Netting the Nymph (The Savage League #2)

Chapter 1

KIERA

Ding dong ding dong ding dong.

“Coming! Hold your horses.”

I whipped open my front door to discover a barricade. Someone had stacked four enormous boxes, one on top of the other, right on my doorstep. By the looks of it, they were going to be heavy, too.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” I was supposed to meet Elli Rogan at Connors’ Bakery in twelve minutes, and now I was trapped.

I peeked around the stack to get a good look at the delivery driver who was just hopping up onto his seat. No surprise. It was Darrel, a gremlin who loved a good joke.

“You’re a pain in the ass, Darrel!”

He cackled, punched his horn twice—beep, beep—then drove away.

I let out a sigh and surveyed the cardboard tower. Normally, I was of the opinion that the world had improved in the last seventy years since the assimilation of berserkers, shifters, and fae into the human population. Unfortunately, supply chain management was one area where I took exception.

Pranksters like pixies, imps, and those asshole gremlins, all gravitated toward the transportation of goods, which sucked for me with my online fashion-influencer career taking off. They were either delivering late, delivering to the wrong address, or doing crap just to make my life difficult.

Aurora, my next-door neighbor poked her frizzy, gray-haired head out of her apartment and bent to retrieve her newspaper. The tassels on her purple silk kimono dragged on the ground. Aurora’s style could only be characterized as fortune teller chic.

She spotted me, shot me a smile, and said, “Good morning, Kiera, doll.”

“Morning, Aurora.”

She yawned, scratched her butt, then ducked back inside. She could be a talker, but never before ten o’clock.

Our single-story apartment building had once been a seedy twelve-room motel, but it had been sold to investors a decade ago and remodeled into six rental units.

Currently, the tenants were me, Aurora, three recently divorced men in their late fifties, and Chop-Suey Bob, thus named because of the constant smell of Chinese food emanating from his apartment.

Generally speaking, the place was plain and unremarkable until you got inside. Or at least, until you got inside my pad. I’d worked hard on my decorating. Or should I say curating?

I’d gone for French Provincial and turned a basic shoebox apartment into a European escape, complete with light blue walls and cream-colored trim. It was the perfect, classy backdrop for staging my photo shoots.

I didn’t have a ton of furniture, partly because of my need for a bare work space, but mostly because I was selective and patient with my purchases. For example, my dove-gray chenille couch would steal all the attention no matter how much furniture I owned. She was a bit of a prima donna that way.

She’d also cost me a whack—two weeks’ pay from my old job at JoJo’s Boutique.

I wandered into the kitchen and grabbed my utility knife from the junk drawer. I knew from experience that the boxes would be too cumbersome to move much farther than the front door all by myself. It was easier to unpack them from where they sat.

As I got to cutting the packing tape, I called Elli and put my phone on speaker.

After the third ring, a gravelly male voice answered her phone. “Hello?”

Side note: as previously mentioned, not every aspect of the human experience had deteriorated since our awareness of the mythological world. For the last several weeks, Elli had been living her best life—free and easy—with Lukas Bakken, an incredibly gorgeous berserker wolf.

Even with his recent facial scars, Lukas still turned heads. In a good way.

He was also a professional hockey player with the local team, the Minnesota Spriggans, though he was currently on the injured reserves.

Elli Rogan’s entire girl squad, in which I’d been miraculously (and probably temporarily) included, agreed: it didn’t suck having our friendship with Elli bring us into close proximity with the team.

They were all good guys and, like Lukas, not hard to look at. Particularly one handsome but persistently delusional nymph, Sean-Ohmygod-those-mesmerizing-green-eyes-Murphy.

“Lukas?” I asked because, assuming it was him on the other end of the line, his voice sounded even more growly than usual.

“You got him,” Lukas replied.

“It’s me. Kiera.” I opened the first box and pulled out a purple winter coat with a faux-fur lined hood. Awesome. It was late October and already getting cold.

“I know,” he said. “Your name popped up on the screen.”

“Right. Is Elli there?”

“Yeah. Here next to me.”

I waited a second, and Elli came on the line. “Hi! What’s up?”

She sounded breathless, and that made me smile. Best guess: the girl had gotten herself some on a Saturday morning. Nice.

“I’m going to be late to the bakery,” I said.

“The bakery? Oh!” she replied. “That’s okay. I totally lost track of time.”

I bet she did.

“Could we make it ten o’clock instead?” I asked.

She exhaled. “That would be perfect.”

“Cool, chickie. See you then.”

I bought two cups of coffee and two donuts—my usual: maple glaze; and Elli’s favorite: powdered sugar—then found a spot at a table near the large picture window that faced the street. Less than a minute later, Elli pulled up in her new Lexus.

Again, it obviously didn’t suck having a professional athlete for a boyfriend. When she first got the car, I called it suh-weet.

Lukas had replied that it got a perfect 10/10 safety rating.

Elli just grinned and shook her head. Her berserker wolf was protective, and that was arguably even suh-weeter.

Elli and I first met here, at Connors’ Bakery, a little less than a year ago. This was back when she worked the counter and I was just starting my online fashion gig, researching and editing from one of the café tables.

We both had better options available to us now. She worked for the Spriggans as their digital and social media manager, and I’d developed a sizable following that had allowed me to quit my job at JoJo’s Boutique and set up my own home office.

Still, we came back to the bakery most Saturday mornings to indulge our guilty pleasures.

I waved at her through the window as she jogged across the street, her high ponytail swinging. The girl had gorgeous chestnut-colored hair, and her recent fashion choices…

Well, let’s just say, with a little help from me, she’d finally unlocked her own personal style.

There’d been no reason for such a creative woman to own so many turtle necks and button-down shirts. Now, her look matched her personality: a little bit sweet, a touch of whimsy, a whole lot of cool. I totally dug the paisley, boho maxidress she was wearing.

If I had confidence in the future of our friendship, I might even ask her if I could borrow it.

The bell rang over the door as she rushed in. “Thank God you got the coffee already!”

“Still hot,” I said.

She dropped onto her chair, looking happy and sated.

“Good morning?” I asked suggestively.

She took a big sip, then smiled like that cat who got her cream. “Lukas is making up for lost time.”

I fought a grin and gave her an I’m-not-surprised shrug. “While his shoulder heals, I suppose he needs to find creative ways to keep in shape.”

“Berserkers heal quickly,” she said. “The team doctor is just being cautious. If anything, Lukas is looking for creative ways to work out his frustration.”

I took a sip of my own coffee, smiling against the rim, and said, “That works, too.”

From there, we slid seamlessly into our typical Saturday morning topics: the growth of my business, the latest drama in Elli’s friends’ (my acquaintances’) lives, and whether her dream of moving to California and doing PR for a Hollywood A-lister had shifted permanently to something more local.

Spoiler alert: It had.

We kibitzed about all of that for at least half an hour. Right up until the conversation tapered off, and Elli gave me a sly smile, saying, “Sean Murphy asked about you again.”

I closed my eyes, prayed for strength, and slowly lowered my cup to the table.

For context, let’s get up to speed on the last seven weeks.

Sean Murphy, or “Murph” as his teammates called him, played defense on the Minnesota Spriggans. He was also a nymph. A tree nymph or dryad, specifically.

Totally hot. Incredibly loyal to his friends. And totally, incredibly not for me.

Not to say hot, loyal pro athletes weren’t my type, but there were certain personal reasons why Sean and I were never meant to be—reasons I didn’t like to talk about.

But Sean was all about the talking because, as he kept insisting, he wanted “to get to know me better.”

Sigh.

I mean, yeah. There’d been that moment of instant mutual attraction. I knew it. Sean knew it. But only one of us was willing to acknowledge it out loud. And the last thing I wanted was for Sean Murphy to get to know me.

Still, every chance he’d gotten since that first day we met in the elevator going up to visit Lukas (him) and Elli (me), he’d made it a point to seek me out.

If I came to visit Elli, he’d have reason to drop by to see if Lukas wanted to hit the gym.

If I was at the grocery store, Sean would appear out of an aisle and nudge my cart.

Every time he even got close to asking me out, I interrupted, telling him—maybe a little too enthusiastically—about all things I had going on. Marketing seminars. Online fashion shows I absolutely could not miss. Once I even told him I was taking a pottery class.

These so-called accidental encounters weren’t stalking.

Sean was too nice of a guy for that. What it was, was polite persistence, and because I was probably giving mixed signals—something I couldn’t help because, like I said before, the attraction was definitely there—he saw through my lies and saw no reason to give up.

I really wished he’d give up on me. Because if I gave in and we became an actual thing, our inevitable implosion would mean me being alone again. And I don’t just mean heartbroken and without a boyfriend.