Dawson Fur Hire (Bears Fur Hire 5) (6 page)

“You don’t have to talk about it. I totally get it. You don’t know me, and you don’t owe me any explanations.” There it was, the out. Dalton was offering her a way to stay hidden, just like him.

She balked. “He posted the video, and when I confronted him about it, he showed no remorse. I was horrified. My mom and dad called because they’d found out about it. They were so deeply disappointed, and my sister left all these awful messages about me ruining our family’s reputation. Anyway, Miller got real mean after that.”

“Why didn’t you break it off with him?”

“I did. He didn’t take no for an answer. He kept coming over. Showing up late at night. Scaring me. He kicked in my door during one of my shifts and was waiting for me when I got home.”

“Did you call the police?”

“Of course. They’d seen the video, though, and didn’t do anything about our little lover’s spat. One of the officers said it wasn’t right that I was raising red flags on a man when I was obviously a willing party in that tape.”

“Shit.” Dalton sounded disgusted. He pulled into an iced-over parking spot near the Taco Trailer. “Did he hurt you?”

“Once. He choked me, and I thought I was going to die. He looked insane, but he doubled over on himself and dropped me, then ran out the back door.” Into the snow where she’d watched him change into a gray wolf just on the edge of the back porch light. His contorted body and white eyes still visited her nightmares. “Dalton?”

“Hmm?” he asked, more growl than question.

“How did he die?”

Dalton inhaled deeply. “He hurt a woman, cut her face with an ax and went after her man.” He slid an unsympathetic look to Kate. “The woman hurt him back.”

“Good for her,” she murmured. The blinking neon lights cast Dalton’s face in greens and blues. She liked Dalton’s wolf eyes much more than Miller’s. They weren’t crazy, just enthralling. “Since we’re full speed ahead on this mortification train, do you want to see what I got in the mail the other day?”

Dalton held out his hand. “Yep.”

She giggled and pulled out the ripped envelope from her purse, slid the wedding invite out of the thick covering, then set it gingerly onto his palm.

“Dalton read it in the glowing lights of the Taco Trailer. “Whose wedding?”

“My pre-Miller ex.”

Dalton slid her a grossed-out look. “Why would he invite you to his wedding?”

“Because Nadine Bertrand,” she explained, pointing to the bride’s name on the invite, “was my best friend for more than twenty years. Basically since we were fetuses.”

Dalton’s eyes went wide. “Your ex is marrying your best friend?”

“
Ex
best friend.”

“Please tell me they started dating after you broke up.”

She stifled a laugh at his expression. “Nope.”

“That’s fucked up. Wait, you’re not going, are you?”

“Heck no. I haven’t talked to either of them since I found out. Nadine keeps calling me though, wanting to be friends again. Apparently, she misses me. As you can see, I don’t have the best taste in…people.”

Dalton huffed a dark laugh. “No, you don’t. Wait there,” he said, shoving his door open.

“Why? I’m hungry.”

“Because, you impatient woman, I’m going to open your door for you.”

“I knew this was a date,” she murmured, feeling giddy.

Dalton gave her a heart-stopping grin before he closed his door and jogged around to her side. He helped her out of the high cab and settled his hand on her lower back as they approached the food truck. Bats flapped around her stomach as his touch lingered at the base of her spine. How could a man pull such a potent reaction from her body with nothing more than the brush of his palm?

Giddy and a little off-balance, she took a spot in line behind a couple of slurring bar patrons ordering what sounded like one of everything.

After Dalton put their order in and collected their paper-lined baskets of tacos, she sat down at one of the tables right beside the giant heater. It was warm on her back, and she offered Dalton a shy smile as he took a seat right beside her rather than across the table.

At the first bite of steaming taco, she rolled her eyes closed and groaned in ecstasy. It had been a long shift under Dr. Vega, and she hadn’t eaten since this morning. “This is my favorite food,” she said around a mouthful. “What’s your favorite food?”

“Pussy,” Dalton said through a baiting grin.

She nearly choked on corn tortilla. “Dalton,” she admonished.

He was laughing now as he poured hot sauce over his own tacos. “Meat. I like any kind of meat. The rarer the better.”

Another tongue-in-cheek werewolf admission, and now he was looking at her, daring her to ask questions.

“Favorite color?”

The smile fell from Dalton’s face. “It used to be blue, but now it’s green.”

Huh. Her eyes were green. She ducked out of his serious gaze so he wouldn’t see the color in her cheeks. “I like your truck.”

“Thanks, I just bought it today.”

“You did?”

“I borrow my alph—” Dalton shook his head hard and let off a bitter laugh. “I use my friend’s snow machine when I visit, but I figured I’d go ahead and get my own ride. I don’t have a truck up where I work near Kodiak.”

“Do you visit Galena often?”

“Not as often as I should.”

“Who is your friend? I bet I’ll know him. Everyone knows everyone around here.”

Wariness slashed through Dalton’s dark eyes. “Lincoln McCall.”

Kate squeezed her tortilla so hard the meat plopped out and onto the table. “Lincoln McCall is your friend?” she asked in a choked whisper.

Dalton dipped his chin once in affirmation. He looked like he wanted to say more, but he gritted his teeth and took another bite of food instead. She hadn’t missed the slip-up, though. Alph? She’d bet her tits Lincoln McCall, Miller’s brother, was his alpha. She knew about wolves. She knew about dogs. She’d been raised around them for goodness sake and was well versed in the similar hierarchy of dog sled teams and wolf packs. She had only met Lincoln a few times. He’d been the quiet one, but still, his eyes had glowed just as terrifyingly as his brother’s.

The food sat like a tasteless lump in her mouth, and she gulped it down. She wiped her hands slowly with a napkin, stalling. If she spoke too soon, her voice would shake and give away just how scared she was. He was in a pack with a freaking McCall werewolf.

“You’re the one who’s freaking out now,” he said, scanning the filling tables around them.

“I’m not freaking out.”

“Well, before you go make a snap judgement, Link isn’t anything like his brothers. He isn’t anything like any of his family. He’s actually a good guy.”

“What do you do out near Kodiak?” she asked, desperate to talk about anything else.

Dalton narrowed his eyes like she wasn’t fooling anyone with her subject change, but being the smart man that he was, he dropped it. “I’m an outdoor guide at Silver Summit Outfitters.”

“Do you guide hunts?”

“Yeah. I’m good at tracking things. We do seasonal hunts depending on when each animal is legal to take, but I do a lot of camping, hiking, and fishing excursions, too. Right now is our slow season, but in the next couple of months, we have a lot of people from the lower forty-eight who have booked us.”

“Who is us?”

“My cousin, Chance, and my friend Jenner Silver.”

“Hey, I know him! Jenner lives here now. He moved outside of Galena with his wife last year. They live up on Elyse and Ian’s homestead.”

“You know Elyse?”

“Yeah, I was her nurse when she got clawed by a bear last year and again when she fell on an ax a couple winters ago…” Kate gasped as something clicked firmly into place. “Elyse. She got cut by an ax across her face.”

“I think it’s time to go,” Dalton said, standing with his empty basket. “You finished?”

She was definitely finished. She stared at him so hard, her eyeballs were actually getting cold. “Elyse killed Miller, didn’t she?”

Dalton looked around nervously and lowered down, arm locked on the table. Voice full of warning, he murmured, “Kate, stop. Stop picking at this one.”

“But—”

Dalton spun and disappeared around the Taco Trailer. A moment later, he strode off for his truck, hands empty of the baskets. The door slammed, and he floored it out of the parking spot, only to hit the brakes and slide to a stop an instant later.

Through the front window, Dalton lifted his light gaze to her as he gripped the steering wheel.

This was a man who had trained himself to run. Whatever had happened to make him this way, she didn’t know and would likely never find out. She’d done this before and didn’t want to feel like this again. Like she couldn’t ever really get to know the person she cared about. Like an outsider…always a guest in someone’s life, but never a main player.

She swallowed the lump in her throat and dared to hold his gaze as she walked up to his truck, then past it to the tailgate, which she lowered.

“What are you doing?” he asked, by her side too fast. She would’ve startled, but she’d seen speed like his before.

“I think you have too many secrets, and I think you’re a runner. I already told you I’ve done this before. I want more. I don’t want to be afraid that you’ll bolt when things get hard.” She pulled the ramps from between her ATV’s tires, rested them at an angle on the tailgate, climbed up into the truck and over the seat of her ride, and turned it on.

Dalton looked ill as he watched her back it down out of his truck, but he didn’t stop her. Instead, he stood there with his hands linked behind his head. As she drove away, she looked back once when the word “shit” echoed down the street. He flung his hands forward, his eyes reflecting strangely in the red glow of her taillights. With Miller, that would’ve scared her, but with Dalton, it filled her with immense sadness.

His wolf intrigued her, but his wolf had pushed her away.

Regrets, regrets, regrets. Dalton Dawson had been broken, too, and though she hurt for him, he wasn’t in the same spot she was. She was finally hopeful and wanted something meaningful with someone she cared about. Dalton had started that change in her, but he wasn’t capable of seeing it through. There was tragedy in that.

Dalton was a tornado, and he would sweep her into oblivion if she let him.

He was such an idiot. When Dalton pulled over the last crest of a snowy ridge, his headlights arched over Link’s cabin. The lights were on inside, which meant Chance was still awake.

Great.

He cut the engine, got out, and slammed the door. God, why was he like this now? He’d been normal once. Well, as normal as a werewolf could be. But now, every April, he turned into a volatile asshole. Oh, he’d read between the lines of Kate’s last words. She’d done it before and wanted more, AKA she deserved better. And yeah, he’d known that, but this was all he had to give right now. One minute he felt confident, like he couldn’t wait to see her, and then when he actually talked to her, he ducked and dodged any serious conversation that pulled her too close to his life. Too close to the real him.

And what had she done? She’d shared her mistakes with Miller. She’d shown him that damned wedding invite, which had probably caused her bone-deep pain, and he’d given her nothing in return.

What had he hoped for? That their conversations would stay shallow and never go past flirting?

Dalton paced in front of Link’s old cabin, wearing a trail in the snow.

He wanted something real.

But his biggest fear was getting something real, and ruining it.

Dalton squatted down and gripped his head as his wolf pushed to escape his skin. His inner animal was clawing and howling to go back to her.

Say sorry. Shelby loved when it you said sorry.

Shelby? Dalton retched in the snow at the pain in his middle. It should’ve been a woman like Kate holding his baby. He’d picked wrong, and now he was unfixable because of that decision. It had damaged something inside of him to mourn the loss of Amelia alone.

The door to the cabin opened, but Dalton couldn’t pull his gaze from the dead grass that poked up from the trail he’d stomped into the snow. He retched again as he tried desperately to keep his human skin.

Nicole’s scent hit his nose, and he swallowed hard, dragging his attention up to the top porch stair where she sat down, wrapped in a blanket with a sad look in her dark eyes.

“Dalton,” she whispered, sympathy tainting the sound.

“I missed dinner,” he said, feeling like shit.

“It’s okay.”

“No.” He settled in the snow, legs folded beneath him. “It’s not. Nothing is okay.”

Her eyes rimmed with tears. “Link told me about April First. I didn’t know.”

“I don’t like talking about it.”

“Dalton, I’ve been so hurt that you didn’t want to be around us. I was mad at you. Mad that you barely look at Fina. Mad that you won’t hold her and bond with her. I thought I was to blame somehow. Like you didn’t want to be in a pack with me, which now I know is stupid, and I shouldn’t have made it about myself. I just didn’t understand.”

Dalton stood and climbed the stairs, then sat shoulder to shoulder with her, watching the green northern lights in the distance.

Nicole leaned her head on his arm. “I’m sorry. I can’t imagine how painful it must be for you to lose your little girl and then have to be around a baby girl who survived.”

Dalton sighed a frozen breath. “I’m kind of messed up right now. The rest of the year, I’m okay. Or at least, I can put on the show, right? But you’re catching me when I screw up the most. I like to hide out during April. I hurt less people that way, you know? But now Chance, Link, you, and…”

Nicole eased off his shoulder and offered him a confused look. “And who?”

“And this girl I met. There is a hundred percent chance I will let everyone down right now. It’s like I can’t think straight. I make the wrong decisions. Everything is cloudy, and I don’t have much control over my animal or my moods. I should’ve done my hiding somewhere more remote, but this year, this place seemed…important.”

“This place or your pack?”

Dalton shrugged. “Maybe both. I don’t know. I’ve never been in a pack before. It’s always just been me and Chance, and we were never officially a pack, you know? And then Link came along and bound us, and now I don’t really know how to navigate anything.”

“Link and Chance
love
you.”

“Strongly
like
you when you aren’t being a twat,” Chance corrected from inside.

“And you’re very important to me, too,” Nicole said without missing a beat. “When you’re ready, you can lean on us. I don’t know how packs work either, but to me, you feel like family. Everything feels better when you and Chance visit. Link is happier. I’m happier. I don’t know how it is for you, but when you and Chance are close, it’s like my two brothers are in town.”

Dalton looked down at Nicole. Her large birthmark, the color of red wine, was stark on her pale cheek. He understood her need for a makeshift family. Hers hadn’t been awesome, and her real dad had died the year before she found out he even existed. She’d come here searching for a place to belong, and instead of him being a positive part of her journey, he’d failed her. He’d failed everyone.

“I’ll try harder,” he promised.

Nicole sniffed and shook her head. “Do things in your own time, Dalton. I understand your reservations now. Link and I will hold. We’ll be here for whatever you want this pack to be.”

Dalton wiped off the snowy porch floorboard beside him in an effort to avoid her eyes when he asked nonchalantly, “When you found out what Link was, did you freak out?”

“I nearly shot him,” she said.

“What?” he asked.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa, what?” Chance asked from where he suddenly shadowed the open doorway. The eavesdropper came to sit on Dalton’s other side.

“Yeah, I figured out what he was before he told me, and I came to this place, guns blazing. I thought he was the wolf who killed my father. Turns out Link was only trying to make up for his family’s shortcomings. Cole was actually the one who killed my dad.” She slid him a glance, then snuggled more deeply into her blanket. “Dalton, you’re allowed by shifter law to tell your mate what you are. Clayton can’t give a kill order for exposing the wolf to your woman.”

Chance snorted. “He couldn’t bring himself to tell the mother of his child. He’s not telling this one.”

There was challenge in his voice, and Dalton growled. He didn’t like being baited. “I haven’t known her long enough.”

“What do you feel?”

“I
feel
like she’s amazing, but complicated, and I can’t stop thinking about her.” Dalton leaned back on his locked arms and stretched his long legs down the stairs. “I also
feel
like her life would be exponentially better if I figured out a way to leave her alone.”

“Why?” Nicole asked.

“Because she’s Miller McCall’s ex-girlfriend. She’s been through enough without falling for another monster.”

“Oh, damn,” Chance said.

“Damn indeed.”

“Does she like you?” Nicole asked softly.

Dalton bit the side of his lip thoughtfully and dragged the heel of his boot over the snowy porch, creating an arc across the wood there. “She says I make her feel safe. She doesn’t sleep well, but with me…well…she did.”

“Wow,” Nicole murmured. She was quiet for a long time before she asked, “Do you want my advice?”

“No,” he teased.

She elbowed him as he chuckled. “Feeling safe with Link was a really big deal for me. I don’t think you should push her away because of what you think is good for her. I think you should let her make her own decision.” Nicole shrugged out of her blanket and stood. Carefully, she made her way down to her snow machine, but before she drove away through the snowy woods that stood between this cabin and the one she shared with Link, she turned around on the seat and said, “You’re no Miller McCall. You’re better.”