No wonder she jumped a little when a voice beside her broke through her thoughts. And blushed. Thoughts like those earned the blush.
“We haven’t really been using this office. Our techs don’t really need it, and the fellow who was running the lab resigned a couple of months ago. Haven’t replaced him yet. Hard to draw that kind of talent to a little town like this.”
Doug Kirby, physician and bobcat shifter, gestured around the small, empty room before burying his hands in the pockets of his rumpled white lab coat. He wore it over a pair of faded blue scrubs and paired it with sneakers that had probably started out white. That was quite a few miles ago.
Even without the stethoscope dangling around his neck, Kirby looked like a doctor. A handsome man of around forty, his face bore just enough lines to make it interesting, and his blue eyes viewed the world with the tired but caring expression that marked a good physician. Then there was the disorder that came from a busy medical career. A pair of pens stuck crookedly out of his breast pocket, and his short salt-and-pepper hair looked as if he’d recently walked through a tornado. Or maybe he’d just made a habit of running his hands through it throughout the day. Either or.
Annie made it a point to take note of his manners and appearance, as well as to give him complete attention as a matter of professional courtesy. After all, they were both doctors, and Kirby was being kind enough to offer her space to work on the problem with Jonas’s clan. Common courtesy dictated she show him a certain amount of respect. That’s all there was to it. Really.
It had nothing to do with the tingling awareness in her skin at the mere presence of the looming bear. Or the fluttering in her belly that hadn’t stopped since the mayor’s office. Or the way her wolf kept dancing about in her head, yipping and chortling and executing flirtatious play bows in the male’s direction.
The slut.
“This is perfect. Really,” Annie assured Dr. Kirby. “I could have made-do with a desk in a broom closet if that was all you had. Especially since you’ve agreed to let me use the lab. That’s so generous of you. I want you to know how much I appreciate it. If there’s anything I can do for you to repay this favor while I’m here, please just let me know.”
Kirby shrugged and waved off her gratitude. “Like I said, we haven’t been using it, and John explained you’re here to help out Jonas and his clan. That counts for a lot. Locals stick together around here. If you decide you’re hung up on paying me back, spend a few minutes here and there in the lab. Our techs are good, but you’ll be able to tell if things are running smoothly. You could offer a suggestion if they’re not, or give them a good word if they are. They’d appreciate it either way.”
“You’ve got it. It’s the least I can do.”
The doctor laughed. “Just be glad you’re not licensed to practice medicine in Washington. If you were, I’d keep you so busy you’d never get any of your own work done.”
He turned and passed Jonas on his way out the door. “The desk should have basic office supplies, but if there’s anything you need, just let Angie know out front. I’ve gotta get back to the trenches. See ya.”
The squeak of sneakers over polished linoleum tracked Kirby’s passage back across the empty lab and through the swinging doors into the main area of the clinic. The whoosh of air had barely marked their closing before the air in the small office grew thick and hot and close. Somehow, Annie doubted she could blame the building’s HVAC system.
Her hackles rose, as much as they could in human form. The hair on the back of her neck stood up, gooseflesh forming across her nap and upper back. Her awareness of Jonas kicked up another notch and then shot straight around the dial to eleven. She could hear the soft puff of his breath, the ticking of the clock in the lab. She almost thought she could hear his heart pounding.
But, no. Wait. That was hers. It hammered in her ears like the entire percussion section of the Seattle Symphony. It was a darned good thing she was young and healthy. Otherwise, her heart would have given out under this kind of strain.
Afraid that if she didn’t do something, she’d either keel over or jump on the bear like a fleeing rabbit, Annie strode briskly forward. She set her backpack down on the bare desktop and then braced them on her hips. Mostly to disguise their trembling.
“Okay,” she said, a little proud that her voice didn’t tremble. “Let’s get to work. It would be helpful if I could get a look at the medical records for anyone in your clan who has undergone fertility treatments, but there are going to be a whole bunch of HIPAA privacy forms to fill out for that. In the meantime, I think the first thing we should do is answer a few questions ourselves.”
“I couldn’t agree more.”
Annie had chosen a strategy of ignoring the five-hundred-pound gorilla in the room with her—or rather, the 230-pound bear—and it backfired with impressive force. Because she’d busied herself pulling her laptop and other materials out of her backpack, she didn’t see Jonas sidling up behind her with a stealth one of his kind should not have been able to manage. Therefore, she had no warning when the deep, seductive rumble of his voice accompanied his hands closing around her hips and spinning her to face him.
She had a second to marvel at the size of them. His palms felt as big as actual bear paws, and the simple grip at her sides had his fingers nearly cupping her ass by default. When he drew her closer, she felt as if he’d swallowed her whole. The top of her head barely cleared his collarbone, and his shoulders seemed broad enough to block out the sun.
Or maybe this was just what it meant to be blinded by lust.
Huh. Annie had never experienced that before. Her scientific mind found it a fascinating cascade of sensory and endocrine stimuli.
Her wolf growled a warning and prepared to pounce. If the bear wasn’t going to wait anymore, why should it?
“The first question I want to answer is this.”
His voice drifted down to her, but she could almost feel it before she heard it. It vibrated in his chest, and she had to tilt her head back to trace the path of the words from his diaphragm up through his lips.
Those lips curved as he stared down at her. “What do you think might happen when a bear and a she-wolf finally get a moment alone together? I’m pretty certain enquiring minds want to know.”
If he considered that fair warning, Annie needed to take a good look at the rules, because she felt in no way prepared for the first touch of his lips on hers. Then again, Hoyle himself couldn’t have prepared her for this.
When a man oozed the sort of alpha confidence that Jonas Browning did, a woman could be forgiven for expecting him to kiss like a Viking invader—attacking brazenly, rampaging through the village, and leaving nothing but smoldering wreckage in his wake. That might have been easier to resist.
Instead, Jonas took her mouth like a soldier home from the war—a little rough, a little desperate, but full of pent-up passion and a surprising undertone of tenderness. Annie felt herself simultaneously ravished and worshiped, consumed and cherished. A weaker woman’s legs might have collapsed beneath her, but Annie had been through the gauntlet over the last three years. Hers just trembled.
She could hear a wolf howling in the back of her head, a full-throated ululation of joy and approval. She tried to ignore it, especially since it took all of her concentration to clutch at Jonas’s shirt, just in case her legs decided to betray her after all. It wasn’t often that she spent so long straining on her tiptoes. Her calf muscles weren’t used to the workout.
Just when she began to fear the worst, Jonas broke the kiss and lifted his head. It took the sound of his low chuckle before Annie realized. Her eyes flew open to find the bear staring down at her, barely a trace of man left in the dark molasses eyes.
She blinked, wondering if her wolf had bled her own eyes from brown to pale gold. She wouldn’t be surprised. She could feel the bitch pressing against her skin, wanting to come out and play with their mate.
Oh, sugar.
There it
was. The m word. The one Annie had been very careful not to allow to even flit through her thoughts for the last few hours. This couldn’t be happening. There was no way. She had not lived thirty long years, three of them in exile, only to find her mate on the other side of the country from her pack. Not now that her pack might finally be offering her the chance to return to them.
Uh-uh. She wouldn’t have it. She wouldn’t allow it.
Annie jerked back, tearing herself out of Jonas’s grip and smacking her hipbone against the edge of the desk on her way. It stung, but she ignored the pain just like she’d ignore the bruise that would heal almost as quickly as it formed.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought would happen.” Jonas smirked, his mouth still glistening from the kiss.
“That’s what shouldn’t have happened.” Annie took two steps backward, trying to put some distance between them in the confined space. It didn’t help that her wolf fought her to reverse each one of them. “We’re developing a professional relationship. I’m going to be your doctor. It would be completely inappropriate, not to mention unethical, for us to engage in any sort of . . . of . . . personal . . . behavior. With each other.”
He chuckled and covered the distance she’d just put between them in one lazy stride. “You haven’t examined me yet, Doc. Though I have to admit I am looking forward to that part of the process. Since we’re talking about fertility issues, I suppose the exam will have to be pretty intimate, no?”
“No.”
Annie nearly barked out the word, and found her further retreat blocked by the tall filing cabinet in the corner of the room. The bear pressed her against it as if trapping her against the trunk of a tree. She had to struggle to draw in a breath. Was it just her, or had the air gone suddenly thin?
“What I mean is, we’re not concerned with your personal fertility. We’re looking for patterns among the clan as a whole that will lead us toward an explanation for the low birth rate. There’s no need for me to personally examine your . . . uh, you.”
He grinned and lifted a hand to cup the back of her neck.
Darn him. Oh, she knew he probably had no idea that her neck was one of Annie’s biggest erogenous zones, but trust a mate to find it like it bore a blinking neon target.
And there was that stupid word again.
Her wolf growled, urging Annie to give in. Here was their mate, pressed up against them, all delicious muscle and intoxicating scent and seductive intentions. Why in the name of the moon would they want to fight him? They should claim him, bite and mark him to let all of the other females know that this male belonged to them.
Annie realized her gaze had drifted to the side of his neck just above his collar, the perfect place to sink in her teeth and brand him as the mate of a Lupine. She jerked it back to his face and gritted her teeth.
“Look, we can’t do this,” she insisted, no longer certain if she was talking to Jonas or to her inner wolf bitch. “It’s inappropriate and unprofessional. We’ve just met, and the reason why we’ve met is a matter of science. An important matter, if the situation in your clan is as bad as you’ve said. If I’m really the best person to help you, we need to concentrate on that and ignore the mating urge. Survival of a clan is more important than one mated couple, right?”
“Sure. Whatever you say, honey,” Jonas murmured. The way his gaze followed her lips, eyes going more and more feral, told her he was barely listening.
At least, he hadn’t been.
Something she said must have gotten through eventually, because he reared back, dropped his hand, and retreated two steps. His eyes reverted to human, the brown iris retreating to allow the human sclera to show again, and his sexy smile drew into a tight frown.
“Wait a minute, lady. Did you say mate?”
Chapter Five
Whoa, whoa, whoa. Someone needed to haul back on the reins and stop this runaway horse before someone got hurt, and Jonas had a really bad feeling it was him.
What the hell had just happened? One minute he’d been seducing the sexy doctor, feeling her soft, hot skin under his hand, the brush of her silky curls against his fingers, and the next she had to go and bring up the m word. How was that even right?
His bear grunted, indicating it thought the idea sounded perfectly right. Which was just ridiculous. Brown bears didn’t mate, not the way other shifters did. And especially not the way the Lupines did.
Wolf shifters mated for life, taking soul mates and remaining monogamous forever. Most feline shifters did the same, letting their human sides overrule the more promiscuous habits of their inner cats. And black bears lived so closely with humans and other shifters that most of them mated like humans as well.
But brown bears were different. In the wild, many brown bears didn’t even remain monogamous during a single mating season, and females routinely gave birth to cubs in the same litter with different fathers. Males would mate with any female in season to whom they had access.
Sure, Ursine shifters weren’t fully bears, but among them, the browns maintained a wilder nature than their cousins. Like their animal counterparts, they tended to be more aggressive than other Ursines, and though generally solitary, they weren’t territorial, so they had no trouble living within the confines of a clan. Well, not as long as resources were plentiful and they had access to privacy when they wanted it. But as far as Jonas knew, they had never subscribed to the belief in soul mates that so many other shifter species clung to.
For the brown bears, mating meant having sex, not taking a life partner. When two of them did decide to pair off, it was their human halves who made that decision. They got married, just like regular people did, and sometimes they got divorced the same way. And they did all that because they saw through the romantic bullshit the wolves and the lions and the coyotes and the frickin’ badgers clung to and admitted that there was no such thing as a shifter’s soul mate.
Judging by the sharp chomping noise his bear made in his head, Jonas had to wonder if anyone had bothered to inform their animal spirits of that.
Either way, it didn’t matter at the moment. Jonas shoved his bear into the background and rolled his shoulders to restore his casual posture.
“I think you’re getting ahead of yourself, sweetheart.” He offered the charming grin that had had females eating out of his palm since puberty. “I mean, I’m obviously attracted to you, and judging by that kiss you could say the same right back, but we just met. No one said anything about mates. No need for crazy talk.”
Her eyes went from wide and a little dazed to narrow and sharp in an instant. “Crazy talk?”
Oh, shit. He’d thrown that word out there, hadn’t he? Jonas held up his hands and tried to backpedal. Fast. “I’m just saying that using the word ‘mates’ after an hour’s acquaintance isn’t exactly normal, right? We’re mutually attracted, and neither of us can deny the chemistry, but—”
“But what? But it would be ‘crazy’ to assume that we could be mates? When exactly did I become the only shifter in the room? Sure, if we were human it would be crazy for me to say something like that, but I don’t know if you noticed, I’m not human. And surprise, surprise. Neither are you. I might not be happy to hear my wolf tell me you’re my mate, especially at this particular moment. But that doesn’t make it any less true.”
Jonas felt himself go white as the blood rushed out of his head. The change left him dizzy and more than a little disoriented. How had his day gone from so awesome to so fucked up so fucking fast?
Any previous attempt he’d made at charm fell away and left him scrabbling just to get his feet back on solid ground. His erection was well and truly dead anyway. Now he needed to forget about his dick and concentrate on keeping his balls.
“Look, Annie. I had no intention of insulting you, so I apologize if it came out that way. You’re a beautiful woman, and clearly I find you attractive. So does my bear. But things don’t work the same for my kind as they do for yours. I know Lupines often recognize their mates
at their first meeting, and I know wolves mate for life, but that’s just not true for bears. Not for brown bears, anyway. We don’t get that kind of mate bond. Just doesn’t happen. So forgive me if I’m a little shocked and uncomfortable to hear a woman I’ve just met talking like she’s refusing the proposal I didn’t make.”
Jonas watched her face while he tried to explain, mostly so he could gauge any tells that might warn him he was about to get a knee to his dangly bits. He didn’t see any. What he did see was the way her anger and indignation morphed into a kind of baffled hurt in her warm brown eyes.
“What do you mean, you don’t get ‘that kind’ of mate bond?” She demanded. “What other kind is there?”
He shrugged, suddenly uncomfortable. And it came from somewhere beyond his inner bear, who was too pissed at him to cause the tightness in his stomach. His bear just wanted to rip out his spinal cord for causing their female that kind of pain.
Not ours, bear. That’s what I’m trying to explain.
The bear growled. It had been a vocal bastard today, which just went to show how worked up it really was. Bears lived most of their lives in silence, saving their vocalizations for times of extreme emotion.
“No other kind. Which is the point. Brown bears pair up for sex or companionship, stay together while they want, then go their separate ways. Ones who want families get married the same way humans do, according to human laws. If they decide it’s not working out, they get divorced using the same laws. We’re not wolves, Annie. We don’t have life mates or predestined partners the way wolves do.”
She stared at him in silence for a long moment. When she finally spoke, it came out more like a squeak.
Something to Howl About Page 3
