Page 3 of Crave

I let my head thump back against the cool metal industrial refrigerator, staring at the employee schedule taped up on the wall. Not that I needed to. Third week in November. Nine years ago, tonight.

As pretty much anyone in town could have told you, I got banished to the foothills of the Canadian Rockies outside cold, snowy Calgary the fall of my senior year. What almost no one knew was the truth. Suffice it to say the details included stupid as hell seventeen-year-old thinking, a party, way too many wine coolers, and a night in the back of my truck I would have given my right nut to take back.

And Lacey Blair.

There’s no excuse for what I did that night. Let’s just get that out of the way. It’s easy to get twisted up in a cascade of bad decisions, so much so that you’ll tell yourself just about anything to justify your own reckless behavior. You grow so desperate to believe your own lies that eventually they start sounding like truth.

Until you don’t realize you’ve become the villain in your own story.

Lacey Blair stormed into my life on a cold January day in zero-hour athletics. I noticed her the second I stalked out to the track, not only because with her long dark hair tied up in a high ponytail and her lean runner’s build, she was undeniably gorgeous, but mostly because she was hopping around on one foot in a pair of purple Nikes, trying to stretch out her quads while texting one-handed.

Or hell, maybe it was because as a werewolf I’d been subliminally conditioned by years of bedtime stories to fall all over myself at the sight of a girl in a sour-cherry red hoodie. All those fairy tales couldn’t be wrong.

I hopped up onto the track. Pale gray eyes the color of that endless January sky caught mine. I sucked in a breath, feeling like I’d just been punched in the sternum.

“Must be a pretty intense status update.”

A faint flush of color rose on her cheeks, and I took note of a tiny constellation of freckles just below her left eye. “That your best line?”

“You’d prefer the one where I offered to help you stretch?”

She smirked. “Okay. Except can I record this? I love being mansplained to by a guy I’ve just met whose gym shirt is on inside out.”

Beside me, West choked back a laugh. Flipping him off, I stole a glance at hoodie-girl’s screen.

“Little early for strawberry lemonade cupcakes.”

She scowled, clutching the phone to her chest. “Nosy much?”

“Because something they sell downtown at Blair’s is a state secret?”

“Don’t you have any other girls to annoy this morning?”

A smile twitched at the corner of my mouth. “Just you.”

“My aunt’s giving me an after school job. I baked these for her over the weekend and she said we could try selling a dozen this morning, see if they have any takers.”

“What kind of frosting?”

“Excuse me?”

“Frosting, Blair. Try to keep up. It goes on top of the—”

She bared her teeth, looking like she wanted to bite me, and damn, if that didn’t send tingles exploding across every inch of my skin. My wolf arched within my bones, desperate to get out. Closing my eyes, I dug my fingernails into my palms until I smelled blood.

“Strawberry. You didn’t get that from the pink?”

“Buttercream? Cream cheese? Royal icing?”

“You wouldn’t use royal icing on a cupcake.”

I tapped the end of her nose. “Just checking.”

That earned me another growl. I took a delicate sniff to make sure she wasn’t part werewolf.

“You bake?” she asked disdainfully.

“Don’t sound so surprised, sweetheart. Having a dick doesn’t mean I can’t figure out the temperature controls on an oven.”