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

by Becca Fanning

  “Excuse me,” she said in a detached voice. “I think I’m going to have that meltdown now. May I use your bathroom?”

  “Of course,” Rick said, frowning in concern. “Is there anything I can do?”

  “No thank you,” she said, rising and walking towards the small bathroom. Once inside she locked the door, knelt by the toilet, and waited.

  Soon enough, she felt the familiar tugging sensation in her stomach. She bent over the bowl just before the retching started. The one good thing that could be said about nutri-paste was that it came back up easily.

  She felt the swirl of caustic, jagged emotions swirl through her veins and rested her head against her hands. She was so tired of all of the running and she would give anything to just stop feeling for five minutes. She had been on high alert constantly since she grabbed the damn book and she wasn’t sure how much more she could take before she went insane. It seemed like every time she turned around there was a new source of anxiety or fear waiting for her.

  Her mind started to go fuzzy, like static, and she could feel herself shaking as her breath rattled in and out of her. She curled in on herself more.

  “Europa, Ganymede,” she mumbled to herself, listing off the moons of Jupiter. As a child she’d been fascinated ever since she’d stumbled across a book about them. She still had all sixty-three memorized, and reciting them helped her calm down. “Io, Callisto, Amalthea, Ananke…”

  Eventually, her breathing evened back out and she felt a little less like making all Hyde’s dreams come true and taking a swan dive out the airlock. She stood on legs that, thankfully, only trembled slightly, and walked to the mirror to check her reflection. She was, as feared, even paler than usual, except for the red, splotchy skin around her eyes. Deciding that it was as good as it was likely to get for a while, she walked back out into the main room.

  Rick looked up cautiously as she emerged.

  “I’ve got a weird question for you,” Zosha said, looking at a point somewhere over his left shoulder. “How good is your hearing?”

  Rick opened his mouth, then closed it again. A hollow formed in his cheek from where he was biting the inside of it. “No one could judge you for…being upset right now,” he said carefully, mouth forming the words like they were glass. “You’ve been through a lot.”

  Well, that certainly hadn’t been the answer Zosha had wanted to hear.

  “Alright, well, I’ve been dealing with about all the emotions I can handle for the time being, so how do you feel about ignoring that little outburst and pretending everything is fine? Because that’s my plan.”

  “That doesn’t sound very healthy,” Rick replied, although he sounded more amused than worried.

  “Yeah, well, I’m a prisoner on a smuggler ship full of bear shifters because I’m running from a homicidal psychopath. Why break the streak now?”

  “Fair enough,” Rick said, the last bits of concern fading from his handsome face.

  “Repression, repression, repression, that’s my motto,” Zosha said with considerably more cheer than she actually felt. “So, what do you do for fun on this thing?”

  From the look in Rick’s eyes, he had caught onto the underlying message of what is there I can use to distract myself, but he didn’t call her out on it.

  “Watch vids, read, try to lock each other in storage spaces, the usual,” Rick shrugged. “You got a preference?”

  “Which one of those will distract you from work the least?”

  Rick laughed, warm and low. “Sweetheart, this is all the shit Leo makes me do so he doesn’t have to do it himself. I would love a distraction.”

  “In that case, tell me a story,” Zosha said. “You’re bear shifter smugglers, cavorting across the galaxy in search of the next haul. Surely you’ve got a few interesting tales to tell.”

  “Hmm… I can think of a few. So, do you know why our girl is called the Breakwater? No? It’s because she can go underwater. Not terribly useful in space, of course, but invaluable if we need to shake someone or hide the ship while picking up a haul on any planet with a large enough body of water. Of course, this is all dependent on everything being sealed up proper. So anyways, there we were on Kitar II, picking up a shipment of what was supposed to be this super rare quail offshoot that rich folks in that system love because it’s the equivalent of just eating a brick of platinum but better tasting, right? But then…” He then proceeded to spend the next fifteen minutes telling her a story of proportions that, even in light of recent revelations, she was disinclined to believe. It involved pirates, an incredibly angry prostitute, and what were, as far as anyone could guess, flying crocodiles that spat poison.

  After he finished, she asked for another one. He told her about how he got a scar on his arm, and she responded by telling him about the time she’d broken her leg in two places sneaking out of a house she’d just robbed and ridden home on a street cleaner. They went back and forth and before either of them realized it, they’d spent the better part of four hours talking.

  “…and that’s why I’m banned from the lower levels of Catastrophe,” Zosha finished. Rick, finally recovering from laughing so hard that she’d thought he might be suffocating, opened his mouth to say something in response when a crackling noise filled the room.

  “Big Bear to Eagle Two, everything alright down there? Over,” a voice that Zosha recognized as the captain’s said from a metallic box on the wall by the bed’s headrest. Zosha, who had sprawled across the mattress about forty minutes in, jerked upright. Rick sighed and walked over to it.

  “Captain, the day I call you Big Bear is the day Custer finally rips away my last tenuous hold on sanity, and it will be all the warning you get before I go on a killing spree,” Rick said with the voice of someone who had made that threat before. “What do you need?”

  “Aww, Annie doesn’t mind calling me that,” the captain’s static-filled voice responded. Zosha choked and Rick rested his forehead on the wall, sighing explosively. “And I’m just checking to make sure you know you need to be up here in five.”

  From Rick’s hushed cursing, he hadn’t. “Be right up, Captain.” He took his finger off the intercom button and turned to Zosha. “Alright, that’s my cue to haul ass up to the cockpit. You need anything else before I go?”

  “I’ll admit, I was hoping for another story,” Zosha said, smiling.

  Rick shook his head smiling. “What are you, five?”

  Zosha tilted her head, then grinned at him. Over the past few hours, she had come to two conclusions. The first was that this strange, tall man with his mechanical legs and golden eyes, would not harm her. The second was that she liked him quite a bit more than she had expected to, given both her situation and the short time she’d known him. Trying for anything with him would be, at best, dangerous. She could practically hear Spinner’s voice in her head, telling her that she was only going to get herself hurt.

  Zosha had an absolutely abysmal track record at doing what was good for her.

  She leaned back on one arm and tugged down on her jacket’s zipper with the other hand. She stopped about halfway to her bellybutton and rolled her shoulders back to widen the gape in the material a bit.

  “I don’t know,” she drawled, running her fingers lightly from her collarbone to the top of her cleavage and back. “Do I look like I’m five?”

  Rick swallowed audibly and turned back to the intercom. “Right. So. The button with the red sticker connects you to the whole ship. Green sticker is the cockpit. If you need Annie, yellow’s your best bet, that’s the captain’s room.”

  “Red for everyone, green for you, yellow for Annie,” Zosha said. “Got it. Anything else?”

  “One thing: if you want to leave the room, the code to get back inside is 2422. Me, the captain, and Annie are the only ones with the code, so you don’t have to worry about the others barging in here. Alright then, I’d better head up,” Rick nodded at her, resolutely keeping his eyes on her face.

  “You
sure? You look a little tense there,” Zosha teased.

  “I have about fifteen seconds to get myself under control before I head up to meet my captain and any of my other crew mates who care to check in. So yes, I’m a bit tense.” Rick said in a measured tone. “I don’t suppose you’re feeling particularly remorseful about that.”

  “Oh, don’t be so hard on yourself,” Zosha said in the silky voice designed to get past night guards. She lay back down, dark hair spilling over Rick’s pillow, and blinked innocently up at him. “Now, don’t you have a ship to fly?”

  “You know, I was expecting a personality change when the shock wore off,” Rick said in a voice that was probably fonder than he wanted it to be, “but I wasn’t expecting you to turn out to be evil incarnate.”

  Zosha scoffed. “Please. I am, at best, severely vexing incarnate. Although that does give me something to aspire to, so thank you. Now,” she continued with a stretch before closing her eyes and waving a hand at Rick lazily, “leave me. I must rest.”

  “You do remember the part where I told you I can turn into a bear, right?” Rick asked, heading for the door. “Because that’s still a thing I can do.”

  “Can’t hear you, sleeping,” Zosha called after him, smile widening as she heard him laugh before the doors closed behind him. She let herself relax completely and waited until sleep claimed her.

  And waited. And waited. And waited some more.

  After approximately ten minutes of trying and failing, despite her exhaustion, to fall asleep, Zosha gave in and sat up, irritated. Even with the trances, sleep was important. There was only so long she could substitute meditation for the real thing before she started to wear down, and she knew from experience that she was at that point. Every part of her body wanted her to just turn off for a few hours and let herself recuperate from weeks on running, but her brain refused to quiet down. She ambled over the desk, looking for a book or vid collection to distract her until she fell asleep. She found both and, remembering Rick was a single man who often spent long periods alone in this room, opted to go with the books.

  She was surprised to see he had actual paper books. While they were common enough ground side, as far as Zosha knew people tended to use digital libraries during long periods of space travel to save room. She picked up a few and flipped through them. They were all action-packed tales of heists and dramatic rescues, which Zosha normally loved; however, it seemed that her mind was too wired to sleep but too unfocused to let her read. She looked over at the intercom and considered seeing if Rick or Annie could get her a sleep aid, then decided they had probably given her enough already. Thirty minutes into her failed attempts to sleep, Zosha gave up. She sighed, then did the only thing she could think of that she actually wanted to do.

  Making sure she was zipped up in all the right places, she stepped out into the hallway. Apart from the hum of the ship, it was quiet. She began to make her way to what she assumed was the front of the ship. Luckily, the Breakwater was a small enough vessel that the trip was both fast and easy and she made it without running into anyone.

  Rick didn’t notice her at first when she entered the cockpit. Moving quietly was second nature to Zosha, even when she didn’t necessarily mean to do it. She considered alerting him to her presence but decided instead to just look at the man for a moment. His skin was tinted in greens and blues from the lights on the control board as he stared intently at the stars rushing by on the view screen. Neither of them moved and Zosha, for the first time in what felt like years, let herself remain motionless, a moment of perfect stillness in a ship going warp 7. Then she moved forward, intentionally stepping down more heavily than normal to let him know she was there. He startled, then swung around to face her.

  “Everything okay?” Rick asked. “The intercom not working?”

  Suddenly, Zosha felt embarrassed. Why had she thought trailing after him like a puppy was a good idea? She straightened her shoulders. The time honored strategy of “fake it ’til you make it” had worked so far, might as well keep going.

  “Couldn’t sleep after all,” she said breezily. “Figured I’d come up and see what an actual cockpit looks like.”

  “Actual cockpit?” Rick asked, smirking. Zosha relaxed fractionally. “As opposed to what, exactly?”

  “Fancy club for people who want to rent a boy for a few hours,” Zosha answered. “Never went myself, but I’ve heard some interesting stories.”

  “I see,” Rick said. “So, you don’t usually wander around the ships you sneak onto?”

  “I’ve never been on a ship long enough to,” she answered, sitting beside the pilot’s seat and looking up at the view screen.

  “You’ve never… Zosha, is this your first time flying?” Rick asked, incredulous.

  “I know, I just seem so worldly,” Zosha said. The streams of light on the screen were having an almost hypnotic effect on her. “It’s just, my entire life I’ve always depended on being able to get out fast and, as I’m sure you know, that doesn’t work as well on a ship. I was always afraid I would end up trapped. And then everything that happened… happened, and it didn’t really matter anymore.” She laughed at Rick’s sideways glance. “I know, I know. The irony is that it trapped me on Lytos. But hey. I’ll take being trapped on an asteroid over a ship any day. At least there’d be decent food.”

  She leaned over, resting her side against Rick’s chair, her head on his armrest. He stiffened for a moment, then placed his hand about two inches away. She closed her eyes. It hadn’t been a fluke, or the emotional runoff of their mutual storytelling. Something about Rick just made her feel… safe.

  “What about you?” she asked, feeling herself relax completely. “How long have you been flying?”

  “As a passenger? My whole life, it feels like. I’m a legacy smuggler, I guess. As a pilot, six years.” He looked down at Zosha. “You with me?”

  “Mmm, yup,” she said, words sleep-slurred. “Tell me about growing up with smugglers.”

  “Wow, you really like getting told stories,” he laughed.

  “Or maybe I just like your voice and this is my clever ploy to keep you talking to me,” she said, then yawned.

  “I think I could live with that,” Rick said softly. “Alright, so, the Backbreaker was about twice as big as the Breakwater and dealt almost exclusively in the Outer Rim. I don’t think I saw a core planet until I was ten, and my mom ended up accidentally kidnapping a shop girl. See, she’d gone in to look for spare parts…”

  The combination of the stars rushing past them and Rick’s voice did what reading and breathing exercises hadn’t managed, and Zosha felt herself drifting off. At some point and indeterminable amount of time later, she felt a soft, warm pressure on the top of her head. When she didn’t move away, the pressure began to move down the length of her hair, lightly at first and then with more confidence. Zosha sighed happily and let the feeling of Rick running his fingers through her hair push her that final step into sleep.

  She was, distantly, aware of fading in and out of consciousness, bursts of awareness of the glow of the screen and the sounds of the ship and, always, of the feeling of Rick’s hand in her hair.

  “You’re gonna wind up outside my door begging to keep her, aren’t you?” she thought she heard someone say at one point.

  “She’s not a dog, Leo,” Rick answered.

  “Says the one petting her,” the captain snorted. “Anyways, you’re in luck. Annie likes her and, more importantly, Annie thinks she might be useful.”

  “Useful how?” Rick asked, his voice suddenly something hard and sharp.

  “Ease up. It doesn’t involve giving her to Lan Doro. Annie’s working on convincing the others to see it her way. If she’s successful, which looking back on her track record I’m inclined to think she will be, there’ll be another meeting. Consider this a heads up.”