Bear Necessities (2 page)

She
winced. She couldn’t hide the slightest amount of pain from Julian. It freaked
her out sometimes. The first time he’d said something, she’d gotten a splinter
not seconds before. He’d frowned, turned her hand around and pulled the
splinter out before she could even say “ow”. “I think I stepped on a chunk of
glass or something.”

“Or
something,” he muttered darkly, pulling her bare foot onto his lap. “This will
only take a sec.” One finger smoothed down the ball of her foot and Tabby, who
was outrageously ticklish, felt…nothing. “Wiggle your toes.”

There
was no pain. “Dude. You rock.”

Julian
grinned and stood, heading for her apartment’s kitchen. “I know.”

She
shook her head.

“When
are your partners in crime due home?” He turned on the faucet, the sound of the
water muffling his voice, but she still heard an odd note in Julian’s voice.
She tried to bite back a snicker. She knew exactly how he felt about at least
one of her roommates.

“Cyn
said she was going to stay late, work on some paperwork.” Cyn owned Living Art
and was Tabby’s boss, as well as one of her roommates. “Glory had a date, so I
have no clue when she’ll be back.” Glory also worked at LA, doing piercings,
and was her other roommate. The faucet stopped and Julian came back. He shook
his hands at her, spraying her with water. “Hey!”

He
flopped back down on the sofa and grabbed the popcorn bowl. He studied the screen,
tilting his head. She waited to see what outrageous thing would pop out of his
mouth this time. “Why is it that Orlando Bloom can look good as a girl
and
a boy?”

Tabby
picked up a kernel and threw it at him. “Legolas isn’t a girl.”

He
turned, raising one black brow, his full lips quirking in a smile. “Isn’t she?”
He tilted his chin toward the screen, his expression turning devilish. “You
think Aragorn doesn’t want a piece of that, Arwen or no?”

Tabby
put her feet up on the coffee table and stretched out. “Yeah, and when Aragorn
lifts Legolas’s kilt, he’s going to find the special surprise inside.” Julian
choked on the popcorn and started laughing.
Score one for me.
She stole
the bowl out of his lap and settled in to watch the movie.

“This
is it? This is what Chloe left Oregon for?” Bunny walked down the street,
pausing to peer into the window of a store. It was very…pink inside. A group of
women sat on an old sofa, drinking tea and laughing, while a short, dark-haired
female rang up purchases on an old-fashioned cash register. He shuddered and
looked up at the sign.
Wallflowers. Should be called Hen House.
He moved
away before any more testosterone could be sucked out through his pores.

Ryan
chuckled. “She loves it here and swears we will, too.”

Bunny
shrugged. “Whether or not I stay is still up in the air.” He paused, looking in
another store. Comic books. Much more his style.
I wonder if they have a
good manga section?
He was always on the lookout for a good store, and if
he was going to stay here—

“Oh,
no, you don’t.” Ryan grabbed hold of his collar and pulled him away from the
glass. “I swear, it’s like those French pigs and truffles. If there are comic
books around, you’ll sniff them out.”

Bunny
rolled his eyes, but allowed his cousin to pull him away. He made a mental note
to come back later without the two-hundred-and-twenty-pound wet blanket. “I
swear, Ryan. You’re getting old.”

“I’m
twenty-seven! And you, asshole, are twenty-eight!”

Bunny
put his hand on his heart. “But I’m young
inside
. Where it counts.”

Ryan
shook his head and let him go. “And this is why you’re not allowed out on your
own.”

Bunny
just grinned and followed his cousin down Main Street, Halle. They’d find
Chloe, who hadn’t been either at her apartment or the diner she usually worked
at. Her problems would be over, whether she liked it or not.

Then
he’d be going home.

Now if
only he could figure out why his Bear growled every time he thought of home,
he’d be golden.

Tabby
stared out the window of Living Art at the sunny spring day and sighed. “Today
is going to be another shitty day.”

“You’re
just saying that because your roots are showing.”

Tabby
turned to her friend Cyn and growled, the sound deep and feral and in no way
human.

Cyn
laughed. “Hon, if I was afraid of you, I’d never have hired you.”

Tabby
rolled her eyes and turned her attention back to the front window. “We haven’t
had a customer all day.”

“Mondays.”
The women looked at each other and echoed, “They suck the big fat hairy one.”
Very few people came in for a tattoo on a Monday afternoon.

Glory,
the one who handled all the piercings at Living Art, twirled in her chair. Her
long blue hair flared out around her. “Preaching to the choir.”

Cyn
shook her head, her dark hair startling with its new hot pink stripes. “And
then there’s Saturdays.”

The
three women exchanged a look and shuddered. Saturdays had become something of a
pain in the ass for the three women. Gary and his friends had stepped up their
harassment of Tabby since the incident in the woods, often enough that the police
had been called out to the store twice now thanks to the catcalls, thrown eggs
and worse. She was pretty sure Gary was responsible for the graffiti they’d
found on the window one Saturday morning. The spray-painted “Cunts” had caused
Cyn to break out in foul-sounding Hispanic curses. It was turning into a
problem that not even the hunky Sheriff Anderson could deal with. While he
might be a Puma, he was only
one
Puma, and since it wasn’t affecting the
Pride, she didn’t feel comfortable discussing it with Dr. Cannon or his Curana.
She wasn’t Puma, she was Wolf, and her problems weren’t theirs.

She’d
traveled for years as a wolf, living off the land, before arriving in Halle six
months ago, half-starved and ready to reenter the human race. She’d passed out
in the backyard of a woman named Sheila Anderson, and that was the luckiest
break she’d had in years. Her grandson, Sheriff Anderson, had quietly found her
a place to stay, food to eat and a place to work. She now apprenticed under
Cyn, had gotten her driver’s license and a car, and almost had her GED. It was
weird to think that she owed all that to a Puma lawman and his bossy
grandmother who weren’t even Wolves. She didn’t want to cause him or his family
any more trouble than she had, despite the fact that every time he found out
about one of the little stunts Gary and his friends pulled, his jaw clenched
tighter. Life had been good right up until the Asshole Pack had found her. She
still didn’t feel comfortable asking the Pride for help, and the Poconos Pack
Alpha, Rick Lowell, was still a freakishly scary man. Rumor had it his new Luna,
a Puma who’d lived in Halle, was even scarier. She’d never met the Puma Luna
and had no intention of doing anything that might get her attention. She shook
her head, catching sight of her lime green bob in the mirror behind the
register. She grimaced as she noticed the dark roots starting to show again.
“Gah. Cyn? Hair emergency.”

Cyn
laughed. “C’mon, honey, we have time. Have a seat.” Cyn grinned, pulling out
the crème bleach. The tattoo parlor had once been a beauty parlor, and Cyn had
opted to keep one of the sinks in place to do the girls’ hair. “Glory, keep an
eye out front.”

“Will
do.” Glory flipped her hair over her shoulders and smirked. “Make sure to get
all those roots or she’ll look like she needs to be mowed.”

“Lucky
bitch.” Tabby leaned back in the chair as Cyn began applying the lightener to
her roots. “Wish I had naturally blonde hair
like some people
!”

Glory’s
giggles almost drowned out Cyn when she clucked her tongue. “Tabby, you are the
only woman I’ve ever met who makes a lime green bob look sexy.”

“That’s
because I’m the only woman you’ve ever met with a lime green bob.” When she’d
first met Cyn and Glory, her hair had been long, scraggly and depressingly
brown. She’d taken one look at their hair and nearly cried in relief. Finally,
some people she could relate to, who understood her! She wasn’t some evil
little troublemaker; she was just someone who was different. Cyn had offered to
do her hair and the rest, as they say, was history. She’d sported the lime
green ever since, and damn if she didn’t rock it, even if she did say so
herself.

Cyn
ignored her. “So, who cares if it takes a little work?”

“Luscious
alert!” Glory sounded positively giddy.

Tabby
and Cyn peeked out from behind the curtain as a man walked past Living Art. He
paused, looking in the window at the flash—the artwork depicting their most
popular tattoos—they’d taped up. He was an absolute to-die-for hunk of a man. His
light brown skin glistened over muscles that made Tabby’s mouth water. He was
bald, and from this distance she couldn’t tell if it was a style choice or
nature that made him that way. Some sort of tattoo circled the biceps closest
to the window, but Tabby was too far away to tell what it was. Something about
the way he moved had every one of her senses sitting up and begging. “Dibs.”

Cyn
poked her. “Bitch. What if he likes the taste of Mexican instead of Hushpuppies,
huh?”

Tabby
giggled. “You are so bad.”

“What?”

“You
heard me.” Tabby looked back to find the man peering in the window. One dark
brow rose as he caught them looking at him, a smile flirting around his
luscious-looking mouth. Oh, the things she would love to have that mouth do to
her.

Tabby
ducked back behind the curtain. “Shit. I think he caught us.”

Glory
darted behind the curtain. “Ohmigod!” She collapsed, laughing. “Oh shit.”

“You
think he’ll come in?”

“I
don’t know.” The sound of the bell brought on a quickly smothered giggle. “Oh
hell. Glory?”

“On
it, but now I’m calling dibs.” Glory rushed out before either Tabby or Cyn
could protest.

“Greedy
bitch.”

Cyn
bopped her on the head with the brush. “Look who’s talking.” She picked up the
bottle of bleach and a comb. “Now lie down and hold still. I have some roots to
kill.”

Tabby
sat back in the chair and wished that she’d waited five more minutes to ask Cyn
to fix her hair. It could have been
her
out there checking out the
hottie instead of sitting in Cyn’s chair getting bleached.

Bunny
entered the tattoo parlor, pulled by the sight of bright, rainbow-colored hair
and pretty, feminine smiles. He looked around and smiled. This place was pretty
nice.

The
tattoo parlor had that feminine touch to it without being the homage to
estrogen that Wallflowers place had been. The walls were a bright aqua color,
displaying the flash to advantage. The women had hung a nice, big art piece
behind the counter that was rather more than flash. It looked like a giant, full-color
pair of dragons, one red, one blue, circling together in a yin-yang, but was
obviously a full-color tattoo inked onto someone’s back. The counter was made
completely of glass and housed more flash in one section, both black-and-white
and color, and jewelry for piercing different body parts. He eyed the Prince
Albert and shuddered, resisting the urge to cup himself protectively. The flash
in the windows and on the walls was in silver frames, making it look even more
like art. Two large books lay open on the counter, bound in brown leather and
containing more tattoos. The floor was wood, a dark ebony stain that would hide
spilled ink. Looking down the long length of the corridor, he could see four
curtained-off cubicles, probably where the women worked. At the very end was a
last curtained-off area marked “Employees Only”.

The
women, if they were the owners, had made the place look both welcoming and
classy. He could see both men and women coming in here and being comfortable.

The
tan-colored chairs near the window looked soft and inviting, but he had no
interest in them. What he did want was down the aisle, behind the employees-only
area. He could smell her, and she smelled
wonderful
. It was the same
scent that had tickled him when he’d opened the door to Living Art Tattoos; a
sassy, succulent scent that drew him like nothing else ever had. He’d almost
barreled into the back room to find the owner of that scent when a blue-haired
girl stepped out from behind the curtain and intercepted him. She brought with
her the scent of the three women, but the citrusy scent that was hers alone was
strongest, and not the one he was looking for. Curly, pale blue locks fell
almost to the woman’s waist. Bright blue eyes almost the same shade as her hair
watched him with a mix of desire and sweetness that would have attracted Bunny
on any other day. She was looking at him like he was a tall glass filled with
chocolate mousse and she happened to have a very long spoon.

“Welcome
to Living Art. I’m Glory. Can I help you with anything?” She batted her lashes
at him, but Bunny wasn’t interested. It was disappointing, too. She looked just
like one of the heroines in the manga he liked to read, all big eyes and hair
and sweet, innocent smiles. He could see himself spending a pleasant evening or
two in her bed and finding out just how innocent she really was.