Truth or Wolf: A Small Town Shifter Romantic Comedy (Wolf Brothers Book 1)

Chapter 22

Twenty-Two

There was something about him in that moment that made me feel like I was a part of something. Maybe it was a pack thing. Like he was always trying to bond, but at the same time keeping me under his heel. Perhaps I was a Werewolf after all…

— CAROLINE PECKHAM AND SUSANNE VALENTI

Ford’s absence left me feeling more scooped out and hollow than a Halloween pumpkin. There was no easy fix for the way I felt.

Therefore, I moped.

I dragged myself around Moonlight Valley in a sad, distracted funk. I doubted myself and my powers of attraction while my brain unhelpfully replayed the highlights of my relationship with Ford, pausing for in-depth failure analysis far too often.

My parents chalked up my depression to the death of my mother. I still called her Aunt Sally; that was who she’d been to me, while Momma had been my mother.

After several dejection-filled phone calls, my parents had taken to texting me links to business jobs in Nashville that I might want to follow up on and the names of a half dozen financial advisers from their personal network.

Then my momma would tag me in a cute Instagram post about Busy hands, happy heart(or a similar emotional soundbite) and ask how my pet boutique business plan was coming along and had I checked out the four possible storefronts she’d sent me information on.

She was of the opinion that keeping busy would not only help me adjust to Aunt Sally’s passing, but would catapult me ahead in life. It was a win-win in her eyes.

I appreciated her attempts to help, but I wasn’t fixated on the loss of Sally. I was sorry she had died, but we had not been as emotionally close as we could have been, more friendly roommates and acquaintances than family.

I did not understand why she’d maintained that emotional distance. Had she believed it was a necessary part of giving me up for adoption, that she could never, ever extend an emotional olive branch? Had she not been good at expressing her feelings? Why had she not told me about my cat shifter DNA?

In reality, the focus of my sad obsession and the cause of the apocalyptic state of my heart was of the lumberjack-bearded man-mountain ilk.

I’d worried that Ford would get back together with Deelie Sue. She was easy to get along with, as opposed to my more high-maintenance self (which the Internet assured me was a grave character flaw and one I should fix ASAP). She was beautiful, and she had deep roots here in Moonlight Valley, so he would not have to ever think about moving elsewhere, even temporarily, which he was so against doing with me apparently.

When we’d met up for a mentor-and-mentee coffee earlier this week, however, she’d assured me they were not a couple despite his recent visit to Wheels of Good Fortune specifically to see her and the numerous calls and texts he’d sent her.

She also insisted—more than once, which caused methinks the lady doth protest too much to loop through my head—that during said used car emporium visit, Ford had indicated no interest in resuming their friends-with-benefits relationship. They were not dating even if he “sure did call her a lot.” She was trying to be nice, although it backfired because it made me imagine Ford dating someone other than me.

Spoiler alert: I was not in a cheerful mood.

And also: I was jealous. As I was hiding in the loft of the Little Love Den, eating ice cream and shopping online, I did not want to hear that Ford was living his best life in Moonlight Valley. Hanging out with old friends. Possibly buying an overly accessorized new truck or spending time with gorgeous female werewolves.

The thought of him and her together made me madder than a hornet. It was not rational—we had broken up—but it was honest.

Maybe Ford had wanted to live out the rest of his life here in Moonlight Valley because he had werewolf-appropriate dating options. Maybe I wasn’t enough for him.

Maybe he was looking for a shifter mate, someone who could run around in furry form with him. I hadn’t told him about Aunt Sally’s bombshell revelation, but I was pretty sure that even if I had been able to turn into a cat on demand, that would not have been the right kind of shifter.

I would never be a wolf, and I would never be part of their world—just someone who had accidentally discovered their secret in yet another temporary summer.

Dear Ford,

According to the American Heart Association, broken hearts are actually a thing. A person can come down with takotsubo cardiomyopathy, which is a polysyllabic way of saying that that unfortunate person has a stricken heart that’s pot-shaped like an octopus trap.

Having an octopus trap for a heart was not part of my life plan and it is painful. It is, apparently, that organ’s response to our breakup and the resultant emotional stress. I do feel that it is also highly symbolic. In this instance, I was the trap and you were the octopus, except you got away and left me all alone in your cabin wearing a sheet. I kept trying to hold onto you and convince you to stay, and you kept withholding yourself and fleeing in consternation.

I did not intend to trap you. Or turn you into delicious sushi or an aquarium pet. I just wanted to be with you.

I meant it when I told you that I had no immediate plans to leave Moonlight Valley, and I certainly was not going to rush out of here like a cartoon character with its hair on fire. I have my obligations at Vanity Fur Salon to finish, Aunt Sally’s things to sort, and sundry other promises that I made and will keep. I may have a business plan and life goals, but that doesn’t mean I can’t stop to appreciate today. That doesn’t mean I won’t honor my obligations. Integrity is important.

Deelie Sue and I met up as we’re both businesswomen, albeit she’s far more experienced than me and therefore has many words of wisdom with which to bless me. After we’d finished the professional portion of our conversation, she mentioned that you’ve been calling and texting her nonstop for the last couple of weeks. This was hurtful to me, although I recognize that since you broke us up, you are, in fact, free to see someone else. Or several someone elses. If you have decided to see someone else, I will attempt to wish you the best.

I want to try explaining what I tried to say that night at your cabin because I don’t think it came out right at all and I keep imagining what I should have said. So please consider this letter my do-over, and also feel free to ignore it and/or walk away from it as you did me that night. This is something I need to say for myself.

So here goes:

I do love you and want us to share a future, so I asked you to come with me to Nashville when I’m ready to launch my small business there. It was a big ask. It is not an easy thing to upend your life for someone else and walk away from your job, your people, your home. But I thought that perhaps we were each other’s happy place and that would be corny but enough.

I cannot help but notice that at no point did you ask me to stay—or attempt to find a compromise that would work for both of us. I believe it is okay to compromise. World history bears me out on this point. It is also okay and not at all dishonorable, controlling, or otherwise wrong to ask me to stay. I would love it if you did.

Love,

Alice

This was not my first draft; my first draft had, in fact, been a list of bullet points. It turned out that I had far more to say than could be summed up in a concise list of items. The more I wrote, the more I remembered about that night he’d left the cabin.

It made me sad—and very, very mad.

The bullet points for the mad portion of events went something like this:

Left alone

In the dark

Naked but for a sheet

After sex

DICK

That last was an executive summary of my thoughts on the matter. Remembering about how Ford had sauntered away from me, red-bearded, overly large, and definitely overly confident, made me see red (and not in the delicious, bearded way, either).

My anger remained, although I recognized that putting my more irate feelings into a love letter would be counterproductive. I wanted him to come back—whereupon I would alternate between yelling at and loving on him—not decide that his mistake had been in not walking away from me sooner.

DICK was not an affectionate and loving nickname.

It was a scientifically accurate description.

As my ten-minute break was up, I tucked my phone away and marched proudly out of Vanity Fur Salon’s employee breakroom. I would be a model employee if it killed me.

Sanye gave me a sympathetic look as I returned to the pet-washing station next to hers. Some of her sympathy was engendered by my next client—a French bulldog that had been skunked—but most of it was due to the Ford situation.

“Are you doing okay?” she asked. “You’ve seemed really down since you got back from Texas. I’m so sorry about your Aunt Sally. I’m not sure if I said that before, but now that you’ve been all over kingdom come to settle her estate, I feel like I should say it now. You spent summers with her, so the two of you must have been close.”

I warmed up the water while I considered how to answer her. “We weren’t,” I said finally. “Close, that is. I guess you could say we were more like roommates those summers. Or more accurately, I was her lodger and she was always considering kicking me out.”

Sanye’s forehead wrinkled in confusion. “But you were family.”

I forbore from pointing out that Sanye’s family was hardly the stuff of reading hour at the local library. Her dad, Mr. Jansen, was horrible and undoubtedly a major contributor to her family’s extreme dysfunctionality.

“She’d leave me notes. Put a key under the mat for me. We didn’t talk. I figured she was either not comfortable interacting with people or she’d decided we didn’t have much in common and so she wasn’t going to make the effort.”

I busied myself with the dog, shaking off my hurt. I’d accepted Aunt Sally’s peculiarities years ago, but learning that she was actually my birth mother made the sting feel fresh. It also made me notice all the ways in which she’d deliberately kept me at arm’s length.

Of course, she’d also been a part-time cat, and cats by definition kept the world at arm’s length.

I was so confused.

I wasn’t ready to tell Sanye about the details of my inheritance, financial or shifter. I was equally unready to talk about Aunt Sally turning out to be my birth mother.

My feelings were more mixed up than one of those tins of Christmas popcorn with the thin cardboard inserts that kept nothing in its proper place, so the cheese popcorn bled into the caramel corn and butter popcorn and you had no idea what you’d end up with.

“Is that why you look so sad? Do not feel guilty about inheriting her stuff,” Sanye ordered.

I shook my head obediently. Because I didn’t think I felt guilty about it. Stuff was just stuff, and while Aunt Sally had turned out to own valuable and life-changing stuff, I was conflicted.

I’d tried to stay open to the possibility of finding love, but what I’d really found was an emotional disaster that would take years—if not forever—to recover from. I’d been abandoned naked in the middle of the wilderness.

Sanye’s eyes narrowed. Ostensibly, she came over to help me lather up the French bulldog, but really, she was about to pry.

“You’re hiding something.”

I shook my head and concentrated on building up a mountain of lather on my client’s fur. The soap and water got all mixed up with the tears pouring from my eyes. And damn it, I was a sobbing, snotty mess and a bad, bad employee.

The French bulldog barked and disappeared along with Sanye. I stood there, trying to pull myself together but only crying harder. Footsteps announced Sanye’s return, and then she pulled me into a bear hug. I cried more and harder, hanging onto her.

“What happened? Are you okay?”

My response was more tears and some snot. I did not have any words left to explain how I was feeling. Eventually, I pulled myself together enough to show her the letter I’d drafted on my phone.

She flipped the Open sign to Closed, read the letter while I paced and tried to pull myself together, and then frowned angrily on my behalf. “Ford Boone is a first-class dick.”

She would get no argument from me.

“He abandoned you in bed?”

I got my crying under control enough to bring her up to speed on the details of that unfortunate night: my sad phone calls and texts from Texas, his radio silence after my first love confession, and my ill-advised midnight pursuit of him at his hunting cabin.

Our lovemaking, my second heartfelt confession of feelings for him and even more ill-advised use of the l-word, and his subsequent abandonment of me under the guise of honorably respecting and protecting my choices about my future also poured out. By the time I’d finished, Sanye looked horrified.

I shrugged, because pretending like this was no big deal and something I could recover from seemed like my only option. “It’s good. I’m good.”

Sanye frowned ferociously. “That is total bullcrap!”

I nodded.

“Do we…want him back? Or are we plotting murder?” Sanye’s eyes glowed with fierce intensity. “FYI, I’m down with either.”

“I don’t know!” I sobbed.

Sanye squeezed me. “You stay at my place tonight. We’ll buy all the ice cream we can carry and then we’ll trash-talk Ford and make you a plan. For right now, it can be a Choose Your Own Adventure-type plan with a Ford option and a hurt-on-sight option.”

Sanye was officially the world’s best friend. I laid my head on her shoulder. “Yes, please.”

Sanye’s frowned deepened. “Bless his heart. He’s something else. Come on. Let’s quit early and raid the Piggly Wiggly for ice cream.”

By the time we pulled out of the Piggly Wiggly parking lot, the back seat of the car was colder than an empty igloo in Siberia thanks to the four bags of ice cream sitting there. We’d loaded up on all the chocolate flavors, plus a peach, a mint chip, and a bourbon pecan.

When my phone buzzed in my hand, I answered it automatically. I had only one bar of service, and being in a moving vehicle was not doing my reception any favors.

“Hello?”

“Alice? Are you there? It’s Deelie Sue. Can you…help. Come out…big problem…”

“Wait. Say that again? You’re cutting out on me.”

We rounded a bend, the road rose some, the trees thinned out, and I heard Deelie Sue say, “…Jansen place and please get a move on. I’m in big trouble and…”

“Are you at Mr. Jansen’s house? Do you need a ride?”

Sanye frowned, her gaze bouncing between my face and the road.

“Please. I’ll?—”

The call dropped. I tried calling back, but it went straight to voice mail.

“I think we need to go get Deelie Sue,” I said, trying to sound calm and in control. “She’s at your dad’s place.”

“At my dad’s? She wants you to go there? Like you’re a Lyft or an Uber?”

“Actually, more like the cavalry or a rescue party. She sounded like she needed help.”

I sat there, hoping a plan would come to me. Fall out of the sky and land at my feet. Something. Since this was definitely a case of do the next thing, I pulled up Alessandro’s contact on my phone.

“I’m going to call Alessandro,” I told Sanye. “And ask him to meet us at your dad’s place.”

“You really want to go out to my dad’s? It’s full moon tonight, and there’s always a big party. It’ll be full of Iron Wolves.” An unmistakable note of panic rang in Sanye’s voice and I felt like I was missing something. Perhaps it was that she and her dad were estranged and she hadn’t stepped foot in his house since her marriage to Evan?

“Take me back to Vanity Fur Salon so I can get my car. I’ll go out there on my own.”

“Absolutely not.” Sanye pressed her lips together. “We’ll go together.”

Alessandro didn’t pick up, and my call went straight to voice mail. Shoot. I left him a message and then texted it too for good measure.

“You don’t have to come,” I tried again.

“Oh, I do,” she said grimly. “I really, really do. You have no idea.”