Bear Mated: A BBW Bear Shifter Paranomal Romance (Pine Ridge BBW Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance Series Book 2) (5 page)

“I don’t think there’s enough
wood.”

“No, but there’s an axe. Trust me,
I know how to use it. I was a lumberjack before I became a ski resort remodeler,
remember. We all were, in the Pine Ridge Crew. First shifter crew in town,
that’s why we call ourselves the Pine Ridge Crew. All the others are
johnny
-come-
latelies
.”

He was proud of the town, she
realized.
His
town. The crew’s town.
That was interesting. Most shifters were more forest-oriented, she’d read. Of
course, everything she knew about them came from books, not actual experience.
A couple times she’d had to keep order at protests when the shifter-haters got
a license for a public demonstration and demanded the mayor kick the shifters
out of town. The bear shifters had arrived, in bear form, and made a parade
down the center of the street, scattering half the protesters. The police chief
had laughed, and when Barbara had asked him about it he’d said the shifters had
a license, too. That had been her only official experience with shifters, really.
She wondered if Rick had been one of the bears there. He probably had.

I’m
thinking like a cop again
, she scolded herself.
I’m sitting across from the hottest guy I’ve ever met and I’m thinking
like a cop
. She should be focused on him, not his people.

“So,” she said, aiming for casual,
“where are you from? The mountain?”

“Not hardly. I’m from Rhode
Island.”

“Rhode Island!” She almost choked
around her fish. “They have bear shifters in Rhode Island?”

He laughed. “If they do, I don’t
know about it.”

“Then how’d you become one? And
wind up here?”

He seemed pleased that she was
taking an interest in him, finally. “You want me to tell you my story?”

She paused, then nodded. “I really
would.”

After a pause, he began to talk.

“There was this girl, and she was a shifter,” he started,
and Barbara listened closely. “A biker chick. Smoking hot, tough as nails.
You’d like her. I was a working class guy, a construction worker. I didn’t have
any family, I was a foster kid, so I didn’t have any real roots. When she
wanted me to come with her on the road, I said hell yeah. Didn’t know she was a
shifter at the time, and this was back before shifters came out of the den.” He
chuckled and shook his head. “She about gave me the shock of my life when she
disappeared one night. We were camped out in the desert—we’d wandered down to
New Mexico—and I guess her bear needed release, because she wasn’t there when I
woke up to take a piss. Oh, uh, sorry. Leak, I mean.”

Barbara smiled. “I can handle
‘piss’.” She cringed. “Okay, forget I said that.”

His gaze was on the fire. “I was
afraid for her, thought some bad bikers must have found us and dragged her off
into the desert to have their way with her, so I went after her. I was
bare-assed naked and half-drunk, and it was as black as a witch’s heart. Well,
actually, I’ve met a couple of witches, and they weren’t so bad. But anyway. It
was dark, darker than it is now. All there was
was
the light of the stars shimmering above like a field of diamonds on black
velvet.”

“
Oooo
.”

“Suddenly, I hear a strange coughing
sound. A deep animal grunt. I stiffen. Freeze. It comes again. I spin toward
the sound, and there, coming at me out of the darkness, is this great big
monstrous bear. I was so shocked I didn’t even know what it was at first. There
are no bears in the desert! And it was hard to make out exactly, as dark as it
was. The bear was just this huge hellish shape coming at me, its eyes kind of
gleaming by the starlight.”

“That’s scary.”

“Well, I started to run for it,” he
continued. “Wasn’t like I had any weapons to fend the beast off, and it would
laugh at my fists. But then I thought, ‘Shit, what if Heather’s still out here?
What if it attacks her?’”

“A biker chick named Heather?”

“That was her real name,” Rick said.
“It’s what I called her. She went by Snake Eyes, on account of her eyes could
glow a little in the dark. Now I know it’s because she was a shifter. Anyway,
so I rush back to the camp, grab some stones from around the fire pit, and run
back out into the desert. I find the bear, which hadn’t gone far, and start
hurling rocks at it.”

Barbara’s mouth dropped open. “That
was stupid.”
Brave, though
, she added
to herself.

“Don’t I know it,” he said. “But
what else was I going to do? Well, Heather—that’s what I’m going to call her;
feel free to think of her as Snake Eyes—I guess she got tired of me stoning
her, because she Shifts, I suppose so that I’ll see it’s her and stop pelting
her. Only I had just tossed a stone right before the Shift, and it hit her just
as she became human again. She got a rock right between the eyes and went down.
I rushed to her and held her in my arms.”

“Don’t tell me she died!”

“Heather? Oh no, like I said, she
was—is—tough as nails. But she’s so pissed off at me that as soon as I wrap my
arms about her, she leans forward and bites me—right in the forearm! Some
gratitude for showing concern for her. Well, she bit me deep, right in the
muscle, deep enough to put a bear in me. ‘Thanks for the rock in the face,
asshole,’ she says. ‘Now enjoy your bear.’ And with that, she gets up, stalks
off back to the campsite and takes off on her motorcycle, leaving me stranded
in the desert.”

“Jesus!”

“I know, right? Naked and stranded
in the desert with a new bear inside me, and I didn’t even know what a bear shifter
was.” He winced. “Well, I won’t bore you with what happened next, which was a
lot of wandering and searching,
years
of trying to figure things out. Eventually I found a chat room online that
mentioned bear shifters. Some conspiracy nuts had some blogs about it and
recordings of bear shifter sightings. One was in Pine Ridge, so that’s where I
went, to get answers. I was lucky. I fell in with the Pine Ridge Crew, and they
took me in, treated me like family. I’ve never looked back.”

Barbara studied Rick with new
respect. “That sounds like a hard life.”

“Oh, it wasn’t so bad. I liked the
open road, never knowing what was around the next bend. But I’ll tell you I
don’t miss being afraid of what was inside me, always worried I might kill
someone, or that it might kill me.” A dark look passed across his face. “It
took me a long time to make peace with my bear. It was wild inside me, and I
didn’t understand it. It felt like it was tearing me apart.”

She swallowed and moved closer to
him around the fire, wanting him to take comfort from her presence. She could
see the memories pained him, that they brought him back to a grim time in his
life. And part of her thought,
No, a wild
time. He really does have a wildness about him. Only it’s his bear, raging and
out of control inside him.

As if to confirm this, he said,
“Sometimes it still fights me. My bear needs to come out sometimes or else it
will go mad. I’ll go mad.” He seemed to hesitate.

“What is it?” she said, softly. She
was very close to him now.

He turned to look at her, then
glanced back to the fire. “It scares most girls,” he said. “When my bear grows
restless inside me. When it rages and drives me nuts. Most women just bail on
me. I’ve learned …”

“Yes?” It came out almost as a
whisper.

“I’ve learned not to get too close
to women. For a long time, I’ve never let myself have a relationship.”

One-and-done
,
she thought, but this time she didn’t think it derisively. It made sense,
really. How else could Rick function? The poor man had been driven half-mad by
his bear and now he lived a life of solitude, at least when it came to females.
Oh, he wet his
willy
when he needed it, but that was
it. His heart wasn’t in it at all.
That
he kept locked up inside him, masked by his insufferable grin. Only he wasn’t
grinning now. He was as sober as she’d ever seen him, his soul laid bare before
her.

“You must feel very alone,” she
said, and laid a hand on his thigh—why, she didn’t know. It just seemed the
right thing to do.

It was. He seemed to sort of relax
at her touch. Take comfort in it.

“I never thought I’d find a mate,”
he said, not looking at her.

She heard the silent
but
in that sentence.

“You don’t think …” She couldn’t
finish the rest of the thought.

Now he turned to her. He moved so
suddenly that it startled her, and when he stared into her eyes she felt like she
was looking into his innermost being. He gazed at her with the most tender,
wounded, and yet somehow desperate look she’d ever seen on a man. He wasn’t
faking this. This wasn’t just some line he used on difficult women to get in
their pants. He
meant
this.

“I think I may have found her,” he
said softly.

Double gulp. “I don’t … I don’t
think …” She tried to find words but none materialized.

He didn’t give her time to locate
them. He wrapped an arm around her and hugged her to him. Unconsciously, her
face tilted up, and his lips shoved against hers, hard. They were hot. She
mashed her eyes shut, overcome by desire. His tongue probed at the seam of her
lips, then thrust inside, and she let it. She played her own tongue against it.

The hand that had been on his thigh
squeezed it. His muscles were so
firm
.
When she opened her eyes she saw that his cock had become instantly hard, and
it stood out huge and proud from between his legs.

“Oh, wow,” she said. It was even bigger
hard than she’d imagined.

Slowly, she trailed her hand up his
thigh, running her fingers through the fluffy patch of his pubic hair, then
tracing his giant shaft from its thick base all the way up its ridged, vein-y
length to its bulbous tip. She ran her finger lightly up it, but even though
her touch was light it seemed to have an impact. He gasped, and his cock bobbed
up and down, pulsing.

“Uh,” he said, sort of a grunt, and
his eyes closed just a little.

Feeling emboldened, she grinned and
encircled his shaft with her fingers. It was huge, but she managed to wrap her
hand about it. It was so warm, almost hot, and as firm as steel against her
palm. Gripping him hard, she jerked down, then up. He gasped and shuddered, and
a bead of white gathered at the tip of his cock. She bent down and licked it
up, then opened her mouth and took him inside. He moaned loudly as she bobbed
her head, taking him deep inside her, as deep as she could (and maybe a little
more). She loved having him inside her this way, loved the taste of him on her
tongue. She’d never been very good at giving head and had a shallow gag reflex,
but where there’s a will there’s a way, and she wanted him in her.

She bobbed her head up, then down
again, and he gasped. One of his hands supported his weight while the other ran
fingers through her hair. She loved his touch. He didn’t try to shove her head
down further but was only delighting in the feel of her hair—just as she was
loving the feel of his flesh.

“I want to see you,” he said.

She stopped and looked up, with him
still in her mouth.

“I want to see your body,” he said.

She bobbed her head down again. She
cupped his balls with one hand and the base of his shaft with the other,
squeezing both gently. He moaned again and lolled back, almost overcome, and she
could feel him swell inside her mouth. She drew back, letting him emerge past
her lips, then licked him, starting with the bulging, cum-filled balls and
going all the way up, taking her time on the shaft, then running circles around
his cock. She grew so wet she thought she’d scream.

“No,” he said, and she could hear
the strain in the word. He was right on the brink. “I want to see you. I want
to be inside you.”

She felt her cheeks burn. She was
still clothed.

“I don’t know,” she started. She
ran her tongue around her mouth, loving the taste of his pre-cum.

“Don’t tell me you’re shy,” he said.

“Maybe a little.” The truth was
that she was a little embarrassed of her body, which was maybe a little too
curvy, at least according to the magazines and movies.

“Don’t be,” he said. “I think
you’re the hottest piece of ass I’ve seen in a long time.”

She had to laugh. His words made
her feel more open, though. She rose up and removed her jacket, then unbuttoned
her water-stiffened shirt. He leaned forward and helped, which was good; her
fingers were shaking.

“Why so nervous?” he said.

“I-I’m not nervous.”

Amusement danced in his eyes. The
firelight glowed on his hard abs and tight
pecs
, and
on the giant shaft sticking up from below.

“You
smell
nervous,” he said.

Damn his shifter senses and lack of
tact. “You know,” she said, “just because you can smell something doesn’t mean
you have to report on it.”

“But you’re a cop! You need
information.”

“Bullshit.”

He helped her tug off her shirt,
then helped her shimmy out of her pants. That left her in nothing but bra and
panties, all very utilitarian and unsexy. His gaze roved up and down her, and
she held in a breath, realizing it was too late to suck in. She needn’t have
bothered. He liked what he saw, she could tell that right away. Sparks
glimmered in his eyes, and his face took on a different look. A look of hunger.

She swallowed. Heat pooled in her
center. His nostrils flared, and she knew he was scenting her increased
arousal. For once he didn’t comment on it, though. His own arousal seemed to
increase, too. His cock throbbed visibly, and another drop of pearly white
gathered at the tip. She bent down and licked this one up, too. Then, feeling
impish, she surged forward, still on her hands and knees, and let her breasts
enfold his member so that it rested against her chest between them, angled up
toward her chin.

“Naughty sheriff,” he said, and she
didn’t correct his use of the word.

Seeing what she wanted, he planted
his palms to either side of himself and lifted himself off the ground, just a
little, sliding his cock up between her breasts. She felt his balls push up
against her ribs. He pumped his hips, thrusting his cock forward, slicked with
her spit and his own pre-cum, then back, then forward again. She kissed the
head of it when it came to her mouth, then again.

She realized she loved his cock. He
had a gorgeous, handsome manhood, thick and long and well-shaped. Her previous
experiences with men were few and far apart, and she’d never been particularly
impressed with any of those men’s members, but Rick’s was different. Kissing it
and tasting it just made her wetter and wetter. She ached to have him inside
her womanhood.

Bracing her knees, she used her
hands to squeeze her breasts in, giving him a tight, firm valley to move
inside. That way the ground dug into her knees, though, and anyway she couldn’t
take it anymore. She wanted him inside her for real.

She splayed her fingers against his
rock-hard chest and pushed him down with his back flat on the ground, then
straddled his middle. His large firm hands caressed her hips, then ran up her
belly to cup her breasts. He squeezed them, then half rose up to suck on her
right nipple. Meanwhile his other hand played with her sex, thumbing her clit.

“Like that?” he said.

“
Mmm
,”
she said, nodding. “I want you—now.”

She reached back and grabbed his
cock, positioned it at the entrance of her cleft, then shoved it in. She cried
out as he entered her, even though it was just an inch. Suddenly, though, he
pumped his hips, shoving deeper into her, and she moaned as he filled her. He
pushed deeper, stretching her, and a shudder coursed all the way up and down
her body. He felt so good, so right. Planting her palms on the ground for
balance, she thrust her hips against him, then pulled back. He pumped inside
her, and she bit her lower lip in pleasure. She moved again, then faster, then
faster still, and his rhythm matched her.