The Baby Shift- Iowa Read online

  The Baby Shift: Iowa

  Shifter Babies Of America 16

  Fanning

  Copyright © 2019 by Fanning

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  1. Vince

  2. June

  3. Vince

  4. June

  5. Vince

  6. June

  7. Vince

  8. June

  9. Vince

  Also by Fanning

  Vince

  Vince Ashton adjusted the Rolex around his wrist. It was one of the latest in his collection, a present from a successful housing developer in Florida. He glanced to the side of his first-class seat to see two air flight attendants blushing and eyeing him. A smirk settled on his handsome face. He knew the effect he has on women, knew it from the smell in the air. As he lifted his phone, his metallic eyes flashed on the reflected screen.

  Shifters had come a long way in the past fifty years. His phone buzzed. It was an e-mail from one of his accounts abroad. He forwarded it to his assistant, a tyrant of an older woman stationed at his headquarters in New York City. He wasn’t the kind of man who looked after small things. His favorite prey were the big wins, the hard challenges. It was a challenge that he was flying towards right now.

  His team had briefed him three months ago about the town of Fresh Meadows, Iowa. It was bubbling with hipster tourism that was pining for fun coffee shops in small-town America. He nearly rolled his eyes. The quaintness of a place held no interest for him. His team pointed out that it was an up-and-coming area, one that promised low property taxes and smart initiatives inviting small businesses to invest.

  “Why are you going to this dinky little town?” His assistant asked before he left.

  How could he not? His powerful arms flexed beneath his suit jacket. It was interesting. Out of the ten proposals he’d sent to his small-town prospects, he received quite the nasty letter from one woman in particular. What was her name again? He ran through his mind for it. January? April? It was the name of a month. He leaned against the seat headrest.

  June. It simmered in his mind. He hadn’t been able to find a picture of her online. He’d been too busy arguing against his team and reminding them that he knew a good deal when he saw one. Had Vince Ashton ever been wrong? No, and he wasn’t going to let June stop him from building his new development even if it meant tearing down a silly old shack.

  I’m shocked by the audacity of Mr. Ashton’s suggestion that we destroy the town lodge next to the museum. It’s the heart of Fresh Meadow’s historical identity. Frankly, we have no room for Ashton Developments in Fresh Meadows with that kind of attitude.

  Nobody had ever written a response like that to him. It’d been delivered through the mail, a slap in the face to his high-speed corporate preferences. He slipped his phone back into his pocket with a smirk. Getting a connection to the mayor had been easy. He called a few business associates, and suddenly, the mayor of Fresh Meadows was on the phone to discuss the situation.

  “Perhaps Ms. June was mistaken. The historical society may be willing to consider your interest in the lot next to the museum. We’d love to call a meeting together,” the mayor said on the phone.

  “We?” Vince had echoed on the phone.

  “Ms. June is the head of the historical board, so she has to be included in any of these discussions. I’m sure she could feel differently after meeting with you and discussing things.” The tone of greed and expectation was clear in the old man’s voice, but Vince was used to these people. For him, the challenge was rewarding enough. The money was just an added bonus. He cracked his neck, stiff from the flight.

  This June sounded like an interesting adversary. He hadn’t had someone interesting in a long time...not since a year ago, anyway. He’d never gotten the woman’s name and had kicked himself every day since for it. His eyes wandered to the two flight attendants, giggling as they caught his eye, preparing a drink cart. Human women usually didn’t interest him. It was too easy to get their attention with his amber eyes and a pearly grin that promised danger. He drank the sparkling water from his plastic cup. An hour until he landed, and then he’d rent a car to visit Fresh Meadows.

  “You don’t want to bring the driver?” His assistant asked before he left.

  No, because it was personal for him. It was a challenge. It didn’t matter that five cities were happy to welcome Ashton Developments and his company’s lion logo to their zip codes. He wanted the city that had put up a fight.

  An announcement came on from the pilot, detailing an update on the weather and their arrival time. Vince sank into his seat, content to dream up his strategies of battle with Ms. June.

  June

  The department store mirror was surprising because June realized that she lost the baby weight, and she hadn’t been trying. Her baby son, Lance, had been happy to bother her with frequent breastfeeding and an inability to sleep for more than three hours at a time in the beginning. He’d finally settled into a routine that allowed her six hours of sleep and her face was finally starting to gain some energy back into it.

  She placed a hand on her stomach, much flatter than she had been used to seeing it in the last year. Weight had never been a concern for her. She was more excited that she could finally bust out her older wardrobe again instead of buying new clothes.

  Except for this meeting. She was determined to purchase a new blouse that would make her look powerful. “I need to look like a woman on a mission,” she told the shop associate, and the young woman had hopped excitedly over to the store’s new arrivals.

  “Date?” the shop woman asked with a knowing look.

  “Business meeting,” June said with a grin. The woman told her to let her know if she needed any different sizes. June already knew that she’d be buying something, as the associate had amazing taste. She’d brought selections that would complement June’s dark hair and olive skin, compliments of her grandfather’s Italian roots. How they had ended up in the Midwest was a mystery to her.

  She’d left for college and spent time dashing between New York City and D.C. at various museum posts, but then she became pregnant with Lance. After that incident with that man…She shivered thinking of his powerful arms that night. His name had been the least of her concern. She was more mesmerized by his glowing translucent eyes. To bed a Shifter? That was a new adventure.

  She smirked. An adventure that had produced a bundle of joy that she hadn’t been expecting. Yet, she was happy. Fresh Meadows, her hometown, offered her the director position of their historical museum, and she purchased a house nearby her old childhood home. Things had worked out. Her parents loved watching Lance.

  More importantly, she loved her town and her job. She squared her shoulders, admiring the blouse that she was trying on. It was a deep red that promised passion and a fight. And how she could give it to him! This Vince Ashton! She hadn’t even bothered looking up his pompous face. She was familiar with the name of his company, having seen it plastered all over New York City when she’d been working there.

  A picture of a scowling old man came to her mind, and she giggled. He had no idea what he was in for!

  “I’m taking the red one!” she called out to the associate.

  “It comes in green, too. Do you want to try that one?”

  “No,” June called back with a grin at the mirror. “The red is perfect.” She dressed again and marched up to the counter with her purchase.

&nbsp
; “I feel sorry for whoever you’re meeting with,” the associate said with a playful wink.

  “Me too,” June replied with a cool tone and a half-smile. Few things energized her as much as flexing her prowess in a board meeting.

  Vince Ashton had no idea what was going to hit him.

  ---

  Lance went down for the night around nine o’clock. June watched his sleeping face dissolve into cute snores, wondering how something so small could be that loud and cute at the same time. She turned the baby monitor on and tiptoed to the bathroom down the hall.

  Tomorrow was her meeting. Her parents were taking Lance for the day. She placed the baby monitor nearby the shower and turned the water all the way to the hottest setting. It was to melt her stress underneath the heat of the water. She slipped off her clothes and hopped into the shower, sighing underneath the stream of hot water. Lathering peppermint shampoo in her hair, she inhaled the scent and imagined herself in the meeting tomorrow, strong and powerful.

  The last time she’d felt this way... She sighed, thinking of the handsome face that she’d met in that bar over a year ago... Had he told her his name? She couldn’t remember between the craft cocktails he’d been ordering them. He was wealthy. His suit and watch screamed that. They’d tumbled into a hotel bed together.

  “You’re beautiful,” he breathed as he kissed down her neck. His lips were fiery pricks of lust, dotting her skin with the promise of pleasure. She muttered something underneath her breath.

  They’d use protection, but the condom must’ve broken. She hadn’t been on birth control. It was a shock when in the first month of her job, she missed her period. The mystery man had been the only tryst she’d had since a few casual dating flings. He had to be the father. She’d left before he woke up in the morning, feeling invincible as she went out into the early morning light of the city.

  How wrong she’d been, but none of that mattered now. She watched the soap bubbles run off her skin and admired the muscles she’d been developing in her arms since carrying around Lance. The water circled the drain and disappeared like her thoughts about the mysterious, handsome businessman from New York.

  Vince

  Things weren’t going as smoothly as he wanted. The car rental had been unable to provide the Audi he requested, the usual car he was used to driving.

  “Give me whatever you have that has leather seats,” he said in a grave tone. They complied and handed over an equally luxurious car. He stopped for an espresso at the coffee joint on the corner before driving towards Fresh Meadows. The bed and breakfast he’d booked, due to a lack of any real hotel chains, was quaint. They showed him to his suite, and he descended into a bottle of fine whiskey while he answered emails well into the night.

  The next morning, after a breakfast of black coffee and dry toast, he asked for directions to the town hall for his meeting.

  “Go down to Main Street, and you’ll see a gorgeous red brick building on your right. There should be parking there,” the older man behind the front desk told him. His eyes were twinkling. “Big meeting today?”

  Vince hid his smirk. He never liked to give too much away. “Something like that.” On his drive, he passed white-picket fences and mothers ushering schoolchildren from minivans in carpool lines. Fresh Meadows was vibrant for its size. His investment would pay off if people continued moving here. He was calculating profit margins as he pulled in to park next to an SUV. There was a Metropolitan Museum of Art bumper sticker on it. He raised an eyebrow.

  The building was surprisingly nice on the inside. His dress shoes clattered across the polished wooden floors. A plaque advertised that these were the original floors of the town hall, restored to their former glory through a grant project. A redhead behind the desk beamed up at him with an open smile that would’ve made any New Yorker turn right back around. But he wasn’t anyone.

  “Mr. Ashton?” There was a polite twang in her voice. He nodded with a polite smile. “You can walk right down the hall, and they’re waiting for you. It’s the mayor, his secretary, and Ms. June, of course.”

  “Of course,” he echoed back and followed her pointing finger down the hall. It’d been a while since he hadn’t been personally escorted to a meeting. He popped a mint as voices grew louder from an open door down the hall. It was the last room in the hall. He could see the morning sunlight spilling into the hall.

  “I don’t care about the money,” he heard a powerful voice saying. A woman. His ears hummed. Something was familiar about that voice. The back of his neck itched. He pulled himself together as he came to the open doorway.

  The first was the mayor, wiping his brow with a cloth handkerchief, sitting next to a mousy looking brunette who was poised over a laptop with bored eyes. Vince’s eyes fell onto the opposition, that loud voice that had rung out down the hall, that familiar echo he’d heard once before.

  June.

  She gasped before she could help herself, and he knew he was right. It was the woman from that night! All of his smooth talking suddenly halted in his throat. They stared at one another. The mayor’s face transformed, perplexed, looking between them both.

  She looked better than Vince remember. Something about her was changed, older, but sexier. She’d cut her hair shorter, but he could still smell the amber-laced perfume that she wore on the night they met. On that night...when he’d taken her to his hotel room, and she left before he even woke up.

  “Do you two know each other?” The mayor’s nasally voice sounded out. Charles, his name was, said the business portion of Vince’s brain. As if on command, he shifted out of his trance. He offered a hand to the mayor, as he was closest. The gears in his head clicked back into place. This was a business meeting.

  She recovered from her shock well enough. “We met once, but I didn’t catch his name,” she said in a smooth voice and offered her hand. He shook it with a firm grasp, let his fingers linger a bit too long on her smooth skin. It was as if her fragrance was pulling him back in time, back into the crisp hotel bed sheets.

  Mayor Charles bumbled something about life being full of funny coincidences. The secretary began typing with interest.

  “Shall we begin?” June asked, her eyes leveled at Vince with unrelenting ferocity.

  Life was full of coincidences, the businessman thought, but he wasn’t sure that they were all funny.

  June

  A powerful woman, a boss from her first job, had once told June, “You must always expect the unexpected in meetings.”

  The sage advice could’ve never prepared her for this moment. Her mouth was parched, and her fingers itched for her glass of water on the table, but she didn’t intend on losing this meeting. Even if it was her mystery lover.

  “I firmly oppose you wanting to destroy a historic building for your developments,” she said in a clear voice. “Why can’t you build your development in a modified manner?”

  “All of our developments have a standard twelve-unit basis,” he explained with lightning speed. “To alter Fresh Meadow’s development just for one building doesn’t make sense for our investment. We always do twelve units for our small-town projects.”

  “How much money do you think this could mean for our town?” Mayor Charles asked excitedly. June shot him a pointed look.

  “Mayor, I’ll remind you that the building he wants to tear down is priceless in terms of the town’s history.”

  Mayor Charles flushed, and she watched as Vince pounced on this. “You seem like you feel strongly against this,” he said. She could hear the teasing deep down beneath his voice. Her knuckles turned white as she pressed her fingernails into the palm, making pretty fists underneath the meeting table. “I’ve looked at the maps you sent over. The building that my company is requesting be demolished for our construction is simply the old town tavern, right? I had an estimator value it at a hundred thousand dollars, and that’s mostly for the plot of land.

  “The old tavern is a staple in this community,” she said. Mayor Cha
rles and his secretary shrank down in their seats. Maybe her voice was getting too loud, but she couldn’t care less. “It’s a protected historical landmark. I’ve compiled a list of four other properties for you to look at with equal access to the public and property value.” She slipped out an official looking list from her folder and pushed it towards him. His eyebrows shot up. He hadn’t been prepared. She concealed a victorious smile.

  “Interesting,” he admitted. She sank back in her chair with a satisfied air.

  Mayor Charles seemed lost as to what to do. He wrung his hands together. “If you’d like to visit those properties, we can go see them today.” June felt a twinge of annoyance.

  Vince smiled. “That would be nice.” She narrowed her eyes a fraction, and he turned towards her. “Will you come with us, Ms. June? Since you’re the expert.”

  He knew exactly what he was doing! She kept a foul word down in her throat and smoothed her skirt. “I’d be happy to.”

  “And then we can do lunch at the lake!” Mayor Charles announced with a beaming face. June debated kicking him underneath the table, but it wasn’t worth it. She’d planned to work today on some grant writing. Now, she was babysitting the one-night stand from last year that she thought she’d never see again!

  Should I tell him? The question crossed her mind more than once in the past year. He was right in front of her, as real as he was in that hotel bed last year. Her skin melted at the thought, but she forced herself to think straight. Vince Ashton wasn’t the type to be interested in children. It was easier this way.

  “Shall we take my car?” Vince offered and pointed to the luxury sedan in the parking lot. She fought rolling her eyes, but Mayor Charles was already happily making his way to the passenger seat. She slid into the backseat silently, stewing over the list she’d prepared. It was a good selection of properties. Fantastic, considering he wouldn’t have to destroy a historical landmark to build it, she wanted to add.