by Holley Trent
Tamara checked news on her phone, and Brian kept his gaze fixed on the lot.
At around two twenty, his hand found her knee and squeezed.
When she cast a glare across the console at him, his stare was fixed on a newly arrived coupe: an iridescent black Civic on spinning rims. The license plate read SMOKEY.
She groaned at the double-entendre.
Bombastic thumping from the vehicle intensified when the driver cracked the window, freeing spiraling tufts of smoke.
The driver flicked a butt—cigarette or otherwise, Tamara couldn’t tell from that distance—out the window, and killed the engine.
Bryan slumped a little lower in the driver’s seat and watched the man debark. The newcomer stretched his arms high over his do-rag-covered head and yawned wide.
Tamara mused at his head accessory, as well as the stack of heavy gold chains around his neck. Taking in his baggy blue jeans and classic Timberland boots, she sighed. “This guy is a lieutenant? Really?”
“Mm-hmm. Mostly he has the job because he doesn’t mind the sight of blood. Doesn’t send him into a frenzy like it does some of the others.”
“Judging by his obscene parking job, and the smell wafting this way, he’s high as a kite.”
“Probably. Dustin calls himself a high-functioning pothead. He’s a menace, though not particularly dangerous. He gets away with a lot of shit because he fences the dope for Gene. Picks up deliveries and gets them to dealers. A lot of the Bears make money that way. Smaller sin than selling it direct to consumer, I suppose.”
Bryan’s dark eyes tracked Dustin as the bouncer walked around the car to its trunk. “I’m waiting until he opens the deck lid, and then I’ll go.”
“I thought I was going to go.”
“Changed my mind. He might be paranoid from the weed. He can’t fight worth a shit, but if he lands a blow with claws extended, you risk contamination. Let me get him into the truck, and you drive.”
“No. I can handle him.” He couldn’t have weighed much more than a hundred seventy pounds. Piece of cake for a Shrew.
Bryan lowered his chin to his chest and gave her an unblinking stare. “If he bites or scratches you, you’re doubling your Bear exposure. It’s only been a day since the last bite.”
“Thanks for the reminder. I assure you, I can get him into this truck without gaining any new holes in my jacket. I’ll only allow one Bear at a time to glory-hole my clothes.”
Bryan laughed, and she clapped a hand over his mouth. Still, his body shook with amusement, even if the chuckles couldn’t escape his mouth.
He wrapped his fingers around her wrist, and pulling her hand down to his lap, said, through wheezes, “Honey, if I were going to glory-hole you, I’d pick a more strategic spot than your shoulder. Yeah, you taste nice, but that hole’s in entirely the wrong zone for optimum usefulness.”
Realizing where her hand was situated, atop his hard thigh just below the pocket, she drew it away, grinding her teeth. The wrong zone, he’d said. Yeah, she’d been giving that zone a lot of thought. At least fifty percent of the dreams she’d had last night were about that zone. Her zone, and his, too.
She just bet his zone was fantastic, though she could only speculate. All she’d managed to catch a glimpse of so far was gorgeous legs and a muscular ass. When she’d had a chance to look, after she’d let him out of the metal room, she hadn’t. Didn’t want him to think she was interested in that way.
At the time, she hadn’t been.
“There he goes,” Bryan said.
Tamara scanned the lot and found that, sure enough, Dustin leaned into his trunk.
She and Bryan both reached for their door handles.
“No. Let me handle this. You start the truck, and let me deal with the rest.” She was out of the cab before he could rebut.
CHAPTER SEVEN
“Holy shit,” Bryan murmured as he wrenched his key in the ignition.
Who the hell was this little woman?
He watched Tamara fist her hands onto her very feminine hips and strut across the parking lot as if it were covered in red carpet and not asphalt. She paused ten feet from Dustin’s rear bumper and cocked her pretty head to the side, saying something to him.
The trunk fell closed, and Dustin, slack jawed, stared wordlessly at the new arrival.
She put her hands up in the international sign language for I’m so fucking clueless, squeezing her breasts together as she shrugged.
Dustin’s jaw flapped some more.
Bryan was somewhat astounded by Dustin’s attentiveness to that particular body part. The guy spent the better part of every day with surgically enhanced jugs in bare view in front of him. Maybe the weed made him forget.
Tamara’s were nice, what Bryan could see of them, anyway, but they weren’t the bouncing double-Ds most made-Bears seemed to go apeshit for. Bryan was more of a hips and ass man.
When his brain registered the soreness of his throat, he realized he’d been growling again. He cleared it and sat up.
Fuck you, bear. Not now. And not her.
Why not? his bear asked.
“Because fuck you,” Bryan said aloud, eyes widening as Dustin extended a hand towards Tamara’s breasts. Bryan had read his lips. He’d said something about him being the first to audition her for the job.
Tamara swung her elbow hard across Dustin’s face, sending a stream of blood arcing from the man’s nose onto the side of his vehicle.
Shit. They’d need to dispose of that car. That was one thing Bryan hadn’t planned for. Of course people would be suspicious of a tricked-out car left in the lot unattended for days on end.
Dustin hit the ground flat like a falling ironing board, and Tamara cocked her head to the side again, looking toward the truck. This time, though, she wasn’t playing up the dumb blonde farce. She was looking right at Bryan and saying, See? Told you so.
She rolled up her sleeves, bent, and grabbed Dustin by the ankles. She dragged him to the truck’s tailgate without so much as a stumble.
Bryan put his hand on the latch to open the door, but before he could step out, he heard the thud.
Dustin was in the back.
Tamara eased around to the driver’s window. Her glossed lips pulled up into a smile that on any other woman would be sweetly flirtatious. Sweet had never made his cock stand up and take note, so this was something else. Provocative. Calculating. Dangerous.
Sexy as hell.
Bryan couldn’t even blame his bear. This was all on him this time.
“Meet me at that empty strip mall a mile from here. I’ll follow you in Dustin’s car,” she said, holding up Dustin’s obviously unlucky rabbit foot keychain. “We’ll tie him up and gag him there. I suspect he’ll be out at least that long. I hit him kind of hard.”
She slapped the door percussively, and strutted away, rubbing her deadly elbow.
Bryan’s stare fixed on her swiveling hips and pert ass, hypnotized by the motion. She wasn’t even playing it up this time. That was her walk, all sex and woman.
If he hadn’t had some principles left, he would have fucked her a week ago. His long-suffering cock wished that he’d fucked her a week ago, or even a day ago when he had her pinned outside that metal room.
She’d had the audacity to wriggle her hips beneath him, teasing him.
The next time she teased, he’d make sure she understood the consequences of playing with an unmated Bear.
___
Bryan and Tamara watched from behind the bars as Dustin begged, pled, and cajoled them to let him out. “Come on, I won’t say shit to Gene. I’ll just pack my shit and go stay with my grandmother in Tulsa. Shit, let me out!”
He rattled the bars with his pudding spoon.
He’d had the munchies, and Tamara was a kind jailer.
“Sorry. Just chill. Watch some television. Relax. Everything will be fine,” Bryan said to the wiry Were-bear in the cell.
As a child, he’d wondered why his ancestors had
built this bunker, which was accessible only through a cave entrance obscured by dense forest. Now things made sense. Not just the metal room on the lowest habitable level, but the jail installed above it. If it were the Bears’ job to keep the peace, they’d need to have someplace to put the miscreants who refused to toe the line. These cells were nowhere near as Bear-proof as the metal room Tamara had locked him in during his full moon shift, but hopefully they’d be sufficient. Few Bears were as powerful as Bryan, but just to be safe, they’d need to finish this collection well before the end of the lunar month. The sooner the better, actually. As more Bears disappeared, the more suspicious the remaining ones would be…and the more likely Gene would suspect Bryan had something to do with it all. He could only hope Drea was safe. Dustin swore she was, but high-functioning pothead or not, he’d say anything to avoid another elbow to the nose administered by Tam.
Tamara was squinting at her phone display when Bryan approached her near the safe where she’d stowed Dustin’s phone, keys, and wallet.
“What do you want for dinner?” Bryan asked.
“I’d like a steak, rare, with blue cheese,” Dustin said from cell A. “Rolls, too? See if they got those soft ones like they used to have at Ruby Tuesday.”
Bryan gave the brazen Bear a long stare. “You’ll be lucky to get peanut butter and jelly, you dumb fuck.”
“Oh, you were talking to the one with the titties. My bad.”
“She has a name. It’s Tamara. Memorize it, if your brain is still has that capability. And drop the homeboy charade.” Bryan bumped the heavy safe door closed with his hip and spun the dial. “You grew up in Bel Air and are whiter than my grandmother’s sausage gravy.”
Dustin didn’t have a retort for that beyond, “If you’re gonna go, can you leave me the remote control?”
Bryan shook his head and turned his attention to Tamara. “You ready?”
Her flushed cheeks and shallow breathing belied her modulated voice. “Yes, whatever you’re in the mood for.”
His thumb alighted on her paling lips seemingly of its own accord.
No, it was his bear. His curious, unleashed bear. “Is your body temperature dropping again?”
“You cold, girl?” Dustin cooed from his cage. “You want a Bear to warm you up? I’ll roll over on my back and let you lie on my belly.”
Bryan picked up the remote control and tossed it cleanly through the bars at Dustin’s head.
It clipped his temple, making the slow-moving Were-bear whine, “Ow! Shit. My bad. Fuck.” He settled onto his cot and scanned the cable television offerings.
Tamara tucked her phone into her jacket pocket and bobbed her head toward the door. “It’s just the draft through my glory hole. Come on.”
He followed her down the short corridor and up the stairs to ground level.
Right. The draft.
She was cold down to her bones, and he could tell because with each degree she lost, her scent faded. He’d grown used to that cloying, feminine scent. It triggered dreams he was glad she hadn’t intruded upon, because if she knew, Dustin wouldn’t be the only one getting a cracked nose.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Tamara climbed into the passenger seat of Bryan’s truck and pulled the door closed harder than necessary. Blowing out a breath, she pulled the seatbelt across her body and closed her eyes tight.
Bryan took his place behind the wheel and said nothing until he got the truck beyond the rocky path and up to highway speed. “Steak okay?”
She didn’t want steak. She wanted a soft pillow and an electric blanket, but she wouldn’t tell him that. Nor would she tell him that when she’d nearly chattered her teeth off the night before, she hoped that she didn’t warm up any time soon because being in his press felt so good. Yes, there’d been that moment of awkwardness when she’d opened her eyes that morning to a dull jab at her belly, at which Bryan had said, simply, “It’s nature.”
Yeah, she knew a little something about that.
He hadn’t been ashamed enough to roll away, and she hadn’t known what to do with herself. Had he been any other man, she would have slung her leg around his thigh in a wordless invitation, but the last thing she needed was for the man to think her symptoms were all an act to get him close and use him up.
Black widow, she was not.
They had to work together, at least for the next couple of weeks, so they needed to keep things professional and platonic. He didn’t need to know about the lascivious nature of her dreams.
“I guess I’m okay with steak,” she said when he nudged her.
“I know a little place near the French Broad River where people won’t pay too much attention to us. They won’t go run and tell Gene they saw me.”
“You make it seem as though Gene has eyes everywhere.”
Bryan huffed, and when Tamara opened her eyes, she caught him shaking his head.
“He’s got a pretty good network. It’s not like with you Shrews. You rely on your personal skills to track people.”
“Yes, psychic in some cases.”
“Right. Well, Gene has a lot of fingers in a lot of different pots. Knows lots of people out here in these rural communities, because he has to find folks to harbor his drugs.”
“And manufacture them?”
“You know about the meth?”
“I suspected. Some of you Bears have awful teeth.”
Bryan spread on his own thousand-watt smile.
“Not you, obviously.”
“Damn right. What kind of Bear would I be without strong teeth and claws, huh?”
“Claws?”
He nodded. “Me and a couple of other born-Bears had to amputate the claws of a couple of Gene’s drug runners. They would get high the day of the full moon, and when they shifted, the stuff wouldn’t have metabolized out of their systems. They’d get wild, swiping paws at people and themselves, so we had to remove the weapons.”
“Doesn’t that render an animal pretty much defenseless?”
“I believe Darwin got a lot of things right. In the battle of the fittest, the idiots who don’t keep clear heads for their beasts are the ones who’ll get snuffed out first. They did it to themselves.”
“Hmm.”
Their beasts. The words echoed back to her father’s last text message. Don’t agitate his beast.
She’d asked why, but his only response had been, See you when we land. Pick us up in Morrisville?
She didn’t have time to entertain her parents during yet another one of their spur-of-the-moment vacations. They always made a point to land in North Carolina for a long layover if they were going to the U.S., even if there was a more direct flight to their destination. It’d never made sense to Tamara why they would go so far out of their way to see her. Her parents weren’t overly effusive with their affections, and family gatherings had never been much of a priority…until Tamara stayed in the U.S. after her father’s last diplomatic assignment. Then they’d become downright solicitous.
Right as the duo crossed the threshold into the small, out-of-the-way restaurant, Bryan grabbed Tamara by the elbow and started backing her out the door with a murmured, “Shit.”
“What?” Tamara scanned the room while he pulled her backward and tried to root her heels to the floor. She hadn’t been hungry before, but now that she was here, she wanted to stay. They’d passed a man seated at the window eating a plate-sized chicken-fried steak on the way in, and her belly picked that exact moment to inform her that it would like to be indulging in the same.
The hostess intercepted them at the double doors before Bryan could lean against the out side. “Two?” she asked, already gathering a pair of laminated menus and utensils wrapped in paper napkins from a bin behind the podium.
Bryan laced the fingers of his left hand through those on Tamara’s right, and muttered, “Yeah,” while herding her at an undignified pace past the counter toward an unoccupied corner booth. There was no one seated on that side of the restaurant, but Br
yan was either oblivious to that, or simply didn’t care.
He nudged Tamara into the inside of the booth with her front toward the deserted restaurant, and pushed her all the way in with aid of his hip.
The hostess, who’d followed along wordlessly, blinked at him.
“This table occupied?” He nudged the menus closer and distributed one to Tamara.
“No.” The hostess shifted her weight, likely unsure of what she was dealing with. She must have been new, and didn’t know how to react when her tasks didn’t unfurl in a specific order. Tamara would have let her off the hook, but she didn’t know what Bryan was up to, either.
“I’ll let your waitress know y’all are over here,” the hostess said.
“Have her hurry,” Bryan said,
She swallowed and eased back.
Tamara brought the heel of her combat boot sharply against Bryan’s shin, and he groaned, “Please,” after the hostess.
She nodded, and spun toward the kitchen.
“You don’t have to act like an animal,” Tamara said. She picked up the menu and scanned the entree columns, just out of curiosity, although she already knew what she wanted. “Did your mother not teach you any manners?”
“You’re one to talk.”
“Excuse me? I don’t have any particular allergy to the words please and thank you in the way you seem to.”
He rubbed his chin, giving her a long, inscrutable stare.
“You want to let me know what’s got your hackles up, Bear?”
He said nothing, because the waitress, carrying two glasses of ice water, set down the cups and opened her order pad.
They ordered, and when the woman had walked away, Bryan said, “I should have caught their scent in the parking lot, but it was masked by that garbage skip around back.”
“Bears?”
His response was a mere jump of his eyebrows.
“You know them?”
“Not personally. They’re not in our group, but they wouldn’t be in this area if it weren’t for Gene’s sufferance. They’re either here running drugs or visiting friends. Either way, I don’t want them spreading news that they saw me.”