Filthy Cowboy (Junkyard Shifters Book 4) Read online

  Fast. Easy. Professional. It’s what any librarian worth her salt would do, right?

  Rather than tell Jillian what she was up to as they closed up the library, Dew kept S’s book in her handbag. She felt like a thief, smuggling a book out of the library that was not hers.

  No. She wasn’t a thief; she was like Garrett. She would be delivering a book to the rightful patron who had borrowed it. Nothing like a thief.

  Except she felt guilty as heck. Not only for hiding her plans from Jillian, but for breaking that unspoken agreement between her and S, the one that said they would never meet in person.

  “You look tired,” Jillian said as she set the alarm and the two of them went out the library door, locking it behind them.

  “I’m okay,” Dew said, although she was anything but okay. Anxious. Heart thumping. Loops of excitement swirled in her gut.

  “Remember what I said about taking some vacation,” Jillian said. “You could even start taking time off tomorrow—I wouldn’t mind.”

  “Yeah, I don’t think so,” Dew said. She just wanted to get through the next hour. Deliver the book, try not to gawk at S’s house, and then rush back home to her own place where she could obsess about whether or not she’d done the right thing.

  Jillian grinned. “In fact, it would delight me to no end if you were to call in the morning and say you were off having an adventure somewhere.”

  Adventure? Dew wanted to laugh. Was this what adventure felt like? Sweaty? About-to-vomit-nervous?

  She and Jillian walked to their separate cars and drove their separate ways. Dew pulled over after a moment to plug S’s address into her phone’s directions app. The signal was weaker outside of town and going into the hills, but it might have enough strength for tonight’s errand. Pedrick Road was a straight shot out of town, so she wasn’t worried about that aspect. But driving to an unfamiliar place in the dark? It would be nice to have a little warning when she approached S’s house.

  The cheerful voice on her phone directed her off of Main Street and onto Pedrick. The app pronounced Pedrick as “pee-drick,” which made Dew smirk, because she hadn’t outgrown potty humor, apparently.

  And then Dew drove. And kept driving. And kept driving.

  “Jeez, how far away is this place?” Dew asked.

  After a long while, the voice said simply, “Continue on Pee-drick Road.”

  “Yes, thanks so much for that useful tip,” Dew said, shooting a side-eye at her phone.

  “Your destination is in approximately ten miles.”

  “Good grief,” Dew said. Did she have enough gas to get back to downtown Sierraville? This was some errand. No wonder Garrett, on the rare occasions he spared a moment to chat, always had something to say about gas prices. By now, she should’ve just about reached that old dump. She and Jillian’s new crush could’ve carpooled, maybe made a date out of finding the old place. She imagined telling him about her quest to bring The Ten Thousand Doors of January to her secretive pen pal. She wondered if the stranger would be amused. Something told her he wouldn’t be. He hadn’t seemed to have much of a sense of humor.

  There was a clearing up above, hard to view in the darkness, but illuminated briefly by her headlights. And jarring in the quiet hum of her car came the app’s voice, “You have arrived at 5844 Pedrick Road. Your destination is on the left.”

  Dew turned down the drive. When her headlights illuminated the world in front of her, she nearly burst out laughing. “Seriously?”

  The app was silent, of course. She snatched it up and looked at the map on the screen. Sure enough, 5844 was the address of the junkyard—the very one she’d been telling that man about.

  S did not live in a junkyard. So something was wrong. Maybe this was a misprint of the address.

  Two men waved at her from the top of some kind of old truck, their legs kicked out over the windshield. One of them said something, but she couldn’t hear it over the sound of her car’s motor running.

  She could turn right around, go home. But she’d come so far already, it would be good to just get this figured out, stuff S’s book in his mailbox—which had to be close—and then reward herself with some takeout and a book of her own.

  Dew stepped out of the car, pulling the white slip of paper with S’s address from the book. The winter evening seemed colder now than it had when she left the library, and she tugged her coat closer around herself before stepping forward.

  Giving a tentative wave to the guys, she said, “I think I must be lost.”

  4

  Stetson was so absorbed in the pages of Mario Puzo’s The Godfather, he barely registered the sound of an approaching car. Stetson had seen some messed-up shit in his life—mob-level drug operations, human trafficking, murder and betrayal amongst criminals—so the Corleone family’s drama was perhaps a way to make meaning from it. Or maybe he just wanted to reassure himself he wasn’t a total freak for living that kind of twisted, criminal life.

  A car door slammed outside the Junkyard. Yet in the book in Stetson’s lap, Michael Corleone was going after a drug dealer. This was far more interesting than whoever might’ve shown up to disrupt the sleepy evening. But Stetson’s stomach was rumbling—it was past the time he usually scrounged for something to eat. He wouldn’t have noticed his hunger if not for the interruption. Irritating. Stetson set a piece of paper in the book, marking his place. Slowly, he eased up from his reading spot—a well-worn stump propped against his van. He’d go inside, find something in his ice chest. Blythe and Jase had sprung for pizza for the entire Junkyard pride a couple of days ago, and Stetson still had a couple of leftover slices.

  Cold pizza. And he was looking forward to it.

  Far cry from the delicious casseroles Annabelle used to make him, but thinking about that was only a trail to pain, so he’d eat his pizza and swallow past the constant ball of emotion blocking his throat.

  Someone shouted in excitement, and Stetson cocked his head. Sounded like one of the Cruthers. The two of them were like cubs, not full-grown grizzly shifters. Punks. Everything excited them.

  As Stetson got closer to the boundary, he heard the voices more clearly. The Cruthers brothers, yes, and a feminine voice. It wasn’t Blythe’s. Was it Gabrielle? That would certainly be noteworthy. She hadn’t come out of her trailer in several weeks—at least, not in anyone’s presence that Stetson knew of. If she were to break her self-imposed exile, Stetson figured those two assholes were the last people she’d want to talk to.

  “I think I must be lost,” the woman said.

  Not Gabrielle. A stranger. The car. A strange woman had shown up in a car. Well, this wasn’t going to be good.

  “I think you’re in exactly the right place,” Weston said, and Stetson could hear that the fucker was smiling.

  “No,” the woman said slowly. “I’m looking for a house. 5844 Pedrick Road. Is that close to here?”

  That was the address of the Junkyard, Stetson knew, because he used it to get his books delivered. But he had instructed the guy who brought them to drive around to Grant and Caitlyn’s cabin behind the Junkyard. Was this a new delivery person?

  “Let me see that paper of yours,” Dallas said.

  “Um…”

  “But if you could bring it over here, I’d appreciate it. We both would,” Weston said. “We sprained our ankles. Hard to walk.”

  Oh, fuck. They couldn’t be serious. They were asking the woman to come over the line.

  No fucking way.

  Stetson began to run, still out of sight of the boundary line.

  “Really.” The woman sounded skeptical. Good.

  “Really,” Dallas said. “It’s a painful topic, though. We don’t like to discuss it.”

  “Now you’re messing with me,” the woman said.

  Stetson sped around a pile of old refrigerators and freezers, then came to a sudden halt. The woman was gorgeous, with black hair, sepia-toned brown skin, and high cheekbones that begged for kisses. She had a lush, c
urvy figure that couldn’t be hidden by her heavy coat.

  And she held a book in her hands. The Ten Thousand Doors of January. That was the book Stetson had requested from the library. But this, this was not the delivery person. A tiny bit of blue stuck out from the book’s pages. Dew’s note.

  The woman standing before him, just twenty yards away, was Dew. She had to be. Even as Stetson’s mind told him not to jump to conclusions, his heart told him it was the truth, and his eyes told him she was even more beautiful than he had imagined her.

  That ball of emotion threatened to choke him again, and he swallowed. It hadn’t even been a full year since Annabelle’s death. It should be too soon.

  “Maybe we’re messing with you a little,” Dallas admitted. “If you could just show us the address, we’ll take a peek and tell you if you’re in the right place or not.”

  “No,” Stetson whispered, starting forward. Then he said it again, a little louder. Damn his raspy voice. Usually being quiet wasn’t a problem.

  The woman—Dew—shrugged in a “what the hell” gesture. “I don’t have time to play games, so fine, if your ankles are injured, whatever.”

  She didn’t understand the danger, the magical barrier that followed the gravel line. Once she crossed it, she’d be stuck here just like the rest of the Junkyard shifters.

  She took a step forward, not over the line yet.

  “No,” Stetson shouted.

  She looked up at his voice, startled, and missed her footing.

  That one mistake caused her to stumble forward. Not in danger of falling, nothing so easy as that. But the inertia kept her moving so she could catch herself.

  Both of her feet came over the gravel line as she found her balance. She still stared at Stetson, her brown eyes telegraphing confusion, hope. He saw it, then. It was the hope. She’d come all this way for Stetson.

  He wished it weren’t true, but he could see it in her face, in her eyes.

  “What have you done?” he said, something hot and furious blazing through his chest.

  Her lips parted in surprise. Hurt flashed across her face before she straightened her features. And he realized he was angry at the wrong person.

  First, he should be mad at himself. It hadn’t been foolproof, his plan to keep them from meeting. He’d known that from the beginning, and yet he’d prayed she would respect the boundaries of paper and ink. He hadn’t told her his name. He’d been purposeful in not telling her much about his life.

  But he’d shown her his heart, his yearning. And apparently that had been enough for someone with as big and pure of a heart as Dew’s to finally break that last barrier between them and come looking for him.

  The other people he should be mad at? The Cruthers. The two of them were laughing, exchanging high-fives. Stetson was on them in no time, yanking one of them back and throwing him to the ground. Vaguely he heard the other brother shouting, and the woman shouting, too. More was happening behind him as he pummeled whichever brother was beneath him. He couldn’t see through his fury and he let his fists pound into the face of the guy beneath him. Things were happening behind him—the other brother yanking him back. Jase asking what the fuck was going on. The woman screaming—why couldn’t she get out, she wanted to know.

  Blood scented the air. The brother’s nose was broken. Stetson’s jaguar urged him to abandon his opponent and run toward the woman, but he was restrained, held back. He growled. Tried to shift, but whoever held him could guess at Stetson’s intent. Pressure came down hard on his throat.

  That choking, ever-present ball of emotional pain, tightening like a noose.

  Unconscious, he wouldn’t be able to help Dew at all.

  But it was too late.

  Everything went gray.

  The last thing he thought he saw was her face, those beautiful eyes wide and frightened. As he went under, her face melded with Annabelle’s. Pain ripped through him and he realized he couldn’t save either of them.

  5

  The guy who’d been in the cowboy hat, the guy who’d shouted, no, as Dew fell forward—he was carried away by a couple others. Not the two who’d first spoken to her. One of them was leading the second away, blood dripping everywhere. Dew wobbled on her feet. She didn’t do well with blood.

  She backed up, hit something solid. Smooth. Looking behind her, she saw nothing.

  That couldn’t be right—she thought she’d imagined it a moment ago, when she’d tried to run to her car. The hallucination or whatever had been caused by her panic, she’d thought. But she was still blocked by…air?

  Dew frowned. Her aversion to blood had never caused her to hallucinate before. She glanced back to the bloody guy being led away. Bending forward, she took deep breaths. This was too weird, and she didn’t want to faint in front of all these strangers. She didn’t feel like she was in danger, exactly. She was just incredibly, unspeakably uncomfortable.

  A woman was suddenly standing at Dew’s side. Red hair, porcelain-white skin. “I’m Blythe,” she said quietly. “Can I touch your arm, to lead you to sit down?”

  “Yes,” Dew said on a gasp.

  She kept her eyes on the frozen ground while the woman led her forward. Don’t look at the blood on the ground, don’t look at the blood on the ground. She saw something red—blood?—and felt her dizziness renew.

  “It’s okay, I got you,” Blythe soothed.

  A log, the top of it polished into a bench-like seat, rested against the side of a rusty Volkswagen Bus. People—mostly men, it seemed—murmured in the background, talking quietly. They sounded angry, yet excited.

  “Here you go,” Blythe said.

  Dew sat carefully on the edge of the log bench. She took great breaths in and slowly let them out. This was fine, she thought. She’d catch her breath, then head back to the car. And S could wait for his book until Garrett made deliveries next week.

  This was what she got for trying to push things, for taking chances. She thought she wanted adventure, passion, romance—and look what happened to her when she went for it. This was like trying to teach herself to do cartwheels as a kid. She’d broken her darn finger, thinking all her friends were doing cartwheels with their fingers outstretched.

  Risks were stupid.

  Now that her adrenaline was fading, she started to feel the cold. Night had fallen. She wanted nothing more than to go home, turn up the thermostat, and snuggle under a quilt with a cup of tea and a good book. Maybe a paranormal romance, but something with comedy. She could use a laugh right now.

  “Feeling better?” Blythe asked.

  “Yes, thank you.” Dew stood up. “Thanks for the seat.”

  She glanced around, well aware she and Blythe had an audience. All men. And they were huge, with muscles that would shame the bodybuilder health nuts she saw flexing on social media. Intimidating, but hot. Not as hot as that scary guy who’d jumped on one of the others. She hoped that guy was all right.

  “He’s all right, isn’t he?” Dew asked.

  “Who?” Blythe said.

  “The guy who jumped on the other guy. I don’t know their names. Obviously. I mean. Both of them. Are they both okay? The man who was beaten, and the one who was knocked out?”

  “They’re fine,” Blythe said. “These guys are tough. Some of them could probably stand to be hit a few extra times. Dallas.”

  One of the men who’d been taunting Dew gave Blythe a sheepish grin.

  It suddenly occurred to Dew just how strange it was that all of these people were hanging out in a junkyard after dark on a weeknight. She opened her mouth to ask what on earth they could be doing, then snapped it shut just as fast. Not her business. Not her business. The sooner she got out of here, the better.

  “I’ll get going,” Dew said, starting toward her car. “Thanks again, Blythe.”

  There was silence from the red-haired woman, and none of the men standing around said anything.

  Dew marched forward.

  “If you don’t tell her, I wi
ll,” a man said, his voice a growl.

  Shivers erupted over Dew’s skin and she pulled her arms in tighter around her waist, holding her coat closed. Still, her car was only a few yards away. She’d just get S’s book.

  S’s book. Where was it? Crap.

  “Has anyone seen the book I was carrying?” Dew asked, not liking how quiet and small she sounded. “The Ten Thousand Doors of January. A dark cover, with flowers.”

  She would absolutely die a thousand deaths from mortification if someone picked it up and read her letter to S. Not to mention, library books were expensive.

  “You don’t need to worry about the book,” the same man said. He had brown hair and hazel eyes, and he was tall and muscular, like every other dude here. “Blythe, if you don’t tell her, seriously, someone has to.”

  “I will, Barnum,” Blythe said.

  “Tell me what?” Dew snapped. “I just want my book and I want to go home. That’s all.”

  “You can’t go home,” Blythe said, her voice so gentle that Dew hadn’t heard her correctly.

  “Sorry. What?” Dew said. She didn’t want to crawl around on the ground on her hands and knees to look for S’s book, but she’d do it if she had to.

  “Here’s your book,” a man said, swooping out of nowhere and grabbing the book from an invisible dark place close to Dew. He handed it to her, his eyes dark, his face grave.

  “You can’t go,” Blythe said, then cleared her throat. “You can’t go home now.”

  An icy feeling of alarm spread through Dew’s body. Blythe sounded regretful, sad. Were they going to hurt her?

  Dew took a deep breath. She must’ve stumbled into something bad. A criminal organization, some kind of small-town mafia out in the sticks of the Sierra Nevada mountain range. Unlikely, yep, but it was the simplest explanation.

  And this dangerous group believed Dew had seen too much.