Page 18 of Stolen Mate

Her memories of what had happened once she left Trudy’s place were vague to non-existent. She remembered walking down the path and out into the meadow and then… nothing. She shook her head again, knowing it wouldn’t clear the buzzing but seemingly unable to stop herself.

“Annoying, isn’t it?” said the hunk.

Tess had almost forgotten he was there. That wasn’t necessarily true—he was hard to ignore or forget—but there had been more pressing matters like the pain in her head, the disorientation, and the fact that she was naked in some bed, presumably his, without any recollection of how she’d gotten there.

Believing that taking the offensive was her best tactic, Tess demanded, “Who are you? Where am I? What happened, and how did I get here?”

“Let’s see; in answer to your questions: I don’t know, my cabin, I don’t know, and I wrapped your naked—and might I say beautiful—body in a blanket and brought you here.”

“No, you may not. And I didn’t ask you who I was, I know that. I asked who you were.”

“You first.”

“Knock it off,” Tess said, annoyed. “My head hurts, and I feel like I’m going to puke.”

“You won’t. The buzzing makes you feel that way, but I don’t recall someone ever saying it made them sick to their stomach.”

“You know a lot of people that have a swarm of angry bees buzzing in their heads?”

He shrugged. “Only those who have a fated mate. Since I answered your questions as well as I could…”

“No, you didn’t. You didn’t tell me who you were.”

“My bad. I’m Derek Grayson. I’m the Deputy Sheriff of Mystic River. Now I’ve answered yours, so how about if you answer a couple of mine? Who are you? Where are you from? What are you doing in Mystic River? If you were feeling disoriented, why did you go for a walk by yourself?”

“I’m Tess Dixon. I’m from Seattle, and I came up to Mystic River for a little vacation. My mother died a couple of months ago, and I needed a break. And I thought the air might do me good. Being cooped up in an airplane going from Seattle to Kodiak and then making the trip from Kodiak to Mystic River isn’t as easy in reality as it would appear to be on paper.” Derek nodded his head as if accepting her story, so she continued on, “You aren’t in your uniform, why is that?”

“Partly because I’m off duty and partly because my boss isn’t all that big on uniforms. He figures the ballcap is sufficient. I can show you my badge if that’ll make you feel better.”

“What would make me feel better is having my clothes. I don’t see them.”

He crooked his head and looked at her in disbelief. But disbelief in what? She hadn’t lied to him. She might not have told him the whole truth, but none of what she’d said had been untrue.

“Who knows where the clothes go when someone shifts? I’ve always kind of wondered if there was some big closet in the sky and eventually clothes get reincarnated back to another life. It would explain why some of the godawful fashion trends of bygone eras seem to resurface.”

“Shift?” All the alarm bells went off in Tess’s head. “What do you mean shift? And how does that get me naked in your bed?”

“You don’t know, do you?” he said, sitting back. “I’ll be damned.”

Know? What could she possibly know, or not know? Was there some kind of communal hallucination or common mental disorder that made those on this part of Kodiak Island believe people could shift into other creatures? Or had the world simply gone mad when she wasn’t looking?

CHAPTER 9

DEREK

Holy shit! Could she possibly be that naive or uninformed?

The woman—she’d said her name was Tess, Tess Dixon—that wasn’t a surname with which he was familiar, at least not in Mystic River or Otter Cove. She said she was from Seattle, but Seattle was a huge city, so telling him she was from there didn’t narrow it down much.

Derek realized she was being quiet, very quiet. All the color had drained from her face, and she was staring at him as if trying to decide whether he was mad or was trying to figure out if she’d understood him at all.

“Wha… What do you mean by ‘shift?’”

He shook his head. Her confusion was legit. He’d bet every last dime he had, which after Annie and Sienna had finished gentrifying—their term, not his—his cabin, wasn’t nearly as much as it had been, that she had little to no clue about shifters.

“You have not been abducted by a crazy man. You can call Trudy if you like; she’ll vouch for me. And for the record, I think you’re being straight with me.”

“Well, thank you so much for that,” she snarked.

---