Page 62 of Bad Blood Bear

Chapter 27

In what he proclaimed to be the second chapter of Worst Alpha Ever, Flynn agreed to let everyone go into town to buy food for Thanksgiving, so he could have some peace and quiet. Lissa didn’t know whether to be excited, or to prepare for a hideous disaster. Tank seemed to be coming down on the side of ‘hideous disaster.’ All the way there, he was lecturing them about what not to do.

“Don’t growl at anybody. No knives. No teeth. No weapons of any kind. If you have to speak to anybody, use your manners. Or I’ll bleed the fuck out of you when we get back.”

“Sounds like a fun Thanksgiving,” Xander muttered, pulling his knife.

“What did I just say?” Tank said.

“We’re not there yet,” Xander protested. “It’s only us.”

“I told you not to bring it at all.” Lissa smacked his hand.

“It’s my security knife,” he said, annoyed. “Without it, I might break down emotionally from being around all the peoplz, and blubber like a grizzly bear.”

Tank growled.

Lissa slapped his hand again, and he slapped hers back. Not hard, but enough to make Tank growl even louder.

She leaned against Tank’s shoulder and kissed it. “Don’t mind him, he’s just playing.”

Tank said, “I’ll teach him to play. With my claws.”

Lissa kissed him again. Disaster. This was going to be a total disaster.

They pulled into the parking lot of the shopping center, which was packed with cars. “Shit,” Tank muttered.

Jasmin gave a little growl. “What the fuck did you expect, the day before Thanksgiving? We’re not the only ones who can’t manage to plan ahead.”

Lissa grinned. “That’s good to know, don’t you think? Maybe we’re not as fucked up as we thought.”

“No, we’re not,” Xander said. “We’re worse.”

Tank cruised the lot, waiting for someone to pull out. Lissa suddenly felt a cold shiver run through her body, the kind of shiver that always made her momma say “someone just walked over my grave.”

She looked up, and across the street she saw a man looking into a shop window. He turned suddenly, as if someone had called him, and seemed to look straight at her.

Brother Damien.

Lissa gave a tiny gasp. It couldn’t be. He’s dead, he’s dead, he’s dead.

“Lissa? You okay?” Tank asked.

She opened her eyes and scanned the sidewalk. He wasn’t there.

You’re imagining things,she told herself. Even if he’s not dead, how would he know to come here?

Police reports, she reminded herself. From her arrest.

No. There’s no way he wanted to find her that badly. Not someone who clawed him up and left him for dead.

But he might want revenge.

She moved closer to Tank. “I’m okay,” she said. “I just saw someone who looked like somebody I used to know.”

The grocery shopping was fun, despite an argument between Sloan and Xander about chunky versus jelly cranberry sauce, with Jasmin threatening to knock down an entire stack of cans and beat Sloan over the head with them.

And Xander almost drawing his knife on a poor hapless housewife over the last carton of pumpkin ice cream in the freezer case.