Page 15 of All Foxed Up

It was then he looked meaningfully at Nat, and that had me taking a step backwards, then another and another.

“No, Holly,” she said. “No, I—”

“It’s true, Nat.” Thorn shot me a sheepish look. “I’m sorry, Holly. This must be tough, finding out what you are so late in life, but you’ve gotta know—”

He was interrupted by the doorbell going off.

“Who the hell would that be?” Lars growled.

“Alaric?” Anne called up the stairs. “You’ve got some visitors.”

“I’ll handle this,” he told us, but I was pushing past him, because somehow I knew.

I’d thrown a bra and underwear on when I got home, but still I felt the cool air of the air conditioning on my legs as I sprinted downstairs. I had an army at my back, the heavy tread of the guys’ steps and Nat’s letting me know they were following me. Anne stood at the doorway looking terribly stiff, eyeing the gap and then us.

“These men say they’re here for Holly.”

Lars growled, the other men all moved to address this, but I cut them off. I stepped up to the door and there they were.

Rye’s fucking dimple popped again as he smirked at me, and Spiky? He loomed over his… what? Skulkmate’s shoulder. The one with the long hair hung back slightly, meeting my eyes then looking away, and that’s when Rye stepped forward.

“We haven’t had time to find suitable gifts to lay at your feet, but…” Rye pulled a small box from his pocket. Not a new one, the velvet on the box was slightly scuffed, the nap pressed down in places. “Perhaps this will do as the first of many.”

I shouldn’t have taken the box. I definitely shouldn’t have opened it, and my mouth shouldn’t have fallen open as I saw the contents. Nat had given me a beautiful necklace and I’d torn it off me, and as if in recognition of that, I was being offered another one to replace it. Inside, on a necklace of beautiful hand-wrought, silver links, was a pendant. Carved from an olive green piece of crystal was a small fox.

“Moldavite…” I said with a small sigh.

Chapter8

Rye

Gods, she was so fucking beautiful.

Standing in the doorway, she was a slender figure, looking like some kind of forest nymph rather than a woman. One I wanted to chase down and ravish, now. The fox inside me paced and paced, snapping at the bond between us, but I forced him to be silent.

“Moldavite,” she said, this Holly, our mate.

Someone had taught her well about crystals and their uses. Many of our kind deployed them with great skill when needed, but this one? I’d carved the pendant myself when I was a teenager, thinking of just this moment. At the time I’d assumed I’d run into my fated mate at a skulkmeet, a social event where the different fox shifter clans got together, or perhaps see her on the street one day, being swept off my feet by her beauty. Time had gone by and hope had begun to temper, then fade somewhat, making me think perhaps we would never be so blessed until…

Holly had stampeded into our clan Christmas party to prevent one of my family being hit by an errant cricket ball. She’d been a picture, perfectly focussed on the trajectory of the ball and nothing else, when all I could look at was her. When I saw her fall, my heart felt like it was being wrenched out of my chest, so of course I dove forward. Todd, my skulkmate, snatched the ball from the air, preventing any further catastrophes, while I grabbed her. I’d pulled her into my chest and that’s when her fox came wriggling forward.

With all the desperation of a caged animal, her animal greeted mine for just a second, before bursting forward for what I now knew was the first time. The look in her eyes when she came back to skin, the terror there. This was not a woman who had been schooled through her first shift by her family, helped to get to know the other side of her nature. She was—

“No thanks.”

I blinked, seeing the woman now, and she was shoving the box towards me, putting it in my hands when I didn’t respond, then closing my fingers around it. Did she feel that deep, throbbing pulse when we touched, because I did. The bond leapt to life like a live wire, pulsing once a connection had been made. But whatever it was, she seemed to have no problems pulling away again, taking a step backwards.

Which only drew us forward.

Even Wyatt, the last of our skulk and perhaps the most reticent, found himself drawing closer. Holly saw that with a frown and then shook her head.

“What do they do in the books? I reject you.” Her eyes flicked from one to the other of us. “I reject the bond, being your mate, whatever this mess is. I reject…” She cast her gaze further afar, as if people lurked in the bushes. “I reject taking fur and becoming goddamn vermin.”

I flinched at that because the fox did too. In Europe, the fox had a varied reputation, sometimes praised for his wiliness, sometimes hunted down by a pack of dogs, but in Australia our cousins were an invasive species.

“While I’m sure I could do my part to keep down the rabbit numbers…” Her beautiful green eyes went unfocussed for a second. “Are there bunny shifters as well?” She looked over her shoulder, and that’s when I let out a little growl. For some reason my mate was choosing to hang out in a bear’s den. “God, I hope not.” She wrinkled her nose and then shook her head. “And what kind of weird peen would they have…?”

Wherever the hell this rambling monologue was going, it seemed to slow as her eyes trailed across my body, sliding downwards.

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