MIDLIFE DEMON HUNTER THE FORTY PROOF SERIES, BOOK 3 SHANNON MAYER CONTENTS Acknowledgments 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 Up Next! About the Author Copyright © Shannon Mayer 2020 All rights reserved HiJinks Ink Publishing www.shannonmayer.com All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a database and retrieval system or transmitted in any form or any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the owner of the copyright and the above publishers. Please do not participate in or encourage the piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental. Mayer, Shannon Created with Vellum ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Thank you to the ladies in the back row. You know, to the ones who cheer the loudest, who support their fellow women even as they themselves struggle. The ladies who stand up for what’s right and for taking on challenges that others shy away from. Thank you to the women who have led by example by showing the kind of life I want to live. Full of laughter. Full of love. Full of life. Living fearless. 1 hat happened when a bigfoot was in love with a fairy who regarded him only as a friend, and a siren was falling W hard for the bigfoot who didn’t notice her? That might sound like the start to a joke, but it didn’t feel so funny from my perspective in the middle of what had become a daily soap opera of sad puppy dog eyes and unrequited love. I stood by the sink in my gran’s house, watching as Eric, said bigfoot shifter, bent in front of the oven. We were into April in Savannah in a house that lacked air conditioning, and the open windows didn’t make it any cooler since the oven was constantly on. But Eric persisted baking in this heat because . “You know I bake when I’m stressed,” he said under his breath. “What do I do, Bree? How do I get her to see me?” Yes, the irony was not lost on me that the bigfoot who was the current hide-and-seek champion of the world wanted to be seen. By a wee tiny fairy. “Good grief, you’re asking me for love advice? Have you noticed the mess I’m in?” I snorted and dunked my hands back into the soapy water, viciously attacking a series of cupcake molds that had blackened with all the baking he’d been doing. I’d been ignoring a lot of things the last week, not least of all the envelope holding information on my gran’s and parents’ deaths. Procrastination, thy name is Breena O’Rylee. I’d almost opened it a dozen times, but every time I picked it up, I found myself putting it down. I’d get around to it, I would. Just . .not yet. It would be opening a whole new can of worms. So I was putting it off as long as I could and enjoying this short respite from the craziness that had become my life. “But you’re navigating your love life better than I’m handling mine. At least the men you’re interested in realize you have intentions toward them. Kinkly doesn’t look at me that way. Ever. I might as well be a talking tree to her.” He stood up straight, barely missing the oven hood with the top of his head. One look at himself ought to have clued him in to the problem—he was over seven feet tall, and Kinkly, tiny fairy that she was, fit in the palm of my hand. A counselor by trade, Eric had the college professor look down to a T, from the bowtie at his neck to the khaki pants and leather loafers, and with that background you’d think he could see the issues he and Kinkly would face. I sighed, thinking about what he’d said and circling back to my own love-life issues. “First of all, I’m not interested in either of them.” Yes, I could feel that lie even as I said it. “I just got out of a crappy marriage, and I’d like to play the field a little. Date men who aren’t difficult. Men who don’t have secrets. Is that too much to ask?” I scrubbed a little harder at the pans, not sure if I believed my own words. “Besides, if you haven’t noticed, Crash has stayed away for over a week without contacting any of us, even Feish, and now she’s getting fussy about him being ‘missing.’ And Corb still hasn’t come by to apologize for coming on so strongly while he was under those mages’ spell. Neither one is ringing any of my bells. Really, at this rate, Robert has a better shot than either of them.” A laugh burst out of Eric. He fumbled the pan he’d just retrieved from the oven, and a croissant slid off and bounced on the floor. I dried my hands and scooped up the flaky pastry, hopping it from hand to hand, blowing at it and tearing off pieces while it was still too hot to eat. I didn’t care. The minor burns were worth the flavor. “The skeleton would make a better date?” Eric carefully set the first pan on the counter. “You’re kidding me, right?” I grinned up at him and winked. “He likes to drink whiskey with me, never fails to show up when I’m in need, and doesn’t try to boss me around. Right now, aside from the fact that he’s dead and nothing more than an animated skeleton, he’s the perfect man.” He wasn’t bad looking either. Back in the day, I mean. I’d finally seen Robert—pre-death Robert—during my own death-adjacent experience last week. Jet black hair, icy blue eyes that had some serious intensity to them, and a lean build—he made a nice package, all in all. Of course, he wasn’t alive, so no point in crying over spilled milk. Or in this case, crying over a skeleton. Eric put another pan down and bent at the waist so we were eye to eye. “You mean, maybe I should find a skeleton woman?” “I could ask Robert if he has a sister,” I drawled, then popped the last of the croissant into my mouth. “But seriously, if you like Kinkly, tell her. The worst she’s going to say is she’s not interested. The best is that she might say, yeah, let’s try this thing on for size.” You might wonder why I didn’t tell him that the more appropriately sized part-siren was interested in him. Simply put, she had asked me not to. Suzy wanted him to like her for her, something she’d never had in a relationship before. In the past, she had always spelled the men she was interested in—forcing them to be with her whether they wanted to or not. Without using her siren compulsion, she was as shitty at relationship stuff as Eric. The upside? Nobody had a broken heart yet. Yet being the operative word. I didn’t think Kinkly would be hurt—she was oblivious to Eric’s affections. He wasn’t wrong that she seemed to view him as a piece of the scenery more than anything else, perching on his shoulders or the top of his head for better vantage points. It was Eric and Suzy who had me worried. Really, you’d think it would be simple, but damn it, I knew from firsthand experience that love and matters of the heart were far from simple. Let me see if I could put my own drama in a nutshell. I was a forty-one—chasing forty-two—year-old divorcee. My ex- husband, who I most commonly refer to as Himself but was otherwise known as Alan (You know the superstition about evil being summoned when you use its name? Well, I believed it.) took me for everything in the divorce, including my gran’s house, which he sold out from under me. I was pretty sure he used someone in the shadow world to help him doctor documents and get them shoved through the legal system. It was the only thing that made sense. Plus, he’d tried to break into Gran’s house to steal her book of spells and the talisman she’d given me. From there, we go to Corb, Alan’s black sheep cousin. Younger than me by more than a handful of years, buff as they come with smoldering dark green eyes and everything you’d want in a bad boy, right down to the cupboards full of so much lube, he could have an orgy and not run out. Anyhoo, he’d inadvertently offered me a place to stay while I got back on my feet after the divorce, and to his surprise—and maybe even my own —I’d taken him up on the offer.