Bear Outlaw (She-Shifters of Hell's Corner Book 4)

by Candace Ayers

  Alex was instantly standing next to me again. “What’s wrong?”

  “He just kicked, I think. It’s early, though. When you put your face against my belly, he moved.” I laughed. “Is he going to come out a bear?”

  He looked appalled. “Of course, not!”

  I laughed even harder. It was all so crazy. “I’m kidding, Alex. He will be like you, though, right?”

  He nodded and watched me curiously. “He will. And one day he will feel the same pull towards someone as I feel towards you. My whole family is like this. I’ll explain everything better later.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, you will.”

  “How are you taking this so well?”

  “I don’t know. I think all of this has just been crazy enough that I’m more stunned than anything. Maybe I’ll freak out later. Maybe I won’t. How do people normally take this news?”

  He touched my cheek. “People don’t normally find out. That’s why the town was so closed up when you got here. It’s a big secret to keep.”

  I pouted. “But they were nice to Sam.”

  At the mention of Sam’s name, Alex growled and pulled me into his chest. “Mine.”

  I nipped at his chest. “Were you trying to eat me earlier? Is that a thing?”

  His laughter rang out loud and clear through the forest.

  “No. We do not eat people. There is something I wanted to explain to you, though. About mates.”

  “Mates? Bailey used that word. Are we mates?”

  “Yes. Mates are just like they sound. Soulmates. You were meant for me and I was meant for you. I could feel it the very first time I laid eyes on you at the rodeo. I knew you were mine.”

  I kissed him then, desperate to feel something solid. “What does it mean?”

  He kissed me back. “It means that we’re going to be together for a long time. It means that I love you, and that my heart belongs to you.”

  I grinned up at him. “This is all so insane and I’m sure you’ll have to explain it all a million times to me later, but right now, I just want to be close to you. As close as I can get.”

  He ripped the straps of my dress and pushed it off my shoulders. With a predatory look on his face, he pushed me against the tree. “As close as possible?”

  My body reacted instantly, the same way it had this morning and three months ago. Maybe it was the mate thingy, or maybe it was just how hot Alex was. I couldn’t be sure, but either way, I wanted him. “What did you want to explain to me about mates? I have about two more minutes of listening before I’m tackling you and having my way with you.”

  He pushed my dress up over my belly and hips, over my head, and let it fall to the ground. His fingers cupped my sex and his mouth landed on my neck. “This. Mates claim each other. I wasn’t trying to eat you earlier. I was fighting the instinct to claim you as mine. Everything in me is screaming at me to mark you so no one else ever thinks they can touch you again.”

  His lips felt amazing against my skin and I was ready to agree to anything. “Is it a hickey?”

  He flicked his tongue over the same spot. “No. It’s a bite. It’s a bond between us.”

  “Will it hurt?”

  “Probably. It’ll be worth it, though.”

  I rocked my hips against his hand, trying to get him to rub my clit. “Do you still want to?”

  He scraped his teeth there and made me gasp with pleasure. “Fuck, yes. I’ve wanted to mark you as mine since that first night. It took everything in me not to do it.”

  I tilted my head farther to the side. “I want you to mark me. I want to be yours. Do I mark you?”

  He yanked my panties down and easily lifted me until my core hovered over his dick. “When I mark you, Elizabeth, everyone will know that I belong to you. You own my heart, little one.”

  I cried out as he dropped me slowly onto his shaft and pinned me against the tree. I dug my nails into his shoulders and held on. I wanted him more than anything. Nothing else mattered.

  Alex drove into me again and again, filling my body until I thought I couldn’t take anymore. “I’ve missed you so much. Never leave me again.”

  “My bear, make me yours.”

  My body was close already. Alex seemed like he was right there with me. His thrusts were erratic and his grip on my thighs punishing. I tilted my head to the side, inviting him to claim me. I wanted to be tied to him forever.

  Alex let out a roar louder than anything I’d ever heard and then sank his teeth into my neck. Stinging pain lasted for only a second before blinding pleasure filled me and I tumbled into the strongest orgasm of my life. I ripped my nails across his back as the pleasure shook me. Alex jerked into me once more before I felt his seed filling me.

  I felt him licking my neck but my head was so light that it just rolled back. My body felt like all my bones had been removed. I slumped against the tree behind me and mumbled his name.

  Alex held me tightly in his arms and lowered us both to the ground. He laid me on his chest and held me tight. “It’s okay, little one.”

  I lost track of how much time we’d been there, recovering, but the night had fallen without my noticing. I idly played with Alex’s hair and pressed kisses against his chest.

  “How do you feel?”

  I lifted my tired head to stare at him and gave him a satisfied grin. “Like I should’ve stayed here five months ago and kept doing that.”

  He grunted. “I should’ve tied you up and made you stay.”

  I flicked my tongue over his nipple. “You should’ve, mate.”

  Alex hardened under me and shifted us so that I was straddling him. “Are you too tired?”

  I grabbed him and then lowered myself onto him, filling myself with my mate. “Never.”

  He reached up and wrapped his hands over my breasts. “I love you like this. Ride me, Elizabeth.”

  Who was I to deny my mate? I leaned over him and kissed him long and hard. “I love you, bear.”

  “Always.”

  THE END

  Home Is Were My Bear Is

  STORY DESCRIPTION

  Curvy Elie Barner left Hemford, Colorado the moment she graduated high school and hasn’t looked back. Until now. After ten years away, she’s returned to find that Hemford isn’t any bigger than it used to be, and not much has changed…

  Not much, that is, except her childhood best friend, Jake Framer.

  Jake Framer has obviously changed significantly. He's no longer the rail-thin, scrawny boy Elie remembers. In fact, Jake has developed into a strikingly handsome, heavily-muscled, hulking giant of a man.

  But, even though they were inseparable throughout grade school and high school, things between Elie and Jake ended on a rocky note.

  That very last hour together, right before Emily was to leave town, Jake asked her to marry him.

  And Elie shot him down cold.

  Now, 10 years later, Elie thinks she may be ready to settle down. But does Jake still harbor any feelings for his once best friend who so harshly rejected his heart?

  And what will happen to Elie’s feelings for Jake once she discovers that he isn’t quite the man he used to be—he’s not even the human that he used to be?

  Hint: There’s nothing a small mountain town loves quite like a bear hunt

  1

  Elie’s old Outback rocked to a stop at the curb. Her parent’s house was just as she recalled. It sat there, at the end of the lane, waiting like a dinner plate left out for one lonely straggler. She’d always been that straggler. How many plates had been wrapped in Saran-wrap and lovingly set aside for her while she ran around town? How many nights had she wandered in still smelling like “Mr. Jock” or “Motorcycle Boy’s” cologne in high school?

  The engine clucked gently as she rolled forward again towards her driveway.

  Hemford was the same as she remembered, if a little dirtier. The mountain air felt glorious, though, after the smog of Denver, and she’d tugged her long hair loose and rolled down th
e window an hour after the hills started rising underneath her wheels. Her curvy frame had gotten a few appreciative stares when she stopped for gas at the Texaco, dressed in clean jeans, a low-cut top, and her aviators. She couldn’t blame the small-town loggers and good ol’ boys for staring at a fresh face—and everything attached to it—when Hemford was so isolated, so… untouchable.

  Everything was green. The Rockies were lovely this time of year, early summer, when life came roaring back in rivers and new things flourished. Elie wondered if she was one of those new things as she joggled open the car door. It creaked so loudly, Grandma Earline in the city cemetery twelve blocks away probably heard it.

  There was a minor vortex of motion in the thick bushes to the left of the neat little clapboard house, and Elie nearly had a heart attack when a big running form on four legs came shooting like a ski-ball toward her car.

  “Jasper!” she laughed. The big German shepherd was gyrating with delight. It turns out, dogs really don’t ever forget. He whuffed and whined, licking her hands and trying to get his tongue to her face. Elie crouched down and hugged him, burying her face in his fur. His muzzle had grown speckled and gray. Guiltily, she wondered what he thought of her long absence.

  “Oh, Elie! I thought I heard a car.”

  She looked up, and her heart twisted.

  “Hi, Mom,” Elie stood up and met her mother halfway across the lawn. They hugged. Like Hemford’s stagnation, mom was the same, and that felt right.

  Alison Barner beamed at her daughter; Elie always hoped she’d look like her mother, when the time came. Strong and sprightly, and a little taller than Elie herself, Alison was in fine health. She was dressed in casual denim and a button-front shirt with the sleeves rolled up. She’d tried to brush them off, but bits of dirt still clung here and there where she’d clearly been digging in the garden. Nothing could have been lovelier. Even the lines of silver threading through her dark hair were glorious, under the hail of spring sunlight.

  “Well, let’s get you inside.” Alison—Alie—opened the back door of the Outback and helped her daughter truck in her big duffel bag. Elie let her, knowing she’d lose if she tried to argue, picking up her smaller bag and her school bag. If there was one thing Elie and Alison shared in eerie communion, it was a need to feel capable—a need to feel needed.

  “How’s school?”

  Elie gulped.

  “I passed my finals,” Elie replied. Of course she did. She knew how the school rituals went, how to pass the tests. Most of her classmates were nineteen-year-olds. She was pushing thirty.

  “When do you pick classes for next semester?” Alison was asking these questions cheerfully over her shoulder as she and Elie eased through the narrow entry hall. Her parents had bantered about widening the entry into a full foyer for as long as Elie could remember—so far, it was still just barely three feet across, a perpetual reminder to eat your greens and sometimes skip dessert.

  “I’d be a returning student, so I can pick them out in a couple weeks.”

  To this, Elie’s mother didn’t respond. It wasn’t accidental. A deaf man could have heard the falter in Elie’s suddenly-thin voice. But, her mother didn’t push.

  “When’s Dad coming home?” Elie changed the subject without grace and without excuse, as she walked the duffel bag up the stairs in the back of the kitchen, but her mother let it happen.

  “He’s taking Friday off so we can go out together, so he thought he’d stay a little later today. He’s loving the foreman work. It was getting tough, the last few years, working the trucks. This is much easier on his knee.”

  Elie glanced up at the wall over the kitchen table. There hung a pictured history of the Barner family, including a military portrait of her father. It was taken when he retired from the Air Force. His knee had been smashed—a stupid industrial accident in the carrier—and he’d been honorably discharged. The Force would send him a monthly check until the day he died, but Brent Barner wasn’t fond of early retirement and had leapt into the logging mill, which welcomed him as a fellow Hemford-ite and mountain son.

  Logging. That’s what everyone in Hemford did. Even Elie had considered it, before she ran away to France with her high school girlfriends.

  Her mother came back down the stairs. “I made up the bed in your old room. Well… it’s a guest room, now, but I hope it’ll still feel like home.”

  Elie smiled. It already felt like home.

  Jasper wagged his tail loudly against the doorframe and sat practically on her feet, gazing up at her admiringly.

  The silence spun outward like a wild spool of thread, and Elie twisted her lips.

  “How long were you thinking of staying?” Alison asked finally.

  The air became oppressive. Such an innocent, justified question, but it shot a jolt of adrenaline through Elie.

  “I don’t know,” she shrugged. Why did she sound so defensive?

  “You can stay as long as you like,” Alison replied putting her hands on her hips. “We aren’t going to make you sign a lease.”

  “I know that,” Elie snapped irritably. Why did she still sound so defensive?!

  Alison didn’t reply. She walked across the kitchen to the fridge and pulled out a pitcher of lemonade.

  “Out comes the lemonade,” Elie muttered.

  “Elinor Barner,” Alison’s voice was a warning and command in one, “It was a simple question.”

  It was a simple question, one that Elie had no idea how to answer. Twenty-eight years old, and she couldn’t admit out loud that she still didn’t know what the hell to do with her life. She’d run to France because she didn’t know. She’d tried New York because she didn’t know. She’d tried University of Denver because she didn’t know. And with thirty looming near, the feeling that she still didn’t know was suffocating.

  “I’m going to go out for a walk.” Elie turned on her heel and let herself out. Jasper didn’t follow. He just hung his head and looked at Alison as if to ask, ‘How long this time?’

  2

  Ringer’s Bar was about the only kind of bar that you had any hope of finding in the middle of America in a town whose population couldn’t even fill Disney World. It was the town bar—as in, the only bar in the town. Elie walked into it knowing what she would find, and happy to find it, dark anonymity, muffled under the sound of a stereo bellowing Hank Jr. and Willy Nelson.

  The multitude of single men was a little off-putting. She’d just as soon be alone, but with one bar in town, options were slim.

  The narrow panel-top bar itself was probably the safest place to in the joint to plant herself. She took an isolated corner stool and slipped her dusty jacket over the back. Dusty? It was dusty, wasn’t it? She batted some of it off, but it hardly bothered her. Dusty felt… safe. Like home.

  “Just a Coors, thanks,” she nodded at the bartender, an ashen old biker-babe who’d apparently lost track of the years that had flown by—the years since she could wear a tank top without a bra. But, she smiled and waved back and reached for the cooler.

  As she waited, Elie turned her mother’s question over in her mind. From a distance, it didn’t seem so threatening. She wasn’t any closer to an answer, but at least it wasn’t choking her.

  Truthfully, Elie was thinking about staying in Hemford for longer than a few weeks. Maybe longer than a few months. Maybe she wasn’t going back to Denver.

  She accepted her Coors with a sigh.

  “Haven’t seen you around here.”

  “Wish that had continued,” she answered, taking a swig.

  She turned to study the intruder to her private brooding. Now, he wasn’t too bad, tall and handsome, with a molded jaw and striking eyes. She’d seen that look in the eyes of men time and time again, and she propped her chin on her elbow.

  Elie had chosen a seat that was awkwardly placed for someone to try and shimmy closer, but try he did. In the dim light, his hair might have been sandy brown—but then, it might also have been blonde. Nothing like
a dimly-lit, smoky bar to alter perception. There was no mistaking his slim legs in those tight jeans, or the soft leather of his jacket.

  “Are you new in town?” he asked. He made himself comfortable in the seat next to hers. Elie laughed.

  “Are you? I’ve never seen you before.”

  He shrugged. “A little. So, you’ve been to Hemford before?” He waved at the bartender; she nodded and reached for a glass.

  “I was born here.” Elie sipped off her beer and admired his profile. He had nice shoulders, and certainly a face worth taking a second look at. Plus, he didn’t look like a mill-worker, so it was unlikely he’d inadvertently blab to her father at work tomorrow.

  He stuck out a hand. “I’m Bryan.”

  “Elie.” She took his hand and tried to shake it, but he pulled it to his lips and kissed it in a gallant gesture that seemed completely out of place and time. She laughed again. He was entertaining, at least. He probably lived in a mobile home, but that wasn’t a terrible thing in Hemford.

  They passed a half hour, then another hour. Elie wasn’t about to get sloshed hanging out with a total stranger. At least, she hadn’t planned to, but having this total stranger take off his jacket so he could show her the tattoo on his shoulder hadn’t been part of the plan, either. Elie made it through two and a half bottles of Coors before she realized the turn of her stomach wasn’t the butterflies of infatuation. Bleh—she’d never been able to drink more than a couple.

  “Hey, I don’t live far from here.”

  Here it was. Elie grinned at him knowingly.

  “Did you need a ride?” she teased.

  “You could call it that.” He smiled half a smile and his hand found her thigh. “Not the kind that needs a car, though. Actually, I thought you might want a ride—my bike’s out front.”

  The hand on her thigh pressed upward an inch, then another. He was leaning quite close now, and he smelled like Axe and dust. Elie could already envision her lips on his ear, his jaw, his neck…