Bear-ly Time

by M. L. Briers

  “Does he now?” Jon gave a silent chuckle. His shoulders moved up and down as he tried to hide the grin that wanted to break free on his lips.

  “Oh, he does,” Jordan said, she raised the teaspoon towards her father and stabbed the air with it.

  “I’ve always found that the man calls it as he sees it.”

  “Well, he called me a shitty parent,” Jordan bit out her annoyance, and then she took it out on the coffee that she was making, vigorously stirring the dark liquid before tossing the spoon upon the counter and finding enjoyment in the clattering sound that it made.

  “He probably just got the wrong end of the stick,” Jon offered back.

  “Well, I’m going to take that stick and shove it up his…”

  “Mummy! Mummy! Look what I’ve done,” Macy said racing into the kitchen clutching her latest drawing and holding it up for her mother’s approval.

  Jon chuckled again. He had no idea what had taken place between Harvey and his daughter, but he guessed it was a humdinger to have her that rattled.

  He mentally thanked the man. It had been a while since he’d seen Jordan all fired up. That damn ex-husband of hers had made her run home with her tail between her legs, and he still hadn’t got to the bottom of it.

  Jordan could be a hothead. She reminded him of her mother, like a Spitfire one moment, and the next as soft as a feather. Damn, but he missed that woman.

  “Hey, Macy, did you meet Harvey?” Jon asked, stirring the pot where his daughter was concerned.

  “Harvey is a bear,” Macy said, all wide eyed innocence and brimming full of excitement.

  “Harvey is a man, but he does have a bear inside of him,” Jon corrected his granddaughter.

  “Dad, can you not?” Jordan rolled her eyes with a sigh. She didn’t need her daughter's enthusiasm to be pumped up any more than it already was where the man was concerned. Macy hadn’t stopped talking about him all the way home.

  “What?” Jon tossed back. “Harvey’s a good man.”

  “He says bad words,” Macy offered back in a whispered voice as if she were sharing a secret.

  “Me too,” Jon grinned. “Especially, when I hit my thumb with a hammer.”

  “Harvey did that!” Macy grinned from ear to ear at the memory.

  “When I caught up with him, he was stalking Macy through the woods with some vampire in tow,” Jordan bit out.

  “That would be Owen,” Jon gave a small nod of recognition.

  “Owen’s funny,” Macy said with a little giggle.

  “Macy, I want you to stay away from both of them,” Jordan warned her daughter and watched the child pull an exaggerated face. She looked older than her years and Jordan hated to think that she would miss out on some of her childhood if she grew up too fast.

  “But…”

  “No buts. Now, if you’re done drawing then go and put your stuff away,” Jordan was ending her daughter's protests before they had even begun.

  Macy’s shoulders dropped at the same time as the excited look on her face fell off. She turned on her heels, muttered something that wasn’t meant to be heard, and stomped out of the room.

  “That child takes after you,” Jon chuckled, bringing a look of disbelief from his daughter in his direction as she eyed him with contempt.

  “You know that none of this would be happening if you hadn’t sent Macy to play alone,” Jordan huffed.

  “You mean you meeting Harvey?”

  “I mean Macy meeting Harvey,” Jordan shot back.

  His daughter’s answer was a little too rushed for Jon’s liking. He sensed that there was something more there, but he wasn’t going to pick her up on it just yet.

  “Well, if you’re going to play in the woods then you are going to meet a few bears,” Jon said as he pushed up from his chair, gave a little chuckle, and strolled off. “You just gotta hope they aren’t pooping at the time.”

  “There are no words,” Jordan muttered to herself.

  ~

  ~

  ~

  Harvey had heard her coming from a mile away, not quite a mile, but she couldn’t have snuck up on him if her life had depended on it. It wasn’t her fault, she was a human after all, and she’d never had to learn to hunt.

  At first, he’d listened to see if it was the kid out alone again, but after determining that what he heard were adult footsteps, he’d been tracking her for a while.

  Harvey told himself it was out of a sense of curiosity, but there was more to it than that. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

  The moment that Harvey had picked up on her footsteps and realized who it was that was close by; he’d felt the strangest feeling inside. At first, he thought he was hungry, but it wasn’t hunger, it was more like the feeling of bees buzzing around a beehive.

  Harvey had resisted the urge to sniff the air. He had the irrational need to find her scent and consign it to his memory.

  He told himself it was so that he would know when trouble was coming his way, but it was more than that. He just didn’t know how much more, and he didn’t know if he was ready to find out.

  She was close. Her feet were crunching down on the debris that lined the ground of the woods that she was skirting through. That part of the woods might have been her family land, but it still annoyed him that she’d taken a shortcut through a dangerous area.

  Harvey felt protective. Too protective. His beast was on the prowl inside of him as if the bear perceived some kind of a danger that he couldn’t quite register yet.

  Harvey heard her footsteps stop, closer still, and he wanted to sniff the air like other people needed to breathe in.

  “I guess I overreacted,” Jordan said, and the sound of her voice washed over him as if she’d run her hands over his skin.

  “I guess I can see why,” he offered back.

  Harvey had the urge to turn and look at her. It was more than an urge, more of a necessity, but he did his damnedest to ignore it.

  “I’m Jordan.”

  “Harvey,” he tossed back at her.

  “So, I guess we started off on the wrong foot.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he tossed his answer back over his shoulder again without turning.

  Jordan got it. He was miffed at her. She could see the tension in those big, broad, muscled shoulders of his, and she guessed that it was due to her presence.

  The man had taken off his shirt, and the sun was beating down on his tanned skin, and boy, did he look good. Her eyes feasted on the way that his muscles moved under the skin, and she couldn’t seem to drag her gaze away. She didn’t really want to, and she didn’t see any harm in it while he wasn’t even looking at her.

  Ogling him was between her and her conscience.

  Jordan had to admit, even if only to herself, that the man’s sculpted body was making the excitement sing within her. It wasn’t as if she was a muscle man junkie, hanging around the gym, and getting her daily dose of the good vibe. She’d never really paid it much mind before.

  Men were men just as women were women. They came in all shapes and sizes, but for some reason that she couldn’t fathom, his hard body bewitched her.

  But that wasn’t the point. The point was that she’d accused him of something and she’d been wrong. When she’d made a mistake, she liked to own up to it, and take her medicine no matter how bad it tasted.

  “It matters to me.”

  “Why? You want to be friends with a shifter?” Harvey gave a little grunt of disbelief at the thought of it.

  Even if she’d wanted that; Harvey knew that it would have been a mistake. She was human, soft, and soft didn’t work well in his world.

  “I…” Jordan had been taken by surprise by his question. She stumbled over her words, and he jumped right on that hesitation.

  “Didn’t think so.” Harvey felt the first rumblings of the growl within his chest, and he knocked it right on the head.

  “Look,” Jordan tried to correct her mistake, but Harvey jumped right
in again with both feet.

  “Are you shifter groupie?” That rumble of a growl was back.

  “What? No…”

  “But, you’re curious.”

  “I’m not…”

  “I know that some shifters do that. I don’t do that,” Harvey did growl a little that time.

  He wasn’t certain if it was his beast annoyed at him for challenging her like that, or the fact that what he was accusing her of sent images into his mind which excited the hell out of him.

  Harvey hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her from the moment that she’d turned her back on him and walked away earlier. Most of those thoughts had been pretty damn X-rated.

  He didn’t mind thinking about her so much when she wasn’t around. Now she was back again, taunting him with the up close and personal, making those images more powerful, those thoughts more personal, and he had the urge to bring her closer and push her away at the same time.

  “You’re an asshole,” Jordan bit out.

  She’d felt bad for thinking the worst of him over Macy, but now she just wanted to pick up a branch smack him over his thick head with it.

  CHAPTER SIX

  ~

  “Yeah, you’re probably right,” Harvey tossed the words back over his shoulder.

  Somewhere in the back of his mind what she’d said annoyed the hell out of him. It normally didn’t bother Harvey what anyone thought of him, words were words, accusations were accusation — so why the hell was it different with her?

  “I came here to…”

  “I know why you came here, sweetheart,” Harvey growled. “But I’m not interested.”

  Jordan felt as if she didn’t know which way was up. The audacity of the man was breathtaking.

  Sure, he was good-looking — with a day’s worth of stubble wrapped around his square jaw, and those soulful chocolate Brown eyes that he couldn’t even be bothered to turn in her direction since she’d arrived.

  Six foot odd of muscled beefcake that screamed hunter gatherer, provider, a manly-man protector at every feminine cell within her body, but that wasn’t the damn point.

  “You are so far up your own backside that it’s scary,” Jordan tossed back on a chuckle of disbelief.

  “Sure I am,” Harvey growled.

  “Oh, you are,” Jordan snapped back.

  She tossed her hands onto her hips, and she didn’t give a damn that he wasn’t even looking at her because it felt good to do it. The damn audacity of the man was astounding, treating her like she was some schoolgirl with a crush.

  For the second time that day and the first time in a long time, the spark of fire within her belly had ignited into a flame. The rush to anger wasn’t immediately followed by the slap in the face of caution, and she didn’t feel the need to hold back from telling him how she really felt.

  “Don’t you have a kid to take care of?” Harvey growled.

  While he didn’t like the tone of her voice, he knew he needed to hear some more of it. Hell, she could be as mad as she liked and say whatever she wanted because the sound of a voice was making him warm inside.

  That urge to pull her closer was scratching within him like his bear did. He didn’t know why, he didn’t care why, but he came to the realisation that it was probably a bad thing.

  He could get lost in listening to the sound of her voice, and if he was to keep his sanity then he needed it to go away.

  He needed her to go away.

  The thing was; that right then he kind of wished that she was a shifter groupie. Then they’d both know where they stood. But she wasn’t, he could tell. If anything the thought of it had probably repulsed her.

  “The tone of your voice makes that sound like an accusation,” Jordan bit back. What she didn’t say was that the accusation had felt like a slap in the face to her.

  Jordan didn’t understand why he made her feel that way. Why should she care what he thought about her parenting skills or the lack of them?

  Why the hell did it matter to her what some jerk thought about her?

  “Sweetheart, that would be your guilt talking and not my tone of voice,” Harvey offered back.

  He hadn’t meant it that way, but he guessed that she’d heard what she wanted to hear, and that wasn’t his fault. If she was that touchy on the subject then maybe she knew her own failings.

  “Firstly, don’t call me sweetheart. I’m not your sweetheart, now, nor will I ever be your sweetheart. So get over yourself,” Jordan was about to let him have it, both barrels, and why not? “Secondly, how I look after my daughter is none of your damn business, and I have a mind to knock your damn teeth down the back of your throat just for saying what you said.”

  “I’ll get you a ladder,” Harvey growled.

  There was a part of him that wanted to chuckle at the thought of little Miss Five-foot nothing bunching up her little fist and taking a swing at him, and then there was a part him that felt guilty, a sense of shame in his words, and he had the damn urge to drop to his knees and beg for her forgiveness.

  He just didn’t get what the hell was happening to him.

  “You’ll what?” Jordan bit down on her words and another blast of anger that had detonated inside of her.

  “I don’t think you’re going to reach me from down there, sweetheart,” he tossed back.

  Harvey still had the urge to turn towards her. He wanted to see that spark of fire in her eyes, the same spark had been the when she’d thought she was protecting Macy from him and Owen, and yet, that was the last thing that he needed. Because he knew that she looked so damn sexy when she did.

  “You really are a piece of…”

  “Hold that thought, sweetheart,” Harvey chuckled. But his bear wasn’t chuckling; his bear was growling, and it was as antsy as hell.

  “Wow, you really do need to get over yourself.”

  “You really need to go away and let me get back to work.”

  Harvey didn’t give a damn about work. He did give a damn about her walking away again.

  The urge to sniff the air and find her scent had turned into a need. That need was strong, too strong, and the longer that she stood there, the more that need grew within him.

  His bear grumbled and growled. The beast wanted out, and he couldn’t let that happen.

  Harvey needed her to go and to go now.

  “Screw you,” Jordan hissed back.

  She turned away from him and stalked back into the woods. She was done trying to play nice. For all she cared the man could go to hell.

  Harvey closed his eyes as his fingers curled into fists on the workbench in front of him and he tried with all of his might, with every last bit of his willpower not to care that she was walking away again.

  Not to sniff the damn air and take her scent.

  Not to chase the hell after her and beg for her forgiveness for being such a jerk.

  It didn’t work.

  Harvey wasn’t strong enough to resist.

  He craned his head back on his neck and sniffed the air. His heart thumped his rib cage before lodging in his throat.

  Every muscle in his body locked up as his mind spun.

  Harvey’s bear didn’t just raise its head, it rushed at him head on, and tried its damnedest to burst free of his skin.

  Harvey knew one thing and one thing only — things had just got a whole lot worse.

  ~

  ~

  ~

  Jordan stomped through the woods like every twig, every blade of grass that had fought for existence in the overgrown shaded ground, offended her.

  She was riled, worse than riled, she was angry with herself for even bothering to try to make it right between them, and she was furious with him for being such an egotistical asshole and taking the olive branch from her only to slap it right back in her face.

  Jordan didn’t rush to violence, but she had the urge to slap his face at the same time that she wanted to curl into a ball in the middle of the bed and stay like that for a good l
ong while.

  People were supposed to have a fight or flight reaction, so why the hell did she have both at the same time?

  “Wait!” The man’s voice was so deep, so full of his bear’s growl, so strangely familiar to her senses that she knew it couldn’t be anybody else but Harvey.

  “Go to hell!” She tossed back over her shoulder.

  She was still stomping across the uneven ground, still walking away from him as fast as her legs could carry her, and she was damned determined that the last thing that she was ever going to do was to come face-to-face with that man again.

  She wanted to take that olive branch and shove it right where the sun didn’t shine.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ~

  “Jordan…”

  “You heard me. Or do you have selected deafness to go along with your obvious need for psychiatric help and your overinflated male misplaced ego?” Jordan bit back.

  She wasn’t about to give him another chance to take a shot at her, place a target on her back for his amusement, or listen to another word that he had to say.

  Jordan sped up, trying to put some distance between them, and because it made her feel better to believe that her heart was racing and her blood was pumping in her ears because of the exercise she was getting, and not because of him.

  “I need to talk to you,” Harvey growled.

  He was trying his damnedest not to race towards her. Not to scare her. Not to hit that panic button that he knew some females had within them where he was concerned.

  He was big and big equalled scary in some women’s minds. He didn’t know if she was one of those women but he really didn’t want to take the chance.

  “Yeah!” Jordan bit of a chuckle of disbelief. “No.”

  “It’s important…”

  “You mean you forgot to accuse me of something else. First, I’m a groupie, and I want your body. Then not a groupie, but I still want your body out of curiosity. Then I’m a bad parent. And to top it all; I’m keeping you from your work,” Jordan kept walking. “Here’s your chance — go there hell back to work.”