by J. K Harper
All was quiet on the Holloway sleuth’s territory. There were no Women in White, no snake-tailed monstrosities, no idiot alpha bears shoving their feet into their mouths.
Hazel laughed suddenly.
“What’s up, beautiful?”
“This time last year, I was fending you away from my car door.”
He chuckled. “I still got your number.”
She bent and kissed his neck. Hudson’s feet almost faltered. It had been a year, after all. Hell, it’d been six months since she’d moved from Wears Valley to share his two-story cabin-inspired Craftsman.
She still hadn’t accepted his claim.
“You’re poking the bear again,” he chided as he climbed the steps to their porch. The pair of wings he’d welded just for her flanked either side of their front door.
“Maybe I like when he gets growly.”
Heading inside, he set her on her feet and shot her a stern but loving glare. “You’re a tease, you know that? A damn tease.”
With the lights switched on, he built a fresh fire in the hearth while Hazel hung up her coat.
“I’ll have you know I’m just sentimental.” She tossed her hair with haughty flair. The long tendrils curled past her shoulders. “If you must know, I’ve been waiting for tonight.”
Hudson’s smile slipped. “Yeah?”
“Well, it’s after midnight, so it is our anniversary.”
The bear rose with interest, its growl reverberating through Hudson’s chest. Hudson stalked across the room in an instant, but Hazel held up a hand before he could throw her over his shoulder.
“Down, boy. I’m afraid you can’t toss me around tonight.”
Hudson drew his brows together. “Was last night too much?”
“Last night was fun.” She beamed, and Hudson hooked an arm around her waist. Tugging her flush against his body, he warmed to feel her curves. “I really do love it when you get growly.”
“You’re supposed to tell me if I get too rough.” He brushed a lock of her hair behind her left ear, then leaned forward until his forehead rested against hers.
“You weren’t too rough. You just can’t toss me around tonight.” She widened her eyes, seeming to hesitate. “Or any other night for approximately nine months.”
For a moment, Hudson lost control of the grip he usually held over his senses. He heard every sound, from the steady beat of her heart to the rush of blood through her veins.
“You’re sure?”
“I noticed after you left this morning.” She glanced down at her chest, a bright smile curling the edges of her lips. “There’s another light. It’s little now. Just a glow. But it’s there. And it’s green.”
Hudson dropped to his knees. He pushed his nose to her belly and inhaled her scent for confirmation. Pregnant women always smelled sweeter.
Hazel still smelled like honeysuckle and whiskey. But there was something else. Something so slight, he’d wrongly attributed the sweetness to her earlier games with Beckett.
“You do smell like marshmallows.”
“Not by much, I imagine. Only Junebug seemed to notice.”
Still on his knees, Hudson looked up at his witch with absolute reverence. “We made a baby, beautiful?”
“We did, handsome.”
Hudson climbed to his feet and swept Hazel into his arms, taking extra care when he lifted her from the floor. He carried her to their bed upstairs, purposeful in his steps.
With swift but gentle hands, he helped her out of her dress.
“Keep the boots on,” he said with a growl.
“Always.”
When they were sprawled out across the bed, Hudson peppered kisses from her neck to her navel. Enthralled, he nuzzled his nose into the dip of her belly button. Within a week, maybe two, her scent would have changed completely. By Valentine’s Day, she might boast a tiny bump. By the end of March, her flat stomach would be swollen with the undeniable presence of their cub.
Or their witch.
Or—by some stroke of luck that would surely delight Katherine—their kitten.
Hudson could have roared.
Instead, he rose over his mate’s soft, lithe form and claimed a kiss that stole the air from her lungs.
“I love you,” he told her.
“I love you,” she replied without pause.
By the time Christmas morning dawned over the Hiwassee, Hudson could still feel the tingle of her magic beneath his skin. She’d marked his right arm with a handprint that was as permanent as the claiming mark he’d left on her right shoulder.
But most of all, he could feel Hazel. She slept peacefully, her dreams light and airy as she curled against his side.
Hudson had never felt so full of the Christmas spirit.
The Honeybear’s Secret Baby
by Jacqueline Sweet
Chapter 1
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”
It was a beautiful night in Bearfield. The moon was nearly full and her song was high and rich, filling every shifter’s blood with fizzy wonder. The leaves were such a bright golden red that the mountainside looked like a forest fire frozen in time. If anyone drove past on the old logging road they wouldn’t even see the van where our heroes waited. They’d parked off the road and pulled a camouflage tarp over the side of it. It could have been a stifling place to wait, except for the moonroof.
“You ever wonder if we shouldn’t be here? If living out in nature like this is an affront to her beauty?” Jordan was in a mood that night. She couldn’t help it. She’d been in a mood often lately, and her Beta was picking up on it.
“Whose beauty?” Alexandra asked. She was pretty and perfect, with blonde hair and ruby red lips, like a Taylor Swift song come to life as a bear shifter.
“Nature’s. The moon’s. Take your pick.” They were all aspects of the goddess. And maybe tearing down her forests and ripping apart her mountains to find precious wealth wasn’t the right way to worship her.
Alexandra gave her the side-eye with her perfect smoky eyes. Eyes that Jordan wanted to claw out. Eyes that said your time as Alpha is just about over, girl. “They’re just trees, boss. They’re paper waiting to happen. They’re houses. They’re kindling.”
“But what happens when we burn the last one down?” Jordan felt herself tearing up but clamped that shit down.
“What has gotten into you, girl?” Alexandra asked, not even trying to hide the scorn in her voice. “What’s with all this doom talk? Where’s the cold as ice Alpha I pledged myself to? Where’s the Lady Nothing that fought the Bakersfield Boys with nothing but her hands and a shovel?”
“I’m not sure,” Jordan whispered. But she knew, oh she knew. It was cold as ice Lady Nothing who walked into a truck stop bathroom six weeks ago with a drugstore pregnancy test in her hands but it was plain old Jordan who walked out. I’m pregnant, she wanted to tell Alexandra. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t fight werewolves and sleep rough and take each day as it comes, never sure where my next dollar is coming from. I have a baby on the way. But she couldn’t tell her Beta. She couldn’t tell her pack. She couldn’t even tell her boyfriend, because it wasn’t his. She couldn’t tell anyone at all.
A baby changed everything.
Would it ruin her life or save it?
* * *
They called themselves the Furies. They were the only all-female pack in the west. Jordan had pulled them together herself, after she outgrew her first pack and goddamn Danny Morrissey. Jordan and Danny and three other bear shifters had grown up together in the awful hole that was Mercy Springs. All but abandoned by their parents, they formed their own pack as teenagers, living in a treehouse and then a dilapidated farmhouse on the flat, dusty land.
Jordan grew up with nothing but horizon on all sides and felt caged in by it. Sometimes open space can be worse than walls because at least you can imagine what’s beyond the walls—when it’s nothing but prairie you can see just how much nothing there is in the world—how li
ttle there is for you to dream of.
But they made a family for themselves, she and Danny, Rhett and Good Boy and Pretty Brandon. At first they may have been The Lost Boys, playing at pirates and having their big adventure, wearing little more than rags and eating what they could find. They were bear shifters and they were a pack. Jordan was just a skinny thing back then, a brown-skinned girl with bare feet trying to outrun the twilight. But she’d messed it all up. She’d kissed Danny. She’d loved Danny. And he’d run away to the city with big dreams, dreams too big for her to share.
No one could remember whose idea it was to start robbing banks. They were five angry kids who knew nothing but that the world owed them, and that Mercy Springs was a prison. Rhett wanted to hurt people. Pretty Brandon wanted to travel. Good Boy wanted to be where his friends were. Danny wanted money for school. And Jordan, what had she wanted?
She’d wanted Danny. She’d wanted freedom.
She got one of those.
Did everyone who got pregnant do this? Go down memory lane? It was too easy to look at the horror show her parents had been and conclude that anything she did for her baby would be an improvement. But that wasn’t enough. She had to do better.
Jordan formed the Furies out of anger. When Danny dumped her those years ago, she’d left the pack. She could have stayed. She could have taken the Alpha job from him, he wouldn’t have fought her. Not perfect Danny Morrissey. But no, she would have lived in his shadow as Alpha and hated herself, so instead she left. She roamed the west and made her own pack. From Alaska to Mexico, from the Pacific to the Rockies, and she’d found four other women shifters who’d been dealt bad hands in life.
The Furies were closer than sisters. They were better than family.
So why couldn’t she tell them she was pregnant?
One look at Alexandra and she knew. There was a cruelness in her. She’d never been satisfied being Beta to Jordan. The woman was always looking for weakness to exploit with her icy blue eyes and a baby was the worst kind of weakness. If she knew Jordan was pregnant, she’d feign concern. “Oh, you can’t fight tonight,” she’d coo, “you have a baby to take care of.” It would start as concern, but in no time at all she’d be muscled out and demoted and subject to Alexandra’s whims. She couldn’t let that happen.
“Boss, you in there?” Alexandra’s breathy cool voice startled her.
Jordan blinked. The night was dark and she craved being able to shift, being able to see the world with her bear eyes.
“They’re back,” Alexandra said. But the look in her eyes said, you’re not, are you?
The rear of the van slid open silently and the rest of the pack stepped into the vehicle. First came Mazzy, wearing long flowing robes that somehow never picked up a single burr or leaf in the forest. She’d painted a blue spiral on her face, which she claimed protected her from surveillance. She was the youngest of them all, but you’d never know it from talking to her. She didn’t speak much, but when she did, she spoke with an old voice, full of creaks and accents she’d picked up young. Her parents were venture capitalists, world travelers. They didn’t know what to do when their daughter had turned into a wolf and had packed her off to boarding school in England. She saw things. She knew things. Mazzy had a gift for talking to spirits that was a once-in-a-generation kind of thing. She loved the Furies like a river loves the sea.
Next came Little Katie. She had red hair that stuck up at all angles and enormous green eyes. She laughed loudly with a sound like a donkey braying and rarely slept. Jordan and Mazzy had found her living in a sewer in Seattle, where the little fox shifter had found a niche in the local criminal ecosystem as a pickpocket without equal. She was curious and hyper and always eating. “Oh my gosh, Lady No, you should see this place. It’s beautiful! I don’t think I’ve ever seen a house so pretty!” She swerved under Mazzy’s arm as she entered the van, pirouetted, tumbled and came up with a cupcake in her mouth. “It’s all red wood and glass and peaceful and I almost feel guilty for robbing it.” Katie burst into a giggle, jumped onto Alexandra’s shoulders, and then was gone out the moonroof, somehow squeezing through a gap that was only inches wide despite being the curviest shifter in the pack.
Last was Duchess, a bear shifter who moved like the night. They’d found Duchess in Mexico City, where Jordan and Katie and Mazzy had saved her from enslavement by a coven of witches. Duchess was all bared fangs and slashing claws. She was moonlight reflecting on a drawn blade. She didn’t walk, she stomped. She didn’t talk, she growled. She was a bear pretending to be a woman and she would have scared Jordan if she didn’t know better.
“This is a bad idea, my Lady,” Duchess growled. She was muddy up to her knees but climbed into the van anyway, pulling the door shut behind her. “Do you know whose house this is?”
Alexandra stiffened next to her, sensing an opening to challenge her Alpha. “Whose house is this, Jordan? You just said it was a good score.”
Jordan tried not to think of her baby, of the terrifying prospect of the future—any future. “It is a good score. There’s a hundred grand in that house in a safe. There’s a vault in the basement with some special goods, too.”
Alexandra, unsatisfied with the answer, turned to Duchess. “Whose house is this?”
Duchess snorted. “This house belongs to the Alpha of Bearfield. Fucking Marcus Morrissey.”
Alexandra went pale, which was quite a trick since she was already milk white. “Are you out of your mind?” she shrieked. “We can’t rob the Alpha. He’ll kill us all. Wait, where did you hear about this job?”
“The Alpha,” Mazzy intoned with a voice like an undertaker, “has left Bearfield. He is on holiday.” A smile played on her lips, like there was some private joke hidden in her words.
“I have a buyer lined up,” Jordan said. “He wants one of the items from the vault and has offered us five million dollars to get it. Anything else we find is ours.”
Little Katie pressed her face against the moonroof, smashing her round nose flat. “Did you say five million dollars? As in like a million for each of us?” she squealed. Her eyes were luminous with excitement, as if the sky suddenly had two new green moons in it.
“Minus expenses,” Jordan said with a nod.
“Holy shit,” Duchess said. “I’m in.”
“No way.” Alexandra crossed her arms. “This is reckless. This is short sighted. This is not what our pack needs.”
“Weren’t you the one complaining that our last scores were too low?” Jordan growled. “I thought you’d be happy with this one.” It was a lie. She knew Alexandra would hate the idea. Lex still thought that if they just behaved better, if they showed up to social functions with other packs, if they played nice, they’d get accepted and be a part of the larger bear community. She hadn’t grown up in Mercy Springs. She hadn’t seen the worst of the shifters—when they turned on their own with roars and fangs and soaked the soil in blood. Lex grew up in Orange County. Her parents were prominent local leaders who didn’t even know their precious little flower had a bear in her soul.
“This is different, Jordan. And you know it. What aren’t you telling us? What’s with all these secrets lately?”
Mazzy closed her eyes and breathed out. “The house is empty now but will soon be full. We should hurry.”
“I’m not done talking about this,” Alexandra said.
“Yes,” Jordan growled. “You are. Now stay here and watch the van while we go make us all rich.”
Chapter 2
“Good morning, Alpha,” the waitress said to him and Sebastian couldn’t help but grin. He still wasn’t used to it and doubted he ever would be. He was the Alpha of Bearfield. Well, the acting Alpha. The temporary Alpha. It didn’t matter that it was for only three weeks. He’d take it.
The town was quiet in the winter before Christmas, the tourists wouldn’t come until after the holiday to ski, so his father had decided it was the perfect time to take a much needed vacation. Marcus had never left B
earfield. Not once. He had a bucket list as long as his very long arms and was desperate to start crossing things off it. Especially since he’d found his fated mate in Diana. Life had never been easy for Sebastian’s dad, so agreeing to watch the town while he was gone was a no-brainer.
Being Alpha of Bearfield was all Sebastian had ever wanted.
It was a time of peace in Bearfield. A light dusting of snow coated the ground at the highest places, while down in the valleys the trees still had the golden glow of autumn. All of the shops downtown competed to outdo each other with their Christmas lights, Hanukkah displays, and public acts of bear worship. Vern Gussen, who ran a little insurance business in the heart of downtown, had been trying for years to get the town council to officially adopt a cute and chubby polar bear mascot for the winter season but no one but him thought it was a good idea. The general verdict was that polar bears were assholes and the town didn’t need to go out of its way to advertise the shifter thing, thank you very much, but Vern persisted and his storefront was full to bursting with Poley the Bear merchandise that no one wanted.
The kids were firmly back in school. The farmers’ fields were prepped and sleeping out the winter. The shops in town opened later and closed earlier. The whole town had that warm and sleepy feeling of hibernation, like it was hitting the snooze alarm a little more each day, staying tucked under the covers where everything was warm and good.
Sebastian loved Bearfield in the winter. In the summer, spring and fall, too, of course, but winter was his favorite.
And he was the Alpha now, so every inch of that sleepy little town and the surrounding wilderness was his responsibility. It was up to him to make sure the town council kept preparing for the tourists. It was up to him to adjudicate disputes between the Bearfielders. And it was up to Sebastian to make sure they were all safe from the things that went bump in the night. But he was pretty sure he had the resources to do it. He had a pack of werewolves at his disposal, and two enormous over-protective uncles who were also bear shifters. Not to mention all of the other shifters that had recently moved to town after his father had opened the doors to all of their kind.
