She threw her hands up. “We’ve known each other less than a day! Am I supposed to believe that there’s some sort of mystical connection between us?”
Fuck. That’s exactly what it was. But if he tried to tell her that she’d just get madder and accuse him of lying to her. And then he’d get mad. It wasn’t a good idea. He needed to talk to Barrett. He needed to talk to his brother and figure out what the hell he was supposed to do.
Logan sighed and shoved his fingers into his hair. “Stay here. Please. I’ll go. I need to talk to my brother, Zoe. My secrets— they’re not just mine. They affect people beside me. I’ll tell you everything, but first I have to tell him.”
She stared back at him, her dark eyes full of doubt and questions. But after a moment, she sighed and then nodded. Relief flooded him. He’d go find Barrett, and while he was off doing that, his Zoe would be waiting for him in his house, his bed, wearing his clothes. He wanted to mark her, to put his scent on her. She was his and that was the end of it for him.
6
Barrett Arthur was in all his fuzzy glory, standing on his hind legs, clawing at a tree, and roaring into the night sky. A noise caught his attention, and he whipped his gigantic head around, letting out a roar that made the tree limbs above him rattle and had every night bird nearby taking wing.
“Jesus, you love all of this king of the mountain shit!”
Recognizing his baby brother’s voice, Barrett growled again, but dropped to all fours and allowed his body to shift, letting the bear recede until the human form could take over. He wasn’t like Logan or Sam. For them, the human was dominant and the bear the secondary part of their nature. For him, the bear was always present, always demanding to be freed. It was a battle every day to keep it hidden.
Standing up, naked and completely uncaring, he faced Logan and said, “What the hell are you doing up here? Who’s watching the lodge?”
Logan covered his eyes and tossed a pair of sweat pants to him. “Christ almighty! You could put someone’s eye out with that thing. I’d like to gouge my own eyes out, now! Put on the damn pants, Barrett. I’d prefer not to have any closer acquaintance with your pecker!”
Barrett took the pants and stepped into them. Getting a raging hard-on from shifting one form to another was just part of it. Maybe it was the fact that he was somehow less human than his siblings, but he’d never been embarrassed by any aspect of his body. “You’re worse than an old woman. You can open your virgin eyes now, asshole!”
Logan did that and then uttered the most dreaded words in the English language. “We need to talk.”
“No. You need to talk. And one of the things you need to tell me is who the hell is watching the lodge?”
“We have a grand total of five guests right now. It’s the middle of the damn week, Barrett. You know we’re good until Thursday. And this is important,” Logan protested.
Irritated with his brother for interrupting him, irritated with himself for once more being more comfortable as a bear than a man, Barrett growled. “Fine. Spill your guts then. Between you and Sam, it’s like a damned episode of Dr. Phil!”
Logan dropped his hand and uttered a phrase that left them both stunned. “I’ve found my mate, but she’s a little skittish. If I don’t go back and tell her everything about us, I’ll lose her forever.”
Mates were serious business and something they never joked about, but so was exposing their secret to someone who might tell the world. “You might tell her and then lose her anyway because of it,” Barrett pointed out. “Not all women are cut out to be with shifters, Logan. You know that as well as I do. That’s why we all had different mothers. That son of a bitch couldn’t keep it in his pants long enough to figure out if one would stick before he’d knock her up!”
It was the truth, but he could tell by his brother’s face that Logan didn’t want to be reminded. While there were only a handful of women that any shifter could mate with, their physical compatibility and ability to breed with a shifter didn’t mean they’d be able to mentally or emotionally cope with having everything they thought they knew about the world turned on its end. He didn’t remember his own mother leaving. He’d been too little. But he remembered Sam’s walking out, and he sure as hell remembered the horrified expression when Logan’s mother had dropped him at the Lodge and told them to take him because she wanted no part of him.
“She’s not like that… I don’t think. Regardless, I have to try. If I tell her and she leaves, so be it. But if I don’t tell her and she leaves, then it’s on me. And I won’t be a coward like that,” Logan said firmly.
It was blind hope. They both knew it. In that moment, all Barrett could see was his brother being hurt. Because there was nothing that would fell a shifter like losing a mate. It made him mad, mad enough to lash out. “So this wasn’t really about you asking me,” Barrett snarked. “This was about you telling me what you’re going to do.”
“I know you’re the head of our clan, Barrett, but you’ve not met your mate yet. You don’t know what this feels like!”
God that pissed him off. No, he didn’t know what it felt like, and he probably never would. Shifters like him, those who were more animal than human, rarely ever found mates, and even if they did, they were rarely able to keep them. Their father had been proof of that.
“Fine. Do whatever the hell you want. You always have anyway!” Barrett shouted.
Logan put his hands on his hips. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“It means that you don’t have any respect for how all this is supposed to work, for the traditions of asking your clan leader’s permission before courting a mate! We do things a certain way for a reason, but you’ve always been such a hot head, we spend more time cleaning up your messes than making the clan better!”
He was being a dick and he knew it. He also knew that most of it was prompted by fear for his baby brother, and he if were totally honest, a fair amount of jealousy. But he couldn’t hold it back. He wanted to meet his own mate, he wanted to feel the human part of himself as much as the bear for a change. He wanted to not be the monster that Logan’s mother had accused them all of.
Logan didn’t take the bait though. He didn’t give Barrett the fight he was looking for. Instead, he threw his hands up in the air and said, “Fine. When Zoe leaves here, if she’ll have me, I’ll leave with her.”
Barrett watched his younger brother walk away. He wanted to go after him, wanted to apologize, wanted to take it all back. But when he opened his mouth, only an angry roar emerged and he once again shifted into bear form. His last completely human thought before the animal instincts took over entirely was that it was the form he belonged in. Words never did anything but fuck it all up anyway.
Logan didn’t run back down the mountain to Zoe. He walked, giving himself time to cool down, time to let his hurt pride and his hurt feelings settle. Barrett had said ugly things, but none of them had been untrue. That was why they stung so fiercely. He’d lived in the human world, grew up in it, playing video games and skateboarding and being the same kind of standard little shit most pre-teen boys were until the night it all changed. He hadn’t known, hadn’t understood. Alone in his bedroom, playing a damn stupid ass video game and losing. He’d gotten so frustrated his temper had won out. It had started with just throwing things, but that had only fueled it. Then everything had gone black.
It wasn’t until hours later that he’d slowly come to himself, buck ass naked and laying in the middle of his destroyed bedroom with his mother crying in fear that he’d had any clue. She’d packed up everything that wasn’t wrecked, drove him two hours to Pigeon Forge, and dropped him in his father’s lap. It was the last time he’d ever seen or heard from her.
When he finally reached his cabin, he took another deep, deep breath and prepared himself for what he was about to do. He’d never intentionally exposed their secret to anyone. He’d never shifted in front of anyone but his brothers. What if he tried and it didn’t happe
n? What if she passed out again? What if she went completely hysterical? What if she left him?
Opening the door, he stepped inside and stopped cold. Zoe was still there, but so was his brother. Sam had come back from Knoxville earlier and he was in full on bear mode at having caught a stranger in their house.
“Don’t move,” Zoe whispered, clearly terrified. “He might charge you.”
Logan was counting on it. He didn’t even strip, just let the change take him, seams popping and ripping as he dropped to all fours and let the bear have free rein.
7
Zoey’s heart was in her throat. She’d been dozing on the couch waiting for Logan to return. The whole time he’d been gone, before she’d managed to fall into an exhausted sleep, she’d called herself fifteen different kinds of an idiot. All the ways it was a bad idea to let him get inside her head had been enumerated and expanded upon at length. If she could have found a pad of paper without being a total snoop she would have made a list. Lists made her feel better.
But no, she’d napped and then a noise had woken her. She’d sat up on the couch and found herself face to face with a snarling and growling bear. Everything had seemed to grind down to almost a stop, melting into this extreme slow motion version of reality that gave her just enough time to picture all the gory ways she was going to die.
And then Logan walked in. She was terrified to begin with, but the idea of something happening to him, of that bear charging him made her realize just how deep her feelings for him were. She couldn’t/wouldn’t put a name on it, but it sure as hell wasn’t a fling. It was something else altogether and that scared her almost as much as the bear did.
Calling out her warning to him, she took her eyes off the bear for just a moment and looked at the man who had turned her world upside down. But he wasn’t a man anymore either. He was something in between. He shifted, morphing and changing right before her eyes, until he too had taken on the shape of a bear, just like the one she’d seen last night. And just like the ones she’d been writing about for years.
“What the—” She never finished the question, never even finished the thought. The table she’d been perched on trying to avoid the first bear gave way under her feet and she crashed to the carpet in a shower of glass and wood.
Lying there on the floor, she heard the menacing growl and the first bear was leaning over her, teeth bared and ready to rip out her throat. For the second time in as many days, Zoe fainted.
In bear form, Logan growled out a warning to his brother Sam. Sam swung his head around and looked at Logan over his massive shoulder and roared.
Even though Sam outweighed him by a good hundred pounds, Logan wasn’t backing down. He was terrified for Zoe. If there’d been a worse fucking way for her to find out the truth, he didn’t know what the hell it could possibly be.
Watching Sam preparing to take a hunk out of his mate, Logan didn’t bother with another warning. He launched himself at his brother, the two of them rolling across the living room floor, reeling from the impact. Furniture crashed and toppled.
Sam lifted his head, growled again, and Logan let out a roar of his own, fierce enough to rattle the windows. It immediately put Sam back on his haunches. The bear cocked his head, from side to side and then shifted immediately to human form.
“What the hell has gotten into you? And who is this fucking Goldilocks in our house?” Sam demanded as he began brushing tiny shards of broken glass and splintered wood from his skin.
Logan shifted back. His head was spinning from changing so quickly and from the rush of adrenaline that had gone through him like a steamroller. “She’s my mate. I left her here so I could go talk to Barrett and tell him that I was going to tell her the truth. Too fucking late for that now since she saw it with her own eyes and will probably be checking herself into the nearest nuthouse!”
Logan rose to his feet and gingerly picked his way around the busted wood of the coffee table and the broken glass from the shelves in it. Zoe hadn’t been cut, thankfully. If she had, he’d probably have launched himself at Sam again.
“Well, how the hell was I supposed to know? I walk into the house and some random human was sleeping on our couch wearing one of my shirts!”
“It’s my shirt,” Logan shot back, lifting Zoe into his arms and carrying her toward his bedroom. With Sam home, and assuming she’d want anything to do with him, they’d spend the remainder of their night in her cabin. Hell, who was he kidding? She probably wouldn’t even stick around long enough to get dressed; she’d be driving back to the city in his borrowed boxer shorts! At least some small bit of him would get to be with her, unless she tossed them in the nearest dumpster.
As he placed her on the bed, she stirred and then her eyes fluttered open. A soft smile curved her lips for a split second before the reality of all that she’d seen intruded. She sat up in bed, pushing her hands flat against the mattress and scooting away from him.
“What the ever-loving hell just happened out there?” she demanded.
“I’m a bear,” he said.
Zoe shook her head, the frantic movement making the soft blonde, waves of her hair bounce over her shoulders. “My neighbor, Joe, and his husband, Leon, are bears, Logan! They have big beards, wear flannel, and do brunch! They also call everyone they meet sweetheart and make the best damn apple pie I’ve ever had,” she shouted. “This thing that happened here… This thing that I just saw—that I think I saw, but that I couldn’t actually have possibly seen because that kind of thing isn’t real and doesn’t exist in the real world— is not being a bear! That’s being a mystical-fucking-shapeshifter! You need to tell me what the hell is going on!”
He didn’t laugh. God, he wanted to, but he didn’t. Mostly because even though she was funny as hell, he was so terrified at the thought he might lose her forever, he couldn’t do anything but look at her and beg. “That’s my secret, Zoe. The secret I share with my brothers that wasn’t just mine to tell. We are all shapeshifters. But it’s not just us. There are shifters of all kinds out there. Lions, tigers, bears. You name it. We’re everywhere. In cities, in the country, in the suburbs. Doctors, lawyers, policemen… The three of us just happen to run a resort in the Smoky Mountains, which lets us shift into our bear forms a little more frequently than most get to.”
“All kinds? Everywhere? I’ve been surrounded by them my whole life?” she asked, wide-eyed and more than a little hysterical.
Logan put his hands on her shoulders, forcing her to meet his gaze, “Zoe—”
She smacked his hands away from her. “Don’t you ‘Zoe’ me, Logan! This is a big damn deal, and just because it’s your normal doesn’t make it my normal! That’s like saying, ‘Oh and we have a rare blood type!’ This, Logan—,” she waved her hands all around, “ —this kind of stuff isn’t supposed to happen in the real world. It’s just supposed to happen in books! Hell, in my books! But it’s not real!”
He pinned her with a hard gaze. “It’s as real as you want it to be, Zoe. You can walk away from me, pretend that none of this ever happened, or you can accept it—accept me and be my mate.”
“Mate? You mean wife? I barely know you! Barely… bearly.” She began to laugh hysterically, but the laughter soon descended into tears. “Oh, my God! I’m losing my fucking mind! The stress of the book— the deadline—- the advance that is dwindling to single digits in my bank account right now… I’ve cracked.”
Logan moved forward to take her in his arms, but she pushed him away and jumped from the bed, putting as much space between them as possible. He sighed heavily. “I know it’s a lot to take in, but you and me, Zoe, nothing has changed from before. All those amazing things I made you feel, that you made me feel…we can have that again. We can have it all the time!”
“That’s just sex!” she snapped.
“No, not for me anyway. Shifters are different from human men in a lot of ways. We can go longer and we don’t need to recover the way they do. But it’s not just the physical,
Zoe. When we find a woman who is our mate, we don’t stray, Zoe. If you agree to be my mate, I’ll never cheat on you. I’ll never leave you as long as there is breath in my body. When we take a mate, Zoe, —in the right way—it’s forever.” He didn’t bother to explain to her about the mating bite or the fact that his own father had never technically mated with any of their mothers beyond just the carnal sense. He figured he’d blown enough of her mind already without dumping the whole backlog of Arthur family baggage on her.
Logan was offering her everything she’d ever dreamed of. No, she thought, he was offering her everything that every woman had ever dreamed of. A man who would never stray, who would always be loyal and faithful to her, a man who would literally fuck her until she couldn’t walk and would want more afterwards. Not only that, but she’d written about him. Maybe not him specifically, but creatures—men—like him. But if there was one thing Zoe believed with her whole heart, it was that if something seemed too good to be true, it usually was. And he did seem too good to be true. He had from the beginning.
It was ironic that her best-selling books had been about men who weren’t truly men at all, but magical, mystical creatures like the one sitting before her. And presented with the reality of it, it was just more than she could take in. Sitting naked on the bed she’d just shot out of like it was on fire, he looked like a god. And all she wanted to do was lick him, but it was stupid and dangerous and about a dozen other really bad things that she couldn’t name at the moment.
“What would happen to me here, Logan? I can’t live out in the middle of nowhere, give up my life and my friends and my house! And knowing what I do about you now, there’s no way in hell you’d ever want to live in the city with me! It would be like a prison for you,” Zoe protested. She was throwing every argument at him that she could think of. Even with how freaked out she was, even with how completely terrifying and unbelievable it all was to her, she still felt the pull. He drew her like a moth to a flame, and she was just about as mindless in her need to go to him.
Two Tickets To Bearadise Page 5