The Shifter's Embrace

by Selena Scott

  Apparently, she hadn’t been completely convinced if she was bouncing off her chair to tell them the reason she’d finally accepted it.

  She waved her hand at Jack. “Well, yes, we went through it, but I still felt left out. Like the one who didn’t quite belong, until today.” Caroline didn’t notice Martine’s green-eyed stare on the side of her face.

  “What happened today?” Celia asked, scooping a large forkful of mac and cheese into her mouth. She was painfully aware of Jean Luc across the table, but was trying to pretend that she was not. Not at all. Not in the least. She flirted with and laughed with and jumped into the arms of gorgeous, famous men all the time. No big deal. She definitely had not been replaying the whole experience on repeat in her head all day. She definitely was not blushing right now, just thinking about it again. No way. It was hot in here, was all. That was why she was blushing. Not because of Jean Luc’s humongous, muscly presence across the table.

  “I realized something,” Caroline said. “Remembered something important.” She leaned across the table and laid a friendly hand over Jean Luc’s. Tre and Celia’s eyes both zoomed in on it like circling hawks in the sky. “Your uncle, his name was Claude, right?”

  Jean Luc nodded, looking like he might know what was coming.

  “Did he sometimes go by Crazy Claude?”

  Jean Luc couldn’t help but laugh. “That he did.”

  “I knew it!” Caroline crowed, delight lighting up her features. “I didn’t make the connection before. I didn’t realize that his last name was LaTour. I just thought that was what he called his business, because it was French for ‘tour’ or something.”

  “I’m sorry,” Thea said, frowning. “What the hell is going on?”

  Jean Luc, smiling abashedly, scraped a hand over his face. “LaTour’s Tours with Crazy Claude. Come see the Everglades the French way.”

  Thea stared at him. “I’m sorry,” she repeated. “What the hell is going on?”

  Jean Luc rose from the table, shaking his head. He returned a minute later with a dusty photo album that he opened up to a certain page and held open for the group to see. “There’s Uncle Claude. He’d guiding a tour on his airboat.”

  “Is he wearing a striped shirt and a red scarf? And a beret?” Celia could barely believe her eyes.

  “Oh yeah,” Caroline said. “He did tours of the Everglades but totally played up the whole French stereotype thing. He wore a fake mustache and hammed up the accent. It was hysterical. I have no idea why it worked, but it just kind of…”

  “Did,” Jean Luc finished. “He had so much charisma. And he knew he needed an edge over all the other schmucks with airboats around here. He needed something in particular to draw the tourists. So he played up the French thing, even though he was French Canadian. And people liked it. It made the tours more fun. Totally random. But totally fun.” He turned to Caroline. “I take it you partook in one of these tours?”

  She nodded, a huge grin on her face. “About six years ago. I came down here with Peter, but he was busy in Miami. I drove through Homestead, looking for a tour. But I’d done a few before and I wanted something different. Somebody told me about your uncle and I was all in. It was the best tour I’ve ever done. Informative and thrilling and hilarious. It was just me and him and another couple. Afterwards, I stuck around for a bit and just talked to him.” Her eyes went a little distant, a little faraway. “He told me that it sounded like I married the wrong guy. He had two sons who would be much better for me. I assume he was talking about you and your brother. He tried to give me your numbers.”

  Jean Luc groaned into his hand, a healthy blush working its way up his cheeks. “Jesus, I’m so sorry, Caroline. That was so rude of him.”

  “No!” she shook her head. “I thought it was funny at the time. And turns out, he was right. I did marry the wrong guy.” She sighed and pushed food around on her plate. “I’m just so thrilled that I have a connection to this place, the way Tre and Celia had a connection to Northern Michigan, you know? It means that I’m a part of it. Of all of this. I’m so relieved! I hated being the odd man out.”

  Martine eyed her for a long time. “You were never the odd man out.”

  “Sure felt like it,” Caroline said, a little laugh on her voice. “Isn’t it crazy what we can convince ourselves of?”

  The rest of the dinner passed in friendly conversation, just the way that Caroline had hoped it would. Afterward, when Celia was clearing dishes, she paused over the photo album, her eyes zooming in hard on one particular feature.

  “Oh my God,” she muttered under her breath, her eyes widening in delight.

  “Don’t say a word,” Jean Luc growled, leaning over her back to see which picture she was looking at, though he was pretty sure he already knew.

  Celia tried very hard not to go still when she felt the heat of him at her back. He was just so big, she could feel him everywhere. She cleared her throat. “Tell me this preteen in a beret is you. Just tell me that and make my dreams come true.”

  He chuckled. “I plead the fifth.”

  “Oh my God. You weren’t lying! You were a dork!” It utterly delighted her to no end to know that the athletic hottie behind her had at one point suffered from dorkdom as much as she had. Because this kid in this picture was not cool. He was big and awkward and there were almost no hints that he was going to grow up to be athletic and handsome. None. She looked at the picture closer. “Dang, you were all ears.”

  “Alright, alright,” he grumbled, flipping the photo album closed. “I’m still all ears, for the record.”

  She turned and forced herself not to step back. They were almost as close as they’d been that afternoon on the screened-in porch, leaning on one another and laughing. She peered up at him and squinted at his face. She saw, with a little jolt, that he did, in fact, have a lot of ear to work with. “Wow. You’re right. How come I never noticed that before?”

  “The beard helps even me out a little,” he said, looking down at her, a blush rising lightly on his cheeks.

  She nodded and stepped around him with the plates toward the kitchen. The beard was definitely not the reason she hadn’t noticed his big ears. She loaded the dishes in the dishwasher and then made sure that she and Martine were definitely alone in the kitchen.

  “Do you think Jean Luc is handsome?” Celia whispered to Martine.

  Martine looked up and narrowed her eyes, like she was trying to figure out why she was being asked this question. She shrugged. “I think I’ve made my stance on his attractiveness clear in the past.”

  “No,” Celia shook her head, still whispering and blushing to beat the band. “I don’t mean attractive. Anyone with a body like that qualifies as attractive. I mean handsome.”

  Martine dumped food into a Tupperware and gave it considerable thought. “I guess not. He’s a little plain. Except for those eyes of his. Which are special.”

  “Right.” Her suspicions were confirmed. She leaned back for a second and pulled her phone out of her pocket. In a matter of seconds she was looking at an endless string of Google images of him. Pictures of him all geared up, black, sweaty stripes under his eyes, his arm cocked back for a perfect throw. There were pictures of him in a suit and tie during a press conference. Pictures of him surrounded by screaming, smiling kids, posing for a picture with a football star. In each one of those pictures, Celia’s stomach swooped hard and low, like a seagull skimming an inch above the waves. But as she studied them, she could see now that his ears poked out just a little far. His features were definitely, just a little, plain. Huh.

  She took another second and Googled a picture of Chris Evans. Then of Matt Bomer. Yeah. Yup. Handsome. Classically so. But they didn’t swoop her belly. Huh.

  “Movie time!” Caroline called into the kitchen. Celia looked from her cloud of thought to see that the kitchen had been set back to rights. The food put away.

  “Oh. Crap. I’m sorry for not helping more, Martine.”

  �
��No, no,” Martine waved her hand with a little smile on her face. “I can tell you had something else on your mind. Seemed important.”

  Celia was the last to join the group in the TV room. It was really the most conventional room in the whole house. It was painted a regular old blue and had a large sectional couch and a couple armchairs all pointing toward a gigantic flatscreen. Jack and Thea were curled up together in one of the armchairs, Tre had claimed the other. Martine and Caroline were on the long end of the sectional and Jean Luc was half-sprawled across the short end. The lights were out and the movie was already flickering to a start.

  Jean Luc caught her eye as she walked in and he straightened up a little, making room for her on the short end of the sectional. Alright. Apparently she was sitting there, between the arm of the couch and Jean Luc.

  She sat down and turned toward the TV, trying not to freeze up when her knee knocked against his.

  “Anybody want blankets?” Jean Luc asked, standing up and moving over toward a chest in the corner. He passed them out to everybody and came back to sit next to Celia, who’d declined a blanket. This time, when he sat down, he was close enough that when their knees knocked, they stayed touching. Just a single point of zinging contact. Celia could have sworn her knee was fifteen degrees hotter than the rest of her body.

  The movie played and she faced the screen, the images zipping past her eye, but she couldn’t have said what the story was about. She took long deep breaths, but even that wasn’t enough to keep her leg from trembling, a little tapping up and down that completely destroyed the nonchalant air she was trying so oxymoronically hard to cultivate. So, she shifted. Away from him. And so did he, immediately. Celia cursed herself for destroying the spell. She didn’t settle. Instead, she drew her legs up onto the couch, leaned against the arm, and sprawled out a little, taking up far less space than he had when he’d sprawled. Seemingly casually, she slid sideways and pressed her toes to his knee.

  He hissed and she turned to him, whipping her toes away.

  “No,” he murmured in a whisper that only she could hear. “It’s okay. You’re just cold is all.” He lifted his leg a few inches and jerked his head back his way. Was he inviting her back in? Slowly, her eyes on his, she extended her legs again and pressed her toes into the little cavern of space he was creating under his knee. He let the weight of his leg back down and her chilly toes were fully cocooned in the warm cave of his leg and the couch cushions.

  She couldn't help but shiver, just a little, as she settled back down onto the couch. The rest of the movie was a blur.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The next morning, the men had shifter practice with Martine while the three women did some shopping and errands that needed to be done.

  “Fine,” Thea had said to Jack, one finger in his chest. “But don’t think just because you’re spending the day being all macho and bear shifter-ish that this means you don’t have to make dinner. The girls did all the kitchen crap last night. Boys’ turn.”

  The three bear shifters had raised their hands in surrender.

  Now they were out in the field next to Jean Luc’s house, shielded from the road by a copse of trees, sweating their balls off. This bear shifter thing was a hell of a lot of work. And none of them were very good at it.

  It was hour three and Martine was still attempting to teach them how to shift on command. “The thing is, you three are all so connected that I’m sure if one of you can figure out how to do it, the others will be able to get it.”

  “I just don’t understand what we’re trying to do here,” Jack said calmly, swiping at sweat that was threatening to get in his eyes. “You’re saying that we need to clear our minds, but also concentrate, to relax, but to also be ready. To try and trigger it, but also to just let it come. It’s all a little counter-intuitive.”

  “I know,” Martine said, frustrated with herself. “I wish I could explain it better. It’s just that I never had to learn how to do it. I was born knowing how. Shifting into my hawk form is as simple as…” She trailed off, looking at their defeated expressions. She realized, a little belatedly, that this wasn’t the time to be talking about how easy this all was for her. “Never mind. What do you say to a break? Lunch and a swim, maybe? We can pick it up again in the afternoon.”

  The three men agreed, all of them exhausted and frustrated and even more exhausted and frustrated because they were tuned in to one another’s feelings as well.

  Jean Luc couldn’t help but feel a little bit of relief that the bear shifter lesson had been so physically and emotionally demanding because he hadn’t had any time to think about Celia. Who had been on his mind a lot over the last few days. Something had changed with her, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. She’d opened up a little, shown him some of the sweetness she’d been showing everyone else this whole time.

  And she’d made him laugh. Really hard. He hadn’t laughed that hard since Hugo. He liked her. Wanted to be around her a little more. Jack and Tre were his friends, sure, but it was almost more like a forced brotherhood. They hadn’t gravitated toward one another because they had sensed they’d be compatible. No. They’d been forced together via circumstance. That wasn’t to say that Jean Luc didn’t like the other two. He really liked them, and was glad to see that the three of them were becoming friends. But becoming friends with Celia was a whole other piece of pie. He was becoming friends with her for no reason other than that they liked each other. And that felt good. Really good. He’d been lonely for so long that he hadn’t even realized it after a while. It was just his everyday existence. Making friends with Celia was gratifying. It felt like stretching a muscle that hadn’t been stretched in a really long time.

  Also, it didn’t exactly hurt that she was cute. And interesting. Tattoos and piercings and crazy hair weren’t exactly his thing—he generally preferred women who looked a lot more like Caroline. Classic-looking and put together. Manicure and pastels. Celia wasn’t anything like that at all. Which was why Jean Luc wasn’t worried about messing up the group dynamic by getting a crush on her. She was cute and attractive, but just a friend. Even if it had made his heart race to have her cold little toes snuggled up under his leg. That didn’t mean anything.

  They made their way back to the house and saw that the van was back in the driveway. The girls were home from town and had hopefully picked up everything they were going to need for the next few days. None of them liked being separated.

  “Swim?” Tre asked Jean Luc and Jack. The three of them had sweated through their T-shirts.

  “As long as there’s beer,” Jack said, groaning as he cracked his neck from one side to the other.

  “You’re speaking my language, old man,” Tre said, a cocky grin on his face as he threw an arm around Jack’s shoulder. The two of them scuffled a bit as they entered the house through the side door and made straight for the kitchen. Tre grabbed a beer apiece for him and Jack and tossed Jean Luc a bottle of water. They knew he didn’t drink.

  Jean Luc screwed the top off the bottle and was chugging water that he pretty much completely aspirated as something caught his eye out on pool deck. Jean Luc coughed and squinted and tried to figure out what the hell he was looking at. There was a woman dipping her foot into the pool. She wore a tiny red bikini and had her back to the house. Her waist pinched in tight but her ass was really a sight to behold, barely contained by the string bikini. And when she turned, he saw that her boobs were pretty much in the same boat, smashing themselves against her bathing suit.

  It took a full three seconds for him to be able to lift his eyes high enough to realize that he recognized the tattoos across her collar bones. It took three more seconds for his eyes to make it to Celia’s face.

  “You alright, my dude?” Tre asked, slapping a still-coughing Jean Luc on the back and raising his eyebrows at Jack. They both hid their smiles at Jean Luc’s reaction to Celia in a bathing suit.

  They hadn’t discussed it amongst themselves, but come on, they
had a mainline to Jean Luc’s emotions. They could tell the kid had a little bit of a sweet tooth when it came to Celia. Just like they could also tell that Jean Luc hadn’t really realized that said sweet tooth existed. Apparently he was a master of denial.

  “Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.” He turned away from the window, toward the dim kitchen, but all he could see was Celia in that bathing suit. A hundred of her, in every place he looked, like she’d burned a silhouette into his eye. “Just swallowed the wrong way is all.”

  “You ready for that swim?” Jack asked casually, cutting a sly eye toward Tre, who sucked his lips into his mouth to keep from smiling.

  Jean Luc cleared his throat. Of course he was, why wouldn’t he be? He wasn’t a dorky high-schooler anymore. He could handle sharing a pool with a girl in a bathing suit without making a fool of himself. He was a former NFL quarterback. He’d had threesomes for God’s sake! There’d been a time in his life when he was tripping over pussy. One woman in a pool with friends around was not reason enough to go take a cold shower and hide in his bedroom for the rest of the day. He was a grown man. “Yeah.”

  Celia felt the eyes before she saw them. She dunked herself underwater and came up ten feet over from where she started, treading water in the deep end. She hoped the water obscured her body just a little bit, which was ridiculous considering she’d just bought this bathing suit in the hopes that it would show off her body.

  She turned toward the house and saw Jean Luc standing there, swim trunks on and a towel in his hand. No shirt. She slipped a few inches down in the water and quickly swam to the side. If he was coming to join her in the pool then she was definitely gonna need to hold on to the side.

  Jack and Tre appeared behind Jean Luc and she couldn’t help but feel twin spears of relief and disappointment. Did she want to be half naked and alone with Jean Luc? Hell yeah. Did it terrify her to be alone and half naked with Jean Luc? Double hell yeah.