“So now you know: bears really do like honey,” the man said quietly. Jennifer let his finger fall from her lips as she choked on the surprise she felt that he had actually—wonder of wonders—made a joke. Before she could make any comment, however, he turned away from her, walking away from the grove and back the way they had come. She had no choice but to follow him, smiling slightly to herself; it wasn’t much, but the fact that he had made a joke had to mean that he was becoming at least a little more comfortable with her.
Jennifer took up the parcels of their food, brushing aside the mysterious man’s insistence that he was fine and could carry them back to his cave without assistance. “You know,” she said, licking her lips and still able to taste the honey from the man’s fingers, “It would be a lot easier if you would at least tell me your name.” The man raised an eyebrow at her, his lips twisting in something like a grin.
“Easier how?” Jennifer shrugged.
“I could thank you properly, for one. ‘Thank you, guy who rescued me,’ doesn’t really roll off the tongue that easily.” The man chuckled, shaking his head.
“You seem to manage it well enough.” Jennifer stopped, holding onto the basket and pouches tightly and crossing her arms to pin the man down with a glance.
“Come on. I’ve helped you all day—yes, I know, I didn’t have to, you’re perfectly fine on your own in spite of two knife wounds, and you’re a very manly man, I get it. I’ve helped you all day, and I think that at least merits your name.” The man looked as though he was going to demur once more, and Jennifer set her jaw, preparing for a long argument. She wouldn’t move—and she couldn’t be sure that she could fend the man off, but she thought he was still a little weak. He sighed finally, looking away for a moment before meeting her gaze.
“My name is Damon,” he said, his golden eyes peering into hers. “What’s yours? I should probably know the name of the woman I ‘rescued.’” Jennifer smiled.
“It’s Jennifer. Thank you.”
“What were you doing in the woods last night?” he asked, as they both resumed their trek back up to his cave. Jennifer shrugged.
“There was a group of us; we were planning on going through the woods to get to the next town over and got lost. The rest of the group went to retrace our steps and I got left alone with Liam… and you know pretty much what happened after that.” The man nodded.
“What made you come after me?” he asked, as they finally came to the cliff that contained his cave. Jennifer shrugged, slinging the basket up to her shoulder and starting the climb.
“Well, it’s not every day that you see a guy transform into a bear, first of all,” she said, glancing over her shoulder at the man to make sure she hadn’t offended him. “Secondly, I thought—and forgive me for this—that you might have gone after Liam, and while he’s definitely not a pleasant guy, I didn’t want to have to deal with him being dead.” She heard Damon snort behind her. “And then, of course, I was just curious—and I saw the blood trail you left behind. That’s how I found you. So I got worried you might have been seriously hurt.” She stopped at the landing, turning around to find Damon surprisingly right behind her.
“You were going to enter a bear’s den without knowing if he was seriously injured? You must be brave or stupid.” Jennifer grinned.
“You’re not the first one to have that opinion of me.” She shrugged. “By the way, if you had been seriously injured—should I have taken you to a regular doctor or a vet?” Damon laughed out loud, clutching the part of his chest where the wound was and reeling against her.
“I would prefer you not take me to either—it wouldn’t be necessary.”
Damon began to unload the food they had gathered, murmuring approval of the greens and wild onions she had found and giving her a smile for the berries. He cringed a little as he stood, but Jennifer didn’t offer to help as he moved to the small stove, taking a deep pot from a shelf and beginning to load it with pieces of rabbit. He poured in water, and Jennifer continued to watch, intrigued, as he opened another basket off to the side of the stove and pulled out something that looked like sweet potatoes and carrots. He chopped them up and added them to the pot before moving to the hearth.
“So, now that we can at least agree that you did rescue me,” Jennifer said, standing and moving to help him at the stove. “Can’t you tell me anything about yourself?” Damon shrugged.
“There really isn’t that much to tell. I live here by myself, I do for myself… I was wandering in the woods last night when I heard you and—Liam, you said—and went to investigate.” He shrugged again, wincing at the pull against the wound in his arm.
It seemed like a rather lonely existence, at least to Jennifer; she wanted to know just how it came to be that a man like Damon—even if he was some kind of supernatural creature—was living on his own completely. Surely he’d had parents of some sort. “How… how exactly did you come to be…” Jennifer pressed her lips together, wondering how to phrase exactly what she was thinking. “Why are you able to turn into a bear?” The words flew from her lips before she could moderate them in any way, and she was relieved when Damon chuckled.
“I am a werebear,” he said, standing back from the stove. He sat down heavily in the chair she had found him in the night before. “All of my people have the ability to transform into bears—by will and during the full moon especially.” Jennifer nodded.
“You do have people, then,” she said, the statement almost a question. Damon’s eyes flickered with pain.
“I did. No more. I’m the last of us.” He sighed, looking up at the ceiling of the cave. “I don’t—I’m not comfortable talking about it right now. Tell me about your life.”
While the stew cooked, Jennifer began to describe her life, telling Damon about growing up in the small town, about her friends, about going away to college. “I was kind of scared, actually—I didn’t know if I’d be able to make friends,” she laughed. “I mean, it seemed like all the friends I’d ever had just sort of… happened, you know? I’d grown up with them. I couldn’t imagine not knowing them.” She shrugged. “But it got easier.” She told him about studying anthropology, about her ambitions to travel to far-off places and learn about unknown cultures, to try and shed light on the many different human experiences that existed.
Damon was fascinated, asking for more details about the school she had gone to; about the mundane things that Jennifer had never had any reason to think about before. She learned that Damon had never gone to a formal school himself; he had been, as he called it, “creatively homeschooled,” taught by his parents and his community. His education had been as much about living in the woods as it had been about reading and writing and arithmetic, and while he’d had a radio for a while—some connection with the greater world—he had eventually run out of batteries and feared to go into town to buy more; not that he had money to buy anything with.
It was clear to Jennifer as they talked, waiting for the stew to cook through, that Damon had been unused to company for a long time—even the company of his own people. He seemed to have a hunger for any details she could give him of human society. “You almost seem like an anthropologist yourself,” she joked. “Looking into the culture of another social group, interested by rituals and languages.” Damon shrugged.
“I just…” he sighed. “I often think it would be nice to rejoin human society—or actually, to join it in the first place. I’ve never really been around any but my own kind, at least not for longer than it took to trade for things we didn’t have and couldn’t make.” Damon shrugged. “But it’s just not possible. I’m the last of my kind, and we don’t really interact with humans. It’s dangerous for us.” Jennifer frowned.
“How is it dangerous? I mean, you can control when you change, can’t you?” Damon bit his bottom lip.
“The tribe I belonged to… by the time I was born, we were already starting to dwindle. By and large, people don’t like bears. We’re… threatening, which can be
good in the wild, but it makes humans afraid, and when humans are afraid they tend to want to destroy the thing that makes them scared.” Damon paused, reaching over and poking at the fire in the hearth while he thought about his next words.
“Almost everyone I knew was killed by hunters. They’d… they’d comb the forest looking for us. Eventually, the only people left were my parents and one or two of the elders, and well…” Damon shrugged. “They died naturally, but I was the only one left of the entire tribe.”
Jennifer could hear the lonely pain in Damon’s words as he spoke. She couldn’t imagine what it would be like to watch the people you cared about be hunted one by one or even in large numbers all at once. It seemed to her that her father had told her faerie stories about a group of “bear-skin humans” as the legend went—people who could transform into bears, who used their ability to get away from regular humans. The story had, of course, been from the human perspective—and had included some unsavory bits about some of the bears taking human lovers against their will to try and keep up their lineages. But she had always thought it was just a tale, the kind of thing that parents told their kids to keep them alert in the woods or to fire their imaginations. She had never even suspected that it could possibly be a real thing.
Chapter Four
An hour later the stew was finished and the two inadvertent companions ate in near-silence, Jennifer mulling over what Damon had told her. She could only barely imagine what it might have been like to grow up as a werebear—a close-knit community of supernatural beings, living off of the land, moving around when humans came too close. It reminded her of stories of other tribes that lived in more distant places, eschewing technology even when they were exposed to it in order to preserve their way of life. She asked him more questions, wanting to know how the society he belonged to had worked, her mind operating as an anthropologist as much as it did as an acquaintance; she was curious, she was fascinated, as he explained the different functions of werebear society, how the elders made decisions but spoke to the entire tribe before rendering verdicts, how justice was meted out, how food was gathered and shared.
It seemed almost idyllic, and Jennifer thought that to Damon it must seem that way; he had lost that society and everything good and bad that had gone with it, so of course he focused more on the good things. “It wasn’t all glorious back-to-nature revelry,” he said cautiously, peering at her from underneath his shaggy hair. “I mean, there was in-fighting, people disagreeing about what we should do about the humans, things like that. But they were the only people who really knew what it was like to be one of us. I miss it, even with the fighting and the other stuff.”
“I wish there was a way that I could get all this down,” Jennifer said, pushing her plate from her. The stew had been surprisingly good, and the warmth of it seemed to creep through her extremities. “It’s always a shame when a culture of any kind is eradicated. Your people were… well, they were people. They had experiences and history that shouldn’t be forgotten.” Damon smiled crookedly.
“I’ve been thinking that it would be good if I could find a way to at least continue my lineage,” he said, looking down at the table and running his finger along the edge of his plate. “I know there have to be other werebears in the world, but I haven’t been able to make myself find them. I’m kind of afraid that I might discover their ways are totally different from mine. But at least if I could continue my own lineage, some part of that culture… it would stay alive. At least for a while longer.” Jennifer nodded. It was an aim that she could definitely agree with.
As they talked, it grew closer and closer to night, and Damon cooked up the rest of the animals he had snared, offering Jennifer a freshly-roasted morsel of squirrel. They ate the berries, watching the sun set, and Jennifer knew that whatever else Damon had in mind; she fully intended to stay at least one more night with him, to make sure he was okay. “One thing that you might find interesting about my kind,” Damon said, giving her another crooked smile. “We heal quickly.” He untied the makeshift bandage that Jennifer had wrapped around his arm, ignoring her protest; Jennifer’s eyes widened at the sight of the wound, almost totally closed, the flesh around it pink with healing tissue.
“That’s amazing,” she said, shaking her head in disbelief. “I… if I hadn’t seen the wound for myself, I wouldn’t believe it had been bad enough for a bandage.” Damon shrugged.
“It helps to eat regularly… the shaman for the tribe said it had something to do with our metabolism.” Jennifer nodded numbly, accepting the explanation that she couldn’t entirely understand.
Darkness gathered around the cave, and Jennifer could tell that Damon was about to ask her when she planned to leave; in spite of the rapport they had established, she could tell that shyness around humans was deeply ingrained in him—and probably something that he would never quite overcome, and she could understand why. “Before you say anything, you should know that you will have to throw me out of this cave if you want me to leave tonight.” Damon scowled.
“I’m almost completely healed!” he said. “I can lead you through the forest and you can be back in your town in a couple of hours, back to your own life.” Jennifer shook her head.
“You’re still weak, even if you have mostly healed. I’m not comfortable just leaving you here. I’m staying tonight and there’s nothing you can say to change my mind.” Damon looked for a moment as though he would argue, but then sighed.
“Fine. But I don’t actually need you to be here.” Jennifer rolled her eyes.
“Whatever gets you through the night, big guy,” she said, shaking her head.
They ate again, finishing off the stew with some of the greens that Jennifer had picked, and Damon pulled her close to the fire, settling next to her as they continued to talk into the night. Jennifer told Damon about the concerts she had gone to, about the clubs she had visited, the different little events of her life. Their conversation began to wind down, and Jennifer realized that while it wasn’t very late, the strenuous activities of the day had made her more tired than usual; she was amused to realize that it explained, quite well, the fact that humans from previous centuries tended to be early to bed and early to rise; the process of getting food from the world around them, instead of a grocery store, took a lot more energy.
Damon wordlessly pulled Jennifer onto her feet, pulling her with him to the bed. Jennifer felt her heart beating a little bit faster and told herself to calm down; Damon had said he wanted to continue his lineage—that probably meant he wanted to find a female werebear to carry his children, and she was far from being a werebear. Damon settled on the bed, drawing her body close to his, and Jennifer could smell the clean wood scent that clung to him, along with the underlying musk of his body and some deeper, earthy scent she couldn’t quite identify. He smelled—in some oddly alluring way—both like a man and like a bear, and Jennifer’s mind flashed back to the moment she had licked the honey from his finger, the peculiarly sharp and sweet taste of it.
For a long moment, Jennifer felt the suspense building between them; she felt as though she was holding her breath, even though she knew she was breathing normally. She glanced upward, looking into Damon’s eyes, and in the deepening gloom of the dying firelight, he stared down at her. Her heart was beating faster, and unconsciously, Jennifer licked her lips, still remembering the honey she had tasted thanks to the man whose body she was pressed against. The next moment, Damon’s arms tightened around her, drawing her even closer, even as his lips moved down to connect with hers. Jennifer froze against him for just an instant, both surprised and not at all shocked by the softness of his lips amongst the roughness of his beard. His mouth was hot against hers, his kiss urgent, almost sucking the breath out of her lungs in an instant; Jennifer moaned softly against his lips, pulling back only slightly.
Her hands came to life along Damon’s body, touching and exploring, feeling the contrast of rough and smooth along his arms, his hands, and his chest. Damon b
egan to trail his hands along her body as well, testing the lush curves of her breasts and hips, lingering at her waist, tickling her ribs. Jennifer shivered against him, feeling the arousal welling up inside of her body; she couldn’t remember ever feeling as swiftly, powerfully turned on as she did in Damon’s arms, as hot and cold thrills danced up and down along her spine, shooting out to her arms and legs, crackling with electricity.
Damon’s lips pressed more firmly to hers and he was pressing her down against the bed, making soft, growling moans as his hands worked to unbutton her shirt. Jennifer slipped his t-shirt off of him, tugging it over his head and tossing it aside, letting her hands roam the broad expanse of his muscled back. He was hot to the touch, his skin almost shimmering in the reddish light as he moved on top of her, shifting his position. Damon pulled away from her lips to bury his face against her throat, nuzzling firmly, the roughness of his beard oddly titillating in contrast to the gentle nipping of his mouth against her most sensitive spots. “You smell like mine,” he murmured, his voice a belly-deep, low growl. “You smell like you belong to me.” He nipped sharply at the base of her throat with his teeth, and Jennifer remembered with a burst of almost-apprehension that the human flesh of the man who was touching her, teasing her with hands far too skilled for a hermit had an animal side. As if he felt her spurt of concern, Damon pulled back, staring down into her eyes. “I will never hurt you, Jennifer. You know that?” Jennifer took a deep breath and nodded; even when Damon had been in his bear form, she remembered the softness in his eyes, the gentle kindness that had radiated from them when he looked at her.
So Much To Bear (A Werebear Erotic Romance) Page 4
