Her ToyBear

by Bonnie Burrows

  Her ToyBear

  A PARANORMAL WEREBEAR ROMANCE

  BONNIE BURROWS

  Copyright ©2016 by Bonnie Burrows

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  Divorced Jennifer Casey was enjoying life in her late 40s. She was fabulously wealthy and still looked good enough to garner more than enough male attention.

  Dating a man who was half her age didn't bother. So when she met muscle bound student Warren she wanted to enjoy every minute of it and life was good for the unlikely couple. For them, this was more than just sex.

  However, eventually the truth would have to come out.

  Wesley would have to tell her that he was not really a human being. He was in fact a shapeshifting WereBear and very soon this would have a very dramatic impact on both their lives, whether they liked it or not....

  This book is a unique twist on the usual paranormal shapeshifter theme. If you want a highly exciting and beautifully sensitive story then start reading this one right away!

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  One day, Jennifer Casey’s friend and neighbor posed a question to her that would change her life. It was a perfectly simple question for something that would have such profound effects. To wit, Michelle Owens sat in the living room of Jessica’s penthouse, going through Jessica’s stacks of sketchbooks and her piles of sheets of drawings, and asked, “Honey, when are you going to get yourself a model?”

  They were sitting together in the living room of Jennifer’s penthouse, the posh dwelling that was both her home and the souvenir of her divorce. In dissolving Jennifer’s marriage, the ace lawyers with whom her parents connected her had gotten Jennifer the penthouse and half of Ken’s money and investments.

  In lieu of her former husband, Jennifer had the panoramic view of the city outside of the one living room wall that was made up entirely of tall windows, the plush modern furniture with which it was decorated, the spiral staircase leading up to the bed where she had slept alone since discovering Ken’s interest in younger women, and the rest of the place that was worthy of a spread in Architectural Digest. She had all of that—and her art, which had become her companion, her entertainment, her distraction, and, in a way, her lover.

  Jennifer’s art served some of the roles of a lover. It was beautiful to look at. It provided her with comfort and occupied her hours with something that made her happy. If she were honest, it provided her with the only things that made her happy just now. Her drawings, rendered in pencil and charcoal and colored markers, would never step out of her sketchbooks and off of her pads and climb into the sketchbooks and pads of other artists, giving them the pleasure that they were meant to give her.

  Jennifer’s drawings, two-dimensional as they were, would never break her heart and leave her suddenly not knowing what her future would be when she had thought she could see the rest of her life laid out before her. They would never leave her in tears and doubt. They would just be there on paper, beautiful and sexy and exciting in the hot-looking young maleness of their subjects.

  She had resigned herself to the very real possibility that the drawings were the only things that would never leave her.

  So there she sat on an ottoman, watching Michelle sitting on the sofa, one sketchbook in her lap, a stack of sketchbooks on the sofa beside her, and a pile of loose drawings on the coffee table in front of her, admiring Jennifer’s work and appreciating the care and the quiet passion that Jennifer had put into them.

  Jennifer, an auburn-haired, well-dressed, and well-put-together client of the best gyms and spas that her ex-husband’s money could buy, watched Michelle, a short-haired, immaculately dressed African-American woman who had been her neighbor from the time she and Ken had first moved here. Michelle’s opinion of her work meant a great deal to Jessica. Michelle was a casting director for television, films, and stage productions, and she knew hot-looking men when she saw them, which was a lot, every day. Michelle’s taste was every bit as good as Jennifer’s and made the perfect sounding board for her work. Jennifer had to admit, however, that the sound Michelle was making today was not exactly the one she had expected to hear.

  “A model?” Jennifer asked. “You think I need a model? Really?”

  “It couldn’t hurt,” said Michelle, looking up from the book in her lap and into Jennifer’s curious blue eyes.

  “Why?” Jennifer wondered aloud. “Are you saying that what I’m doing now isn’t up to my standard? Do you think I’m losing my touch? I don’t think so at all. I’m very happy with what I’ve been drawing. I think it’s some of my best work.”

  “I agree,” said Michelle, flipping through the pages and admiring their handsome, muscular young contents. “You’re as good as ever, maybe better. But you’re doing an awful lot of it now, aren’t you?”

  “Is that such a bad thing?” asked Jennifer.

  “It’s not a bad thing at all,” Michelle replied. “I think you get better and better. It’s just…”

  “Just what?”

  “Well…you told me the subjects of these sketches all came off the Internet, right?”

  Jennifer stiffened on the Ottoman a bit. “That’s right; they did. I picked them all out.”

  “So you went on your computer or your iPad and collected all these shots of hot-looking guys—and they are all incredibly hot-looking—and you saved them, and you’ve been going through everything you saved and drawing them. Right?”

  “Right,” Jennifer said, suddenly not at all sure she liked the direction of this conversation.

  “Well, Jen,” Michelle said carefully, “here’s the thing. It must have taken you a lot of hours to collect all of the photos where these came from. And I know it took a lot of hours sitting and drawing everything you collected. And honestly, they’re fantastic. I think you should be showing these, not just letting them sit in your books and so forth. You’ve got a show here. A few shows.”

  “And that’s a good thing!”

  “Yes, yes, that’s a good thing,” Michelle continued. “But…like I said, it was a lot of hours, wasn’t it?”

  Jennifer shook her head at this. “Good work takes time.”

  “Yes, it takes time. You weren’t just doodling here; it takes time. But honey…it’s all been just you. You and your work and this place, where no one ever comes but the cleaning woman once a week. Just you and your computer and your iPad and all this.”

  “Are you suggesting I’m becoming a recluse?”

  Michelle reached out and touched Jennifer on the knee. “I’m saying you’re divorced, you
’re…the same age as me, and we know what that is…and you’re by yourself all the time.”

  Jennifer stiffened more and frowned. “My work needs time, and it needs solitude. It’s not something you do in an office, and it’s not something you do with a lot of people and distractions around you. I’m an artist.”

  “And all I’m saying,” said Michelle, as gently as she knew how, “is that a model for an artist isn’t a distraction. A model is an inspiration. And when you take a break, a model is someone to talk to. Who do you talk to? There’s never anyone here.”

  “Even when Ken was here, I hardly talked to him the last year we were together. He had other people to talk to. And more than talk.” She looked away, as if taking her eyes from Michelle, who knew the whole story, would take away the memory. It did not.

  “You used to work with models,” Michelle reminded her.

  “I used to do a lot of things,” Jennifer replied.

  “I know. And you’re divorced and you’re depressed, and being depressed makes you not want to do anything or see anyone. I understand that. You just want the whole world to go away…,” she touched Jennifer on the arm as if to take the sting from these next words, “…like Ken did.”

  Jennifer looked back at her with eyes shadowed as much by her feelings as by her mascara. She could only imagine that Michelle must now see all these past weeks catching up with her. “Art is therapy, you know,” was all she could say.

  “And it’s good therapy,” Michelle agreed. “It must have felt good to draw all this stuff.”

  Jennifer sighed. “It did. It felt damn good. It’s the only thing that has felt good for me—does feel good for me—now.”

  “I appreciate that,” said Michelle. “But maybe you might want to try changing the treatment a little.”

  “With a model?”

  “Why not? You had models in school, right? And you worked with some models before the divorce, right?”

  “Yes…yes, I did,” said Jennifer, frowning so hard and so deeply that she might consider taking some of her divorce settlement and using it for Botox. “And look where it got me.” She looked right at Michelle. “You know where it got me.”

  Michelle pulled back a bit and rolled her eyes, remembering, and now sorry that she’d brought it up. “I know, honey. I’m sorry.”

  “That one model—the redhead,” said Jennifer. “That was really where it started, right under my nose. The girl who posed for me, for that one painting that was in my college alumni show. Ken and I went to the opening of the exhibit, and there she was, on canvas and in the flesh. The red-haired flesh. I sold that painting, you remember. I was glad to get rid of it. I wanted to take a knife to it. I wanted to stick a knife right in it and slice it to pieces, thinking of what Ken was sticking…” She trailed off, shut her eyes, and raised a hand to cut off anything that Michelle might say to that. She opened her eyes again and went on ruefully. “I never used another model after that. At least, not that way. I’d sit in the park and draw the people there. But I stopped painting, and I stopped working with models.”

  Michelle replied, understandingly, “I know, Jen. I know how much it hurt. But a model—a male model, like the ones you spend so much time looking for online—isn’t going to hurt you like the redhead did. And it’ll get you out of yourself, get you to start engaging with people again. Sugar, divorce isn’t death. Remember, I’m divorced, too. And here I am.”

  “So, are you seeing anyone?” Jennifer asked.

  “I’m not ‘seeing’ anyone that way,” said Michelle. “But I’m seeing people, not just head shots of actors. I’m out and doing things. I’m not saying you have to be a social butterfly. You are an artist, and you’re not going to be out and around all the time. I just mean, a model will get someone else into your life besides just you.” She held up the sketchbook full of young male pulchritude in pencil and charcoal. “And if he’s somebody like these guys, that’s all the better.”

  Jennifer began to turn over the idea in her head. “A model,” she pondered. “A model.”

  “Yep,” said Michelle. “A model. To come over, in person, and sit upstairs in your studio that you haven’t used since the divorce. An actual, real, live model,” she held up the sketchbook again, “who looks like these guys. They’re out there. They pose for photographers. They’ll pose for you. All you’ve got to do is find one.”

  “One of those guys?” Jennifer blinked at the idea.

  “Sure! You know, a lot of the actors I’ve worked with started out as models. And before they had agents, they promoted themselves online. I know about a website that a lot of them use; my agency handles some of the models who used to be on it when they were looking for work. I can give you the URL; you can look it up. I bet you’ll like what you see there.”

  Jennifer’s mood lifted. Her eyes narrowed, and her former frown turned to a fascinated crease of the lips. Her pupils darted back and forth as if she were watching a tennis match. Tentatively, she asked, “And I can just hire one right from there?”

  Michelle nodded. “Of course you can! Just like you’d hire a plumber or an electrician. Just like you found your cleaning lady.”

  Jennifer pondered further: “Just like you’d send out for a pizza…” She remembered the videos that Ken used to ask her to watch with him to spice things up in the bedroom. They were full of stories—if one wanted to call them that—about things that happened when people ordered a pizza and sent for a plumber. She recalled how some of those pizza boys and plumbers had looked. They were a lot like the young lads that she enjoyed drawing.

  It had made her feel decidedly uncomfortable, trying to suppress her reactions to them while Ken openly admired the actresses who played their “customers.” The presence of those videos in their home should have been Jennifer’s first clue about where their marriage was going.

  “I’m telling you, girl,” Michelle went on, “get yourself a model. Bring these sketchbooks of yours to life. Didn’t your professors in school always tell you there was nothing like working from real life?”

  “They did,” said Jennifer. “They always said there was no substitute for a live model. Those were the fine arts professors. The illustration professors always said, ‘Swipe from wherever you can find the right image.’ It could be a photograph, as long as it made the drawing look convincing. But the fine arts professors, it was always ‘Draw from life! Draw from life!’”

  “So,” said Michelle, leaning in earnestly, “think like you’re back in your fine arts class. Draw a hot-looking young dude who’s sitting warm and breathing right in front of you.”

  Jennifer was edging closer to being persuaded. There was just one last hurdle. “And some of these models on this website…will they actually pose nude?”

  “Some of ‘em will and some of ‘em won’t. They’ll tell you in their posting if they will.”

  “And the ones who will…,” she tilted her head down at the sketchbook, “…are they like the ones in there?”

  Michelle grinned at her. “A lot of ‘em are.” And she arched her eyebrows encouragingly.

  Jennifer sat up straight, her eyes tilting upward now in the direction of the second level of the penthouse, where the studio was. And, not incidentally, her bedroom. Though she dismissed that second thought.

  “So,” said Michelle, “you want the URL for the website?”

  Jennifer looked back at her, the decision made. “Give it to me,” she said.

  _______________

  And so, when Michelle excused herself from Jennifer’s penthouse to return to her own luxury apartment downstairs, it was after leaving Jennifer with the URL, muchomodels.com, on the back of a business card. Alone again with the card and a new mission, Jennifer went up to the bedroom, curled up on the king-size bed with the king-size pillows, on the sheets with the highest thread count that her ex-husband’s money could buy, took her iPad from the nightstand, and pulled up the website. She navigated to the male models section and had a look ar
ound. A very, very delightful look around.

  They were the way Michelle had described them. Some of them wanted careers just in modeling. Others were aspiring actors, and many of them were seeking the representation of agents for one type of career or the other. But post after post, page after page, they were exquisite. Many of them she thought she recognized from the online photographers’ galleries and male physique blogs to which her gay friends had directed her when she first went looking for subjects online.

  There was surely a great deal of overlap. Quite a few of these guys looked very familiar. Quite a few of them, she was sure, she had seen wearing less than the Speedos, thongs, and jockstraps in which they posed on Mucho Models. Some of them even had “private” sections of their portfolios where, if you unlocked the privacy, you could view them showing their privates. Jennifer took particular note of them.