Love Bites (Harmony Lake #2)

Chapter One

COMING AWAKE IN the middle of the night sucked.

Seriously. It just blew a hearty one. One eye then the other creaked open. I stared at the ceiling, willing myself to go back to sleep but my brain was already at warp eight and set on a direct course to intercept the Borg. Damn Borg. Stay out of our quadrant!

Creeping into my mind at—I glanced to the side but saw only a cat butt.

So I pushed up to one elbow to gaze over Daisy Duke—the calico queen with brown fur on her backside and halfway down her back legs that looked like short shorts, ergo Daisy Duke whereas her brothers, Bo and Luke, who were not calico.

Mostly only female cats were usually calico so Bo and Luke were plain old tuxedo cats all from the same litter because genetics were wild.

They were down by my feet keeping my toes—

“Okay, stop, drop, and roll.” Shit. No, that was for when your clothes were on fire.

And Conor said I never paid attention to his fire safety spiels.

I felt the flood of information rushing into my head like an open tap.

My pulse was spiking. Forcing my eyes closed, I took three cleansing breaths.

In through the nose out through pursed lips.

I found my mantra and began thinking it with each breath.

Om Mani Padme Hum. I loved this mantra. It was a six -syllable Sanskrit mantra associated with the Buddha of Compassion, or so said the online meditation app I had recently signed up for.

I’d never really meditated before but of late the pressure of watching my sales grow smaller and smaller every month had started pushing me towards little anxiety episodes.

Just tiny things, not what I would call an “attack” or anything.

Only moments of fluttery heartbeats and raspy lung function that would result in me feeling a little woozy and—

“Damn it, Haider, focus on the mantra. Go away intrusive thoughts! Begone worrisome words! Fare-thee-well fretful feelings!”

The cats all made that sleepy little mewl at me.

A polite feline way of telling the human to lie still and shut his claptrap.

Claptrap. That’s a funny word. Claptrap.

Claptrap. It was a word my grandmother would use.

I bet that was where I heard it. Grandma, or Mamie as she preferred to be called, had probably said it at work.

She was known for being quite feisty with some of the suppliers, which was why I usually handled all the ordering for the shop.

No one wanted to tangle with a tiny seventy-year-old French chocolatier.

Oh damn. I did need to see about ordering more of the fun factory tour tickets for the upcoming Founders Day event.

Maybe this year I would give away two tours instead of one.

Anything to drum up some interest in the shop.

Sometimes the people who did the tour bought things on the way out.

Sales were needed badly or else my little dream was going to go poof, and not in the cute Parisian way Mamie said poof but in the catastrophic way.

A bad poof. A horrid poof. A poof that was more like a fiery explosion of all my hopes and dreams and—

“Shit. Shit. Shit.” I slapped the bedding with both hands.

The moon peeked through the slats of the miniblinds as I lay there panting.

I reached out to find the lamp on the nightstand.

The room flooded with soft white light. All three cats lifted their heads then leveled death glares at me.

“Sorry, it’s one of my bad nights.” I wiggled free of the weighted blankets pinning my legs to the bed then sat on the edge of the mattress, my toes resting on the cool tongue-and-groove flooring of my apartment.

It was a small space above Harmony Chocolates.

I’d given up the little cottage by Harmony Lake a few months ago to save on rent.

Thankfully, this space was nice. Lots of windows to let in the sun, great ambiance and an open floor plan.

My bed and dresser sat behind a stunning wooden screen Ryan had made for my twenty-fifth birthday.

The folding screen served well as a tasteful wall to separate the living room/kitchen/bath from where I slept.

Daisy, the biggest beggar of the bunch, padded over to me. Her black, orange, and white head bonked my elbow. Automatically my hand went down her back for comfort.

“Okay, so we’re up. It’s three-fifteen. What say we have some cat treats? Well, not me, obviously. I’ll find something that isn’t chocolate to nibble on, and then we can come back to bed.”

I rose, slid my feet into my little pink fuzzy slippers, pulled my robe over my bare backside, and made my way to the kitchen area.

The cats all followed, sitting at my feet as I shook out three treats for each cat.

Bo gobbled his, Luke pushed his aside—he didn’t like the seafood flavor this morning—and Daisy ate her delicately then fell on Luke’s like a starved jackal.

A fight broke out. Much hissing and swatting and poofy tails.

“Hey, no, no Luke. That is not how we treat our little sister. You didn’t want them. ”

Luke shot me a dark look then went back to bed, tail in the air. Bo stalked off to sit in the window and stare down on Caldwell Crossing. Not that he was going to see much in the middle of the night. Our little town wasn’t exactly a roaring mecca of nighttime frivolity.

I plugged in my tea kettle and shuffled to the bathroom, my favorite spring robe slipping from my bare shoulder.

After taking a piss I washed up, taking a moment to frown at the thirty-year-old business failure staring back at me.

My eyes were red from lack of sleep, my curls dull and lank, and my usual sunny smile nonexistent. Worry. It rode a dude hard.

Moving to the kitchen, I made some tea. A light little berry blend Mamie enjoyed when we took our lunch breaks—Mamie, me, and Crocus.

I then grabbed a tin of tiny butter cookies from Mamie’s home kitchen and plunked my ass into a chair at my desk.

I tucked my feet under my butt, pink fuzzy slippers tickling my nude backside.

It was nice. I’d not had anything tickle my ass in many a month.

The gay men in this town were limited, and most were my closest friends.

I wondered what the threesome were up to right now.

Maybe I could call someone and tell them all about my concerns.

No, that was dumb. Ryan, Conor, and Sam were all sleeping like little lambs.

Ryan was probably dreaming of what he could create from a slab of white ash, Conor was probs lost in a dream where he rescued someone from a fire and got a kiss on the cheek from said rescuee, and Sam was likely lost in a nighttime meander through the woods to whisper to all the maple trees on his farm.

‘Give me all your sap you sexy sugar maple you. Yeah, that’s it baby, give me all that sticky sweetness!

’ then some sort of crazy-ass human-slash-Ent knothole love fest would take place.

Although, Ents aren’t technically trees, they’re sentient beings that resemble trees and serve as protectors of the wood so it would be a human-slash-bark-skinned-being-hookup, which seemed a little less weird than sticking your dick into some random knot hole.

I mean a squirrel could be nesting in that hole and bite your cockhead then where would you be?

At the ER getting rabies shots with a bandage on the tip of your dick, that’s where you’d be.

I blinked out of that weirdness. “Okay, Haider, you need to either speak to a therapist or get laid.” Since there were no mental health providers in our small town or available gay men, I was zero for two.

Daisy leapt from the floor to my lap. I buried my nose in her soft fur and breathed in the subtle smell of fabric softener.

“How do you always know what I need?” I asked in a soft whisper as her purrs eased the tension that had knotted that spot between my shoulders.

I never did get back to sleep but I did order tickets for tours, set up a sale page on my website, and designed a new chocolate truffle centerpiece for Conor’s birthday in a week. Sleep was overrated. Who needed rest? Pfft. Not this guy.

“HEY BOSS.”

I jerked awake, eyes flying open, to find Crocus and the other three employees staring at me. My manager, a hulking man with a bald head sporting a crocus tat growing up the back of his neck onto his shiny pate pointed at my face.

“You fell asleep wrapping the maple creams,” Crocus, aka Leonard Pillen racing pigeon enthusiast said, as if I didn’t know I had done just that. I totally didn’t know. “You want to get some coffee or something maybe?”

“Coffee, yeah, coffee sounds good. Keep up the good work gang,” I told the foursome of ex-offenders who worked for me.

They were all good men, hard-working, and incredibly thankful for the job.

Crocus had been with me the longest. He was the very first hire from the Stonebridge Foundations Compassion Project for Ex-offenders to be placed with me.

And here he had stayed. He now rented a nice little house in Stonebridge, raised pigeons, and dated a pretty lady named Dora who owned a bike rental business over by the Parker Trail.

Did we have some issues reintegrating at times?

Sure. But overall, the experience had been a good one for me and for the guys trying to get their lives back on track.

A few folks in Caldwell Crossing were not happy but they could go take a flying leap.

A few people—probably the same few people—weren’t happy with an energetic gay twink openly bouncing around town. I had two words for the haters.

Tough. Titties.