Other than that, he couldn’t think of any danger. There was Michelle, who hadn’t seemed overly pleased about being dumped. It was unfortunate and all, but they had only gone on a few dates. He wouldn’t even classify it as a relationship.
“You never know,” Lydia said darkly. She looked up at him with big, worried eyes and he kissed her forehead.
Everything felt completely unresolved and yet, for the moment, he was just glad she was here. Naked in his arms was nice. He would’ve been happy if she was clothed and yelling at him. Only now, with Lydia again in his life had he realized how much he’d truly missed her. It was as if he was getting a major organ back. He felt like he could breathe again.
“I’ll talk about one thing,” Lydia said. She had a funny little smile on her face and her eyes were merry and teasing.
“What’s that?” His lips curved up as a smile snuck up on him out of anticipation.
“I’ll talk about how you used to be afraid of bees,” Lydia said this very seriously but when Eric sputtered and then groaned, slumping against her, she giggled. Her breasts shook under his cheek as she laughed and it felt like the kind of familiar and incredibly intimate moment that happened all the time between real couples.
The desperate urge to keep her here always just for this throbbed within him, but all he said was, “You’ll never let me live that down. I was a kid!”
“I was a kid too,” Lydia said lightly. She tangled her fingers in his hair, still a little damp from both sweat and product. But it felt good as she scratched his scalp and he rested his head on her chest. “I was a kid and I wasn’t afraid of bees.”
“I wasn’t afraid of bees as a human,” Eric murmured. He found her other hand and played with it. “I was only afraid as a bear. Because they kept stinging my nose when I was just a cub.”
“That’s because you always went after the beehives looking for honey, you doofus.”
“I like honey,” he whispered.
He imagined licking honey off of Lydia’s body and his cock twitched in interest.
“That’s why I used to call you Winnie.” She giggled, and though she had laughed several times since she’d come back, this was the first time she sounded just like her younger self.
But he liked this older Lydia too. This Lydia was less innocent and probably a little sadder. But she was smarter and she seemed braver and stronger even if she wasn’t quite as easy with a smile. They were all beautiful Lydias to him.
“Like Winnie the Pooh,” Eric whispered.
“Yes.” She kissed his hair and he closed his eyes, almost unable to bear looking at her again, he was so overcome with feeling for her.
Sometimes, he deliberately tried not to remember everything when he thought of her.
It could be overwhelming.
Suddenly, at the memory of that playful giggle, he was thirteen years-old and sneaking her into the house. He had grown up in a mansion on the outskirts of Elkswood, Oregon. They’d been surrounded by what Eric considered to be the most beautiful woods in the world. He loved Black Bear Lake and considered it his home now, but Elkswood would always hold a special place in his heart.
It wasn’t that he wasn’t allowed to be friends with somebody like Lydia. It was that his parents would keep talking about his position as an important shifter in the shifter community. They always managed to say things without really saying them. It was a trait that had always exhausted Eric. He’d been more than happy to follow new opportunities to Colorado with his brothers and get out from under his parents’ oppressive control.
But, every once in a while, his mother had come right out and let her true feelings be known.
“That girl’s sleuth is trash.”
“In the old days, they would have been our servants.”
“They can’t even assimilate. They don’t live like shifters, they live like animals.”
Lydia’s sleuth was known for causing trouble around Elkswood. In human form, they lived in rusted out shacks deep in the mountains and as bears they ran rampant. They were wild and uncaring about the human rules of law and convention that other shifters learned how to navigate. They rooted through trash and stole and got into fights. It had been an especially large sleuth too.
As bear sleuths could be any size group of multiple bears, Connor was the alpha of his own sleuth of Strauss brothers, though there were only four of them. Their parents’ sleuth had been larger, numbering in the tens, all aristocratic bears of Elkswood. But there had been a hundred bears in Lydia’s sleuth. And their numbers gave them power. There had existed, at best, a shaky truce between that sleuth and the Strauss’s. So Eric’s parents hadn’t been exactly thrilled that their youngest son was hanging out with one of those wild girls from up the mountain.
At the time, it had all served to excite Eric. Lydia was a wild girl yet she was sweet and always happy to play games with him when they were kids and, later, happy to sneak off with him to go looking for trouble or to drink the high end booze he stole from his parents’ liquor cabinet before they went on a run.
The bulk of his childhood involved Lydia.
Then one day, when they were eighteen, he’d told her how he felt - that she was more than his best friend. She was maybe his mate. She’d left the next day without a trace.
But they weren’t going to talk about that now.
“What are you thinking about?” Lydia said, as memories of their long past swam in his head.
“Nothing,” Eric murmured and kissed her shoulder again.
This is just sex, Eric told himself as he dressed in his clothes again, having finally left Lydia’s bed.
As much as he would have liked to stay there all day, he had guests to assist. He could already think of four impending requests for VIP concert tickets that were going to take some doing.
“You’ll be here for a while longer, right?” He raised an eyebrow at her as he tied his tie.
Lydia was standing naked in the living room and she looked away, ducking down to grab her robe off the floor, dressing in it quickly and cinching it tight. He couldn’t read her expression.
“Um,” she shrugged. Her dark hair was a mess, tousled and falling over one eye. It made her look even sexier and he sighed as he pulled on his jacket. “I don’t know. I know you can’t hold the room forever-”
“Don’t worry about the room,” he swallowed, fighting the urge to show his entire hand. “Stay a while. We’ll catch up. Maybe even talk about...ya know.”
She chuckled at that, “I doubt it.”
“Well…” He chewed his lip and approached her, reaching up to feel that silky hair between his fingers again. “You have to stay and guard me, right? Make sure I’m safe.”
“You’re not taking this seriously,” she said, rolling her eyes.
Eric snorted at that and looked around for his shoes, letting go of Lydia to collect them, as well as his socks. He wasn’t looking at her when he said, “If it gets me sex that hot, I’ll believe anything.”
She was different when he looked up at her again and he pretended she wasn’t.
I heard her thoughts, he told himself. It should mean something.
But all he could picture as he combed his hair before leaving her alone in her bathrobe, was Lydia leaving him again and this time, maybe she’d never come back.
A guy had to protect his heart after all.
10
Eric
I heard her thoughts.
It was hard to think about much else when he went back to work, still feeling Lydia’s kisses on his skin. It had been, by far, the best sex of his life. He’d had plenty of decent sex. But this...this had been something else. For a second there, he had thought the two of them were about to ascend to some other plane of existence. And yet, the thought that Lydia wasn’t going to hurt him again seemed impossible.
“May I help you, ma’am?” Eric smiled in his solicitous way as the next guest stepped up to the front desk. She was a bear shifter out of California an
d she had the big blonde hair and sun kissed skin he saw from all the other bear shifters who came out of California.
“I was wondering if you knew about any good shows nearby?” The guest was… Eric racked his brain. He was good at remembering names, which sometimes meant the difference between repeat business and a lukewarm review online.
But he was so scattered over this Lydia business that his mind was drawing a blank.
“Shows,” he heaved a breath and blinked. This was easy. People asked him this all the time. There was nothing major in Black Bear Lake, but forty-five minutes away in two directions there were cities with good theater and symphony and sometimes dance. Black Bear Lake had dinner theater, some art galleries, and several festivals throughout the year.
Eric dutifully rambled off the spiel he had memorized, sounding a little shorter than he’d intended. He saw the guest’s smile waver. He sounded rude.
“Um, if you do decide to go out to Denver or Boulder I’ll be happy to find you excellent tickets for a reasonable price.” Eric took a deep breath and summed up an almost genuine smile. “Black Bear Lake also has escape rooms, wine and painting nights, and a few other fun events-”
“Let’s look at Denver!” the guest said, brightening up. “We have a driver.”
Eric complied, and he went about his business, feeling inexplicably agitated about the whole thing.
Lydia had really wormed her way into his head. And the worst part was, he didn’t want her to leave.
When the guest was gone, Connor came sidling up next to him. His older alpha brother had been in an unusually good mood lately. Eric suspected Connor was happy for Nathan who had found his mate and had a baby on the way. Connor liked the whole alpha uncle thing. Eric suspected he had already covertly bought some onesies and toys for the incoming cub and they didn’t even know what the sex was yet.
“What’s wrong with you?” Connor said. He was eating sunflower seeds. That alone was surprising, to say the least. Eric had never before seen Connor snacking in the lobby on anything other than peppermints. It had never happened once.
“Nothing,” Eric muttered.
“Have you locked Lydia down yet?’ Connor said.
“What do you mean, locked her down?” Eric snapped. He leaned on the counter, watching all the guests in their designer parkas and faux fur snow hats walking around. They all looked so happy.
It pissed him off a little.
“Well, we always kinda thought she might be your mate,” Connor said.
“Lydia left me,” Eric snapped.
He flushed and pursed his lips. He hadn’t meant to say it like that. He hadn’t been in a relationship with Lydia at the time, after all. All she’d really done was take off without letting her friend know where she went. It was rude, kind of a dick move. But she hadn’t abandoned a mate or a boyfriend.
“She’s here now,” Connor said.
“Haven’t you talked to Cody?” Eric said. He had to imagine that all the brothers were discussing this privately. “She only came because she thought I was in danger because of some weird nightmares. She cares about me, sure. But just as a friend. She came down here to make sure I was safe.”
Connor was laughing at him. He was cackling, his eyes bright and merry. He slapped Eric on the back and shook his head. “Bro, at the risk of being gross, I can smell the sex on you.” He said it quietly, glancing around to make sure nobody was hearing them. “You’re not fooling anyone. You just got down.”
Connor was hunched down, a bag of sunflower seeds resting on the counter in front of him. But he still looked huge, his broad shoulders bowed as he leaned on his trunk-like arms. He had taken off his suit jacket and rolled up his sleeves, looking slightly more relaxed even in his tie.
Yet he was still the big, hulking alpha. And worse, he was the oldest. As much as Eric sometimes hated being the baby of the family, he had always looked up to Connor. If there was advice or consolation to be had, he supposed he would take it.
Still, it was strange to Eric to talk to his brother about such personal things right there at the front desk. Bear shifters had great hearing, though he supposed nobody gave a shit about his sex life.
“Yeah?” Eric muttered. “So what? Just sex.”
“I doubt that,” Connor said. “If it was just sex you’d be in a much better mood. Cody said he told you to talk to her. Have you talked to her?”
“I was a dick and I apologized. One thing led to another…”
“That’s not what I’m talking about and you know it,” Connor said. He tossed seeds into his mouth, cracking them with his teeth and looking sort of funny as he separated the meat from the husk while he squinted at Eric. “You need to really talk. Clear the air. Find out exactly where you stand. I remember how you were when she left. You were a mess. Don’t wait till she leaves again.”
“I don’t want to hear whatever she’s going to say,” Eric mumbled.
“Ugh.” Connor punched him in the shoulder and because it was Connor, it actually hurt a little. “Man up.”
“Oh, c’mon! It’s not about that-”
“Talk to her or I’ll talk to her for you.” He gave Eric a wink and said, “That’s an order from your alpha.”
It was rare for Connor to actually pull rank. It always had to be something very important for Connor to insist. Eric nodded, “Alright, alright.”
“Good.”
11
James
James had decided he was both in love with and absolutely terrified of Michelle the first time he saw her blow out a light with a shot of magic. It had been in a bar and the light had been a cheap chandelier. She did it because she had been given the wrong drink by a bartender.
James had already been watching her from across the bar because she was beautiful. That she was a powerful witch on top of being a fellow shifter had been even more impressive (and rare). James had attached himself to her immediately. He considered himself incredibly lucky that she wasted time on him, even if he was devastatingly handsome by his own standards.
Life with Michelle was equal parts terrifying and exciting. If she really managed to take the Strauss brothers for all they were worth, that would just be a whole other level of exciting.
He liked when she gave him something to do and he always tried his hardest to do it well. He wanted her to think he was important.
There was also the fact that if he failed one too many times she would definitely kill him slowly and painfully. He had seen her kill men before. She’d disemboweled a guy with a spell once, before stealing the contents of his safe. And she’d only ended up getting a few thousand dollars out of it. Then she’d said she wished she’d done worse than disembowel him.
James didn’t want to know what was worse than a disemboweling.
Michelle was the most evil and powerful creature he’d ever met, much less heard of.
If nothing else, he wanted to see if she ever ended up taking over the world. And if she did, he damn sure wanted to be there.
So when she told him to keep an eye on Eric Strauss and his new girly, well, he wanted to do the best he could.
It was fun anyway.
He wore a dark suit and sunglasses and felt like a superspy hanging around the lobby as if waiting for someone to meet him. Eric was in absentia for a while and James broke away a couple times to grab a drink in the lounge. But in the late afternoon Eric showed up again, looking ruffled and smelling like sex.
Aha!
James was inordinately excited when he deduced that Eric Strauss had just had sex. He felt like a brilliant detective...even though it was all incredibly obvious when you were a shifter who could smell sex on other shifters. A lot of the guests smelled like sex. It was a strange thing to be able to sense about a stranger, but shifters were generally used to it.
James wished he had a hat because spies, he thought, should have hats. He also felt as if he should have a newspaper to hide behind instead of his phone, but it gave him something to look at
while he listened to Eric talk to his brother after helping a bunch of annoying customers.
The more Eric and Connor talked, the more James found himself smirking down at his phone. The conversation was incredibly revealing. He had to think Michelle would be pleased by it. Yes, Eric had some girl who had replaced Michelle but things weren’t going well there either. And she’d left him at some point. Surely, Michelle could exploit something juicy like that.
Once the conversation ended, James got to his feet. He had been sitting in a nice leather chair, far enough from the front desk that he certainly didn’t look like a man who would be eavesdropping.
But he still made a point of clucking his tongue and shaking his head as he looked down at his phone. He was definitely someone who had been about to meet someone and had been stood up instead. He was definitely not Michelle’s actual lover who was staying in her suite, off the books.
He felt like a stealthy genius as he made his way back to their room.
“Michelle!” He clapped his hands and laughed, tossing his shades on a side table. The bathroom light was on and he heard soft music. He found Michelle in the jacuzzi tub under a heap of bubbles, her hair piled up on her head as she sipped wine. “Have I got some news for you. This is good. This is very good.”
“Well?” Michelle snapped. “What is it? Get to the point.”
He was almost impressed at how impatient she could be even while sipping wine in a bubble bath.
“The girl Eric Strauss is seeing is named Lydia,” James reported. He sat on the edge of the tub and grabbed the still half-full bottle of wine, taking a swallow. “But it’s already imploding. His brother wanted Eric to talk to her. Sounds like some old bad blood. They definitely had sex but it didn’t end well. You totally have an in!”
Eric (Strauss Bear Shifter Brothers 0f Colorado Book 2) Page 6
