"But why?" Nicki asked him. "Why not just break in and get what you need? You're certainly strong enough!" She waved angrily at her ruined door. Why couldn't he just do that?
"Does your building have a security alarm?"
She felt stupid. Of course it did. "If you broke in…"
"Then the alarms would go off and I wouldn't get anything accomplished. At best, I'd get to run away before the police came. Or worse, I'd draw the attention of the Shifts."
"So you need to sneak in."
"Right."
"With a security badge."
"Which I don't have. So I took the one off your friend there."
Nicki relaxed, and let him come close enough to take her hand. "So," she said, "you did him a favor by beating him unconscious."
"Well. Not the way I usually like to do things. I don't beat up people for fun." He scratched at his neck. "Sometimes there's no other choice. Stopping the Ursa Initiative is too important."
The extinction of his people, Max had said. Something she'd read in that folder this morning came back to mind. Nuisance animal containment. Could that have meant Max and the rest of his kind?
"You still haven't told me what this Ursa thing is." She said, feeling the electricity where his fingers touched hers.
His sigh was heavy and deep. When he spoke, it was like he was carrying some impossibly heavy burden.
"The Ursa Initiative," he said, "is a plan to wipe out my entire species."
Chapter 5
"So. No pressure." She muttered.
They closed her door as best they could and then Max let her lead them down the city streets to her office building. Above them in the sky, barely visible through the haze of city lights, the Big Dipper twinkled. The other name for the Big Dipper, of course, was Ursa Major. The Big Bear.
She should have known. She should have made the connection before now. The Ursa Initiative actually had a word for bears right in the title. Of course it would have something to do with bears.
How could she have known, though? Before this morning she had no idea that there was such a place as Gallandrien or men who could turn into bears.
"Are there women?" she asked as they took the last turn before her building. "I mean, women who can turn into bears?"
"Of course," he said with a little smile. "There are men, and women. It'd be kind of hard for us to make little baby Ursallin without women to be their mothers, right?"
She felt her face heating. She'd been on a birth control pill since she was eighteen, thanks to the wisdom of her mother. There was no way Max could have gotten her pregnant from their sexual encounter earlier today. Still, the thought of him lying with her was weird now that she knew what he was.
He watched her out of the corner of his eye. "Are you sorry we did it now?"
She pursed her lips and looked away. "You guys can read minds or something?"
"Not yours, I can't. The Ursallin can talk to each other telepathically, when we're close to each other, but I haven't been able to look into your mind at all."
"So you've been trying?" she asked.
"I, uh, tried to do a few times, sure. A guy likes to know what a woman is thinking when he's…you know.”
In the glow from the streetlamps and neon signs all around them she had the pleasure of watching him blush. She'd been right, though. It had looked like Max and Arcan had been talking to each other without saying anything, back in the woods. Telepathy. Massive strength. Amazing sex…well, that last one might not be because he was part bear but Max was just one surprise after another.
The main doors at the front of the building weren't locked. They never were. It was the access to the upper levels that would be blocked off for the night. "Wait," Nicki said to him, "we can't just go marching in there. The security guard at the front desk will keep us from going up the elevators. Plus I'll need to sign in and then everyone will know I was there."
Max looked up at the front of the building with all of its darkened windows. "Got any ideas?"
"You mean other than breaking through a solid brick wall?" she asked sarcastically. "Sure. Back door."
They walked around through alleys and short side streets that had no names until they were standing at the back of the office building. It was a dark area back there, with only one small security light positioned over a double metal door. The entry way was covered in peeling green paint with the words "Deliveries Only" marked across them in white.
"There." She said. She held tight to his hand in the dark. It made her feel better, no matter what he really was. "That's the way into the back."
Max looked around them. "How do you even know about this place?"
"I come back here sometimes during my shift to be alone with…" She almost said guys from the office but she didn't want to make herself sound like the office slut. It had only been twice, well., three times, but still. "Uh, alone with my thoughts."
His body suddenly felt very close to hers. The tingling on her palm intensified as if just thinking about being out here alone with him made their strange physical connection more intense. He turned into her and suddenly she had her back up against the wall of the neighboring building, his closeness becoming an erotic pressure as he leaned against her. It excited her, turning her on, making her gasp in a breath.
His lips settled over hers and she forgot why she had ever been scared of him. Trailing feathery soft kisses across her cheek, and down her neck, his breath slid warm and sultry over her skin. She didn't fight it when his hand slid up the front of her shirt. She didn't want to.
He pushed into her legs, and his thigh pressed against her in just the right spot, a hot and wet sensation spiraling up and up and up as her heart raced and her brain gave everything over to the feel of what he was doing to her. When she came, her hands fisted into the back of his shirt, and he growled, low and sensuous. Her face was buried in his shoulder and on a whim, she bit him, hard.
His reaction was immediate. He grabbed her by the arms and pulled her into him, trapping her to his chest with one arm around her back. His free hand went to her pants, pushing inside the waist of both her jeans and her cotton panties. His hand was huge, and she was afraid it would hurt when his finger found her slippery crease and began to slide inside…
It did, in all the right ways.
Some part of her came back to herself and she hated that part of her more than she had ever hated anything in her life. It told her to slow down, to remember who Max was and why they were here and how insane it was to be doing what they were doing, here, in the back alley of her office building.
"Max," she whispered, trying not to cum all over his hand right then right then right then! Panting, breathing in as much of the night air as she could to clear her mind, begging her body to do that again, she put both of her hands behind his neck and made him look into her eyes. "Max. Not. Here."
It was all she could do to get those three words out and when he huffed a few times and visibly took control of himself again, she wished she'd just let him keep going. Her sensible side was right, though. This was not the time nor the place. And this wasn't right, no matter how good it felt.
He nodded his head, then pulled out of her, slowly. It was too much. She came again. "Sorry." He whispered. "You smelled like…um. Sorry."
Sex, is what she smelled like. If he wasn't so damned good at this… She stood there, pressing a hand to the notch between her legs, feeling the aftershocks rocking through her. After this was done, she promised herself, she would find a spot with a real bed, and make this man do everything he wanted to do to her.
Not her apartment, she reminded herself bitterly. She'd be lucky if the landlord didn't sue her. It would have to be somewhere else. What was she going to do after this? She had no place to live. There was a man in her apartment who’d been assaulted and was probably calling the police right now. She was suspended from her job and after what they were about to do she was no doubt going to be fired. She looked up at Max. What was it
about this man that was making her do all these crazy, insane things?
Then remembered feel of his hand inside of her was only part of the answer, she decided. There had to be more to it than that. But there wasn't time to figure it out. Max turned on his heel and marched up to the metal doors and swiped Larry's pass card through the slot on the electronic reader. The red light above the box turned green and the doors opened just a few inches inward.
"Come on," he said to her without turning around. "If I start touching you again we'll never get this done.” Somehow, hearing him say it like that made her smile.
Inside was a dark, open area stacked with boxes of office supplies and other things. No one guarded this area at night, Nicki knew. The guard at the front desk would do a sweep of the ground floor every hour, or at least he was supposed to. Other than that, they would have the run of the place; if they were quiet and quick.
Nicki showed him where the service access to the stairwell was. Another swipe from Larry's security card got them through this door as well and then they were stepping up the stairs as fast as they could. The laminate tiles over the concrete steps made an odd clicking sound as they went up, soft echoes preceding them as they advanced.
"Which floor?" Max asked.
"Fifth," she told him, wishing they could have taken the elevator. She worked out on a regular basis and her legs were in fine shape if she did say so herself, but it was still a long way up.
They went up the last two flights in silence, then Max put his ear to the door on the fifth floor landing and waited. "I don't hear anything." He said after a moment. "That's a good sign. Here's what we're going to do. You're going to show me where those files were the last time you saw them, I'm going to take them and we're going to leave. Quick in; quick out. I hope."
"Uh, that might be a problem. They were in my boss's office last time I saw them."
He sighed through his nose. "One more door taken off its hinges, that's all."
"You don't think Mister Donovan will have an alarm on his personal office?"
"Donovan?" Max stood up taller as he repeated that name, looming over her, reminding her very much of what Arcan had looked like when she'd first seen him as a bear. "Did you say Donovan? He's your boss?"
"Uh, yes. Sure. Bryson Donovan." She actually moved back from him as his expression turned darker. "Max, you're scaring me."
"Donovan." he muttered, not hearing her at all.
She swallowed and reminded herself what she had seen Max do to Larry back at her apartment. She didn't want to find herself on that side of his temper. "You're acting like you know him."
"I do." His eyes suddenly focused and the look he gave her would have melted hard steel. Then he blinked, and his face smoothed out again like he was remembering where he was. "Don't worry, I'm all right. The pieces are just starting to come together, that's all."
"Mind sharing with me?" She asked him.
"No. Not yet. Just get me to those files."
Pushing the door open slowly, they stepped out into the darkened fifth floor hallway -- the same one that the elevators opened onto, where Nicki came into work each morning. She'd used those stairs dozens of times and knew there wouldn't be an alarm on them. All the same, she felt like this was going way too easy for them. Something should have gone wrong by now. If this had been a movie, cops would have already surrounded her black ass.
But this wasn't a movie. This was real life. She was really standing here with a shape shifting werebear, breaking into her office, to steal a file that she had been suspended for just looking at. There was no way any movie could be as crazy as this. She led them down the hall to the left, careful in the dark not to bump into furniture or file carts. The only light came from soft blue LEDs along the bottom of the wall, spaced every five feet or so, just enough to make out shapes and deeper shadows. She knew which door was Donovan's.
When they got to it she tried the handle. Just like she'd thought, it was locked for the night.
"We could try Larry's card." She suggested, pointing to the rectangle of the electronic reader on the door just below the knob. "I mean it might work."
Max nodded, taking the card out one more time and sliding it through the slot on the reader. The light stayed red. He tried it again, with the same result.
"Maybe you should turn it—" Nicki started to say.
With a muffled grunt Max rammed his shoulder against the door right above the non-compliant card reader, snapping it free of its frame hard enough that it swing all the way around to slam against the wall. She waited for the inevitable alarm but it never came. It looked like they were in the clear.
"Thought we were trying to be quiet." She reminded him in a whisper.
"For me, that was quiet." was his answer.
Shaking her head, Nicki followed him into Mister Donovan's office.
The lights in the room suddenly flared to life, momentarily blinding them both. Nicki's first thought was that they had tripped some kind of motion sensor when they entered the room. She frantically tried to remember if there were any windows in Mister Donovan's office that the light would shine through, showing the world outside how they were breaking in. Then she heard the voice.
"I've seen you be less subtle, Maximillian, but this is about what I expected from an Ursallin."
A man sat in the swivel chair behind Mister Donovan's desk, his feet kicked up on top of it, papers and folders and pictures displaced and shoved out of the way by his fancy black shoes with the tasseled laces.
Chris McCann. The private investigator.
He glanced at her smugly, shaking his head and smirking. "I was really hoping you weren't mixed up in this, Nicki. Not after what happened in your apartment. I was hoping you were the helpless damsel in this story for me to save. You're too sexy to pass up." His eyes studied her body, paying close attention to her breasts in the outline of her t-shirt. Then he shrugged. "Oh well. I can smell the taint of bear musk on you now. If he's had you, I wouldn't touch you."
"Hey!" She snapped, offended by his tone and his insinuation both, even if it was true. "Wait a minute. What are you doing here in Mister Donovan's office?"
"I could ask you the same," he said, "but I know why you're here. You're bringing this dumb bastard to Ursa Initiative files. You really should have just stayed out of it, Nicki. If you hadn't read that file this morning, none of this would have happened."
"I didn't mean to." She said, feeling stupid for the pleading tone she could hear in her own voice. "It was an accident."
"Just bad luck, is that it?" He quipped. "I don't believe in luck. Only sacrifice."
The way he said the word, with his lips twisted, gave it a harsher meaning. Like, spill the blood of the innocents, that kind of sacrifice.
"We tried to take care of you in your apartment." He went on, finally swinging his feet off to the side and standing up. "But, no, this guy had to step in and save you. Didn't you, Maximillian? Had to be the big hero. It could have died with her, you know. You didn't have to get killed with her."
Nicki's heart pounded in her chest.
"That's funny," Max said to McCann. "Considering how you plan on killing me and every one of my kind."
McCann ran a hand along the edge of the desk. "Well, yes, there is that. Nothing personal."
"I take genocide very personally." Max growled. "Especially when it involves me."
McCann laughed. He threw back his head and roared with laughter that left Nicki's ears ringing. "I always did like you, Maximillian. That's one of the reasons why I was going to kill you last. That, and I do need to pay you back for what you did to my mate."
"It was less than she deserved."
"You filled her veins with acid and then shredded her into pieces so small I never did find them all."
"I could have done worse. I should have done worse, in fact."
Nicki stared at Max. There was no emotion in his voice. Whoever this woman was they were talking about, Max had killed her in a way so horr
ible that Nicki's brain couldn't even wrap around the image of it, and it didn't even phase him. "Max?" she said quietly.
"Oh, that's right darling," McCann said. "Your lover here is a killing machine. All the Ursallin are. That's one of the reasons why we're going to wipe them off the face of the Earth. Every Earth. Even theirs."
"Don't listen to him, Nicki," Max warned her. "The Shifts are liars."
Nicki's mind raced. A Shift? This man, this man who she had found so attractive on their ride in the elevator, was one of those black, oily, deadly monsters who had broken into her apartment by tearing apart a wall?
"Aw," McCann said when he saw the expression on Nicki's face. "Now look what you did, Maximillian. You ruined my surprise."
Simply Bears: A Ten Book Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance Collection Page 31
