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  Blackwater Falls: Travis

  SHANNON WEST

  SUSAN E SCOTT

  Blackwater Falls: Travis

  Copyright © 2020, Shannon West, Susan E Scott

  Published by Painted Hearts Publishing

  About the Book You Have Purchased

  All rights reserved. Without reserving the rights under copyright, reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or any other means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Such action is in violation of the U.S. Copyright Law.

  Unauthorized reproduction of distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to 5 years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Blackwater Falls: Travis

  Copyright © 2020 Shannon West, Susan E Scott

  2nd Edition, Publication Date: May 2020

  Originally Published 12/2013 under the title “Plan B”

  Authors: Shannon West, Susan E Scott

  Editor: Ashley Kain

  All cover art and logo copyright © 2020 by Painted Hearts Publishing

  Cover design by E Keith

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED: This literary work may not be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic or photographic reproduction, in whole or in part, without express written permission.

  All characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead is strictly coincidental.

  Chapter One

  Some things in Travis’s life hadn’t always gone exactly to plan. The cards hadn’t fallen the right way, the lottery numbers had been just a few off, and the car had almost been in the safety of the driveway when the blue lights appeared in the rearview mirror. When that happened, there was only one thing to do—fall back on Plan B. Except that on this particular Saturday night, Travis Sutherland didn’t have much of a plan of any kind, “B” or otherwise.

  He had partied way too much earlier in the evening, with a lot of alcohol and maybe a few too many hits off the bong that was being passed around, and he had that nice floaty feeling like he was flying along just above the road. He was still high, but not too bad, and he knew he could make it home if he took it nice and slow. His car weaving a bit, he was trying to keep it between the ditches. There was little traffic on this old back road so he was good. He was better than good. He was in a groove and feeling no pain.

  It was then he noticed a flash in the rearview mirror and looked up to see the blue lights. Groaning, he pulled carefully over to the side of the road and waited to see who would get out of the vehicle. Fuck. Of course, it had to be Hawke, his cousin and the local sheriff. Things were definitely not looking up.

  For most people, having one of your relatives pull you over after a bit too much to drink would be a good thing—unfortunately, Travis wasn’t one of those people. And Hawke wasn’t one of those kinds of relatives. Hawke was a hard-ass and would cut him absolutely no slack. The fact that he and Travis’s older brother, Spencer, were best friends didn’t bode well either. He’d be lucky not to wind up under the jail.

  He watched his cousin warily in the side mirror as he got out of the vehicle and sauntered up to the driver’s door of the car, oozing cop attitude. Shining a flashlight in his eyes, Hawke held it there for a moment before sweeping it over the interior of the car. “Where you headed, Travis?”

  Trying for a pleasant voice, Travis replied, “Just on my way home, Hawke. Almost in the driveway.”

  “You been smoking a little weed, Travis?”

  “Well, hell no. What would make you think that?”

  “For one thing, you reek of it, though it’s kind of hard to tell, since you also smell like a damn brewery. Get out of the car, Travis.”

  “What for?”

  “Because I’m asking you to.”

  “Ah, damn, Hawke, please. Just let me go home. I’m almost there.”

  “Can’t do it. What if you got fifty feet down the road, ran off in a ditch and flipped your vehicle? Or worse yet, hit some other driver on the way home? What’s your family going to say knowing I let you drive in this condition?”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Hawke. Don’t you think that’s a little bit dramatic?”

  “No, I don’t. Not in the condition you’re in—I don’t even know how you’re still conscious. Now get your ass out of the damn car.”

  Realizing that he couldn’t win this argument, Travis opened the door and wearily stumbled out of the front seat, nearly face-planting when his feet hit the ground. Hawke grabbed his arm to steady him, heroically refraining from saying anything else, though Travis figured it must have cost him dearly.

  Travis’s mama was going to have his ass for this, not to mention having to listen to his dad and Spencer, but his mama was a force to be reckoned with. One of the clan females, Emma Sutherland, was known both for her prodigiously bad temper, even worse than the norm for clan females, and her ability to talk so long and so loud that any would-be opponent just gave up. Although Travis was her youngest son and her pride and joy, she would ream his ass for this one.

  All this was making Travis seriously lose his buzz, and he wanted to go home, get in his own bed, and block out everything for a few hours. His head was beginning to pound, and he thought there was a distinct possibility he might throw up on Hawke’s shoes. He stayed where Hawke put him, next to the back bumper. Hawke’s flashlight moved away to sweep over the interior of his car.

  If only Holden had let him stay at his place tonight this wouldn’t have happened. He rubbed a hand over his face, silently cursing Holden MacKay and what seemed to be his increasing lack of interest in Travis—the main reason Travis had tied one on in the first damn place.

  He and Holden had hung out and partied together for the past year or so, had even shared some pretty hot make-out sessions, but that was all. Holden seemed to want to keep him as little more than a friend.

  Travis knew he was good-looking. No sense lying about it. He’d been voted Best Looking Senior Superlative in high school, along with being the Homecoming King and the Prom King in both his junior and senior years. He wasn’t particularly conceited about it—it was an accident of birth after all. But still, he couldn’t understand why Holden didn’t seem to want to have sex with him. It wasn’t like Travis hadn’t offered often enough.

  Male or female didn’t much matter to the clan members, who were remarkably without prejudices about sexuality, considering the fact that they’d always lived in the Bible Belt south where it mattered quite a bit to most folks. It was a fact that many of the clan were just as happy with a same sex partner as not, and sexual preference was entirely left up to the individual. In that respect, at least, they were an open-minded society, but there was one thing that clan members couldn’t seem to do very well, and that was to be mated to each other.

  Casual sex was okay, and frequent, really, with so many young, attractive clan members running wild on the dark of the moon, but a true mating between clan members was rare and extremely difficult to pull off. The fact was that they were all too damn dominant and aggressive to ever co-exist peacefully together. There had been instances, of course, over the years when two clan members got a mating call for each other, but the situations never ended well and usually not without bloodshed.

  Most clan members picked themselves out a nice, uncomplicated human, who usually fell completely under their spell, seeing as how clan members were almost always quite attractive. Sometimes there was even a mating instinc
t for a human, like with Hawke and his mate, Jace. It used to be more common, but over the years the clan blood had become watered down by the constant infusion of human DNA. Now mating calls were becoming increasingly rare.

  It was said that in times past, clan members mated regularly together, but not anymore. At some point in the not too distant past, clan women had become stronger and more domineering, forcing clan males to look elsewhere for their mates. Matings between two clan males however, was almost unheard of. Sex between them might be possible, but they’d never be able to live together for long without one of them killing or seriously injuring the other in a bid for control.

  In the meantime, there was nothing wrong with fooling around and experimenting, like Travis wanted to do with the gorgeous Holden, but Holden was still holding him at arm’s length, even after a year.

  Holden was older, more his brother Spencer’s age, and the unacknowledged head of the MacKay clan. The MacKays, like the Sutherlands, had lived in the Alabama mountains for hundreds of years, and had originally come over from Scotland around the same time as the Sutherlands.

  That didn’t mean the two clans were friendly, though, and his relationship with Holden was very much a sore spot with his family. There had been bad blood between the Sutherlands and the MacKays since the great clan wars in Scotland around the fourteenth century. The feud first came to a head then, when a Sutherland murdered the head of the MacKay clan in his own bed. Things had gone downhill from there.

  “Sit over in my car, Hotshot, while I call a wrecker.” Hawke jerked his head toward the patrol car and Travis decided to give it one last try.

  “A wrecker? Please, Hawke, it’s not but a mile or two up the road to the house! Hell, just park my car on the side of the road and I’ll walk. Please?”

  “No.”

  “Damn it, Hawke, can’t you call Spencer to come pick up my car?”

  “I could, but I won’t. If your mama and daddy have to pay for a wrecker, maybe they’ll lay the law down on you before I have to. This kind of shit is going to get you killed, boy, and I, for one, don’t have any desire to go to your damn funeral. Now sit in my car and shut the hell up. Consider yourself damn lucky I’m not taking you to jail—and I would be if the dark moon wasn’t tomorrow night.”

  Travis decided maybe he better do as he was told, because Hawke didn’t seem to be in the best of moods tonight. As usual on the night before the dark of the moon, everybody was edgy and feeling the strain. Maybe that had been the cause of Holden’s rudeness earlier, when Travis had tried to get him to take him upstairs to bed. Like the Sutherlands, the MacKays had the curse.

  “Go home, Travis, and sleep it off,” Holden had said. “I’ve already had one visit from your family this week, and I have no desire for another one.”

  “My family came to see you! What?” Travis had cried out, incensed and embarrassed. He knew it had to be Spencer, and it infuriated him that his brother would involve himself in his relationship with Holden. Travis was twenty-one years old and a grown man—he didn’t need anybody’s interference. “They have no say in what I do or don’t do!”

  “Well, they seem to think they do. They told me to leave you alone. Not only that, but Spencer and Hawke were over here making threats about me selling alcohol in the bar to underage boys from Blackwater Falls.” He turned an angry face toward Travis. “You told me all those boys were legal, Travis.”

  “They are! Well, most of them are, anyway. One or two of them might be only nineteen…”

  “Damn it, Travis!” He pushed him away then when Travis tried to hug him, and turned him and his friends out, telling them all to go home.

  Since Travis and Holden were both shifters, even though they were from different clans, they had no future together and they knew it. He realized that the other man didn’t love him, and Travis didn’t love Holden either, really, but, it still hurt to be dismissed like that. If Holden wasn’t so hot and Travis didn’t need to get laid so damn bad, he’d give some thought to breaking it off with him. As it was, he was afraid that Holden would soon be putting him on the road.

  Travis was brought out of this reverie by Hawke’s voice. “Okay, Travis. I’ll call the garage to come tow your car to the house, and then I’ll drive you home.”

  Knowing that it was useless to try to talk Hawke out of it, and grateful that he wasn’t being taken to jail, Travis put his head back on the headrest of the passenger seat in Hawke’s vehicle. “Okay, fine then. Jesus, stop dragging it out. Let’s just go.”

  “Hold your damn horses. Sit over there and shut up, or I’ll put you in cuffs and throw your ass in the back. We have to wait on the tow truck. I’m calling MacKay’s now.” Travis folded his arms and narrowed his eyes. He knew better than to say anything more when Hawke was looking at him like that, but it didn’t mean he didn’t want to. It damn near choked him to death to sit there and not tell Hawke exactly what he thought of him and his highhanded ways.

  He honestly didn’t know how Jace, Hawke’s new mate, could stand him. Jace was close to Travis’s age and seemed pretty cool, but Hawke had always been an arrogant, opinionated asshole. Hawke was like a big brother to him in a lot of ways, but still, at times like these, he pissed Travis off.

  Travis felt like he’d been sitting in Hawke’s vehicle for hours, but it had probably only been about fifteen minutes before he heard the tow truck coming down the road. When it stopped in front of his car and the driver jumped out, Travis wanted to slide down in the seat out of sight. Camron MacKay. Of all people, why him?

  Travis had gone to high school with Camron, but he doubted that Camron would remember him. Travis was two years younger, and Camron had been a big football star and absolutely the best-looking male in his class or any other as far as Travis was concerned. Travis had a huge crush on Camron his sophomore year in high school and still felt fidgety every time he saw him. The only problem was that Camron was rather aggressively straight, which was odd for a clan male, and he had never shown the slightest interest in Travis one way or the other.

  Travis heard Hawke talking to Camron, but couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then, Camron started past the police vehicle, stopping to look in and smile at Travis.

  “Hey, Travis, got yourself in a little trouble again, huh? As soon as I can get this hooked up, I’ll tow it to your house. It won’t take but a minute.”

  “Okay. Thanks, Camron.” Camron nodded and looked back at the tow truck behind him. Travis’s gaze followed his, and he flushed when he saw Jenny Calhoun sitting up in the front seat, waiting for Camron. Her Barbie doll blonde hair was being twirled around a finger as she gazed out the window and when she saw Camron looking at her, she gave him a little wave.

  Camron must have been on a date with Jenny when Hawke called. Camron was the owner of MacKay’s Garage, and usually the one on call after hours. He was also one of Holden’s cousins, not that they got along at all. Holden was of the opinion that the feud between the Sutherlands and the MacKay’s was still alive and well, while Camron and most of the other younger members of the MacKay clan thought of it as ancient history. There was no doubt in most people’s minds, though, that the curse came directly from the Sutherlands.

  It seemed that back in the day, several of the Sutherland women were kidnapped, raped and held captive by the MacKays, and it brought the curse into their own family. The curse was an interesting Sutherland ability to shift into a big mountain lion on the dark of the moon. It must have freaked the hell out of the MacKays when they discovered what their wives became during the three nights of the dark of the moon, but by that time, it must have already been too late. The notorious clan charm had taken its toll on the MacKay men and they refused to give their wives up.

  They still blamed the Sutherlands, of course, but their wives must have been something pretty special, because they protected them in a time when most people would have just burned them at the stake and been done with it. That was the beginning of the love/hate relationship bet
ween the two families. Of course, a great deal of all this so-called history was just legend and myth, but the seemingly impossible fact remained that his family, along with the MacKays weren’t exactly human, and probably never had been.

  Pretty little Jenny Calhoun was human and had been in Travis’s high school class. Like most of the people they went to school with, the humans had no idea about the clan secrets. Only the humans who were chosen as mates by the clan ever had any idea about their true nature.

  Camron, like most clan males, was obviously avoiding the clan females, and had picked out this little human for himself. Travis didn’t know why that should cause him a little twinge that felt suspiciously like jealousy, but it did. Hell, it wasn’t like Camron would ever have any interest in him anyway.

  He put his head back on the seat again and tried not to think about his mama’s reaction when Hawke brought him home. Please God, let her be asleep and not wake up until Hawke was already gone. If she came out on the porch and raised hell with Hawke, he might haul Travis to jail anyway just out of spite. His mama had practically helped raise Hawke since he spent most of his time with Spencer as a kid, but the two of them had always clashed.

  Once Camron had Travis’s car hooked up, Hawke drove slowly down the road, letting the tow truck follow behind, and in just a few minutes, Travis saw his driveway up ahead. As they pulled in and parked, Spencer stepped out on the front porch. Spencer’s presence wasn’t exactly comforting but still better than his mama. Hawke must have called to alert him before joining Travis back in the car. The wrecker pulled in with Travis’s truck and parked near the barn.

  Hawke opened his door at the same time that Travis did and curtly told Travis to follow him to the porch. For God’s sake, couldn’t they just leave him in peace? It was hell having an older brother and cousin who were both so straight-laced and perfect. His face burned at the idea that Camron was going to witness his embarrassment. Now if his mother joined them on the porch, his humiliation would just about be complete. Please God, let her be asleep.