Teddy noted his eyes were less narrow now, more contemplative. “I’m sure.”
“So does someone want to explain to me why Toni wouldn’t tell us you were a bear? We spent a solid month with her in Shamalot—”
“What the hell is Shamalot?” Cormac asked, once more crossing his arms over his wide chest.
“It’s a very, very long story. One we’d be happy to share with you. Privately,” Wanda added with a direct gaze in Teddy’s vicinity. “But that still doesn’t answer the question. Why would Toni purposely not tell us you’re a bear? Why isn’t she a bear, too?”
His answer was stiff as he rose and moved to his computers, turning each screen off. “Because she didn’t know. It happened after we…”
After what?
Teddy wanted to ask, but he wasn’t at all approachable at this point. She needed to get a call in to her brothers and figure out where everything had gone so wrong.
“Can we speak somewhere privately, Cormac? We have a lot to discuss,” Wanda reminded him again, pointing to a door just beside the small kitchen.
Cormac eyed her with suspicion as he pulled off his knit cap and lobbed it on the makeshift plywood he used as a desk. “And her?”
Teddy fought an angry retort, opting to remain silent. Her was just fine, thank you very much.
“I’ll stay with her,” Marty offered, rolling up her sleeves as though she were preparing to babysit a T-Rex. “She can tell me all about this life mate thing while you two talk.”
Like she needed a babysitter. But there was no getting out of this now. She was in for the duration. At least until she could get a phone call to her brothers.
And until she could figure out what to do about this call her heart had made.
Because whether Cormac Vitali liked it or not, he was destined to be hers.
*
Cormac sat on a hard chair opposite Wanda, who’d taken a spot on the bed, crossing her legs as she explained to him this completely whacked tale of wormholes, knights and princes and ogres and Toni, who was, if he’d heard correctly, planning to marry a prince and would thus be a princess, and living in an entirely different realm.
He calmly stroked his cat, Lenny Kravitz’s ears while he listened, and Lenny purred with contentment.
“Are you hearing everything I’m saying, Cormac? Did you hear me tell you I’m a hybrid, or as my dear friend calls me, a halfsie?”
Yep. Half vampire, half werewolf. He’d heard.
“Oh, I hear you talking.”
“But have you absorbed what I’ve said?”
“Like the proverbial sponge.”
She sighed a grating, impatient sound he was meant to hear and shifted her position on the shabby quilt he’d pulled up over his pillow just this morning. She looked almost out of place in a room so sparse and dim compared to her refined sophistication. She belonged with fine crystal, silk drapes and fancy goblets in a mansion somewhere.
Her voice took on a stern teacher’s tone when she said, “I’m not the enemy here, Cormac. So I’d appreciate it if you’d kindly stop treating me as such and pay me the respect I deserve for hauling my butt up this damn mountain just to find you. I came all the way here from New York because we made a promise to your sister—someone we hold quite dear to our hearts after all we’ve been through. If you’re not willing to listen to me, then I’m happy to leave you right here in your frozen tundra of a prison. I do have a family and things that need tending back at home. I also have Nina. A very disgruntled, very lost ex-vampire who, as you’ve seen, is a beast with a food obsession. Clearly you can see my plate is full. Now, either you participate in this conversation, and squish your way onto my full plate, nestled in next to Nina the Crabby, or I leave you here with your alleged life mate and I go home.”
Rolling his head on his neck, he stretched it from side to side, setting Lenny on the floor. Her story was insane.
But was it any more insane than the idea that he’d been bitten and turned into a bear by a Russian mob member? The hair that clogged the drain in that pitiful shower of his after one of those bone-crunching shifts certainly said otherwise.
“You have to admit it’s a lot to wrap your brain around.”
Her face relaxed then and her lips tilted upward in a small smile. “You heard the part about OOPS, our company, right?”
“The paranormal crisis hotline. Yep. I did.” More crazy. Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
“Then you understand that absorbing these sorts of things is a steady diet for me and my friends.”
“Okay, I get the paranormal bit. I do. I get the accident bit, too. But the other-realm thing—Shamalot? A prince? An ogre? Fairies? A castle?”
Her lovely face turned sour when she wrinkled her nose at him. “Is that really any more difficult to believe than you being accidentally bitten and turned into a bear? A bear? Please, Cormac. Surely you’re past the stage of disbelief if you’ve been living with this for three years.”
He rubbed the spot where his finger had once been and grimaced. “Point taken. Look, I know I’m being pretty ornery here, but I’ve been on guard day and night since this whole thing with Toni’s ex-thug of a boyfriend went down. How am I supposed to just trust that you people even know Toni, let alone can help me when no one else will? Not the police, not anyone? I think it’s only fair that if I have to see your side of things, you should have to at least take mine into consideration.”
She slapped her thigh and finally smiled, lightening the vibe of the room in an instant. “Fair enough. But I do have proof we know Toni.”
He sat up straight, wary but all ears. “Via a crystal ball straight from Castle Nantucket?”
Wanda pursed her lips, very clearly not enjoying the joke as she scooped Lenny up and rubbed her nose against his white head. “Castle Beckett, Funny Man. I’ll let that slide for now and just tell you, I know something no one else but you and Toni and one other person in the world knows.”
Now she had his attention—but… “How do I know you didn’t beat it out of her? Maybe hack off her finger the way Stas and his goons hacked off mine to get her to talk?”
Wanda got that eye of the tiger again when she looked at him. “You don’t. There’s a modicum of trust we’re going to have to lend each other here. Once you get to know me—know us—you’ll see how utterly absurd that statement is regarding my two yappy friends and myself. But I also think you’re going to have to take a stab at logic here. Why, if we wanted to kill you, aren’t you already dead? That, you can either take or leave.” She smoothed her hand over her snow pants and re-crossed her legs, cool as a cucumber, and waited.
According to some of those ebooks he’d read, he should at least be able to sense whether she was being truthful. But that’s what he got for putting stock in romance novels because they were the only pseudo guide on the web with anything even remotely like his own very real-life trauma. His choices had turned out to be very slim.
Leaning back, now Cormac crossed his feet at his ankles as Lenny wound his tail around them and said, “Okay, show me your proof.”
“You have a tattoo.”
Cormac lifted an eyebrow, keeping his face passive. “Do I?”
“You do. Toni told us she only knows about it because your best friend Damon never lets you live down that night of infamy and takes every opportunity to razz you about it.”
Shit. Maureen. Aka Mo. His first love. The first love he’d lost, and after seven or eight beers, he’d drunkenly memorialized his love for her with a tattoo. With all sorts of declarations about how he’d never love anyone the way he loved Mo, he’d demanded his friend, Damon, take him to a tattoo parlor where he had her name glorified in ink.
On his left ass cheek.
“And what do you know about Damon and this tattoo?”
“I know it’s your ex-girlfriend’s name on your left butt cheek and you got it in a drunken tattoo parlor run after Mo broke up with you.”
That still didn’t prove anyth
ing. “How do I know you didn’t force Toni to tell you something so personal?”
“Are you denying Mo’s name is on your ass?”
He squirmed in his chair at the memory of that damn night when he was just twenty-one and drunk on what he was sure was love. “I can neither confirm nor deny.”
“Then I believe we’re done. Now, do you want help catching Stas and having him thrown in jail, where he can rot for eternity, so you can see your sister again? Or would you prefer we take our leave?”
Suddenly, he didn’t know. He was so busy keeping his guard up, so used to being alone, aside from the fact that he was unsure they were telling the truth, he didn’t know if he could even accept help anymore. Besides, how could these women help him catch someone who had the entire Jersey police department in his pocket?
“Surely, as those wheels in your mind turn, you’re not doubting our ability to help you, are you? It was you I took down like a tree in the forest, wasn’t it?”
Now he gave her a sheepish grin. “You’re pretty tough. I’ll let you have that.”
“Times two if you include Marty. Add in the other forces we have at work for us, and we’re a pretty damn good team to have on your side. I wish Nina could help as well, but like I said…” She sighed forlornly. “Marty wasn’t joking when she was taunting Nina about chewing her face off. Nina was a formidable foe.”
“So you were all accidently bitten?”
Wanda had explained how they’d all come to be, something he couldn’t deny because of his situation, but certainly something that would take time to digest.
She bobbed her head and chuckled. “Every last one of us, and we help people who’ve had the same experience all the time through OOPS.”
He’d kept his poker face on when Teddy had declared herself a bear, but this was unreal. Now he found himself riddled with curiosity; to know there were others just like him was incredible. “Was Nina always so testy?” The question slipped out before he was able to contain it.
Wanda’s expression was one of pride, despite her next words. “You mean before she was bitten? She was a horror. But she was pretty tough even without the vampire thing. She’s always been cranky and difficult. She has no filter. She’s very confrontational. But as a vampire? She was a bloody warrior with no fear and no doubt she’d come out on top of whatever we faced. Alas, she always did come out on top…”
Wanda’s voice sounded so gloomy, it left his chest feeling tight, though he couldn’t quite explain why. Maybe because they’d both shared a huge loss? The losses were nothing alike, but they were still losses.
“So how did she become human again?”
She lifted her chin, her glossed lip trembling ever so slightly before she appeared to mentally shake it off. “She saved your sister from a very powerful, crazed Queen in Shamalot named Angria. Nina threw herself in the face of this queen’s rage and sank her teeth into her neck to keep her from killing Toni, who was only trying to save the man she’d fallen in love with,” she said in a hushed tone.
Cormac swallowed, unable to speak. He’d come so close to losing Toni not just once, but twice? He closed his eyes and tried to gather his thoughts. If Wanda was lying, she was damn good at it. To come to him with a story as outlandish as this Shamalot tale was one thing. That alone took an act of pure faith, not to mention courage.
But to then concoct a story about this Nina saving Toni’s life and losing her vampiric powers in the process would be beyond ballsy.
“And Theodora?” he asked, her very name on his lips feeling foreign yet comfortable. “Do you think she’s a part of this thing with Stas?”
Wanda sucked in her cheeks again, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know, Cormac. I can’t get a clear read on her. So we keep her close until we know differently.”
To trust Wanda or not.
That was the question.
The other question was the gorgeous summer-blonde lunatic in the other room. Sure, most guys would be happy to have a woman as beautiful as Theodora “Teddy” Jackson declare them hers.
However, a hot woman and a mate for life were two different things, according to those romance novels.
So what to do about the beautiful blonde with the curvy hips, long legs, raspberry-tinted full lips and startlingly hazel eyes. A woman who smelled like Nirvana wrapped in the meaning of life.
Whoa-whoa-whoa. Why was he espousing her attributes when he thought she was batshit?
Why can’t she be one donut hole shy of a dozen and hot? Is there a rule against it? Some unwritten law none of us are aware of, Pooh Bear?
But wait. Wasn’t this the way every single one of those relationships in romance novels had begun?
One of the protagonists declaring an unwitting, sometimes unwilling partner their life mate? They fight, they have all kinds of sexual tension, they have some sort of inner conflict, coupled with an external conflict that keeps them apart, but in the end they overcome said obstacles, fall madly in love and mate?
No. That was crazy made-up shit.
Yep. Just like all the other crazy made-up shit, Mr. Bear.
Well, hell.
Chapter 4
“So life mate, huh? I had no idea bears even had life mates,” Marty prodded, skepticism lacing her tone as she poured Teddy some tea she’d found by rummaging in a cabinet.
She was as uncomfortable hearing it as she was admitting it. But for the time being, the explanation had saved her hide and kept her from showing all her cards. “We do.”
“What happens in your community if you don’t mate with your alleged life mate? Do you have alphas and such who enforce the mate?”
Teddy sipped her tea and eyed Marty over the rim of her mug, weighing her options. But she remembered the rule about inviting anyone into their private culture. Even if Marty and the others were paranormal, they weren’t bears.
“Do you mean like a leader? Like packs and clans and stuff?”
“Packs, clans, a murder of crows, a herd of dust bunnies. Whatever.”
“We’re called sleuths, and no. We don’t have a leader, per se. We don’t band together in quite the way I’ve heard your kind does.” After defining their paranormal roles, Teddy had a much clearer picture of what she was dealing with.
She’d never met a vampire or a werewolf or an ex-paranormal anything, but she’d heard rumors about their kind, understood the basic inner workings of their mating rituals.
“So what happens if you won’t mate with your intended—or you can’t get your intended to mate with you? Do they turn you into a rug?” She laughed at her own joke then, the tinkle of it grating on Teddy’s frayed nerves. Somehow, she had to get away from these women and call her brothers, pronto.
Clarity was desperately needed. Cormac was a bad guy, but if what she’d felt when he’d looked into her eyes was true—if the legend meant anything at all—he was her bad guy.
But he’s a criminal, Teddy…
Of course he is. Why would finding her honest-to-God life mate be any easier than anything else in her life when it came to relationships? Remember the last one and how that turned out?
Stirring her tea, Teddy forced a laugh. “It’s frowned upon, but not necessarily enforced. Plenty of bears mate with bears who aren’t necessarily considered their traditional life mates. But the rule of thumb is probably much like yours. You know the score where that’s concerned. Procreate for the good of the group, yadda, yadda, yadda.”
Marty leaned forward, pressing her chin into her fist, her eyes glittering. “So how did you know your life mate was here? Somewhere so secluded, even remote? Denver’s pretty far away. Was it intuition? A dream? Tea leaves?”
Teddy looked past Marty to Nina’s back, where she focused her gaze as she lied once more. “Instinct, I guess.” Not a total lie. Her instincts had helped her locate Cormac, she just didn’t know at the time he was her life mate.
“You’re awfully vague, aren’t you?” Marty said in the most pleasant of ways, yet there
was the underlying subtext of her suspicion in every word.
She’d purposely kept her answers vague. The less she lied, the less she had to recall. “It’s a little personal, I suppose.”
Nina swiveled around on her chair and made a face, licking her thumb clean of the remaining salt from her potato chips. “Vague means get off the broad’s back and mind your own damn beeswax, Marty. Jesus and the moose lodge. It’s not your job to figure out the direction her hormones are pointed or anything else that has to do with her. That’s not why we’re here.”
Score one for the ex-vampire Nina. She was proving useful.
But Marty waved her off in a dismissive flick of her hand. “It’s just girl talk, Nina. Something you’d know nothing about.”
The undercurrent of anger in Marty’s words gave Teddy pause. Why was she so angry with Nina and why did she care? But it gave her the opportunity to divert the conversation. “So why are you all here?”
Marty’s pink-glossed lips instantly thinned, though she quickly slapped a phony smile on and a wide-eyed expression of innocence graced her face. “Just visiting.”
Now Teddy was suspicious. Tucking her hair behind her ears, she stuck her toe in the deep end of the pool. “It didn’t sound like Cormac knew you…”
“He’s a friend of a friend.”
Nina’s chair scraped abruptly against the floor. “Look, Teddy, here’s the score. We don’t know you and you don’t know us. It’s none of your damn business how we know the big dude or why we’re here. So let’s quit pussyfootin’ around until we figure this out and someone tells us we have to be one big happy paranormal family, okay?”
Marty groaned, dropping her head into her hands. “Nina. Don’t be so rude.”
“Aw, fuck you and your rude. I’m still just as sick and tired of pretense as I ever was. Even more tired of the cat-and-mouse bullshit we play every time we run into someone with secrets. And you got secrets, Theodora. I damn well know you do. I’m just not that interested in ’em. So if you don’t want to tell us your secrets, we’re not gonna ask about ’em. But that means you can’t ask about ours either. Cormac’s with us and he’s not goin’ anywhere without us from now until we say other-fucking-wise. So deal with your own shit and we’ll deal with ours. Capisce?”
Bearly Accidental (Accidentally Paranormal Book 12) Page 4