Cute But Prickly: A short sweet shifter romance

  Cute But Prickly

  Zoe Chant

  Cute But Prickly

  by Zoe Chant

  A Shifter Bites Sweet Romance

  © 2021 Zoe Chant

  Contents

  1. Hester

  2. Mauro

  3. Hester

  4. Mauro

  5. Hester

  6. Hester

  7. Mauro

  8. Hester

  Epilogue: Hester

  A note from Zoe Chant

  Also by Zoe Chant

  Preview: Stoneskin Dragon

  Hester

  It was snowing. And snowing. Snow slanted across the road, coming down sideways. It piled up on the trees and made the branches dip until they nearly touched the road, forcing Hester to slow the car to a crawl, edging around them.

  She was barely driving above a crawl anyway. Conditions were terrible.

  But the cold and the snow matched her mood. There was nothing but a swirling storm of anger in her prickly little hedgehog heart.

  In the summer, she couldn't help thinking, this was probably an absolutely gorgeous drive up into the mountains. The brochures had looked beautiful when Ralph had waved them in front of her face six months ago, back when she had a relationship and a future and a wonderful Valentine's getaway to look forward to, celebrating the previous Valentine's when Ralph had popped the question and slipped a ring onto her finger.

  By this time, she had thought she would be planning a spring wedding. They hadn't married last summer because Ralph was pulling long hours at work (he claimed) and she was still trying to get her Etsy store off the ground. The money (he said) just wasn't there. But Hester was fine with a long engagement. And things were finally turning around for him, so they were going to have a wonderful Valentine's weekend in a beautiful mountain lodge and plan a dream wedding and Mom was going to be so happy and—

  And then.

  And then.

  She ground her teeth just thinking about it, clenching her hands on the steering wheel.

  She had rid her apartment of every memento of Ralph the Cheating Cad that she could possibly find, including his cheap ring, which turned out to be gold plating over pot metal, just like the entire relationship. But somehow she had overlooked the brochure from Heart Mountain Lodge. And then she'd found it again, buried under bills and junk mail.

  She had looked through its pictures of stunning pine vistas and glimmering mountain lakes, of happy guests laughing around a fieldstone fireplace and dining in front of big windows looking out at the mountains. She had looked at the printed receipt clipped to it, showing four days and three nights for two guests at the Honeymoon Suite as part of their Winter Valentine's Getaway luxury package. It was all paid for by Ralph the Rodent, and it had suddenly occurred to her that she could take Mom and drive out to the mountains for the weekend, sit by the fireplace and drink expensive champagne and eat steaks and bill it all to Ralph's credit card.

  It had sounded like a good idea at the time.

  "Are you thinking about Ralph again?" her mother asked from the seat next to her.

  "I thought you were asleep," Hester said, forcing her jaw to unclench.

  "I was." Her mom yawned and stretched. She squinted out the windshield at the snow, the gathering dusk, and the stretch of white where the road was supposed to be, and added, "Not that I'm backseat driving here, but are you absolutely sure you know where we're going?"

  Hester took her phone off the dashboard and thrust it at Mom. "Here, you look it up. We've been driving on the same road for hours." Or at least it felt like hours. "There's been nowhere to turn off. There's no anything. This has to be the right road."

  She refused to consider the possibility that it might not be. If it wasn't, then she had driven very far up a winding mountain road in a blizzard, and it was getting dark.

  "You don't have any reception," her mother reported.

  "That's okay, I have the map loaded. Just see where the roads are."

  There was a pause while Mom squinted at the phone, then held it away from her eyes.

  "You need bifocals," Hester said.

  "I do not. I'm only fifty-three. My eyes are fine."

  While Hester managed not to say anything, her mother eventually tilted her glasses down so that she could look over them at the phone. She poked around on the map for a little while.

  "I think we're on the right road," she said at last.

  "That's what I just said five minutes ago."

  It was really getting dark out here. Hester flicked on her high beams. Oh no, that was worse. All she could see was a whirl of snowflakes. She switched them off and resigned herself to not being able to see beyond the pool of her low-beam headlights.

  At least they were going slow enough that she could stop if a deer or something jumped out in front of her.

  Assuming she could stop at all.

  Her mother yawned again and twisted around to reach into the backseat. "Want a snack?"

  "Mom, I'm trying to drive."

  But her stomach growled. The burgers they had eaten at a roadside diner were a very long time ago. By now she had been hoping to be munching on the Surf'n'Turf Platter advertised in the brochure and unwinding before jumping in a hot tub, not driving down a road that was recognizable as a road only because there weren't trees on it.

  "Hypoglycemia," her mother said. "You're getting grouchy because your blood sugar is crashing. Get a chocolate bar in you, that'll help."

  "I do not have hypoglycemia," Hester said between her teeth, glaring out at the stupid snowy trees and the annoyingly picturesque falling flakes. "That's you. You keep saying I do because you do, but that's not how it works."

  "Fine," her mother said, without taking offense. "I need to get a chocolate bar in me. You can share it."

  "Mom ..."

  Complacently, Peony Hatherill opened the neatly packed box of snacks and found a plastic knife to cut a Mars bar in two. She offered half to Hester, who heaved a deep sigh and took a bite.

  That was pretty good.

  Her hedgehog was never going to pass up free food anyway.

  She and Peony looked about as different as any two women could. Peony was tall and rail thin, with slightly curly dark hair and olive skin that she said came from Greek and French ancestry. Hester was small and round and freckled with brown hair that had to be coaxed and encouraged with gallons of gel and hairspray to do anything other than hang limply around her face and make her head look even rounder.

  Hester, at the age of twenty-nine, was already noticing strands of gray showing up. She was probably going to be fully salt-and-pepper by the time she was thirty-five. Meanwhile Peony barely had any gray at all and, with the makeup that she rarely went without, could easily pass for her early forties. People often thought she was Hester's sister.

  If Peony had been her biological mom, Hester might have had some hope of inheriting at least one of those genes. Maybe she could have been tall, she thought wistfully. She would have loved to be tall.

  But she was neither: not tall, and not Peony's biological daughter. She had first met Peony at age four, when she was a tiny, angry foster child. Peony had taken her in for the weekend when another foster home fell through; that was all it was supposed to be.

  But Peony Hatherill had fallen utterly for that tiny, angry child, and so here they were, twenty-five years later, crawling up a mountain road in a car that was going just slightly above walking speed, and probably about to die in a ditch.

  "I think this was a mistake," Hester said.

  "You're doing fine." Peony opened a package of cheese and crackers. "Here's some protein to go wit
h the sugar so you don't crash." A quick smile. "Figuratively or literally."

  "I'm not going to crash." She hoped. "Oh, okay, fine." Peony was holding out a small stack of crackers and cheese with a mini wiener sandwiched between them. Hester opened her mouth and let her mother poke it inside.

  "You know," she said when her mouth was available for talking again, "it just figures that Ralph would screw me over one more time by booking rooms at a mountain lodge that doesn't exist."

  "It exists," Peony said, licking her fingers. "I looked it up on the internet." She picked a crumb off her thigh and ate it. For a tall and elegant woman, she had the table manners of a raccoon.

  Not that she was a raccoon. Not an actual raccoon.

  At least Hester was pretty sure not.

  Hester had gone to great lengths all her life to hide her shifter nature from her mom. She had eventually gotten over the fear that Peony would send her back if she found out that her daughter could turn into a hedgehog—at least, mostly—but after lying about it for so long, she couldn't even imagine how she could ever explain, or how it wouldn't drive a wedge between them.

  And with Ralph out of her life, and no prospects of romance in the future, now or ever, her mom was all she had.

  "You're thinking about Ralph again," her mother said.

  "How do you do that?"

  "You have a face." Peony scrunched up her nose and did a thing with her eyes that made them appear to narrow to pinprick intensity, as if they were about to bore into Hester's soul. "You look like you're trying to melt the glass in the windshield with Superman's heat rays," she added.

  "I wish I had heat rays," Hester said wistfully. "I could set Ralph's hair on fire."

  "Or, more usefully, melt this snow," Peony said.

  "That would be useful." Hester thought about it. "I could fuse glass in the jewelry I make. Or fire ceramics without needing a kiln."

  "How is the art going?" Peony asked brightly. "Are you working on anything nice?"

  Hester ground her teeth. For some reason she could not seem to explain to Peony that running a business selling handmade wedding and anniversary gifts while suffering from a terminal broken heart was the most miserable thing in the world.

  Valentine's Day was usually one of her busy times. Last year, she'd had an entire Valentine's line of matching couples' jewelry and romantic mugs that had sold out almost instantly. At the time, she had planned to get started in October and turn out a bunch of new pieces for the next year's Valentine's rush.

  Instead, she hadn't even been in her studio in a month.

  "It's fine," she said.

  "Which means it's not."

  "Can we not talk about this while I'm trying to avoid sliding off the road and killing us, Mom?"

  She feathered the accelerator as the road angled steeply upward. Her heart was sinking lower with every turn that did not result in a lodge cradled in a beautiful pine forest. Well, they probably were in a beautiful pine forest, but she couldn't see much of it, not through the falling snow and gathering darkness.

  "Mom, can you see if you can find the station on the radio with road condition updates? I think it's AM."

  Peony fiddled with the buttons. Static faded in and out. They caught snatches of a radio announcer's voice, and then nothing.

  "Maybe if I hold our phones up close to the ceiling, they'll get reception," Peony said, and did.

  "It's not like two feet between your lap and the top of the car is going to make a difference, Mom."

  "You never know until you try," Peony said. "It's the scientific method."

  "That's not what the scientific method is."

  "Are you going to disagree with everything I say?"

  Yes, Hester thought, but she bit her lip and didn't say anything.

  Ever since Ralph left, she had been a ball of aggressive urges and misery and anger. Over the years, she had mellowed a lot from that angry little child who used to lash out at people rather than letting them close. Peony's love and patience had a lot to do with that. And with Ralph, she thought that she had finally made it to a proper, happy adulthood. She had felt good.

  And then Ralph had left her. And now she was angry all the time, pushing people away, not taking care of her business, just ...

  Falling apart.

  Or curling up. Hiding from the world.

  She pictured her hedgehog as a little prickly ball in her chest, pointing small spines in all directions. Protecting her.

  But it's kind of lonely inside that ball of spines.

  "Oh, look!" Peony said abruptly.

  Startled, Hester jerked the steering wheel. The wheels slid before she managed to straighten out the car. Fury flushed through her, all out of proportion, spurred by adrenaline and misery and the creeping suspicion that Ralph had lied about the vacation and the lodge in the first place.

  "Mom! Are you trying to kill us?"

  "There's a light up there," Peony said, pointing.

  Hester wanted to argue that there wasn't, just on general principles, but her mother was right. The trees were opening up around them, and a friendly light shone through the falling snow and the darkness: the porch light of a massive, rambling log building.

  It was hard to get an accurate feel for its size in the dark. Most of the lights were off; there was just the single light on the porch. The large open area in front of the lodge, which Hester assumed was a parking lot, hadn't been plowed. Her small car wallowed through the snow as she tried to get closer.

  There wasn't a single other vehicle here. The porch light looked less friendly now, and more lonely.

  "This can't be the place, can it?" Peony asked quietly. "It looks closed."

  "It can't be closed!"

  They had finally found the lodge! It actually existed! They couldn't come this far just to be screwed over in a completely different way.

  Hester parked as close to the lodge's front steps as she could get. She left the car running, headlights stabbing out at the darkness, and opened her door. Cold wind and snowflakes swirled inside. Shivering, she stepped out into the snow. She was wearing tennies, and her shoes sank and vanished, the snow closing over the shoe tops and the lower legs of her jeans. The wind bit through her sweater.

  "Hello?" she called.

  "Coat!" Peony said, waving it at her over the top of the car.

  "I'm not cold, Mom!"

  But she took it and put it on anyway.

  In the glow of the car's headlights, she and Peony floundered up the unshoveled walk to the lodge's front porch. There was a big sign on the door, and it got bigger and more obvious the closer they got. CLOSED FOR THE SEASON, it said, and below that in smaller letters, Heart Mountain Lodge Mgmt.

  "No, no, no," Hester chanted. She was shivering, and her inner hedgehog was nothing but a miserable, prickly lump. "I cannot believe that Ralph managed to fuck things up this badly. Oh, what am I saying? Fucking things up is his one true talent in life."

  Peony, somehow managing to look elegant in her long tan overcoat even with her hair wind-tossed and spangled with snowflakes, leaned over to cup her hands around her face, trying to look through the window in the door.

  "There must be someone here, don't you think?" she asked. "There's a light on, which means they haven't shut everything down entirely. There's probably some sort of winter caretaker."

  "I don't care," Hester said bitterly. This was it, the one good thing that Ralph had left her with, and it had turned out to be complete trash, just like the rest of the relationship.

  "You look cold," Peony said. She began digging in her bag. "Here, you should put a hat on. Do you need gloves?"

  "Do you just carry hats around in your purse?"

  For answer, Peony shoved a hat into her hands. Hester stared. It was a multicolored yarn monstrosity, lumpy and misshapen. There was a giant pompom. To add insult to injury, the pompom was off center.

  "Mrs. Yoder at church made it," Peony said. Her teeth were chattering. "It's warm."

&nbs
p; "You take it, Mom. I'm warm enough." She actually wasn't that cold, while Peony was visibly shivering. She'd always been able to handle cold better than her mom. She wasn't sure if it went along with the hedgehog thing or had to do with having more insulation. Maybe both.

  Peony shook her head firmly. "I'm fine," she said, turning her collar up.

  Hester sighed and pulled the hat on. It was slightly too large for her head, and instantly fell over one of her eyes, because of course it did.

  The worst part was, her mother was right. The hat instantly cut the wind and she felt some small fraction warmer, if no less ready to set Horrible Ralph on fire with her brain.

  She took a deep breath of bitterly cold air and clenched her hands into fists in her coat pockets.

  So what? she told herself. So Ralph had fucked her over.

  Again.

  She wasn't going to let it break her. She wasn't going to let that asshole win.

  Mom was right. They had to find someone here, or if there wasn't anyone, they needed to get into the lodge somehow. There was no chance of driving back down that awful road in the dark, with the snow getting deeper. She'd be lucky if she even managed to get the car unstuck from the parking lot.

  It occurred to her that this might be an advantage—one of the few—to turning into a hedgehog. Small mammals could get into places that people couldn't. If she and Peony couldn't find a caretaker or manager or some sort of official person, she might be able to shift and slip into the lodge through a small gap in a window or wall, and open the doors from the inside.

  It was some kind of plan, wasn't it?

  "Okay, Mom," she said. She burrowed her hands into her pockets and absolutely refused to ask for gloves. "Let's go try to find the caret—"

  She stopped. Someone had just come around the end of the building.

  A man.

  An incredibly well-built man, with a ladder over his shoulder.

  His bare shoulder.