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  Once Rejected, Twice Shy

  REJECTED MATES COLLECTION

  FAERELL BOOK 1

  TJ BELL

  ONCE REJECTED, TWICE SHY

  Rejected Mates Collection

  Faerell Book 1

  by TJ BELL

  Cover Design: McKayla Schutt

  Editor: Julie Sturgeon

  Copyright: 2023 by Tami Lund LLC

  License Notes

  All rights reserved. This book is copyrighted property of the author and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes without express, written permission from the author or publisher. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to purchase their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer.

  Thank you for your support.

  All entities, locations, businesses, etc. in this book are strictly figments of the author’s overactive imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  Questions, comments, or desires to seek permission to use any part of this book for your own purposes should be directed to [email protected].

  Created with Vellum

  Contents

  About the book

  Rejected Mates Collection

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Lyall: Dark Moon Falls

  Chapter One

  About the author

  More books by TJ Bell

  About the book

  Once Rejected, Twice Shy

  Faith Calhoun was almost forty when she walked in on her husband screwing someone else.

  Talk about a terrible way to end what had admittedly not been an iconic decade of her life.

  After serving him divorce papers—on her birthday—she heads straight to her favorite bar, where the ultra-hot bartender plies her with drinks to take the edge off.

  They end up tumbling into bed together.

  That part’s not bad—in fact, it’s really, really good—except in the morning, he rejects her too, and somehow, that rejection is even worse than the first one. Especially when he insists he needs to remain in her life to ensure she’s protected.

  From what? Her gossipy neighbors?

  Oh, and let’s not forget all the strange occurrences that are getting harder and harder to explain away.

  First, there’s a wolf in her house. A real, live, massive wolf. Then the house is attacked and nearly destroyed by some unknown—and unseen—enemy, and, get this, the wolf saves her. Then the bartender tells her he’s a wolf too. It’s like something out of her favorite shifter romance novel—except she’s living it!

  And then there’s the icing on the cake: Mikail, the bartender-slash-wolf, tells her she’s a faery princess.

  Maybe this week isn’t so bad after all. If you overlook the reason he kept her identity a secret: the enemies she didn’t know she had want to kill her, and now that she’s been outed…

  Her bad week is about to get a whole lot worse.

  Rejected Mates Collection

  Dragons, wolves, and mates…oh my!

  These authors have written a collection of Rejected Mates stories for you to devour that will keep you up all night long.

  Rejected Mates Collection features New York Times, USA Today, and other bestselling authors. Each month expect new releases filled with magic, mates, and more.

  Check out our website at rejectedmates.com for our release schedule and more about our fabulous authors.

  Chapter One

  “The deed is done,” Faith Calhoun informed the bartender-slash-owner at her favorite neighborhood hole-in-the-wall bar, Shift Happens. The name implied the hours it was open, of course, but Faith liked to pretend the owner was also a fan of shapeshifter romance books.

  “On my birthday,” she added, slumping over her mojito. She only ever drank mojitos at this bar because Mikail was the only bartender who had ever made one she actually liked.

  “Happy birthday. What deed are we talking about?” Mikail asked, his voice, as ever, smooth-as-whiskey. She loved listening to him talk, not that he was particularly chatty on the regular.

  “I had him served with divorce papers,” she announced. Hopefully, she sounded far more brave and confident than she felt at the moment. Defeated was probably a better description of her mood, but she didn’t want to feel defeated on her birthday, so she was trying to live the whole fake it ’til you make it motto.

  These mojitos would definitely help in that respect.

  “Who?” Mikail asked dumbly.

  Really, it was a dumb question. “Who else would I serve divorce papers to?”

  “You’re divorcing your husband?” He made it sound like she was chopping the man’s head off. Truth be told, she had fantasized a few dozen times a day over the course of the last week about chopping off a different part of his body.

  “He cheated on me. A week before my birthday. My fortieth,” she added, in case that wasn’t clear to Mikail.

  “I know which birthday it is,” he said evenly.

  She gave him a good glare, even though he had nothing whatsoever to do with her husband’s infidelity. But he was still a man, and at the moment, she was rather put off the entire species.

  “In my bed,” she said, stabbing at the bar top. “She was on her back with her legs up in the air. He was between her thighs, performing cunnilingus. Enthusiastically.”

  Mikail arched his brows.

  Faith frowned. “I literally cannot remember the last time he went down on me. Cannot. Even. Remember. And you know what makes it worse?”

  “It gets worse?”

  Faith slapped her hand onto the bar top. “I planned to ask him to do to me exactly what he was doing to her, for my birthday. Today,” she added, stabbing her finger against the smooth surface, in case Mikail didn’t quite get the gravity of the situation.

  “I’m sorry your birthday is not progressing the way you wanted it to.”

  She drained her drink, pushed the glass toward him, and rested her chin on her fist. “I suppose it can’t get any worse, can it?”

  Mikail darted a furtive glance around the bar. “Don’t say things like that around here. What’s that law people always talk about?”

  “Um, Murphy’s Law?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Exactly.”

  “No, seriously. It can’t get any worse than my husband cheating on me right before my birthday. I mean, I suppose maybe if it had been our anniversary. That would really be shitty. So I take it back. It could be worse.”

  Mikail slid a fresh drink across the bar. “I sincerely hope your evening only improves. Do you have plans?”

  She tipped the beverage to her lips, taking a more-than-generous sip. These things went down easier and easier the more she drank. Funny how that worked out. “Well, I’d hoped to be flat on my back with my legs in the air, but that’s obviously not happening.”

  She glanced around. The bar was on the second level of a three-story building, with a screen-printing business downstairs and Faith honestly wasn’t sure what was on the third floor. The long plank of well-worn wood behind which Mikail spent his evenings faced an open-air seating area. While winter wasn’t truly a thing here in New Orleans, it still sometimes got chilly for a few weeks in January. Didn’t matter to the patrons of this bar; Mikail just cranked up the heat lamps, and no one missed a beat.

  As it was currently April, there were definitely no heat lamps on. Faith plucked at the front of her blouse. If only Mikail had dehumidifiers that clicked on when the evenings were particularly humid, like this one.

  A surprisingly cool breeze swirled around her, lifting her hair and providing welcome relief to the back of her neck. Faith sighed, then dug around in her purse for a hairband. She pulled her long, wavy strands into what was no doubt a messy but not in a sexy way bun and secured it with the band.

  “Much better,” she said.

  “Good,” Mikail replied, as if he’d had anything at all to do with that sudden breeze.

  “Must be a storm coming,” she remarked.

  He frowned. “You feel something?”

  She took another swallow of her drink and snorted. “Yeah, about six thousand percent humidity.”

  “Oh, right.” He seemed relieved. What the heck had he thought she was going to say?

  She studied the man while he headed down to the other end of the bar to wait on a couple who had just stepped into the room. He wore a black button-down shirt with two too many buttons undone, offering up a tempting peek at a perfectly sculpted bronze chest. His thick, dark hair was swept away from his face, one lock draping down to curl around his left eye.

  Speaking of eyes, his were a fascinating gold-green color, and sometimes she imagined they literally sparkled.

  He had a narrow nose, plump lips, and a heavy coating of scruff that never seemed to change, wh
ich told her he likely groomed it every single day. She liked men who took care of themselves, and she also had a penchant for facial hair, so that was a win in her book.

  When he turned away to snag a bottle of vodka from the shelf behind the bar, she let her gaze drop to a perfectly rounded ass under black, fitted linen pants. She wanted to take a bite out of that ass.

  Mikail whipped his head around to look her way, his brow furrowed, and Faith glanced up at the ceiling like she found the slowly rotating bamboo-style fans utterly fascinating.

  Jeez, she could swear he knew what she was thinking, which was crazy, of course.

  Also, why was she thinking that way?

  Probably because she hadn’t had all that many intimate encounters in recent history. At least not the sort that included another person.

  Considering her current set of circumstances, was it really any surprise at all that she was suddenly eyeing Mikail with heightened interest? Her husband had cheated on her and she’d just asked him for a divorce, after all. And the longer she sat here and drank booze and thought about all the signs that she had heretofore ignored, she began to realize it was entirely likely this was not the first time Luke had stepped out on her.

  Over the course of their nearly decade long marriage, they’d had at least five—no, six—dry spells, when he hadn’t touched her for months at a time. The first one had occurred shortly after their first anniversary.

  There had always been an excuse. Usually, it was his job—he was too busy, too stressed, too something or another. This last time had started with an argument, and uncharacteristically, Luke had carried a grudge. No matter what she’d done to mend fences, he’d stayed cold and distant until she’d finally stopped caring and stopped trying.

  Mikail extracted the glass from her tense grip and made a fresh mojito.

  “I should have left him forever ago,” she murmured, more to herself, although she knew Mikail was listening. He always listened to her.

  “You’ll get no disagreement from me.”

  She snapped her gaze up as he placed the drink in front of her. “What?”

  He shrugged. “You’re so much better than that guy.”

  Oh, the irony. Luke’s family had money, a lot of it. That and his mother’s social climbing tendencies had secured them as New Orleans high society, whereas Faith was just…Faith. A nobody. She took a sip and stared at the mint leaves floating in her glass.

  “I’m sorry you’re going through this, love.”

  Mikail had been calling her “love” almost since the first time she’d stepped foot into this bar shortly after she’d graduated from college, and she liked to pretend she was the only customer with such an intimate nickname.

  She did a lot of pretending where Mikail was concerned. It was probably because he personified those sexy, alpha shifters she enjoyed reading about. Add a heavy dose of the fact that her real life sucked and it was a recipe for living in a pretend world.

  She rubbed her head. “I need a change.”

  “Getting divorced isn’t change enough?”

  “That’s only the tip of the iceberg. I need to do something else.”

  “Like what?”

  Why did Mikail ’s voice suddenly sound sharp? She glanced up. He was staring at her with enough intensity to make her shiver. Jaw ticking, he turned his attention to the server, a buff guy in a tight T-shirt and navy shorts that rode low on his hips. Faith had been coming to this bar since her mid-twenties, and Mikail had only ever been a tender of one.

  “You have help,” she said instead of answering his question. She didn’t have an answer anyway, and inquiring after his new hire was more interesting than her lack-of-interesting life.

  He filled four pint glasses and loaded them onto a tray, and the hot server took off to deliver the drinks.

  “Yeah,” Mikail said absently, his unfocused gaze tracking the guy who was now doling out beers to four flirty women sitting around a high-top table. “A friend suggested I hire someone so I didn’t have to be here ’round the clock all the time.”

  “That’s smart.”

  He shrugged.

  “Hey, at least now you can take a vacation once in a while.”

  He snorted. “That’ll never happen.”

  “Sure it will. It may take a little time to get him up to speed, but if you have been able to hold down the fort by yourself for two decades, no reason he can’t for a couple of days. Or a week.”

  “Why does it feel like you’re planning this so-called vacation for me?”

  She chuckled. “I can if you want. I’m really good at dreaming. I can list at least five different places I’d love to visit but will probably never get around to.”

  He didn’t question why she thought she’d never visit any of her dream vacation spots. Was that odd?

  “Don’t you want to know why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why I won’t ever get around to taking those dream vacations.”

  “I’m pretty sure I already know why.”

  “You do?” She blinked. Owlishly, going by her reflection in the mirror behind the bar.

  He swept her empty glass off the counter, replacing it with a fresh mojito.

  She stared at the hazy liquid and did not sip. “I should probably slow down.” Then again, it was her birthday, she had nowhere to go but home to an empty bed, and Uber was just one press of a button in an app away and—she lifted the glass and gulped.

  “Good thing you have such high tolerance,” Mikail noted.

  It was true; she had always been able to drink anyone under the table, including her husband, who had been so impressed by that feat that he’d asked her out. Their first date had been to a sports bar on dollar-shot night.

  “God, I don’t want to think about him.”

  “Then don’t,” Mikail suggested.

  “I never brought him here,” she noted. That had been Luke’s choice, not hers. She glanced around at the slightly cheesy tropical decor. Luke liked sports bars and martini bars, and this place did not remotely fit into either of those categories.

  “There were so many signs,” she murmured, and apparently, she was going to think about him after all.

  “Faith, love, you don’t have to rehash—”

  “My ability to win at drinking games was what attracted him to me,” Faith cut him off. “How is that a solid basis for a long-lasting relationship? And considering what I know about his family and his upbringing, dating me in the first place was nothing more than an act of rebellion.”

  “If that were the case, why did he ask you to marry him?”

  She shrugged. “Who knows? I was good in bed? I was fun at parties? I looked good on his arm at charity events? Although I doubt it was that last one, since attractive socialites are a dime a dozen in his circles.”

  “Maybe he really did love you,” Mikail suggested, although did he really just wince as he said it?

  “He cheated on me. That isn’t love. That’s rejection.”

  “That’s—”

  “I said I don’t want to talk about it.” Okay, that was harsh. She was the one who brought it up, after all. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t apologize. You’re in a bad place right now. Letting out your frustrations in this way is far better than the alternative.”