Not Half Badger (Fated Mountain Lodge #2)
1. Doreen
DOREEN
“Hey, Missy D, the boss wants you in the office.”
Doreen pulled herself out from under the transmission of a beat-up early-2000s Ford Econoline van. “Congrats, Tim, you get to finish taking this apart,” she told her fellow mechanic, cheerfully slapping the wrench into his hand.
As usual, she pulled her punch to the force that a normal human would have been able to exert, but he winced a little, so maybe she’d overdone it. As usual.
“Don’t forget to give me all the credit for loosening the bolts for you,” she added, passing it off as a joke. Tim made a rude but friendly gesture, and Doreen tossed him a grin as she strode off, reaching for a shop towel to wipe her greasy hands on.
She slowed as she approached the office. She really enjoyed most aspects of working in Mike’s Garage. She liked the work and, although she’d had to struggle to be accepted by the otherwise all-male staff, she felt like she was starting to settle in now.
Still, some nervous part of her brain, the part that was aware she hadn’t fit in all her life (too big, too loud, too bossy, too strong) was afraid that the other shoe had dropped—again. She had to fight the urge to smooth her hands over her head, making sure her tangle of dark hair wasn’t working its way out of its practical braid. Trying to make herself look girly for the boss could end badly in any one of a number of ways. Squaring her shoulders, she marched into Mike’s office.
“Doreen,” Mike said, looking up from his paperwork. “Glad you could make it.”
As if she’d dawdled, when she came as soon as she heard. Doreen ground her jaw, forced a smile on her face, and sat down in the chair in front of Mike’s desk.
The current Mike was actually Mike Jr., the son of the previous boss. Doreen had gotten along perfectly well with the old guy. Like most of the mechanics in the shop, he’d had a few moments when he hadn’t believed she could do the work. But he had been polite and respectful; in fact she’d had to coax him into joking and trash-talking with her like one of the guys. Old Mike wasn’t fully retired, but after his bypass surgery, he was down to coming in a few days a month, while his wife coaxed him into practicing his golf game and giving his heart a rest.
So now Mike Jr. had taken over his dad’s chair, and for Doreen, everything had changed around the shop. He really seemed to have it in for her, and she couldn’t figure out why. To keep things in perspective, she reminded herself that half the guys in the garage didn’t like him either. He wasn’t picking on her solely because she was the lone woman in the shop. But it probably didn’t help.
“You wanted to see me, sir?” she asked. No joking around with Mike Jr.; it usually didn’t land well.
“Yes, I did. What’s this I hear about you yelling at a customer?”
It took her a minute to remember what he was talking about. “You mean yesterday?”
“Yes, I do mean yesterday. I hear you screamed at him and threatened him with a lug wrench.”
Doreen wondered who on earth had told him. Probably Harry, the one remaining holdout among the old guard, who hadn’t liked Doreen putting her foot down about his occasional wandering hands. No surprise if he’d chosen to stick up for another jerk doing the same thing.
“I didn’t scream,” she said defensively. In fact, she was very proud of herself for keeping her temper as much as she had. “I—corrected a customer whose hand wandered into the vicinity of—no, I’m not going to sugar-coat it. Sir, a customer pinched my ass—that is, my rear end, and I told him that behavior was unacceptable. I—” She had to grit her teeth to get the words out. “I apologize for the unpleasantness, and I hope it won’t happen again.” Which was not quite the same thing as saying she wouldn’t do it again, but hopefully Mike didn’t notice that part.
Unfortunately he was not to be put off so easily. “You shook a wrench in his face and told him if he did it again, you’d break his face.”
“Wrist!” Doreen said, horrified. “I said I’d break his wrist . I would never—ahem.” She realized at Mike’s frown that she wasn’t making things better.
“You can’t assault customers, Doreen, or even threaten it. He could have filed a police report.”
“If he does, sir, I’ll take full responsibility.” She meant it, but she didn’t believe that he would, because she suspected a guy like that would never admit that a woman had scared or intimidated him.
“You won’t have to,” Mike said. “You’re fired.”
Doreen stared at him as the words sank in. Still, it didn’t make sense. “What?”
“You heard me. Clean out your locker. You’re a troublemaker, and I’ve had enough.”
“I am not!” Doreen protested. She knew that arguing with the boss was no way to keep her job, but the unfairness of it stung her deeply. After all the times she had clamped down on her badger-sized temper, all the work she’d done to fit in, all the small slights she’d swallowed and the jokes she’d put up with ... “I work really hard, you know that I do. You can’t possibly have a single complaint about my work.”
“It’s not about the work, it’s about you thinking you can get away with threatening our customers.”
“What about what the other guys get away with?” Doreen snapped. “I know I’ve put up with Harry making lewd jokes every day of the week, and Tim punched right through the front of the vending machine when it took his dollar.”
“Doreen, you threatened to break a man’s arm.”
At least I didn’t actually do it. She considered that a win. Evidently, Mike didn’t agree .
“You know I do twice as much work as any man at this garage, while I put up with five times the crap they do. You know I’m the only one who can break off those stuck bolts when?—”
And then she stopped, because it wasn’t Mike’s expression exactly, it was some little tell on his face, maybe a slight drop of his gaze to the desk and back up to her again ... but it told her everything she needed to know.
Her outburst at the misbehaving customer was an excuse. Okay, so maybe she really did need to get her temper under control, but she was working on that. And the other guys did get away with just as much.
But what they really couldn’t stand was Doreen showing them up. She really did break loose bolts they couldn’t budge and pick up things they couldn’t carry. She tried to hide her shifter strength, but every now and then it was just easier. Why should she wait ‘til one of the other guys was free to pick up something she could lift by herself anyway rather than needing a second person to help? Why should she make a customer pay for shop hours when she could bend a damaged panel back into place in a couple of minutes?
Apparently, this was why. She didn’t know if on some level the whole shop had picked up on the fact that she was really, truly different , or if they just hated that she could out-bench-press any man in this shop by a lot, and she hadn’t put enough work into hiding it. Either way it came down to the same thing.
“You’re firing me,” she said, “because I’m too good at my job.”
“No, Doreen, it’s because you waved a wrench in a customer’s face.”
“Bull. Crap. You’ve been waiting for an excuse, and I was stupid enough to give you one. But at least admit that’s what it is!”
Doreen’s badger temper had her in its teeth now. She leaped out of her chair and swept an arm across the desk, scattering papers and tipping over Mike’s stupid radio station giveaway mug.
At least that was what she meant to do. Unfortunately, as was so often the case when she was really pissed off and channeling her badger shifter strength, she failed to anticipate how far or how fast her arm would actually go. Her fist skidded through the paperwork and slammed into Mike’s ancient desktop computer, which went flying off the end of the desk and sailed the foot and a half into the wall of the small office. Doreen lunged to catch it, rage instantly turning to horror, but she only succeeded in smacking the top of the old beige monitor and driving it into the floor with extra force. There was a loud smash and a smell of burning electronics.
“Okay,” Mike said after a stunned moment. “That’s coming out of your final paycheck.”
“Fine,” Doreen said. Some part of her wanted to apologize, but she crushed it. How much could the dratted thing cost, anyway? It was probably new in 1995. “I don’t need this dumb job anyway.”
She marched out, holding her head up and blinking rapidly to avoid giving him the satisfaction of seeing her burst into tears. The worst part was, Mike probably would think more kindly of her if she did leave as a sobbing mess. She might actually have gotten her job back, come to think of it, if she’d cried all over his desk rather than leaving him a dent in the wall and a pile of computer parts to remember her by.
“Hey, D!” one of the other guys called. “You want in on the NASCAR pool this week, or?—”
Doreen waved him off, unable to speak because she was horribly afraid she would cry. She didn’t want to talk to anyone. Right now she had no idea which of the guys had ratted her out; she almost hoped it was Harry because she didn’t like him anyway, but if it was Carlos or Tim or one of the other mechanics she thought of as friends, she didn’t know if she could bear it.
She swiped everything in her locker carelessly into a gym bag she kept there, and took it out to her car, beating herself up the whole time. Why couldn’t she have kept her temper? At the very least she might have been able to talk Mike into letting her finish out the jobs she was working on. He might have walked back from firing her if she’d said all the right things and let him soothe his own ego about it. Instead she had matched ego for ego, and look where it got her.
I don’t need this dumb job. Her own words echoed in her head.
She actually did need this dumb job. She needed this dumb job quite a lot. Because now she was going to have to get another one, and that would be much harder without a reference from her last boss.
Mike Sr. might be willing to put in a good word for her, but the way things were going, she wasn’t prepared to bet on it.
Doreen looked up at the clear blue sky, flecked with white puffs of clouds. Well, maybe she could look on the bright side. It was Friday, and she already had planned a long weekend. So her long weekend was starting a few hours earlier than she had intended, but that just meant she could start her drive sooner than expected and get to her destination with even more weekend to enjoy.
Whatever was waiting on the other side of Mike firing her, she would worry about it later. Not for the next few days, in any case.
Doreen pulled off the clasp holding her braid in place. She shook out her unruly tangle of thick curls and brushed some fallen leaves off the hood of her car.
It was a gorgeous autumn day, perfect for a drive, and three indulgent spa days at a mountain resort lay ahead of her. On the website, the place looked beautiful, and the best part was— no humans . In the off season, this resort was shifters only.
Which meant she could enjoy, for once in her life, using her shifter strength without worrying that someone was going to call her a monster or take offense to Doreen lifting more weight or running faster or being bigger and stronger than most of the people around her. She didn’t have to keep tight control of her shifting, no matter her emotional state. If she wanted to be a badger, no one was going to stop her.
All of that plus mud masks, massages, nature trails, and a sauna.
For once in her whole life, if only for three days, things were going to be perfect .