The Wolf's Mate Book 4: Michael & Shyne (2 page)

He came over and looked at the paper but didn’t take off his gloves.  “I’m proud of you, Shyne.  Really.  I’d give you a hug, but I’m all sweaty.  Rain check?”

“Sure.”  She laughed and turned to walk out.

“Hey,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“So Dante offered you the job?”

She nodded.

“You said yes, right?”

“Of course.”

“Good. Next weekend is the Temple County Fair, and we’ve got a booth reserved to sign up new business.  I’m also doing an exhibition fight on Saturday night.  We’d like you to help pass out brochures and stick around for the fight.  I’d like you in my corner.”

“Aw.  Cool.  I’d love to.”

He moved back to the heavy bag.  “Trust me.  With you on the payroll and passing out brochures, we’re sure to get a ton of business into the gym.”

“I think you’re overestimating my appeal, Cairo,” she snorted.

“Not hardly.  You’re hot, and you know it.”  He smiled at her once, dark eyes flashing in good humor, and then he turned back to the bag and his features slid down into serious concentration.

She looked into the fitness classroom, amazed that in a few short weeks it would be hers.  Filling up the classes and being the best teacher she could be were her next two goals.

Leaving the gym for the day to head home, she sat down in her Miata and turned on the engine.  The stereo blasted her, and she pushed the volume button.  She always forgot to turn it down before she turned off the engine.  One of these days she was going to blow her eardrums out.

Dalton, Kentucky, was what some referred to as a whistle stop.  There really wasn’t much to the town:  one main street, a few small developments for nice homes, and a few businesses.  It was bigger than some other towns she’d been in but had that nice, homey feeling to it.  A girl could walk through Dalton at night and feel safe.  Not that she would, mind you, but she could if she wanted to.  The gym sat on the outskirts of town, basically between Dalton and the next town, Farris, which was slightly larger.  The gym did a lot of business because of Cairo’s boxing career and the high quality of trainers and equipment.

She and Trav met when she had just aged-out of the group foster home, and he had come fresh from rehab.  He’d had a drug problem because he was trying to cope with his parents' hatred of his gay lifestyle.  He’d tried to kill himself, and they tossed him in rehab but wrote him off and said to never contact them again.  Like him, she was also tossed out on her ass.  She was turned out of the home with her scant belongings in a duffel bag and twenty dollars.  Trav was shown the door at rehab and had only the clothes on his back and a bus ticket voucher.

Age eighteen.  No driver’s license.  No home.  No job.  Barely any money.  Woefully unprepared for the real world, even though she felt like she’d already lived and died in the “real world”, suffered and bled for it.

She was standing in a bus station looking at the queue when a young man came to stand next to her.  After several quiet minutes of both of them looking at the board, he looked down at her, his eyes rimmed with dark circles from lack of sleep and his mouth drawn into a frown.  “I don’t even know where to go.”

“Me either,” she admitted.

“Travis Heron, but you can call me Trav.”  He offered her his hand, and she took it.

“Shyne Jackson.”

“That’s a cool name.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m gay,” he blurted out, and then he clapped his hand over his mouth and blushed.  “Sorry.  Sorry.  I was going to ask you if you wanted to maybe go to the same place together, but I didn’t want you to think I was trying to pick you up.”

There was something very puppy dog about him, and she knew they were going to be good friends.  “I only have $20.  But there’s a restaurant in Clarksburg that the woman who runs the group home I aged-out of told me about.  Supposedly, he has a room he rents out over the restaurant to people who work there.”

“I could do Clarksburg.  If you want company?”

“Sure, Trav.  Better to go marching into hell with a friend than alone, I always say.”

“You’ve got a strange sense of humor, Shyne.  I like that.”

A few hours later, they stowed their bags in the safe in the manager’s office and began their first shifts at Bruce’s BBQ.  Travis washed dishes and bused tables, and she waitressed and did side work in the kitchen.  The room was just that: a large empty room.  Cots leftover from WWII with blankets and pillows were their beds, and they shared the space with two illegal immigrants who were saving up money to bring their families up from Mexico and a young woman just slightly older than Shyne who had left an abusive home.  They stayed with Bruce for a long time, saving every penny they could.  They both took second jobs nearby.  Within a year, they had a few grand between them, and the world was their oyster...so to speak.

They decided to leave Tennessee.  There was nothing there but bad memories for both of them.  They looked for jobs in Kentucky, and both of them found work in Austin, which was just north of Dalton.  Trav at the coffee shop, and Shyne in a mall bookstore.  They moved into one apartment together for two years, and when the apartment across the hall opened up, she snagged it.  They were still neighbors, best friends, and the only family either one had.  She’d change a lot of things about her life if she could, but not meeting Trav and becoming friends.

The next week passed quickly for her.  She stayed at the front of Terri’s four classes, and Terri gave her the cool-down time.  Shyne had a lot of good feedback from the women in the classes.  She certainly hoped to keep all of Terri's clients, but it would remain to be seen.  Shyne just didn’t want to disappoint the boys, who had shown such interest in her career and been almost as supportive as Trav.

Saturday morning was the first official day of the county fair.  She hadn’t really known what to wear, and they promised she could wear anything as long as she also wore one of the gym shirts.  She paired the form-fitting white golf shirt with a Champion running skort and black tennis shoes with aqua trim.

Trav walked into the bathroom while she was brushing out her long black hair.  “Wow, baby girl.  I don’t think you’re going to attract women in that outfit.  Well, at least not the sort of women you’re thinking of.”

She laughed and met his eyes in the mirror.  “I just want to bring business to the gym.  If I have to flash a little thigh to do it, then I am not above doing that.”

“How was dinner last night?”  He took her hairbrush away and began doing her hair, pulling it back into a high ponytail and leaving a section loose to braid and wrap around the tie.

She had eaten dinner with the boys at a nice Italian restaurant.  “Okay.  They’re sweet.”

“Hot.”

“Yeah.”

“When isn’t 'hot' enough for you to grind them through the mattress?”

“You make me sound like a slut.”

“You’re not, Shyne, of course not.  But you like to have sex with men you like, and you like them, right?  You’ve known them for a few months, and you haven’t done anything but kiss their cheeks and eat dinner with them.”

“I can’t explain it.  I get the feeling that there’s more to them than they’re saying, you know?  I like Mason a lot, but they’re so connected to each other that I’m not sure they don’t do some extra kinky stuff.”

He stopped braiding the loose section.  “Kinky like what?”

“I think they share.”

“Ew.  Like each other?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake, Trav, of course not.  I mean I think they share women.  Like four-way sex.”

He made a face and finished the long braid.  Wrapping it around the tie that held the mass of her hair back, he tucked the end underneath and reached for the hair spray.  “Nothing wrong with playing multiples, Shyne.  You might like it.”

She shivered and toyed with a hair tie.  “Maybe in another universe I might like to play once with a three-way.  But a four-way?  I don’t even know how that would work.”

He snickered.  “I think they make the girl airtight, baby.”

Images flashed through her mind until she hit on the right one.  “Trav, you’ve got such a dirty mind.”

“Hey.  I’m painfully single, and I think I’m getting carpal from jacking off all the time.”

“I’m sure you don’t play your pipe to four-ways with a girl in the middle.”

“Hell no, baby girl, but I have stumbled upon the odd image over the years. The Internet is a fucked-up thing.”

She spritzed a bit of honeysuckle body splash in strategic areas and turned around.  “Only a gay man would think straight sex is fucked up.”

“Only a repressed woman wouldn’t want to try a four-way with three hot were-hyenas who are richer than anyone we know.”

“We don’t know that many people,” she pointed out.

“Still.”  He shrugged and then hugged her.  “You don’t like them that way, then fuck ‘em.  But not literally.  You’ll find your knight in shining armor, and I just hope to hell he’s got a gay brother.”

She hugged him back with a laugh, and then headed out to her car and drove thirty minutes to the fairgrounds where the Temple County Fair was being held.  With her exhibitor tag in the windshield, she was able to get in before they opened the main gate and walked the dirt pathway that made up the main circle of the fair’s amenities.  Tucked near the arena where the boxing match would take place at eight that night, she found the booth for Stone’s Gym with the boys finishing the set up.

It was going to be a long, hot day.

Chapter 2

“I’m still not sure I see the point of interviewing bands for the bar.  Quill’s doing just fine as DJ on the weekends, and during the week we’ve just been running the no-commercial satellite station.  It’s worked for the last year.  Why fuck with it?” Michael groused to his brother, Jason.  Michael had been acting manager of Jake’s bar since they officially reopened it last March.  The bar originally belonged to the alpha of the Garra Pack that shared the small town of Allen with them.  After the alpha’s son kidnapped Cadence, his brother’s mate, pack justice was delivered in a brutal and final way, and the Garra Pack left town for good.  The Tressel Pack – of which Michael was second in rank – took over the bar along with a few homes and a restaurant.

“I heard you the first time you complained, Michael.  I told you that eventually you’d need to find a band to do a weekly show.  I’ve let you slide for a long time, but now it’s the end of May.  I want a house band in here by the end of June, period.  Get your act together. The pack alone can’t sustain the bar.  We need the humans that come in to drink, and they’re not loving Jake’s as much as they did when it was run by the man himself.  If we start to lose business, then it’s everyone’s problem.”

Good point.
  “So you do it.”

“Nah, you like music, so you can pick out the house band, and then eventually we’ll hire a manager.  Maybe you’ll get lucky and one of the bands will have a manager with them who can run the bar for us.”  Jason shrugged as if it wasn’t a huge undertaking.  Michael couldn’t really deny Jason.  Not only was he his big brother, but he was also pack alpha.  Right now Jason was being genial.  If he decided to put his alpha authority into the order, then Michael wouldn’t have a choice.  At least if he went along with it, then it appeared he’d made the choice himself.

Jason wasn’t wrong, anyway, and Michael knew that.  If the bar went into the red and had to close, then the pack would go elsewhere to drink.  Here, the pack protected their own.  Out and about, a wolf could go off alone and get into a lot of trouble.

It hadn’t exactly been his choice to take over managing the bar.  He was a mechanic by trade and a smartass by nature, two things that didn’t exactly go hand-in-hand with slinging suds and dealing with customers and employees.  So far, though, he wasn’t doing a bad job.  He just didn’t
want
the job.

* * * * *

Three weeks into June and Michael wasn’t having a good time of things.  He rubbed his temples and glared at the call sheet.  He’d placed the ad a couple weeks ago in local papers around Kentucky and on an online posting website for bands.  They were offering very little in the way of perks to start, but they’d had a good response to the ad:

“Small town bar needs house band for weekend gigs.  $200 per show plus all the beer you can drink.”

As the bands trickled in over the weeks to audition, Michael grew steadily more disappointed.  Were there no decent bands not already house bands elsewhere?

Thursday afternoon, as the deadline for finding a band before the end of June hovered over his head like a battle axe, the first band of the day took the stage.  One look at their punk clothing, and he knew that even if they played amazing, the town wouldn’t go for them.  He knew what would fly here.  A band that could play both rock and country, would do covers on request, and had a nice looking girl as part of their entourage.  Maybe that last part was all his thinking.  He was damn lonely.

The last girl he’d been with, well, that was a long while ago.  He flirted around with the females because that’s just the kind of guy he was, but he hadn’t slept with anyone in a long time.  Tired of the get-out-before-dawn fucks that most of his friends enjoyed, he’d figured out that none of the females in the pack were a mate for him, and then he’d soured on the whole casual sex thing.