Her Mistletoe Minotaur: A BWWM Paranormal Holiday Romance (A Very Alpha Christmas Book 1) Read online

  "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she fussed at him.

  "I'm trying, the hell, to get your trailer on the bed of my wrecker. After that, I'll try the hell to get your car on the flatbed, as well," he gritted out between clenched teeth.

  "Who said I wanted you to?" She crossed her arms over her chest.

  Mitch had a moment of *blink, blink, blink* incredulity. "You want me to leave the trailer? And your car?"

  "I don't know you from Adam," she fussed at him. Her voice held a brassy tone. Due to the cold, her nipples pebbled under her sweater. His dick perked in response, and he looked away, embarrassed and confused by his response to her.

  He had been so caught up in gawking at her that he didn't formally introduce himself. He silently cursed himself and his minotaur nature, which often had him forgetting the social niceties.

  He set the trailer down, wiped a hand on his jeans, then held it out for her.

  "Mitch Wayne," he said. "I own the wrecker company in town."

  She did not uncross her arms. She looked him up and down, her eyes landing on the outstretched hand. This irritated him.

  "It's cold, it's snowing, and it's late," he told her. "Stay out in the cold and wet and freeze to death. Or, get into my nice, toasty warm truck and stay cozy while I get your trailer and car loaded into the flatbed of my wrecker."

  She looked at him, eyes narrowed and curious.

  "Petunia Greene," she said, offering him a small smile. "But everyone calls me Tu. Nice to meet you."

  They shook hands, and he was surprised when a jolt of electricity sizzled up his arm. Her hand was warm. Toasty, even, considering how cold it was. He blinked at her, processing the sensations. She blinked back, looking startled as well.

  "Um, do you happen to have a smartphone I can borrow?" she asked him. "I need to contact my sister. She's expecting me. I should call and tell her I'll be awhile."

  He fished in his back pocket, handed her his smartphone, and trudged back down the hill.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow

  Well, for fuck's sake.

  That is what Tu thought as she sat in the cab of the wrecker, looking with wonder and some trepidation at the smartphone that tall, strong, and beastly had given her. She couldn't remember the last time she'd used one, and wished she had her Omni because Omnis were easier and better.

  She stroked the thin metal Omni receiver circling her wrist, as she might rub a genie's lamp. If only wishing it would make Omni amplifiers magically appear around the little shifter town somewhere up the road. She felt foolish, driving 1100 miles without getting her own smartphone first and learning how to use it.

  "Call Jasmine Greene," she told the device. Nothing happened. Tu frowned.

  She tried again. Nothing. Tu pursed her lips, thinking.

  "Turn on smartphone," she said, and the device turned on. Tu grinned like an idiot.

  Success!

  Jasmine Greene answered the call, voice only, and Tu explained her predicament. "I'm not sure when I'll get there," Tu told Jasmine. She got her nose close to the window to stare up at the sky. "It's still snowing."

  Jasmine sighed. "Are you sure he's bringing you here? The whole town is snowed in."

  "Why wouldn't he bring me there?" Tu wanted to know.

  "Who are you with again?"

  "Mitch Wayne?" said Tu. The statement came out as a question.

  Jasmine paused on the other end of the line, and Tu became suspicion

  "Mitch Wayne?" Jasmine asked.

  "Yes, that's what I said," she told Jasmine. "Why? Is there something I need to know about this guy?"

  "No..." Jasmine said, but her tone said otherwise.

  "Is there something wrong with him?" Tu asked, thinking about the very large man. Although he did talk to her, Tu felt as if he would have preferred not to. Was he some kind of eccentric loner? Did he keep women locked in his basement?

  "No, not at all. He's a respected member of the community," Jasmine hedged.

  "Is he rumored to be a serial killer or something? What are you not telling me?" Tu's tone got a little shrill as alarm crept into her voice.

  "No... he’s just...not exactly friendly." Jasmine said diplomatically.

  Tu thought about it. "He's a minotaur. Aren't they known for being antisocial, yet harmless?"

  "How did you know he's a minotaur?" Jasmine asked.

  "My car and trailer went waaaay off the road," Tu said. "He said he couldn't get them up the hill with his wrecker. He's quite impressive shifted, isn't he?" Tu searched for the right word to describe him. "Kind of majestic."

  "I wouldn't know," Jasmine said. "I've never seen him shifted. He pretty much keeps to himself. You might even call him reclusive."

  Tu pondered that. "He did actually seem kind of...shy."

  "I think minotaurs are just like that," Jasmine put in helpfully.

  "Well, like I said, I guess he's bringing me to the cottage tonight," said Tu. She peered down the hill, looking for Mitch. She spotted him, his eyeshine glowing in the gloom. "You sure about that? This isn't Ohio. When it snows in Texas, people lose their damn minds." Jasmine had assumed a warning tone with Tu, which came across as patronizing.

  "He's out here looking for stranded motorists. I guess he knows how to drive in these conditions," Tu snapped.

  "I'd double-check if I were you," said Jasmine. "Seems like I've heard people say that he sometimes puts people up in his cabin after he rescues them during ice storms." She ended on a singsong, older sister note.

  "It's just snowing, though." Tu took another peek at the sky and noticed a light drizzle falling against the passenger side window. “And raining, a little.”

  "Are you sure?" Jasmine asked. "There's a cold front coming through, and mixed snow and sleet. Once the ground freezes, we're talking a minimum of two or three days with the roads closed."

  Tu blanched at this distressing information. She had zero interest in holing up in some mountain man's cabin for two or three days. She hung up with her sister, then opened the passenger door of the wrecker and stepped out.

  Conditions had changed in the short time she'd been inside the truck. It felt wintry, making ice crystals in her nose when she breathed in and tears come to her eyes. Tiny, hard raindrops pelted her face. The ground, lightly covered in snow and glazed with ice, crunched under her boots. From this distance, Mitch was a silhouette of horns and shoulders, his white eyes glowing in the dark. She wondered what he looked like in his human form. There was something...compelling about him. Weirdly, she wanted to get closer to him. And what would his beard feel like if he kissed her?

  Tu pumped on her mental brakes. Her wayward thoughts surprised her. She really did not make a practice of lusting after strange men. Sure, she'd had boyfriends, but she didn’t experience immediate chemistry with someone, and she'd never had the hots for someone in their beast form.

  Unique among shifters, ruminants retained their ability to speak when in their beast form. A lot of people found this trait weird, but Tu had never given it any thought one way or another. Now, she gave it thought.

  He came closer, dragging the trailer. He scowled; his face screwed up from the exertion of pulling the trailer.

  "Thought I told you to wait in the wrecker," he said bluntly.

  Rude motherfucker.

  Hugging herself, she shrugged. "I got tired of waiting inside."

  He dragged the trailer to the lift gate and set it down. On the flatbed of the wrecker, she saw he had somehow already loaded her car without her being aware of it. She watched him intently, rubbing her arms against the cold. His muscles moved underneath the waffle-weave fabric of his green Henley. It must have been some kind of miracle fabric that stretched as he grew, because while it was a bit tight over his shoulders and arms, it didn't split. His jeans were similarly stretchy. Black hair sprouted all over his body. She wondered what this type of hair would feel like.

  She felt a compuls
ion to touch his shifted form, to discover the texture of the coarse-looking hair, to run her fingertips over the brutish planes of his face with its wide mouth and flattened nose. His horns jutted out from his head in the shape of a hunter's bow. They were a buff color that gradually darkened to black at the tips. She knew shifters only allowed close friends and relatives to touch their beast forms, and she doubted Grumpy McAsshole would let her touch him, shifted or not.

  Mitch checked her car, pressing down on the front end and watching it bounce.

  "What are you doing?" she asked. When she spoke, her breath condensed and froze in the air.

  He gave her another irritated scowl, nostrils flaring. "Securing your car," he said, his voice clipped. He sounded pretty put out by doing it.

  "Oh," she said, feeling lame. She needed to find out if what Jasmine had said was true, that Mitch Wayne might not take her to her sister's house. But how to ask this grumpy dude anything without fear of him turning even grumpier?

  As she pondered this dilemma, lost in her own thoughts, Mitch must have said something to her because he stomped his foot where he stood in the flat bed, seemingly to get her attention.

  "I said 'Hey'," he bellowed, in the deepest, darkest bass she'd ever hear.

  She snapped out of her musings to blink at him. "Sorry?"

  "You're cold," he said. "Go stay in the truck."

  She shivered. Her skin prickled under her soft sweater, and her nipples went hard. She crossed her arms over her chest again. No need for him to know her headlights were on.

  "That's okay," she said, barely managing to keep her teeth from chattering. "I've been in that car for hours. Standing up feels good."

  He paused, held his arms out, and turned around slowly, treating her to a view of his seven-foot, shifted self. Then he looked her in the eye and glared at her.

  "Was that a good enough look for you?" he grunted.

  She watched him, blinked again, confused.

  "I don't understand—" she started to say.

  "Go wait in the truck," he said.

  Yep, a rude motherfucker. Then it occurred to her that he thought she'd been looking at him too long. Had she been she ogling him? Or perhaps looking at him like a specimen in a Petri dish? Did he think she regarded him as some kind of freak?

  "I'm sorry I offended you," she said aghast. She hadn't meant any harm. "I was just—"

  "You were just, what?" he bit out. He had hopped down from the flat bed and stalked toward her. She knew she shouldn't stare, but she continued to do so. He was just so...interesting looking. She tried changing the subject.

  "My sister...Jasmine...said I should ask you whether you'll be able to take me home tonight." She could feel her eyes stretching more and more in wonder, the closer he got to her. He was so...big. Huge.

  "Do I look like a taxi service?" he said, eyes hot with irritation. "I saved your ass tonight. I took a huge fucking risk coming out here, looking for stranded motorists. Be grateful!"

  "I was just—"

  "You were just arguing with the person saving you. The person who showed up after you went tits over teakettle off the road. Be happy you're not still stranded halfway down that hill!" he yelled. "Right now, you should be grateful you aren't freezing to death, and let me do my fucking job!"

  "But I—"

  He whirled away from her, put a hand on one hip, and tapped one of his enormous booted feet impatiently. She wondered, offhandedly, how it was that his boots somehow were able to accommodate his shifting body size. His hands clenched and unclenched at his side.

  Mitch was big, hulking, and angry, but he didn’t scare Tu. She could not help but notice that he smelled great, a mixture of pine and leather. Did he smell like that in his human form? He pointed at the cab of the truck. "Anything can happen to your frail little human body when you're standing on the side of the road. It's fucking cold out here, and it's dangerous. Go get in the truck!"

  "But I—" Tu felt the need to keep talking, to explain what she wanted to know from him. Her head hurt, her car might be totaled, and she really just wanted to know what to expect next. She wanted to know where she was spending the night. Everything in her life had been turned upside down when she skidded off the road, and she felt she deserved to know where she would lay her head tonight.

  Mitch wasn't hearing it. "Get in the wrecker. Now," he said, his eyes intent on hers.

  "I just—" she started to say, but the next thing she knew, Mitch had picked her up and tossed her over his massive shoulder, caveman-style. Her hat fell off, and her long braids went flying.

  "Hey!" she yelped, to no avail. In seconds, he had deposited her on the passenger seat of the wrecker's cab. Her head ached, but she was reasonably sure Mitch didn’t keep women in his basement. He was just a garden-variety asshole. She sat and stewed while Mitch got everything loaded into the truck bed. He reappeared a few minutes later. The time she'd waited for him did nothing to cool her ire, and she'd been mentally rehearsing a diatribe wherein she told him exactly how she felt about his high-handed ways, his rudeness, and his antisocial behavior.

  Only, minotaur Mitch had been replaced by Macho Mitch. As impressive as he'd been while shifted, he was hubba-hubba hot in his human form.

  He had thick, wavy, light brown hair, shaved on the sides, but longer on top. She immediately wanted to run her fingers through it to feel its softness. His eyes were a startling pale green, his nose had been broken at some point and had a rakish sideways deviation near the tip. His brows were thick, his lips full, and his beard neatly trimmed. He looked to be in his early forties and had the sexy demeanor of a seasoned bad boy who would be good at cunnilingus. Where his Henley gaped at his throat was the beginning of some sort of swirling tattoo. Making matters worse, his intoxicating scent wrapped around her like a warm duvet in winter.

  A few melting snowflakes clung to his facial hair, both mustache and beard. She wanted to lick the droplets of melted snow.

  Her nether regions swelled and moistened. Her mouth fell open as lust slammed into her. She wanted this man. Yes, she did.

  Aware that she must look and sound like an idiot, she planted her back against the comfy upholstery of the bench seat. She focused her eyes on the road and willed herself to sit still.

  Not a serial killer, but his lips and beard were lethal to her self-control. If she had to be locked in someone's basement, let it be this guy's basement. So long as sex slave duties were part of the deal.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Over the River and Through the Woods

  Mitch tossed Tu's baseball cap on her lap. She looked looking at him with those big, brown doe eyes of hers. But they were full of pure anger for him at the moment. Good. He really needed to stay away from this woman, for all sorts of reasons.

  Mitch started the wrecker, pulled into the sparse traffic, then steered the wrecker down the highway. He had to go slow, due to the weather and the hazards it presented. He had lived in Perdition all his life, but before that, his family had all lived in Traverse City, Michigan. This snowfall reminded him of the winters of his youth.

  He and his best friend Tommy Swofford, along with their boy posse, played in the snow for hours, building snow people, sledding down hills, building snow forts, and playing king of the mountain. Their parents would make them hot chocolate and bowls of tomato soup with grilled cheese sandwiches. Also, in Michigan, people knew how to deal with snow, and lots of it. Here in Texas, people lost their minds when it snowed.

  When so much as an inch of snow covered the ground, schools were shut down. While a majority of school children were shifters who could simply transform into their beasts, and thus have an easier time getting to class, a good portion of students were human. No one in Texas knew how to drive in bad weather. There were no snow drones, as most drones were banned from town. Snow fell so infrequently, it made little sense for most communities to purchase snow removal equipment. There were no salt trucks, no snow plows, no nothing. The human children played in the snow
. The human adults huddled in their houses waiting for the snow to melt. The shifters—children and adults—frolicked in the snow and went on pack runs in the cold.

  No one hit the roads, in any event, because the roads were generally not in any condition to accommodate inexperienced motorists.

  Tu sat next to him, at first seething with irritation, then brooding, then disinterested. As a minotaur, Mitch had an expansive field of vision, about 330°, which allowed him to see everything but what was directly behind him. He retained this spectacular vision even in his human form, so he could watch Tu out of the corner of his eye without her realizing. He told himself he did the right thing by making her get in the wrecker. It wasn’t safe for her on the side of the road.

  She licked her lips, and his eyes were drawn to the motion. Her pink tongue, her moistened teeth. Then she started to talk.

  "What do you call a kid who doesn't believe in Santa?" She looked a little nervous when she said it, her doe eyes dominating her face.

  "Excuse me?" he said, wondering whether she was nuts.

  "I said, 'What do you call a kid who doesn't believe in Santa?'" she repeated.

  He turned to look at her, deeply puzzled by the question. Her big brown eyes stared into his. She looked apprehensive, but she seemed determined to get an answer.

  "I have no earthly idea," he said.

  "A rebel without a Clause," she said. She let out a nervous laugh and attempted a small smile. "It was a joke. Do you get it?" She continued to look at him as if she really expected him to answer. Her eyes held a pleading expression.

  He looked at her, this time turning his head completely to stare with incomprehension. Did he look like someone who wanted to hear jokes?

  Nothing to say to this, so he turned his eyes back to the road. They drove on for a few minutes, the awkward silence stretching between them.

  "How do you help someone who's lost their Christmas spirit?"

  He turned to look at her again, brows knit. Cute, but also weird. He turned back to the road.