Quinn was just as confused as ever and no closer to a solution to her problems. In fact, she felt less confident every day. Part of her blamed Drew for her inability to get it together. She’d been muddled and fuzzy since she’d left him, and every day she felt more and more empty. It was as if something was missing, something she’d never even known existed. There was a gaping hole inside her and every time she looked at it, she could feel Drew deep inside the bottomless pit of loneliness.
She hated that more than anything. He’d cast a spell on her and now she couldn’t get away from him, no matter how far she ran.
Quinn picked up the utility notice, crumpled it, and threw it in the trash can under the sink. She had to get out of here. But where was she going to go? She couldn’t go to her parents’ house. They hated shifters more than anyone she knew.
Shifters had come out to the public twenty years ago, letting the world know that they’d existed alongside humans since the beginning. After the revelation, humans had reacted as they do. The entire society had focused on secluding and limiting shifters’ rights and freedoms. Fear ran deep among humans. Not only could shifters transform into animals, they were also bigger, stronger, and had sharper senses. In many ways, shifters made humans obsolete.
Hate groups formed almost right away. Quinn’s parents were the founders of one of the oldest and most hateful groups in the country. She’d been raised to fear and loath shifters like they were dangerous aliens who’d invaded her planet.
Quinn’s parents used to celebrate when they found out a shifter in the community had been beaten by a cop or jailed for no reason. They wanted more violence, more segregation, more limits to shifter freedom.
When the war started six years ago and the government opened up the shifter draft, most male shifters had served their country. The shifters had not only served, they’d helped bring an end to the brutal war.
When they’d returned, society had changed. The media heralded them as heroes. They were handsomely compensated for their service. The talk shows and women’s magazines couldn’t stop talking about how male shifters were the hot new ticket on the dating scene.
Since the Shifter Equality Act had been passed a few years ago, things had changed for shifters in general. Specifically, human females were now free to date and mate with male shifters. Since male shifters outnumbered female shifters five to one, the men needed human women to mate with. And male shifters didn’t take mating casually. They believed there was one special person for each shifter. They called it being fated mates.
Quinn was Drew’s fated mate. They both knew it. She’d felt it inside. But with her past, she couldn’t see it as anything but treacherous. The truth was, she hated that part of herself. She didn’t want to feel anything but good intentions to shifters. They were human too. Just because they had an animal inside them didn’t mean they were less than human. Maybe they were just a little more.
The fear she’d been raised on wouldn’t leave her alone. So much of what was known about shifters had been the stuff of myth and legend. Most of the old stories were tales of horror and despair. The ones she’d been raised on, anyway. When she went to college, she learned more legendary stories of shifters. There were stories of love as well.
The child within her twisted as she went to her room. The furnished rental was simple, but comfortable enough to live in. There weren’t many of her own things in the house. She left most of her stuff in her condo back in Portland.
She’d been paying the mortgage the entire time she’d been living on the coast. She knew she needed to sell it, but with everything that was going on in her life, she was too distracted to even start.
If she could sell her condo, she might have enough money to get by for a little while longer before she figured out what she was going to do with the rest of her life. No matter what she did, she knew she was going to have a baby coming soon and would have to make concessions for the child. She had so little money left now, she had to make a decision soon.
Quinn pulled her suitcase out from under the bed and began throwing things into it indiscriminately. There was only one place for her to go. Quinn had been putting off the inevitable for some time now. She knew that her one option was going to Fate Mountain and finding her child’s father.
Facing Drew after all this time was not something she was looking forward to. Quinn had no other options left. She couldn’t go to her family. She had abandoned all of her friends. Besides, the child’s father had a right to know she was bringing his baby into the world.
Quinn packed up the rest of her belongings and threw them all into her car. Waddling around to the driver’s seat, she opened the door and slid behind the wheel.
Quinn pulled out onto the highway and drove down to the turnoff, headed east. It was a long drive from the coast to Portland and then to Fate Mountain, but she would be there by the end of the day.
Driving that far this late in her pregnancy wasn’t something she wanted to do, but she didn’t have any other choice.
Chapter 6
Drew poured the hops into the massive pot of boiling malted barley. He took a deep inhale of the scent. He loved the smell of hops and barley. It was probably one of his favorite scents aside from the scent of his mate. Just thinking about how compelling her scent was to him made him angry as hell.
He pushed thoughts of Quinn from his mind and focused on his work. His beer had won several regional awards for excellence since he’d opened the brewery. Even before the war, Drew had been brewing small batches of beer in his kitchen. When the government started giving shifters generous veterans packages, he’d used his to open his own place. It had been one of the happiest days of his life. He still looked back on it and smiled each time it came to mind.
Using a large wooden paddle, he stirred his boiling beer. After a few minutes, he stepped away from the tank and hung up his paddle. Just as he was leaving the brewery, he felt his phone ping. Drew pulled the phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen. What he saw almost made him fall down on his ass.
There was a text from Mate.com. He’d gotten a few over the past nine months from different women. But this was a text he’d never expected to get. It was from Quinn.
“Hey, how are things?” it said.
Drew stared at the text for long moments, his heart racing like a thoroughbred at the Kentucky Derby. He grabbed his chest and took a long breath. Why the hell was she contacting him now? He shoved the phone back in his pocket without responding.
The brewery wasn’t opened this time of day so there weren’t any customers in the tasting room. He went out the front door of the building and got in his SUV. He had to talk to someone about this.
Angus would be in his woodworking shop down the street. Hopefully, he could take a break from making tables and flirting with his wife long enough to have a heart to heart with Drew in his hour of need.
Drew parked in front of Angus’s shop and got out of his car. The sliding doors were open and Drew could see Angus running a plank of wood through a miter saw. He had ear protection and eye protection on, obscuring Drew’s arrival from his senses. When Angus had finished cutting the plank of wood, he turned off the saw and pulled the ear protection away from his ears.
“Hi Drew. What brings you to the shop today?” Angus asked, looking up at him.
“I got a text from Quinn.”
Angus’s eyes widened, and he blinked a few times behind his goggles. He pulled them away from his face and rubbed the sawdust off his chin. Angus tilted his head to the side and gave Drew a concerned looked.
“What did it say?” Angus asked.
“She asked how I was.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you responded?”
“Not yet. I don’t know what to say.”
“Haven’t you been waiting for this for months?” Angus asked.
“No. Not really.”
“Are you really going to try to tell me you haven
’t been waiting for your fated mate to contact you?”
“I’ve resigned myself to live my life alone.”
Angus slapped his hand on Drew’s shoulder and squeezed, pulling Drew closer to him.
“She’s come out of hiding. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to see her?”
“No.”
“Come on, man. You can’t be that angry. She’s your fated mate.”
“She betrayed our bond. Fuck her.”
“Dude. You have to be realistic about this. She is your mate. If she’s asking you how things are, she’s giving you an opening. I know you want your mate.”
“Not anymore. I’ve spent the last nine months trying to convince myself that it will be okay if I never have a mate. Do you know how hard it was for me to be okay with that?”
“Did you ever succeed at being okay with it?”
“Not really.”
“So you haven’t lost anything except maybe some pride.”
“My pride is important to me.”
“Of course it is. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be Drew.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You have a reputation on the crew as being a bit of a drama queen, bro.”
“Me? A drama queen? I would think that distinction would go to Shane.”
“Wild Bear used to be unhinged. He’s never been high maintenance.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Especially from you, Angus.”
Angus squeezed Drew’s shoulder again and pulled Drew into a rough hug. Drew relented to Angus’s hug. He could be infuriatingly simplistic about things, but Angus was a good man with a good heart.
“Why don’t you just text her back? Tell her you missed her.”
“I haven’t missed her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“She betrayed me, Angus. She left me to be alone for the rest of my life. It hurts every single day not to have her here. It’s like a knife cutting into my heart. And you know the worst part? I don’t even know if I like her. We only spent a few hours together.”
“From what you’ve told me, those hours were some of the best of your life,” Angus said, picking up a two-by-four.
“They were. We could have been great together.”
“There’s no reason to believe it couldn’t be great now.”
“I’m not going to get caught in her trap again. I’m past that now.”
“You’ll never be past your mate.”
Angus wasn’t making things any easier. Drew decided to change the subject.
“How was the honeymoon, by the way?”
“It was fantastic. Poppy and I swam every day. The water in the tropics is crystal clear and warm. It was a very nice way to spend time with my mate.”
“I can imagine,” Drew said, crossing his arms.
“Stop standing around being bitter. Go text that girl and get her back.”
“Meh, see ya, bro,” Drew said, turning out the door of Angus’s workshop.
“Good luck,” Angus shouted at his back.
Drew climbed into his SUV and started back home. His inner grizzly was going crazy. The bear growled and roared inside Drew’s head so loudly he could barely drive. Ethereal claws dug behind his eyes and bit into his brain. There was no way he could live with his inner bear acting like this.
When he pulled in front of his house, he grabbed the phone out of his pocket and flicked across the screen with his thumb. Drew pushed open the front door and sat at the dining room table. He let out a deep sigh and clicked on the Mate.com icon on his phone.
Quinn’s text came up, and he read it again. His grizzly gnashed at his ears and bit at his heart. Drew pressed his eyes closed and took three deep breaths. What the hell was he supposed to say now?
Things hadn’t been good since she’d gone, but that was the last thing he was going to tell her. He didn’t even know if he wanted to see her again, despite his bear’s protests to go find her immediately. There was no use in resisting any longer. He had to at least text the woman.
Drew clicked on the screen and brought up the text keypad. He growled and started to type.
“Things are great.”
There. The biggest lie of his life. She deserved it. He felt self-satisfied staring at the screen, waiting for a reply. He hated that he’d fallen back into her web. What if she rejected him again? He didn’t know if he could live with that.
Drew walked into the kitchen and put his phone on the counter beside the stove. Angus had installed cabinets a year ago, and they’d put in nice appliances. The kitchen was still the place he did most of his brew experiments. Small batches of beer in oak barrels were fermenting along the back wall.
He grabbed a steak out of the fridge and threw it in a frying pan with some salt and seasonings. Drew scratched his beard and grimaced at the delicious smell. He used to be a fun bear. What the heck had happened to him? He flipped his steak, and his phone pinged from the counter.
“Good to hear it,” Quinn’s text said.
Drew gritted his teeth as he read the message. What was she playing at? What did she want? Obviously something had changed. But what? Did he even care? His bear rumbled inside him, reminding Drew that his inner grizzly cared very much about what was going on with Quinn. He typed out a quick message almost involuntarily.
“How are things with you?”
He regretted it almost instantly.
“Super strange. TBH.”
“This is strange.”
“I know.”
“Why are you contacting me?” he typed. Might as well put it out there and be honest.
“It’s been a long time.”
“You dropped off the map for nine months.”
“I had my reasons.”
“Which are?”
“I don’t want to talk about it over text.”
“You contacted me.”
“I know.”
Drew put his phone back down and scooped the overcooked steak onto a plate. Dang it. Quinn was ruining his dinner now, along with the rest of his life. He decided he wasn’t going to text her again, no matter how much his bear protested.
He was a man. He was in control of his own life. Right? His grizzly moaned loudly and sulked off into the back of his mind. Drew knew it was a temporary victory. The bear would not be contained when it came to Quinn.
He took his plate to a table and covered the steak in Shane’s secret BBQ sauce. The sauce made up for it being well done, and Drew sliced bites, popping them in his mouth until he was done.
When he took his plate back to the sink, he picked up his phone. She hadn’t answered back. Maybe his attitude scared her off. It was for the best, really. She didn’t want to be his mate. She’d made that perfectly clear. It was better to cut all ties and be done with it.
He rinsed his plate and put it in the dish drain when his phone pinged again.
“I’m sorry.”
Drew looked at the text on his screen, shocked she’d said it. Sorry was something he hadn’t expected to hear from Quinn. That meant she was taking responsibility for her actions. He was so tempted to tell her she should be sorry, but decided against it.
He had no idea how to respond. There was no way he was going to let her back into his life, just so she could stomp all over his heart again.
“That’s something, I guess,” he typed.
“I need to talk to you,” she texted back.
“Isn’t that what you’re doing?”
“I need to talk in person.”
“When?”
“Soon.”
Chapter 7
Drew was obviously angry. How would he feel when she showed up at his doorstep nine months pregnant? She grimaced at the thought of confronting him. Maybe driving to Fate Mountain was a bad idea. Drew hated her, and she didn’t blame him.
She knew what she had done. She was Drew’s fated mate, and she?
??d asked him to mark her. Right afterwards, she’d run away and hid from the world. That had been a really shitty thing to do.
Unlike humans, shifters were only happy with their fated mates. No one else but the perfect match would do. Humans might wonder for a long time if someone was right for them; shifters knew right away. Even their human mates knew.
Quinn could feel her connection to Drew down to her bones the night they spent together. Her entire body had been filled up with his pheromones, and she’d been drenched in him. He had become her everything.
It had all happened so fast, she couldn’t trust it. Nothing in her experience had ever prepared her for such an intense connection with another person.
In all her life, Quinn had never been as terrified as the morning she’d woken up in Drew’s bed with his mark on her neck. It was like waking up in a nightmare. So she’d run. What else was she supposed to do? Stay on Fate Mountain and become Drew’s mail-order bride?
Quinn hadn’t even been serious about a long term relationship when she’d agreed to the date with Drew. By the end of the night, she’d found herself under the expectation of a lifelong bond. She’d been far too freaked out to think straight the next morning.
Now, after all this time in hiding, she needed his help. Quinn felt utterly vulnerable and alone. If Drew rejected her and the baby, what would she do? She didn’t have enough money to make any more mortgage payments on her condo. If she didn’t figure something out fast, it would end up being foreclosed. She had to figure something out fast, or it would all come crashing down around her ears.
Quinn had to admit to herself that she might actually want to make things work with Drew. He was her baby’s father. And he was her fated mate. The feelings she’d had that night weren’t a lie. They had been very real. They were so real Quinn couldn’t accept them. She’d had a long time to think and search herself, and she realized that Drew might actually be the right guy for her.
She didn’t know exactly why she was beginning to think that. Maybe it was the pregnancy hormones, or the fact that she was pretty much destitute. She wouldn’t know for sure until she saw him again.