Witchs fated mate parano.., p.1
Witch's Fated Mate: Paranormal Shifter Romance, page 1
Witch’s Fated Mate
ELENA BLAKE
Copyright © 2024 by Elena Blake
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Contents
1. Bea
2. Wes
3. Bea
4. Wes
5. Bea
6. Wes
7. Bea
8. Wes
9. Bea
10. Wes
11. Bea
12. Wes
13. Bea
14. Wes
15. Bea
16. Wes
17. Bea
18. Wes
19. Bea
20. Wes
21. Bea
22. Wes
23. Bea
24. Wes
25. Bea
26. Wes
27. Bea
28. Wes
29. Bea
30. Wes
Epilogue
Sneak Peek
Chapter 1
Bea
“So gorgeous, what time do you get off?” The man leaned his weight onto his elbows, staring up at me from his barstool with kind eyes and a confident smile. “Because I would love to help you get off again whenever your shift’s over.”
I smiled, batted my long, painted eyelashes at him, and slid his glass across the grain of the wood towards me. Without saying a word, I gave the man a refill and then added the new drink to his tab. “I own the place,” I said as he sipped. “So my shift never really ends.”
“You’re telling me you never take some time off for yourself? Don’t you ever need to blow off a little steam?” He glanced over his shoulder and nodded toward the supply closet on the other side of the room. “I could work quickly if you’d like. You have to take a break at some point, right, so why not right now?”
I hesitated. This man was very attractive, and it had been over a month since I’d last had sex. Random, rushed hookups had always been my preferred method of stress release, and what he offered was tempting. But not tempting enough to make me walk away from the bar on a busy Friday night. I’d built the business from the ground up, and I knew the reason the doors were still open all these years later was because I didn’t take breaks when there was a line of people waiting to be served.
“Maybe another time,” I said with a wink. “Leave your number on your receipt, and I just might give you a call when I actually have some time to kill.” It was unlikely that I would follow through on this flirty suggestion, but I knew he’d tip me better if I let him feel like he had a chance.
He pointed a finger at me. “I truly hope you do.” He then took his drink and walked away from the bar, probably to go find someone else to shoot his shot with. The open place he left at the counter was immediately filled with two girls in slinky tank tops who, thankfully, already knew what they wanted to order. I made their drinks, and they thanked me before opening up a tab. I moved on to the next patron. Then the next. And the next.
It wasn’t until over an hour later that the crowd finally started to die down, and I had a moment to myself. I snagged a bin of dirty glasses and took it into the back, placing it in the sink to be dealt with later. I leaned back against the counter and sighed. I’d been on my feet for the last six hours straight, but I worried that if I sat down, I would lose my momentum—perhaps even fall asleep. Thankfully, a few seconds later, Elaina walked in from the back alley, and the woosh of sea air that wafted in through the open door behind her helped wake me up a little.
“Oh good,” she said. “I was hoping you would be away from the crowd. It’s a madhouse out there, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, definitely more people than I expected. I guess the tourist season came early this year.”
“Anyway, while I have you—I wanted to let you know that the water heater is on the fritz again. I ran up there on my break to redo my makeup and couldn't get any hot water.”
I groaned. “The guy who came to fix it last time said for certain that it wouldn’t go out again.”
“I know, but he must’ve lied.”
“Alright, I’ll call him in the morning. Strike that. I will call a different plumber in the morning. One who doesn’t make promises he can’t keep.” I brought my hands up to my temples and rubbed the sides of my head. “As if I don’t already have enough to do tomorrow.”
Elaina walked over and put her hand on my shoulder. “I’ve been telling you to take a day off for weeks now. Maybe it’s time you actually take my advice. You’re working yourself too hard.”
I shrugged. “Maybe, but what else would I do with my time if I didn’t work?” I looked around at the dingy kitchen attached to the bar I’d purchased for a steal a few years back and grinned. “Besides, I love the work that I do here, you know that.”
“But it’s still work.”
“How about I take a break next week? Deal?”
She rolled her eyes. “Sure, I would say we had a deal if I thought there was any chance in hell you would actually follow through with your end of the bargain. But since there’s not, I’ll just say this—when you collapse from exhaustion and need someone to carry you to our apartment later tonight, don’t come calling for me. I simply don’t have the upper body strength.”
We shared a laugh, and then I hooked my arm around my best friend’s shoulders and guided her to the door. “C’mon, let’s get back to the rat race. We’ve got only two more hours to go before closing.”
“Two!” She balked. “I thought we were closing at one tonight.”
“It’s Friday. We always stay open until two on Fridays.”
She made a face. “Except last Friday, when we stayed open until three—you said we could close an hour earlier this Friday, remember?”
“Hmm. Did I say that? That really doesn’t sound like me.”
“Bea,” she said, drawing my name out so it was more of a whine than anything else. “You promised.”
“Fine, fine, fine,” I surrendered. If there was anyone in the world who could convince me to close up my bar earlier than planned, it was Elaina. She’d been not only my closest friend but also like a little sister to me ever since we met nearly eight years ago. I would do anything for her—including kicking all my paying customers out early so she could get some well-deserved downtime. “We’ll close an hour early if you insist.”
She nodded definitively. “I do.”
Not being able to take a hot shower at the end of the day made it that much harder for me to unwind after my shift. Elaina and I had dragged our sleepy butts upstairs to our shared two-bedroom apartment shortly after two, where Elaina promptly threw herself down on the couch and turned the TV on. I, however, went straight to the bathroom to wash off my make-up and get ready for bed. I had a whole ‘un-ready’ routine after coming home from the bar, but it was a lot less relaxing with frigid water.
When I wasn’t working, I hardly wore any make-up, but years ago, I learned that the more eyeliner I had on, the better tips I got. Since I needed the money, I used to really cake the stuff on when I was younger. Now, I tried to keep things classy and just considered a done-up face as part of my work uniform.
I also dressed a lot more provocatively at work, opting for t-shirts that were one size too small and jeans so tight they left little to the imagination. It was the complete opposite of how I dressed when I was off the clock, but in some ways, I enjoyed having these two sides in my life. It made me feel like I was getting the best of both worlds.
That said, without my shower, it was a lot harder to get all the eyeliner off, and I ended up joining Elaina on the couch ten minutes later with raccoon smudges around my lids. She laughed when she saw me, then held a corner of the blanket open for me to crawl underneath. Once I was comfy, she snuggled up next to me and rested her head on my shoulder like she often did.
“Bea,” she said when her favorite sitcom went to commercial. “I think it’s time we talk more seriously about hiring someone for the summer. Like you said, tourist season has apparently come early this year. The weekend crowds are only going to get crazier and crazier.”
“Or this weekend was just a fluke,” I argued. “Maybe there’s some sort of event happening in town.”
She shot me a look. “When is there ever anything going on in town? This is Haven Harbor. The only reason tourists come every summer is because they want to get a slice of that quiet small-town life where nothing ever happens.”
“I still think we have some time before we need to hire a barback or whatever.”
“Maybe, but I’m not so sure,” she said. “I don’t know about you, but I feel like even some of our regulars are getting tired of how long it takes to get their drinks sometimes. I would hate for them to get so impatient that they decide to go drink somewhere else. You know that place across town, Eddie’s or Freddie’s or something—it’s already stolen a few of our most loyal customers. It’s time we step it up.”
I said nothing at first. I knew Elaina was right,
“I know the little mean control freak inside of you is against the idea,” Elaina said as if she had been reading my mind. “But before you say, consider this—you love me, right?”
I rolled my eyes at her, already knowing where this manipulation tactic was going. “You know I do.”
“I’m like your only living family, right?”
“Yeah…”
“Exactly,” she said. “Which is why I think it’s safe to say you would be totally devastated if I died so young from a heart attack.”
“You’re not going to—”
“But,” Elaina talked over me. “That’s what’s going to happen if I get screamed at one more time by a man who claims I didn’t make his gin and tonic right.”
I sat up straighter, forcing her to move her head and look at me dead on. “Someone yelled at you tonight? Who? When?”
“It’s not important,” she said.
“Yes, it is important. Why didn’t you come tell me? I would’ve thrown him out on his ass in a heartbeat.”
“That’s why I didn’t tell you,” she said. “He was with this big group of people, and I didn’t want them all to leave.” I opened my mouth to argue, but she waved a hand in the air. “It doesn’t matter. I can handle a couple of unruly customers now and then, and I’m not telling you about this now because I want you to go into protective big-sister mode. I’m only bringing it up because the longer it takes me to make drinks, the more antsy people get, and so, really, the best way for you to protect me from getting yelled at in the future is to bring on another employee… Makes a lot of sense, huh?”
“Okay, well, now you’re just using emotional blackmail to get what you want out of me.”
She shrugged. “Maybe a little. Is it working?”
“Maybe a little.”
“Then yes, I am,” she said. “But really, I also think this would be good for you too… It would just be for the summer, and I promise I will do everything when it comes to finding someone and training them. I’ll put the job posting online and conduct interviews and stuff. You won’t have to lift a finger.”
“Okay,” I said begrudgingly. “You can put the job posting out there. Just don’t give anyone a job offer before letting me see their resume first, yeah? And letting me meet them. I’m going to want to do my own vetting.”
“Of course, of course. No problem.” Elaina clapped her hands together. Then, her show returned from commercials. “Oh, it’s back! This is one of my favorites.” She shimmied her shoulders down and brought the blanket all the way up under her chin. I laughed at her, shaking my head a little, then tuned in to see how the predictable plot points would wrap up in this episode. Afterward, I headed to bed.
Crawling under the covers, I turned on my left side so that I could look out my bedroom window at the night sky. It was a new moon, so it was much darker outside than usual. There were tons of stars, however, a few of which were shining so brightly that I wondered absently if they were planets. If my mom were here, she could’ve told me for sure. She’d always been so fascinated with astronomy and had charts of the night sky hanging up all over her office.
She often used to joke that in another life, she must’ve been an astronomer or astrophysicist or something. Over the years, my dad and I tried to encourage her to go back to school and get her degree in something related to the cosmos, but she came up with a number of excuses for why she didn’t think she was capable of doing something like that. But she could’ve done it. She was definitely smart enough, and I got my work ethic from her, so I knew she would have handled the course loads with no problem.
I often thought that if the two of them had survived the car accident, she would’ve eventually bitten the bullet and enrolled in at least a class or two at the local university.
My eyes began to flutter closed as I stared out at one of the brighter stars, and a smile spread across my face as I thought about how the three of us used to sit on the roof of our old house on summer nights and watched for comets. Those were some of the best memories I had from my childhood, and while reflecting on them now was bittersweet, I was mainly just glad that I could still recall the smile on my mom’s face when she would catch sight of a shooting star, or the way my dad’s voice sounded when he held us both close and said he loved us to the moon and back.
I would give anything to spend one more night on the roof with my parents.
Just to sit with them and catch sight of one more blazing comet.
Chapter 2
Wes
My eyes flew open seconds before my alarm was scheduled to go off.
I wasn’t sure if it was my heightened senses or just dumb luck, but this was how my mornings almost always went. I was pulled out of a deep slumber right when I needed to be awake and tended to jump out of bed with much energy and zest for the day. My mother, who is anything but a morning person, used to say that this feat alone made me her easiest child because she never had to worry about getting me up and ready for school.
But even though I still woke up before the sun every morning, that didn’t mean much else had stayed the same over the years.
A lot of things had changed since I was a kid, my morning routine being just one of them.
Whereas I used to rush downstairs and start my day at the breakfast table with my family, lately, I’d been slipping out of the back door before they were up so that I could get some time to myself. As much as I loved them—my parents, brothers, and in-laws—they’d been getting on my last nerve, and if I didn’t get some exercise in before greeting them in the morning, things often turned ugly.
Hence why this morning, I went straight from my bedroom to the kitchen and went out the backdoor to start my run. On the trails carved throughout the compound, I ran in human form to start. I needed to make sure there were no townies in the area. This was private property, and the compound was difficult to find buried this far in the forest. It wasn’t unheard of for people from the surrounding towns to stumble their way onto our land by accident, though. We weren’t supposed to shift when we were near the edge of the property, but I did anyway, especially this early in the morning.
Fifteen minutes in, I took my shirt off and slid out of my basketball shorts. The sun was only just beginning to rise, and dew blanketed the grass. I shifted—my body contorting in ways that now felt natural but which I remember had truly been agonizing initially. My limbs shortened while my jaw elongated. Claws sprouted from where my fingernails used to be, and my back arched forward. When my paws hit the ground, I launched off them with the strength of at least three regular-sized wolves and raced down the path at top speed.
It felt amazing, running in wolf form. Like nothing could touch me.
And really, besides another shifter, nothing could.
Running like this was life-affirming, to say the least. As shifters, the rest of my pack and I all carried around a lot of extra heat and energy. It would take its toll if we didn’t find ways to burn it all off throughout the day. We were often known for being hotheads, starting unnecessary fights, or taking things too far.
So, a few months ago, when my family started digging into me day in and day out about finding a mate and settling down, I found that going for runs was the only way those conversations didn’t turn into screaming matches.
Even still, they sometimes did. There was only so much I could do to prepare for fruitless discussions on topics that immediately made my blood boil. And it wasn’t as if my family was trying all that hard to remain calm either. My dad especially.
Thinking about the last conversation I’d had with my parents, the condescending tone they used, and the way they spoke, as if I had no idea what had been expected of me my entire life, made me grit my teeth even now. I channeled that anger into my run and increased my speed. Barreling through the woods, I went the long way around the compound and didn’t return home until over an hour later. Grabbing my clothes in my mouth on the way back to the house, I scampered behind the family shed and shifted back into my human form. I rinsed off in the outdoor shower my dad rigged up a few years back, dressed, and went inside to be greeted by the smell of bacon and scrambled eggs. For a moment, I thought about trying to sneak back upstairs without anyone catching me, but that would mean I’d have to miss breakfast.
