“Of course.”
Jasmine’s face darkened for a moment and Eneko wondered if she was thinking about the way Jana had come to the clinic to attack him.
Why non-shifters insisted that they knew better about what shifters needed and what they could handle was beyond him. Or rather it wasn’t beyond him at all. He knew exactly why they did that. Ignorance, prejudice, and a distorted view on their rights. It didn’t matter if they were at the top of the ladder, didn’t matter if shifters weren’t even allowed on it. If a new one was introduced just for the shifters, they had to cry and complain that they weren’t getting what they deserved. At least, non-shifters like Jana were like that.
“I thought about going to medical school once,” Jasmine said as Eneko led her deeper into the house. “The costs were too high, though. The thought of having that much student debt… I decided that it wasn’t the right call for me. What was it like for you?”
Eneko considered for a moment. “Hard. I’m still paying off my student loans, but I’m applying for forgiveness since I run a non-profit clinic. Right now, Isaias Durant–you know him, right?”
“Everyone knows Isaias Durant. He’s a billionaire and married to one of the best authors out there.”
Eneko smiled. “Well, he’s paying for the clinic and my wages for the most part. Hopefully this mess with the loans will be over soon. And if not, I’m at least helping people. That’s what is most important to me. Making sure that people get the treatment they need and that their pain is eased.”
Jasmine laughed, a high, tinkling sound. “Well, now I just feel selfish for not going to med school.”
“Nah, you’re not.” Eneko glanced at the clock. “I do have to get going now, though. Tell the kids I’ll be home for supper.”
She nodded and he grabbed his cellphone and keys and bolted. Driving with the windows down helped to finish waking him up. As he drove, he let his mind dwell on Jasmine. It had been a while since a woman had gotten the type of reaction she got from him.
The mother of his children, Sadie, had been a bear shifter like him. Their life hadn’t been perfect together but he loved her. Then one day he came home to find the children alone in front of the TV. There was a note on the fridge saying that Sadie had left. A few years later she returned and told him that she wanted a divorce. She never asked about the children and he hadn’t seen her since. It had been a hard, hard time. He thought that she was his mate and they’d be together forever. His bear still growled and howled in mourning whenever he thought of her. But maybe his reaction to Jasmine meant it was time to move on…
When he got closer to the clinic, he saw a group of people standing in the parking lot. Many of them had large signs. His bear growled at the sight, and Eneko pushed it down as he pulled into a nearby parking lot. It didn’t take him long to figure out these were protestors. But protesting what? The clinic?
He groaned when he saw Jana with them. She stood with her boyfriend, Andy, and had a loudspeaker at her side. She had worked with him for a few months, until she had made the mistake of complaining to him about their clinic providing services for a mostly shifter clientele. When she found out that he himself was a shifter she had nearly flipped her lid. Before that, however, he’d had to escort Andy off the property several times as he kept refusing to leave Jana alone, even when she told him to leave.
Of course, once she had quit all of a sudden he was the bad guy, driving off the love of her life for a chance to get her in bed. She told everyone how he had ‘harassed’ her. Sometimes Eneko wondered if she believed it, too.
Eneko pulled out his cellphone to phone Marcus, who the matriarch of the clan had set in charge of security and shifter pride marches. Before he had even dialed, though, there was suddenly a lot of screaming from the protestors. He looked up in shock.
“Stop stealing our resources!” Jana chanted into her loudspeaker, over and over again. “Stop stealing our resources!”
Eneko got out of his car. The person they were screaming at was Rachel Higgins. She was one of his most timid clients. Eight months pregnant, married to a non-shifter though she was a bear herself. Her eyes were wide as she wrapped her arms around her stomach and inched away from the clinic while looking around for someone to help her. Eneko’s bear snarled.
How dare they terrorize a pregnant woman?
With his bear still snarling with the desire to protect Rachel, Eneko rushed over. The crowd’s shouting quieted slightly as they saw him coming and a few of them started to back away. Eneko was aware that he had an intimidating presence. He was big, even for a bear, and his facial features were less Hollywood hunk and more mob boss’ muscle man. It normally bothered him a little when people were immediately afraid of him, but in this case he was grateful for his intimidating presence.
He got to Rachel and put an arm around her. “Let’s get you inside for your checkup.”
Rachel nodded, eyeing the protestors with terror in her eyes.
Eneko led her towards the clinic, being sure to have a ferocious scowl on his face. A few of the protestors tried to stand in his way, but they quickly chickened out when nobody else backed them up.
“He sexually harassed me!” Jana suddenly shouted. She grabbed one of the ‘resources for humans’ signs and marched towards him. “Every dollar spent here is a dollar that could be spent on someone who needs it. Sick children. Humans who have been in accidents. Not to this sexual predator!”
Going with the sexual predator story? Eneko ignored her as he unlocked the door. Even when she jabbed him with her sign. But when Rachel gasped and he looked up to see Andy roughly grabbing her arm, he couldn’t stop himself. With a snarl, he seized the man by the throat. The crowd gasped, somebody even screamed. Andy’s eyes widened as Eneko dragged him from Rachel and pushed him away. Andy stumbled and went down, landing on his butt.
There was a moment of shocked silence before Jana started to scream profanities. She came at him with the sign again and Eneko dodged the attack.
“You’ll pay for that, you animal! You beast! I’m going to sue you for everything you have! You’ll be in jail for the rest of your life—"
“Inside,” Eneko muttered to Rachel. He ushered her inside and quickly locked the door behind them.
Rachel rubbed her arm, shivering. “Will they really send you to jail for that?”
Eneko’s heart pounded from the adrenaline, but he tried to shrug it off with a smile. “I have cameras. He laid his hands on you first. The matriarch has a good legal team, if anybody tries anything they’ll be in for an uphill battle. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Just shaken up.”
The protestors started to shout and rattle the door while banging on the windows. Eneko quickly ushered Rachel into a back room before calling Marcus. It was bad enough that they didn’t have half of the equipment and resources they actually needed to properly give medical services for the people around here. Bad enough that women like Rachel were coming to him, a general practitioner, for checkups with the pregnancies because non-shifter OB/GYNs turned them away because there was the pervasive notion that pregnant shifter women always isolated themselves before giving birth. This had to stop, before they scared off any of his other clients that needed his help.
“Marcus, I need you to get to the clinic,” Eneko said once he got hold of him. “And maybe bring some of your biker friends. I have a feeling that I’m going to need them today.”
Chapter Three
“Where the hell have you been?”
Jasmine jumped as Lori rushed at her. She checked the time–only ten minutes late. Considering Lori’s normal time frames (Jasmine usually planned an extra half hour from when Lori said she’d be in) it really made no difference. Lori threw her arms around her sister and hugged her tightly.
“What’s going on?” Jasmine patted Lori’s back and managed to wiggle her way free of her sister. Her parka was covered in snow as she took it off and hung it by the door. “What are you so upset for? I was at
work.”
“Working for that man, right? Eneko Alava?”
Jasmine sighed. “Yes… Lor, are you drunk? Please don’t tell me you’re drunk.”
“I’m not drunk!” Lori stomped her feet as she pulled her cellphone from her pocket. She waved it in Jasmine’s face. “I’ve been trying to call you all day. Why haven’t you answered?”
Jasmine moved to the counter that separated the kitchen from the living room and picked up her cell. “I forgot this here. I put Eneko’s number on the fridge if you needed to get hold of me in emergencies. Jeez, Lori. Calm down.”
Lori threw her hair back, eyes flashing. For a moment Jasmine couldn’t contain her jealousy. Lori had always been the pretty one. Taller than Jasmine, curvy in all the right places. While Jasmine fought to tone down the weight in her thighs and butt, Lori always was perfectly proportioned. Her curves belonged on a swimsuit model. A career she had gone for at one point before deciding it was too pedestrian. As though the job she took after it, flipping burgers, was glamorous.
“I want you to quit that job,” Lori said, glancing down at her phone as she typed rapidly on it. She handed it over to Jasmine.
Perplexed, Jasmine looked down. A video was playing, with the headline ‘Shifter doctor attacks peaceful protestor’. It showed Eneko hurling a man away from a frightened-looking woman. Jasmine couldn’t stop a snarl. Eneko had told her what had gone down at the clinic that morning, and to see her own sister buying into this crap…
“Peaceful?” She snorted. “That man had just assaulted the woman Eneko is with. The pregnant woman. And these ‘peaceful’ protestors? They were harassing his clients all day. They’re trying to get the clinic, the only clinic that most of these people can go to, shut down. Why don’t you try learning facts before you go around believing this crap?”
Lori looked guilty for a moment before putting her hands on her hips. “Don’t get mad at me for worrying about you.”
“I’m not mad at you for worrying about me. I’m mad that you would look at this and automatically assume that the shifter was at fault without thinking about anything else that might have happened.”
Lori’s jaw dropped.
Jasmine turned her back on her sister. “I see enough anti-shifter sentiments every day already. I’ve had enough of it from Mom. I don’t need it from you too, Lor.”
Her sister didn’t respond to that. Not that she could really have said anything to make it better.
Jasmine went to her room and shut the door, the tension and stress building up in her neck and shoulders. She and Lori didn’t see eye-to-eye on many things. And while Lori might not understand exactly what it was like to be a shifter, since they had different dads and their mom wasn’t a shifter, she had usually had her back in the past. And maybe Jasmine was a bit too tightly wound from what had happened already but Lori’s attitude was just… too much to deal with right now.
After putting on her ‘calm down quickly’ music, Jasmine stripped down to her panties, sighing in relief as the bra came off. The lines in her breast that it left behind showed that she needed to get a new one, but with her current situation it was best to just make do. To go from having several wealthy clients to having one occasional wealthy client and one pro bono doctor client meant she’d have to watch what she was spending.
A few minutes of trying to relax later, Jasmine grabbed her cellphone. She dialed Eneko, holding the phone to her ear. She also pulled a light blanket over herself. Even though there was no way for him to see her like this, it felt awkward to be naked while talking to a man.
The whole situation was a little odd, actually. Jasmine usually had a solidly defined relationship with her clients within the first couple times she spoke with them. They usually fit the same mold, too. Mothers, usually working moms, who needed help with their kids. She’d worked a bit with fathers from time to time, but given the stories she’d heard from other nannies, both with unwanted male attention and nannies going in and splitting up marriages by getting too close to the husband, she felt it was better to deal with the women.
Eneko, however, was a single dad. There was no wife or mate to deal with. If Jasmine wasn’t so hard-up for money, she probably wouldn’t have agreed to work with him. The first time they spent any time together she had almost started to giggle and flirt, and it was hard to hide her interest even now. She had never worked for someone she was attracted to before.
Does this mean that there might be something more for us?
“Jasmine, are you okay?” Eneko’s voice came from the phone, making her jump.
“Oh! Yes, I’m fine. I was just calling…” Why? “…to make sure that you’re okay. Somebody posted a video they filmed on their cellphone of the… incident at the clinic.”
Eneko made an angry grunting noise. “Yeah, I know. Don’t worry about it, though. The clinic’s cameras caught a good shot of Andy grabbing Rachel before I touched him. I’ll be fine. I appreciate your concern, though. And I’m really happy with what you did with the kids. They kept telling me all through supper about everything that you did with them after school. Maite especially seems quite taken with you.”
“I’m glad.” Her tense muscle relaxed as Jasmine rolled herself into a blanket burrito. “She’s a real sweetheart. I’m just happy that I could help you out.”
There was a brief pause and Jasmine’s hand started to wander towards her own breast. She could just imagine Eneko sitting in his room naked, phone to his ear and—
Whoa. No. Stop that right now.
“Well, if you’re okay then I should get going,” Jasmine blurted. “I’ve got a date that I need to get ready for.”
Um… what was with that? Jasmine winced. Why had she felt the need to lie to him like that? Eneko quickly agreed with her, though, and they hung up.
She threw her face into her pillow and groaned. What was wrong with her? Everybody knew that shifters only had one true mate. Yeah, if something happened to one of them then the other could find someone else to be with, eventually at least. But Jasmine hadn’t found her fated mate yet, and she didn’t want to waste time and break hearts if Eneko wasn’t hers.
Jasmine didn’t know what had happened to the kids’ mother. It wasn’t her place to ask, even though she burned with curiosity. It had to be something very tragic, though… something that had torn them apart, leaving Eneko with two young children alone…
With a sigh Jasmine shook her head and unrolled from her blankets. It had been a long day but she needed to go to the gym before she got too comfortable.
Just as she finished dressing and stepped from her room, Lori grabbed the car keys.
“Where do you think you’re going?”
Lori jumped and turned. A flash of guilt crossed her face and then it was gone. She shrugged. “I’m going out.”
“Out?” She was dressed in a sparkly pink halter top and a little skirt that went mid-thigh. Jasmine frowned at her sister. “Aren’t you supposed to be job hunting tomorrow? Going out clubbing—”
“Wow.” Lori put her hands on her hips. “Seriously? I’m not allowed to be concerned when I see a video of your boss throwing around another guy, but you’re allowed to start scolding me for something I’m not even doing? I’m not going to a bar. I’m going to meet some friends.”
“Dressed like that?”
Lori narrowed her eyes. “You know, I’m not one of your kids, Jazz. So just don’t, okay? I’ll be back in a couple hours.”
Jasmine opened her mouth to apologize, but Lori was gone before she could set aside her pride long enough to do so. With a groan she rubbed her temples and shook her head. Maybe she did act like a mom to Lori, but she didn’t know what else to do. While Jasmine had been taken away from their mother (partly, she thought, because their mother didn’t actually want her) Lori had been left with her. And the men and drugs and alcohol. The system had screwed them both over, and as soon as Jasmine was an adult she had gotten Lori away from their mom.
But by then
Lori was already picking losers to fill the desperate need for companionship in her life. Going to meet her ‘friends’? Yeah, right. More likely going to meet with yet another man she thought was going to fix all her problems. At least Jasmine had had the farm getting her into adulthood. Lori only had her older sister who was trying to figure herself out as well as trying to figure out how to take care of her teenage, rebellious sister.
That didn’t mean that she didn’t still continue to worry. Part of Jasmine wished that Lori would find the right guy. The man who would calm her down and show her what her great worth truly was. But the truth was that Lori needed to figure that out on her own before she found the right guy.
Jasmine grabbed her gym shoes, deciding to just use the fitness room in the apartment building. Lori would just have to face the consequences of her actions.
As she jogged on the treadmill with music blasting in her ears, her mind turned to herself. Her own ‘quest’ to find a mate had thus far ended in failure. Not that she had spent much energy looking for the right man. After her tumultuous childhood, she wasn’t eager to go running head-first into a relationship that might end up falling apart.
The man she wanted had to be kind. Above all, she wanted someone who was gentle, cared for others, who wasn’t quick to violence. She didn’t want one of those alpha types that romance novels were stuffed full of. She wanted a guy who listened to her first and foremost, who didn’t insist he knew better than her, and who would rather help people than beat them up. The kind of man who would argue with her but not fight.
The kind of man that doesn’t exist, Jasmine sighed to herself. Maybe I’m just too picky… Maybe I just need to find a guy who checks most of the list and be happy with him.
Chapter Four
Eneko stretched his back as he stood. The chair wheeled back from his desk and he checked the time. Crap, he had missed the kids’ dinners. Again. Jasmine had been working for him for a month now, and he had somehow managed to be home late nearly every day.
The Bear Shifter's Nanny Page 2
