Chapter One
~ Burke ~
I always thought the dumbest thing about country living was the idea that life slowed down. Nobody who’d ever drove into town with a sleep-deprived omega riding shotgun would call this relaxed. If anything, it was perpetual motion with a little extra dust in your teeth and more bugs in your grill.
Today’s mission: haul Jojo to the Black Butte Garden Center for “emergency tomato starts.” Apparently, Jojo was convinced the only thing standing between him and greenhouse glory was a flat of Early Girls from Harmon’s.
I’d suggested, more than once, that if tomatoes were such a goddamn crisis, maybe he could just plant the seeds Rawley brought home last week. Jojo, for his part, acted like this was sacrilege on the level of spitting in a preacher’s hat.
“Do you think the yellow ones are heirloom, or are they just dyed?” Jojo had been talking for the last six miles, half to himself, half to me, hands moving like he was already cradling a sun-warmed tomato.
“They don’t dye tomatoes, Jojo,” I said, shifting gears as my pickup hit the washboard outside the city limit. “They justbreed ’em that way. Like dogs, except less inbreeding and more lycopene.”
“I read that supermarket tomatoes are engineered to survive being trucked for hundreds of miles,” Jojo said, voice grave, “but they’re basically tasteless. You can taste the difference, Burke. Like, the soul is gone.”
“Maybe I just like a tomato that’s built Ford tough,” I said, and he wrinkled his nose at me, like I’d offered to deep-fry a baby chick. He did that a lot. It never failed to amuse me.
We crested the little rise before downtown Black Butte. To call it a “downtown” was like calling a single wildflower a bouquet, but they did their best. Harmon’s Garden & Hardware sat at the far edge of Main Street, between a shuttered video store and the kind of bank you only entered with a hat in hand. The place smelled like fresh mulch and the chemical tang of bug repellant, even from the parking lot.
I killed the engine and stretched, listening to the metal tick as it cooled. Jojo was already halfway out the door, sneakers hitting gravel, ponytail bouncing. You had to hand it to the kid—he had the energy of a wind-up squirrel, even at eight a.m. on a Saturday.
“You coming?” he said, clutching his ragged canvas shopping bag. “Or are you gonna nap in the truck while I do the heavy lifting?”
“You see the size of your arms, Jojo? The only thing you’re lifting today is your dignity.”
He beamed at that, which was why I said it.
The garden center was a sensory mugging. Fifty flavors of dirt and peat, racks of neon seed packets, humming fluorescent lights, and the sticky-sweet perfume of petunias gone feral. Jojo made straight for the tomato section, as if his blood sugar depended on it.
I followed more slowly, my boot soles catching in the warped linoleum, because if there’s one thing I learned from years of spec ops and ex-military alpha wrangling, it’s that sometimes the best way to disappear is to just slow down and watch.
That’s how I noticed it.
The scent came at me sideways, an ambush in a river of garden store funk. It was… fuck. I wanted to say “clean,” but that was a copout. It was warm, alive, threaded with crushed basil and sun-baked sand, but under that, something green and sharp that hit every pleasure center I had.
Instinct snapped my head around. I scanned the aisles, hunting for the source, and when I found him, I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from grinning like an idiot.
He was stocking fertilizer, brown paper apron tied loose over a T-shirt with a faded university logo. Short, sandy hair and narrow shoulders, jeans that hung on skinny hips. Not my usual type, if I had a type, but what he lacked in size he made up for with concentration. He bent, hefting a bag that probably weighed as much as he did, and I caught another punch of that scent.
My pulse tripped over itself.
I must’ve been staring, because the moment his gaze drifted my way, he froze. A glimmer of something—I couldn’t tell if it was irritation or anxiety—flickered across his face before he yanked his attention back to the shelf.
Okay. That was promising.
Jojo had vanished into the jungle of heirloom seedlings, so I followed my nose. I drifted into the fertilizer aisle, perused a spray bottle of deer repellent like it was high literature, and waited for the kid to notice he wasn’t alone.
It took about thirty seconds.
He straightened, wiped his hands on his apron, and gave me a wary side-eye. “Need help finding something?” His voice wassoft, but not shy, a little rough like he was recovering from a cold. Or maybe he just didn’t love talking to strange alphas before lunch.
“Not unless you stock Stetson hats and Glocks in the back,” I said, smiling. “But I could use your professional opinion.”
He looked at me proper this time, eyes a weird shade of gold-green that I decided, instantly, was my new favorite color. “About…?”
“Deer repellents. Or tomato cages. Or which of these fertilizers won’t dissolve my eyebrows if I spill it on myself.”
He seemed to relax half a centimeter, like I’d passed some sort of test. “If it’s for tomatoes, you want the twelve-six-six.” He walked over, pointed at a sack with an ugly cartoon beefsteak on the front. “It’s slow-release, so you can’t screw up the timing.”
