by Holley Trent
Her jaw grated, cheek twitched, and nostrils flared.
He had a good nose, because he was both bear and man, so he smelled her adrenaline spike and knew to move out of the way of her fist.
He moved around her, grabbed her by the waist, and carried her to the pullout sofa beneath the windows opposite to the table.
He dropped her onto the cushions and pinned her arms behind her back.
Growling like a bear herself, she writhed under his hold and tried to kick out at him.
He straddled her legs and pinned her, chuckling as he did it. She was no match for him. “I’m stronger now, Shrew. You might be a stiff opponent for most made-Bears, but unfortunately, you can’t beat me.”
“Get off me, Eric.”
“Are you going to listen?”
“No.”
“Then neither am I.” Said through his teeth, his words came out snarly—growled, even—and when Maria’s eyebrow jumped up and her eye widened with shock, he knew it was the bear inside him talking.
The bear was pissed. The woman didn’t know how to take care of herself, and she was being too stubborn to let anyone else step in and do the job. The bear wanted to take away her right to choose. Eric didn’t like that idea. He also didn’t like that the bear was wondering if she were fertile.
We could find out, that feral beast seemed to be saying.
Nope. Don’t care if she is, the man part of Eric rebutted.
I do.
Nope.
Tightening his grip on her wrists, he growled through his clenched teeth and put his lips to her ear. “Act like you know what’s best for you. You’re agitating my inner bear.”
She wiggled her ass against his swelling erection and chuckled. “Yeah. He’s agitated, all right. But that’s okay. If he wants a ride”—she wiggled again, the brat—“he can have one.”
“I’m not fucking you. We’re not doing that anymore.”
“Sure we’re not. We’ll see how long that lasts.”
His inner bear chuckled. Not long at all seemed to be his opinion. The part of Eric that was just man knew it was folly to disagree.
CHAPTER FIVE
Maria felt the slightest bit guilty for antagonizing Eric the way she was, but the asshole deserved it for poking at her. If he’d just left her alone, she wouldn’t have been so angry, but no. He wanted to go and pick at things and try to make her talk.
Two could play at the game. She was going to make him do things he didn’t really want to do, either. He was hard and pissed—a delightful combination as far as her needs were concerned—and if that cranky inner bear of his was becoming more influential in his thoughts, Eric’s urges were going to become baser. He was going to be worried about getting needs met and not with so much fucking talking.
She wriggled against him again, pressing her swollen sex against his erection and savoring the delicious friction from his jeans.
“I told you we’re not doing that. Get it out of your head,” he said.
“If we’re not going to, then get off me. We have driving to do.”
“I’ll get off you when you promise to listen.”
“When I promise to talk, you mean.”
“Believe it or not, they’re two sides of the same coin. You used to work in CPS, so you should know that. Have you forgotten those lessons already?”
“Ugh! You—” She threw all of her strength into trying to push up onto all fours, but he’d been right. He was stronger than he had been months ago, and his mass was more substantial. He was the same size he always was, more or less, but much, much heavier.
He sat up, still holding her wrists, and freed one hand to stroke the back of her neck. “What about me?”
Her shoulders bowed against the gentle, ticklish sensation and she kicked her feet hoping to dislodge him. “Stop touching me!”
“You mean stop touching you like this.” He trailed his fingers along the side of her neck and down her arm, swirling the tips over her bicep and elbow, tickling her elbow and gliding past the tender underside of her wrist.
She squirmed, heart rate up in the stratosphere and muscles coiled and ready for her to run, if she could.
Run, oh God, run.
She couldn’t, though. She couldn’t get him off. “Eric, stop—”
He caressed the palm of her left hand.
She couldn’t pull it away, but she could make a fist, so she did, and also with the other hand.
“I could just roll you over,” he said. “Tie your hands up and keep them behind you so I can drive you nuts touching whatever I want. And that’s all you’re gonna get from me.”
“Go away.”
“No. Not until you tell me some things.”
At the moment, she’d tell him anything if doing so would get him off her back. She needed space. She needed to think and meditate and try to push all the nasty thoughts away if he wasn’t going to help her.
“What do you want, Eric?”
“I want to know what had you standing frozen inside the gas station.”
She groaned. “A news report.”
“About what?”
“A child taken by protective services.”
“What specific thing about the incident bothered you so much?”
“He…I saw…” She choked back a sob. “Please get off me.”
Surprisingly, he did. He freed her wrists and stood.
She sat up, glowering at him as she rubbed her sore flesh, and stunned by the dark glint in his eyes.
Is that man or bear? Who am I talking to right now?
Likely both. She wished she’d paid more attention when Tamara talked about Were-bear things. Maria had always tuned out, having so many other pressing considerations to devote her mental energy to.
This is what happens when you don’t study for the test.
She hadn’t even known what it really meant to study until college. Going from the unstructured “unschooling” environment her mother had raised her in to a rigorous tier one academic institution had nearly broken her spirit when she was eighteen. She’d dropped out a semester in, and hated that she’d failed at something she’d wanted so badly. The degree she’d gotten from an online institution had since become discredited when government controllers closed the school.
She dragged her tongue across her dry lips, thinking. I could try again, now that I’m older…
Now that she’d been around people and had lived with routines.
Eric pressed his hands to her cheeks and tipped her head up to him. “What are you thinking about, Maria? I just asked you three different questions.”
She furrowed her brow. “You did? I didn’t hear you.”
“Are you trying to think up lies to tell me? It was a simple question. I just want to know what you saw on the television.”
“Uh…” She gave her head a small shake and looped her fingers around her wrist. “I…wasn’t thinking about that. I was thinking about being eighteen.”
“Why?”
“My mind ran away from me. I was thinking about college and how I didn’t finish because I couldn’t adjust. I hate her for making me so—” She clamped her lips on the words and closed her eyes.
What were we even talking about?
She felt the sofa cushion move beside her, and for a minute of two, he just sat there, his knee touching hers, and him saying no words.
Curious, she tapped into his aura for a little taste—a useful skill if she could ever remember to use it when she was upset and not just at stupid times when it didn’t matter. His mood was hard to make out. It was muddled and not quite all him.
The bear.
If she’d spent more time around Bryan and the others, she might have been more familiar with how to process the nuances in their moods and the pulses in the auras. Eric seemed half confused and half angry.
She opened her eyes and looked at him, needing a visual cue to help understand the mental one.
He was staring at the table with his fore
arms draped over his thighs and his brow furrowed. His lips were set in a tight line and jaw clenched. One knee bobbed up and down. Up and down.
No, not angry. Impatient. Why impatient?
“You could always go back,” he said quietly.
Oh. She shrugged. “I want to, just to prove to myself that I could. It wouldn’t be easy. I’m still not so great with schedules and with there being right and wrong answers to things, but those are important lessons to learn. I wish I’d learned them earlier.”
“Did you talk to Dana? She would have helped you. She goes out of her way to help all of you.”
Maria shrugged yet again and pulled in a bracing breath at the mention of Dana’s name. That name always evoked a feeling of unquenchable guilt in Maria. The woman had done so much for her.
During the point of the Shrew study when Maria’s health had started spiraling quickly downward, Dana had been there to monitor her. She’d been present at the hospital a few times when Maria was in and out of comas. Dana was there when Maria’s body finally gave up on killing her and decided that if she were going to stick around, she’d be different than she was before. “Better” than she was before.
And that transformation had hurt like nothing else Maria had ever experienced. There was no drug that could touch the pain, and no doctor who could tell her what was happening to her.
Dana came by, though. Her face was a memory in Maria’s thoughts, even if she couldn’t remember Dana saying anything in all those days.
Later, when Maria was in rehab learning how to make her body obey simple requests like bring fork to mouth, Dana was there, too. Dana had sat across from her in the cafeteria or been waiting in Maria’s room for her when she got wheeled back to her room. Maria would always be crying from physical therapy sessions that hurt so bad that Maria wished she’d gone ahead and died in the hospital.
She’d thought Dana worked there for a long while, but it’d turned out that she’d once been a patient. She’d been one of the first women in the drug trial, and when her side effects and those of the other women in her cohort started, it was already too late to stop them from giving it to the women in the next phase.
Dana was the only one from her cohort to survive. There were more from Maria’s cohort, and Maria wondered now if it was because Dana had been there. An angel in the hospital doorway, who always seemed to show up on the days when Maria was angry that she’d woken up at all.
“Dana does too much for me already,” Maria said finally. “I should do something for her for a change.”
“You could be happy and successful. That would be a big thing for her. She wouldn’t want to think you’re standing still in life because you’re afraid to move on to the next big thing.”
“I’m not afraid.”
“But aren’t you? Something’s holding you back and you don’t want to let go of it, because if you do, you’ll be unstoppable, won’t you? What is it that you won’t let go of?”
She wrung her hands.
“Tell me.”
She shook her head hard. Not going there.
“Okay. Fair enough. But you still need to tell me something.”
She leaned against the backrest and rubbed her eyes. “What, Eric?”
“The television. What was on it?”
Sighing, she dropped her hands and met his concerned gaze. Stop looking at me like that. “Last night when we were parked outside the pharmacy, there was a disruption a few shops over. A man with a child. He was being rough with the boy, and I was getting angry because I couldn’t interfere. I constantly struggle with these sorts of scenarios, because if I interfere, I would risk exposing myself as…” She turned her hands over and shrugged. “This thing I am.” This monster. “Fortunately, that manager intervened. The police showed up, and I didn’t get out of the car. The news report was about the man. When the police took him in and ran his fingerprints, they found a bunch of outstanding warrants on him for domestic abuse in three different states. The kid wasn’t even his. The boy belonged to his meal ticket, I guess, but they likely won’t return him to his mother’s home anytime soon.”
Eric grimaced. “I imagine you saw a lot of cases like that.”
“Too many. And the problem with being a bleeding heart liberal nightmare, as you so often call me”—he rolled his eyes at her—“is that I want to do good work, but I can’t always let go of the bad stuff.”
“You carry it around.”
“I’m good at compartmentalizing, but I can’t shove that to the back of my mind the way Astrid can. She’s much better at it.”
“You pretend well.”
“Because I had to learn to look happy when I was a kid even if I wasn’t. If I didn’t, my mother would make me do hours of yoga and meditation. She always had me doing things, when sometimes, I just wanted to do nothing. To read a book that I chose or to just…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Be normal and go to a sleepover or something. And I don’t know why I’m telling you this.”
“Because you have to,” he said without hesitation. “My grandmother used to say that thoughts are heavy to carry around, and that if you want to keep moving, sometimes you have to give some thoughts up by speaking them.”
“You and Astrid always manage to make your grandmother sound like some kind of saint.”
“I guess she was. She took us in after our parents died, right? Her love of cilantro aside, Mom-mom was a phenomenal woman.” He knelt in from front of Maria, and gave her knees gentle squeezes. “You’ve got to figure out better ways to decompress.”
“I don’t know how. I never learned to, and all of the ways I could think of right now would be either illegal or immoral.”
“Maybe you should get a hobby.”
Yeah, it’s just that simple. She rolled her eyes and gave Eric’s shoulders a hard shove, but he barely budged. Damn. “Get this thing moving, will you?”
“You’re not off the hook that easily.”
“I wouldn’t dare think that. You’re going to needle me to death, aren’t you?”
“No, I’m not going to needle you. I’m going to keep making you confront yourself. And trust me”—he stood and strode to the driver’s seat—“it’s not because I’m such a charitable person.”
“Then why are you doing it? What are you getting out of it?”
He didn’t answer. He put on his seatbelt and got the RV moving.
“Fine, don’t talk.” Hypocrite.
CHAPTER SIX
In northern Delaware, sometime around dawn, Eric backed the RV into a space at a superstore and did some mental time calculations. The kids’ school started at nine, and he and Maria were about two hours away. Their ideal pickup time, according to a sympathetic teacher inside the school, was right before lunch. There’d be enough chaos around the school during that time because of parent co-lunching that Maria could get in and out without suspicion. That gave them another two hours of wait time. He figured he should probably take advantage and grab a couple of hours of sleep.
Maria picked her head up from the window she’d fallen asleep against and rubbed her eyes. “Where are we?”
“Delaware.” He pulled down he shades and double-checked that the doors were locked. “We’ve got a few hours before we need to be onsite, and I need sleep.”
“I can’t believe you factored that into the equation.”
“Why, because Shrews don’t sleep?”
“I think we can go longer than most people without sleeping.”
“Yeah?” He walked to the sleeper sofa and pulled it into bed configuration. His back would remind him upon waking that, Were-bear or not, he was too old to sleep curled up in a ball, and he needed room to stretch his stiff muscles. Maria could take the bed in the back.
“Yes. So, if we can’t make the time, we don’t worry about it too much. When we’re on the clock, our schedules don’t allow for much beyond catch-as-catch-can. We get sleep whenever we have a few minutes here and there, and usually our bodies don�
�t rebel too much.”
“I don’t believe that. That can’t be true.” He heeled off his shoes and removed his shirt. It was going to be hot in that tin can, and he didn’t want to turn the air on. He wouldn’t be able to sleep through the noise. That was one part of his newly improved hearing that he still hadn’t adjusted to. He opened the window nearest the sofa a sliver and hoped for a breeze.
Maria leaned against the little counter in the kitchenette and crossed her arms over her chest. “You think you know more than our own doctor does?”
He scoffed and unfastened his jeans.
Her gaze tracked down his body as he stepped out of his pants, her eyebrows raised in apparent surprise.
“What?” he asked.
“As far as I knew, you still wore underwear. I didn’t think you’d become one of those shifters who let it all hang.”
“Makes sense not to wear them when I might have to shift. I’ll probably change into some bummy clothes before we get to the school just in case. If I can’t retrieve the clothes I take off, I’d prefer them to not be my good stuff. And if I do shift”—he crawled onto the bed and pulled the single sheet over his body—“you’re going to have to drag my ass back here, so let’s pray it doesn’t come to that.”
She pinched the bridge of her nose and groaned. “That’s right. You’re a made-Bear.”
He grunted and set the alarm on his phone. “If I force a shift to my bear form and then back to my human shape, I’m not going to recover immediately.”
“Unlike Bryan and the Ursus.”
“Right. I’m pretty sure that if Bryan were passed out, though, Tamara would be able to carry him, even if she is does have the stature of some kind of cranky Romanian elf.”
“She’s the strongest of the five of us.”
“Well, she’s a Bear, even if she doesn’t have her brothers’ ability to freely shift. So, don’t go into this situation thinking that you can do what she can do. You’re not built the same way. Speaking of the situation, we’ve got to figure out now what our contingencies are.” He hit the reading light behind the sofa and burrowed down to get comfortable.
“You sound like Astrid. She’s more of a planner, whereas the rest of us tend to rely on the wait and see method more often than not.”
