Chapter 51

BOOK THREE

ENCHANT WOLF

JO

The last time a man flirted with me, before that day, he ended up with a sprained wrist and a black eye. Men should know better than to try and touch someone who's not theirs without their permission. It doesn't matter what kind of shifter you are, I wasn't there to be nipped or pawed at.

I owned the damn place, after all.

Turning over the bar of hand soap in my hand, I gave it another smell before I tossed around fifty of them into my cart. I guess owning and working in my bar and hotel opened me up to these kinds of advances, it's the two places people just want to cut loose. Lonely men with booze or boredom were constantly looking for someone to take out their frustrations with or on.

That doesn’t mean they have to do it to me.

My weekly shipment of supplies was running a couple of days short and, although I only had twenty rooms, those goods added up quickly. I was lucky to have tons of mini-shampoos and conditioners stocked up, but, God forbid, I left hand soap there for more than one day.

Pushing my cart to the checkout, looking like I had some weird hand soap fetish, I took one last glance over the store.

The mirror caught my eye.

It was long, at least ten feet, and three or four feet tall.

A big discount sticker said it was half off, but when I checked the price tag … nope, still too expensive. I’d been staring it down for weeks, considering what to do about it. I probably wouldn’t do anything, but the fantasy was always there.

It would have looked so great hanging behind my bar, making the place look a little bigger, but it had been a pretty slow month. A two-hundred-dollar mirror wasn't in my budget. I ran my fingers across the frame it was in, slightly ornate, very seventies, and I hoped nobody else would buy it before I could afford it.

Loading my tiny car with my haul, I headed home. I loved this town.

Every inch of it was familiar, from the cobblestone streets in the main square to the way the houses and businesses themselves seemed to spiral out from the center like one long curve. I glanced up at Purple Ridge as I made my way through town, it was still a couple of hours until sunset when the bar got heavy.

I’d have to give the new employee a pep talk.

It was hard to keep people working in the bar. The hotel was easy - my two girls on the cleaning staff would go through and have the rooms and laundry done by three in the afternoon. In the bar, though, they had to deal with whatever kind of weirdo was there to flirt with them, fights between drunks, calling the cops at least once every other week because people can’t handle their alcohol. New girls in the bar never lasted longer than a week or two after training before they decided it wasn’t for them.

Don't get me wrong, my bar was a respectable place, I worked hard to fix this place up and make sure of that. When I was growing up, this hotel had been abandoned. Nobody had owned it since the seventies, and it became a hideaway for teenagers and grifters. I bought it when I was twenty-two and spent the next couple of years fixing the hotel and bar inside out.

Hell, the plumbing was out, electricity was a fire hazard, and the place was dying.

I brought it back to life. It was my pride and joy.

People just couldn’t handle themselves after a drink or two.

Turning the corner, it came into view and I smiled. It’d been five years since I had my Grand Opening and I still wasn't tired of coming home to it. My apartment was just a door behind the main office. Two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen; it wasn’t much to look at, but I'd made it home. Most of my money and energy was spent on the parts of the hotel other people would see.

Something else came into view with the hotel.

Over a dozen motorcycles were lined up out front, gleaming in the afternoon air like they knew they weren’t supposed to be there. Fuck.

I hated biker gangs and hated the biker attitude a lot of men got. My youngest brother died because he made an ass of himself in another club’s area, and yet my older brother is still in the Carved Flames despite that. What the hell were they doing there anyway? My brother never said he was going to visit.

As I parked my car, I saw a patch on a couple of the saddlebags. “The Speared Lions,” I read aloud.

A rival gang?

In my bar?

Hell no!

I didn’t need that trouble dragged in.

Turning off my car and rushing, I just left the soap and hurried in. Please, please tell me the new girl can handle this. Opening the door to the bar, I wanted to howl. I wanted to shift, and I haven’t let myself do that in ten years!

The bar was crowded for once, which was nice, but there was broken glass on the ground and chaos throughout the whole room. A couple of my regulars pushed past me to leave, looking annoyed at all the commotion. A few men were leaning across the bar, as far as they could go, trying to talk to my employee as she shakily made a drink, a few others were fucking with my television, and another group of them were dragging a table with them across the room to join it with another.

All my tables had been nailed down, so not only did they have to pull it loose, but they were leaving a trail of scratch marks on my wooden floor.

That was it.

My eyes landed on one biker and I decided he was who I was talking to.

He glanced at me as I started over and it felt like my heart stopped for a moment. Like the world spun on a Dutch tilt for just a second, just long enough to notice. He wasn’t bad looking, short, shaggy, with dark blond hair, angular features, and thickly muscled that the MS came out of the sleeves of his shirt. He was taller than me, with me being 5’8” was always a plus.

These thoughts sprung on me hard, but as I got closer to him I pushed them aside.

No way in hell.

I was told every ‘fated mate’ story on earth when I was a kid.

It didn't mean I was buying it, and it sure as hell didn't mean he was the one for me.

"Where's the leader of the club?" I asked. His eyes were such a bright shade of green that my immediate thought was that they were contact lenses. That didn't seem like the case, though. I caught my thoughts and shoved them aside before they could keep it up.

“He’s not out with us,” he shrugged. His voice was deep, just barely audible over the rest of the sound in the bar. “You’re fucking beautiful, you know that? Did you feel that…”

“You all need to get the hell out of my bar,” I cut him off. He felt it, too? Maybe it was just the stress of the day, there's no way connections like that existed. If they did, I'd be the last person who'd get a fated mate, especially one this good-looking.

“No.”

I wanted to strangle him.