A Unicorn Foal for Christmas (Animal Rescue Shifters #4)

CHAPTER ONE

∞∞∞

Turner Cole jerked up at the sound of screaming from the fence post he was trying to repair.

Unfortunately, the screams were distressingly common.

They had been the punctuation of his days and his nights for going on three weeks now.

One never really got used to the shrieking displeasure of a unicorn mare about to give birth, but he had somehow managed it.

At this point, it was a common enough occurrence that he would have gone back to fixing the fence if it hadn't been followed by a startled woman’s shout.

“Oh, come on!”

It took Turner’s brain a moment to wonder at the voice’s sense of nearly hysterical humor and offense, but without actually planning it, he was already running for the front of the house.

His charge was missing, might have been so for a while as he was fixing the fence, and he could only pray that nothing too bad had happened yet.

He came around the side of the barn at a dead run, and then he had to pause for a moment to take in the strangeness of what he was seeing.

A white unicorn the same size and shape as a small horse, swollen tremendously through the midsection, was at the base of the steps.

Her golden hooves and golden horn gleamed dully in the winter afternoon’s light, beautiful but absolutely sharp; and when she tossed her head back and forth, her horn swung in a wide arc that would absolutely have knocked the breath out of anything in its way.

As he watched, she snorted, arching her powerful neck, pawing at the ground. She was agitated, terribly so, and it all had to do with the woman standing on the porch, swinging a loaded tote bag like it was a bludgeon.

She looked to be about his age, with long dark hair braided down her back.

She wasn’t tall, but there was a kind of solidity to her, as if there was nothing in the world that could sway her once she had set herself on a path.

Even through her winter jacket, he could see she was curvy through the hips and small through the chest in a way that he couldn’t help appreciating.

Then the unicorn snorted, tossing her head back and forth, and Turner transformed.

In the space of a heartbeat, he had dropped to the ground, senses thrown open like a door to a different world. In his wolf shape, the world shaded darker and dimmer, but the smells and the sounds more than made up for it, especially in conjunction with the muscles and teeth.

Took you long enough, his wolf observed. What are you waiting for? Go fix that.

As a wolf, he could comfortably cover enormous distances with his long-legged lope, but there was none of that ease now.

Instead, he dashed like lightning itself across the yard to the unicorn, and he didn’t stop when he got there, either.

He dove immediately for the unicorn’s legs, snapping his sharp white teeth at her heels, making brief feints at her face.

Irritated, the unicorn shrieked again, and, when she swung her head with fury, he danced back, escaping a long gash along his side.

The unicorn was bigger than he was and stronger, but he was far more maneuverable at close quarters.

He took advantage of his dexterity now, keeping close, dancing straight up to her face, shying back from a hefty kick, and dodging back in to headbutt her shoulder.

It should have worked to get her snorting and trotting back to the barn, but she lingered, turning around and snorting hard as if to get the smell of something nasty out of her nose, all while occasionally shrieking.

Turner kept his attention focused on the unicorn.

It was a damned stupid thing, being around something this dangerous and letting your thoughts wander, but part of his mind insisted he turn to the woman on the porch, that he needed to leave off whatever silly thing the unicorn had going on and get down to more important matters.

That unicorn is pregnant with her first foal and upset beyond all belief, he thought grimly, dodging a sweep of her horn. Nothing is more important than she is right now.

It was very true, and he would figure out why he didn’t seem to believe it worth a damn later. Right now, he had to get his recalcitrant charge back into the barn and hope that his makeshift repair job on the corral held.

The unicorn snorted, tossing her head. For a moment, Turner dared to hope that she had gotten bored and decided to look for something else to do, but then that deadly horn leveled at him, her entire strong, white body moving forward with all the lethal intent of a bullet.

If I go right around her and then spin back as fast as I can, then maybe…

He had no time to complete that thought. Instead, a flower pot came flying out of nowhere to shatter on the ground between them, stopping the unicorn in her tracks. For a second, Turner and the unicorn glanced at each other across the inter-species divide, united in their confusion.

Did you see that?

Sure did. Man, life’s weird sometimes.

He risked a glance over his shoulder where the poor woman the unicorn had cornered on the porch shook what look like a gardening trowel at the pregnant beast.

“Hey, no! You leave him alone! Go on, shoo!”

For some reason, those words made the wolf inside him howl with approval. His wolf sure thought something was funny, but Turner had no time to figure it out, because the unicorn dropped her head with a frenzied snort and charged, this time not toward Turner but toward the porch.

No, no, no!

He lunged forward, leaping bodily to put himself between the unicorn and the woman who had tried to help him.

In his wolf form, he was big, barrel-chested, and strong as hell, but even his wolf’s strength only turned the unicorn rather than stopping her.

She shied back and would have course-corrected and perhaps run him straight down if a paper-wrapped package hadn’t flow through the air, smacking her square in the nose.

In any other situation, Turner would have protested.

Here, though, he could only watch, heart between his teeth, as the unicorn shook her head and then leaned down to investigate the package on the ground.

She pawed it open with her sharp hoof, and then to his surprise, she made a satisfied whuffing sound, lowering her face to lip at what was inside.

She seemed content at the moment, but you never could quite tell with unicorns. He backed up step by step, eyes on the now-quiet animal, and was just wondering how to explain all of this to the woman on the porch when she spoke.

“So which Madsen are you?”

Relief flooded him. Apparently she knew about the wolf shifters who had made Clearwater their home for generations, and that meant that there was a lot he didn’t have to worry about. He stood up from his wolf form, man-shaped, and continued watching the unicorn eat.

“My mother was a Madsen. My dad was a Cole from Whitefish Harbor up north, and that makes me Turner Cole. Good to know you.”

“Ah, just the man that I’m looking for. I have some groceries for you.”

It startled a laugh out of him.

“So I guess that’s my sausage that she’s eating?”

“I’m afraid so. Is... is that a bad thing? It won’t make her sick?”

“Not at all. She’s got four cast-iron stomachs, and if she wants to put it in her mouth, she can generally digest it. I just didn’t think that garlic-black pepper sausage links were going to calm her. Damn. Well, I guess that’s one for the books.”

As he watched, the unicorn finished off his sausage, nosing at it sadly and turning the paper over hoping for more. It was fair. The co-op made great sausage, and he figured that was how he looked when it was gone as well.

“She looks a lot calmer now,” he mused. “Ma’am, thank you for the groceries, but unless you want to get roped into another episode of Unicorn Rodeo, I might suggest you get back in your car and hit the road.”

“Sounds good to me, but.”

“Hm?”

“I hate to be that person, but I was told that I’d get some cash…”

“Oh! God, yeah, I’m sorry, here.”

The unicorn looked intent on licking a hole through the paper on the off-chance she could get some more meat off it, and it gave Turner the chance to dig in his pocket for his wallet.

“Sorry, I’ve been a little preoccupied here. Thank you for asking, I would have felt like shit if you had… if you had…”

He froze, cash in hand, looking up at the woman who lingered on the third step.

For someone who had recently been attacked by a unicorn, she looked remarkably composed, her long dark hair tamed back into a loose ponytail with flyaway strands wisping her face, one bare hand shockingly pale where it rested on the hip of her dark wool coat.

He couldn’t avoid observing how her hips swelled under her coat, round even through all the cold-weather protection—it was his favorite when he had the time to have favorites, but then he looked up into her face, and everything—house, field, unicorn, winter, world—faded into the background.

In that moment, nothing else mattered, not even the breath in his lungs, and he could barely breathe.

She had the kind of face that poets would have called dreamy, full lips with a slight downturn at the corners that could make her look sultry or sullen, but it was her eyes that caught him and would never let him go.

Her eyes were as deep and dark as the forests where he had grown up, and, when he met them with his own, he and his wolf both knew what she was beyond a shadow of a doubt.

To his wolf, she was every good thing in the world, a full belly after a hunt and the hunt itself, digging out a den and sleeping in it. She was spring, summer, and fall; and, here in the winter, he would love her like the storm.

To Turner, there were words, and they rose up in his throat as if they’d come straight from his heart.

My fated mate.