Chapter 3
Maverick
“Oh shit!” I yelped, scrambling so fast I fell off the bed. “Is he dead? Did he have a heart attack? Oh my goddess, what do we do?”
“Mav…”
“Mav, I don’t think…”
“What are we gonna do now, Briar? Do we move the body? Hide the body? Eat the body? Oh eww, please say we don’t have to eat the body. I don’t think I can. I’ll puke, Briar, I know I will.”
His arms slid around me, and he hugged me tight, lips tickling the shell of my ear as he spoke directly into it.
“Relax, Mav, breathe. Just breathe, okay?” Briar cooed. “He’s not dead. He just passed out and hit his head on the floor. We’d better call up to the reception desk; they’ll know what to do.”
“What the hell was he doing in here anyway?” I squeaked, clinging to the arms he’d wrapped around me. “Why break into our cabin? This better not be another of Pasqual’s attempts to steal our recipes, ‘cause I swear I will eat him and deal with the heartburn later.”
“Just relax and put some pants on,” he said, nudging me in the direction of the dresser where I’d unpacked our clothes. “I’ll call the receptionist, and we can take it from there.”
“How are you so calm about this?” I asked as I yanked the drawer open so hard, I pulled it out completely and dropped it on my foot. “Owe! Fuck! Dammit! Son of a fucking bitch!”
Now we had a passed-out human on the floor and me hopping around on one foot, cussing up a blue streak.
“Shhhh, shhh, it’s okay; let’s see what you’ve done to yourself,” he said as he sat me on the edge of the bed and took my foot in his hands.
“Hardly even a bruise; it will be gone in a second, sweetheart. Just slow down. We’re not going to get into trouble for this, I promise.
He’s the one at fault for breaking in here, not us.
As soon as they look at him, they’ll see that we didn’t lay a claw on him. ”
“Why didn’t you? Why were you just lying there staring at him when I woke up?”
Pain made me angry. Fear amplified it. I was usually the chill one, while he tended to go off half-cocked and threatened to claw people’s eyes out and feed them to them.
“I don’t know,” he said as he picked up the drawer and slid it back into place. “I just didn’t sense a threat from him. He seemed more curious than dangerous, at least until you scared the shit out of him.”
“Me?” I squeaked; glad my foot had stopped throbbing so I could help him pick up the rest of my clothes. “I scared him? How do you think I felt seeing a stranger standing beside our bed watching us? Not that there was anything to see, but…you don’t think he was looking for a thrill, do you?”
I was getting worked up again; I could feel it. My nerves were completely frazzled, there was still a passed-out stranger on our floor, and we were both still fucking naked.
“I really need you to get yourself together before your imagination runs even further off the rails and takes us both with it,” Briar said. “I’m sure he didn’t come in here hoping I had you pinned to the bed.”
“Good,” I snapped, “because we swore we were done with all of that when we shut down our OnlyFans page.”
“And we are. I don’t know what the hell is going on, but we will get to the bottom of it. Now put these on and let me find my phone.”
“They’re in the pocket of your jeans, which are still on the floor of the kitchen,” I replied as I wiggled into the pair of sleep pants he passed me. “I’ll go get them. I don’t want to be alone in here with him.”
Before he could reply, I scrambled out the door, keeping my eyes straight ahead so the sight of the stranger wouldn’t send me hurtling back to the edge of a meltdown.
I gathered all the clothes we’d left discarded on the kitchen floor and carried them back to the bedroom, not wanting whoever they sent up here to deal with the stranger to think we were a bunch of slobs or had decided to fuck right there on the kitchen floor the moment we arrived.
That’s pretty much where my brain would have gone if I’d seen the way our clothes were scattered.
I had to go up on tiptoes to get my shirt down from the chandelier, but I snagged it and without putting a hole in the collar when I flipped it free.
It was only when I left the kitchen and stepped back into the living room area that I noticed a bunch of things by the door that we certainly hadn’t left there.
There were snowshoes behind the boot rack and a bulging brown paper sack sitting in front of the couch.
Several other items had magically appeared since we’d curled up to nap, including some kind of wooden contraption that was propped up behind the door.
What the fuck?
“Hey Briar, you’re not gonna believe this; he brought a bunch of stuff with him,” I said as I stepped back into the bedroom to see that Briar had pulled on a pair of sleep pants too.
“Really?”
“Yeah, there’s a bunch of stuff in the living room that doesn’t belong to us.”
“I’ll bet someone at reception made a mistake when they handed out cabin keys. At least he’s starting to come around, and I don’t smell any blood, though I did feel a bit of a goose egg on the back of his head when I checked.”
“If the worst that comes out of all of this is that we send him on his way with a headache, then I can more than work with that.”
“Hopefully he can too.”
He was kneeling next to the stranger, who was moaning, and held out his hand for his phone, which I happily handed to him before nudging the stranger with my toe.
All that did was prompt another moan, and little else.
Certainly not an explanation for what the fuck was going on here, which I was dying to hear.
While Briar waited for someone to pick up the line, I paced in between studying the stranger.
He really was quite striking, with that pale skin contrasting his midnight hair.
He definitely didn’t read shifter, though, not his aura or his scent, which was all human with an underlying sweetness of omega, like me.
With all the things I’d seen piled up in the living room, I was starting to believe that someone had given him the key to the wrong cabin, because it definitely seemed like he’d packed for a stay.
“What the hell? It’s not even going to voicemail; it’s just ringing and ringing and ringing and…. Hi, this is Briar Mallone in cabin 55, and we’ve got a major problem up here.”
I wished he’d put it on speakerphone. I probably should have suggested it when I’d handed the phone to him, because now I was back to pacing again while he waited for the end of what seemed to be an awful lot of rambling taking place from the other end.
“Look, not to be rude or anything, but I’m not really interested in what else you’ve got going on up there right now and who’s threatening to do what with flames.
I’ve got a passed-out stranger on the floor of our cabin bedroom that we absolutely did not invite in and would like to have removed immediately. ”
More silence.
“No, he’s not drunk or on anything; he fainted after we shifted in front of him.”
Silence again.
“Well, it’s not like we planned to shift in front of him, but we were curled up in fur in the middle of our bed when he came in here, so shifting was pretty much the only option we had since he couldn’t understand us in our fur.
Now will you please send someone to deal with this?
We’re certain at this point that he’s at the wrong cabin, but if you’ve got a medic or a nurse on staff, you might want to send them up to do an assessment because he hit his head on the floor when he passed out, and it’s a bit swollen. ”
Briar smacked a hand to his face and groaned as more silence followed.
“Like, I didn’t measure it or anything, but he’s got a knot on his head, and since he doesn’t smell like a shifter, I’m not sure how long it’s going to take him to wake up or for the lump to go down.”
I was getting frustrated, not being able to hear more than the occasional word here or there, and none of them made any sense when I tried to compile the fragments of conversation.
“Yes, cabin 55, Okay, good, you’ll send someone right away then, right?”
I was staring at Briar’s face when his features contorted, letting out his inner feline when he bellowed, “What! I don’t think I heard you correctly. You might want to slow down and give me a better answer than that because what you just said is completely unacceptable.”
I was seriously getting sick of these bouts of silence.
“How can you not be able to fix it! This is exactly the sort of thing that requires fixing, not your sincerest apologies, which are absolutely worthless to me. Are you really trying to tell me you’ve done this with every single cabin?
How! How does that even happen? No, no, no, back up and explain it to me like I’m a five-year-old, please, because I am absolutely too frazzled right now to be able to grasp this. ”
Briar went to sit on the edge of the bed, missed, and landed on the floor beside the stranger, who was finally starting to do a bit more than moan.
First his hand began to flutter, fingers twitching and rubbing against the polished hardwood floor.
Twice he lifted it only to drop it back onto the wood with a thud before he finally managed to muster up the strength to brush the hair back from his face.
I watched his chest rise and fall as he let out a series of long moans, muttering unintelligible phrases as he slid his hand along the side of his head, wincing when he reached the lump.
“Yeah. I’ll get back to you after I’ve had the chance to talk it over with my partner, but don’t be surprised if he calls you and gives you an earful once he hears what you’ve just told me, and I’m sure our human guest will want you on the line once he’s fully conscious again.”
This time the silence was much briefer.
“Yes, he is starting to come around now, but I still think you need to send up a medic.”
Nodding, Briar just pressed his head against the side of the bed while looking utterly flabbergasted.
While it wasn’t rare to see him look that way, the fact that he wasn’t in an absolute frenzy and shredding the curtains right now had my flabbers gasted, knowing him the way I did.
He actually sounded resolved, and he didn’t do resolved; that was too much like conceding, and he absolutely hated to lose.
“Oh good, thank you, we’ll listen for their knock,” Briar said before hitting the red phone icon to end the call and dropping the phone in his lap. “Unfuckingbelievable.”
“What?”
“This is the biggest clusterfuck I’ve ever heard of in my entire life,” he groaned.
“What is?”
“That Branson guy up at reception should never be allowed to book another thing ever in his life. Like ever-ever!”
“What. Happened!”
Being kept in the dark was getting old, and now it sounded like we were going to have more strangers, and thus, more scents invading our space, though I supposed it would be rather rude to drag our unexpected guest out onto the front porch for the medics to assess there.
“Wh-why am I on the floor?” The stranger muttered, groaning and sitting up a little.
His eyes were a deeper blue than mine, and he steadily blinked against the light shining through the window when he looked up at me.
“You fainted,” I explained.
His brow furrowed as scowl lines formed between his eyebrows. “I don’t faint.”
“You did today,” Briar explained. “I’m going to go out on a limb and assume that you’ve never encountered a shifter before.”
“A…a what?”
“A shifter,” I said. “Someone who can change between human and animal forms at will.”
“Like a werewolf?”
“Nope, sorry to disappoint, but we don’t have in-between forms. Just skin or fur in our case, though we’ve got friends with scales, feathers, and even quills.”
He studied me for a moment, taking the time to let my words sink in.
“I’m not dreaming this, am I? I saw you guys shift.”
“Yeah, sorry about that,” Briar explained, scrubbing a hand over the back of his neck. “It was the only way to be able to communicate with you. I’m sorry it was so overwhelming you wound up on the floor with a lump on the back of your head.”
“Yeah, it’s not the best feeling in the world, let me tell you.”
“There are medics on the way to take a look,” Briar said. “In the meantime, we’ve, um, got a bit of a problem we need to sort out.”
“Are you referring to what the two of you are doing in my cabin?”
“Yeah, about that, you see, we’ve got this cabin booked for the next two weeks too,” Briar explained. “I just got off the phone with the reception desk, and apparently there has been one hell of a mix-up with the reservations, and all of the cabins are double booked.”
“Wait, double booked as in there are no more cabins available?”
“Pretty much.”
“So, what the hell did he suggest?”
Briar actually squirmed when he met my gaze and shrugged.
“Yeah, Briar. What did he suggest?” I asked, though I had a damn good idea just from the look on Briar’s face.
“Getting to know one another and working out a way to share the space,” he replied.
“I see,” the guy said, sitting up a bit more.
“Well, considering that you guys could have just shredded me with your claws and had me for supper while I was laid out on the floor, I guess I really don’t have anything to fear from you.
Are you sure that you’re both okay with it, though? One of you was pretty snarly.”
“That was me,” I said, waving a hand at him. “Waking up to a stranger in the room freaked the hell out of me, and I don’t really do surprises well.”
“No, he does not, not even good surprises like birthday ones,” Briar chimed in.
“I’m sorry. I honestly thought you guys were part of the decor when I came in, or I never would have booped you on the nose,” the man said, turning his head to face Briar.
“No harm done; besides, I booped you back, so I’d say we’re even.”
“True. I’m Leo.”
“Briar. And this is Maverick. Mav, you wanna stop hovering and help Leo up off the floor?”
I reached to do so, mind whirling over the fact that our vacation for two had just become a vacation for three, yet as his hand slid into mine, I got the oddest impression that despite the way things had unfolded, Leo belonged with us.