Bearly Hanging On (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 6)

by Red, Lynn

  A finger slipped inside her, curled deeply, and her knees went weak.

  Ryan dragged a deep breath through his nostrils, rolling his eyes back and shivering slightly. His breath grew ragged and hot, dripping from his lips in sweet gusts that prickled Jamie's nipples and sent a wash of goose bumps up her neck.

  He pushed deeper, rotating first the one, then a second, finger inside her.

  "I'm safe with you," she whispered as he slid his fingers along the spot at her front that made her shiver. It was almost a question, but wasn't. He smiled in response.

  "I am. I feel it, I feel like you aren't going to take me for granted and make me feel like nothing six months from now when you're done with the novelty of... of me."

  Ryan reclined and pulled Jamie into his lap. He nuzzled her chest with his whiskery, scruffy face, and kissed her again. The prickles of his stubble were more thrilling than painful, though they did tickle a little.

  "Even you giggling in the middle of me trying to be romantic," he said with a smile, "I doubt your 'novelty' is ever going to wear off."

  He lifted her effortlessly off him, and sat her back down so that his pubic bone ground against her clit with every breath he took. Those strong, clutching hands grabbed at her ass and he pushed his thumbs into the muscles of her hips, massaging away pain she didn't know she had.

  "Sorry," she said with a smirk. "I don't mean to, it's just the—"

  He stuck one of his fingertips into the tendon between her thigh and her sex, sending a spasm, then a jolt of involuntary laughter, bursting from her lips. She slapped at his chest. "You son of a bitch! How'd you know that was my tickle spot? And oh my God, I just said 'tickle spot.' I'm a baby."

  "You're the cutest, tallest, sexiest, smartest baby I've ever seen if you are," he said. His voice was aged gravel that could have made quotes from Monty Python skits sexy enough to drop her panties. "But I had a feeling that if you got that wiggly at some whiskers, you must have at least one other good one."

  She was blushing, and smiling, and laughing as the muscles between her legs stretched at Ryan's entering her. The thickness of him, the heat of his body moving inside hers, it would maybe have made a lesser woman scream. But Jamie? Jamie just giggled with pleasure - always the giggles.

  The hot flush running up her neck turned to a sweet ache when he pushed deeper, holding her in place and guiding her with his hands. She pitched forward as an entirely different sort of spasm clenched the muscles between her legs.

  "Don't you need a... you know?" she asked as they both breathed harder and faster. She felt Ryan’s pulsing heartbeat through the hand she had on his chest.

  "Condom?" he laughed. "You're dreaming. No matter how fertile either of us is, I think dream babies are a stretch."

  As though to prove it, he drove into her deep and hard, but so slowly that her toes curled in automatic response. "This isn't gonna take long, if you keep it up like this," she was sighing in between words, her head back and relaxed as her nerves flared and her muscles tightened.

  "Good," he whispered, sitting up and cupping her body against his before turning her over so that she was on her knees. "We don't have very long before you wake up."

  He was so deep, so painfully, wonderfully deep, that Jamie thought if this weren't a dream she might actually die of pleasure. And then he grabbed her hair.

  A fistful, done just the way that makes it thrill and please, but not hurt. He yanked, forcing her head backward as he pushed into her again and again. Jamie arched her back in response, and he lay against her, bare chest on bare back, their sweat mixing, and sucked a kiss behind her ear.

  Ryan pulled away, then drove forward again. She felt him shudder inside her, and before she knew it, Jamie was letting out the tiny, gasped breaths that signal one hell of an orgasm.

  When she opened her eyes, the darkness in her room was complete. The blackout curtains she used did their job very well, even though it was somewhere around noon. In the cool stillness of her bedroom, the only thing she could hear was her breathing as her heart pounded in her chest. She flopped one of her hands sideways onto the mattress, in the silly, vain hope that it would land on a bear.

  Sweat ran down her back, down her face, pooling slightly in the hollow of her throat. She let out a loud groan, a dry laugh.

  I'm going to go nuts, she thought. I have to see him. I have to do... something. I don't even know what I need to do, but if this keeps on, I'm going to be certifiably bat-shit crazy.

  She always liked that term, though it never did make much sense. Bats, at least all the ones she knew, were practical, almost to a fault. Showing emotion wasn't their best trait, but frugality, logic and reason? Sometimes she had a hard time telling her dad from an android, she remembered with a laugh.

  The memory of her fantasy was still lingering in her nose and on her sticky-wet fingers. She could still taste his kisses, still feel the way his tongue slid around her nipples, teasing them to life. But then, that's all it was. Just a fantasy.

  He was a real man, with real problems; she a real woman with a whole host of her own. How in the world could they get past reality? Did they even need to? Maybe the better question is why was her first thought was about avoiding reality instead of figuring out how to make it work.

  She laughed softly as she pulled on a pair of jeans and a thigh-length tunic that fit snugly - when you fly around all the time, snug fits keep embarrassing situations to a minimum - and brushed her teeth. I should go see Thor again - best dentist... hell, the only dentist I've ever been to who wasn't bothered about the fluoride application making my teeth get bigger.

  As she went about the morning rituals of dressing, hair pinning, and wing maintenance, she listened to the soft drone of a morning talk show on Jamesburg's single news station. Mostly it was the normal day to day drone of uninteresting small-town news, but something caught her attention.

  "This just in, reports are coming from Whit Whitman of News Channel 3 that all of the local grocery stores - that is, both of them - were burglarized during the night."

  "Oh shit," Jamie swore, cheeks burning.

  Whit Whitman was the literal silver fox who had delivered the news in Jamesburg for as long as anyone who hadn't gone insane from extreme age remembered. He was as sleazy as they came, he was a womanizer, and his hair was so perfectly sculpted that it wouldn't move even in gale force winds. That last part had been proven plenty of times when he stood outside in some kind of tempest, his suit lapels whipping all over the place, garbage flying through the air, people fighting to keep on their feet, but his hair defiantly stood, stock still, giving the middle finger to wind gusts and rain alike.

  But damn did he ever have a smooth voice. To Jamie’s ears, the old newsman seemed like James Earl Jones mixed with Ted Baxter from The Mary Tyler Moore Show mixed with one of those really loud TV pitchmen who always seemed to be shouting at someone.

  When the radio host patched through to Whitman's report, his words read like the script from a heist movie. The only thing missing was the hiss of a radio, and a montage set to tense music.

  "The Jamesburg police are reporting this morning that upon opening, employees of both Fresh Land and Earth Market grocery stores alerted them to what appeared to be large scale burglaries. At Earth Market, the entire meat section was found completely empty, and the wine and beer was largely picked over, although many domestic cans are still available, so don't panic."

  Jamie had to laugh at that one. In the midst of a news story, Whit Whitman had to make sure everyone knew there was still Bud Light on the shelves.

  "At Fresh Land, it seems that," he turned and mumbled to someone off the mic. "Apparently a vast quantity of creamed corn, creamed spinach, and packaged macaroni and cheese were taken. Along with approximately eight crates of corn tortillas, and all of the salsa and cheese."

  Whit laughed. "It's funny," he said. "Of all the things to steal from the grocery store, why take all that? Unless you were going to have one heckuva Mexi
can food party. With a lot of creamed corn. You know, Jamesburg, creamed corn was one of Mama Whitman's favorites, but I never agreed with it. I don't like the gloppy, cloying sweetness."

  Somehow, every word the ancient newscaster said was so laden with gravitas and importance that he might well have been announcing the start of a war, or some kind of invasion instead of expounding on his distaste for creamed corn.

  "Oh, yes, right, I was also going to say that it's funny for a place called Fresh Land to be robbed of a lot of starch-filled processed foods. Kind of ironic, isn't it?"

  Jamie could almost see Whit Whitman's self-satisfied grin. It reminded her of someone else she knew. Or, okay, a whole lot of them. Humility wasn't exactly a hot commodity among wolf and bear populations. She tuned out the rest of Whitman's talking because she already knew everything he was going to say.

  There were no suspects, although security cameras caught poorly-focused images of a very large man wearing absolutely nothing, wandering through the aisles. He went to enough caution that his method of product removal wasn't caught on camera, but Jamie figured he must have had either help or some contraption like his sled thing, if he'd managed to get that much stuff. Past that though, it was a mystery.

  Jamie felt a slight pang in her stomach, but knew it wasn't hunger. At least not hunger for food. Hunger for the big, gruff, muscled up bear of her dreams? As good as it felt to wrap her legs around him right before she knocked him out, it'd feel a thousand times better if he were facing her, kissing her, pushing his...

  She shook her head and opened her window. She never left through the door - this just felt more natural. As badly as she wanted her bear, she also knew that something had to be done to stop him. If it didn't, he was going to get caught eventually, and if nothing else, Erik Danniken wasn't a big fan of bald-faced threats. Even in a place where Petunia Lewis had been given a commuted sentence and a few months community service for attacking the town's carrot supply, open threats were a good way to make sure you spent a good, long time pondering the inside of a cell.

  Jamie sighed. Why can't anything just be simple? Simple boyfriend, simple life, simple problems?

  But, there was no point to the moping. There never was, not even in the darkest times. Not even when she'd lost pretty much everything over the course of a single month. If nothing else, she was tenacious, and she clung to hope like Whit Whitman to his gallon-sized pump can of Aqua-net.

  The gray of an overcast, fall morning was impenetrably deep. There was just the slightest mist in the air that was cool and refreshing on her face. The higher up she went, it might be heavier, or it might be ice, it was hard to tell at this time of year.

  But the sky, she thought with a laugh, the sky's not the only thing holding some moisture around Jamesburg today. Just thinking that made her sigh again, partially at her own ridiculousness, and partially at how she was walking... flying, headlong into trouble. Then again, it might be nothing.

  He may turn out to be nothing more than some kind of fantasy that's better left that way. She'd certainly had enough experience with that to know it was a definite possibility.

  Something about him is just different though, she thought, swinging her legs out over her third story windowsill.

  It wasn't that her house was particularly huge - it was a small, circa 1930s place with enough work that needed doing to keep her weekends full - but she had converted the attic into a bedroom. Seemed right, somehow.

  Either he's different, or I'm just a horny idiot, Jamie thought, snickering slightly. But it doesn't matter. I've gotta figure it out, whatever it is. And if there are people needing help, I've got to at least try to help them.

  Taking a big, deep breath, the scent of fir trees and the clean, crisp smell of winter just around the corner filled Jamie's nose. She loved this time of year for the same reason she loved twilight and dusk.

  For whatever reason, the times between the other times - where daylight and nighttime mingled, or where summer gave way to winter - those were her favorite times. As her wings flexed and took the air, she thought that maybe, just maybe, there was something to that too.

  *

  Jamie's swooping took her up, then down, up and then down again, along the drifts of wind, and almost to the ground. She skimmed along lakes, rivers, and the tops of Jamesburg's famous Douglas firs, and then finally saw what she thought Ryan had talked about during his fevered, vampire-bitten rambling before she left him in West and Elena's care.

  In an attempt to figure out what was going on, Jamie asked him where he lived, thinking that would give her a clue, but the directions were so jumbled and odd that it took a few days of mulling it over before she was able to make enough sense of them to follow. But, when she finally did, what she saw was a mixture of completely unsurprising, and still unsettling.

  How could something like this go completely unnoticed for so long?

  A bunch of houses, most of them hand-built, and all of them made with a mixture of love and desperation.

  "Jamesburg's forgotten," she said sadly. "So forgotten, that only a handful of people in town know they exist. Ryan's their saint, I guess, because without him, who knows how long ago they would have died."

  Still, she couldn't fathom that the guy she was almost nightly fantasizing about was also a cow thief, and also knocked over a couple of grocery stores in the middle of the night. No one was hurt - as rough and tumble as he might act, he wasn't going to hurt anyone, but damn had he stolen a lot of cans of creamed corn.

  Okay - alleged to have done all those things. Someone knocked over the town’s biggest grocery stores, stealing canned goods and apparently sacks of dog food and birdseed by the ton, and there was nothing to go on. Not a shred of evidence, not a hint of hide nor fur.

  But Jamie thought it might be worth it to finally go and visit this bear who kept haunting her dreams.

  She knew she had to do something before he went too far. But as she circled the deep forest compound, it became very obvious to Jamie that he wasn't making any of it up. There were a lot of forgotten people out here, and most of them were trying their best to cut wood or tan hides, or anything they could.

  Jamie watched one very old man - she could tell by his crooked gait and slumped back - finish up a row of some sort of planting. He was chewing a stick that looked a bit like bamboo, but from her height she couldn't be sure. Even so, from all the way up there, and from all her speed, she knew Ryan was right. His methods might be wrong, but... then again, what else was he supposed to do?

  Is that him? Jamie circled slowly around someone hacking away at a pile of logs about half the size of himself. Pick one up, lay it on a stump, whack it with a big wedge, rinse and repeat. He's even good looking when he chops wood.

  It was him all right - Ryan was shirtless, covered in a thin sheen of sweat from his work. The hair on his forearms and his chest was thick, but not out of control. The slopes of his shoulders were defined by big trapezius muscles that flexed every time he raised the maul and exploded with each impact. She stopped the circling and bobbed up and down, about fifty feet off the ground, behind him.

  "I know you're back there," he called out. "You make a shadow that's fairly unique."

  Jamie felt herself blush - and she was not, in any way, a blusher. She settled to the ground, then tucked her wings back behind herself, and crossed her arms behind her back. Slowly, almost cautiously, like either a tentative lover, or someone who wasn't entirely sure how the person they'd just drugged was going to react.

  Six of one, half a dozen raged-out bears of another, Jamie thought, still walking slowly toward Ryan.

  "What are you doing?" he asked. "It isn't like I'm going to, I dunno, drop out of the sky and bite you on the neck."

  There was a laugh after he spoke, though Jamie couldn't decide whether it was bitter or genuine. "Sorry about that," she said. "I just... I didn't want you to end up doing something you were going to regret."

  His arms froze at the apex of the next
swing. Muscles were all taut and primed to explode, but he just stood there, flexed, as flawless with his back turned as one of the eight hundred imitation David statues Jamie'd seen when she was in Florence, except with a pair of jeans that were hanging loosely on his hips. Well, and that he was tanned and not made out of plaster casting.

  She came to a stop just outside the range of the maul's head, should he swing it. "You seem okay," she began. "Doesn't seem like—"

  "Regret?" he swung, the tool thunking heavily into the wood, splitting it down the center in one strike. "What would you know about regret?"

  All right, there's the venom.

  "Ryan," she started, "I didn't know how bad it was. I’ve been after Erik to do something for a while, both Izzy and I have, but we had no idea it was this bad. How could we?”

  "Care? Find out? It isn't like we're exactly hidden. Thirty little houses and two big ones, not even ten miles from your buddy's farm, or ranch, or whatever it is, and I'm supposed to believe the entire town has no idea we exist?"

  Jamie shrugged, her wings unfurling in nervousness. She uncrossed her arms, and let them hang limp at her sides. "I don't know," she said. "That's all I can say is that I don't know how no one knew. There's a lot about these woods that no one knows. Hell," she took a breath, trying to come up with the right words. "I mean, it took six months before anyone knew Jenga had strung cable from the middle of town out to his place, and he's only five miles from town. This place may as well be the middle of the ocean."

  There was sadness in her voice. Genuine upset. "Yeah," Ryan said, again gruff and cold and she couldn't blame him. "Well, let's not talk about what I will or won't regret, then, yeah? This is year six since my aunt and uncle came out here, followed by the entire contents of their rolodexes," he paused. "That was a joke. They're old, so they have rolodexes instead of phones."

  Jamie nodded, but couldn't bring herself to laugh.

  "Anyway, they and all their friends came out here, and then more came. Forgotten, old, broken people, Jamie. Look around you." He finally turned. There was fire in his eyes, but it wasn't just raw anger. It was something much deeper, more pained. She thought she understood why.