Summer Enchantment (Shifting Seasons Book 1) Page 2

  “Emmett, then,” she agreed, warm and obliging. Her dark eyes were trained on mine. “Friends call me Kea.”

  “Do I qualify as a friend?” I half-joked but I hoped she would say yes.

  She looked at me as though she was asking herself the same question. Eventually, she said, “You can never have too many friends.”

  I huffed out a laugh.

  “You’ll be my first on the island then.”

  She looked scandalized by the thought.

  “Are you telling me you’re on vacation all alone? I can’t imagine spending that much time by myself!”

  I shrugged nonchalantly.

  “I’m not really a people person.”

  “More of a lone wolf,” Kea mused.

  I winced. I could have done without that phrasing.

  “You could say that,” I demurred.

  “Then you really do need some company,” she said brightly. She grabbed a napkin from the end of the table and jotted her name and a phone number on it. “Let me know when you’re free and I’ll show you around a few other local spots when I’m not working.”

  She handed over the tissue and I took it, staring down at her bubbly, looping handwriting. It suited her well. I knew I shouldn’t have entertained the thought of spending more time with her, lovely as she was, but I couldn’t help gripping the thin paper like it was a piece of treasure. It felt like something out of an old movie, getting a girl’s phone number on a napkin.

  “Next time, you’ll have to bring your appetite,” Kea joked as we get up to leave. I followed her out of the restaurant, slightly dazed and watched the way her dark hair swayed across her back as she moved, like a current of deep, black water between her shoulder blades.

  As we stepped outside into open air, away from concentrated scents of coffee and maple syrup, Kea turned to face me and the breeze caught a different scent to fill my nostrils—hers.

  She smelled like sunscreen and roses, rich and floral, and beneath those pleasant but manufactured scents was one much more natural and designed only for her.

  She had the pheromones of a potential mate.

  3

  Kealani

  I don’t think I’d ever seen someone’s pupils dilate in real-time before, but as Emmett and I stepped out into the parking lot, the dark centers of his already dark eyes blew wide. It looked like one of those funny cat videos, except instead of a kitten it was a grown man, and the laser pointer was me.

  Or at least, I thought he was looking at me.

  The change in lighting from the restaurant to the sunny outdoors should have turned his pupils to pinpricks as they adjust to the brighter light, but for some reason, he didn’t react to it. It gave him an intense, wild look that sent an odd shiver through me.

  For the first time since meeting, I felt a little wary of him. It wasn’t that he seemed dangerous, exactly but there was something about him, something beneath the surface. It was sharp and sudden, like ice breaking. If I stared into the darkness in his eyes for too long, it felt as though I might fall into the abyss.

  “So,” I said quickly to snap myself out of the momentary enchantment than had befallen me. The sudden word startled Emmett too. He blinked at me, his shoulders relaxing. I hadn’t realized he was so tense. “This was fun.”

  “Yeah,” Emmett agreed, but it sounded half-hearted. He averted his gaze uncomfortably. Just a few seconds ago he was looking at me like he wanted to… I don’t know. Sweep me off my feet? Pounce on me? Carry me off? Something sexually charged and exciting. Now he seemed a little pale. The mixed signals were making me a little dizzy.

  “Maybe I’ll see you around?” I prompted, testing to see if I could ease back into the chemistry we shared during brunch. I was beginning to wonder if I had imagined the whole thing.

  He nodded distractedly, holding up the napkin I’d scrawled my number upon.

  “Yeah, for sure. I’ll call you. Um...” He met my eyes again, a touch of intensity still lingering in his expression as he thought about his next words. “After you finish up at the fishery. Same time tomorrow?”

  A part of me wanted to suggest blowing off my internship for a day just to watch the sunrise. Another part doubted Emmett would entertain that idea.

  Maybe he just wanted to be friends.

  Maybe he just wanted a tour guide.

  “Sounds like a plan,” I replied lightly, taking a step toward my car as I swallowed the suggestion of playing hooky. I gestured at the passenger side in an offering gesture. “Did you want a ride back to your hotel?”

  Emmett opened his mouth to answer and promptly shut it again. He shook his head.

  “No that’s a—” He cut himself off, sounding uncertain. Instead he said, “I could use a walk.”

  I wasn’t sure if I was disappointed or not. I had wanted to spend more time with Emmett, get to know him better, but now that he was being distant, I wasn’t sure if it was possible. Maybe he was one of those guys who doesn’t want anyone to know the real him. If that was the case, I was probably wasting my time. I couldn’t imagine being friends with (much less dating) someone who was so closed off.

  Not that anyone said anything about a date.

  “Oh, nice. Enjoy the fresh air,” I chirped with a shrug, unable to keep the flirtatious tone out of my voice. “Just be careful not to get a sunburn out here.”

  Emmett nodded distractedly, not seeming to register that I was teasing him. He was off in his own little world, lost in some deep thought I could only guess at.

  “I’ll do that,” he replied vaguely, and, after a moment of hesitation, gave me a curt wave. “Have a good one, Kea.”

  The nickname made me smile and gave me hope he wasn’t going to ghost me and disappear into some hotel, never to be heard from again.

  “You too, Emmett.”

  I watched him walk toward his hotel, transfixed for a moment before I remembered I should really be getting in my car and getting back to my life.

  He was a strange guy, Dr. Emmett Sable.

  He was a strange guy and I couldn’t stop thinking about him.

  Throughout the afternoon as I put in a short shift waitressing, my mind wandered from table numbers and combo platters to thoughts of the Alaskan wilderness. From there, they branched off to Emmett Sable and exploring ancient caves with him in the great north. He was in the back of my mind well into the night. Even when I got home from work and settled in for the evening, I was still thinking about him.

  Who was he, really, deep down? Was he just shy or was he hiding something? The part of me that couldn’t resist a mystery or a research project, was fascinated. Of course, the part of me that appreciated a handsome face was intrigued too.

  “Someone’s head is in the clouds,” my roommate, Maddie, teased as she browsed romcoms on Netflix. “Are those fish giving you a hard time at the internship?”

  Our other roommate, Nalani, piped in as she always did, offering a cheeky, “Or did you finally meet a dreamy grad student?”

  I rolled my eyes at them, laughing along with their good-natured jests, but their guesses were a little too close for comfort. I was sure the missing salmon were going to be a problem for me the next day. As for a dreamy grad student? Not quite. A dreamy archaeologist, though, that was another story.

  “I may or may not have met a cute tourist today,” I admitted, keeping my description vague.

  “A tourist?” Nalani parroted, sounding slightly horrified. “Oh Kea, no, don’t tell me some doofus at the restaurant finally wore you down?”

  I laughed, already shaking my head.

  “That’ll be the day. Yikes.”

  Customers at the restaurant were a mixed bag. Sometimes I got nice, local families, other times, harmless old couples on vacation. And sometimes, unfortunately, I got sleazy groups of frat boys eager to flirt with a “real” Hawaiian girl.

  Nalani knew the struggle all too well. With her dark hair and brown skin, she and I were in the same boat of attracting gross men who f
etishized Hawaiian women.

  Emmett didn’t strike me as that kind of guy. He was older than the college guys who usually hit on me, for one thing. He was established in his career and seemed more interested in talking to me about social sciences than guessing my bra size. He was a little odd, but also seemed genuine and kind, a real gentleman.

  “No wearing down necessary. I pursued him,” I explained, and I had Maddie’s full attention. She turned around on the couch to look at me, feigning a gasp. “Kealani, you flirt!”

  I waved her off.

  “We just had brunch. It was barely even a thing. And you’re one to talk, Mads. Weren’t you named biggest flirt in high school?”

  “And proud of it,” she confirmed, turning back to flip through movie options.

  “Just be careful falling for a man who’s going to be getting on an airplane in a week’s time,” Nalani warned. She had just opened a bottle of ice blue nail polish and was focused on applying it to her pinky nail.

  “I never said anything about falling for him,” I replied defensively. “I only said that he was cute.”

  Without looking up from her nails, Nalani reminded me, “That’s always the first step.”

  She was teasing but her real concern for my well-being shone through.

  It meant the world to me to have friends like Nalani and Maddie. As much as we joked around, we were always there for each other. They had been with me for years, through the good and bad. They were there for me after my parents died, giving me a shoulder to cry on. They helped me through school, celebrating with me on every milestone crossed. We graduated high school together, went on disastrous group dates together and I couldn’t imagine how I would have made it this far without them.

  “I’ll be careful,” I promised, just to appease Nalani. The truth was, I didn’t know what will come of my meeting Emmett. I didn’t have any expectations…not really.

  As Maddie settled on a sugary little movie about strangers meeting by chance and falling in love in Venice, Nalani moaned about the unlikely premise.

  “Oh please,” she grunted. “Like that ever happens!”

  But I had a different take on the film. My eyes were on the screen, but my mind was still on Emmett.

  4

  Emmett

  The air-conditioned isolation of my hotel room was a welcome respite after time spent socializing. The morning had gone on longer I had expected. I had only spent a few hours with Kea the previous day and the short time together had been the most fun I’d had on my vacation so far. Still, I was an introvert at heart and time alone was practically sacred.

  Then there was the whole matter of her being gorgeous— and possibly my mate.

  It was still strange to think of a woman that way, as a mate. I wasn’t thinking of her as a cute girl to flirt with or date, or even marry, but a as mate. The thought sparked somewhere deep inside me, the most instinctual, animal part of me, threatening to consume all my senses. It had always been there but it had only gotten stronger with time since the Northern Lights. Ever since I’d found the carving.

  As I stared up at the ceiling from my hotel bed, I held tight to the smaller carved figure I kept as a reminder of that day. It was a tiny, intricately carved bear of white stone, strung on a necklace. I had received it from an old woman shortly after that incident, the one that changed my life forever. It looked akin the artifacts I’d found at the dig that day. Having it in my life was frustrating but I couldn’t seem to let it go.

  Not that I’d really tried.

  Stretched out flat on my back in the cool of the hotel air conditioning, I thought back to that fated day I found the carved figure.

  It had been a day just like any other.

  The chilly weather was bracing as I went about my work beneath a set of floodlights, lingering on an excavation site in the early morning hours. Technically speaking, I shouldn’t have been alone— it wasn’t considered wise to go prodding around an archaeological dig site by oneself. Too many things could go wrong but I never heeded to that precaution. I always preferred working alone and this site seemed safe enough. There were no crumbling stone structures to trip over or unstable ancient caves to collapse. It was just a curious little spot in the woods, a place where things had been buried long ago.

  It hadn’t been a grave site—I had determined that much already. The layout was all wrong, for one, and it was not marked in any way to designate a sacred place.

  If anything, the way that the artifacts here had been buried suggested that something had been hidden, not unlike the way a child might bury a shoebox of secrets, or a time capsule. It wasn’t quite like anything I had ever seen before and I my curiosity was piqued.

  In the distance, the Northern Lights flickered across the sky, just barely visible to me beyond the powerful lamps at my feet. I paid the phenomena no mind as I poked around the two-by-two-foot space I had dug.

  In a relatively short time, I had uncovered a small knife and broken pieces of what appeared to be a mask, but there was clearly something larger beneath.

  Delicately, afraid to break whatever might be beneath the soil, I moved the dirt with gloved hands and soft brushes, clearing a path for the artifact. Finally, my hand had closed around it—a smooth stone, carved, but the face of it was obscured. It was a large figure, made with a great rounded back and thick legs.

  As I freed it entirely from the earth, I carefully turned it around to brush the hard-packed dirt from the face. Suddenly, the nature of it became clear to me.

  It was a polar bear, carved out of light stone and filthy from its years underground, but the clean, simple lines of its head and muzzle were unmistakable.

  I held the carving between my hands for a long moment, marveling at its near-perfect condition. Unlike the fragile, broken mask I had unearthed before it, this was unscathed by its burial. It was heavy in my hands and cold, even through my gloves. As I stared intently into the carved hollows of its eyes, I wondered just what it was doing out here in the woods, buried unceremoniously with a strange, broken mask and a small knife.

  Suddenly, the large lamps above me flickered out.

  The distant lights of the Aurora Borealis came into focus, bright and beautiful against the dark of the early morning sky.

  As the colors twisted and swirled overhead, the stone carving in my hands grew warm. I had the fleeting thought that I should drop it, but every practical part of me was overwhelmed by my curiosity. I held tight to the carving and peered down through the dark into its eyes.

  Like a bullet, the carving exploded in my hands, the stone cracking and breaking apart faster than my eyes could follow.

  I flinched, expecting to be struck by sharp stone shards, but no pain followed. All I felt was a warmth washing over me. It pulsed in time with the colors of the lights in the sky, the sensation leaving me frozen in place, shocked and confused.

  I stared down at my hands, at the dust coating my gloves that had once been a perfectly preserved stone carving, and my vision swirled. My body tensed from head to toe, my muscles tightening, twinging painfully. The need to stand and stretch was overwhelming, and as I did, those waves of pulsing warmth seemed to ease me through the satisfying stretch of rising to my full height, my arms reaching up to the dazzling sky.

  It felt strange, almost like nostalgia as the force I had unintentionally unleashed overtook my body. Every part of me seemed to move, my muscles and bones realigning as I took on a new shape. My clothing stretched too, seams popping until my gloves and boots burst at the seams, exposing me to the elements. I could hardly even feel the cold anymore, and as I looked down at myself dazedly, I realized that it was because my hands and feet had become covered with a thick, white fur.

  Somewhere in the back of my mind there was a dawning sense of horror, but on the surface, all I could do was watch. I was both puzzled and enraptured as my body morphed as it never had before. I doubled in size and dropped onto all fours. My hands met the cold ground in the form of enormous paws.
I rolled my shoulders and felt invincible.

  The Northern Lights slowly faded from the sky, and everything around me gradually came into focus.

  There was the dig site before me, the knife and broken mask set aside to be packed up and cleaned, and a few tiny shards of what had once been the stone carving. My clothing lay scattered around me in tatters.

  Panic set in. Hard. In the most serious way possible.

  I ran for the nearest reflective surface, a pond I had seen a half-mile back. I was clumsy on my new legs but I didn’t slow for an instant. I skidded over stone and patches of snow, the wind rushing through the fur that had raised all along my back, and as I came to a stop in front of the pond and stared down into the murky, half-frozen water, the face of a wild animal stared back.

  I stayed like that for another twelve hours, frantic, trapped, unsure of how to change back into myself—if I could.

  I paced around the dig site, searching for answers and found none. I wandered the woods, consumed in consternation until I wore myself out. When I’d calmed down enough, I snuck back to the cabin I had rented at the edge of the woods. Under the cloak of darkness, I crept back to the little wooden structure and struggled with the handle of the door between my huge paws. Eventually, desperate, worried that someone might happen past and catch sight of me, I broke the whole fixture off the door with one powerful swipe.

  Inside the cabin, now hardly big enough to fit me, I sat and tried to focus. I thought about being myself again, on fitting into the space, on being human.

  Slowly, after hours of effort, I was able to grab hold of some small ounce of me—the mere mortal. I pulled myself back from the beast I had become, the change into my human flesh. I felt like I was breathing for the first time.

  I climbed into bed naked, wrapped in a blanket and fell completely asleep the moment my head hit the pillow, exhausted after the unbelievable day I’d had.