A Shifter for New Years Read online

She counted to three in her head to control her anger. “I was just going to tell you thank you.” She gestured to the number on the counter. “For offering to help. I’m…” Why was she about to say this out loud? “I’m in a bad spot.”

  His bright gold eyes softened just a little. “I’ve watched you since last Christmas. Watched you withering at every family event after you got served those divorce papers. Watched the ingenuine way you talk to people. That right there? ‘I’m in a bad spot.’ That was the first real thing I’ve ever heard you say.” He turned to leave but then stopped. Looking down at her high heels, he murmured, “It’s okay to be in a bad spot. That’s where you’re supposed to be right now. That’s normal. The important part is how you dig out.” Burke glanced up at her, then to the keys on the counter. Then he left.

  She watched as he and Kieran and Leslie loaded into that old work truck and drove away. Watched out the window as a light snow started falling. She had this urge to message her friends and tell them the rude things Burke had said. That was her knee-jerk reaction because she was real. She said real stuff. But…he’d been soft with her at the end, understanding, and shared that he’d gone through a heartbreak, too. Her friends were all married and rich, while Kimberly was divorced and didn’t have a penny to her name until the house sale went through.

  Failure.

  She looked closer at the home like Burke had told her to. There was a vase of yellow flowers on the kitchen counter, and the woodblock countertops were kind of cute. The cushion she was sitting on was a gray and white pattern, and upstairs, she would have her own space to sleep without anyone barging in, even if it was embarrassingly small.

  Kimberly stood and climbed the narrow staircase to the loft. The sheets and comforters were cute and smelled like laundry soap, all folded neatly at the foot of the bed. There were gray flannel sheets on the bed that were still wrinkled from the dryer, like no one had laid on them. Even the four pillows were stacked neatly.

  Kimberly just meant to lay on the bed. Just lie down for a little bit and rest her mind. She sank down onto it and hugged a pillow to her chest, and then she had an accidental cry. She curled in on herself and sobbed, but eventually pulled the covers over her and felt all warm and safe. It was actually nice. No one was here to witness her weakness.

  An hour later, when she’d cried herself out and taken a little nap all nestled in the bed, she got up and climbed down the stairs. She held the weight of the keys in her hand, just considering. Just considering.

  Mom and Dad had a mansion and a chef and four hundred opinions about her divorce and her future.

  But here?

  She could be a mess, and no one would be the wiser. No one could watch her fall apart or judge her. No one could tell her she should handle things better or push a new man on her too soon.

  Carefully, she put the keys to the tiny house into her pocket and then texted Leslie.

  I’ll take 1010. Send.

  Chapter Three

  Hell had frozen over.

  That’s the only thing that could explain the text Burke was currently staring at on his phone.

  Moving day is tomorrow. If you accept this mission, you will have to brave the Wilson family home and confiscate my boxes from the garage. My mother will frown at you lots, and my father will drag you into a discussion about the dastardly future I have chosen. Be there at 1:00 p.m. Bring Chex Mix. I don’t know why I said that. I’ve just been really craving Chex Mix. Oh, this is Kimberly.

  He snorted. Okay, she might be teasing, but Chex Mix was delicious. At least the spoiled woman had good taste in snacks. Brownie points for her. Mmmm, brownies. He was probably going to pick up some brownie mix now, too, when he ran to the store and grabbed some Chex Mix. Not because she told him to, but because he was craving them, too. Yeah. That was the only reason.

  Okay, he hadn’t expected her to actually accept Leslie’s tiny house. Not at all. She’d just shocked him to his bones with that decision. He’d never seen a more entitled family than the Wilsons. Leslie had fallen far from the tree, but she’d fallen uphill. She was the best of them, and Kimberly was the opposite. Over the past year of attending family parties with Leslie and Kieran, he’d watched her. He couldn’t help himself. She was fucking gorgeous, but she also knew exactly how pretty she was. Her jet-black hair was always curled and sprayed into place, her makeup always flawless. Her figure belonged on a goddess. And those eyes of hers? They were as big as a Disney princess’s and bright blue like a summer sky. Perfect pixie nose, high cheekbones, designer clothes that hugged every curve. Perfect tits she was clearly proud of because she wore low-cut everything.

  And to match those boner-inducing looks? An entitled attitude that rankled him. Every time she hurled an insult or talked down to anyone, it had felt like someone was rubbing his lion’s fur the wrong direction. But over the last year, since her ex-husband Brayden had served her those divorce papers, she’d become a wallflower at the family parties. Oh, she’d still shown up to each one dressed to the nines, but she’d gone quiet. She’d started looking at the ground a lot. Her cheeks had started turning pink anytime anyone mentioned her divorce. She looked…ashamed. She had become more and more invisible. Or she’d tried to be, but Burke had watched her. He didn’t like when animals were injured around his lion. Made his lion wanted to hunt them, and hunt her he did. He hadn’t been able to stop paying attention to the falling queen.

  She’d never cried at the parties, never broke down; she’d just grown silent, and her smiles were forced and sad and mostly aimed at the floor.

  But still, she was a Wilson. Entitlement ran deep in those veins. It was ingrained since birth. So when he’d read the text a first and second time, even a third, he still had trouble accepting that she’d really said yes to the small house and Leslie’s job offer.

  Maybe there was hope for her yet.

  I’m not paying you. I can’t because I’m poor now.

  Her follow-up text came through, and he didn’t know why, but it made him chuckle.

  I’ll be there. Send.

  He wanted to say more. He wanted to say she could pay him back by going out to dinner with him. Just to test her. Take her to a food truck, feed her the chili and cracker dinner of the common people, and see if she scrunched up her face. He wanted to say he was proud of her for taking the first step toward her independence, but it was way too soon to tell if she was salvageable. She could change her mind tomorrow, and his words would be wasted on a cold heart. He’d wasted words on another heart like that before, and he liked to think he was smart and learned lessons, didn’t make the same mistakes twice, so he left it at that. I’ll be there.

  And then he shoved his phone into his back pocket, turned his headphones up with some Slipknot, fired up his chainsaw again, and dragged the blade through another big log.

  She’d told him he would have to face her parents, but he was a lion shifter.

  He wasn’t afraid of anything.

  Especially not the Wilsons.

  Chapter Four

  “I don’t understand why you’re doing this to us,” Mom said. Why was she crying? She paced the living room while Kimberly sat on the couch, wringing her hands. No one was better at the art of guilt-tripping than her mother. “We have everything you need here. You won’t have to do anything, just recover from that awful Braden’s treachery. I bet he was cheating—”

  “Mom, he wasn’t cheating.”

  “What else could explain him leaving you?”

  “Because I wasn’t that great to be around, Mom! I wasn’t enough. I wasn’t fun enough, or charismatic enough, or patient enough for him. I never was. I’m not even mad at him. I get it. He explained it. He’d been asking for me to be nicer for years. To go easier on him. To go on trips and loosen up, have fun, but I never changed—”

  “You don’t have to change! You’re a Wilson. The people around us can change, and we can do whatever we want.”

  “It’s that attitude right there, Mom. It’s
that attitude that lost me my marriage. That notion that I didn’t have to change a thing, and he could just deal with it. And look what happened? He didn’t want to deal with me.” A tear slid to her cheek, and she whispered that last part again, thickly, “He didn’t want to deal with me.”

  There was a knock on the door. Shit. That was probably Burke, and he couldn’t see her like this.

  Dad stood to answer the door.

  “It’s just Burke!” she called. “He can wait.”

  Dad frowned at her. “It’s eight degrees outside, Kimberly.”

  “He’s a lion shifter,” she exclaimed, rushing to wipe her cheeks.

  “Why is that man coming over to our house?” Mom demanded as she watched Dad open the door for Burke.

  “To help your daughter move,” Burke answered as he entered the house. He offered her dad his hand for a shake, and moved past him into the living room. “And I might be a lion shifter, but I’m still freezing my nuts off.”

  Stupid shifter hearing!

  “We were just discussing how my daughter won’t need your services because she’s staying right here where she is safe and taken care of,” Mom explained, her tone a little too bitter to be polite.

  “Cool.” Burke stood behind where Kimberly sat on the couch and locked his arms against the back. “Now your daughter can explain why she needs to not live under this roof.”

  Mom’s eyes narrowed to angry little slits. “What is he talking about?”

  “I…” Kimberly twisted in her seat and glared at Burke. He looked annoyingly handsome in his dark gray wool-lined winter jacket with blond scruff on his chiseled jaw and his messy blond hair. “I…”

  “Well, spit it out!” Mom said.

  “I don’t know!” Kimberly said, panicking.

  Mom parted her lips to say more, but Burke interrupted her. “Kim needs some time to figure out who she is outside of the Wilson Bubble. That doesn’t mean you are losing your daughter, Mrs. Wilson. It means your daughter is searching for a vein of independence. Let her work. Let her understand the value of a dollar. Let her struggle a little and figure out her own grit. If she can’t hack it, she can always come back to you. She knows there is a safe spot here, but right now? She needs to work on her shit.”

  “Well…she can work on her—her—”

  “Shit,” Burke drawled out.

  “She can work on herself here.”

  “No thanks,” Burke said.

  “Excuse me?” Mom asked, standing.

  Burke gestured from Kimberly to her mother. “Say it, Kim. This is where we start work on you learning to say no. It is ingrained in you to not let anyone down but, at some point, you have to stop letting yourself down, so say it. Say ‘no thank you.’”

  Kimberly was frozen into place. Her dad’s face was unreadable, Mom looked furious, and Burke was sitting there with his eyebrows raised in expectation like she was capable of saying no to her parents. “I…”

  “Say, ‘no thank you,’” he repeated.

  “Kimberly, I think you should go to your room while we have a discussion with Mr. Dunne,” Mom gritted out.

  Go to her room? Like she was a child and not a grown woman in her mid-thirties who had been married and divorced? “No thank you,” she whispered.

  “What?” Mom demanded.

  Kimberly sat up straighter and cleared her throat, looked her mom in the eyes and murmured, “No thank you. Your offer to let me stay here is very kind. So very kind. But Burke is right. I have to figure my life out. And maybe that means I’ll be right back here in a week. Or maybe that means I’ll learn some confidence in myself and be okay, because right now? I don’t see any value in myself—”

  “You’re a Wilson—”

  “And I want to be valued for more than my last name. Like Leslie is.” Holy. Shit. She couldn’t believe she’d just said that. Couldn’t believe it. Like Leslie? She barely liked her baby sister. But that had come out of left field, so there must’ve been some deep feelings inside of her to utter something so shocking. Some deep strain of buried respect for what Leslie had done when she’d gone against the family’s wishes and struck out on her own.

  “You should do this,” Dad said quietly.

  “Bert!” Mom yelled.

  “Enough.” Her dad nodded at Kimberly. “Kimberly said her piece. She needs space, wants some independence—”

  “She wants to be a heathen like Leslie!”

  “And Leslie is happy.” Dad arched his eyebrow at Mom and said it softer, “Leslie is happy. We have a happy one.” He twitched his head toward Kimberly. “Let her try for the same.”

  “I can’t believe you are siding with them,” Mom gasped out between her tears. She stood and marched toward the stairs. “I simply cannot believe it. I’m losing all of my daughters, one by one.”

  Her heels clacked on the stairs as she stabbed each one. And each echoing crack made Kimberly hunch a little lower. She couldn’t even remember the last time she’d said no to her parents. Her life had always revolved around pleasing them, being good enough, and garnering compliments from them.

  Biting her lip hard to hold back the tears, she stood and nodded formally to Burke and then her dad, then walked stiffly out the front door.

  Only when she was outside did she realize she forgot her jacket.

  She stood there on the porch like a bump on a log, mind overwhelmed, and wondering what the heck to do next. Dad followed her out and opened his wallet. “You’ll need some groceries for the house.”

  When he pulled out a couple of hundreds, Kimberly shook her head. “No, thank you. You’re doing what a dad is supposed to do, and I appreciate it, but I don’t want it.”

  “Your accounts are frozen, and you won’t get paid from the sale of the house for another month, Kimberly. What are you going to live on?”

  “I got a job. I get my first paycheck on Thursday. Please understand, this isn’t me being ungrateful. This is me asking you not to bail me out this time. I have to learn how to bail me out.”

  Please just let me go before I break down!

  Dad lifted his chin higher and put the money back in his wallet, leaned forward and kissed her on the forehead. “You call me if you get in a spot,” he murmured before he turned and went back inside.

  He didn’t know it, but she wouldn’t call him. Even if she was in the gutter, she was determined not to call him or Mom for help. She would only call Leslie, who would hang out in the gutter with her. Leslie wouldn’t judge her.

  Burke appeared in the doorway, her jacket and purse in his hands. He handed her both and made his way past her. “You’re doing this,” he gritted out.

  Okay. Okay. “I’m doing this,” she whispered as she followed him around the house toward the garage where her boxes were stored.

  His giant navy and white Bronco was sitting by the garage like a gosh-darn monster truck, all jacked up to the sky with the biggest tires she’d ever seen.

  “Okay, that’s a little much,” she muttered.

  “You say that until you need me to haul your stupid little car out of a snowbank.”

  “I really don’t have money for groceries,” she whispered to herself. “What if I starve?”

  “Sell your purse. It smells like alligator leather. Should make you enough to pay off the damn tiny house.”

  “I can’t sell my purse. It’s worth more than your life!”

  “Good. You can buy at least four boxes of macaroni with the profit then,” he deadpanned. Obnoxious boy. “How many boxes?” he asked, waiting for her to enter the code into the garage door to open it.

  “Twenty-seven, I think.”

  “Ha! Choose five. The tiny house won’t hold twenty-seven boxes of garbage.”

  “It’s not garbage! It’s my whole life!”

  When he arched his eyebrow at her in a “your whole life is garbage” look, she kicked at him. She didn’t know why she did it. He just made her so mad she stabbed her high heel at his thigh. But he moved out of
the way easily. “I wish you weren’t a shifter.”

  “Yeah? You and me both. Which five?” he asked, pointing to the stacks of boxes.

  “I want all of them!”

  “Fine. I’ll choose.” He sauntered over to a stack of three boxes and read the sharpie writing on the top one out loud. “Shoes. Let’s take this one because you can sell them.”

  “I’m not selling my shoes!”

  He carried the box to his Bronco. “You don’t need six billion pair of brand-name high heels, Kim.”

  “It’s Kimberly!”

  He walked back to the stack of boxes. “Oh, my God, all of these boxes say shoes on them.”

  “I have the best shoe collection in all of Missoula.”

  “Grand. Now, you can sell that collection and invest in some functional snow boots and maybe a pair of UGGs to wear around your house.”

  “I don’t wear UGGs. They’re mundane.”

  “Your loss. They are the comfiest shoes you will ever wear, and I disagree. They are pretty damn cute. Wear them with leggings and a hoodie and show off that little ass of yours. Flaunt all them squats your fancy trainer has had you do.”

  “That outfit sounds hideous. And besides, I don’t even own a hoodie.”

  Burke stopped sifting through her boxes. “What?”

  “I don’t own a hoodie. They are baggy and make me look homely.”

  “Homely? Hoodies are warm and functional and cute as hell to a guy like me.”

  “Well, I’m not trying to land a guy like you. I’m trying to land a millionaire.”

  Burke offered her an impressive eyeroll and a muttered curse. He was so annoying.

  “Stop!” she exclaimed as he picked up another box. “If I only get five boxes, I want to choose them.”

  “There you go. Okay. Now we’re getting somewhere. Choose. You have four left.”

  Whatever, she would just come back this week and load more boxes into her car, so screw him. “I’ll take the toiletries one, the one that says peasant clothes, and that one over there with my favorite kitchen utensils, aaaaand…” She looked around at all the writing on the stacked boxes. “That one over there.” She pointed.