Page 5 of A Shifter Disaster Thanksgiving

Diane let out a nervous chuckle. “Great joke. Thanks for saving me, though. I’ll just be on my way now.”

She didn’t make a move but looked to him like she was expecting his permission. He simply stared back at her, and her green eyes shone with realization.

“You’re not kidding,” she said in a quiet voice.

Sylvester said nothing, but instead continued to regard the woman. He’d watched her sleep for a bit after he’d brought her to the village and into his cabin. Awake, she was even more beautiful. Her face was oval-shaped, her skin smooth and creamy. He’d put the sweater on her because it matched her hair, and looking at her now, he couldn’t help but be impressed with his choice. The jeans hugged her hips, outlining her curves in a way that made his heart beat a little faster.

“You… you want me to be your wife?” She looked at him as though he was insane.

It did sound insane. No, itwas. But that was exactly the point. If it irked Gregory, the village chief, it was even better. And taking a wife seemed like it just might do the trick, especially after the discussion he and Gregory had just had.

“Yes,” he said. “Was I not clear enough?”

“B-but that’s crazy! I’m grateful for your help, but I’m not going to marry you just because you saved my life. That makesno sense.” She laughed uncomfortably. “Why would you even say that?”

“Because it’s what I want,” he replied simply.

“It’s not whatIwant. Right now, I want—no, Ineed—to get off this mountain. I need to get home. I… I’ve got cats to feed.”

He lifted an eyebrow, unable to rest a smirk this time. When he plucked her out of the sky earlier, she’d had a terrified look plastered on her face. That look was back now. But she wasn’t in any real danger.

She was afraid of him.

A lot of people were, especially when he got angry. Sylvester understood their fear. In the past, Dragons were known to have caused destruction during fits of rage. And Stormbringers like him were especially dangerous. Most people feared being burned alive as a result of a dragon’s bad mood. But Sylvester had ways of calming himself down. He either busied himself blacksmithing or he took to the skies.

He'd been flying high above Frost Mountain yesterday when he saw that plane breach the portal. Even before the craft came apart in midair, he’d known that its occupants were doomed. And then he’d spotted a few of them rocketing toward the mountain. He’d managed to save two of them, a man in a blue suit and the woman standing before him right now. As for the others… they may have survived—or not.

Diane was lucky he’d been around when her plane breached that portal. The only reason Sylvester had been up there to begin with was his conversation with Gregory. Gregory was many things. He was the village chief. He was a warrior. He was also a Stormbringer.

Their conversation yesterday had not gone well. Gregory had been dismissive, as usual. “You are worrying about the wrong things at the wrong time, brother,” he’d snapped at Sylvester. "You should be focusing instead on the immediate danger thisvillage faces. Pine Gap is under threat of war. Our father would have wanted you to focus on that problem.”

It was that last statement that had ticked him off. Even now, Sylvester could hardly believe the calmness with which his elder brother had uttered those words, especially when he had a hand in the death of their father, Malcolm, who’d been the village chief.

He could pretend all he wanted, but Gregory was not innocent. He was responsible for Malcolm’s death, and Sylvester knew it, even if no one else did. He knew for a fact that in the weeks before Malcolm was murdered in his sleep, he and Gregory had argued about the best approach to the imminent war between the villages. For days, they’d battled heatedly. Then Malcolm was discovered lying in the snow with a dagger in his chest.

That had been months ago. The tension between the villages was still rising. The opposing village, Glenstra, still threatened war, and Gregory was certainly preparing for it. Over the past few months, whenever Sylvester confronted his brother about their father’s mysterious death, all Gregory did was dismiss his concerns.

“We need to be ready for this war,” he told Sylvester. “We need everything we can get—weapons, food, warriors. You are a blacksmith. Go and do what you do best.”

And so Sylvester spent a lot of his time forging weapons alongside his friend Jon. Together, the duo had already produced an array of weapons that Sylvester believed to be more than enough for this impending war. And it still wasn’t enough for Gregory.

The way Sylvester saw it, his brother was using the war as an excuse to keep him distracted from the real problem. Glenstra and Pine Gap had always been at loggerheads with each other. This wouldn’t be the first threat of war in three decades. Inthat time, there had been several actual wars, some of which had resulted in painful casualties in Pine Gap. Sylvester still remembered holding his mother in his arms as she drew her final breath, just feet away from the corpse of the invader who had attacked her.

His mother had passed over a decade ago. Now his father was gone, too. And Gregory was the new village chief.

It seemed all too convenient. And the more he thought about it, the more he found himself wondering whether there was a chance that Gregory wasn’t merely using the war as a distraction. He’d pushed for war when Malcolm insisted on keeping the peace between the villages. Their father had always tried to avoid conflict. Gregory had seen that as a weakness. With him gone, Gregory was chief of the village and could do whatever he wanted unless Sylvester put a stop to his nonsense first.

“Why would you want to marry me?” Diane wanted to know. “Doesn’t it sound weird to you?”

He considered her question. She was human, no doubt. It wasn’t even the trepidation on her face that told him. By now, she should have sensed that they were different. She should have connected the dots. Instead, she stood in his living room, beautiful but clueless as to her situation. A supernatural would have put up a fight by now or tried to escape. In fact, if she’d been a supernatural, she might not even have needed saving.

She folded her arms across her chest, the very act pushing her breasts a little higher. “Are you going to answer me or not?”

I want to annoy my brother,he thought, but that’s not what he said.He cocked his head to one side. “I want you to be my wife. That is all that matters.”

Diane shook her head, pursing those delicious-looking lips of hers. “No. Nuh-uh. Negative. This is just outrageous. Don’t you realize how weird it sounds? I’m supposed to be in Chicago formy book signing. If my agent finds out I never made it, he’s going to flip. I’m sure by now he’s already wondering where the heck I am—he and all my readers. I’m probably pissing him off by not showing up. Trust me, readers are the most vicious kind of fans there are.

“Just let me get off this mountain and get home.” She sighed. “I’m really grateful for your help, Sylvester. Right now, I just need to make sure I get home safely. I’ll pay you or something, okay?”

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