Black Bear Buns: A BBW Bear Shifter Menage Paranormal Romance Novella (The Twelve Dancing Bears Book 3)

by Sable Sylvan

  Liam’s bear dodged. The bear was cunning and angry, its senses razor sharp, the anger fueling its physical form. Liam was afraid of one thing and one thing only: the potential he wouldn’t be able to stop his bear from destroying Nick then and there, and only because it would hurt his clan and hurt his fated mate. That was the only set of reasons that stopped the bear from tearing Nick to shreds, the only reason it wasn’t using its claws. After all, it was Nick who had rushed things, Nick who had pushed for them to mate with her before explaining, Nick who had pushed her away at the club and Nick who had pushed her away just mere minutes ago…

  Two titans in fur, clashing against each other, like two furry shadows clad only in the neon lights of the rainy Seattle night, two demons fighting for control of a woman who had slipped like a ghost from their grasp…or were they two angels, taken over by their inner demons, the demons of insecurity, of fear, of unrequited desire? That was for none to judge but the three concerned, two fighting on a city sidewalk, one running away through an urban road, the only thing blurring their tears from sight was the rain that washed them away. The two things connecting them? True love…and true pain, both piercing the heart in equal measure.

  Ann witnessed the fight from the cab as it was stuck in Seattle traffic. This was exactly the sort of drama she needed to remove from her life. It didn’t mean that it couldn’t bring a tear to her eye, and without asking, the cabbie put up the privacy screen to give the sobbing woman privacy.

  Chapter Eleven

  The next months passed by like a blur. The two months that Ann had spent with Nick and Liam? Ann tried to push aside, out of sight, out of mind, boxing up anything that reminded her of them and putting the box into the back of her closet. She kept herself busy with Paige, Jeremiah, and Brendan, but when they asked what happened to Nick and Liam, she found herself lying to them for the first time, saying that they were just busy, hoping the kids would stop asking…but they didn’t. Even if the kids hadn’t asked, they would have occupied her mind. Whenever she tried to fall asleep at night, they were the only thing she found herself wanting in her bed, and only by letting herself think of them, dream of them, and cry over them, could she manage to get a wink of sleep.

  That’s why, when three months after she’d last seen Nick and Liam, when she received a call from her father, asking her to come down to California with the kids ASAP, she found herself missing Nick and Liam more than ever. On the flight over, she found herself wishing they were there to help her get the kids in line and there to hold her hand and tell her that things would be okay. She wished that Nick was there to entertain her three triplets, that Liam was there to tell her that he’d handle the flight plans and driving and the hotels. She’d resisted calling them and asking for help, because she still was unable to forgive what they’d done.

  They’d lied to her.

  A lie by omission was still a lie. She needed someone who would bare their soul to her, warts and all, the way she had bared her soul to them. She’d thought that’d been Nick and Liam…but it hadn’t been. At least this way, she didn’t have to see Liam’s mate mark and the constant reminder of her missing sister, of the reason she was a single mom of triplets and a virgin to boot, of the reason why, as much as she hated to admit it, she had forced herself to be alone.

  Ann drove straight from the airport to her parent’s house. Her parents were on the porch waiting for her and as soon as Ann parked, the kids were out the car and running up to their grandparents. They were sitting in white rocking chairs on their forest green porch, in their gorgeous Northern California house, near the Napa Valley, in the Vaca mountains. All around the house were tall, gorgeous trees, and in the beautiful California autumn, the trees were shades of green, orange, red, yellow, and even pink, reminding Ann of fresh apples.

  Ann started to unpack the car but her father came down the steps. He had even more grey hairs than the last time she’d seen him, the year before when he’d come up for Christmas with her mom, and he was walking more slowly. He was finally starting to show his age.

  “Ann, don’t get those bags,” said Ann’s father, Jason.

  “Dad, I can’t let you carry them,” said Ann.

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” said Jason. “Leave them in the trunk. You know I wouldn’t’ve called you and asked you to come down here without a good reason.”

  “What’s going on?” asked Ann. “Are you and mom…you know…”

  “What?” asked Jason.

  “You know…dying,” asked Ann. “Did something happen? Does mom have cancer?”

  “No, your mother does not have cancer, we’re fit as fiddles, thank you very much!” said Jason. “We need to talk to you about something in private. Come up to the porch with me and don’t say a word to the kids about the gravity of the situation.”

  “Dad…” started Ann.

  Jason took his daughter’s hand and gave it a squeeze before letting it go.

  “Let’s just say this news is a long time coming,” said Jason. He led Ann up the stairs and sat her down on the plush bench on the porch.

  “Kids, why don’t you go play in the yard, we got a new jungle gym just for this visit,” said Ann’s mother Martha. “Go tear away that green tarp over there! We wanted to keep it nice and new for you rascals.”

  “Oh, ma, you didn’t have to,” said Ann, as the kids scampered away to tear the tarp off of their new toy. “That’s so generous. You two didn’t assemble that on your own, did you?”

  “Of course not, we had some help,” said Martha with a twinkle in her eye. “But your father didn’t call you down from Seattle so that we could talk about jungle gyms. We have some serious news to tell you…and we’ll tell the kids, but after we tell you.”

  “I’m nervous,” said Ann, her stomach in knots. “But go ahead. This won’t get any easier.”

  “It’s been nearly six years since your sister Hibi went missing,” said Jason, using the family’s nickname for Hibiscus. “I know you think about our little Hibi every day, and for the kids to not even know their biological mother…well, it’s heart wrenching.”

  “Not a day goes by without us thinking about the daughter we lost,” added Martha.

  “What are you saying?” asked Ann. “Did they…find Hibi’s body?”

  “Not exactly,” said Martha. “But…we’ve got answers to the questions we’ve all had for years. And now, we can move forward.”

  “I’m never going to move past losing Hibiscus, not now, not ever,” said Ann. “I will never give up hope that she is alive, not until I see her body in front of me on a cold slab, do you hear me?” Ann’s eyes were welling with hot tears. She looked at her parents, first at her mom, then her dad, then her mom again. How could they, of all people, tell her that they could finally ‘move forward’.

  “Honey, that’s not what your mom means,” said Jason.

  “No, I get what she means,” said Ann.

  “Ann, you stop that this instant,” said Martha. “Your father’s right. You’ve entirely misunderstood. It’s best we…show you.” Martha got up from her chair and hit the doorbell.

  Why the heck is ma ringing her own doorbell? Ann wondered, but before she could ask, she got her answer…as well as a bunch more questions.

  In a few seconds, the door opened, and what Ann saw shocked her.

  It was like she’d seen a ghost.

  In front of her was a girl with curves like her own, a little older, a few grays in her hair, some crow’s feet around her eyes and laugh lines around her mouth. Her hair, her face, her everything was like an older mirror image of Ann.

  “Hibi…Hibiscus?” said Ann through the floodgate of tears. “After all these years…is it really you?”

  “It is,” said Hibiscus.

  “I thought you were dead,” said Ann, through hot tears as she brought her sister close to her and hugged her tightly, worried at first that what she saw was not real, and then, worried that if she let go, that the figure would float
away, forever. “I can’t believe I’m admitting it, but ever since you went missing…I thought…I thought you’d died. I’ve tried to stay hopeful, and failed, on so many lonely nights, and every year, it was harder to have hope. What happened to you?”

  “They can explain,” said Hibiscus, and she stepped back so she was standing between two men, two men all too familiar to Ann, men who were strong, burly, who could turn into frikkin’ bears, but who above all else…were in love with her.

  It was Nick and Liam.

  “You two?” asked Ann. “What…what are you two doing here?”

  “Can we explain?” asked Liam.

  “Please,” said Ann. “Mom, Dad?”

  “I’ll stay to watch the kids,” said Jason. Martha got up and followed Ann inside and shut the door.

  The five people walked into the living room, where Ann sat in a chair, and across from her, sat Nick and Liam, and Hibiscus and Martha.

  “How the heck…” started Ann, rubbing her temples. “Okay, what I want to know is….Ugh. I can’t find my words. Explain. Please.”

  “You told us to never contact you again,” said Liam.

  “And I have to admit, when you said that?” said Nick. “We were…pissed.”

  “But we knew that to get you back? We’d have one shot,” said Liam. “So after we fought on the street, we brainstormed ideas.”

  “We were gonna buy you a house, pay for you to get a graduate degree, take you around the world,” said Nick. “But we realized all our ideas were absolute crap because that’s not what you wanted. What we had to do was find you the one thing in the world you wanted more than anything…your sister.”

  “We knew that it would be hard,” said Liam. “We had a plan for if we learned she’d died. We’d tell your parents, with evidence, and they could tell you that some cops had identified a body. We didn’t want to be the harbingers of that news, but we thought you’d deserve to know.”

  “We thought that we could use our money to figure it out,” said Nick. “All the money we spent on private detectives? Didn’t turn up zilch. And trust me…you don’t want to know how much we spent.”

  “Half a million dollars, because time was of the essence,” said Liam. “Wait, Nick…did you mean that rhetorically? Oh well.”

  “Okay, but as I was saying, the money? It didn’t do jack diddly squat,” said Nick. “We flew around the frikkin’ world to see if maybe your sister had been sold as a sex slave in the Ukraine, lobotomized in Romania, or organ harvested in North Korea. It was a heck of a month.”

  “That’s when we decided to stop using our billions…and start using our bears,” said Liam. “We went to shifter elders around the country for advice.”

  “Did they tell you to trust your bear?” asked Ann.

  “We got a lot of advice…but the best advice we got was a clue,” said Liam. “We showed my mate mark to an elder in Tennessee, who said that, as plain as day, my mark wasn’t just a set of symbols.”

  “What is it?” said Ann.

  “It’s a map,” said Nick. “The pistil of the flower? It’s a road, leading to the heart of the flower…in Idaho.”

  “I don’t understand,” said Ann.

  “The pistil marks a spot on the map of Idaho, and if we went to that spot, we could find your sister,” said Liam. “Of course, once we were in Idaho, we still had to do our research, but luckily, fate…had something in mind.”

  “We asked around the local shifter communities, asking if anyone had seen your sister,” said Nick. “We used a picture of her that our team had composited out of her old pictures, distributed by your parents online on their site asking for people to submit leads, aged up a bit.”

  “Somebody in a grizzly clan had heard a rumor that the alpha male of a wolf pack had been nursing an amnesiac back to health, and he recalled that the amnesiac looked like your sister,” said Liam. “We headed his way. That’s where we met your sister. She was at a special rehabilitation center for people with severe amnesia, with experimental therapies being used to jog the memory. Your sister’s doctor hadn’t made any headway at all.”

  “How the heck did Hibi end up in an amnesiac’s rehabilitation center?” asked Ann.

  “That’s where this story gets weird,” said Hibiscus. “We’ve pieced together what we can. I was driving through Idaho but I was using a rental car that had different plates than the one that the service had records of me renting. They had messed up the paperwork. I left my wallet and luggage at a hotel, which you of course knew about from the investigation. On trying to check in at the next hotel, I realized I’d messed up, and I headed back. I had a car accident on the way back to the first hotel, and emergency services took me in. I was transferred to the ICU, but as a Jane Doe. Everyone was so focused on trying to ensure that I didn’t die that nobody thought to contact the cops about the fact I was an unidentified person, so when the paperwork was finally filed, it was filed with an intake date that wouldn’t match the date of me going missing. I had been transferred between so many hospitals that it was practically impossible for my case file to stay cohesive and complete, so I was just another name lost in the system. I had no clue who I was, and as a total Jane Doe, I didn’t have many options other than to try to figure out who I was. I went to the rehabilitation center in Wholesome, Idaho, where I worked with the best amnesia doctor in the country, Doctor Addams, but even he couldn’t help me jog my memory. He was contacted by Nick and Liam, who showed up in person and refused to leave until they got to see me. It was unorthodox, but he let them in.”

  “And what happened?” asked Ann.

  “You won’t believe it,” said Hibiscus. “It’s like something out of a fairy tale. I…oh gosh.”

  Hibiscus had to wipe her eyes. Martha wrapped an arm around her and offered her a tissue with her other hand. Hibiscus wiped her eyes and blew her nose.

  “They talked to me, every day, about everything about you they could think of,” said Hibiscus. “And slowly, over time, I felt…something happening. I felt that I was recognizing you, that you were someone I must’ve met in my old life. It wasn’t until they said three magic words that my memories started to really come back, though. Before, they were blurry, but when they said those three words…well, they flooded back, crystal clear.”

  “What were the words?” asked Ann.

  “Brendan,” said Hibiscus. “And Paige…and Jeremiah. My kids’ names.”

  Ann’s tears, which had dried up out of dehydration, came back in full force.

  “I can’t believe they found you,” said Ann.

  “Believe it, because I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere again,” said Hibiscus. “Well. That’s not quite true. I need to be under observation for a few more months, to make sure that nothing else is wrong.”

  “Do you…need us to break you out of the hospital?” said Ann.

  “What?” asked Hibiscus. “No!”

  “She’s fine in Idaho,” said Liam. “She’s doing outpatient, not inpatient. The center has her set up with a cozy cabin and a job. She just goes to the center a few times a week for outpatient work. Nobody’s keeping her trapped.”

  “Oh, good, because that’s the last plot twist I need,” said Ann. “So, Hibiscus…what’s next for you?”

  “I have a lot of feelings to process,” said Hibiscus. “Six years’ worth. Including…the fact that I’ve gone from being distraught over losing my husband, to forgetting he even existed, to feeling myself falling back in love with him and losing him all over again, combined with the guilt I feel about forgetting him in the first place. I know it’s a lot to ask, but, I need you to keep being a mom to my kids for a while longer while I process this with professional help. I don’t want my kids to have more drama. I don’t want them to have to move around, to have their routines messed up. I want to be able to move back into the Seattle house and be a mom for the first time, but I need to be ready to be a mom first, so I can be the best mom I can be.”

  “I unde
rstand completely,” said Ann, squeezing her long-lost sister’s hand. “And I can help you out, even when you get back. I’ve done it for six years…what’s a lifetime more?”

  “I know this isn’t the first time we’re meeting, even though it should feel like it is, because I knew you’d say that, somehow,” said Hibiscus. “Of course, you’ll let Nick and Liam help too, right?”

  “I’m not sure about that,” said Ann. “The three of us…we’ve got a history.”

  “Trust me, I’m well aware,” said Hibiscus. “They told me everything.”

  “You haven’t heard my side,” said Ann, crossing her arms.

  “Oh, trust me… I have,” said Hibiscus. “You think that Liam and Nick gave a flattering account? Nuh-uh! But what I know is this. They went to the ends of the earth and back to find me, for you. You will never find anyone able to give you a better gift, and here you have not just one, but two guys that love you enough to do that.”

  “Ann…if you take us back, we will never lie or keep anything from you again,” said Nick.

  “It was wrong of us not to tell you about the circumstances of our birth sooner,” said Liam. “Or of the fact that we’re…billionaires.”

  “Here’s what I need from you two,” said Ann. “I need you two to never break the promise you just made…because if you do, you will break my heart, and my heart has been broken badly twice in my life. The first time was when Hibiscus disappeared. The second time? That was when you two broke my heart. I can’t have it break a third time. I can’t.”

  “We will never break your heart again,” said Nick.

  “That’s a promise,” said Liam.

  “Then yes…I can give this a second shot,” said Ann. “And, I know I haven’t said it yet, but…thank you. I can’t believe that you two were able to hunt my sister down. My sister’s right. This is the best present I could ever get. I can never repay you for this.”