Bear Fursuits Books 1-4: Bear Fursuits

by Montrose, Isadora

  When he at last claimed his reward, she was spent and trembling from a series of climaxes each more intense than the last. He gave a last victorious roar in her ear and collapsed on her limp and exhausted body. She drew him as close to her as she could manage, glorying in his weight.

  Her heart was full. Her loneliness assuaged at last. Never had she felt so close to her lover. Theirs was an epic love that would last them all their days.

  Morning brought a pale spring sunshine that illuminated her bedroom and shone a beam of light on the desert that was her solitary double bed. Gabriella’s demure sprigged nightgown was buttoned at wrist and neckline, and she was quite alone. Despairingly she covered her face and wept as if her grief was new.

  How could she still feel so connected to a dead man? Why did it feel as if her bond with Roman had never been severed? Would this pain never end?

  * * *

  “What do you mean you’ve taken two months leave?” Jools Malcom shouted at her daughter. “Are you crazy. It’s spring. In about a day and a half we’re going to have twenty projects that we’ll need you to sign off on yesterday. You can’t bugger off for two months at the start of summer.”

  “I’m sorry, Mom, but I’m going to join the hunt for Roman. I’ve signed up to join a group of civilians assisting the Forest Rangers. I’m driving out tonight after work.” Gabriella stood with her legs spread in the same aggressive posture as her mother. Her arms were set on her hips, and her face looked just as determined as Jools’.

  Jools abruptly gave way. She sat down on the edge of the desk she had been standing in front of. “Oh, my dear girl, what can you expect to find after all this time?”

  “Closure. Maybe some bones. Clothes. I don’t know. Something to set me free.” Even to her mother, she could not confide her conviction that her nightly dreams were a sign that her lover was still alive.

  It was a crazy idea, probably the result of her prolonged grief. But this week’s nocturnal visits by her hirsute lover seemed more real than much of what had passed for reality since Roman’s plane had crashed.

  “Forest Rangers have mounted a two month search?” Jools asked dubiously.

  Gabby shook her head. “No, just this weekend. It would be impossible to keep a hundred and fifty people in the mountains for two months. People can bring their own tents and rations for two days, but for sixty...” She shook her head. “Why, you’d need a supply line that just doesn’t exist.”

  “But you’ve taken a two month leave,” Jools reminded her. It was a question.

  “I’m going to stay on. Take bear if I need to hunt. Keep looking for some sign of Roman. Or at least pay my respects to his resting place.”

  “What about the Spring Bear Hunt? Have you considered that?” Jools voice was a worried growl.

  “You know that Washington State has no Spring Bear Hunt, Mom.”

  “Just lots of hunters who don’t accept it. Woods are full of poachers at this time of year.”

  “That’s the beauty of this new search. It’ll scare the poachers off. Who could be dumb enough to go setting traps or shooting bears with the Air Force watching.”

  “I guess.” Jools sighed. “You tell Ma yet?”

  “You know your phone would be ringing right now if I had. You can tell her, or you can let me tell her myself. Up to you, Mom.”

  Jools sighed and looked at her tall, strapping daughter. She had grown used to Gabriella’s air of drooping sadness. Surely this energetic sense of purpose was an improvement. She and Winnie wanted their eldest daughter back.

  “Take a satellite phone,” she advised. “Call home every day.”

  “I’ve got one in my pack. Probably no way to charge it though if I’m in the deep wilderness. You guys are just going to have to let me be free range for eight weeks.” Gabby grinned. “I’m a bear. I like the woods. It’ll be fine.”

  “Of course,” said Jools wryly. “Don’t matter that it’s mating season.” She wondered at Gabriella’s deep crimson flush.

  Of course, it being mating season was part of her strategy. She knew she was coming into season. If Roman was in the vicinity, one whiff of her and he would be lured out of wherever he was lurking. She had to believe in the strength of their bear bond.

  She knew Roman was only a partial bear, with poor control of his shift. She had to assume he could have responded to life-threatening injuries by shifting and gotten stuck as a half-man half-bear. In that hybrid form he couldn’t return to civilization, could he?

  Okay, so it was pure speculation or hopefully folly. But still, she was sure her bush-wise lover could have survived for three years as a hybrid. When she found him, she would help him to shift, or maybe she would just have to stay with him in bear forever.

  She was tired of her own half-life without her mate. She was young, she yearned for a relationship like Jack and Hannah’s. She wanted babies. Roman’s babies. There never would be another shifter for her. It was past time she made a push to secure her happiness.

  Sure it was a long shot. Lot of wilderness up in the north, and it probably was crazy to think anyone even a bear could survive the complete destruction of his plane. But she had to trust her bear instincts. They had been niggling at her for years, and this last week they had been roaring.

  If Roman was still alive, she was going to find him and bring him home.

  “I’m going on a bear hunt,” she hummed as she pointed her SUV towards the Cascades.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gabby drove into the North Cascades National Park around nine-thirty. The big Ranger at the gate took her name and scrolled through his computer file for her. He assigned her a campsite and a number tag.

  “You need to be wearing this at all times, ma’am,” he told her sternly. “This number contains your group and sub-group. If you get lost without it, it’ll cause a peck of trouble to get you back.” His bristly face looked tired and bored with telling civilians how to behave.

  “Yes, sir,” Gabriella returned smartly, making sure he understood she knew the chain of command. “Do I report tonight?”

  “Four hundred hours,” he informed her. He handed her a map, circling one of dozens of red stars with a pen. “This here is where you are meeting your Group Leader.” He consulted a sheet. “His name is Asher Bascom.”

  Gabby’s face lit up as she recognized the name, and the bored guard got a little broader at the sight of her sweet smile. “Do you have a tent?” he asked.

  “Yes, sir. And food and water. In fact, everything on the list the Rangers sent me.” She paused. “Is that Asher Benoit from Kittitas County?”

  “Yeah. You from up there?”

  Gabby shook her head. The ponytail she had secured her hair in bounced a little. “No, sir. But my brother-in-law is from Hanover—he’s got a cousin by that name.”

  “Ash is from French Town in Kittitas County. Who’s your brother-in-law?”

  “Jack Enright.”

  This must have been the secret password, because the Ranger stuck out his hand. “Tim Harland,” he said. “Pleased to know you, Ms. Malcom. You need anything, Ranger Station is marked on your map.”

  Her campsite was a dilly. There was a water connection, and an electrical outlet. It was set up in fact for a camper. Well she only had a tent, but she was in favor of all the amenities. There would be time aplenty for roughing it.

  She parked and used her headlights to illuminate the campsite until she had put up her tent. It was a bright blue two-person beauty that the moms had given her as a graduation present. It went up in minutes and once she had her LED lantern hung up, she turned off the headlamps and finished unpacking.

  She couldn’t remember the first time she had gone camping. She supposed she and Art must have been babies in carriers when the moms starting taking them into the woods. Certainly she had no more memory of learning bush craft than she had of learning to walk.

  She had grown up hiking, camping, hunting and fishing in the wilderness areas of the Pacific
Northwest. When both your parents were bears who loved to run wild in bear form, you spent quality time deep in the forests. She and her twin Art had raced together through the woods in every season. The Trips as they called Jacob, Caleb and Gwendolyn, had followed them as soon as they were able.

  The moms had scolded them more than once for playing games where tourists could take snapshots of an apparent family of Black Bears frolicking in white water or playing follow the leader up a steep rock face. But bear shifters naturally thrived on adventure, and the moms had always understood their kids need to take risks and stretch their bears to the fullest.

  Within half an hour, Gabby was eating a hot supper outside her tent. The pleasant warmth of the day was gone, and the temperature was falling, but she was wearing two layers of polar fleece and a wool shirt. She wasn’t cold. And she would sleep warm tonight.

  She wanted to have her phone fully charged for tomorrow, but if Asher Bascom expected her at four a.m., she needed an alarm. Good thing she was an engineer. A few minutes tinkering with her car’s onboard computer and she had an alarm that would wake the whiskey jacks.

  The camp grounds were crowded and consequently noisy. Gabby preferred her wilderness peaceful and lonely, but she wasn’t on a pleasure trip. These people had all given up their weekends to help locate Roman. Every single one had a reason for doing this, and it was ungrateful of her to object to their disturbing her peace.

  She stretched her legs, before turning in, and discovered that although the people on either side of her had campers, either side of them there were folks with tents. She gave a woman and her daughter a hand to tie their tent down properly and refrained from lecturing them.

  They had seen the picture of Roman inset into one of his family in the paper. “It’s a perfect scandal that an American serviceman from a family of servicemen, is lying unburied in these woods,” Mercy Collins told Gabriella.

  “I told Jenny that we had to help. So here we are.” The older woman smiled at Gabby and indicated her teenaged daughter. “What about you?”

  “I’m a friend of his,” Gabby said softly. “Thank you for coming out. What group are you with?”

  Mercy had not yet put on her id tag. Gabriella bit her tongue. But when Mrs. Collins found it, it turned out that while she and her daughter had been assigned to the same one, they were not in Gabby’s.

  “I don’t know how we’re going to get there for four a.m.,” Mercy complained. “I am sure I won’t wake up for four.”

  “I’ve rigged my SUV to beep at three, so you’ll be up too,” Gabby assured her.

  “Where do we park?” asked Jenny Collins.

  “Right here. Once you’re set up, you’re supposed to leave your vehicle until you leave the park. You’ll be hiking out to meet up with your group.”

  “Oh.” Jenny was clearly stunned. What did she think they were going to do tomorrow and the next day except walk?

  “I’m going to turn in,” Gabby told them. “We’ll have an exhausting day tomorrow.”

  She left Jenny whining indistinctly to her mother about the hardships of camping and returned to her own comfortable tent and sleeping bag.

  She lowered the door flap, but left the inner one unzipped, so she could see through the transparent plastic outer layer. Her sleeping bag was positioned so she could see a slice of sky through the trees.

  Gradually, as her neighbors turned out their lanterns and stopped talking, Gabriella could see the stars emerge in her patch of sky. She fell asleep listening to the soughing of the wind in the branches of the trees.

  Her lover moaned inchoate love words in her ear. He huffed warm breath on that tender organ and licked the rim. His teeth nibbled lightly on the earlobe. He soothed the little bite with little kisses before pulling into his hot mouth. His beard tickled the side of her neck.

  Gabriella’s head writhed with pleasure on her makeshift pillow—a flap of sleeping bag stuffed with her jacket. Her long hair had come loose from its elastic and her curls spread out over the flap of the sleeping bag. Her lover’s long fingers combed through the mass of curls to find her sensitive scalp. He kneaded lightly, but his touch was incendiary. She felt her pussy throb and grow damp.

  Her lover chuckled into her ear and kissed his way to the dip of her collarbone. He lifted her head so he could kiss her properly, lips to lips. His tongue tasted her sweet saltiness. The musky pleasure of his tongue mating with hers made her clutch his shoulders.

  He was naked and warm. His muscular shoulders and his broad hairy chest were strong and supple. She dug her fingers into his muscles just to feel their supple resilience. “You feel alive,” she told him in a throaty whisper. “I love you. Stay with me,” she pleaded.

  He chortled. She couldn’t make out his words, but they soothed and comforted her. His big hands let her head fall back onto the sleeping bag pillow. He caressed her collarbones and told her she was beautiful without language.

  He hefted her breasts and plumped them lightly. He kissed the round top slopes, and the delicate undersides, reveling in the fiercely puckered nipples. Gabby felt sensation shoot from breast to clitoris as he took each aureole into his hot, wet mouth.

  He raked each one lightly with his teeth, with just enough pressure to make her start to spasm. At the same time one hand began to trace her waist and wander behind her to find the crack that ran between her buttocks. A long, strong finger played with the fluff it found there and then grabbed one cheek as if to reassure her lover of her solidity or to intensify her orgasm.

  He was blowing on her eyelids, as if she had fallen asleep. The mirthful whuff of his hot breath trailed down her face between her throbbing boobies, past her swelling belly to her sex. He pulled her legs apart and his bearded face titillated her as he lapped contentedly at her honey pot.

  He seemed determined to bring her to her zenith many times. His growling pleasure in her bucking body was an aphrodisiac that intensified the series of crescendos he induced in her exquisitely sensitized flesh.

  In an agony of love, Gabby pleaded with her lover to consummate their love. She wanted to feel his hardness there where she ached and throbbed and was so lonely. “Why do you not stay with me?” she sobbed.

  Her answer was another hungry kiss that stole her breath. Then the incubus set his steel love rod to her wet lips and pressed deep. She clutched him with her powerful legs, both to prolong her pleasure and to keep him from escaping.

  He seemed to like this fond embrace for he lunged yet deeper and set a frantic pace to his thrusting. His hairy chest grew wet and slippery where it rubbed deliciously against her soft breasts. And then with a shout of jubilation he claimed his conquest of her body with the white hot explosion of his seed.

  Gabriella gave herself to the frantic pulsing of her inner walls. She could feel the series of climaxes in her legs, pussy, buttocks and breasts. She reached again for her lover’s mighty shoulders, but as easily as smoke through a chimney, he melted, became incorporeal and left her satisfied but utterly bereft.

  * * *

  It was not simple coincidence that had placed Gabby in Asher Bascom’s party. His cousin Jack had called him to arrange it.

  “We’d appreciate it if you kept an eye on her. Hannah thinks she may be hoping to find Roman alive,” he said.

  Ash Bascom sighed. “I wish,” he said. “I was out here looking for that boy three years ago. Snow was drifted eight feet deep in places. Even in a flight suit, even suppose he survived the parachute drop, he’d have frozen to death.”

  “I know,” said Jack in the grief-stricken tone of a man who seen many buddies die but had never learned to accept death.

  “I’ll keep an eye on her. For Roman’s sake too. I for sure thought he had found his mate in that sweet, little girl. I’ll watch out for Roman’s woman, don’t you fret.”

  “Gabby’s a sensible woman. Been hiking and camping all her life. She’ll be an asset on the search. Don’t want you to think she’s some sort of weakling.”

>   “I hear you. Wish us luck.”

  “Luck.”

  Asher remembered the pretty bridesmaid that Roman had snatched away from him at Jack’s wedding in Hanover. That was the last time he had seen Rome, come to think. Gabriella Malcom was still a beauty, but now an indefinable air of sorrow haunted her. Well, that was bears for you, they loved deep and long.

  “Morning, Miss Gabby,” he said, offering his hand. His handsome pleasant face showed none of his knowledge of her private grief. “As soon as all the stragglers show up, we’ll get set up. There’s coffee, if you want some.” He pointed to a big urn on a card table that had been set up under some maples.

  “Thanks, I made myself some, but I’ll bet this is the last hot drink until supper time,” she returned, shaking Asher’s big, strong hand. She didn’t expect much beyond hot with caffeine, but the coffee was at least diner grade. Lap of luxury.