But sure enough, when I focused on Cas’s other arm, I saw that he’d caught that too and was balancing it like it was nothing.
Who was this guy?
“Are you okay there?” he asked, voice layered with concern, which definitely did things for me. Was that weird? Maybe. I was pretty sure I was past caring.
“Am
I okay?” I retorted. “You’re the one who basically stopped two hundred pounds in freefall, give or take.” I actually wasn’t one hundred percent certain how much the box of heavy cream weighed, considering it was categorized by unit as opposed to weight. “You sure you didn’t dislocate your shoulder or something?
He huffed a laugh under his breath and got me the rest of the way to my feet. What was it about the guy that always made me feel like I was living in my own personal rom-com? The things that happened around him were just too perfect for real life.
Or maybe I was just a lot more romantic and lonely than I’d thought.
“Nah, I’m fine. Farm strength, ya know?”
Ah, yeah. I had heard about that. There were certain jobs and lifestyles that had their own special strength to them, and mine was one of them. I had a very developed upper body for someone who didn’t go to the gym, and I’d been told by my doctor back when I had insurance that my forearms were overdeveloped. But I was pretty proud of my baker’s biceps, and I preferred them a tad more than my baker’s belly.
Not that I didn’t like my stomach. I used to be self-conscious about it when I was younger, especially considering how hyper-skinny Asian women were “supposed” to be, but I’d grown to love it. I liked being a touch soft, and flaring out from my tummy into some wider hips. Besides, without my extra fluff, my booty would be a lot smaller, and I certainly didn’t want that.
“I gotcha.” I chuckled. What I was laughing at, I didn’t quite know, but I supposed with all the adrenaline and whatnot, everything was a bit amplified. It was beginning to feel like I had a certified crush on a man I’d only just met, which was totally outside the norm for me. I could count the crushes I’d had in life on one hand, and one of them was Keanu Reeves and one was Queen Latifah. “Well, thank you so much for your help. Anything else I can do before you boogie out of here?”
I didn’t know why I asked it that way, but I supposed I was giving him a way to stay longer if he wanted to.
A serious expression settled over his strong features.
Serious as if he was going to ask me out?
Did I even want that? I was currently struggling to save my business, so what kind of time would I have for a relationship? It hadn’t even been on my mind in years, and yet when Cas’s green eyes landed on me, the thought was very much there.
But then the seriousness cleared, and he was grinning at me again.
“Not a problem, not a problem at all. But I think I’ve made Chris wait long enough. Thanks again for the keys. I probably wouldn’t have realized I was missing them until I tried to drive my personal car.”
“We wouldn’t have wanted that,” I said.
I wasn’t sad to see him go, per se, but I wasn’t thrilled about it either. I walked him to the door, then locked it again for the twenty minutes or so I had until opening.
Now that I was alone in my shop, it kind of felt emptier than ever.
Huh.c16Z
Castiel
Out of the Mouths of Babes and Wolves
I should have asked her out.
That was what I told myself as I walked into my cabin after we’d packed away the groceries in the communal storage area where people could go and grab at their leisure. I had a bag of greens myself, but I left them on my kitchen counter so I could flop down on the couch and turn on my TV.
I wasn’t the biggest television watcher, but I enjoyed certain YouTubers. Some mythology buffs, some deep-divers who did iceberg videos on fantasy shows, some survivalists, some homesteaders, some animal channels, and slime reviewers.
That last one had thrown me for a loop. I had zero desire to actually touch the stuff, but for some reason watching it when I was particularly agitated or anxious always helped me settle and feel a bit more in my body. Chris said it was something called
ASMR, but I didn’t want to look into the reasoning behind it lest I ruin the magic. Insomnia was a fairly common issue for shifters given the constant fight between our human natures of being diurnal and our wolf selves being crepuscular, and I didn’t want to sabotage a reliable way to settle down.
“Can I survive three nights alone out in the Alaskan wilderness?”
I listened with half an ear to the video I’d picked to play, but my mind was most certainly on other things. Namely, the strange and perhaps even exciting bundle of emotions building in my chest.
I was attracted to Felicia-there was no denying that. Besides, I was a red-blooded man. Even though I was insanely busy as an alpha, I still noticed when a beautiful woman entered my orbit. I never had any desire to do something about it, but I noticed it.
But with Felicia, I wanted to do something about it, which was pretty wild to me. The last-and only-serious relationship I’d had was with my high school sweetheart, Layla. Chris, Bethany, Layla, and I had grown up together and formed our own little friend group, so it had been natural that we ended up together. In all honesty, the whole thing was so easy.
Or it was, until high school ended and we had to make it work while she went off to college and I began to fully step into my alpha duties. Before, we could ignore that country life had never really been for her and that she’d always had greater dreams. It had been hard to let her go, but our breakup in her sophomore year was amicable. Well, as amicable as a broken heart could be. There was no bad blood between us, and I’d even attended her wedding to a very beautiful witch who was a part of the Velka coven in NYC. The two of them lived in the city, which struck me as particularly uncomfortable for a wolf, but she seemed happy enough, and that was what was important.
“By putting the hot coals under this raised frame, it can keep me warm all night.”
It wasn’t like I’d been celibate since her. Back in my twenties, I’d had a short relationship with another wolf shifter who moved to our area. Mara was a strong, independent wolf I’d really admired. Again, no messy breakup there. Neither of us had had the time to get serious, and she’d ended up moving to Scotland to claim some ancestral land and married into a huge wolf pack there.
Always the bridesmaid, never the bride, it seemed.
And I’d always been okay with that. Unlike some alphas, I never felt like I needed a mate to properly lead my pack. It wasn’t like our numbers were hurting. Some packs were dwindling so much because of various modern reasons that there was pressure to procreate, and I was beyond happy that we weren’t in the same boat. No, our biggest worry was not pissing off the fairies any more than Barris had.
Still, even if I didn’t have the overwhelming pressure to breed, as I got older, the idea of not coming home to an empty den was kind of appealing.
My mind was getting too full again, so I stopped the survival video and hunted for a slime one. Maybe a nice nap was in order.
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