TUCKER: Valley Enforcers, #3 (5 page)

“I don’t slack. I overslept
once
. I pulled a double yesterday and I don’t have a day off until Christmas Eve. I just needed the rest.” It was a lie by omission. I did need the rest but it wasn’t entirely because of the double shift. The fiery haired bombshell in my bed did more to wear me out than twenty straight hours of staring at the snow. “It won’t happen again.”

He rubbed his jaw. “Just a few more months and we’ll have some fresh meat to take some of the workload.”

“Yeah. We’ll still be four short for our projected number of Enforcers, though.”

“We’re not a high profile clan. Ten for a group of seventy four will cover our bases. Once we all settle down from the recent activity I’ll feel more comfortable cutting back on patrols, too. I can’t get rid of the excess land, but I can make the shifts more manageable.”

“What was it you told me when I first started? Boring is good? No way to make boring more manageable, man, but if it means the clan is safe that’s all that matters.”

He let out a little laugh. “Yeah. Boring is definitely good where the Alpha is concerned. It’s a little bit different on our side though, right?” Vex pulled his hair from the holder and immediately began to redo it. It was a nervous habit. “Just try not to oversleep anymore or else Xavier might get pushy on the punishment thing. He cooled off when I reminded him that he cheats the system, but you know it’s hard for him to balance his home stress with work shit.”

“Obviously. Dude shouldn’t have been accepted into the program.”

“He’s a good guy. Fatherhood just doesn’t sit with him all that well.” He shrugged, as if to say ‘what can you do’ and looked over towards the trees. “I’m heading home. Have a good one, man.”

I got to Justin’s place before he did, and when he showed up with our already cold pizza to find me in one piece and waiting on him he declared it a Christmas miracle.

Funny. My idea of a Christmas miracle was a spunky wolf shifter wrapped in a shiny red bow that matched the color of her hair waiting for me in bed. Too bad I’d go home to an empty house that smelled like a girl I could never have. At least I’d have my hand to keep me company. Ba fucking humbug.

Emily

“Merry Christmas!”

I swatted at whatever was poking me and groaned. “Go away. Don’t you know what a sock on the doorknob means?”

“I don’t think
you
know what it means.” Rolling over, I glared at my very amused and very teenage sister, Amanda. In my mind, Mandy was still six and sporting pigtails. She traded her pigtails in for chemically treated blonde locks and a human boyfriend with a varsity jacket. In her reindeer pajamas, she resembled the little sister of my memories. Sort of. “I was a little afraid to open the door. I’ve already seen little Shawn. I don’t need to see Thing 1 and Thing 2.”

“A) Please don’t call my boobs Thing 1 and Thing 2. They have names, you know.”

“Itty and Bitty?”

Echo lifted her head from the end of the bed and thumped her tail, as if to agree with Amanda. I tossed the blanket back and started to get up. It was still dark out, and I didn’t want to even look at my phone to check the time. Directing my attention at Echo, I chided, “I’ll remember that the next time you’re begging for my leftovers. You think you’re cool when you’re with your big girl friends but just you wait, little shit.”

“You’re going to be a great mom someday,” Amanda ribbed.

“And you!” I wagged a finger at her. “B) Please don’t remind me that our brother has a penis. I like to pretend he’s a Ken doll and May is just so in love with his personality she sticks around. Oh, and C) I don’t want to know why you know anything about socks on doorknobs. You should be doorknob free until you’re seventy three.”

A new voice joined from the door with an amused click. “I got suspended for a week because I caught you beneath the bleachers with Charlie Wells your freshman year, Em. A little hypocritical of you to give Mandy the talk, don’t you think?”

My brother, older than me by three years, leaned against the door with all the natural swagger of the wolf in his chest. Unlike Amanda and me, who inherited our mother’s rusty red locks and green eyes, Shawn favored our father with his lean face and dusty brown mop. He still had the trademark Fisher green eyes, but nobody ever made the connection that we were siblings. He had the looks and muscles to be one of the cool guys, but he’d pick a night tinkering with electronics over going out any day. Turns out, Shawn is kind of a whiz with computers. He landed a scholarship to Northwestern and returned home four years later with a Bachelors degree in Computer Science and a doting fiancé, May, who was a wolf shifter he met at a job fair. Shawn did some important work for a security company that we weren’t allowed to know about, but he drove a brand new cherry red F-150 and May’s clothes definitely didn’t come from the clearance rack at Kohl’s.

“What about that time I went to the kitchen for water and saw her groping Tommy Lawrence?” Amanda popped her hip and looked at me. “I had to wash my impressionable pre-teen eyes out with soap to try to forget his hairy ass cheek.”

“My Christmas wish was that I wouldn’t have to wake up to a conversation about my embarrassing high school sexual experiences with my siblings. Look how that turned out.”

“You think
I
want to talk about this shit?” Shawn shivered, like he himself got a glimpse at Tommy Lawrence’s fuzzy cheeks. “I was just coming up to fetch you two. Mom will have an aneurism if breakfast gets cold.”

Echo jumped off the bed at the mention of breakfast. She was still cautious around shifters, even my family. She didn’t whine and hide like she did when I first rescued her. Typically, she took a ‘mightier than thou’ approach and ignored them. Unless food was involved. Brushing past Shawn’s leg, she trotted down the hall and disappeared. Shawn followed, but Amanda hung around while I searched through my overnight bag for a pair of socks.

Amanda was the only one who still lived at home; she was a senior in high school and had an early admission to the University of Montana. Though campus was only a twelve minute drive from my parent’s house in the Fairviews, she was going to live on campus. Dad threw a fit because he didn’t want to pay room and board, but what eighteen year old girl wants to live with her parents? I knew, from personal experience, that being out of high school and still living with the rents was a pain in the butt. Granted, I was the black wolf of the family that didn’t go to college. I took the courses to get my state license to be a nurse aid and that was that. Even though Shawn and I both moved out as soon as we could, our rooms remained the same. It made the holiday seasons nice; we both lived in town, but there was something special about waking up Christmas morning in your childhood bed. 

“No Christmas sweater for Echo?” Mandy asked as I finally freed my obnoxious holiday socks from the bottom of my bag.

I sheathed my cold toes as quickly as I could and shook my head, following her out of my room. “She’s going through a rebellious phase. The other night I got home from work and she managed to tear up the kitchen, eat a bag of potato chips, and rip up my favorite throw pillow.”

“Did you put her in time out?” Mandy teased.

“Hell yeah I did!”

My mom shoved a delicious looking pile of icing and cinnamon goodness in my hands. “It’s Christmas morning. Can you please not use foul language?”

“Hell isn’t a bad word. Besides, Dad says it at least twenty times a day.”

“Try twenty times an hour,” Amanda muttered, snatching her own plated cinnamon roll.

“But it’s
Christmas
,” My mom stressed, like she was trying to explain String Theory to a caveman. Actually, it’d probably be easier to teach a caveman Physics than it would be to get me to not swear on Christmas.

With half a roll crumbling from my mouth (and Echo, conveniently at my feet to pick up my crumbs), I lobbied for my cause. “That means I get a pass. My filthy mouth won’t ruin Christmas any more than Shawn’s rancid coffee farts.”

“Oh, God – so gross,” May said. It came out half a groan, half a laugh.

Even at 6:37 in the morning, May managed to look gorgeous. Her silky blonde hair was pulled back into a stylish ponytail that totally wasn’t supposed to look good with her bright blue snowman pajamas but did anyway. May had that girl next door vibe that meshed so well with my brother’s sarcastic and typically grumpy personality. She brought out the best in him. It was gross how in love they were. Like, throw up in my mouth gross.

Like they could both read my mind, Shawn plopped a dollop of icing on the tip of May’s nose before leaning down and licking it off. The only thing that kept me from hacking up my homemade plate of delicious gooey-ness was that Christmas was made for lovey-dovey happiness.

I had been like that with Connor. I chewed on the inside of my cheek to keep from scowling. Twenty one and already a woman scorned. It kind of makes loving anyone else hard when the person you
thought
you were going to marry runs off to California to be with his true mate. It blindsided me, and I still felt the sting seven months later. Granted, May and Shawn’s fluttering eyes and kissy faces were giving me heartburn long before Connor left skid marks in my driveway.

“Is it too early to spike my cocoa?” I asked, dropping my head on Mandy’s shoulder.

“Thinking about You Know Who again?”

“He’s not Voldemort.”

Shawn, picking up on our conversation, scowled in our direction. “Don’t let that asshole ruin your Christmas, Em. If I see that look on your face any more today, I’m taking the first flight to San Francisco so I can go beat the shit out of him.”

“Language!” My mom nearly screeched.

“Wait, how do you know he lives in San Francisco?” I asked. I didn’t even know where Connor was. “Never mind. I don’t want to know.”

“You’re better off without him, sweetheart.” My dad finally looked up from his breakfast to weigh in on the conversation. The train wreck that was my love life had been a hot topic in the family for a long time – even before Connor hit the road. My dad was anti ‘Emily and Connor getting married despite not being intended mates’ from the beginning. Fathers know best, I suppose. “Hey, you never would have opened Emmy Lou’s up if it weren’t for him leaving.”

Emmy Lou’s was the best thing to come from Connor leaving. I had been making things for friends, family, and residents at the nursing home since high school. I didn’t have the space in my apartment with Connor to have enough space for my projects. He left, and I moved into the other half of Kate’s duplex. It had yard space for Echo and a garage for me to use as the central hub for Emmy Lou’s. I cried into my Rocky Road for a good two weeks before throwing myself into opening up an online store.

“Let’s just not talk about him today,” I forced out with a smile.

“Done and done. Now can everyone hurry up and finish eating? I want to open my presents!” Mandy did a frustrated little dance that made it look like she was either on the verge of a tantrum or needed to use the bathroom.

I was tempted to finish my second cinnamon roll at a glacial pace, but I was probably just as excited as Amanda was to see what was under the tree. My parents always gave us a great Christmas. It wasn’t all about the gifts, of course. The entire atmosphere of a Fisher Christmas was festive and joyous enough to fill your stomach with enough yuletides to last the rest of the year. My mom was one of those Homes and Garden magazine, multiple trees throughout the house kind of women. The house always twinkled like a picturesque display in the department store. Even in my twenties, it was magical.

My dad worked as a senior sales associate at Silver Lumber. Our Alpha’s family business had been around as long as the pack and the ever generous family staffed mostly pack members. My dad was lucky enough to have a degree and the ability to sell ice to a snowman. A lot of the pack got put on jobs that required a lot of physical labor. My mom stayed at home until Amanda was in middle school before she decided she wanted to start working. She got a job with the city as an administrative assistant and worked her way up to a top tier position in the permits office.

With the smell of fresh evergreen and sugar cookies filling our noses and Michael Bubl
é
in our ears, we took our rightful spots around the tree. I knew gifts weren’t supposed to be anyone’s favorite part of the holiday, but they were mine. To be more specific, giving them. Watching someone’s face when they opened something you picked out or made specifically for them was hands down, one of the best feelings in the world. The extra shifts at Hewitt were worth seeing the twinkle in Mandy’s eyes while she opened up the antique starburst mirror I found at a flea market in Billings or the low chuckle Shawn gave when he saw I bought him a quadcopter. He had three more at home, but I had a nasty habit of running his copters into the side of his house. Even Echo was part of the gift exchange. She was on her best behavior; probably because a giant bone and a slew of new chew toys were involved.

That night, after I polished off all the egg nog in my parent’s fridge and ate what felt like a whole damn ham by myself, I collapsed back in my childhood bed. I was too tired and a little too tipsy to drive home. My place was on the other side of town. It was also empty. The number one rule of Christmas is that you should always be surrounded by those you love. Kate was visiting her parents in Big Timber, so Echo and I would
really
be alone.

“Can you at least pretend you love me?” I sighed, reaching over to ruffle the fur on the back of Echo’s neck. She’d been preoccupied with her new bone for the better part of the night. Usually when she got new toys she wanted to try them all out and drive me insane, but the bone was her main focus.

Echo gnawed at the end of the bone one last time before nudging it off the bed. It landed with a very heavy thud on the ground. I expected one of my parents to yell up the stairs about it, but it was so quiet I could hear a pin drop. Taking me off guard, Echo rolled until she was nuzzled next to me. Her wet nose bumped against my hand. I giggled and lifted it so she could attack it with her tongue, bathing me with affection.

“That’s my girl,” I cooed. I was too tired to get up and turn the light off, but I was a solid three minutes away from passing out in my brand spanking new Christmas clothes with my dog making out with my hand.

A pair of mocha eyes flashed into my mind as I was drifting into my Christmas induced coma. Better than any hot chocolate – spiked or filled with half a bag of mini marshmallows – they wrapped me in a warm comfort that I felt even in my sleep. The last thing I remember before falling asleep was a half assed prayer to Santa to bring me the Christmas gift I
really
wanted.