21 Shades of Night, page 280
His brain went fuzzy. He slowly raised his gaze up her drop-dead body, pausing at her generous breasts for a heartbeat too long, before he met her eyes.
Yeah, she was gypsy. It was in the dusted gold of her skin and the pure chocolate of her exotic eyes.
His mouth watered, and the longer he stared at her, the more beautiful she became. Despite her barely five-foot size, she was all earthy, raw sexuality.
As if reading the intention in his head to touch her, which he had no plans to do, she reached out and slapped a hand on his chest, the multi-colored bracelets that covered half of her forearm twinkling in the sunlight.
“Who are you,” she asked, those dark eyes wary and steady as they searched his, “and why are you looking for me?”
He stared down at her hand, which had flexed against his pecs like she enjoyed what she touched, before he lifted his gaze and narrowed his eyes at her. “Shay Evernight?”
She dropped her hand and stepped back, putting enough space between them that she didn’t have to give herself a neck ache to stare up at him. She crossed her arms over that perfect chest.
“Who are you?” Her cell phone beeped before he could answer, and she held up her hand to hold him off as she dug it out of her boho bag. She glanced at the phone screen, and then laughed while leaning to the side and waving at Garret in the body shop. “Got it, thanks!”
Tyler turned to glare over his shoulder at the kid who’d obviously sent her a warning text telling her he was looking for her, before returning his attention to her. She was back to staring up at him, waiting for an explanation.
“Tyler Wade.”
When her eyes went wide, he nearly smiled. He didn’t miss the way she was trying to nonchalantly check him out, and he recognized attraction when it sparked in the air.
“Do your friends always send people you invite to town on a wild goose chase just to find you?”
She smiled. “Yes. Actually, I’ve asked them to stop, but that’s kind of like asking the wind to change directions. It can be done, but it’s usually not worth the effort.” While he just blinked at her, she tucked her phone back into her purse, her face turning serious. “We were beginning to think you weren’t going to come.”
His body jerked. “We?”
“Yes.” She moved in closer, her hand coming up to rest on his bicep. “I know you don’t want to hear this,” she murmured, “but your mother is dead, Mr. Wade. You know that, right?”
He took a step toward her, suddenly furious. Twenty years of repressed grief and rage clouded his vision. “Really? How do you know this? How do you think you know anything about my mother?”
She didn’t flinch back from him. Like she’d expected his temper and had already braced herself for it. She simply lifted her chin and held his gaze. “Did you go by the house? Did you find Wilfred? She—your mother—said he was still there.”
“Really?” Tyler had no idea where all this temper had come from, but he hadn’t talked about his mother out loud since he’d been ten. It had either been lock it down, or go down a path of violence he’d never be able to pull out from. Then he’d been sent to live with a monster, and the violent path had become his only option.
“My dead mother has nothing better to talk to you about than a stuffed animal I lost when I was nine?” He dealt with demons and ghosts on a daily basis, but people like her—people pretending to be psychic when it was all bullshit to make money—pissed him the fuck off.
“Oh, we have a lot to talk about, actually,” she countered, her slightly husky voice even, “but I didn’t think leading with the star-shaped scar on the inside of your left thigh would be polite. Or the small scar on your right butt cheek from when you fell out of a tree when you were seven.” Her delicate dark brow winged up. “I wouldn’t want to embarrass you on the street or anything.”
He leaned forward, the urge to intimidate and back this woman off nearly overwhelming him. It wasn’t a feeling he was comfortable with, but he’d underestimated what being back in this place would do to his well-being.
He bared his teeth at her instead. “Honey, trust me, it takes a hell of a lot more than talking about my ass to embarrass me. You don’t have what it takes.”
A knowing look flashed over her exotic face before she shrugged and stepped back. Somehow, Tyler was aware it wasn’t a surrender or an admission of defeat, but a postponement of the battle she had every intention of winning.
“There’s a bed and breakfast on the outskirts of town. Take Main until it Ts, take the left fork, and it’s down the broken pathway on the right. I’ll be around if you decide to take me seriously and stop being an ass.”
As quickly as she’d appeared, she turned and started to walk away, weaving effortlessly through the traffic. He had just realized he’d cocked his head to watch her ass when she stopped and looked at him over her shoulder.
“Word to the wise, Tyler,” she called back at him. “Don’t challenge me. I don’t back down easily, and I always win.”
She was lost in the crowd before he could even think to form a response, and he just stood there on the sidewalk, shaking his head. Yeah. Coming back was a bad idea all the way around. He hated small fucking towns.
Chapter 2
SHAY WAS SHAKING as she opened the back door of Evernight Apothecary and Tarot Readings and let herself into the small kitchenette area used for creating herbs and salves. She was used to strangers treating her with mistrust and skepticism. It usually rolled off of her. She refused to let their opinions of her matter. It was the only way to survive being what she was with her heart somewhat intact. But strangers were not normally as big, angry, or gorgeous as Tyler Wade.
And holy damn was the man gorgeous. Huge and intense and gorgeous and…biteable. She wasn’t sure where the urge to sink her teeth into him came from, but he was the first man she’d ever met that was just eat-him-up yummy.
Even as she’d stared up at him on the sidewalk, she’d had visions of ripping off his jacket and shirt and just licking him all over. For hours. Like a cat with a bowl of cream.
She slumped back against the door. She’d had visions. Not a fantasy, not a daydream, but visions. And at the moment, she wasn’t sure if it was his massive size and his temper, or the ridiculous amount of hotness that scared her more.
“Did you find him?” Ivy asked from behind the counter.
Shay managed a smile for her friend. Ivy, at seventeen, was the town geek, and the love of Garret’s life.
Today, her bright red hair was piled on top of her head in a messy, haphazard knot, and her dark jeans were rolled at the ankle, showing off her one-of-a-kind Doctor Who Converse. The blue and grey plaid flannel shirt was borrowed from Garret and hung almost to her knees, the sleeves rolled up to her elbows. Skinny in a way only teenagers could be, she should have been dwarfed by the shirt but instead, the whole outfit just worked on her, including the purple horn-rimmed glasses.
Yesterday, she’d worn a pretty sundress with combat boots.
Though Shay wasn’t sure they knew it, Ivy and Garret were the reason she could still believe in love. The two of them had been inseparable almost since birth, and no one who spent any time around them could doubt that they were in it for the rest of their lives. It was in the way they made each other smile, the way Ivy sat on his lap while they played video games, and the way that no matter how hard their parents had tried to keep their time limited when they were younger, they always snuck out just to be together.
Aware that she was stalling and that Ivy was waiting for an answer, Shay blew out a breath and pushed off against the door she’d been leaning on. “Oh, yeah. I found him.”
Eyes wide, Ivy followed Shay into the employee’s breakroom. It was barely more than a closet, but it held the essentials—a mirror, a vending machine, a table, and a worn-out, overstuffed chair for catnaps. “It didn’t go well?”
“No.” She sighed in front of the mirror. She twisted her jet black hair into a loose, crooked braid that fell over one shoulder, before hanging her oversized patchwork boho bag on a wall hook. “He was really…” Her nose wrinkled as she tried to figure out how to describe him without going into too much detail. She just snorted in irritation. “Annoying. He was apparently unimpressed with my knowledge of Wilfred. Or his scars.”
Ivy grabbed her name tag off the table and pinned it to her shirt. “So, what are you going to do?”
Shay headed out of the breakroom, Ivy on her heels. “I don’t know. Gemma isn’t going to be happy if I don’t at least try to follow through with this.”
“It’s his mother. You’d think he’d at least be interested in finding out what happened to her.” When Shay only snorted again, Ivy grinned at her. “Emmaline said he is hot.”
“You can check him out for yourself. I gave him directions to the bed and breakfast.”
“Really?” Excitement lit up Ivy’s freckled face. “Now I know what I’m doing on my lunch break.” She stopped walking abruptly as they entered the storeroom. “Hey. You didn’t answer the question.”
Shay grabbed a box and bumped the swinging door open with her hip. “You didn’t ask one.”
“Fine,” Ivy muttered, stretching the word out to four syllables. “Is he hot? Mega hot?” When Shay only frowned, Ivy’s eyes went huge. “You’re speechless! He’s that gorgeous?”
Gorgeous was an understatement. Unfortunately for her—and her heart–– she’d always been into the tall and brooding type.
“He’s alright, I guess,” she said, nonchalant. After setting the box on the floor in the store, she went to find a knife.
Ivy tapped at the screen of her iPhone. Her mouth dropped open as she stared at it, and then she shoved the phone in Shay’s face. “Tori from the diner just sent me this picture of him. That face is not ‘alright.’ That is ‘sell your soul to the devil for one night with him’ amazing. That is ‘let him eat crackers in bed, leave wet towels on the carpet, smile at every stupid joke he ever makes’ gorgeous.”
Yup.
Shay broke and gave his picture a quick look, her mouth watering as lust slammed into her chest. The shot was candid, probably taken while Tori hid behind the kitchen door, but it showcased his face perfectly, from the bright blue of his eyes, to the way one corner of his mouth was lifted in a smile, or a sneer, to the dark blonde scruff of his five o’clock shadow.
“He’s alright,” she said with a shrug. Pulling a tool box out from under the counter, she snagged a box cutter out of it and moved back over to open the box. “We have work to do.”
Pulling out a handful of the decorative bottles she used for personalized lotions and salves, she headed toward the glass-and-mahogany display case in the front window.
Work was good. Work would keep her brain off of that yummy, pain in her ass, stubborn man.
Ivy snorted and darted after her. “You are blind, Shay Evernight. Either that, or you’re hiding something from me.”
Shay deliberately ignored her. Despite the four year age difference between them, Ivy had an old soul and had gone through more crap in her seventeen years than most people could imagine going through in forty. Garret was the only thing that had kept her sane through most of it, and the only constant in her life.
When they’d been thirteen, Garret had gone berserk when he’d found out her father was beating her, and she’d moved in with Shay shortly afterward. Shay loved her like a sister, and Ivy knew all about Shay’s…abilities.
So it wasn’t like her to hide things from her. But there were some battles Shay was learning she had to fight by herself.
And meeting Tyler Wade was proving to be one of them.
* * *
TYLER HAD MEANT to hunt down Malia and call this job a bust, but he’d ended up in the driveway of one of his childhood homes, instead.
He only had vague memories of this place. His mother had never been able to stay in one place long, but there had been something about Willow Creek that she’d fallen in love with instantly. She hadn’t wanted to leave.
Now, looking back on the first nine years of his life, even if she hadn’t disappeared when she had, Tyler wasn’t sure she’d have been able to stay. Then again, he had no idea what had drawn her to this place to begin with.
Putting his vehicle in park, he stared out his windshield at the decrepit, postage-stamp sized house he and his mother had spent their last seven months together in. His memories of this place weren’t clear, but jumbled in with the dozen other places they’d lived in his early years.
She’d been a good mom, but he didn’t remember her ever being anything but tired. Even when she had taken him to the park or for ice cream, her beautiful smile had been exhausted around the edges, and there had always been dark smudges under her eyes. He’d been on his own since kindergarten, because she’d raised him to be independent enough that she would never have to depend on anyone else to help with him while she’d worked two and three jobs at a time to make ends meet.
Which, he thought now, she’d never really been able to do. The majority of their running had been to avoid all the people she owed money to.
Pissed off that he’d come to this place, he still couldn’t put his truck in reverse and leave. He wasn’t going to be able to sleep until he found out how Shay knew about Wilfred. So he climbed out, grabbed the shovel he’d stopped at the hardware store for, and headed to the desolate back yard.
The part of his brain that had been forced to life after his mother’s disappearance recognized that something wasn’t right with the small yard and house. It had been clean and in decent shape when he’d been sent to live with his uncle in Manhattan, but it looked as if no one had touched the rental home in the twenty years since. Even the yard was barren, more dead than alive. Barely a single weed poked through, and the one lilac tree in the back corner had long since wilted.
He walked over to the crumpling back porch and crouched, his hand reaching out to brush off the layers of dirt and leaves before he went to work with the shovel. He didn’t expect to find anything. In his line of work hunting the bad shit in the world, things had long since stopped surprising him, and the lengths people would go to just to make someone’s life miserable never failed to disgust him. He knew what the Evernight family was capable of, and he wasn’t going to trust Shay as far as he could throw her. He’d dealt with enough ‘psychics’ to know how they worked. They were frauds. All of them.
And when he unearthed the stuffed bear a few minutes later, it didn’t change his opinion of her any. He’d been around long enough to know that charlatans were successful and good at what they did by giving their mark just enough to earn their trust.
It might be ridiculous, but he couldn’t stop staring at the toy. Wilfred had been Moms promise to him on his seventh birthday that they would find a place to stay and plant roots, that he’d have friends he could keep and he wouldn’t have to take care of her anymore.
It had never happened, but he’d kept the bear anyway, a reminder that no matter how sincere someone sounded and how hard they tried, sometimes words just meant nothing.
It was a lesson he’d never forgotten.
Brushing the bear off, he grabbed the shovel and stood, finding himself face to face with a police officer.
“What do you got there?” the man, who couldn’t have been out of the academy for six months, asked, one red brow quirked.
“An alien spaceship. They’ve taken the form of innocent stuffed animals to make their worldwide takeover easier.”
For a second, Tyler was sure the officer believed him, but then he shook his head and narrowed his eyes. “We don’t like smartasses in this town.”
“Better than being a dumbass.” When the officer’s face turned a mottled shade of red, Tyler cursed. He should probably be playing nice if he wanted to use what Willow Creek considered a police force in his attempt to find out what really happened to his mother and all those other women. He held out his hand. “Tyler Wade. I lived in this house when I was a kid.”
The officer blinked at him while slowly reaching out to shake his hand. “Wade? As in Gemma Wade’s son?”
Tyler’s jaw set. This cop didn’t look old enough to have been alive when his mother went missing, let alone remember her. “Yes. Did you know her?”
“I know of her.” At Tyler’s narrowed eyed look, the kid squared his shoulders. “You’re on private property, and the owner doesn’t take too kindly to people trespassing. The last group of kids that did spent the weekend in jail.”
“I’ve got this, Officer Wilkins.” A tall, line-backer built man in a flannel shirt and chief’s badge rounded the corner of the house. “Isn’t there some paperwork at the station you should be filling out?”
Officer Wilkins looked like he wanted to argue before he straightened his shoulders, nodded at Tyler, and left.
The chief didn’t turn back to him until the officer’s car had rounded the last corner of the street. Finally, he leaned against the side of the ruined house and shoved his hands into the pockets of his jeans.
“So. Tyler Wade returns to Willow Creek.” Before Tyler could form a reply, long-forgotten memories invading his brain, the chief continued on. “Still look like a dick.”
“Deacon Stone. Still a power-hungry son-of-a-bitch.”
Chief Stone jerked his chin up, his light blue eyes narrowing on Tyler’s face. “Funny coming from a trespassing thief.”
Tyler barked out a laugh when his old, only friend stepped forward to embrace him in a back-thumping hug. “You are not a chief. The last time I saw you, you were on the wrong side of the bars for breaking into Chief Carson’s car.”
Deacon grinned. “Between his forcing me into community service and my mother blistering my hide for six months after that, it seemed easier to stay on the just side of the law.” He cocked his head at the stuffed animal in Tyler’s hands. “What’s that?”
