Smolder: A Werebear + BBW Paranormal Romance (Bearpaw Ridge Firefighters Book 2)

by Sexton, Ophelia

  Mark cleared his throat. "I, uh, wasn't sure if you still wanted to sleep with me, now that you know what I am…Caitlyn, I'm so sorry," he repeated yet again. "I was going to tell you, I swear I was, but I didn't want you to find out like this."

  The pain in his expression compelled her to step forward and hug him. "You have nothing to apologize for. And I'm sorry I didn't tell you about the video," she said, burying her face in his chest. "I never thought trouble would find me here—and now your kitchen is ruined, and more people might get hurt."

  His arms came around her, holding her so tightly that her ribs creaked.

  "Forget about the windows," he said, his breath stirring her hair. "You're safe, and that's all that matters."

  Which reminded her… "Speaking of safe," she said, "I saw how that monster clawed you up. I want to see how you're doing."

  She took a step back. He released her reluctantly. "It's nothing." She saw him smile and got a fleeting glimpse of the dimple on his bearded cheek. "You should see the other guy."

  "Let me be the judge of that." Then she smiled back at him. "And I did see the other guy. I bet he's still running!"

  Mark chuckled as she pulled up the hem of his sweatshirt.

  Relief rushed through her as she saw that the long lines of his wounds were thoroughly scabbed over. She'd been ready to drive him to the ER in Salmon if she thought he needed stitches.

  "They'll be completely healed by morning," Mark told her as she traced her fingertips lightly over the parallel claw marks. "Shifters heal fast."

  "Let's go to bed," she said, capturing his hand and leading him down the hall to his—their—bedroom.

  There, Mark undressed her with exquisite gentleness, then put her to bed. He tucked the comforter tenderly around her before stripping and slipping in next to her.

  She sighed with pleasure when he took her in his arms, spooning her. It was their nightly ritual before falling asleep, and she loved the skin-to-skin contact.

  "Caitlyn," Mark said after a few minutes. "What are you going to do with that video? You told Sheriff Jacobsen that you hadn't posted it yet."

  "I haven't," she admitted. "Up until today, I thought it was just a hoax, something created with CGI. I thought the real story was why Sergeant Montoya was killed for it. But now that I know it's real…I just don't know."

  Mark was silent for a few moments. "If you post that video, it won't just be the sabertooth shifters you're exposing. It'll be all of us. Once people have proof that shifters aren't just fairy tales, that we're real, things might get really bad for us. As long as we're discreet, we're safe, because most people don't think we're real."

  "I know, but it's not my call. Not entirely," Caitlyn said, feeling like a coward. "My boss Jake's mission in life is to prove shifters are real. But I'll try to convince him not to post it."

  Mark stroked her breast. "Okay. I trust you to do what you think is right."

  That simple declaration of faith shook her. She curled against him, soaking up the heat from his skin. Mark always seemed to be a few degrees warmer than the average human—was that a shifter thing?

  Questions began to bubble up in her brain.

  "Mark, how did you become a shifter? Were you attacked by someone who was a shifter, like in the werewolf movies?"

  He laughed, and she felt the rumbling sound vibrate through her back, where his chest pressed against her. "It doesn't work like that. Ordinary humans can't become shifters. You have to be born into a shifter family or have shifter blood somewhere in your ancestry."

  "If we get married, will we be able to have kids? Will they be shifters too?"

  "So you're still keeping your option on me? Good." Mark was trying for a light tone, but she could sense his relief. "Yes, we'll probably be able to have kids. Some of them might be shifters, some of them might be ordinary. It's kind of a genetic lottery."

  His question about her option on his marriage proposal brought up her next question.

  "When Evan called me your mate, what did he mean?"

  "Well, marriage and committed relationships work a little differently among shifters," he began, and she could tell he was searching for the right words. "I mean, we date and we break up or get married, just like ordinary humans do. But sometimes a shifter meets someone and there's an instant connection. We call it meeting your fated mate, and if you pursue a relationship with that person, you…bond permanently. It's a lifetime thing."

  She stroked the back of the hand that was cupping her breast and thought about that. "And when you mentioned knowing that I was the person you wanted to marry…" she let the words trail off.

  "It was because you are my fated mate." Mark lifted his head from the pillow and kissed her shoulder.

  She tensed. So his agreement about the option on his proposal had been bullshit? They were already committed to each other?

  As if reading her mind, he said, "As an Ordinary, you're free to stay or leave, though I really hope you'll stay. But you should know I'm bound to you now…I didn't mean for that to happen, not before you said yes, but it just…happened." His lips moved up to her neck. "And you know what? Whatever happens, I'm not sorry."

  She felt his teeth close over her nape and gasped as arousal flared up inside her.

  "I love you," he continued, hoarsely.

  She turned in his arms and kissed him, fiercely, hungrily. Bear shifter or not, he was still the same Mark she had fallen in love with. And she needed to let him know how she felt.

  "I love you too, Mark. I'm confused as hell right now, and I have some thinking to do…but I love you."

  He moved over her, and she forgot the rest of her questions for a while as Mark proved yet again that bear shifter or not, he was all man.

  * * *

  In the end, despite being wounded and alone, Pete made it back to his car.

  He shifted back to human, slowly and painfully, then crawled wearily inside the vehicle to rest for a few minutes.

  Once he had the strength to sit upright again, he pulled down the mirror on the sunshade. A stiff mask of dried blood covered half of his face below the place where the bear had nearly torn his scalp off.

  Pete gingerly touched the deep lacerations on his head and felt the pull of the other deep wounds on his back and shoulders.

  What he really needed right now was a hospital and some stitches, but that was impossible unless he wanted to get himself arrested on the spot.

  Damn it, he thought, shaken to his core by what had just happened.

  He'd grown up in Louisiana before moving to Texas and eventually to New Mexico. In all of those places, the sabertooth cats had been the apex shifters.

  Not here, though, thanks to fucking grizzly bears.

  His opponent had been at least three times his weight. If Pete had hung around any longer, that bear would have crushed his skull like an egg. No lone sabertooth cat stood a chance against a bear shifter. Taking one down would require the coordinated efforts of the entire pride…a resource that Pete didn't have at the moment.

  Wearily, he got out of the car and went to pull the first aid kit out of the trunk.

  He'd purchased it right after leaving the car rental place, along with a pup tent, a sleeping bag, and a few other bits and pieces of camping gear.

  At the time, it had seemed an over-the-top precaution, but now he was glad he'd yielded to his impulse to go shopping.

  Moving as quickly as he could, every sense straining to detect signs of pursuit, Pete disinfected and bandaged everything he could reach.

  What he really needed right now was healing sleep, but first he had to get away from here.

  Hating how weak he felt in the aftermath of the fight, he started the car and drove south for an hour.

  Following a posted sign, he pulled off the highway and bumped along a winding unpaved road for a while until he reached a deserted campground nestled in a stand of lodgepole pines.

  While he was driving, the shock began to wear off. He thought abo
ut how close he'd just come to dying back at the ranch, and it pissed him off.

  When he had parked his car, Pete pulled his cellphone out of the car's glove box. He had a signal. Good.

  He called his mother's numbers. All of them. And they all went straight to voicemail. Shit.

  Then he called Bertrand.

  "Well, is it done? Do you have the USB drive?" demanded Bertrand as soon as he answered the phone.

  "Fuck, no," growled Pete. "Since you conveniently forgot to tell me that this town is full of bear shifters…and that Caitlyn Morgan is living with one of them!"

  "What?" Bertrand's voice was shocked. So he hadn't known.

  Realizing that the Pride Second hadn't bothered to do his homework was even worse than thinking he had set Pete up for failure.

  The latter was understandable, given that Pete had never showed Bertrand the proper deference.

  But the former proved that Bertrand was unfit to lead the pride.

  He would bring disaster down upon them all…if he hadn't already done so by killing a cop and letting that video get into the hands of a journalist.

  "Yeah. She's mated to a giant fucking grizzly bear shifter, Bertrand. He nearly tore me to fucking pieces when I showed up to take care of her, and now I'm pretty sure there's an APB out for me."

  Silence on the line, though Pete could hear harsh breathing.

  "Well, Pride Second?" he needled. "Got any bright ideas about to fix this clusterfuck?"

  To his surprise, Bertrand chuckled. "Let's just say that I've got an ace in the hole. Stay put, Langlais, and try not to get arrested. As soon as I can gather up the others, we'll be on our way. I'll call you when we arrive."

  "Great. Just fucking great," muttered Pete after he had ended the call. What's that asshole planning to do now?

  Chapter Fourteen – Opening Negotiations

  "Bastard had a car," Evan reported glumly the next morning. "We tracked him as far as the Cottonwood Bend boat ramp, but he'd already driven off. He was bleeding like a son-of-a-gun, though. Made finding his trail easy."

  Looking tired and unshaven, Evan showed up at the house just as Caitlyn and Mark were sitting down to a breakfast of homemade waffles with bacon and eggs.

  Mark had spent a long time last night proving just how much he loved her, and Caitlyn was pleasantly sore in all the right places this morning.

  When she had woken up in his arms this morning, she had realized that sometime during the night, she had made her peace with the idea that shifters were real.

  She did have a lot of questions and was looking forward to asking Mark over breakfast. Evan's appearance thwarted her plans.

  Mark promptly dished up the rest of the scrambled eggs and bacon for his brother, handed him a mug of coffee, and poured a ladleful of batter into the waffle maker.

  "Any description of the car?" he asked.

  Evan shook his head and chased down a mouthful of bacon with a huge gulp of coffee.

  "Not yet. Sheriff Jacobsen is contacting all of the rental agencies between here and the airport in Missoula. He's also got a call in with the Albuquerque police to get the plate and description for Langlais' personal car, just in case he decided to drive rather than fly in."

  Mark shook his head and refilled his brother's coffee before topping up Caitlyn's mug and his own. "Considering he's a cop, he sure wasn't very smart about planning this." Then he looked thoughtful. "Unless the shifter we saw yesterday isn't Pete Langlais at all but someone trying to impersonate him."

  "Now that's a conspiracy theory worthy of my boss," Caitlyn commented. She sat back in her chair, cradling the warm cup of coffee between her palms. "I just can't figure it out. It's almost like he wants to get caught. Maybe he's feeling guilty about his partner's death, especially if he had something to do with it."

  Caitlyn sipped at her coffee and pondered everything she had learned about shifters since yesterday…which wasn't much.

  But Pete Langlais hadn't seemed like a bad guy, and she usually had a good instinct for people. "Is there any chance that someone else ordered him to do it? Maybe blackmailed him or something?"

  Mark and Evan both looked thoughtful at this. "He couldn't refuse a direct order, if that's what really happened," Mark said slowly. "But he could find a way to sabotage things without directly defying an order from his alpha or whoever is in charge of the sabertooth shifter hierarchy. Problem is, we don't know much about them. They keep to themselves and don't interact with other shifters much."

  "Yeah, well, who cares why he did it? Let's get him before he decides to come back for a second try, and we can ask all the questions we want." Evan cracked his knuckles, and Caitlyn noticed that his hazel eyes were hazed with gold.

  "That's assuming that there's going to be enough left of him for an interrogation if he's dumb enough to return here," Mark rasped.

  His eyes, too, had gone gold.

  * * *

  Three days passed with no sign of the wounded sabertooth shifter despite an intense manhunt. It was as if he'd disappeared off the face of the earth.

  During those three days, Caitlyn got to experience a bear shifter in full-on overprotective mode. Mark wouldn't even leave her in a room by herself, and forget actually going outside.

  But every time she got irritated by Mark's smothering care, she looked at the sheet of plywood nailed over the broken kitchen window and remembered the sight of the sabertooth crashing through it to get to her.

  The threat was real. And Mark hadn't hesitated to leap to her defense. He had put his life on the line for her, and his brothers and even his mother had quickly joined him.

  It was humbling, especially when Caitlyn knew that she hadn't done anything to deserve this level of care and protection.

  So she continued to work on updating the Mythtrust News site.

  On the day after the attack, Jake sent her a set of revision requests for the Roger Pemberton story. She stared at his comments for a long time, wondering what to do, now that she knew that Pemberton hadn't been lying about seeing Dane Swanson shift from bear to man.

  After considerable thought, she wrote back and told Jake she no longer felt comfortable with her initial take on the story and that she wanted to do a complete rewrite.

  Jake did not respond. Nor did he reply to subsequent email messages about some of the other items in next week's posting schedule. Which was weird.

  On Saturday, when twenty-four hours had passed without any word from him, she tried calling Jake's cellphone. It went straight to voicemail. Then she tried his landline. It rang repeatedly, then also went to voicemail.

  Now she was getting worried…but could she really trust the police? After all, what if other sabertooth shifters were working for the APD, just like Pete Langlais?

  Besides, she told herself, it was more likely that Jake and Jen had finally managed to get their truck repaired and had left town, after all.

  Caitlyn decided to wait until Monday. If she still hadn't heard from Jake by then, she would contact Sheriff Jacobsen and ask for his advice.

  On Sunday afternoon, she and Mark walked over to Elle's house, carrying a large bowl of salad.

  That morning, Elle had informed all of them that their family dinner was going to proceed as planned.

  "I'm not going to let some mangy cat disrupt tradition," she had said on the phone. "Caitlyn, sweetie, will you and Mark bring the salad this week? Annabeth's bringing bread and dessert, as usual, and Evan says he's contributing his homemade elk sausage. You like elk, don't you?"

  "I've never had it," Caitlyn had admitted. "But I like sausage."

  "You'll like these," Elle had said with satisfaction. "He smoked them himself, and he usually simmers them with beer and onions before finishing them on the grill."

  Making salad had involved a trip into town to buy lettuce and veggies.

  Mark had hovered at her shoulder like a bodyguard the whole time they were in the grocery store, and Caitlyn had wondered if this was what being a c
elebrity felt like. The impression was heightened when various people stopped them to ask whether the sabertooth shifter had been caught yet.

  Everyone in town seemed to have heard about the attack, and everyone had a theory about where the missing shifter had gone.

  Later on, when they sat down to dinner at Elle's table, Caitlyn discovered that the elk sausages were delicious. They were served hot-dog style on fresh-baked buns split lengthwise and were topped with a generous heaping of caramelized onions cooked in beer.

  The conversation limped along at first. Elle had forbidden any further discussion of the attack or the subsequent manhunt while they were at the table, so Dane gave his report on the progress of spring calving at the ranch.

  Things lightened up a bit when Evan described some of his adventures while working as a wildlife biologist for the state government.

  In hilarious detail, he told them about his very first job after graduating with his doctorate. It had been a project that had required him to count the number of ticks on a sample population of moose. Which were legendarily bad-tempered and dangerous when it came to ordinary humans and twice as bad when they caught the whiff of bear on him.

  By the time Caitlyn got around to telling the story of a chupacabra scare that turned out to be someone's pet dog in a Halloween costume, things felt almost normal again.

  Then they heard the sound of an approaching vehicle and the crunch of gravel under tires as it pulled up to the front of the house and parked.

  "Stay here," Dane ordered Annabeth tensely as he pushed back his chair.

  "You too," Mark said to Caitlyn. He looked at his youngest brother, who was still seated at the table. "Ash, guard them."

  Ignoring Ash's scowl, Mark followed his brother out of the dining room, with Elle and Evan close on their heels.

  Caitlyn waited until the heavy tread of feet receded down the hall and she heard the front door slam.

  She jumped to her feet. "I am not just going to sit here and wait!"

  "Let's head to the front room and see what's going on," Annabeth suggested.

  She didn't look any happier about being ordered to stay put by her mate than Caitlyn felt.