Crave: A Paranormal Shifter Romance (Blood Moon, Texas Shifters Series Book 2) Read online

  It. Was. On.

  For months, I resisted. We pranked each other like crazy. Snarked and flirted across a lab table in AP Chemistry while I fought not to breathe every time her ponytail, which I was pretty sure at this point was going to be the death of me, brushed my arm. She went to her after-school job at Blair’s, selling cupcakes and muffins while I avoided staring in their shop window on my way home. I went to football practice, tried not to fall on my ass while she ran circles around the track in her sour-cherry red hoodie, and stared up at the ceiling of the room I shared with my brothers at night, picturing me and her, together.

  The rules about interspecies relations were pretty cut and dry. Hookups? Fine. Relationships? Not so much. The werewolf council might not give a damn about a one-night stand after a wild night out at a bar, but get serious with a human and potentially expose the existence of werewolves everywhere? Yeah, you were pretty much screwed.

  Those were the Council’s rules. We wouldn’t even talk about Ben Caldwell’s.

  I told myself our growing friendship was harmless, justified the way my pulse spiked any time she entered a room as some freaky aberration. Every shifter had to learn to leash their inner wolf, particularly at the full moon. That was what this was. Nothing more. Lacey Blair and I were friends, and it never had to go any further.

  That summer, on a lazy July night after we’d been lying out on a blanket at the lake watching the stars come out, we kissed for the first time. Our hands were sticky from ice cream, strands of her ponytail kept getting caught in my mouth, and as she whispered my name, breath tasting of chocolate dipped cone and me, I couldn’t lie to myself any longer. That kiss we never should have shared was the culmination of a thousand others I’d pictured every night before I closed my eyes, a future I’d never allowed myself permission to want. I craved Lacey Blair. And I didn’t know how to stay away from her without destroying us both.

  We met in secret. School started back up in the fall, and we traded notes in the library at lunch where I managed to get us assigned to the same study group. We stole long kisses after football games. Every morning she left a single cupcake from her shift before school at her aunt’s bakery in a pink Blair’s box in my locker, all the feelings forming between us that I never should have allowed to grow spelled out in a thousand flavors of double chocolate fudge, pineapple upside down cake, and decadent buttercream frosting swirls.

  I should have ended things that first fall. But each time I told myself it was time, something always stopped me. Home was a constant pressure cooker. Ethan got into fights and failed classes. I played varsity football and busted my ass pulling in A’s. Our dad wrote him a pass every time, coming down hard on me whenever the two of us fought. He only seemed to see the fault in everything I did, while when it came to Ethan, his mistakes were excused. I felt isolated, in desperate need of someone, anyone who could make me feel good again. And Lacey, whose hair always smelled like sugar from the bakery, who I could go running with, then argue about the best ingredients for salsa (our current favorite featured watermelon, mint, cilantro, jalapenos and sweet Texas onions), then kiss senseless under a canopy of stars, made me feel good. And so I said nothing, letting her work out the tight knots at the back of my neck on nights when things with my dad had gotten especially bad, all the while telling her what at best were half-truths, at worst, lies.

  It was incredibly, unbelievably stupid, but somehow over the course of all those stolen weeks, months and years I convinced myself that one day I would reveal that last secret part of me. And just like she’d accepted my pain of feeling rejected at home, my shame over feeling like an outcast among my brothers, she wouldn’t run away, even knowing what I really was.

  I was careful. We never went past first base. Every month at the full moon, I stayed home from school, making excuses to my mom. I told Lacey my parents were strict and wouldn’t allow me to date, which was only half a lie. If they’d known what I was doing, I would have been homeschooled until graduation with a chain and padlock around my dick. Which was why I couldn’t tell them. I got in so deep my stomach hurt at night even while seeing Lacey Blair was sometimes the only thing that got me up in the morning. I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t give her up. There was a way we could be together. I just had to figure out how.

  Then came the night of the party our senior year, the singular day of my life I would have given anything to take back.

  It never should have happened. The transmission window for lycanthropy was thirty-six hours every full moon, a day and a half when viral loads spiked and human transmission became possible. It was a week early, a week when contact should have been safe, and if you think our dad didn’t have the seven of us Caldwell boys lined up out in the barn making darn sure we knew to wrap it up from the time we were old enough to find our dicks, well, then you didn’t know Ben Caldwell. But in the end, those were just excuses. What mattered was this:

  I was the one to blame for what happened that night. If I’d listened to my parents, I wouldn’t have shattered two families. If I’d stayed away, Lacey Blair would still be human. Instead, despite seventeen years of warnings from my father and Alpha, I had just committed the one unforgivable sin. And destroyed the future of the only girl I’d ever loved.

  I got the ass-whooping of my life. Sometimes I think my dad would have killed me right there on the barn floor if my mom hadn’t stepped in. The truth was, I probably would have let him. Instead he just stared down at me, broken and bleeding while moths swirled crazy patterns silhouetted by the barn’s blinking fluorescent light, and told me to pack a bag and get out of his sight.

  That was the last time he and I spoke for four years.

  The bell over the door jingled.

  “I gotta go,” I said to West, ending the call and tossing my phone on the counter. The TV mounted up in the corner over the bar was replaying game highlights from earlier in the day, casting flickering blue light out across rows of empty tables.

  I balled my hand into a fist. Some things it was better to get over with fast.

  “Wasn’t sure you’d come.”

  “You saw the text from Brody.” Ethan was still in his work uniform of black skinny jeans and a t-shirt that said Dark, the retro hipster coffee bar in town that he and his wife owned.

  Yeah. This was starting off great. Waiting until SportsCenter cut to commercial, I started towards the heat lamps.

  “You hungry? Fixed us a couple of brisket sandwiches before we closed the kitchen—"

  “I’m good.”

  I stopped short. So here’s the thing about the South. We had about a thousand ways to flip someone the middle finger that you could get away with at high tea with the queen, bless your heart being among the more infamous. Announcing you weren’t hungry while sitting in pretty much the best BBQ restaurant south of the Red River was about like walking into Emo’s high-end coffee bar and ordering a can of Coke. Hold the ice.

  And that went double when you were a shifter with a metabolism that burned through ten thousand calories a day.

  Just saying.

  “Want a beer?”

  “That such a good idea?”

  I gripped the counter so hard my knuckles turned white, wondering why the hell I’d agreed to this in the first place.

  “Look, if you just want to go—"

  He muttered something I didn’t catch under his breath. And then—

  “Sprite, I guess, if you’ve got it.”

  When I got back to the table, Ethan was still on his phone, glasses lit up by the glow of the screen. Like he couldn’t stay off social media for five minutes without getting the shakes. I ground my teeth.

  “So. You and Hayden.”

  Closing down the screen, he dropped the phone on the tabletop, slowly rotating it back and forth with one finger. “Yup.”

  Which was followed by possibly the weirdest minute of silence ever. Letting my head fall back, I stared out across The Spoke.

  My dad always said there were two kin
ds of people in life. Those who never could seem to pull their shit together, and the ones who knew when they’d gotten a wake-up call.

  I stopped drinking up in Calgary, got my GED, and wrote about a thousand apology letters to Lacey that she probably burned. Since my uncle’s rules didn’t include access to the phone or widescreen TV in the den, I busied myself when I wasn’t mending fencing or doing repair work out on the ranch by building a smoker.

  Everyone was good at something. The trick in life was figuring out what your something was. Cal worked as a psychiatrist. Brody, in addition to serving as acting pack Alpha, had followed in our dad’s footsteps and become a deputy down at the sheriff’s department. West taught freshman English and creative writing over at the high school. And it turned out I had a knack for making sweet pork ribs so tender they fell off the bone, carne asada marinated in garlic and fresh-squeezed orange juice, and seared Angus cheeseburgers smothered with smoked cheddar and onion strings, which we served the third weekend of every month at The Spoke, always to a sold-out house. But our specialty was slow-smoked beef brisket, so juicy and tender it fell apart the moment you touched it with your fork.

  I built The Spoke with my own two hands, from the dinged-up food truck I’d bought at auction to the brick and mortar restaurant that now drew tourists to our little town of Blood Moon from all over Central Texas. And even if there wasn’t much else in my life I could claim credit for, there was no denying my restaurant was a success.

  I tipped my beer Ethan’s way. “Guess congratulations are in order.”

  He fiddled with his bottle of Sprite, at last having the decency to look uncomfortable.

  “Thanks.”

  Instead of a ring, he’d gotten Hayden Crowe’s initials tattooed on his fourth finger, right above a tiny purple flower. Hayden was a local rock legend, lead guitarist for Daisy Addiction and one of my brother’s former baristas at Dark. Hard to miss the chemistry there, both of them into alternative music and indie rock, not to mention the goth thing, which wasn’t really my scene, but seemed to work for them if the cartoon hearts circling over my brother’s head any time Hayden entered a room were any indication.

  I gestured with my beer. “So what’s with the iris?”

  Ethan shifted in his chair, and for the first time all night, actually smiled.

  “Oh, uh. It’s a violet.”

  “That like a metal thing?”

  He snorted. “Yeah. Metallica. Black Sabbath. Everyone’s doing it.”

  I waited, because it was clear there was a story there, but he just kept staring up at ESPN like he gave a flip whether the Packers won. Or had even heard of them.

  “Not exactly my scene.”

  “Well, you’d know if you had bothered to show up.”

  “So that’s all you’re going to say?”

  For a minute Ethan just let his head hang, picking the label of his unopened Sprite to shreds so that no way would I be able to resell it tomorrow. And then—

  “Meaning?”

  I ground my teeth. “Meaning you’re not even going to apologize?”

  “You skipped out on my wedding and you think I owe you a goddamn apology?”

  I pegged my bottlecap across the room where it bounced off a framed aerial shot of Texas Memorial Stadium with the Longhorn Band out on the field at pregame.

  “Hard to skip out on something you were never invited to in the first place.”

  Ethan shoved his chair back, yanking at the leather cuff strapped around his wrist.

  “You could have come to the reception.”

  I took another pull off my beer. “Turns out I had other plans.”

  “Yeah,” he muttered. “It’s always something with you, isn’t it?”

  I gripped my beer so hard my hand started to hurt. The day after the wedding, there had been a group text from Cal, telling me about a reception they were planning out at the ranch. Guess they finally noticed I wasn’t there. Twenty bucks said it was the moment they figured out they needed someone to handle the catering.

  If it wasn’t West riding my ass, it was Brody. And if it wasn’t Brody, it was Cal. And none of them got it. None of them could. I would never minimize what Lacey had been through by pretending our experiences were even on the same playing field. But you didn’t get banished for four years and come back the same person you were when you left, either. And I’d felt the shift in the way my entire family looked at me when I got back, no matter how hard they tried to hide it. How many warnings had our parents issued over the years? I was now the object lesson. The mistake. The fallen son with tarnished wings. I might have served my time up in Calgary, but there was no scrubbing the shame of what I’d done off my skin. I was toxic. Irredeemable. Damaged.

  My phone buzzed. I swiped to unlock the screen.

  Lacey. A feeling I couldn’t name stirred in my chest. I forced it down.

  BabyGotBake: Supergluing all my pens? Please, Caldwell. I expect better.

  Me: Off night.

  BabyGotBake: And thanks for the creepy rubber roach marching band formation across my prep counter.

  BabyGotBake: There’s nothing a girl dreams of more than seeing her name spelled out in insects. Speaking of which, when was the last time you got laid?

  Me: Interested?

  BabyGotBake: Hmmm… cheesy rom-com where you sweep the roaches to the floor and make hot love to me between my dirty baking pans?

  Me: And they say romance is dead.

  BabyGotBake: For real, though. Are you busy later?

  Some people had chemistry. Lacey Blair caused a physical reaction in me that was dangerous. Ten years might have taught me to control it, to keep a leash on my wolf whenever she was around, but that was because I didn’t take chances. I wouldn’t let her get hurt again, or anyone else. It was why tonight, just like every other month at the full moon, I made myself scarce.

  She’d already paid the price once before.

  Ethan drew a long breath, pulling me from my thoughts. “August said he included you in the group text, same as everyone else. He showed it to me, okay? Not my fault you got so wasted you dropped your phone in the can.”

  I drained the rest of my beer. “Yeah? So how come no one even tried to come and find me? It was the lunch rush. You knew where I was. A mile down the road, and none of you could be bothered to—"

  “I was a little busy getting married.”

  “Bullshit. We both know if you had really wanted me there, you could have sent Brody or Cal—"

  “Yeah. Because with you, it’s always someone else’s fault.”

  Whatever.

  I rose from the bar. “Think we’re done here.”

  “You really blame me for thinking you were a no-show? This thing between us has been going on for years. Hell, you’ve had it in for me since the day Ben and Sofia got me out of foster care.”

  “That why you slept with her?” I felt my chest constrict until I could barely draw in air, my wolf so close to the surface the room briefly greyed out. God, I needed a drink. “To screw with me?”

  Ethan held up his hands, palms out in a submissive posture, warily facing off against me.

  My breath sawed in and out, my hands starting to shake where my fingers had curled into claws. But I’d been holding this in for a goddamn year and a half, ever since the night I’d been walking home from the bar where we’d been celebrating Brody’s promotion and seen Lacey’s car parked outside Dark. Felt her and Ethan through the pack bond upstairs.

  Together.

  I forced my voice to remain flat. I was getting this out. Even if it was the last conversation my brother and I ever had.

  “You know, if you’d really cared about her, wanted something real, I would have found a way to be okay with it. Hell, I would have even been happy for you. Might have taken a while, but I would have gotten there, no matter how much it tore me up inside.”

  Ethan blanched. “Dallas—”

  “But you hooked up with her just to get back at me. That
stuff that went down when we were kids—that was between you and me. How would you feel if I’d hooked up with Hayden, made her feel like trash, then blown her off in a text message like she’d never been anything to me but a way to get off?”

  My brother’s eyes flared wolf gold. But he didn’t try to deny it.

  “Hate me all you want,” I continued. “But that’s effed up and you know it.”

  Shoving up his glasses, Ethan pinched the bridge of his nose. “Look. I’m not proud of what I did. I was in a messed-up place—”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Yeah, like you’re some kind of saint?”

  “Don’t even try and make this about me.” Stalking over to the bar, I wrenched the top off a bottle of tequila.

  Ethan’s voice sounded in the dark behind me.

  “We weren’t dating. It was a casual thing. Strictly to keep our wolves in check.”

  I growled. “Yeah. Keep talking. Totally helping.”

  The first shot burned on the way down. The next two I barely felt. The four walls of The Spoke felt like they were closing in around me, everything in it down to the last chair, napkin and piece of Howlers sports memorabilia on the walls something I’d picked out with my own two hands. And somehow, here in the one place I should have felt more at home than any other, it felt like my heart was going to explode.

  “Little late for that.”

  The bell over the door jingled. Letting my head thump back against the wall, I pulled out my phone. Lacey’s last text flashed on the screen.

  BabyGotBake: I really need to talk to you.

  Something flipped in my chest. Here was the thing my brothers didn’t understand: sometimes when you’d caused so much hurt, so much destruction, the best thing you could do was to stay the hell away. Lacey and I were friends now. As in, she was the one I called that time a giant tarantula got loose in my kitchen and I needed someone to come capture it and release it at least a hundred miles from my house so I’d be able to sleep at night. Which—don’t laugh. Those little dudes had like eight thousand beady spider eyes. Freaking creepy. As in, I was the one she had on speed dial for certain monthly emergencies when her refrigerator ran low on essentials like chocolate frosting, slow-smoked beef ribs, and carbs. Because real men didn’t fear the tampon aisle.