll do what I can, but it’s no promise.”

“That’s all I want,” said the officer.

Then he nodded at Delilah and walked away to talk to some other witnesses.

Delilah looked down at her watch. “I should get going,” she said. “Jeez, it’s almost seven. I forgot how light it stays up here.” She started to shrug off the jacket, but Miles put a hand out.

“Keep it until you get home,” he said. “I saw you use yours on Susan.”

“Come on,” she said, holding it out.

Miles raised his hands in front of himself and began backing away, toward his old pickup truck. Delilah recognized that, too — he’d had it since high school.

“I’ll get it next time I see you,” he said, and then he got into the cab and was gone.

Delilah walked slowly back to her own car and buckled herself in, around Miles’s jacket. She turned the key and then cranked the heat, let the officers stop traffic briefly to let her out. All the way to the grocery store, she kept her mind carefully blank, except for one thought:

I guess I’ll be seeing Miles again
.

T
he one thing
that had changed in Fjords, it seemed, was the layout of Carr’s grocery store. At some point in the past seven or eight years, they’d repainted it, taken down the tired, chipping signs over the aisles and replaced everything. Even the lighting was better, the ugly fluorescents of her childhood gone and replaced with something just a tiny bit more pleasant. Alaska prices hadn’t gone down at all, though. It was still wildly expensive to ship groceries all the way up there.

She didn’t even need very much — peanut butter, bananas, yogurt, bread — but Delilah found herself wandering the grocery store for a little while, seeing what sorts of food had made it up to Fjords, Alaska. To her surprise, they had tofu now, but still no kombucha. The apples were tired and bruised, the avocados all bright green.

Something had made her leave Miles’s jacket in her car. She’d realized, back at the accident, that she still knew most of the people who lived in town, and she suspected she’d be recognized. Better if she wasn’t already wearing the jacket of the boy she’d dated in high school —
that
would be sure to get people talking.

All the same, in a strange way, the inside of the grocery store felt like proof that Fjords
could
change, when it wanted to, proof that it wasn’t just stuck in time even if it felt that way. Carr’s could get better lighting and a new layout and could stock tofu. Who was to say that she couldn’t move on from her shitty father, that the town couldn’t find new industries and thrive again? Who was to say that the violent, hyper-masculine pack was the way that things had to be?

Who was to say she, too, was stuck in the past, feeling a twinge of
something
for her high school sweetheart?

Of course you felt something
, she reasoned with herself, walking down the beer and wine aisle. She grabbed an exorbitantly expensive six-pack of Sierra Nevada from the shelves and put it in her cart.

Miles was your first love
, she told herself.
You’ll always feel something about that. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just a memory.

By the time she left the grocery store, paying far too much for two scant bags full of food, she had almost convinced herself that it was true.

* * *

D
elilah had never intended
to come back to Fjords.

It had been five years since she’d last spoken to her father, and even that hadn’t gone well. He’d been drunk and it had been late in Alaska and even later in California. She had woken up when the phone in her tiny apartment rang, and she stumbled out of bed, dropping the receiver once, her heart beating fast, because who called at two in the morning if it wasn’t an emergency?

“Lilah,” the voice on the other end had slurred.

“What’s wrong?” she said, panicking, but doing her best to keep her voice down and not wake her roommate.

“You don’t call me anymore,” her father said.

Delilah had gripped the phone until her hand hurt. After everything, he was upset that
she
didn’t call
him
?

“Someone had better be fucking dead for you to call me this late,” she hissed. “I’ve got an eight a.m. class tomorrow.”

“That’s your problem,” he went on, totally ignoring her. “All you think of is
you
. You don’t care about your
people
. Your
family
.”

Her roommate’s bedroom door opened and the other girl padded out, wearing a robe and pajamas, frowning at Delilah.

“What’s wrong?” she whispered. Clearly she also thought someone had died, or gotten into an accident. Something to warrant a phone call this late.

Delilah shook her had. “It’s nothing,” she murmured, one hand over the receiver.

“I heard that,” her father slurred. Her roommate nodded and went back to bed. “I ain’t nothing. We ain’t nothing. Someday you’ll realize that and stop thinking that you’re too good for us, Miss Med School.”

Then he hung up, leaving Delilah open-mouthed in fury, only twenty years old.

* * *

Y
ears later
, unlocking her father’s house with two bags of groceries, it still made her angry. Her going to California, getting an education and making something of herself hadn’t cost him a
thing
. She’d done it on her own, attending Berkeley on a combination of scholarships and student loans, working half-time to pay for her own food and lodging. She’d done the same through medical school, studying her brains out sleepless night after sleepless night.

He, on the other hand, had seen fit to drink himself out of a job and then out of his family by the time Delilah was three. Her mother had taken her and stayed in Fjords because the pack was there, and the pack was what had kept her father alive when he was found drunk on the side of the road or when his electricity got shut off, but she knew he was tolerated at best.

He’d never gotten properly inducted, and when she was a kid, Delilah had looked at other men’s bear tattoos, wishing her dad had one. Her mom had gone to Anchorage at the same time that she’d gone to college in California, and he was left alone in Fjords.

And now he was gone. He’d driven drunk and finally had the bad luck of careening head-on into a Mack truck. The truck driver hadn’t had a scratch, but when Delilah spoke with the police about her father, they’d just assured her that he hadn’t suffered.

She wasn’t totally sure how she felt about that at first, but finally, after five days on the road between Berkeley, California and Fjords, Alaska, she’d decided that he’d suffered enough in life. His death didn’t need to be hard, too.

Delilah walked through the living room with the groceries, doing her best not to look at it. She hadn’t known that her father had been a budding hoarder. There was trash everywhere, things that he’d probably gotten for free from the side of the road, broken furniture, newspapers, pillows and cushions, McDonald’s wrappers. All she’d done so far was clear a path to the kitchen.

At least it didn’t look like he’d used that, she thought, setting the groceries down on the counter. It wasn’t exactly clean, but it wasn’t piled high with random shit the way most of the house was. As far as she could tell, he’d barely used it to do more than reheat pizzas in the oven and keep beers cold in the fridge. Now all the white-and-gold cans were pushed to the back, and she put the milk and yogurt away, then sat heavily at the kitchen table.

She was wearing Miles’s jacket again, and it crinkled when she sat. Slowly, she took it off and laid it over the back of a chair.

Miles had been the absolute worst part of leaving. Delilah didn’t think she’d ever forget his face when she’d told him that she was going to Berkeley instead of the University of Alaska campus in Anchorage, which was a little over an hour away.

He’d barely passed high school, getting C’s and D’s in every class that wasn’t shop class or auto repair, and when they graduated, he’d already had an apprenticeship set up with Dale’s Motors. Leaving Fjords had never really occurred to him — maybe he’d go to California or the Lower Forty-Eight someday, on a vacation or something, but why leave behind everything he’d ever known?

Why leave behind his
people
?

And then, today, he’d been there at the accident. He’d lifted a car off of a woman and then given Delilah his jacket, and she’d felt the same thrill at his touch that she’d felt when she was sixteen and feeling it for the first time.

Delilah rose and went back into the living room to start dealing with the physical mess, at least. The less time she stayed in Fjords, the better. Then she could go back to her real life, down south, where there were no shifter politics, no father’s affairs to deal with.

Most of all, down south, there was no high school sweetheart to tempt her.