Joel (BBW Bear Shifter Wedding Romance) (Grizzly Groomsmen Book 5)

by Becca Fanning

  Picking up her beer and taking a sip, Lorne caught Dina's eye across the room, Dina offered her a quick wave, then made her way through the crowd towards her. Lorne had been so busy putting this whole thing together that she kept on forgetting her best friend would be getting married in only two days, a terrifying thought for someone as single as she was. Sometimes, she couldn't believe they were the same age, now that Dina was getting married, it seemed as if she'd moved up to a whole other level of grown-up-itude.

  "How's it going?" Lorne asked as Dina approached her, trying not to wobble on her stiletto heels.

  "Pretty good, though I need to find some way to avoid all the family members who want to come and drunkenly tell me stories from when I was four," she pulled a face, and Lorne grinned

  "Well, I'll do my best, but I'm not promising anything," she replied sternly, and Dina reached behind her to pour herself another glass of champagne. Lorne cocked an eyebrow at her, and Dina immediately protested.

  "Hey, I'm allowed to be hungover tomorrow, it's not my wedding till the day after that!"

  "I know. But I've seen you hungover, and it's not something I want to have to deal with again," Lorne shot back dryly.

  "Yeah, fair point," Dina took a sip of champagne. "But why would you organize all this booze if you didn't want me to get a little drunk?"

  "What's a wedding without a bit of social lubricant?" Lorne replied. "That's why everyone always hooks up at weddings, you know. It’s the mixture of booze and being reminded of the fact that you're tragically single."

  "Aw, are you feeling lonely?" Dina turned to Lorne with a half-sympathetic, half-teasing look on her face.

  "I've got too much to do to feel anything other than busy."

  "Shame," Dina nonchalantly replied. "I noticed Sam was looking like he needed some company."

  "Who's Sam?" Lorne asked, scanning the room, trying to set her sights on anyone who wasn't having a good time.

  "He's one of the groomsmen," Dina explained, turning her back on the room so she could murmur directly into Lorne's ear. "He's sitting by the window, glass of red wine, kind of burgundy suit?"

  Lorne glanced across the room, trying as hard as she could not to look like she was staring at anyone. Then she saw him, he had tightly cropped slick of blonde hair, a carefully fitted suit, and his fingers drumming up against the glass on the table in front of him.

  "Oh, that's him?" She nodded towards his table. "It's kind of weird, putting a face to all these names."

  "You should go talk to him," Dina prompted, grinning mischievously.

  "Look, just because you're getting married, it doesn't mean that you have to find someone for me to have a happily-ever-after with," Lorne scolded her playfully. "Besides, the groomsman and the bridesmaid? Do you want me to be a walking cliché?"

  "Yes," Dina pouted. "And it's my wedding, so I get whatever I want."

  "Tell me about it," Lorne muttered pointedly, slyly eyeing Dina out of the corner of her eye to watch for her reaction. She tried to keep a game face, but ended up grinning.

  "Right, okay. I suppose I don't want one of the groomsmen sitting there all miserable for the night. So one dance, okay?" Lorne smoothed out her dress, black and white, with no halter, even if she did have to find an industrial-strength strapless bra to keep everything in place. "Anything I should know about him?"

  "Um, Tom and him lived together before he met me, and I think he works in publishing or something?" Dina wrinkled up her nose. "That's not important. He's cute and you look like you need to relax."

  "I'm fine," Lorne replied firmly. "Really, I'm having a good time."

  Dina raised her eyebrows at her skeptically.

  "Yeah, okay. Well, go and have a better one."

  "But-"

  "The bride decrees it to be so!" Dina cut across her before she could form any kind of protestation. Lorne shrugged, picked up her drink, and headed across the crowded room, weaving in and out of people dancing and drinking to get to his table.

  "Sam?" She asked, raising her voice so she could be heard over the music. He looked up, an expectant look on his face.

  "Yeah?"

  "Can I join you?" She gestured towards the empty seats surrounding him, and he shrugged, looking resigned.

  "If you like."

  Lorne stepped past him and into one of the seats, he had picked a good spot, next to the window, where she could make out the distant water lapping gently against the beach.

  "So, you're one of the groomsmen, right?" She leant across the table.

  "Yeah, Tom invited me a few months ago. I've never done it before, so I'm kind of nervous." He glanced at her as he spoke, and she noticed his eyes, a deep, wooden brown, flecked with a shimmering bronze color.

  "Yeah, it's my first time doing this whole thing too. I'm on bridesmaid duty, and I'm pretty much certain I'm going to trip over my dress or forget my flowers or something."

  "Oh, how do you know Tom and Dina?" he asked, turning to her. "I'm trying to find the logic behind all the people they invited, because I don't recognize, like, any of them."

  "I met Dina a couple of years ago. We're just your regular, run-of-the-mill friends, I guess."

  "I saw you talking to her over there," Sam nodded to the spot where Dina was now nonchalantly watching them and sipping champagne. "Looked like you guys had good banter."

  "We do. Even if she's insisting that I find someone to spend the wedding weekend with," Lorne rolled her eyes, and he flashed a knowing grin her way.

  "Yeah, Tom's pretty much been doing the same for me." He admitted. "Hey, you think that's the logic behind the wedding party?"

  "What, just getting all their single friends together?" Lorne laughed. "I wouldn't put it past them."

  "It seems like exactly the kind of shit they would do," he nodded, turning to her with a glint in his eye. "I bet they've been planning this for years, getting married is just secondary to pairing off all the single people they know."

  Lorne looked at him for a moment, incredulous, until she scanned her brain back over the guest list that Dina had given her all those months ago. Every member of the wedding party, and she had checked, because it had seemed strange to her at the time, was single.

  "You know, you could be right," she nodded. "How do you know the rest of us were single, though?"

  "Oh, I know the other groomsmen," he waved his hand vaguely, apparently speaking without really giving much thought to his words. Lorne wrinkled her brow, this was the first she was hearing of this.

  "How do you know them?"

  "Um, squash team?" He offered up hopefully, as if Lorne would swallow his answer without question.

  "Come on, you can tell me," she leaned in conspiratorially. "What is it?"

  "Nothing that you should get burdened with," he looked away, his warm expression dropping away, as if he knew he'd said too much. Lorne was intrigued now, and she wasn't exactly the type to let someone brush her off like that.

  "Look, I've been burdened with putting together pretty much this entire wedding," she pointed out. "I'm pretty sure I can handle whatever it is that you're keeping from me."

  "It's just that Tom and Dina don't know," he looked at her seriously, and she leaned in closer.

  "Trust me, I'm good at keeping secrets." She kept her voice low, her interest piqued. "Now will you just tell me what the hell is going on?"

  "We're shifters," he shot back, and for a moment Lorne was knocked off-balance-which was not a feeling she tolerated with much joy. Then she took another look at him, the metallic flecks in his eyes, the wiry build, the solitude. Now that she thought about it, it seemed obvious.

  "Oh." She replied, taking a sip of her drink and thinking for a moment. "How does Tom not know that?"

  "We met through him. We sniffed each other out."

  "Literally?"

  "Yeah, pretty much," Sam grinned sheepishly, obviously used to a bigger reaction than the one he got. "That doesn't bother you?"

  "The only
thing that could bother me right now is the caterers getting stuck off the island or something," she raised her eyebrows at him. "Provided you're not planning a twenty-one groomsmen shift or something, I'm pretty sure we'll be okay."

  "Huh," Sam commented, running his finger round the rim of his glass.

  "Not what you expected?"

  "Most people tend to be at least a little rattled when I first tell them, you know?" He admitted.

  "Would you rather I fell to the floor in a dead faint and had to be revived with smelling salts?" She rolled her eyes. "You've been around for more than seventy years now. Meeting a…shifter, one of you, it's not the big deal it was."

  "Have you met one of us before?"

  "Well, obviously I have, even if I didn't know it." she gestured to the other groomsmen dotted around the room. "So, what are you, a pack or a…herd or something?"

  That finally coaxed a smile out of Sam.

  "We're a pack. We don't see each other often, but we take trips to go shift sometimes. We've only met up about six times in the last three years-since Tom and Dina got together, but it's good to have your own kind around."

  "That's neat," Lorne nodded. She was determined not to be shaken by the news, but truth was, this was the first time she'd ever knowingly met a shifter, and she could already feel her mind brimming over with questions to ask him. She'd read plenty about shifters when she'd gone through an obsession with them in her early teens, she'd found the concept of them so romantic, so dashing, so fantastically weird. But she quickly grew out of that as her pragmatic adult self kicked in, or she thought she had, as she found herself fluttering slightly in the presence of a real, live shifter.

  "So, what kind of shifter are you? Shit, is it alright for me to ask you that? I don't want to be rude, I just-"

  Sam waved his hand in the air, as if knocking the question away from him.

  "You ask what you want, and when I get offended I'll storm off and you'll know better next time. Deal?"

  "Deal."

  "We're all bears. It was weird, actually, I had never met a bear shifter before Tom and then-" he nodded at the other groomsmen, who were variously dancing, drinking, and flirting around the room, "-I found four at once."

  "Bears?" Lorne knew from her teenage obsession that every kind of shifter was theoretically possible, but she'd always been hung up on the old-fashioned notions of werewolves and vampire bats. There was something so enormous and ungainly about bears, at least in theory, that she felt her mouth twitch upward into a smirk.

  "Are you laughing at me?" Sam demanded, with mock outrage. "I wouldn't piss off a bear, you know."

  "Sorry, it's-"Lorne stopped herself, and shook her head. "It's weird, I'm having trouble putting the pieces together in my head. I know that shifters exist, and I know that you're a shifter, but…you know?"

  She flapped her hands in the air, awkwardly trying to get her point across, and Sam shrugged.

  "Yeah, I get it. Sometimes even I don't really believe it's a thing, and I do it a couple of times a month."

  "So, how come Dina and Tom don't know?" Lorne leaned in close again, glancing around to make sure she hadn't missed an errant bride approaching behind them.

  "Dina's had some bad experiences with shifters in the past. We didn't want to freak her out," he explained. "I'm sure she's told you about that."

  Lorne was temporarily taken aback. She was sure Dina had told her everything-but this was coming as news to her.

  "Her ex? Before Tom? He was a wolf shifter, and he was a piece of shit, from everything I've heard," Sam shook his head angrily. "I don't blame her for not wanting to trust any of us again."

  Lorne was still staring off into space, trying to process what she'd just heard. Dina had mentioned her ex, and Lorne knew with no equivocation her feelings about him, but she had never told her anything about him being a shifter. Why would she keep that from her? Was it that bad that it was a part of her life she never wanted to talk about again?

  "Huh, yeah, I guess," she nodded, realizing that she'd been sitting in silence for at least thirty seconds. "Can you give me a minute?"

  Lorne stood up abruptly, and made her through the crowd once again. Dina caught her eye, and immediately her expression changed from playful to concerned. She hurried towards Lorne, drink in hand.

  "What's wrong?"

  "I was just talking to Sam," Lorne gestured vaguely over her shoulder, in his direction. "He was just telling me about your ex?"

  "Who? Freddy?" A flicker of fear in Dina's voice sent a chill down Lorne's spine, she'd never heard that before.

  "Yeah. Said he was a shifter."

  "He was," Dina replied carefully. "And kind of a dick."

  "You never mentioned that before." Lorne knew that Dina was entitled to tell her or not tell her anything at her discretion, but it bothered her to know that she'd been keeping this, especially if it had hurt her as much as it seemed to.

  "He-" Dina shook her head. "It's not a big deal. He was just a piece of shit, but he's nothing to do with my life any more. I didn't go into detail about him because I wanted people in my life who didn't know about him. Then no-one would see me as his victim anymore, you know?"

  She sounded shaken, it wasn't a tone Lorne was used to hearing out her usually bubbly friend. Dina's expression had hardened, and it was clear she was done talking about Freddy.

  "Sorry I brought him up," Lorne replied emphatically, placing a comforting hand on her arm. "I was just surprised is all."

  "I know," Dina shrugged. "But you shouldn't be letting my dick ex get in the way of you and Sam! Looked like the two of you were really getting on."

  Lorne let a flicker of a smile pass across her face before she could get herself in check.

  "Yeah, he seems cool, I guess." She yawned, suddenly overtaken by tiredness. "I'm exhausted, though. Should probably head to bed."

  "Yeah, I should probably join you," Dina stretched and looked around. "We're missing the last bottle of champagne, anyway, so there's not much point in staying up any longer."

  "Missing a-?" Lorne shook her head. "That's not my problem right now. I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"

  "Love you," Dina pecked a kiss on her cheek, and turned to leave.

  Lorne stood for a moment by herself, and found her eyes drifting back towards Sam. She was intrigued by him, and she couldn't deny it, ever since she'd split with her last long-term boyfriend, maybe eight months previously, she'd been struggling to find that spark with anyone else. It wasn't that she didn't get on with the boys she ended up on dates with but, at this point in her life, she felt like she'd already dated most of them, the moody, flaky musician, the distracted business guy, the college bro. She'd hit every cliché in the book, and none of them worked out. Maybe her problem was that she was looking for someone too…normal? Perhaps a shifter was what she really needed to shake things up. Sam lifted his head and met her gaze, and she felt a jolt run down her spine, yeah, okay, this was something, even if she couldn't quite put her finger on what. He grinned, and gestured her over, and she went to join him again.

  "Everything okay?" He asked, flashing her that smile again.

  "Yeah, fine," she nodded, " Though we're missing a bottle of champagne, for some reason."