Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (14 page)

“Sounds like you have a secret admirer, too,” Orion said.

Clea blinked. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing,” he said, laughing softly and staring deep into those beautiful, blue eyes. “Long story.”

For a second, Orion and Clea just stared at each other, almost unable to believe everything that had happened. “Will you come with me this time?”

Orion paused.

“Actually,” she said. “I’ll answer that for you. Yes.”

Panic gripped Orion, clenching his stomach and making him feel oddly at peace at the same time. “I can’t,” he said. “They’re... they’re looking for me.”

“Then they’re looking for us,” Clea said. “Whoever ‘they’ is, they’re going to have to deal with your friends, now.”

Dean and Malia wandered up. Dean lay his hand on Orion’s shoulder. “You saved our lives,” he said. “I don’t care about me, but for saving her? I owe you everything. Whoever is after you has to deal with us.”

“I don’t know... what to say,” Orion said.

“Just say thank you,” Clea said, catching his eyes. “Say thank you, and say yes.”

Fire glimmered in Orion’s eyes. He nodded. “Yes, thank you,” he finally managed. And then he lowered his head to Clea, breathed her in for one more second, and pressed his lips against hers.

Never, never, never in the world had anything been so sweet, so strong. Clea gasped when he pulled away, lifting her hands to Orion’s face. “Thank
you
,” she whispered. “You saved more than my life.”

––––––––

“I
make the rules, gettit?” Celia’s voice was high pitched but commanding. “I ask the questions, you answer them and then I pay you. That’s how this works, right? Not the other way around.”

Two very slight, very twitchy women stood at either side of Celia Maynard’s carved, wooden chair. In front of her chair was a white and silver, futuristic looking desk that she’d attempted to make herself, but ended up just buying from the Ikea catalog. Turns out that carving a chair out of a tree stump is a little easier than dovetailing rivets... or whatever it was you had to do to join a desk top to the rest of the thing.

Celia curled her fingernails on the smooth arm rests and then grabbed the ends of them, pushing herself forward to look as imposing as possible.

“You’re four and a half feet tall and somehow I’m more afraid’a you than I am the rest of my gang.” Mitch Samuelsson slumped his shoulders. “I can’t believe it’s come to this.”

“Come to what?” Celia’s voice was sharp and pointed, just like her teeth. “You gonna take my money or not? What are you doing with the moping and the complaining? You’re part of something
great
– something important! And all you can do is whine.”

“It’s not that I don’t like the money,” Mitch said, “it’s that I can’t believe I’m taking orders from a four-foot-tall beaver.”

Narrowing her eyes to angry slits, Celia leaned back in her chair. It creaked a little as she shifted her weight. “Do you want me to be nicer? Did I hurt your feelings? Would you like if I gave you more encouragement? You’re doing a good job! You’re so good at being my thugs!”

It was Mitch’s turn to glare. “Now look’ere, I don’t feel like I need to put up with that. You pay me, but you don’t get to—”

“C – Celia?” One of the squirrels spoke up. She had her finger on the back of the earpiece that Celia insisted they wear for communication instead of just shouting across the office. “I’m getting some strange news.”

“Stranger than
his
face?” she leaned her head toward the biker bear. “What is it?”

“It’s the lake, someone... uh... there’s a dinosaur in Jamesburg Lake?”

“Sort of,” Celia said. “That thing’s not really a dinosaur, but it’s not really
not
a dinosaur. Anyway, what does this have to do with me ordering my half-witted goons around, Billie?”

Celia hopped up in her chair, first crouching on the seat and then standing straight up. When she was nervous, or anxious, or feeling a little trapped – which was pretty much all the time – Celia needed to stand. Maybe it was the height thing or the Napoleon complex she was nursing. But, at least she never felt the need to stick her hand in her jacket.

It would be sorta nice to have a pocket or a sack or something to put my hand in
, she thought, wrinkling her forehead in thought.
Or maybe a horse to ride, or a...

Celia shook her head, jarring herself back to reality. “Right, the not-dinosaur. What of it? Her, right?”

“J – Jenga, the witchdoctor? You know?”

“Of course, he used to give me suction globe massages to help with the muscles in my jaw.” She turned to Mitch, who was shaking his head in absolute confusion. “I’ve got TMJ, you know? So he used to do whatever it is he does with those fishbowls and it made my jaw relax. Beats the shit out of me how, but... Anyway, what’s the hold up? What about him? What were we even talking about?”

“Well,
you
were talking,” Billie said. “I didn’t want to—”

“Get
on
with it!” Celia said, stomping her foot for emphasis. “Get to the point!”

Shaken, Billie nodded half-heartedly. “Right, anyway, Jenga, apparently he was out at the lake feeding her or playing with her or something, and then that group from the daycare that you tried to paste with the log, they showed up, and—”

“That was an accident,” Celia said. Her ferocity turned to a smoldering thunderstorm. “I never meant to hurt anyone. I never wanted to hurt anything. Especially not cubs. I’ll smash Erik Danniken’s smug, pouty-looking lips all over the side of the highway, but not them.”

She took a deep breath before dragging her nails along the arm rests again, and sitting. “Damming up the river? Yeah, I’ll do whatever it takes to choke Jamesburg out. The Siege of Jamesburg by the brave crusader, Celia Maynard.” She was getting that distant, excited about herself, Napoleonic twist to her voice. “Hero of the forest, savior of the people and of nature and of—”

“Those two coyotes and that lynx, they caught the dinosaur and she thought they were playing, and started kinda flailing around and... Anyway, the short version is she went on a rampage, almost killed the three of them, but that bear showed up again and saved them.”

Celia was just staring, blankly, at her right-hand girl. “The hot one? That golden one with the pale eyes who caught the tree I
didn’t actually mean at all
to drop on the lynx? On the one hand I hate him for ruining my damn plan, but on the other, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a pair of eyes or a set of traps like the ones that guy had.”

“Golden?” Mitch cleared his throat. “Pale brown eyes? You didn’t happen to notice his, uh,” Mitch made a gesture toward his face, indicating the tattoos around his eyes.

“Yes, goon,” Celia said. “As I was hiding in the woods three hundred feet away and watching a tree fall and then watching a giant bear catch it and basically make my sexy parts go all woozy in the process, yeah, I spent a lot of time looking at some lines around his eyes.”

“That was sarcasm,” she added a second later.

“Thanks for clearing that up,” Mitch said. “Only reason I ask is that one of ours went missing recently.”

The older Samuelsson filed the information away in the grinding gears of his brain. It all made sense – that river was where Orion always went when he was little and irritated about some thing or another. He also went there when he felt weepy and whiny, which, according to Mitch, was all the goddamn time. In reality, Orion ran to that river and sat on that huge overhanging branch not because he was sad or whiny, but because he wanted – no, needed – to get the hell away from his father, and the Devils.

Either way, it didn’t matter. Mitch was going to find his obnoxious, ungrateful, whiny prick of a son and teach him a lesson he wouldn’t forget. What, exactly, the content of that lesson would be? He wasn’t exactly sure yet. Mitch Samuelsson wasn’t ever the best at planning. Or, being honest, really much of anything which required the use of his brain.

“What do I care if one of your toughs goes missing? There are plenty of you thick-skulled morons to do what needs doing.”

“And what
is
that, exactly?” Mitch asked, derailing his insane genius of an employer. “You keep saying shit, but never talking plans. So...”

Celia trained her vitriolic gaze right in the middle of Mitch’s forehead. “I’m damming up rivers! That’s the whole idea. We dam up all the rivers, make a giant dry spot where Jamesburg used to be. Once that’s done, the city will die out and nature will be able to take back what is rightfully hers in the first place!”

“Yeah!” Billie said, actually jumping in the air and thrusting one fist skyward. “That’s the way, boss! We’re gonna do it good! We’re gonna save the forest!”

Celia blew a puff of air upward. She whipped off her glasses and rubbed them on her shirt to clear the fog. “I’m glad you’re enthusiastic, but there’s much work to be done. Much, much to be done.”

Suddenly, she grew cold and calculating. The exuberance was gone, replaced with a stony, intelligently thoughtful gaze. “Get the map,” she said.

Moments later, Billie bounced back into the meeting room and unrolled a huge sheet of paper. With the map spread out and flattened, she grabbed a sheet of plastic with a grid pattern emblazoned on it, and laid that on top.

“Good,” Celia said. “Now pin all that up on the wall. That seems like a thing that you do when you plan, right? Pin a big map on a wall and then mark all over it?”

As the squirrels set to work nailing the map, then dropping it, then getting crooked and
then
having to do it all again with the plastic sheet, Mitch was scratching his chin through his sparse, patchy, gray beard.

“Why plastic?” he asked. “Usually when you see war rooms or whatever this is, you got all them little pins stuck in the map. Or you get the big whiteboard with a list of whatever, or you get the buncha pictures with the strings connecting them. Like on
X-Files
where Mulder had that whole big pile’a shit on his wall with the spider web of strings running all over.”

“Plastic so you can write on the map without ruining it. Then you can just erase the marker you use and do it again. That map was almost fifty bucks, I don’t see any reason to muck up a fifty dollar map.” She hopped off the chair and to the floor, then walked around the smart, ultra-modern Ikea desk and pushed Mitch’s chair back with her foot. “I do like the rest of it though. Billie!” she turned to the squirrel, who snapped to attention. “Did you hear all that? Whiteboard, pictures of something with strings between them?”

“Nope!” Billie squeaked. “I never listen in to other people’s conversations on account of that being super, super, super rude!”

Celia shook her head slowly. “Anyway,” she said, “get all that stuff. Let’s make a
lair
.”

“Yes ma’am!” Billie squealed, jumping in the air and fist-pumping again. “Let’s do it!”

Celia rubbed the bridge of her nose, pinching it between her thumb and forefinger. She kicked Mitch
hard
in the shin.

“The hell was that for?” he asked, standing up.

“To get your attention. While she’s getting all that stuff set up – and thanks for the interior design suggestions – you go and get your grungy biker bears to work damming up the Northern Erasmus. Of the five rivers left, that’s the second biggest. It’ll take you all a while.”

“You got it,” Mitch said, itching to leave so bad he was already most of the way to the door. “Damming up a river. That’s definitely the best use for a feared outlaw motorcycle club.”

Celia didn’t respond to the complaining.

In fact, she didn’t even hear him. Her brain was running a thousand miles a minute. She was hatching plans, thinking up contingencies and making sure everything checked out – all in her own head.

“There!” Billie finally said. “The only thing missing is the whiteboard. But we can get that at Target if you loan me the car.”

Celia grabbed the keys out of her pocket and made to throw them to Billie, who bent her knees and acted like a baseball catcher getting ready for a fastball.

But the keys never came. “Celia?” Billie asked.

“I just thought of something,” the beaver said, waddling toward the door. “You stay here, arrange things or stack the pencils or do whatever you do. I’ve got... I had an idea.”

“K-O, there! Gotcha loud and clear, ten-four! I copy, I—”

Celia shut the door, interrupting her second-in-command’s string of parting salutations. It didn’t matter anyway, she was in a haze. She was always like this when a plan was coming together. She got one track in her mind and never deviated from it, not for a second.

Crossing the parking lot took her slightly longer than it would someone taller, someone with longer legs, but that wasn’t on Celia’s mind either, not right then. Her short, milky-blue Smart Car with brushed chrome trim glittered in the sunlight. Her legs might’ve made walking a little slower, but they also made her fit perfectly in her tiny car.

Small blessings are sometimes the sweetest.

She turned on the car, relishing the nearly silent electrical murmur of power coursing through the tiny engine. Okay, so
coursing
might be a slight exaggeration.

About half a mile from the office complex where she’d rented her two thousand square foot, late-1980s model evil genius lair, something on the side of the road caught Celia’s attention.

A massive, towering crane with a cherry picker basket was moving between several trees, sawing them down as it went. She stopped at a light, and then sat there, watching mesmerized, through four entire cycles.

“Perfectly good trees,” she said absently, to no one in particular. “Why are they doing this? Why does this have to happen?”

Sweat beaded up on Celia’s forehead as she clenched the steering wheel so tight her knuckles went white and began to tingle. She gritted her teeth, grinding her molars. The man in the basket was halfway done cutting down the four Douglas firs. They were massive things – or once were anyway – that must’ve been at least a hundred feet tall before the cutting started.