"Get a mate," Hunter said, and went past Axel to the door to the stairs. On Tuesday afternoons, Hunter picked up his daughter from Brie's mother, Maisie, while Brie ran Sweet Summit Bakery.
Everyone in the pack was pairing up and having children. Dom had Valeria and Adrian. Siren had Reed and a cottage, and Saturday night folk music at the Fate Mountain Brewery. Blaze had Stella and a baby coming at the end of summer. Axel's wolf huffed inside him. It was an old lonely ache.
Blaze came in twenty minutes later and set a diner container on Axel's desk. "Burger and fries. How's the data site scrubbing going?" Blaze leaned on the desk and looked at the monitor. "Is my mother-in-law on there?"
"Lily's clean. Shane had two listings that popped back up from his TV years. But they're dying now." Axel opened the container. The burger smelled delicious. "Thanks for lunch."
"Family rate." Blaze knocked twice on the wood and walked toward the door to the basement gym.
Axel ate at his desk and felt the familiar comfort of being remembered by the pack. Underneath it, he felt the loneliness he usually kept buried until he was alone. Dom came into the room, picked up Adrian, and stood at Axel's shoulder, looking down at the screens.
"You get them all?" Dom asked.
"I did. I'll add Stella and Blaze's baby when he comes." Axel had already built the placeholder entry.
Dom shifted Adrian to the other arm. "Valeria wants me to tell you, her mom invited the whole pack to their house for Sunday dinner. The zucchini and corn came in all at once, so Rosa is making calabacitas to use it up. Come hungry."
"I'll be there."
Adrian leaned out from his father's arms and drooled on Axel's desk.
"Sorry," Dom said. "He's teething."
Axel just laughed. In all the years he'd known Dominic Steel, he'd never imagined him holding a drooling baby. Until he found Valeria on mate.com.
Axel had joined the shifter dating app soon after arriving in Fate Mountain. The questionnaire had asked what vegetable he would be. He'd typedasparagus. You plant it and wait three years before it gives you anything. Then it comes back every season for decades. For the photo he had used one Ryder took at a Fourth of July barbecue a few years before.
Axel had watched everyone but Ryder find their mates. Hunter had avoided his match during a stakeout. Siren pretended she made a mistake. Blaze had charged down to the diner for Stella, even though he'd been banned.
As Axel was stretching, he realized it had gotten dark outside. Then he looked at the time on his computer. It was long after closing, so he shut down his computers and prepared to leave.
He spotted Adrian's dinosaur on the floor near his desk, got up, and set it on the front desk where Valeria would find it in the morning. He'd been the dinosaur's night custodian for about a month now, and he liked the job.
He went upstairs to his apartment at the end of the hall. The living room flowed into the kitchen in an open layout. A deep charcoal sofa faced a walnut coffee table.
Floating shelves along one wall held his collection of soul, blues, and jazz records. He pulled a record from the wall, Sam Cooke'sNight Beat. He bought it in Denver the same month he bought his first record player. Axel put it on the turntable and went to the kitchen to make dinner.
He cooked chicken thighs in a steel pan and rice in a rice cooker. He ate on the small café table by the window. Main Street was growing quiet below, shop lights turning off one at a time. While he ate, he picked up his phone and opened the mate.com app.
He scanned his matches. Ninety-one percent, a woman holding a fish. She had messaged him once, two years ago. But the truth was, only a one hundred percent match was a shifter's fated mate. Eighty-seven, a sunset photo with no face in it. Eighty-four, a human who'd been inactive for over a year.
After he finished eating, he washed his dishes and tried not to listen to the lonely sound of his inner wolf's lament.
Chapter
Three
Reese got homeand washed her work shirt in the bathroom sink, wrung it out, and hung it over the shower rod. She walked back out into the living room. It was furnished with a brown couch, a lamp, and a framed print of a lighthouse that came with the place. Like everything else.
Her only real belongings were her clothes, the envelope of money tucked inside a hollowed-out paperback on the top shelf of the closet, and the jar of green onions regrowing in water on the kitchen windowsill.
She'd bought the onions for forty-nine cents, six weeks ago. She had used them down to the white ends, stood them in a jelly jar, and they had grown back twice already. It was a trick Reese had learned from her mother, back before she'd remarried.
She made a dinner of eggs and toast, and a few snips of green onion. She ate at her small table and worked out her budget in a composition notebook she bought at the dollar store. Rent was paid through the end of the month. The envelope in her hiding spot had two hundred and six dollars. Payday was on Friday. Theprenatal visit she still hadn't scheduled went at the bottom of the column, the same place she wrote it every night.
She had looked up the clinic's prices. She could probably manage her first visit. The problem was the endless appointments and medical care that came with being pregnant. She was going to have to apply for state health insurance, and that meant paperwork, and forms with her name on them. Until she figured out how to do it without leaving a trail for Wade, she kept finding reasons to wait.
She washed her plate and her pan and stood at the window, watching the evening sun turn gold over the rooftops across the street. She had made a life in Fate Mountain from almost nothing, and most nights it was enough to let her relax and sleep.
