by Zoe Chant
A Pair of Bears
By Zoe Chant
Copyright Zoe Chant 2015
All Rights Reserved
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Paisley
Chapter Two: Jackson
Chapter Three: Paisley
Chapter Four: Eli
Chapter Five: Paisley
Epilogue: Paisley
Chapter One
Paisley
Paisley Clark pulled the drapes in her hotel room, shutting out the white glare of the street lights. The room was almost certainly too high for anyone to see into— that was why she’d picked it— but you could never be too careful.
She took off her black wig, careful not to disturb the pinned-up braids of her long blonde hair. Then she stripped out of the expensive clothes she’d worn to check in. For a hotel this fancy, she’d needed them to blend in. Her false ID had passed without a blink.
Paisley barely glanced at her nude body in the full-length mirror. It didn’t matter what she looked like, so long as she was agile enough to leap, strong enough to climb, and fit enough to run.
She’d seen other women checking themselves in mirrors, and heard them worrying that they were too fat or too thin, too dark or too pale, too curvy or too flat, too something or too something else to attract a man. But Paisley’s problem wasn’t what she looked like, but what she was. She was a loner— an outlaw— a freak of nature. The closest she ever got to a relationship was a one-night stand, and that was the closest she ever could get. No man who knew what she was could ever want her.
Paisley fiercely pushed away the pang of sadness that had pierced her at that thought. She was always going to be alone, and that was just how it was. No point getting all weepy over something that couldn’t be helped, especially when she had a job to do. There were more important things in the world than whether or not one orphan werecat had someone to love.
She concentrated on catness. Being covered with a soft layer of pure black fur. Being able to see in the dark. Seeing the world in black and white and shades of gray. The ability to leap ten times her own height. The irresistible desire to pounce on small moving objects.
Paisley shifted. A little black cat sneezed, cleaned its face with its paw, then leaped on to the dresser. From there, it slipped behind the drapes, then jumped out the window that human Paisley had left half-open.
Her nimble paws easily balanced on the window ledge, thirty floors above the street. If she fell all the way down, she’d land on her feet, but she’d be just as dead as if she’d landed anywhere else. But she felt no fear as she leaped nimbly from ledge to ledge, working her way toward her target’s room. Paisley rarely fell, and she had plenty of ledges to land on if she did. It was an ordinary night’s work for a werecat cat burglar.
Two leaps down and four across, and she was at her target’s window. Paisley peeked through the drapes. The room was dark, but her cat eyes had no trouble making out the shape of a man sleeping beneath the bed covers.
Alan Krikorian, she thought. That scumbag.
He was a wealthy con man who sold land in Florida to elderly people who wanted to retire and build homes. The land was real, but it was under water. By the time they showed up to look at it in person, he’d taken their money and run with it. Paisley intended to steal his credit cards and bank account information, extract the list of his victims from his laptop, and return the money to his elderly victims.
Krikorian’s window was shut and latched. Now came the hardest part.
Paisley concentrated on being human. Clipped fingernails instead of sharp claws, blonde hair instead of black fur, and thoughts of loneliness and justice instead of napping and tuna fish.
She shifted, then instantly moved her weight to her toes and caught the window frame. Paisley wavered, then found her new balance. She was naked, of course, but she’d carried a few tiny tools in her mouth. She spat them into one hand, placed them carefully on the ledge, and got to work. Five minutes later, she had a small hole cut into the window. She inserted a loop of wire and flipped the latch, then eased the window open.
Paisley slipped through, landing soundlessly on her feet. As quietly as if she were still a cat, she crept toward the laptop on the table.
A big man stepped out of the shadows and slammed the window shut. The man lying on the bed sat up and flipped on the light.
A trap!
Every nerve of Paisley’s body sizzled with fear and anger.
“We’re not going to hurt you,” the man at the window began.
Paisley didn’t stick around to hear more. She bolted for the door.
The man on the bed scrambled off it and dove for the door, blocking it before she could reach it.
“Wait! Let us explain,” the tall man at the door said. “We want to—”
Blood roared in Paisley’s ears, blocking out the rest of what he said. She was trapped. She couldn’t fight two men unarmed and naked. She’d be thrown in jail for the rest of her life, confined to a cell that not even the smallest cat could escape, bored out of her mind and unable to do any good for anyone ever again.
“No!” The shout burst from Paisley’s throat.
She’d never before shifted in front of strangers, but she bet even the toughest man would flinch if he got a faceful of spitting, hissing, biting, clawing cat.
It was the quickest shift of her life. With a yowl of rage, she leaped at the face of the man blocking the window, all claws slashing.
She crashed into a solid wall of shaggy brown fur.
Paisley bounced off and landed on her feet. She looked up from the floor, bewildered.
The man at the window was gone. A gigantic grizzly bear stood in his place.
It was hard to think logically when she was a cat, especially when she was excited. Cats operated by instinct, not reason. All Paisley could focus on was that she was trapped and needed to escape. She spun around, her claws scrabbling on the polished wood floor. With another furious yowl, she leaped at the face of the man blocking the door.
She crashed into a solid wall of soft black fur.
The man at the door was gone. A big black bear stood in his place.
Now in a panic, Paisley began ricocheting from wall to wall, caterwauling and spitting and lashing out with her claws. Within seconds, she’d shredded large portions of the drapes, the bed, and the sofa. She tried to shred the two bears, too, but her claws couldn’t penetrate their thick fur.
As she leaped madly past the black bear, it suddenly swung its head and caught her in its strong jaws. Paisley dangled in its grip, helpless as a kitten, howling and lashing about to no avail.
The grizzly bear at the window became a man. He strode nude to the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and deftly wrapped Paisley in it. She spat furiously, but she was completely immobilized.
The grizzly bear man scooped up the Paisley-package, took it to the bed, covered it with blankets, and held the blankets tight.
“Shift back,” Grizzly Bear Man demanded. “I swear, we are not going to harm you in any way.”
Black Bear Man— now also a naked man— joined him at the bed. “He’s telling the truth. We don’t want to hurt you— we want to hire you!”
Paisley lay limp, exhausted. This was all hard for a cat to follow. But she did know that as a woman, she’d be able to understand it better. She shifted back.
She lay pinned beneath a towel and a blanket, with two naked men looming over her. Naked men who had previously been a grizzly bear and a black bear. Now that she could think as a human again, amazement drove out her fear.
“You can turn into bears,” she said.<
br />
Black Bear Man chuckled. “Yes. And you can turn into a cat. I have to say, we weren’t expecting you to be a shifter.”
“A shifter?” Paisley asked. “I didn’t even know there was a name for what I am.”
The amusement vanished from Black Bear Man’s face. “Were you turned without your consent?”
“Turned?” Paisley echoed blankly.
“Bitten and made into a shifter.” Anger tightened Grizzly Bear Man’s ruggedly handsome features. “Do you know the name of the person who did it? I could take care of them for you.”
Paisley stared at him. His anger was on her behalf? No one ever got mad because someone else wronged her. At least, not since Mom had died when Paisley was ten. No one in the long string of foster homes she’d lived in since that had cared about her for any reason but the check they’d get for having her.
“I don’t remember anyone biting me,” she replied. “I’ve always been able to become a cat. Mom used to tell me how funny I looked as a kitten peeking out from a pile of baby clothes.”
Neither man commented, but she noticed the sympathy that crossed their faces at the used to. She spoke hastily, eager to change the subject. She hated pity, and she hated thinking about how Mom had died. “Who are you guys? And do you mind not pinning me to the bed?”
“Oops, sorry.” Grizzly Bear Man released his hold.
Paisley sat up, clutching the blankets tight around her.
“I’m Eli Sterling,” said Grizzly Bear Man.
“And I’m Jackson Ford,” said Black Bear Man.
They both offered her their hands. She ignored them, folding her arms tight across her chest. “I’m not telling you my name.”
“It’s Paisley Clark,” said Eli.
She whipped her head around to stare at him. “How did you know?”
“I’m good at finding things out,” said Jackson. Quickly, he added, “But we’re not going to call the cops on you, or use it against you. I swear!”
Paisley didn’t see any reason to trust his word. On the other hand, the cops weren’t there yet. She decided to sit tight and see what she could find out. Paisley had been too overwhelmed before to get a good look at the men, so she started with that.
Eli the were-grizzly bear had light brown hair the color of his bear’s fur, in a once-short cut that was growing out shaggy. He was big and ripped, bulging with muscle everywhere she looked. But his magnificent body was marked by a number of scars. One was pink and new-looking, the size of a quarter and right over his heart.
The knuckles of Eli’s big hands were callused and scarred: the mark of a brawler or a martial artist. His ramrod-straight posture made her guess that he was current or newly-ex military. Between his size, his scars, and his rugged features, he would have been intimidating, if it hadn’t been for the surprisingly gentle look in eyes as blue as a summer sky.
Jackson the were-black bear was also handsome, with thick, curling black hair and dark brown eyes, but in a more polished way. Eli looked like he normally wore a uniform, but Jackson would have been at home in a three-piece suit. He might be a long-distance runner or a swimmer, with his height, his broad shoulders, and his lean muscle. But Paisley guessed that his job involved thinking, not punching. Even nude, he had the air of a high-powered lawyer or businessman or tech genius.
The skin that covered Jackson’s wiry muscles was smooth as brown silk, without a mark on it. His fingers were long and deft, his eyes were bright with intelligence, and his mouth looked like he spent a lot of time laughing.
Paisley looked from Jackson to Eli, and from Eli to Jackson. Two men who could turn into bears. Two men of completely different types, but both handsome and sexy. Two sizzling hot, naked men.
She had been trying not to look below the waist, but now she couldn’t help it. And once she looked, she couldn’t help comparing them that way too. Eli’s cock was thicker. Jackson’s was longer. Both were a good size. Both were nicely proportioned, contributing to the overall impression of “This guy looks great in the nude.” And both were getting hard, even as she watched.
Both men followed the direction of her gaze.
“Sorry! Sorry!” Jackson snatched up a small suitcase and bolted into the bathroom with it.
In contrast, Eli was completely unfazed. “It’s a guy thing. From the adrenaline rush. Just ignore it.”
Only then did Paisley think to look where the men had been standing when they’d become bears. Shredded heaps of cloth lay beneath the door and the window, along with two pairs of ruined shoes.
“There’s an advantage to turning into a cat,” she remarked. “I just step out of my clothes. They don’t explode off me. Did you bring a change of clothes, too?”
Eli nodded, looking amused. “If I go get into them, will you make another run for it?”
Paisley considered it. She didn’t exactly trust these men— she didn’t trust anybody— but they hadn’t harmed her, and they’d had plenty of opportunities. She was curious about why they wanted to hire her, and more curious about the whole shifter thing. Besides, if things went bad, she’d be able to escape more easily if she convinced them to let down their guard.
“I won’t run,” Paisley promised.
For now, she thought.
Eli walked to a duffel bag on the floor, giving her a great view of his muscular ass. At no time did he betray the slightest hint of self-consciousness about being naked. He pulled on a pair of boxers, covering his still-growing hard-on, then a pair of blue jeans, then socks and combat boots. Paisley was mildly disappointed when he put on a white T-shirt, concealing his chiseled pecs and prominent six-pack, but consoled by the contrast of the cloth with his bronzed arm muscles.
“You don’t care about strangers seeing you naked,” she remarked.
Eli shook his head. “I’ve spent too much time in barracks and in the field, jammed in together with hundreds of other guys. There’s no privacy in the military. You get used to it.”
“What sort of military?”
“I’m—” A flicker of pain passed over his face. “I was a Navy SEAL. You know what that is?”
Paisley didn’t know a lot about them, but she’d heard that they were the best of the best. But she didn’t want to give away that she was impressed to the guy who’d captured her with a bath towel, so she plastered on an unimpressed look and said, “Some kind of Special Forces. But I’ll tell you what I don’t know about: werebears. And werecats. So I must have been bitten by a werecat when I was a baby? And you guys were bitten by bears?”
Jackson emerged from the bathroom as she spoke. Paisley had pegged him correctly, too: he wore a black suit with a blue silk tie, silver cufflinks, and polished shoes. She couldn’t help noticing how good he looked, with the tailored lines of the suit showing off his broad shoulders and slim hips. She also couldn’t help noticing that he, like Eli, still had a visible bulge in his pants.
“Neither of us were bitten,” Jackson said. “We were born bears. And we call ourselves bear shifters, not werebears. You’re a cat shifter. I’ve never heard of a baby getting bitten and turned— I wouldn’t think they’d be strong enough to survive that. So your mother wasn’t a shifter?”
Paisley shook her head. “She would have told me. She always said I’d been born with a special, magical gift that I had to keep secret. She had no idea why I was like that.”
“What about your father?” Eli asked.
“I never knew him,” Paisley replied. “He was a one-night stand Mom had in college, when she went to Burning Man. She never knew his last name and she didn’t get his number, so she had no way to tell him she’d gotten pregnant. But it was him, right? He was the werecat?”
“Cat shifter,” Jackson corrected, giving her that pained look she was so familiar with— the “Paisley, could you possibly be more tactless” look. “He must have been. So you grew up thinking you were the only one of your kind?”
“That must have been lonely,” Eli said unexpectedly.
&
nbsp; Paisley bristled. She didn’t want to discuss her past or her private feelings with a pair of strange werebears who’d wrapped her up in a bath towel, no matter how hot they were.
“What do you want with me?” Paisley demanded. Once she began, everything she’d wondered about poured out. “You said you wanted to hire me— is that true? What for? How did you know I’d be here? Where’s the guy who’s supposed to be here? Do all you werebears know each other, or did you answer some ‘werebear seeks same’ ad? Do you know any other werecats? If you really do want to hire me, how much are you offering?”
She could have gone on, but Eli put up a hand. “Whoa. I think I’ve already lost track of the first couple questions.”
“I can start over,” Paisley offered.
“That’s okay,” Jackson said hastily. “I think this’ll make the most sense if we start from the beginning. I don’t know if all werebears— dammit, you’ve infected me— all bear shifters know each other, but a lot of us do. There are definitely other cat shifters, but I don’t know any personally. Eli and I grew up together in a little town in Maine. It’s got a couple families of bear shifters, and lots of forest for us to roam around in.”
“I don’t remember a time before I was best friends with Jackson,” Eli put in. “We’ve been buddies since we were five.”
“Three,” Jackson corrected him. “Then we graduated from high school, and we went our separate ways. Eli became a Navy SEAL, and I became—”
“A hacker,” said Eli.
Jackson elbowed him in the ribs. “An inventor. Hacking’s just a hobby. Anyway… Eli, do you want me to tell the next part?”
“No, it’s fine.” But from the grief and anger that tightened Eli’s jaw, Paisley realized that Jackson had been thinking it might be too painful a story to tell. She knew all about painful stories. “I can’t get into details. Most of our missions are classified. All I can tell you is that my team was issued new, lightweight body armor made by a company called SmartDefense. They told us it was state of the art, and would protect us much better than the older, heavier vests. There was an ambush, and one of my buddies, Ryan, was hit. The bullet went straight through his armor.”
