Bear and Baby_Fun & Flirty Romance

by Elsa Jade

  Rolling up to her tiptoes—giving herself another inch of height, rubbing her needy flesh against her panties—she spread her palms on those wide, strong shoulders and kissed him.

  Just as she’d known, the stubble of his beard rasped deliciously on her skin, but his lips beyond that were shockingly soft. He parted them on another hot gust of breath at the smooth lock of their mouths.

  No tongue. But as the air from him filled her, at the faint hint of mint, she realized he’d not taken a single swig from the beer bottle he’d been carrying around since she saw him. Oh no, he wasn’t even a little bit tipsy, and she was on her third shot of courage. How she wanted to just let that alcohol tide sweep her away.

  Her lashes fluttered closed as he raised one hand between them to cup her cheek. The calluses on his palm and fingertips were rough against her jaw and cheekbone. Sparks of sensation jumped across her nerve endings like frayed wires, sending jolts all the way down her spine. With the barest twist of his wrist, he angled her head, rasping his thumb across the throbbing pout of her lower lip, opening her wider…

  And the kiss exploded.

  With a deep groan, he thrust his tongue into her mouth. And she met him willingly, wildly, awash in the cascade of feeling she’d forgotten since the last time she’d been with him.

  Her first, her last. And right now, her only.

  His other hand fisted at the small of her back, dragging her closer, as if he’d impale her on his tongue. The slick, hot caress of his mouth over hers brought back the memories of their day together, skin glossy from open-mouthed kisses and eager sweat, laughing when their teeth clicked together and their tangoing hips bonked as they found their shared rhythm.

  They’d shared more than that.

  That recollection shocked her out of the boozy, breezy, blissful moment faster than a dunk in Angel Creek.

  She wasn’t here for her pleasure. She was here for her plan.

  His hand at her cheek slid farther to cup the back of her head and tangle in the locks of hair that had come undone from her bun. She reached up to pull the silk poppy from her hair. The coil unraveled in a whisper, and she gripped the hairpin until her fingers ached.

  And when he reached for the top button of her bodice, she held her breath and jabbed the sharp point of the pin into the side of his hand.

  Chapter 4

  As her hair cascaded down around her shoulders in a gloriously scented waterfall of sweetness and spice—like strawberries and cinnamon—Mac didn’t even realize what was happening until she broke off the kiss to babble, “I’m so sorry!”

  Then he noticed the pain.

  It was a minor thing. He’d taken much worse from the cholla cactuses and desert scorpions he encountered on the regular at work. Still, the note of panic in Brandy’s voice made him pull back.

  Scarlet streaked down the meaty side of his fist. He angled his hand away to avoid dripping on her pretty dress. The pink flowers didn’t need blood drops for decoration, although her heaving breasts did something very nice for the neckline.

  “So, so sorry,” she kept saying. Her frantic tone softened the hard bulge in his jeans more than the pain did.

  “It’s okay,” he soothed. “Hardly worse than a bee sting.” He gave the hairpin a mistrustful glance. “Although you shouldn’t have that thing in your hair. You could’ve given yourself a lobotomy.”

  She grimaced. “That would explain why I’m so stupid—”

  “Hey.” He put his other hand under her chin and tipped her mouth closed. “Don’t. It’s nothing. I’m fine. See?”

  When he showed her the little prick—which was already closing, thanks to his toughness—she used the silky red flower on the non-pointy end of the pin to wipe away the blood.

  “Oh,” she murmured. “I thought I stuck you much harder.”

  He pulled his hand away. No good her thinking there was anything odd about his physiology. At least there was nothing unusual about a guy’s single-minded lust.

  Especially not with a girl like her. She still looked flustered, which only made him want to cuddle her closer, show her he wasn’t hurt at all, and that no matter what she did to him, he could take it.

  After everything that had happened to the clan and as hard as he’d pushed himself to make things better, nothing she could do would be worse.

  He brushed the silky waves of her hair back over her shoulder, letting his knuckles brush the satiny smoothness of her bare shoulders. Maybe he’d try going for that top button again…

  And then he realized she was talking.

  “…sorry again.”

  He focused on her words, not pawing her. “What?”

  “I should get going,” she repeated. That note of babbling was back in her voice. “I’m sorry—”

  He scowled. “Stop saying that.”

  Her jaw jutted. “Look, I really do have to go—”

  “Fine. But stop saying sorry. If you don’t want to be here, that’s fine.” He took a long step back, spreading his hands to the sides. The meat of his palm panged, and he wondered if she’d pierced something important. Whatever, he’d heal.

  Maybe for a minute he thought he’d get a break from the grind—get a chance to grind again on somebody who’d let him forget, just for a little while, that the fate of the clan was in his grubby hands.

  And now he was one-handed.

  He clenched the wounded one into a fist, letting the ache remind him that he had responsibilities that wouldn’t walk away after an afternoon’s fun. “I’ll take you back to your aunt’s house.”

  “I don’t need you to do that.”

  He bit back a growl. “You want to try to walk those heels up the sandy slope alone?”

  She swiveled her lips from one side to the other, and he could almost hear the hemming and hawing in her head.

  Finally, she gave him a nod that would’ve looked far more regal if her red-gold hair had still been piled up on her head instead of tumbled around her shoulders in riotous abandon as if they’d been—

  He cut off that thought and the half-chub that returned to his jeans at the irresistible mental blow-by-blow. They wouldn’t be doing that, not now, not ever again.

  Though his skin felt too hot and tight—as if he were on the verge of an accidental shift—he held out his elbow to her. Keeping his steps short while everything in him longed to get away from the scene of his humiliation, he guided her back to his truck. Aw hell, it’d taken him months to forget how she’d looked through his windshield when he’d pulled up behind her and she’d turned to smile at him. Like that one time he’d seen a shooting star blaze across the night on a lonely cross-country drive: bright, startling, lovely.

  And gone so damn fast.

  She didn’t say a word as he opened the cab door for her, and his neck flushed with dull heat as he had to scramble to move a crate of decorative stone that was sitting on the bench seat.

  That’s what he was: dumb as a box of rocks.

  He yanked the crate out of the cab and stomped around to the bed. By the time he climbed into the drivers seat, she was already settled and neatly seatbelted, her pink-flowered skirt tucked around her like a shroud.

  She was holding that wicked sharp hairpin clenched in her hand. The red silk disguised the bloodstain, but the metallic scent pinged in his sensitive nose. Probably he should be grateful the prick had halted their ill-advised trip down memory lane. If he was going to show the shifters of Angels Rest how trustworthy and dependable the clan was, he couldn’t just go falling into bed with every passerby.

  A whisper of thought, even deeper than his beast, reminded him the only one he’d ever fallen for had been Brandy.

  Despite his best effort, the growl remained in his voice when he asked, “Is your aunt still on Fifth?”

  She gave him a tight little nod. “But you can just drop me off on Main and I’ll walk.”

  He didn’t even answer that and drove the five extra damn blocks.

  Maybe she heard the gro
wling he wasn’t letting out and decided not to argue. But he hadn’t even come to a complete stop in front of the old Victorian—he’d remembered the house because the style stood out from the rest of the town’s post-war ranches and Cape Cods—when she popped open the door.

  “Dammit…” He stomped on the brakes. Obviously she couldn’t wait to get away from him, but really?

  She whisked out of the cab, “I’m sorry” trailing over her shoulder, souring the strawberry-cinnamon scent lingering behind her.

  The puncture in his hand ached when he gripped the steering wheel and watched her flee up the cobblestone walk. If the walkway hadn’t been perfectly straight, he would’ve lost sight of her in the overgrown thicket of the front yard. The two-and-a-half-story home barely peeped over the ash, oak, and alder trees, its top window like a single suspicious eye. Even if the older lady didn’t mind bushwhacking, the landscape could use good trim. XXX

  Mac scowled to himself. The lamp hanging above the front door lighted her way…and provided a silhouette of her hurrying legs through the thin skirt. Legs that could’ve been wrapped around him… But nope, nothing doing.

  He’d probably never see Brandy Wick again.

  Chapter 5

  “Did you get it?”

  Brandy had just closed the front door behind her and sagged bonelessly against the heavy wood when Rita hustled into the vestibule. “I got it.” The hairpin felt permanently bonded to her fist. Even tighter than her grip was the threat of tears in the back of her throat.

  What was that about? And why had she thought about bonding? Never mind the maddeningly fantastical (and maybe utterly wrong) stories she and her sisters had managed to unearth about shapeshifters—no way was she getting entangled with any man. Or bear. Or whatever.

  She pushed away from the door, away from the yearning to run back to the truck. “Where is he?”

  Gin was peeping through the curtained window in the parlor that opened off the vestibule. “He’s just sitting there.”

  “I’m not talking about Mac,” Brandy snapped.

  “Oh. Just as well since he’s pulling away now. And I think he left a streak of rubber on the road.” Gin let the curtain fall back into place. “Not that he used a rubber last time.”

  Brandy didn’t care, not about Mac’s retreat, not about her betrayal.

  She repeated that several times as she stared down at the crumpled silk flower.

  Balancing on one crutch, Rita plucked the flower from Brandy’s slack hand. “Aster’s fine,” she said with her perfect equanimity. “He’s in his crib.”

  “Cage,” Gin said sharply. “He’s in his cage. Just in case you were maybe feeling bad about what you did.”

  Brandy glared at both her sisters in turn. Which wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t get mad at them just because Rita was calm and Gin was honest and she herself wasn’t feeling either of those. “Where’s Aunt Tilda?”

  “Her friends were here when we got back from the bar. So they hit the road.” Gin ambled over to peer at the bloodied flower Rita had taken. “They’ve got a ways to go before the solstice. I hope I’m still that excited about road trips when I’m seventy.”

  “And she knows you aren’t comfortable with the others around.” Rita arched one mildly disapproving brow at Brandy. “Anyway, she wasn’t sure if you’d be home tonight.”

  Brandy grimaced. “Where else would I be?”

  Rita and Gin glanced at each other and then at her with identical shrugs.

  With a strangled swear word, she kicked off her wobbly heels and stomped past her sisters toward the narrow stairs. Each creaking tread up to the second floor was like another complaint about what a terrible person she was: a selfish niece, a needy sister, a drunken cocktease who should be brought up on assault charges.

  Not to mention a bad mother.

  At the smallest bedroom, she eased the door open—silently, thank heavens and WD40—and slipped into the comforting gloam.

  She followed the whuffle of breaths to the slatted enclosure in the corner. It was a crib. Oh, she was lying to herself now. It was a cage. Angling her arm between the bars, she rested her hand on the small, sprawled shape inside.

  All the tears and aches and swear words in her vanished at the hump of Aster’s butt under her hand, her love swelling until it pushed out every other thought. His stubby limbs went all directions, as if sleep had caught him mid-gambol and dumped him on his nose. Which it probably had. He was a wild little boy.

  A wild little bear cub.

  Her breath caught so hard it seemed to crack her chest, exposing all the love in her heart to the fears that had haunted her since her beloved son first shifted.

  What if he never shifted back? Or worse, what if he shifted uncontrollably, neither bear nor man? What would happen to him in a world that still had trouble accepting the differences between humans, much less the differences between human and shifter? She knew better than most how hard it was to be different.

  She bit her lip to stifle a sob of despair. Though she would’ve given her life to protect him, she hadn’t saved him from this sneaking wild animal attack. Everything she’d tried—semi-patiently giving him time to shift again, letting him whiff some anti-bear spray (and hadn’t that been fun to hunt down in NYC?), showing him his favorite video game that wouldn’t work without thumbs—had failed. Now her beautiful boy was lost in the beast.

  Though she hadn’t made a sound, he must have sensed her distress. With a muffled whimper, he rolled into a tight ball, trapping her hand between the curl of his furry belly and his short snout with his black button nose. The puffs of his breaths feathered against her wrist, and her own racing pulse echoed his agitation.

  “Shhh, Mama’s here,” she whispered, more to herself than to him since he was a heavy sleeper. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” She kept murmuring nonsense until his taut little body relaxed again.

  Except it wasn’t nonsense, dammit. She couldn’t expose him to clueless human doctors, but she wouldn’t lose him to a vicious animal. No matter what she had to do, she was going to make it all right.

  She might not be a mama bear, but she was a bear’s mama. At least until she found the cure.

  She smoothed his fur, the plush texture midway between finger-length strands of Mac’s hair and the bristle of his stubble, and the same rich, dark color except for some paler patches around his neck, chest, and belly like her own hair. If she’d known Macmahon Montero was a bear shifter, if she’d understood the power of the mating season and the spring full moon that drove the changes in their blood, she’d never have slept with him.

  If she’d never stopped in Angels Rest…she wouldn’t have Aster.

  She would get her little boy back.

  One more caress—more for herself than him—and she straightened. Though she hated leaving him in the cage/crib, he sometimes woke in the night, and his teeth and claws could do a surprising amount of damage. And he must never get out where he might be seen, not by people, not by other shifters. She’d check on him again, but first…

  She marched downstairs, then down another flight to the basement.

  Her sisters were in the spellatorium.

  They didn’t call it that, of course. Aunt Tilda just called it a workroom, as if that hid the fact she did magic down there. As if an otherwise unsuspecting person would look at the herb bundles hanging from the rafters, the baffling array of glass jars and canopic urns and padlocked treasure chests, the actual real-live bubbling cauldron in the middle of the bare earth floor, and say, “Oh, so you’re really into potpourri and canning?”

  Nah, it was obvious: The Wick women were witches.

  Not Brandy, though. After too many untethered years skipping from town to town as neighbors got weirded out by strange noises in the night and inexplicable smells at all hours, she’d walked away from all this. Or run, actually, all the way to a nice, normal, numbers job in New York City. Until she’d realized she was pregnant, of course.

  She crossed
her arms low over her belly, wishing she had a sweater to counter the cool basement air. Maybe a big denim jacket…

  She shoved away the regretful thought. She wouldn’t waver in her resolve, no matter what. Mac might be Aster’s father, but neither of them could ever know it.

  Witches from her line never initiated men into the circle. Even when a witch chose to risk the tricky path of bringing a child—always a daughter—into the legacy of magic, she knew she’d be doing it without a man around. Uh, other than for the obvious part.

  Brandy getting knocked up so easily after one sexual encounter, and having a boy, had greatly interested the circle council. Since she’d been greatly uninterested in sharing the specifics (they might be witches, but they were still women so it wasn’t that hard to figure out!) she’d shut down their nosey nonsense with a quickness. But she had to get Aster back before people, bears, or witches started asking questions she couldn’t answer, to keep him safe from the secrets that had plagued her own childhood.

  It was this place messing her up and bringing back painful memories. Growing up in one small town after another, always keeping ahead of the whispers, she’d renounced the circle to live her own life. Even though the spellatorium was clean and well-ordered (Aunt Tilda said a messy workroom meant messy spells; not so different from Brandy’s own spreadsheets) a hint of that old chaos seemed to lurk in the shadows.

  Or maybe that was just the shed dragon skin coiled in the corner. Because a witches’ circle might be smart, strong, and shipshape, but magic itself was untamed. As wild as a wild animal, as wild as the love that made her heart a monster to protect her little boy.

  She grimaced, her teeth clenching hard enough to grind.

  Oh wait, that was just the sound of Rita’s mortar and pestle. “I don’t need you for this part,” her sister said from over by the heavy butcher block island. “I know you don’t like it down here, and you’ve done everything you need to do.”

  She hadn’t done everything, though, had she? Or her son wouldn’t be a bear.