In My Christmas Stocking

  WINTER ROMANCE

  IN MY CHRISTMAS STOCKING

  BY

  M L BRIERS

  Copyright © 2019, M L Briers

  All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced whatsoever without written permission of the author, except for brief exerts in reviews. Any unauthorised reproduction or distribution of the material herein is illegal and may result in criminal proceedings. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded to the internet or distributed via electronic or print without prior consent.

  Note from the Author;

  All names, places, and incidents contained herein are purely fictional and have no basis in actual events or linked to actual Humans, Witches, Vampires, Werewolves, Lycans, Werebears or persons living, dead or undead.

  Copyright © 2019, Cover Design by; Sans@Coverkicks.com.

  Table of Contents

  WINTER ROMANCE

  IN MY CHRISTMAS STOCKING

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR

  CHAPTER ONE

  ~

  Chloe was concentrating on the road ahead; she didn’t have a lot of choice. The roads around the little backwater town all looked the same when they were covered in snow, and as she’d found to her annoyance, what she’d thought was the road to town had turned out to be a road to nowhere facing an impenetrable hedgerow that had been frosted with the white stuff.

  In her book that had been a pretty impressive thing to achieve, especially when the whole place was nowhere like somebody thought it was a good idea to dump some housing and a main street of stores out in the wilderness without thinking about city folk like her trying to navigate it.

  But it was Christmas, and she’d had needed to make the trip to visit her son and deliver his presents. Time was an issue, and she’d meant to be somewhere else last night, but she’d ended up staying in nowhere because her sister had found a mate.

  Good for her, good for her son, Jackson, bad for Chloe. Now she had to make up for lost time and get to where she needed to be, and she knew she’d be driving for a good few hours on bad roads.

  Her heart was telling her one thing, and her brain was telling her another. She wanted to follow her heart and stay awhile, maybe forever, be a mother to her son, but her mind knew she couldn’t do it.

  Sometimes life really did hand you lemons, and she’d squeezed everything she could out of them, but she still didn’t have lemonade.

  Seven years away from her son, away from the one person who she was put on the Earth to love and protect, and she resented not seeing him grow up, but the alternative was just too horrible to think about.

  Sometimes she’d just sat in the dark listening to the sounds of silence, closed her eyes and imagined that she was home, that she was normal, and that she could live her life as she chose to, but that only led to more heartache.

  After seven years she’d hardened to what life was instead of what she wanted it to be, and now she was on the road again – back to the past that haunted her and prevented her from having a future.

  It would have been so much more convenient had Kaylee not up and left home with Jackson, but she knew why she’d done it, and she was grateful for her sister’s quick thinking.

  There was talk about Kaylee raising Jackson, and if talk led to intervention and the state became involved – well, she would have needed to do a little more than get her vampire friend, Mercy, to step in and convince a Judge to grant Kaylee custody using vampire magic.

  Nobody was putting her baby in the care system – she’d use every magic trick in the book before she allowed that to happen.

  When the mobile played Bon Jovi’s Living on a Prayer, she knew who was calling, and she flicked the switch on the steering wheel as she concentrated on the whiteout ahead of her. “I know – I know, and I’m on my way to you as we speak,” she said, cutting her friend off at the pass.

  “Well, hold that thought because we’ve got trouble,” Mercy said, and she felt her heart thump her ribs.

  “Define trouble,” Chloe said while she fought the back wheels as they skidded a little on the snow.

  “Like six foot five of rookie vamp with a free day pass,” Mercy informed her.

  “You lost him?” Chloe spat out in disbelief. “How could you lose him?”

  This was not good. Mercy might have called him a rookie vampire, but in truth he’d been turned for a few years. But time in the vampire world wasn’t like our world – and a rookie was someone who hadn’t quite mastered the urge not to drain a person dry of their blood, or kill for the sheer hell of it, and because they could.

  Nope, things had just got a lot more complicated in her world.

  “If I say I misplaced him instead of lost will you calm the hell down?”

  “So, you left him somewhere?”

  “No, he escaped, but screeching about it in your shrill human tone that has absolutely no melody to it at all is annoying, and I’ll say anything you want to make it stop,” Mercy said in her usual sarcastic tone.

  “Well, I’m not hearing a melody in your tone either,” she grumbled.

  Then she noted a signpost that was clad in snow, and by the time she’d realised what it was, she’d driven by it. “Poop,” she cursed under her breath, it would have been nice to have a clue to where she was, maybe then she could find a way out.

  “Look, I’m tracking him…”

  “And how’s that working out?”

  “Meh.” Mercy admitted her failure in her usual way, by not admitting it at all.

  “Tell me where you are, and I’ll come meet you,” Chloe said, ready to reprogram the navigation system and be on her not-so-merry way.

  “From what I can tell, I’m about halfway between where you were supposed to be and where you are…”

  “How do you know where I am?” Chloe asked frowning. “I don’t even know where I am.”

  “Your little phone tracker…”

  “I don’t have a little phone tracker…”

  “Well,” Mercy said and left it hanging in the air, and in the silence of the car, it hung there a good while.

  “You put a tracker on me?” Chloe asked with a big dollop of disbelief and a whole lot of annoyance.

  “Let’s not dwell on that…”

  “Perish the thought,” Chloe snapped back. “But we are sure going to revisit it at some stage soon.”

  “Well, can that stage be once we’ve found him?” Mercy snapped.

  “What – you didn’t put a tracker on him?” Chloe asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm.

  “I didn’t need to put one on him; I knew where he was…”

  “How’s that working out for you?”

  There was a long pause of awkward silence, and Chloe took the time to pull faces, mimic the vampire on the line, and generally curse her lot in life. “Fine, meet me halfway.”

  “Fine, send me the location,” Chloe snapped, and when her phone dinged, she took her eyes off the road for just a moment and boom!

  There he was, one moment the road was clea
r and the next time she looked up; some idiot had run out in front of her.

  Chloe squealed, hit the brakes without thinking of the skid factor and the snowy conditions, yanked the wheel to the right without thought for what came next, and as the wheels skidded, and she cursed – she tried to pull the car back the other way – and failed.

  Big time.

  There wasn’t even time to magically defend her car against the thud of the front end hitting the stupidly placed tree trunk, but there was a brief moment when she managed to use her magic to hit the airbag just before it hit her in the face. That probably saved her a broken nose.

  “Chloe!” Mercy screeched down the line, but she was in no mood to answer, not when she was wondering if she’d pooped her panties, or injured anything other than her pride.

  “I might be a little later than expected,” Chloe bit out, tasting the chemicals in the air from the airbag and turning her nose up at it.

  “Did you crash?” Mercy’s tone said she wasn’t impressed.

  “I did not crash,” Chloe bit out.

  “I heard the crash.”

  “Ok, fine, I did crash, but it was not my fault,” Chloe bit back.

  What she wanted to do was get her hands around the neck of the idiot who had caused the accident.

  “Everyone says that,” Mercy snorted in disbelief. “I’m not the insurance company; you can tell me the truth…”

  “Truth is, I have an idiot to kill,” Chloe said, looking in the mirror as movement caught her eye. “And here comes that numpty now…”

  “Enjoy,” Mercy said. “And hurry up.”

  Chloe reached out and jabbed at the phone with her finger to get Mercy off the line. She didn’t want any witnesses to what she was about to do to the man who had hurt her car and her pride.

  She clicked off the seatbelt and grumbled at the pain over her ribcage. Seatbelts saved lives, but they also chaffed when you got in an accident, and she wasn’t best pleased.

  When the driver’s door was suddenly yanked open, and a rush of frosty air raced in at her, she was magic ready to do her worst, but only because it felt good to have that fantasy where she got her own back and zapped him into tomorrow.

  “Are you hurt?” The deep tone of his voice let her know right about the same time as her magical alarm bells that rang through her body, that the man was not human.

  “No, but you’re gonna be,” she bit out, and now that she knew he was supernatural by design, she had no reason to keep her magic at bay.

  Just one blast took him off his feet and sent him flying back through the air; it was like he was on a bungee cord, and he’d just been yanked back to where he’d started, and boy, did that feel good.

  CHAPTER TWO

  ~

  Jackson really did like Max’s cabin, for one thing, it was so much bigger than the one that he and Aunt Kaylee had been staying in, and for another, it had a wall of windows that he could just stand in front of and look out at the snowy scene of the mountain. He couldn’t wait to build a million snowmen out there.

  “Hey, are you going to do any of this lifting or are you going to leave it all to us?” Kaylee asked, and he thought he’d take a moment or three to consider it. “It wasn’t really a question…”

  “But it sounded like a question,” he offered back, quick as a flash, giving her the half-innocent half-smarty-pants routine that usually distracted her from what she’d been saying.

  “Ok, so it might have sounded like a question, but there was a not-so-subtle hint of sarcasm in there.”

  “I don’t do sarcasm,” he informed her. “I’m a child.”

  Kaylee wasn’t about to go ten rounds with him today. It was Christmas Eve, and all was right with the world – almost. “Sweet and innocent?”

  “That’s me.”

  “Cherub face?”

  “I can’t comment on that,” he tossed back, and when Kaylee cocked an eyebrow at him, he knew he should stop while he was ahead – so, he offered her the Puss in Boots look and noted the way she melted.

  It worked every time.

  “Fine, play your game, or look around,” she said, and inside he was high fiving himself. “But you’ll still need to sort out your room.”

  “That I can do,” he informed her, smirking on the inside.

  When Kaylee turned on her heels to go back to the truck for another load of their meagre belongings, she found Max standing in the doorway to the cabin grinning like an idiot at her. It wasn’t as if she could go around him – the man’s shoulders were practically touching both sides of the wooden frame.

  Big, muscles like Popeye, and he was all hers – yummy.

  “You’re too soft,” he said chuckling. “If my mom had been like you, I would have been in real trouble.”

  Kaylee was about to speak when she was saved by the shifter, the she-bear-shifter that made Max straighten his stance just a little when she called out from outside. “My ears are burning,” Tanya said.

  “Then stop eavesdropping,” Max said back over his shoulder, but with a gentle shove in the back, he moved out of the way for his mom, and she swept inside carrying a Christmas tin.

  “I wasn’t given these big old ears to waste them,” Tanya said, snorting a chuckle at her son, but she only had eyes for Jackson. “Anyone around here need some sugar cookies?”

  The boy was already pleased to see her, and now that had doubled. “Me!” he said, eager for a taste.

  “Please,” Kaylee admonished him for his lack of manners.

  “Pretty please with some icing on top,” Jackson said, pushing his luck with the cute button as he grinned at Tanya like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth, only it would, about two bricks worth if the taste of the sugar cookies was anything to go by.

  Tanya held out the tin. “Have at ‘em,” she said, grinning right back at him like a proud Grandma.

  “Grab ‘em and growl?” Jackson said, and Tanya couldn’t help but chuckle.

  “That too,” Tanya said, and then turned back to Kaylee. “Although, if he came home with me for a while, there are other treats that he could try?”

  Damn it to hell, but she had that Puss in Boots look as well. Kaylee had to wonder if there was any getting away from it, and if not, she wondered if she could find some magic or a spell to counteract it.

  When she didn’t answer, Tanya jumped right into the silence. “You have to trust me sometime, right?” she said and snorted a chuckle. “And he really is too tiny to eat…”

  “I…” Kaylee looked at Max, and he shrugged those big shoulders, but she could see in his eyes that he liked that idea a lot.

  They were new mates, and new mates usually did what new mates could do as much as possible. But with Jackson around that was kind of hard, or not so much hard as impossible.

  “Although, he might make a nice snack,” Tanya said and frowned. “Do you really not trust me?” She looked a little disappointed and a lot like Puss in Boots again.

  “No,” Kaylee said.

  “Huh?” Tanya snapped out, unsure if she’d heard right.

  “I was taking a breath,” Kaylee said. “No, I trust you – it’s just he can be a little…”

  “ Monster? Because I’m good with those,” Tanya said and shot a look at Max.

  “Hey, I was not a monster that was Lucas. I’ve always been the good son,” he protested.

  “He has,” Tanya said, and then frowned. “Most of the time.”

  Max snapped to attention. “We don’t talk about that,” he rushed out.

  “What?” Kaylee and Jackson asked together.

  “Well, if we talked about it, then we wouldn’t be the thing we don’t talk about,” Max said and shrugged.

  “I’ll tell you at my house,” Tanya said to Jackson.

  “And then he can tell me when he gets home,” Kaylee said and shot a smirk at her mate who grumbled something under his breath.

  “Or I could keep Jackson with me and you two could come over for Christmas Eve din
ner tonight,” she said it like it hadn’t been planned already, but she looked so hopeful that Kaylee didn’t have the heart to say no.

  Not that she would anyway – free food was free food, and a home-cooked meal – especially when it was cooked by someone else – was always a good thing.

  “Ok,” Kaylee said, and Tanya grinned like she’d given her a tin of those cookies. “But,” she said and looked at Jackson.

  “I’ll be good,” he rushed out.

  “Great,” Kaylee said. “I’ll hold you to that, but I was going to say – the cookies stay here.”

  Jackson pouted. “I got more cookies at home,” Tanya informed him, and he practically slammed the tin into Kaylee’s hands.

  “We got more at home,” he informed her like he’d won that battle and was claiming his victory.

  “And you’ve gotta walk to get them,” Kaylee said, grinning right back at him.

  ~

  Lucas slammed his hands down into the snow and snapped up to sit and glare at the witch across the landscape. She’d thrown him pretty far with her magic, and his bear was torn between bursting free and kissing its backside goodbye.

  The woman had attacked without provocation and no warning, and that was why people like him hated people like her. “And witches wonder why they get run out of town,” he muttered to himself.

  “You idiot,” Chloe bit out, climbing out of the Jeep and turning a cold, hard glare on the man who had murdered her car. “How old are you and you still haven’t grasped the concept of looking before running out into the road!”

  “What damn road?” Lucas growled, pushing up to his full height, and it wasn’t lost on her that he was a big guy.

  Chloe stood there in silence. Her breasts rose as she heaved in a breath and fell as she slowly released it, he noticed. She scanned the area. “The road I’m standing on.” She replied but grunted inwardly with annoyance.

  It was sort of hard to keep to your moral high ground when you were the one in the wrong, but she had to at least try – right?