“Fifty-five minutes!” Cal exploded. “That’s how long that maul-less ex-con sat there before atouristwandered in and changed his whole life. And what do you do? You hire him as our prima donna winter cook. Like,Hey, this guy hasn’t been lucky enough—let’s pay him to only cook what he wants to!”
I didn’t regret hiring Hawk. That ex-con could cook.
And the one thing every winter diner could agree on? My twin brother could not. Not even close.
Great bartender, sure. But the cooking genes must’ve all gone to our baby brother, Cody.
And, yeah, Hawk only made one or two items per meal. But the numbers didn’t lie—he’d quadrupled our customer traffic during a season that was normally dead. He paid for his own paycheck and then some.
Still, Cal had been simmering since Hawk rolled into town, mauled up with two Mounties, and got their new mate pregnant within a week or two after her arrival.
“That’s some prodigal son bullshit,” Cal muttered. “Holly didn’t even give any of the other already-made mauls a chance. Just looked at the ex-con and the two cops who hated each other and said, ‘Yep, those are the guys for me.’She was mauled up within three hours of getting here. We’ve been mateless for three years.Three years.It doesn’t even make sense.”
What didn’t make sense was this conversation. Holly smelled like chocolate. Even if we could have made her scent work with our cloves and cardamon, our first maul’s Labrador tea scent would have made a maul mateship a no go. Tea and chocolate wasn’t really a thing.
Speaking of our first maul.
I rubbed a hand over the back of my head and glanced toward Rys’s bedroom. Door wide open. He was still in Victoria, doing his thing as our MLA. Too bad. Rys was good at talking Cal—or anyone—off a ledge.
Me, not so much. I preferred the things I could do for Cal silently. Matching his rhythm in the gym. Keeping us identical so no one could tell us apart. Pretending I didn’t ever hear him beat off to that naughty teacher porn he liked.
“And youknowwhy it’s not a surprisebreakfast?” Cal said, still banging out pull-ups.
“Because they have jobs?” I guessed.
“Because they’re too busyfucking! Everyone over the age of eighteen isfucking—except us.”
So this wasn’t just about Hawk. My twin was also strung out over Spring Fever.
Blame it on animal instincts or too many months holed up in cave dens, but the second we emerged from hibernation, bear shifters lost their damn minds. So much sex, in fact, that Rys—our first maul, mayor, and MLA—had to formally designate the woods behind the village as the only outdoor area where bears in the throes of Spring Fever could go at it.
Most maul proposals, one-on-one hookups, estrus matings, and baby deliveries happened during that short stretch between the end of hibernation and the start of the summer tourist rush.
But we were already in a maul, so we weren’t allowed even the one-on-one hookups with other shifters. Not unless we wanted to piss off some female bear’s three dads by one-night-standing her without any intention of ever exchanging bond bites cos she wasn’t a scent-match.
No, if you were already maul-bound, tourists were your only option.
Didn’t matter much to me. But judging by Cal’s attempt to break the world pull-up record, summer wasn’t coming fast enough.
“This something you want to talk to Rys about?” I asked.
“Already tried. He’s not even returning my calls.” Cal hit the floor and started pounding out sit-ups.
Thank the Great Bear.I gave in to the matching twin instinct and anchored his feet on the other side of the squat rack.
Under Ayaska law, siblings weren’t allowed to trade the bond bites that let maul-mates talk telepathically. But we didn’t need that. We fell into a rhythm easy as breath—synchronized core-crunching, two shadow-box punches at the top.
“You know, I’m starting to wonder if Rys even cares about finding a mate for our maul at all.”
He was just now starting to wonder?
Then again, Cal wasn’t rotting from the inside, like I was. Pretty much anyone not using a watercraft to smuggle drugs across Canada’s western border was A-OK in his book.
Me, not so much.
I’d been side-eyeing the mayor’s motives since the day he invited us into his maul out of the blue.
And by “out of the blue,” I mean right before his last election—after his opponent accused him of being unfit to lead because he didn’t even have a maul.
