Bait This! (A 300 Moons Book)

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opyright
© 2016 by 13th Story Press
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof
may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever
without the express written permission of the publisher
except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

1
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over design
2016 by Sylvia Frost

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acked with steamy shifters
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S
ome people said
Kate Harkness was a witch.

Others said she was an angel.

But to the very special group of foundlings in her care, she was just Mom.

Mom, with a long ponytail of frizzy yellow hair, smiling so hard that her sunburnt cheeks nearly covered her eyes. Mom, pushing a wheelbarrow or driving the pick-up truck that pulled the hayride at Harkness Farms. Mom, laying down the law when you messed up, and making you want to cry with pride when you had earned her gruff praise.

Any mom will tell you her children are special, but the kids who came to live at Harkness Farms weren’t exactly your run of the mill orphans. Kate’s children all possessed special gifts. Unique abilities, you might say. Each one had the unlikely power to shift into the form of an animal or magical creature.

And it was precisely because of these blessings that the children found their way to Kate Harkness. Most shifters didn’t have the power to change until adolescence. But rarely, a child would come into their gift early. And sometimes, this was just too much for even a shifter family to handle.

But not too much for Kate.

Bear. Wolf. Tiger. Dog. Butterfly. Dragon. It didn’t matter.

She made room in her home and her heart for them all.

To help them, every precocious young shifter brought to Harkness Farms was paid a visit by Gloria Cortez, a witch of no little renown, on the night of their arrival. Although Mrs. Cortez’s role in their everyday lives wasn’t as evident as Kate’s, it was no less important.

The tiny woman would cradle the child in her warm arms and whisper a sweet song, though none could ever remember the words.

“Three hundred moons, Kate,” she would say with a crinkly-eyed smile, handing the child off again.

“And then what, Gloria?” some of the children heard their Mom whisper one night, when they had snuck downstairs to witness the welcome ceremony of a new sibling.

“And then we wait,” Mrs. Cortez replied. “Magic always has a price. We’ll find it out soon enough.”

The children all believed that Mrs. Cortez had somehow given them the power to control their animals, to live a normal life among the rest of the world. But whenever they tried to ask Mom about it, she told them they would know well enough when they were older, and set them to work on one farm chore or another.

Eventually, they stopped asking. And the song was all but forgotten.

But now is a significant time for the first group of children who came into the care of Kate Harkness all those years ago. The 300th moon is finally upon them. Some memories refuse to stay forgotten forever.

And some prices won’t remain unpaid.

D
erek Harkness gazed
out the incredible wall of windows in his corner suite office.

The elevated view included the glassy glamour of Glacier City’s architecture and the delicate spires of the ornamental bridge stretching from downtown all the way to suburban Greensburg. The few lonely clouds above drifted past, their reflections echoing madly in the glass of the nearby buildings.

But Derek’s eyes were trained on the motionless green postage stamp of a park far below, where a few trees competed for the bit of soft autumn sunlight that filtered through the towering edifices above. He could almost feel the cool dirt beneath his feet, the brisk air blowing through his fur.

“Damn it,” he muttered, wrenching his eyes from the park.

The bear inside him grumbled and tossed his snout in the air in a flash of teeth.

When he caught himself in moments like these, Derek wanted nothing more than to shoot himself with a tranquilizer gun.

He knew the key to control over the beast was eternal vigilance. But these last few weeks the creature would come to him any moment he let his guard down. No sooner did Derek relax than the bear would sneak into his consciousness as it had just now, subtly pushing his senses toward its wild agenda.

Derek would never let it take it over again, never. But the act of caging this thing, which used to take a fraction of his mental energy, was now requiring a strength of mind he wasn’t sure he could maintain.

In desperation, Derek had even snuck out to go to the discount book store in Cobble Slope last night, where no one would know him, and read self-help books in the aisle.

You are your own worst enemy
.

They had all boiled down to that.

The authors had
no
idea.

He’d given up and left again, even as the bear threw itself against the bars of its mental cage when the pretty check-out lady with the blue hipster glasses asked if he’d found everything he needed.

The worst of it was that the bear had… certain
advantages
.

Derek was smart, disciplined, strong. He was close with his foster siblings and had a handful of friends, in spite of the high demands of his career.

Women seemed to like him, and he’d been told that he resembled some dark haired, blue-eyed movie star or other. Even before the money, there were always plenty to choose from.

Now, at twenty-nine, he was one of the youngest CEOs of a major corporation. Derek was proud that he had earned every millimeter of the climb to the top with hard work and focus.

But a little voice in his head always reminded him of the bear.

The bear that had wrested him from his biological family by pushing itself on him too soon and too hard, had also pushed him up the corporate ladder.

Derek was an ethical person. He tried to do the right thing. But putting the shareholders first meant making hard calls when it came to colleagues, employees and even those who had been higher than he was on the food chain.

Each time he found himself at some crux of his career, it inevitably began with him looking at the person right in front of him and trying to make a judgment call.

Had that outraged employee actually embezzled funds, or re-organized the data for the quarterlies to take the heat off their own department, or slept with the intern?

Was the woman across from him actually the perfect choice to fix a problem department, or would the unpleasant new assignment run her off to another corporation, losing one of the best brains at his disposal?

Each time he combed his mind for rational answers, and generally made sound decisions on his own. And based on that, he would have enjoyed a reasonable level of success.

But some calls had to be made on instinct.

And the times when he chose fastest and best, those moments that had shaped his career and built his business, each of them were times when the bear chose for him.

The first time had broken his heart.

Gretchen had been a beautiful junior VP whose green-eyed smiles caused him to splurge two months’ salary on an obscenely large diamond ring that was burning a hole in his pocket waiting for their Valentine’s Day date. She was everything he could want in a wife, smart, beautiful, and career-minded. Best of all, she had a quintessential New England family with whom they had spent Christmas. Those few days had filled holes in Derek’s heart that he hadn’t even known were there.

One afternoon in late January, Gretchen dragged Kurt Engle, one of the accountants, into his office, practically by the ear.

Kurt was unlikeable.

There was no beating around the bush. He complained at every staff meeting, he blew his nose so loudly in his cubicle that other accountants held a lottery to swap seats further away from him. He enjoyed sniffing out and announcing the minor mistakes other employees made.

So when Gretchen stood before Derek and accused Kurt of embezzlement, it would have been the easiest thing in the world to believe her. Firing Kurt would have been satisfying and would have made everyone happy.

But as the miserable man stood, sniffling and red-faced before Derek, repeating endlessly that he’d done nothing wrong in his grating, nasally voice, Derek had stopped to consider for a just a moment.

And in that moment time stood still.

The bear poked out his nose from the cave of Derek’s mind and sussed out the situation instantly from the note of acrid sweat under the locks of Gretchen’s hair.

“Gretchen, give me your phone, I’m going to call security,” he’d barked so suddenly that she chose not to question him.

When security arrived, he’d instructed them to accompany her to the lobby to wait for the police.

He would never forget the exact instant when she realized he knew. Her lovely face twisted into an expression of absolute hatred for a moment before she got control of herself.

“Derek, I wouldn’t. I would never,” she babbled. “I love this company, I love
you
.”

But no one had ever
really
loved Derek.

She only wanted his money. And apparently, she wasn’t patient enough to wait for him to give it to her.

He turned away from her to find Kurt, staring at him slack-jawed.

“You saw something in the books, huh?” Derek asked.

“Y-yeah, I brought it to Gretchen, but—” Kurt stammered.

“Next time, bring it to me,” Derek told him.

Kurt pulled a wadded up napkin out of the pocket of his discount slacks and blew his nose like a trumpet.

“Thank you, Mr. Harkness,” he said at last, with feeling. “You can count on me.”

Before Derek could chase him out of the office, the bear asserted that it was true, Kurt could be counted on.

“Thanks a lot,” Derek muttered sarcastically to the bear.

“Anytime,” Kurt answered sunnily, not picking up on the sarcasm and assuming Derek’s words were meant for him.

Behind the glasses, Kurt had intelligent dark brown eyes which Derek now noticed for the first time.

“Hey, you want to go get some lunch?” Derek heard himself ask.

Derek’s friendship with Kurt had ended up being the second best decision he ever made, business or personal.

Bear -2, Derek - 0.

But he knew that wasn’t all the bear could do.

The bear had wrecked his relationship with his birth family. Given its freedom it would party and carouse with every woman in sight, luxuriating in temporal pleasures, surrendering to mad furies, and forgoing the orderliness that gave Derek’s life comfort.

And it would trample over his plans for a quiet family life and a happy future.

So the bear, while cunning, must be kept at bay at all costs.

The buzz of Derek’s cell phone was a welcome distraction from this line of thought.

He glanced at the Caller ID.

“Hey, Mom,” he said with a smile, stepping out of his office and onto the catwalk that overlooked the massive entryway to Harkness Assets, Ltd.

“Derek, are you behaving yourself?” Kate Harkness barked, her straightforward manner making him smile.

“I’m trying my best,” he admitted.

“Well, we all know that’s true,” she said. “When are you coming home?”

“It’s a little early. Harvest Festival isn’t until next month.”

“We have more to celebrate this year. It’s your 300th moon, you remember that, right?” she asked impatiently.

Oh boy.

“Do you, uh, think that’s a real thing?” Derek hedged.

“Do you think Gloria Cortez would do magic that didn’t work? Yes, I think it’s
real.
”

“Work is very hectic—” he began.

“Don’t even try it. I’ll expect you home by the end of the week,” she said firmly. “If you don’t show up, I’m sending someone after you. Are we clear?”

Why had he thought he could argue?

“Yeah, Mom, I’ll be there,” he assured her.

“Good boy. I love you and I’m proud of you,” she told him. “The kids are cooking up a storm, hope you’re ready.”

“I’m ready,” he smiled, thinking of all his little foster brothers making corned beef and cabbage and freezing pies to prepare for the homecoming of the first group of Harkness kids.

“Okay. Go check out your hip when you have a sec. Bye!”

She hung up before he could ask what the hell she was talking about.

Check his hip?

“Mr. Harkness, your four o’clock is here,” Lena said from the doorway.

Lena was very attractive with her long legs, pixie-cut hair, and seemingly endless array of tight skirts. But Derek had stopped carrying on with the assistants long ago. It had tripled his productivity.

The way she was studying him today was more intense than usual, though. Her lips parted slightly and her pulse thrummed at the base of her neck.

Oh hell, he could smell the arousal coming off her, under a thin layer of fruity perfume.

The bear in his head stood and shook himself off, ready to claim her. Derek fought him down.

Why was the bear so insistent? Maybe there was more to this 300th moon thing than he thought.

He needed to remove the distraction.

“Lena,” he said to the ground, not wanting to make things worse. “Would you please do a quick coffee run? The usual.”

“Huh?” she said, snapping back to herself. “Oh. Yes. Absolutely, Mr. Harkness.”

But she still stood there for a few seconds before scurrying away - like maybe it had taken her longer than it should have to recover from the chemistry of the moment. She’d definitely caught him checking her out by accident a couple of times before, but this was different.

If this
did
have to do with his 300th moon, it was a bad sign. It wasn’t even dark yet.

Derek took a deep breath. He had to get hold of his body before stepping into his next meeting.

Naturally, the bear was still pacing in his chest, eager to explore and claim the tasty female.

Go back to sleep,
Derek implored it.
Please.