Hare Today, Bear Tomorrow (Mating Call Dating Agency #1)(13)
There wasn’t a thing in the world fake about Lita Dalton. Not a thing. That was another thing that got her thinking about Stacy. He didn’t have the first pretension about anything. As Lita rattled on about this and that, and Garnet wrote down everything that sounded important, but she couldn’t help her thoughts drifting constantly to Stacy and the way he laughed.
Maybe that’s what it was, Garnet thought, maybe that’s why she liked both of them so much, because they weren’t scared to laugh loud as hell.
Oh my God, Garnet thought with a lump in her throat. I don’t just like that guy. I think... I can’t have fallen in love over a four hour Thai meal can I?
“Yeah, you could,” Lita said. “Although I’m guessing you didn’t mean to say that out loud?”
“Oh God,” Garnet said. “I’m cracking up.”
“That’s what love is like,” Lita said. “At least, that’s what I heard on TV.”
*
After a long series of instructions and a whole bunch of calls to local authorities to make sure Garnet wasn’t going to find herself on the inside of a jail cell, she made her way to downtown Sun’s Hollow, Ohio. This place was a decently populated little shifter tourist trap town hidden away in a valley.
It was charming, in a small town, stuck in the 1950s sort of way. And it was definitely a pretty place, with the town being framed in greenery and rivers. Oh and then there was the fact that it had a massive selection of outlet malls, which Garnet had scoped on the way in. Except right then, she wasn’t thinking about Kohl’s sales, or getting a good deal at the Coach outlet on that new handbag she’d needed approximately forever. Instead, she was primarily concerned with the fact that she was making her way through what would be a warzone if it were anywhere but the US of A.
“No buses?” she asked Lita via text. Her editor, and acting advocate at the present, was sequestered away in the business district of Santa Fe. Of all the places in the country where shifters and humans happily mixed, Santa Fe was the one that seemed the most normal. Or the craziest, depending on how you read it. “How am I supposed to get through here?”
“Take a bike? Use your feet?” Lita asked, not helpful at all. “I have no idea.”
In front of Garnet, the streets were littered with people chanting slogans and holding weird signs, one of which read HEALTH INSURANCE FOR SHIFTERS OR GO TO HELL. A couple of old sedans were turned over, one of them with a bumper lit aflame. However, on all the streets around this one, there wasn’t a single piece of evidence that anything was wrong whatsoever.
“What am I supposed to be looking for?”
“News?” Lita texted back. “I have no idea, anything that seems like it shouldn’t be happening.”
Garnet huddled herself down into an alcove near the ‘action’ and started scribbling abstract notes that only she’d understand. No police on scene. No looting, except for the Walgreens. Check Macy’s for sale. Call Stacy ASAP.
When she penned the last note, she just about jumped out of her skin. Why the hell was she acting like this? She couldn’t figure it out for the life of her. This guy had managed to get completely under her skin in a day and a half. That wasn’t her, not at all. I’m stoic and hard to get through to, Garnet thought. I don’t communicate well and I’m a hermit. I’m a hermit that fell in love.
She swallowed, hard. “I’m going to miss my date with Stacy,” she texted to Lita, immediately confused why she hit the send button.
“Sorry? Call him. Maybe Captain Badass has always wanted a trip to Tourist Trap, Ohio?”
Garnet bit her lip. She hadn’t thought about it, but what the hell? Maybe her bear had a deep-seated love for antiquing and outlet shopping? “Can’t hurt to ask, even though he’ll probably think I’m crazy.” she texted back. “Thanks.”
“Honey, you do whatever the hell will get your head back in the game. I hope you get laid, and SOON. Now get to work.”
Garnet didn’t even have time to blush before a chunk of concrete, or maybe it was a vase—it was hard to tell—whizzed by her head and exploded on the door behind her position. “Damn!” she squealed, jumping back even further into her alcove. Sharp bits of something hard bit into the back of Garnet’s neck, but she didn’t pay attention. She had to get some kind of story if she wanted to get a paycheck.
She had about fifteen different problems bearing down on her brain, but when a single, totally innocent message from a certain mountain of bear muscle buzzed her phone in her pocket, Garnet kind of forgot about all of it for just a few moments. “I mean,” she said to herself in a self-lecturing tone, “he is big and strong and all that, so if anything’s really dangerous here, he can be my body guard. Like I need one,” she scoffed. “I’m enough of a bodyguard for myself. What do I need a big badass around for?”
But even as she was talking to herself, she felt her stomach twitching. It wasn’t a bad ‘about to hurl’ sort of twitch, rather it was an anticipatory sort of thing, like she was about to see a movie she had been looking forward to for years. All things being equal, she had really been looking forward to something like this for a long, long time. But the timing was never right.
And now, the timing was absolutely, totally, completely wrong, but that didn’t matter. Maybe that’s what made it all seem more real to Garnet. Even in the worst possible timing, she couldn’t stop thinking about the guy.