Bearly Begun (BBW/Bearshifter Romance) (Bachelor Bears of Yakima Ridge Book 1)

by Isadora Montrose

  “This gig suits me better.” He scooped her up in his muscular arms and carried her off.

  * * *

  “You bought this house?” Doug looked around in disbelief at the derelict living room Len had taken him into. “Just what was wrong with those rentals I sent you to, Lenny?”

  Leonard Benoit shrugged his massive shoulders. “Jeez, Dougie,” he said. “Joey and me we couldn’t live with neighbors right the other side of cardboard walls. And when we went outside onto that bitty little balcony, we could see right into the places opposite. Couch, dining table, folks eating dinner, bedrooms, the lot.” He sounded truly appalled.

  “Joey and me, we decided maybe we could rent a house, but then we saw this place for sale. It’s a dump. But it’s solid. Needs new wiring, and a new roof, and a whole lot of other stuff too, but we can do it while we’re living in it. We can sell it on down the road, make us a little profit.” Len looked around at the cracked plaster complacently.

  Doug turned to survey the decrepit timber framed house. The broken windows were boarded up. The floors showed evidence of the fires that had been lit in the living and dining rooms. The plaster was falling off the ceiling and damp marked the walls. Rubbish lay in drifts in the corners. There was an unpleasant tang of stale urine and feces in the air.

  Doug grunted. “This is a pretty rough part of town. Hope you bought low.”

  “Very, very low. Bank was some glad to have a buyer. And if the neighbors come looking for trouble, we’ll have to show them some.” Len bared huge white teeth in a big red grin.

  “I meant that flipping a house in this neighborhood might not be a good way to make a quick buck,” Doug warned his cousin.

  Len whipped a computer printout out of his hip pocket and showed it to Doug. “No guarantees,” he said, “But in the last three years, as the fancy shops and condos have crept this way, every street west of this one has seen property values go up fifty, sixty percent. This street should be next. “

  Doug made a noncommittal noise.

  “My guess is that within two years, this street will be full of Yuppies—maybe sooner. No more whores on the corners, no more gangs in the warehouses, no more drug dealers any place,” Len predicted.

  Doug clapped his cousin on his back and laughed. “Okay, you have a plan. And a realistic perspective on your new neighbors. But I don’t know how you plan to keep an eye on your investment from French Town for two or three years.”

  Len lowered his head to whisper in Doug’s ear. “Thing is I got a cousin living right here in Portland. Figured he could swing by to look at the place. Of course, we’ve planned on putting in a good security system and new windows and doors. Get a good tenant if we have to. Don’t intend to make it easy for burglars.”

  Doug shook his head at Len and looked up into his cousin’s stubborn face that was so like his own. “And just when do you plan to work on Maddie’s gym and look for a mate?”

  “Maddie doesn’t need both Joey and me yet. We can’t do much for her until she’s roughed in and wired up. I’ll work on the house until she’s ready for finishing work.” Len held up a big hand. “Don’t you worry. Joey is going to keep an eye on her general contractor and trades. Anything slipshod and he’ll sort it out.

  “I figure that I’ll still have plenty of time to meet me some of those lovelies at the gym.” Len’s big face split into a wide grin.

  “You’re drooling, Lenny.”

  “Have to watch that. City girls likely don’t much go for salivating bear.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Five years earlier...

  The shabby apartment was illuminated only by the street lamps shining through the skimpy curtains provided by the landlord. A small, thin boy bumped first into a chair, and then the coffee table, as he wound his way through the small, dimly-lit living room.

  He stood shaking silently beside the couch and waited. The young woman who was sleeping there sat up and let her blanket fall to her waist. She put a maternal arm around the child’s quivering shoulders.

  “Bad dream?” she asked softly.

  The boy nodded. “Can I sleep with you, Erin?”

  His sister hugged him and swung her feet off the couch. “That’s not such a good plan, sweetie. Let’s see if some milk will help.”

  Erin Salter shoved her feet into her slippers and put her hands on Cord’s narrow shoulders feeling their tenseness. His bones poked into her palms. She moved him into the galley kitchen and took out the carton of milk. It was only half-full, she noted worriedly, but she poured some into a mug anyway and zapped it in the microwave.

  “Come on, Cord,” she said softly, we’ll sit at the table.”

  Obediently the little boy climbed onto a chair and put his hands around the hot mug. He sipped and looked at the woman with uncertain blue eyes. His sister gazed back at him from kind hazel eyes. Her soft curves and gentle expression were mild and affectionate and he relaxed a little.

  “Want to tell me about your dream?” Erin asked softly.

  Cord shook his lint blond head and drank some more. He looked small, lost and adorable.

  “Okay.” She put out a big hand to smooth his hair off his face, and ignored his automatic flinching. “Do you want peanut butter and crackers?”

  Cord nodded but didn’t speak. While Erin was busy in the cupboard, another boy a little taller than the first, but just as thin, walked into the dining room and sat down across from his brother. His hair was a darker blond than his brother’s but lighter than his sister’s. Erin sighed when she saw him and placed the plate on the table between them.

  “Hey, Hunter,” she said. “Did we wake you?” she asked softly.

  He nodded and reached for a cracker.

  “One each,” said Erin. “I’ll make two more.”

  Cord looked suspiciously at his twin and made the other cracker disappear. Hunter kicked his brother under the table.

  “Don’t kick your brother, Hunter,” Erin said automatically. “Apologize.”

  She had to wait a long time for Hunter’s grudging, “Sorry, Cord.”

  “Would you like some milk, too?” Erin asked Hunter.

  Hunter nodded.

  “What do you say?” Erin prompted.

  “Thank you.”

  Erin tried not to laugh. “Yes, please,” she corrected.

  Hunter glared at her but she stood firm. “Yes, please,” he finally muttered. His blue eyes were calculating and defiant. When she set crackers and milk on the table and waited for his thanks, he stared at her with the same impudent expression.

  She smiled and didn’t move her hands until his grouchy, “Thank you,” emerged from his sullen six-year-old lips.

  “You’re welcome,” she responded with as pleasant a smile as she could muster.

  Erin tried not to take any of the byplay personally. The twins had been through a lot, and she figured they had been dragged up any which way since her mother’s death. Please and thank you had apparently been given a miss.

  Hunter was by any measure worse than Cord. Which made sense since he was the more dominant of the two boys. On the one hand, he was fiercely protective of his twin, and on the other, he stole his brother’s food and thumped him if he felt like it. Little barbarians, the pair of them, she thought wryly.

  Erin pulled out another chair and sat watching the boys eat their midnight snack in the twilight of the unlit apartment. She didn’t want to rev them up by turning on the lights. And she didn’t want to feed them extra meals at two a.m. either.

  In the three weeks since the social worker from Child Protective Services had asked her if she would take charge of her half-brothers—while their father was serving a prison sentence, she had only grown more worried about money. If they had gone into foster care, their foster family would have received a stipend. As family, Erin got no such payment.

  She had already dipped into her meager savings to buy clothes for the boys. And now it appeared she would have dip again to supplement the
grocery money. She tried not to let her money worries show to Cord and Hunter. They were just getting used to her and learning that three meals a day and a regular routine of school and home were standard issue.

  But the truth was she was swimming in deep water without a life-jacket. Maybe she should have visited more after Mom had the twins, she mused. But the likelihood of running into her mother’s boyfriend had put her off. After Mom’s death three years ago she had stopped going round altogether. As a result, the boys were virtual strangers to her—strangers with attitude.

  Why her mother had let her on-again-off-again partner get her knocked up was beyond Erin’s ken. Howie (Pacman) Pacey was such a deadbeat. Wasn’t it enough that he had run Erin off with his clumsy gropings when she was only sixteen? If a friend’s family hadn’t let her stay with them, she wouldn’t even have graduated from high school.

  Her mind was wandering. No point asking where the money was going to come from. The boys were her responsibility and she would just have to figure it out. Now they had to go back to bed and so did she. She had a twelve-hour shift at the plant tomorrow and the boys had school. They all needed their sleep.

  She stood up and told them so, and began the slow process of getting teeth brushed and the boys back into her double bed. She returned to the lumpy couch and her single flimsy blanket.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Present day...

  Erin lay sleeplessly brooding on the narrow sagging couch. The boys were asleep in their bedroom. She wondered how she could work so damned hard and never get anywhere. After five years, she was still sleeping in the living room and the twins still shared her old double bed in the single bedroom.

  Somehow she never managed to scrape together enough money to be able to move to a two-bedroom apartment. It wasn’t a huge ambition. Pretty damn modest in fact. If only she could find a better job, make some decent money, she could find a better neighborhood and a better place to live. This apartment was too damned handy to Pacman’s crib. And too damn small for three people.

  No sense in wishing for the moon. She was doing okay at Diamond Foods for a woman with only her high school diploma. It was just such a struggle to feed and clothe those two growing boys. They wore out their jeans and outgrew their shoes so rapidly she could never catch up. And they never stopped being hungry.

  At least she wasn’t in debt. Although taking the pay cut to have a day job on the food line was nibbling away at her savings account. She couldn’t keep dipping into that to pay for everyday necessities. And it would be years before she could reasonably expect the boys to have jobs and bring home their wages. Besides, at the rate they were going, they would be in jail by sixteen.

  Most days she felt much older than her twenty-nine years—tonight she felt ancient. How long had it been since she had her hair cut, or bought herself something new to wear instead of picking up something at the thrift store? Years, she thought gloomily. How long since she had a date? Had sex?

  That last was easy. Five years. Since she took the boys in and her boyfriend, Josh, had balked at the prospect of two six-year-olds sucking up all her time and money. Not to mention that she had refused to have sex with Josh when Hunter and Cord were in the next room. Even if they were supposed to be asleep.

  These days she didn’t meet men much. And even if she did, who was going to going to make a pass at a frumpy, plus sized woman with bad hair and worse clothes? Of course, wearing men’s tee-shirts cut down on the harassment issue. Big tits and a big rear seemed to bring out the pig in a lot of guys. She’d just as soon not show off her body and have to deal with grabbing and coarse comments or worse.

  After high school, when she had got her first full time job, she had had big dreams. She was going to find herself a good, decent man—one with a good job—and they would get married and live in a nice house with a backyard, and pay down the mortgage sooner rather than later. They would drive a minivan with a couple of car seats. Have a couple of kids and a stable home life. Maybe a dog for the kiddies to play with in the backyard.

  Well, Hunter and Cord had sunk that ship of dreams. Not that they were to blame for the misfortune of having Mom die. The van that had plowed into the bus stop and killed her, was nobody’s fault. Well probably the driver’s. But he had died too—so there wasn’t any satisfaction in that. There had been a decent insurance payout, but Pacman had blown the lot before he was sent to jail.

  And it absolutely wasn’t the boys’ fault that their dad was a crook. But probably if she had done a better job of raising them, they wouldn’t have been so quick to absorb Pacman’s criminal tutelage. She had done her best, but clearly it hadn’t been enough.

  Mind, eleven surely was too young for their characters to be fully formed, so they had to be salvageable. But how to manage it was beyond her. That book she had listened to at work was full of nonsense that required money to implement. Money she did not have.

  It hurt to have her darlings call her ‘Ho,’ and ‘Bisnotch,’ and worse. Pacman was leading them astray and there didn’t seem to be anything she could do about it. She was pretty sure if she got Child Protective Services involved that Pacman would get custody—they were insane about keeping families intact.

  Or they would put her brothers into foster care. No one was going to support her in her efforts to bring those boys up right. She was only the half-sister and didn’t fit into their idea of the intact family. CPS would have lots of advice but nothing concrete, except taking the boys away from her.

  Best she could hope for was being assigned another overworked social worker who would schedule meetings to suck up her free time. And if there was one thing she had learned in five years as surrogate mom to her brothers, it was that nagging didn’t change behavior—it just pointed out that you were powerless to make them do whatever it was you were asking.

  Sitting down once a week with a nice lady who had to check their file to recall their names wasn’t going to make the boys stop cutting school or calling her names. They knew they were supposed to go to school, do their homework, and treat her decently. Telling them so was pointless without consequences for disobedience.

  Hunter and Cord knew that she couldn’t make them do anything anymore. Pacman would give them new electronics if she confiscated the ones he had given them. They knew she had to go to work before they left for school. And that, even with her sandwich making gig, she was home after they were supposed to be back from school.

  When they strolled in late, smirking and calling her Boob Queen and the like, what was she to do? Smack them? Hardly—she didn’t believe in beating kids. Send them supperless to bed? Right, as if they wouldn’t just leave and go back to Daddy. Assign them chores? And make them do them how?

  She wasn’t a whiner, but she sure could use some help about now. A strong shoulder to rest against now and again. Someone to share responsibility with occasionally. Because those boys were on the road to ruin if something didn’t change.

  Erin wiped the tears trickling down her cheeks in surprise. Crying wouldn’t help her. She needed a plan—not self-pity. She fell asleep chewing fruitlessly on her hopeless predicament.

  * * *

  Erin stood with a row of other women at the long stainless steel counter. They were all dressed in identical baggy, white overalls and white hair covers. Their hands were encased in latex gloves. Erin pulled a loaf of bread from the stack on the shelf before her. She laid out the twenty-four slices of wheat bread as if she were dealing cards.

  She plopped twelve scoops of egg salad from the bowl on the counter on twelve of the slices, covered them and stacked the sandwiches. She passed them to the woman beside her who deftly sliced them into triangles and put them into the machine that wrapped them and stamped the best before date on them. When her tray was full, another woman carried them off to the refrigerated racks.

  Erin was bored. But she was used to being bored. She listened to the audio book she had borrowed from the library. A woman’s voice cheerfully explained the sev
en simple steps to raising well-rounded, well-behaved adolescents. Erin had to laugh at the assumptions of the author.

  Be Present, was the title of this chapter. Well she had arranged to be present in Cord and Hunter’s lives. But being around after school meant swapping her job delivering sandwiches for a job making them. And, surprise, surprise, a big pay cut. And for what? So those budding young offenders could continue to skip school and hang out with their jail bird father.

  Suddenly they had fancy new shoes and snappy haircuts and cell phones. All courtesy of dad. But if he ever fed those two hulking eaters, it was one hundred percent junk. She had outright asked him for money and he had leered at her and told her he could fix her up with a new job. Pole dancing. What a loathsome piece of work he was.

  Hunter and Cord were turning into little hooligans and Erin knew that Pacman was coaching them in the criminal arts that were his skill set. Six years of raising them right all gone in a matter of weeks. They were cutting school, lying, taking money from her purse, doing worse with their dad for all she knew. It was heartbreaking.

  She was so proud of her handsome, blond, muscular brothers. They were big for their age, but they were only eleven. Pacman had seen their tall, burly physiques as an invitation to involve them in burglary and drug running. Since they weren’t quite twelve they were too young to be charged. What a complete dickwad.

  Pacman didn’t give a damn if his boys wound up in a group home or someplace more detrimental. And nothing she said got through to her foul mouthed, cocky half-brothers. For sure Satan had their souls. What she needed was an exorcist.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The two husky boys were struggling to lift the copper tubing on the back porch. Len guessed they were about fifteen. Copper didn’t weigh much, but when it was secured to rebar, that was a different matter. Cast iron was plumb heavy. Lenny signaled Tracker to heel and watched to see what the kids would do. They had the stocky build of wrestlers or junior weight lifters. But rebar was rebar.