Bear Lake (2 page)

Jackson couldn’t find
it within himself to pull away from her. She was his and he’d been prepared to
let her go, but now he’d tasted her one more time he was back in limbo. He
leaned forward and rested his forehead against hers. Her hands were still
fisting his hair and he could have wrenched away from her but he liked it, he
liked that she was still holding on to him, but he needed to let her go, either
for now or forever, and that was her choice.

“You know where to
find me when you’ve made up your mind, Alex.” He forced his body from hers.
Felt her fingers tug against his hair as her hands fell away. There was a
stabbing pain to his heart, but he moved off on fast feet anyway.

Alex tried to steady
her heart. Her eyes feasted on his naked body as he moved away from her. She
hated herself about as much as she hated him right then.

She wanted him to lose
himself in her. She wanted him to take the damn decision right out of her
hands. Mate her and be done with it, so she didn’t have to choose…

“Fuck you, Jackson.”
She yelled out at the top of her lungs. He didn’t stop. He didn’t hesitate in
his step. He just kept walking away. She wanted to do the same, but there was
just something that kept her there watching him leave, and she knew that if she
could figure out what the hell it was then she might just have stood a chance
of some sanity.

Shane sat outside of
his cabin with a beer in his hand and a scowl on his forehead. He’d seen Chance
come back all bloodied and torn up and he’d waited for the next member of his
clan to emerge with the same kind of injuries. Out of the five shifters that
occupied all but one of the six cabins in the woods, anyone was a likely
suspect, but from the look on Chance’s face he’d guessed that it had been the
alpha that he’d been fighting.

Sure enough not long
after; Shane’s eyes locked on the naked alpha storming back through the
clearing with red welts covering his body and the look of death on his face.
This clan was all about fighting and had been for a long time, but something
had come between them of late, and that someone was a little human female that
just happened to be the alpha’s mate. Three of the clan believed that the alpha
should just carry her off and mate her, while he and Jackson thought
differently.

“Beer.” Shane launched
the bottle in Jackson’s direction at the exact same time as he called him a
warning. Jackson’s hand came out fast and snatched it from the air. He lifted
the cap to his teeth and wrenched it from the bottle, a neat party trick for a
bear shifter.

Jackson didn’t slow
his step as he wrapped his lips around the bottle and in a few long gulps the
contents was down the back of his throat. Uncharacteristically for the alpha he
tossed the bottle away into the underbrush. Then he cursed, stomped one large
foot, turned on his heels and went back to snatch it up again.

“Don’t say a fucking
word.” Jackson growled at Shane and the man chuckled. Shane knew better. He
reached for another bottle and tossed it at his alpha. Jackson caught it and
growled long and hard as he stopped with his foot on the bottom step of his
cabin.

“Chance was out of
line.” Jackson growled as he shook his head on his neck and looked anywhere but
at Shane.

“Guessed that much.”
Shane offered back.

“He tried to stop Alex
from leaving.” Jackson could feel the uncertainty within him. There was a part
of him that wanted to go back and fuck her to oblivion, put his mark in her
skin. Then there was the part of him that knew she needed to come to him of her
own free will.

“She gone?” Shane
reached up and scratched at his head. His eyes were fixed in the distance.
There was a moment when his heart leaped in his chest, it was the moment when
he thought that he might just have to put his alpha down if the man’s mate had
left him.

“Not when I left her.”
Jackson growled again. He bit the cap off the second bottle and drown his
sorrows. Draining it dry. Now he had two empty fucking bottles and he could
have plunged head first into a casket of scotch. His bear was pissed at him for
not claiming their mate, and he felt like shit.

“Still time then.”
Shane offered.

“Time?” Jackson turned
his eyes and scowled at Shane. He kind of longed for the days when he’d been
that damn relaxed in his life. Since Alex arrived he’d been all over the place.

“For you to mate her.”
Shane kept his eyes front and centre. He didn’t have a problem fighting man or
bear when challenged or drunk, but from the scent that was coming off Jackson
his bear was fit to kill something or someone and he might have been slightly
fucked in the head but he wasn’t suicidal.

“I’m not going to
just…” The alpha was grunting and growling like his bear was going to tear from
his body and start ripping into shit.

“Not what I meant.”
Shane tossed back before that happened. “You know where I stand. She’d human,
you can’t just carry her off and fuck her senseless, even if that’s what the
pair of you need.”

“Yeah.” Jackson didn’t
say any more than that. He stomped up the cabin stairs and disappeared inside
with the heavy thud of his front door and Shane knew that conversation was
over.

“He gone?” Chance
poked his head out of his cabin on the other side of Shane’s, some twenty feet
away, and asked on a whisper. Shane nodded his head and still heard the man
sigh from that far away.

“You fucked up.” Shane
offered quietly.

“I know.” Chance
growled back. He’d gone to Alex’s house to make sure that she wasn’t about to
do anything stupid and had found her fit to leave. He hadn’t thought it through,
he’d just acted on instinct. Now his alpha was pissed at him and with good
reason.

“This is why bears
shouldn’t live in close proximity to each other. We’re too unpredictable, too
prone to stupid shit to be able to co-habit with anyone but our one true
fucking mate.” Shane bit out.

“I like having you
guys around. It helps to be able to take my aggression away…”

“When we can beat the
shit out of each other?” Shane finished that for him. He’d had the same
thoughts. “Yeah. I hear that, brother.”

“I guess I should stay
out of Jackson’s way for a bit…” Shane snorted a chuckle.

“Yeah, and then some.”
Shane shook his head in disbelief. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

“I wasn’t. I saw Alex
fitting to leave and I tried to stop her.” He scowled. “She attacked me first
with a fucking bat and then some baton shit. My bear just…” He growled at his
inability to control the beast within him. He regretted that he’d allowed his bear
out, not that he could have kept the fucker inside.

“You couldn’t have
hurt Alex or you’d be dead now.” Shane offered what he knew for sure. If Chance
had hurt the alpha’s mate then Jackson’s bear wouldn’t have stopped until one
of them was dead, and he’d lay odds that someone would have been Chance.

“I didn’t.” Chance’s
hands fisted at his sides. “But I could have, Shane.” He knew the beast within
him was capable of hurting people. The animal was truly unpredictable and it
scared the hell out of him sometimes. He didn’t want to be like that, but he
couldn’t find it within him to be able to control that wildness, that darkness
that he had.

“Couldn’t we all,
man?” Shane knew that feeling only too well. “We’re all fucked up. That’s why
we’re here in the middle of shits-Ville, because we can’t trust ourselves to be
around decent people.”

“What about Alex?”

“What about her?”

“What if she stays?”
Chance could see both sides of the coin. He wanted the little human to mate
with his alpha and yet it worried him some when she was around the clan. What
if one of them hurt her, killed her?

“Once she’s mated then
she’s part of this clan. We’ll all protect her from outsiders and from each
other.” Shane was sure it would work like that. Unless they all went insane at
the same damn time.

When Chance withdraw
back into his trailer Shane knew that he was doing exactly the same thing that
the alpha was. Thinking. They might have been thinking about the same problem,
yet they were coming at it from two different angles.

~^~

Alex hadn’t bothered
to drag her shit back into the house from the car because she wasn’t entirely
sure if she was coming or going- literally. She’d come to this backwater town
to escape the shit of her life and yet she’d found an even bigger pile of crap
waiting for her. She was a mate to a bear shifter, how screw up was that?

Out of the damn frying
pan and into the fire. The grass isn’t always greener… There were probably a
million little crappy clichés that would probably fit the bill rather nicely to
her woes, and as she tossed herself down on the lumpy sofa she tried to think
of them all.

Jackson was a good
man. He might have been a pain in the arse, overbearing, son of a bitch, and
yet, deep down she knew that he was the kind of man who would die to protect
her and not the kind to knock ten tons of shit out of her. How crazy was that?
She’d run from a man who wanted to kill her, would kill her if he ever got
another chance, and here she was with a man that could kill her with the swipe
of his claws and yet it would never cross his mind.

Alex lifted her hands
and ran her fingers through her hair, dragging it back from her face and lacing
her fingers at the top of her head. She blew out to breath that she hadn’t
quite released again since the moment that Jackson had disappeared into the
woods. There was still an ache within her for him and she knew that was part of
the mating process. That need to be near him, to be with him, because he’d told
her.

He’d told her too damn
much. He’d explained in great detail what it meant to be mated to a bear
shifter. How they’d be mated, why he’d put his mark in her skin. What would
happen if he lost control and bit her…

Alex groaned with the
insanity of it all. Her eyes stung as they filled with tears and she bit down
on her lip to try to keep them at bay. She didn’t cry for a man or over one.
That wasn’t who she was. Those kinds of emotions had been beaten out of her
long ago, so why the hell did she wanted to cry a river now?

Right now leaving
wasn’t an option, but then neither was staying. How the hell could that be? She
couldn’t commit to going or staying. That was screwed up beyond belief.

Alex dropped her hands
and swung for the lamp on the side table. The sound of it hitting the floor and
the glass shattering was music to her ears. She wanted to be a damn bear just
so she could kill something.

She hated herself for
feeling that way. She’d spent over a year with a man that had used any excuse
or none at all to treat her like a punch bag. She’d spent six months learning
to defend herself with an ex-soldier who had been recommended to her by a
woman’s survivors group, and now here she was wanting to be a fucking bear so
she could kill…?

With a rush of
frustration she pushed up from the sofa and started to pace back and forth
between the furniture. Her life was out of control once more, and yet unlike
before that control was within her reach. It wasn’t some arsehole that had
stolen her control, taken it away, it was just circumstance and her fear of
something that she couldn’t really comprehend.

What the hell would it
be like to be mated to Jackson? What would it be like to be loved so
completely, so utterly that the man would lay his life down for you? How could
she possibly surrender herself to a man’s will ever again?

Alex knew that if she
stayed she would be his. Not just his girlfriend, his woman or his wife, but
his mate, and that seemed so much more possessive than all of the above. Here
was a man who was deadly in ways no human could ever be, and yet he ignited a fire
within her that she couldn’t seem to put out.

Alex wrapped her arms
around her body and moved to the window to stare out at the woods that
stretched all the way back across the land to where the clan had their cabins.
He was there, somewhere. She could feel him calling to her as if he was right
beside her, but it wasn’t with words, it was just his presence, and it wasn’t
something that she could shake off.

She couldn’t go back
to her old life- that Alex was dead and buried. Luckily not in a physical sense,
although it had come close. If she stayed then she’d be tied to Jackson for the
rest of her life. Onwards and upwards?

~^~

Marcus wrapped an arm
around the cutie at his side and copped a feel of a nice, fleshy cheek of her
backside, and she giggled up at him from under those damn eyelashes that had to
be weighing her lids down they were so thick and long. The woman wore more
makeup that a commando going into night battle and yet she was warm, willing,
and had the kind of killer body that he couldn’t wait to explore as his thrust
his cock into her. He wasn’t looking for a mate like his alpha, he just really
needed to get laid so that his bear was a little more chilled within him.

“What say we get the
hell out of here and go to your place?” Marcus gave a gentle growl against her
ear and she squealed accordingly. Woman liked his bear and that was a damn good
thing because when he was screwing around his bear was front and centre.

“I’m just going to
tell my girlfriends I’m going off with a big bear stranger, they’ll be very
jealous.” She flashed him the kind of look that said she was going to go down
and dirty on his arse the moment that he got her alone.

“How many girlfriends
you got?” Marcus peered around the suit that just walked through the door of
the bar and looked so out of place that it was laughable.

“Three.” She slipped
her hips in between his open legs as he sat on the stool and brushed her hand
against the hard swell of his cock. “And we like to do things
together.”
She gave him the kind of dirty giggle that made the hairs rise all over his
body and his length twitched inside his pants.

“Well, I’d hate for
anyone to feel left out.” Marcus growled again before he ran his tongue down
her neck and nipped her shoulder. This wasn’t his mate and he had no intention
of marking her as his, but that didn’t stop these shifter groupies from wanting
to be nipped on.