Her co-worker and best friend Mary meant well, of course. And Amber, who was snickering as she climbed out of the poorly-sprung resort van, didn’t have a mean bone in her body. (She als
o looked almost exactly like she had when she and Alice were rooming together, which was terribly unfair.) Neither of them realized how much the idea of mates hurt Alice.
“Oh my gosh, the entrance looks exactly the same as it did,” Amber exclaimed. “Wow, the memories! The smells! The flowers! Oh my gosh, the flowers on that hyacinth!”
Mary had her nose in the air as well. “What amazing surprise has Chef concocted?” she wondered out loud.
“Pot roast,” Amber deduced. “With a garlicky marinade and a side of fresh roasted radishes and some kind of onion soup, and I think chocolate for dessert.”
Alice stared at her as her own bear confirmed every one of those smells in turn. “Pregnancy nose is so weird,” she said in awe. “You couldn’t even smell the difference between dish soap and toilet cleaner when we were rooming together.”
Amber, who was not quite to the stage of waddling, but well past the dangerous-to-ask ‘plump or pregnant?’ phase, smiled. “It’s not entirely a blessing! I had to kick the cat off the bed because she smelled like cat spit,” she confided. “And if I weren’t already banned from scooping the catbox, I would be incapable of it for the stench.”
She reached for her bag, but Tony, coming around from the other side of the van where he’d been talking with a man he had greeted as Travis, stopped her. “You aren’t supposed to carry heavy things!” he insisted, grabbing it first.
“It’s not heavy,” Amber protested.
Tony gave a harrumph of disbelief and shouldered the bag anyway.
“You know, women have been giving birth and carrying their own luggage for thousands of years,” Amber reminded him.
“Be glad I’m not insisting on carrying you,” Tony said, ignored the laughing protests of Travis as he scooped up half their luggage and sailed into the resort entrance. “I know where our cottages are, you girls check in!”
Neal, Mary’s mate, grinned and silently took another load of luggage in his wake.
There were other guests already queued to check in at the desk in the glorious little courtyard and while Amber and Mary chattered about weddings and babies, Alice found herself scrutinizing the woman behind the desk.
Her movements were brisk and efficient as she handed out keys and ran credit cards and shuffled forms, and Alice guessed even before she heard her introduce herself that this must be Scarlet. The brilliant red color of her hair suggested the origin of her name, though Alice kept second guessing whether or not it was dyed. It looked too bright to be natural, but too natural to be from a bottle.
Maybe the spa was really exceptional.
She wondered wistfully if they could do anything for her own limp, short, brown hair, then dismissed the thought. Even if they could, they couldn’t do anything about the towering height or the linebacker physique, and even less about the aggressive forward nature and short temper. She wasn’t the pretty, pleasing type like Amber and Mary. And she certainly wasn’t here to snag a mate to marry.
It was their turn at the desk.
“Welcome back, and congratulations!” Scarlet greeted their party with a warm smile. “Please consider yourself at home and let me know if you need anything while you’re here.”
Though Alice thought Scarlet probably said something like that to everyone who came through, it felt particularly sincere and even grateful. Her smile included Alice, who felt uncomfortable, remembering the business card that was burning a hole in her pocket.
At least you don’t have to kill her, she reminded herself.
Which was good, because Alice was pretty sure she wouldn’t be able to do that. Not even for fifty million dollars.
Forms were spread out over the counter. “Please inspect these for accuracy, initial here and here, and sign on the last page. You received copies of the rules and requirements, but I do want to remind you that our foremost rule is no predation.”
She was looking at Alice when she said that, which made sense, as the newcomer, and a scary bear shifter, but Alice wondered if there was more significance to Scarlet’s glance than that.
Alice met her gaze without wavering, trying to guess her shifter type just from her characteristics; she’d been able to tell Mary was a deer shifter the first day they’d met as new teachers in middle school, and she knew that Amber was a cat shifter immediately from her feline grace, even if she never in a hundred years would have guessed Andean mountain cat, an obscure wild cat like a tiny snow leopard.
The sense of power around Scarlet was without question, but for some reason, she didn’t feel like any of the large predators that Alice could think of. Something mythical? There was supposed to be a dragon lifeguard, which opened up a whole box of ‘I didn’t know they were real’ possibilities. A gryphon? A unicorn? An... angel?
Scarlet was still looking at her, and Alice finally decided that a direct approach was a good as any.
“So, what’s your shift form?” she asked casually.
Mary and Amber both went still beside her and she could feel their surprise without turning to look at them.
Alice grinned. “I mean, you’ve got all our information,” she said casually, indicating the form as she scrawled her initials boldly and flipped the page over. “It’s a fair question.”