Shifters with Secrets (An MMF Bisexual Threesome)(26)

Alexi placed a tray on the counter and set eight chipped mugs on it. The pot of coffee had finished brewing and she filled the mugs, spilling coffee onto the tray.

“Where’s my coffee?” one of the Flint guys yelled out.

She picked up the tray in a hurry, not wanting to cause another scene, and one of the mugs fell over, spilling coffee down the front of her apron and onto the floor.

“Shit,” she muttered under her breath.

Barbara untied Alexi’s wet apron and tossed it onto the counter. “I’m assuming you’ve never waitressed before,” she said, taking a new apron from the cupboard and wrapping it around Alexi’s thick hips.

Alexi shook her head. At thirty three she had never even had a job, period. She grew up in a rich high class household where she got whatever she wanted and attended the city’s best parties and galas with the who’s who of San Francisco. She dined at the best five star restaurants and was waited on like a Princess. The old Alexi would never have worked here. Hell, she would never have eaten here. But everything changed last week and now all that Alexi wanted in the world was to keep this shitty job in this old, dilapidated diner in the middle of nowhere.

She walked over to the table of eight guys holding the tray of coffees with two hands. They started clapping when she arrived. “It took you long enough,” the fit, muscular one with the short blond hair said.

“I was brewing a new pot,” she said. “I didn’t think you guys wanted the stale coffee.”

“It’s stale now,” the blond one said, “it took you twenty minutes to walk over here.” He reached out to grab a mug off her tray.


Alexi jerked her tray up out of his reach. “Do you guys want it?” she asked. He stared at her waiting. “Then keep your hands to yourself. And a please and thank you won’t hurt.”

She placed the mugs in front of the guys, wishing that she was nicer to all of the servers in all of the fancy restaurants that she ate in over the years.

She handed out the mugs and walked back behind the counter. She grabbed the mop and started wiping up the coffee that she had spilled behind, jerking the mop back and forth.

Barbara returned from her table with a dirty plate and laughed. “It’s not a hockey stick love,” she said, placing the plate in a gray bucket and taking the mop from her. “In circles. Haven’t you ever mopped before?”

Alexi’s cheeks flushed and turned red.

Barbara raised an eyebrow. “Where did you say you were from again?” She hadn’t.

“You said these guys are lumberjacks?” Alexi asked, trying to change the subject.

Barbara lost her smile. “You can say that. Lumberjacks usually help the forest grow, these guys just burn it down.”

“They set fires in the forest?” Alexi asked. “Why would they do that?”

“Why else?” she shrugged, as she put the broom away. “For money.”

Three pickup trucks pulled up outside in front of the diner. A smile broke out across Barbara’s refined and charming face. Her cheeks were big and wrinkly, surely from smiling so much. She had a warm smile and Alexi felt like Barbara was her only friend in the world, even if she had only known her for two days.

Barbara stood on her toes trying to see out the window as the men climbed out of the trucks. “I’ll finish up with the Flint Crew,” she said. “Take these guys. They’ll treat you better.”

Alexi looked out the window. “Who are they?”

“Barbara,” Chuck hissed from inside the kitchen. “Is that your boys? I don’t want any trouble.” He looked over at the Flint Crew, who were all staring out the window, looking tense. He took his shotgun out from the bottom shelf and held it in his hand as he flipped a sizzling egg on the flat grill.

The five other diners pulled out their wallets, dropped money onto the table and hurried out the door. Alexi saw a table of two construction workers leave who had just gotten their food. They had barely started eating.

A history of abuse had left Alexi with a keen ability to know when shit was about to go down. She was a survivor first and foremost and she inched closer to the butcher’s knife on the counter that she had used to cut lemons earlier that morning. She placed her hand on the handle as the bell above the door clanged.

Her mouth dropped as seven of the most gorgeous guys that she had ever seen walked through the screen door.

And then all hell broke loose.





three





Ellis stuck his hand out the window of his brother’s pickup truck and felt the cool mountain air slam into his palm. It attacked his hand, fighting to push it backwards as his brother, Beckett, sped down the highway.

He looked out the dirty windshield of the pickup truck at the thousands of tall trees crowding the side of the road.

“I’m sorry again about this morning,” Ellis said. It was the tenth time he apologized for dropping a tree on Beckett’s chest.

Beckett squeezed the steering wheel and shook his head slowly. “I just don’t understand why you can’t follow orders and work with the group. You always have to go off on your own like some renegade bear. No one is forcing you to stay in the crew.”

Ellis watched the forest whiz by, thick and dense. If the Pacific Northwest was missing anything, it wasn’t trees.