On the other hand, she was kind of touched that he cared enough to wonder how she was doing and what she was feeling. Did he … like her? He could be so thickheaded and insensitive it was hard to tell.
“So what if I am?” she added. “I guess this McDonald’s of yours has a super-size option?”
He laughed. “I’ll hook you up,” he promised, although she wasn’t sure what that meant.
They walked for a ways, and the sun was edging toward the mountains to the west when Barbara heard the sound of water. They came to a creek—maybe a river; it was pretty broad—and followed it for a time. More sound reached her, the sound of a waterfall, and ahead of her she saw mist. Soon they came on the falls themselves, a beautiful cascade of crystal water plunging down into a secluded lagoon encircled on three sides by a curtain of stone. The setting sun threw sparks across the rippling surface of the little lake, and a fish leapt up into the air, its scales shining silver-green.
Barbara had to stifle a gasp. “It’s beautiful,” she said.
He wasn’t starting at the falls or the lagoon. He stared at her. “Yes,” he said, and his face was as solemn as she’d ever seen it. “It is.”
Gulp. She twisted away, feeling her neck grow warm.
“Take a break,” he said. “I’ll find us some grub.” He started to turn, then said, “Just so I don’t frighten you—I’m going to Shift.”
She nodded and stepped back. He faced the river, and a bear exploded from him, superimposed itself over him, eclipsing his human self. He became the bear, huge and handsome, a formidable gray-brown grizzly showing terrible scars from the recent battle with the eagles, and some older wounds that were larger and more vicious. Doubtless caused by other bear shifters. Barbara had read that they fought a lot amongst themselves. Their bears could get unruly and wild. Did that ever happen to Rick? He seemed so calm, so in control. It was hard to imagine him truly wild—cocky, yes, and living in a seat-of-the-pants manner, but not crazy.
Judging by those scars, though, his bear might grow out of control at times. He hadn’t talked about it, though. She realized he was a deeper being than she had thought, that there were facets to his personality beyond the ones he’d showed her. He had his own pain, his own struggles. Just who was he? She realized she didn’t know. He’d asked a lot of questions about her, but when she’d asked questions about him they hadn’t really been about him but about his people. About whatever mystery they were guarding. She had acted like a cop, she thought with dismay. Not a friend. Not … well, not a friend.
Rick caught one fish, then another, and another, laying each one side by side on the river bank, and she was impressed by his smooth, quick movements, and she had to admit his bear was very handsome. At last, when he had five fish gathered, he Shifted back into human, and she had to suck in a breath at the sight of him, all muscles and slim waist and sly grin. His bear had gotten wet obtaining the fish, and the water had stayed on him during the Shift so that now it glistened on his pecs and trickled down the hollow between them, over his rippling abs. Some of it even tangled in his pubic hair and sparkled like dew. A little of it even misted his cock and made it shine wetly. His body was so naturally hot that a hint of steam rose off him, even his shaft.
Barbara realized she was biting her lip and staring. Hastily, she averted her gaze. Too late. Out of the corner of her vision she could see Rick looking pleased. Gone was his gloating smile. In its place was a quieter, deeper expression, more somber and somehow way sexier. His eyes almost bored through her, and she wasn’t even looking!
He scooped up the fish by their tails and said, “Come on, dinner’s on me.”
“You don’t expect me to eat them raw, do you?” Maybe that was fine for a bear, but not for her.
“What, you don’t eat sushi?”
“Not this mountain girl,” she said.
“I thought you were from Chicago.”
“Not anymore. And I didn’t eat it there, either.”
He laughed. “Don’t worry, this isn’t my first rodeo.”
“Meaning?”
“My crew and I come here sometimes. We call this place Crystal Falls. There’s a little camp down below—” He hitched his head toward the lagoon. “We can cook the fish there. Come on.”
He held out a hand to her. She deliberated with herself for a moment, then took it. His flesh really was warm. He smiled when she touched him, but it wasn’t that gloating smile this time. It was a deepening, a warming of that more solemn expression. Barbara felt goosebumps bust up all over her body, and she shivered.
“This way,” he said, and led her to the side of the falls, then down a narrow switchback trail that snaked along the cliffs down to the shore by the lagoon. She almost tripped once or twice, but he steadied her, and she felt dizzy, not with the height but with the feel of his hands on hers.
Stop it, she told herself. Rick Barnes is not for the likes of Officer Barbara Thompson.
Then again, why not? Why not, really?
But, dang, if she started down that path, she had a feeling she could fall for him super hard, and super fast. And that way lay disaster. She knew his type, had known it since the moment she’d laid eyes on him—his human self. He was a love-em-and-leave-em sort, a true man-ho of the first order, and she would do well to steer clear of him.
Even if his cock literally did smoke.
At the bottom of the cliff, sure enough, there was a circle of stones and an old firepit, even a few supplies buried in a hole in the ground. Rick dug up some firewood, heaped it in the pit along with some chips for kindling, then lit it with a fire starter. Before long he was grilling the fish on a metal grill laid across the flames, and the sumptuous smells wafted at Barb’s nose and made her mouth water. Rick located some seasoning in the hole, too, and dusted the fish with it even as it cooked.
“I can tell you’ve done this before,” she said, sitting on a rock. The sun was just then vanishing over the mountains, plunging the world into darkness except for moon, stars and fire. It was as if she and Rick occupied a private space, the only place lit on Earth, just for them.
“Sure I have,” Rick said easily.
She tried to resist the crushing wave of hurt. “I knew it,” she said, feeling angrier than she had any right to be.
He looked at her in confusion. “What’s wrong? Obviously I’ve been here before. My crew and I left supplies.” He stared at her, frowning, then smiled. “You mean women. You think I’ve brought other women here before.”
“Well, haven’t you?”
He shook his head, and he wasn’t smiling anymore. His eyes drilled straight into her core, and she felt it turn to jelly.
“No,” he said. “You’re the first female I’ve ever taken here.”
“Really?”
He nodded.
She sniffed. Was she crying? Good gravy, he must think she was an idiot.
“Shit!” he said.
“What is it?”
“The fish is burning.”
Quickly he took the fish off the fire and blew on it. She joined him, blowing out a few last sparks. They had come very close together and were almost blowing in each other’s face. When the fire was out, she realized her face was very close to his. He seemed to realize it, too.
He bent toward her, his lips questing …
She jumped backward.
“No!” she said.
He looked crestfallen. “No?”
She nodded, adamant. “No.” She smoothed her jacket and pants, as if they had gotten wrinkled. It was just something to keep herself occupied with as her mind spun out of control and her heart smacked against her ribs as if they’d done something wrong.
“Okay,” he said teasingly, “but then you get the burned fish.”
“You wouldn’t!”
He laughed, eyes sparkling. “I don’t know … Well, alright, since you are an officer of the law, I guess you deserve something halfway decent.” He had set the grill down on the ground and now he squ
atted over it, examining the fish by the light of the fire. “This one looks best,” he said. Using a pair of tongs, he lifted it and held it out for her.
The bear shifter crew had left behind some basic cooking implements, but they hadn’t bothered with plates or forks or knives, so Barbara had to accept the offering by hand. It was still hot, but not hot enough to burn. Still, she blew on it as she joined Rick beside the fire and sat cross-legged on the ground.
She bit into the fish, and its juices and spices filled her mouth. “Wow,” she said. “This is really good.”
“This is nothing. You should see me in a real kitchen.”
“You can cook, too?”
“Hell yeah! You haven’t lived until you’ve had my quiche.”
She gaped at him in wonder. Rick Barnes was full of surprises. Not only could he defend her from maddened eagle shifters, not only could he catch fish but he could cook them, too—and still look like he was sculpted from marble. Just what have you gotten yourself into now, Barbara Thompson?
“I haven’t done this since I was a little girl,” she said, after another bite.
“Eat fish?”
She blew a raspberry at him. “No, sitting out under the stars eating at a campfire. It’s just like summer camp at Camp Squaw.”
“Camp Squaw? That’s a terrible name.”
“Yeah, well, it was before the age of political correctness, I guess. It was just for girls.”
“Got it.” He bit into his fish, too, and a burst of juice gathered at his lips. She had to fight the urge to lick it away. “You know,” he said, “it’s probably too dark to go anywhere tonight. I could see well enough, but you’d trip and fall. I could carry you back to the road …”
“Ha! I’d like to see the day.”
“Well, then I don’t see any choice. We’ll have to stay here for tonight.”
She stifled a curse. “Can’t believe I dropped my phone. The station won’t know what happened to me. I may be the worst cop ever.”
“Trust me, in these woods it won’t be the first officer they’ve had go off the radar for a day or two. There are some funny things in the forest on this mountain.”
“What’s that supposed to mean? More of your werebear mysteries?”
“Call it what you like. But don’t fret about your job. They won’t fire you for losing your phone, especially not when they hear how it happened.”
“Think they’ll believe me? Chased off by eagle shifters?”
“I think so. It is the Pine Ridge P.D., after all. Lot of shifters around Pine Ridge.” Before she could ask him why again, he said, “You going to be warm enough in that jacket? I could build the fire up if you’re not.”
“I don’t think there’s enough wood.”
“No, but there’s an axe. Trust me, I know how to use it. I was a lumberjack before I became a ski resort remodeler, remember. We all were, in the Pine Ridge Crew. First shifter crew in town, that’s why we call ourselves the Pine Ridge Crew. All the others are johnny-come-latelies.”
He was proud of the town, she realized. His town. The crew’s town. That was interesting. Most shifters were more forest-oriented, she’d read. Of course, everything she knew about them came from books, not actual experience. A couple times she’d had to keep order at protests when the shifter-haters got a license for a public demonstration and demanded the mayor kick the shifters out of town. The bear shifters had arrived, in bear form, and made a parade down the center of the street, scattering half the protesters. The police chief had laughed, and when Barbara had asked him about it he’d said the shifters had a license, too. That had been her only official experience with shifters, really. She wondered if Rick had been one of the bears there. He probably had.
I’m thinking like a cop again, she scolded herself. I’m sitting across from the hottest guy I’ve ever met and I’m thinking like a cop. She should be focused on him, not his people.
“So,” she said, aiming for casual, “where are you from? The mountain?”
“Not hardly. I’m from Rhode Island.”
“Rhode Island!” She almost choked around her fish. “They have bear shifters in Rhode Island?”
He laughed. “If they do, I don’t know about it.”
“Then how’d you become one? And wind up here?”
He seemed pleased that she was taking an interest in him, finally. “You want me to tell you my story?”
She paused, then nodded. “I really would.”
After a pause, he began to talk.
Chapter 8
“There was this girl, and she was a shifter,” he started, and Barbara listened closely. “A biker chick. Smoking hot, tough as nails. You’d like her. I was a working class guy, a construction worker. I didn’t have any family, I was a foster kid, so I didn’t have any real roots. When she wanted me to come with her on the road, I said hell yeah. Didn’t know she was a shifter at the time, and this was back before shifters came out of the den.” He chuckled and shook his head. “She about gave me the shock of my life when she disappeared one night. We were camped out in the desert—we’d wandered down to New Mexico—and I guess her bear needed release, because she wasn’t there when I woke up to take a piss. Oh, uh, sorry. Leak, I mean.”
Barbara smiled. “I can handle ‘piss’.” She cringed. “Okay, forget I said that.”
His gaze was on the fire. “I was afraid for her, thought some bad bikers must have found us and dragged her off into the desert to have their way with her, so I went after her. I was bare-assed naked and half-drunk, and it was as black as a witch’s heart. Well, actually, I’ve met a couple of witches, and they weren’t so bad. But anyway. It was dark, darker than it is now. All there was was the light of the stars shimmering above like a field of diamonds on black velvet.”
“Oooo.”
“Suddenly, I hear a strange coughing sound. A deep animal grunt. I stiffen. Freeze. It comes again. I spin toward the sound, and there, coming at me out of the darkness, is this great big monstrous bear. I was so shocked I didn’t even know what it was at first. There are no bears in the desert! And it was hard to make out exactly, as dark as it was. The bear was just this huge hellish shape coming at me, its eyes kind of gleaming by the starlight.”
“That’s scary.”
“Well, I started to run for it,” he continued. “Wasn’t like I had any weapons to fend the beast off, and it would laugh at my fists. But then I thought, ‘Shit, what if Heather’s still out here? What if it attacks her?’”
“A biker chick named Heather?”
“That was her real name,” Rick said. “It’s what I called her. She went by Snake Eyes, on account of her eyes could glow a little in the dark. Now I know it’s because she was a shifter. Anyway, so I rush back to the camp, grab some stones from around the fire pit, and run back out into the desert. I find the bear, which hadn’t gone far, and start hurling rocks at it.”
Barbara’s mouth dropped open. “That was stupid.” Brave, though, she added to herself.
“Don’t I know it,” he said. “But what else was I going to do? Well, Heather—that’s what I’m going to call her; feel free to think of her as Snake Eyes—I guess she got tired of me stoning her, because she Shifts, I suppose so that I’ll see it’s her and stop pelting her. Only I had just tossed a stone right before the Shift, and it hit her just as she became human again. She got a rock right between the eyes and went down. I rushed to her and held her in my arms.”
“Don’t tell me she died!”
“Heather? Oh no, like I said, she was—is—tough as nails. But she’s so pissed off at me that as soon as I wrap my arms about her, she leans forward and bites me—right in the forearm! Some gratitude for showing concern for her. Well, she bit me deep, right in the muscle, deep enough to put a bear in me. ‘Thanks for the rock in the face, asshole,’ she says. ‘Now enjoy your bear.’ And with that, she gets up, stalks off back to the campsite and takes off on her motorcycle, leaving me stranded in the desert.”
/> “Jesus!”
“I know, right? Naked and stranded in the desert with a new bear inside me, and I didn’t even know what a bear shifter was.” He winced. “Well, I won’t bore you with what happened next, which was a lot of wandering and searching, years of trying to figure things out. Eventually I found a chat room online that mentioned bear shifters. Some conspiracy nuts had some blogs about it and recordings of bear shifter sightings. One was in Pine Ridge, so that’s where I went, to get answers. I was lucky. I fell in with the Pine Ridge Crew, and they took me in, treated me like family. I’ve never looked back.”
Barbara studied Rick with new respect. “That sounds like a hard life.”
“Oh, it wasn’t so bad. I liked the open road, never knowing what was around the next bend. But I’ll tell you I don’t miss being afraid of what was inside me, always worried I might kill someone, or that it might kill me.” A dark look passed across his face. “It took me a long time to make peace with my bear. It was wild inside me, and I didn’t understand it. It felt like it was tearing me apart.”
She swallowed and moved closer to him around the fire, wanting him to take comfort from her presence. She could see the memories pained him, that they brought him back to a grim time in his life. And part of her thought, No, a wild time. He really does have a wildness about him. Only it’s his bear, raging and out of control inside him.
As if to confirm this, he said, “Sometimes it still fights me. My bear needs to come out sometimes or else it will go mad. I’ll go mad.” He seemed to hesitate.
“What is it?” she said, softly. She was very close to him now.
He turned to look at her, then glanced back to the fire. “It scares most girls,” he said. “When my bear grows restless inside me. When it rages and drives me nuts. Most women just bail on me. I’ve learned …”
“Yes?” It came out almost as a whisper.
“I’ve learned not to get too close to women. For a long time, I’ve never let myself have a relationship.”
Bear Mated: A BBW Bear Shifter Paranomal Romance (Pine Ridge BBW Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance Series Book 2) Page 5
