“Sometimes I think you are, too.” O’Malley took a long drink of his beer and then turned around to look at his bar. “I just have to find my own luck. Since I think you all have rubbed it away.”
“We’ve what?” Shawn asked.
“I’m a lucky guy, I’ve always had luck on my side, and since I walked into your lives, one by one you have found your mates. Remember when you called yourselves The Bachelors Three?”
“Oh, yeah.” Shawn laughed and nearly choked on his beer.
“And now you all have mates, you are all happily settled, and I’m left all alone.” He stuck out his bottom lip and pouted. “Poor me.”
Shawn laughed so hard he nearly spilled his beer. “Some woman out there does not know what is in store for her when she finds out you are her mate.” He tipped his bottle of beer up and drank down the rest of the amber liquid. “I need to get going. Jane is anxiously trying new recipes for you. She is taking her job very seriously.”
“Ahh, did I make a mistake asking her to bake a few things for O’Malley’s?” he asked.
“No, she’s incredibly proud of herself. It was a nice thing to do. She’s now decided to open a bakery when she’s all grown up.” Shawn’s expression faltered. “Which I hope is a long, long way away. I want to enjoy all the childhood years first.”
“And the teenage years?” O’Malley asked as he took the two empty bottles around the back of the bar and placed them in the bin under the counter.
“I’m not thinking of those. I want to bury my head in the sand and believe Jane is never going to grow up.” Shawn waved as he headed for the door. As it swung closed behind him, O’Malley was left alone in the bar.
He sighed, a big, sorrowful sigh. He loved the place he’d created here in Cougar Ridge. He moved here from the city to find peace, to find a quiet place to call home. But would he ever be genuinely happy if he never found his mate?
Taking the empty bottles out to the back, he grabbed a broom and swept the entryway leading from the bar into the paved back area where the empty beer barrels and empty bottles would be stored until they were collected. It didn’t really need sweeping, but he needed something to do something to keep his hands busy.
His cougar itched to be free. Maybe that would be the best idea, go for a run across the mountain. One of the many reasons he’d moved here was for his cougar to have more freedom. All their lives, the feline side of him had been kept hidden. First when he served in the Special Forces, then when he opened his first bar, catchily called O’Malley’s, in the city.
Who would have thought we’d have two bars? his cougar asked, sharpening his claws. Does this count as a chain?
Perhaps when we open the next one, we can say we have a chain, O’Malley answered.
He paused mid-sweep and lifted his head. Someone was in the bar.
O’Malley propped the broom against the wall and headed back inside As he walked, his head throbbed and he reached out a hand and pressed it against the wall as the world spun around. He felt as if he’d drained his bar dry, his thoughts were incoherent, his legs were not his own. Yet he was consumed by a need to reach the bar and meet the person in there.
Our mate, his cougar’s words penetrated the fog in his brain.
O’Malley figured it must be some trick. You didn’t talk about wanting your mate and wish for your mate and she just showed up right in front of you. That wasn’t how these things worked.
Did they?
There were no rules, there was no schedule that fate stuck to. He’d seen enough shifters find their mate to know exactly what was happening to him. Unless he’d been drugged. Was there something in the beer?
His cougar chuckled. Of course, that is a much more plausible explanation. Our mate isn’t waiting for us in the bar, we’ve been drugged by some unknown person for some unknown reason.
But maybe there were reasons, O’Malley thought as he reached up and opened the door into the bar. As a member of an elite Special Forces team, he’d brought down his fair share of bad guys. Sure, that was a decade ago, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t been targeted. He could be at the end of a long list of people someone wanted to take revenge on.
“Hello. O’Malley?” The woman standing in front of him looked vaguely familiar, but he could not recall ever meeting her and if he had met her, she would have been indelibly etched onto his memory.
“Yes.” He pushed himself upright and straightened his shirt, wishing he weren’t dressed in work-worn jeans and a T-shirt splattered in cobalt blue paint. He needed to appear normal. Failing that, he needed to at least appear as if he wasn’t drunk. Or high.
Even if he was kind of high. The image of his mate in front of him had done something to his brain. It was as if he was alive and seeing things clearly for the first time.
“I went to your bar in the city…” She paused, her gaze shifting to the polished wood floor before she raised it to look at him again. “They told me I could find you here.”
“And they were right.” He swallowed hard as he tried to keep a hold on his emotions which threatened to spiral out of control. If this woman, his mate, needed help then he had to focus. Focus on her face, focus on her voice, on her lips as she nervously ran her tongue over them.
He wanted to rush forward and pull her into his arms and kiss those lips so badly he had
