Page 1 of Sparks Flying

Dean

Chapter 1

“Shit!” I sucked the blood off my finger.

There was nothing worse than a paper cut. It hurt like a sonofabitch.

“Bernice, can you get me the file on the satellite infrared system?” I snapped. “And a Band-Aid,” I added.

She returned a few minutes later with what I’d asked for, as well as a glass of water.

“Another paper cut?”

I glared at her, but she was entirely unaffected by my attitude. I appreciated that she didn’t take any of my shit. She also appeared to be immune to my charms. Bernice Dean was probably the only woman in all of Ravenden that didn’t think I hung the moon and stars. I appreciated her even more for it.

“Yeah.”

“You know, if you read these things on the tablet I got you, then you wouldn’t get these cuts. And you wouldn’t force me to kill another tree every single day printing out these manuals and things all the time.”

I rolled my eyes.

Bernice Dean, like all of the Dean Flock, was a protector of Earth and plants and trees and shit. So of course she was going to harass me about such a thing.

“I hate reading on that thing. You know that,” I complained.

She shook her head as she left the room.

I patched up my finger and pulled out the file she’d just brought while smiling as I thought of Bernice. What would I do without her?

The woman was old enough to be my mother, maybe even my grandmother. Like all Deans, she was a distant cousin to my mother. I supposed to me too. And yes, that’s where my name came from: Dean Davenport, the best of both Flocks, my mother would tell me when I was young.

Helena Dean Davenport had married up in the hierarchy of raven shifters, but maintained close ties to her birth Flock, which also topped the elite of our kind.

I didn’t really care about that sort of shit. It made no sense to me why someone felt entitled over another just because of their last name or the family they were born into.

Fortunately for me, my siblings were breaking down those barriers, especially when it came to mating.

My sister Gia had found her true mate first. David was a great guy, but still a relatively unknown. He wasn’t from Ravenden and we had no real idea what family line he came from. They were true mates though, so what difference did it make? Plus, our mother could imagine he was from some high up snooty, elite family line and there was no one that could refute her.

But then my oldest brother, Elias, mated Kim Grimes. Talk about a scandal. If there was a true ladder of raven society, it would be a toss-up whether the Grimes Flock or the Pierces were at the bottom while the Davenports were the clear winner at the top.

It was all ridiculous, but Eli and Kim had really stirred things up around here. With our brother Ryan’s help, they’d even gotten both the Grimes and Pierce Flocks representation on the Ravenden Congress.

Then Ryan mated Gracie Montgomery. The Montgomery Flock was respectable in the middle, but Gracie was a firefighter. Much to the horror of many, she continued to work as a first responder in the community, even though my mother and her friends would much rather see her sitting on the committee and attending teas. That wasn’t Gracie at all and never would be.

Fortunately, Ryan knew this and, despite his occasional apprehensions as her mate, he had no desire to clip her wings.

The good news for me was that they’d all screwed up so badly in the eyes of our mother that I could probably announce I was mating a blow-up doll and my mother wouldn’t bat an eye. As far as she was concerned, our family had already been through the ringer and survived. There was no way I could sink any lower than my siblings already had.

Plus, I was pretty sure I was her favorite. Aren’t the youngest children always the mother’s favorites?

I was convinced I could do no wrong in her eyes, but I’d certainly tested that theory in my teenage years.

It wasn’t that I had been a bad kid or anything. I was largely a nerd at heart. I loved video games and still spent too many hours playing. When I wasn’t doing that or working, I was either spending time with my family or sharing a bed with a beautiful woman.

I loved the ladies, and they loved me.

It was never hard to find companionship, even in a small town like Ravenden. I never pretended it was anything more than it was and I was well aware of the reputation I’d acquired throughout all the Flocks, but I didn’t really care about those sorts of things. I was young and free. What was the harm in having a good time as long as it was consensual?

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