by Selena Scott
Danil glanced at the gaudy, gilded clock on his mother’s wall. 8:45 on a Sunday night. It was a little late to be selling Girl Scout cookies.
“Look,” Maxim said, slinging an arm around Anton’s shoulders. “Danil is suspicious of our visitor. He thinks Sunday nights are not good time for ringing doorbells.”
Anton gave his characteristic quick-flash smile, here for one brilliant second and completely gone the next, absorbed into his dark, somber face.
“Well,” Anton replied as a woman’s voice floated through the house to them. “Danil does fear strange women.”
Danil lunged for his brother, but froze mid-scowl as the voice he was hearing rang a very specific bell. It was a silky voice, sweet and unassuming. And it was tightening a fist inside his chest that had been tightened only earlier that evening.
Danil ignored his teasing brothers and followed the sound into the living room, where his father sat in his armchair across from a cap of shiny dark hair, a battered leather jacket and eyelashes for days. Jesus Christ, it was that Dora woman.
“Well, I’m new in town. I live just over the way,” she gestured vaguely as she spoke to Ilya, obviously holding him, gleefully, in her thrall. “And I was just wondering if you’d had any encounters with bears. I live alone and I’m a little nervous about them.”
Ilya’s face broke out like a sunrise. He had the secret joy of a private joke written all over him. He connected eyes with Danil in the doorway as he answered the woman’s question. “Da. I know about bears. Quite a bit.”
His father spoke in careful English, but his face spoke of no hesitation. Danil’s stomach turned. His father was not a discreet man and he loved a good story. Danil thanked his lucky stars that he was here to intercept this woman before she got his father’s entire life story.
“Oh,” Dora Katsaros cocked her head to one side, noting Ilya’s accent. “Are you Russian?”
“Belarusian,” Danil answered as he stepped into the room, hands in his pockets.
Dora’s eyes snapped up to his and Danil had the feeling that every single detail about him was being absorbed in the matter of a second. Her eyes lingered for a moment over his untucked shirt, his loosened tie. Her discerning look quickly melted into a winning smile that might have worked, had Danil not seen her use that same look on Rickford not two hours ago.
“Twice in one night,” she purred. “Must be my lucky day. Dan, was it?”
“Sure,” he nodded, crossing his arms over his chest. He could feel his father’s disapproval of the icy way he was treating this guest but more than one alarm was blinking in Danil’s head right now. She’d been arrested for trespassing twice in two days and now here she was at his father’s house, asking questions about bears? Nuh uh.
“You know this woman?” Ilya asked Danil in Belarusian.
“Da,” Danil answered curtly. He could explain everything in a moment, once he’d gotten her the hell out of his house and away from his family.
Dora looked back and forth between them. “Your father was just filling me in about the bears in the area, Dan. I have a little phobia, you see. And I just want to make sure I’m safe.”
“You have fear of bears?” Maxim asked from behind Danil, moving into the room with a grace that belied his large stature of 6’ 4”.
Danil watched Dora’s eyes take in his brother, much the same way they’d taken him in just a moment before. But for some reason it annoyed the shit out of Danil. Was that interest he detected in her little smile? It wasn’t unheard of. Women fell all over themselves for Maxim. And it had never bothered Danil. He had no trouble with ladies. But right now, that look on her face was making Danil want to shove his brother through the plate glass window in the front of the living room.
Maxim went to sit next to her on the couch, crossing his legs and stretching one large arm across the back of the cushions. Dora grinned at the move, rearranging herself so she faced him.
Danil gritted his teeth from the doorway.
“There is no reason to fear bear,” Maxim said, leaning forward to flick an imaginary speck off of Dora’s coat. Her eyes followed his hand with a little, private smile. Danil remembered seeing her pull the same move with Rickford earlier that afternoon. “A bear does not bother you if you do not bother the bear.”
“Brothers?” Dora guessed, asking Danil.
He nodded. “My older brothers, Maxim, and Emin,” he pointed behind him. “And Anton.”
“You’re the baby?” Dora asked, lightly fluttering her eyes.
He heard Anton’s smirking laugh from behind him and ruthlessly ignored it.
“Da,” Danil answered.
Maxim narrowed his eyes at Danil. It was unusual for his lawyerly brother to answer anyone in Belarusian, not when he’d worked so hard to have nearly effortless English. It meant that his brother did not trust this woman. Maxim turned his eyes back to the fragrant little bird sitting next to him on the couch. He cocked his head to one side. She didn’t look suspicious. She looked beautiful. And stylish.
“You are from New York?” Maxim asked Dora, not realizing that he’d interrupted the flow of conversation.
“How’d you guess?” she asked, fluttering her eyes at Maxim in a way he was sure she’d practiced, but he didn’t care. It was working.
Maxim plucked at her coat. “You are stylish and good-looking. Like model. From New York.”
An appreciative smile danced over Dora’s face. Danil noted that she didn’t seem at all flustered by the brazenness of his brother’s compliment. Which must mean that she was used to it. “It’s the haircut,” she replied to Maxim.
Danil watched as Dora turned back to Ilya. She was obviously here for some specific piece of information and she’d realized who she was going to get that information from. Not from scowling Danil, or flirtatious Maxim. She was going to get it from wrinkled, grinning Ilya, thrilled to be speaking to a woman with a model’s haircut.
“Do the bears ever come into people’s backyards?” she asked Ilya. “I’m not normally this scared, it’s just that I heard some rumors from people in the neighborhood.”
“What rumors?” Ilya asked in a soothing voice, obviously wanting to quell the worries of a sweet young woman.
A victorious look swept quickly over Dora’s face. Danil was certain that no one else had noticed it. She knew she’d hit pay dirt in Ilya. Sweet young woman, his ass.
“I’ve heard that there is one bear in particular that’s been spotted in the woods behind the neighborhood. It has scars, and a shock of white hair.”
If Dora noticed the change of tension in the room, she didn’t mention it, her eyes flicking from one brother to the next.
But Danil felt it like a fishing wire pulled tight between the hearts of him and all his brothers. He felt, rather than heard, Anton slip away back down the hall. A moment later the back door slammed and he knew his brother had disappeared into the night. Moments later, Emin wordlessly followed. Even after all these years, they didn’t like for Anton to be alone in moments like this.
Ilya’s smile had saddened. And Danil knew that this was when he had to be the one to protect his family. They were all too sweet. Sometimes Danil had to be the asshole to make sure they were safe. That they were making the right decisions for themselves.
He crossed the room in two strides. He held his hand out to Dora. “Ms. Katsaros,” he said in a tone just teetering on the edge between icily polite and flat out rude.
“Danil!” his mother scolded him from the doorway of the living room, where she’d just entered, drying her hands on a rag. She didn’t like to see him being so abrupt with a visitor. But Danil didn’t care; let her scold him later.
Dora’s eyes narrowed, but she obviously knew that her welcome had officially been worn out. She eyed Danil’s hand for just the breath of a moment, before she wiped the frustration from her expression and gave him a sweet little smile. She rose, taking Danil’s hand as if he were offering it kindly, not as a way of pulling her
out of the room.
Both of them froze at the first contact. Something hot and zinging burst between their palms like a child’s Technicolor bubble. Danil’s chest contracted painfully, but it was her breath that whooshed out, between her teeth. She cut it off mid-exhale and covered the noise with a little cough, a bright smile.
“Nice to meet you all,” she said over her shoulder as Danil tugged her from the room.
He’d gotten the feeling back in his hand and he’d remembered that he needed her off his mother’s property as fast as possible. But then they were out the front door into the fresh, fragrant spring air, striding toward her car in the driveway, and Danil knew he’d made a mistake when he’d come outside with her. It was much harder for him to be cool and civilized when he was outside.
Her citrusy scent mixed with the pine of the forest that pressed in on them from all sides. Danil got a flash of what it would be like to peel that jacket off of her like an orange. He wanted to taste her fruit.
“So it’s Danil, huh?” she asked him as she struggled to keep up with his quick pace as he basically dragged her to her car.
“Da,” he replied. “My real name. The men at work call me Dan.”
“I prefer Danil,” she told him as he paused at the driver’s door to her car.
“I don’t care,” he replied.
She cocked her head to one side and leaned up against her car like she hadn’t a care in the world. “You don’t like me much, do you, Danil?”
“I do not care one way or another,” he said, inwardly kicking himself as he heard his accent grow a little thicker. It only did that when he was agitated. But she was just so damn exquisite, standing there in the azure twilight. Her cheekbones were two stunning slashes and her hair fell across her forehead in a jagged chop that highlighted her huge, round eyes.
“I think you do, Danil,” she said, her eyes narrowing a tiny bit. “I think my question just struck a nerve. And I think you care very much.”
Shit. She was right. He’d given away his hand in his urgency to get her out of there. He cursed himself. He needed to throw her off the scent. She was smart. Annoyingly smart. How to make her stupid?
There was one way that he knew how. And it worked every time.
“It wasn’t your question that struck a nerve,” he said, shifting his weight infinitesimally into her space. Her eyes tracked the movement. “It was this face.” He intentionally raised a hand like he was going to stroke her cheek but dropped his hand. She tracked that movement as well. “These eyes. Your legs. I find that they’re striking all my nerves.”
It was a calculated move. He’d meant to discombobulate her, confuse her, get her thinking in circles. But when her pink little lips fell open and the tiniest flash of arousal zipped through her eyes, it was the first honest expression her face had made since he’d met her. And Danil realized that he was as disoriented as he’d meant to make her.
Suddenly he was completely in her space. His hands on the hood of her car on either side of her curvy little body. He could feel the heat her skin was kicking off, he could scent it in the air. Her eyes had fallen to his lips and she wetted her own.
It was just the tiniest little glimpse of her delicate tongue, but Danil felt it like a punch to the solar plexus. He leaned down, their lips both tasting the air between them. Her warmth caressing over him, just a breath away.
“Oh, crap. Sorry, Danil,” a voice said behind them which had Danil straightening up and turning. It was AJ, a family friend who lived a few blocks away. She was 25 years old and like a sister to them. They’d known her since they’d moved here ten years ago. And right now she was looking more uncomfortable than he’d ever seen her. Pink in the cheeks.
“That’s alright, AJ,” he told her in the characteristic sweetness that they all used with her. “Dora was just leaving anyways.”
Before he could turn back to her, get lost in that moment again, Danil reached behind Dora without looking, and opened her car door.
“Oh, okay,” AJ said, obviously still very uncomfortable. “Well, nice to meet you, sort of. I’m just gonna go inside and die now.”
AJ scampered up the front walk and only then did Danil turn back to Dora. She’d obviously regained any composure she may have lost a few moments before.
“Apparently I’m leaving,” she said to Danil, one eyebrow raised.
“Goodbye,” he said, without any more explanation. He stepped back from the car.
“Hmm,” she said to him, her eyes giving him the full up and down as if she were still trying to figure him out.
Right when he thought she was going to slip into her car and drive away, she leaned over the top of the door. The light from his mother’s porch dusted her skin gold. “You hang out at the northwest precinct a lot, Danil?”
His eyes searched hers. “Why?”
“I just want to know where I can find you,” she said, a little half-smile on her face. And then she ducked down, started the car, and reversed away.
Danil refused to watch her taillights disappear into the night. His heart was stupidly clenched, his skin was too tight and he was literally about to scream. The night called to him and he could smell his brothers on the air.
He skirted around the side of the house, pulling off his shirt and belt as he walked. He spotted the pile of his brothers’ clothes on the back porch and he added his. And then he was running, first as a man, on two legs. And then Danil stretched his arms out before him and they just kept stretching. And he tumbled forward, running on four legs as fur sprouted over his skin. His haunches bunched and expanded, his head grew three times its size and his teeth severed the air as he gave an appreciative huff.
Danil lumbered through the woods, quickly leaving the sparse trees behind and following his brothers’ path up the mountain. He could follow their scent easily, but when they were in bear form, he could also hear their voices in his head, as if they were calling out to him.
With a last, galloping run, Danil burst into a familiar clearing, where they often met after they’d shifted. And there they were, his three brothers.
“Did you kiss her?” Maxim asked. His humongous bear was larger than the other three and a light, honey brown. He wasn’t the most vicious fighter, but his weight and creativity made him a formidable opponent.
“Of course not,” Danil snapped.
“Why of course not?” Emin asked. His bear was smaller and darker, and he was the fastest and had the keenest senses of the brothers. “She was a beautiful woman. Why wouldn’t you kiss her?”
“Because you heard her,” Danil said, his patience thin after the almost-kiss with Dora. Not even the running or the shifting had taken that edge off. “She was asking about Anton.”
Anton stood in the shadows. His bear was almost identical to Danil’s. Chestnut brown and big, they were both vicious fighters, ruthless. Except Anton had a series of scars across his back, and a thatch of bone-white fur down one side. They didn’t like to talk about how he’d come by those features. And now there was this woman, come into their lives and stirring it up.
“So what,” Maxim said, sniffing at a tree. “She can ask questions about the white bear all she wants, it’s not like she knows that it’s Anton.”
“Of course she’s not assuming we’re bear shifters,” Danil said, frustrated. “But I don’t like it. I met her for the first time down at the precinct today. She’d been arrested for trespassing for the second time in two days. And now she comes here, happening to ask about Anton? That’s suspicious to me.”
Anton was quiet in the underbrush. He was as still as a statue, absorbing the refreshing, wild calm of being in bear form. He hated when his brothers worried about him.
Emin looked up at the sky, noting the arc of the moon through the clouds. “We should get back. We’re gone too long, and Mama will worry.”
The brothers agreed with him, though none of them wanted to shift back to their human forms on such a beautiful night. Danil knew that Emin and
Anton shifted any chance they could, and were often alone in the woods. But Danil and Maxim typically only shifted once a week at Sunday dinners, when they were all together. He cherished that time.
But they didn’t want their mother to worry, so they lumbered back down the mountain. Sometimes chasing and racing. Sometimes pausing to scent something in the wind. For animals of their tremendous size, they moved as quietly as cats through the pines.
They shifted back at the edge of the tree line, under the cover of the shadows. There weren’t any other houses for a few miles in any direction, but just in case, they wanted a little privacy. Although none of them had any problem walking naked back across the lawn, laughing and shoving and snickering.
They pulled on their clothes on the back porch. Anton froze, sniffing the air.
“AJ is here?” he asked in Belarusian.
“Yeah,” Danil replied, remembering her entrance in vivid detail. How Dora had looked in the tense, pulsing seconds before AJ had interrupted them.
Anton whipped his shirt on. “She walked here alone in the middle of the night?”
“It’s 9:30 on Sunday night,” Emin said, raising an eyebrow at his brother. They were all protective of AJ but none more than Anton.
Ten years ago, Anton, in his bear form, had been the one who’d found AJ in the woods, about to be attacked by a mountain lion. Unsure of what to do after he’d scared off the cat, Anton had brought her home to his mother. And AJ had been like a sister to them ever since. She was the only human in their lives who knew they were bear shifters. But her dramatic entrance into his life had always made Anton sensitive about choices she made.
“Yes, but she’d have had to cut through Shear Woods.” Foregoing his shoes, Anton stalked in through the back door of his house, obviously off to give AJ a piece of his mind about walking in the dark though the woods.
Maxim tugged on his own shirt and shook his hair out of his eyes. “He’s too hard on her.” He hurried after Anton to soften whatever harsh words were sure to be thrown AJ’s way.
