Michael was snapped out of his reverie by the sound of a shotgun being cocked.
A curvy woman, with chin-length straight black hair and warm brown skin, stood sleepy-eyed in pink pajamas in the doorway with a gun aimed squarely at Michael’s chest.
“Stand up,” she said. “Slowly.”
Sighing, Michael put his hands in the air and rose to his feet.
“Are you naked?” she asked.
“I can explain,” Michael said, smiling sheepishly.
The bear inside him froze and quivered like it did when it scented a particularly amazing treasure. This one, it roared. This one is our mate.
Chapter 2
Bearly Dressed
The man was gorgeous. Impossibly so, with rippling muscles, a lean torso and a boyishly handsome face made even more attractive by the embarrassed grin. If you’d asked Alison Meadows if she would have been alarmed to wake up to find a naked man prowling her house, she would have looked at you in that way she learned from her mother, like you were an utter fool. It was her mother’s favorite expression, one Alison had learned early and learned well. Of course she would have been alarmed. Naked. Strange. Man. Which part of that isn’t alarming?
But here she was, with an old shotgun aimed right at the chest of the most beautiful man she’d ever seen, and she didn’t feel in danger at all.
Instead of the familiar panic coiling at the base of her neck and that sour tang of adrenaline on her tongue that she knew from so many fights with Drew, she felt excited. Her fingers and toes tinged with anticipation and her lips buzzed like they did when she’d sampled her own brew a little too much. What was going on?
“Really, I can explain,” the man said. His voice was a warm Northern Californian drawl. He held his hands up and made no attempt to move or even cover himself. A strategically placed piled of antique soda bottles just barely hid his manhood from her eyes. Did he see her peeking? If she raised up on her tiptoes just a little she’d be able to peer around the bottles. But what was she thinking? This wasn’t a date gone sideways, this was a stranger who broke into her new home to steal her things.
“Tell me this,” Alison said. “Where would you put it?”
“Put what?” The man’s forehead crinkled adorably, giving his boyish beauty a certain roughness that made her breath stop for a second. She felt like she’d walked in on a god and now had no idea what to do with him. Well, that’s not entirely true. She had some ideas of what to do, but none of them seemed appropriate.
“Whatever you were planning to steal? Where would you put it?”
The man turned slightly to show off a backpack hanging loosely on his back. He also showed off his incredibly muscular butt. Did he do that on purpose?
“As you can see,” he said, “I have a backpack.”
“It’s quite small.”
“I wasn’t actually going to take anything. I was just having a look around.”
“Then why the backpack?”
“To put my shoes in?”
Alison held the shotgun steady. She’d never fired a gun in her life and had no idea if it was loaded or if the safety was on. She was pretty sure she had the right end pointed at the naked man, but that was as far as her gun knowledge went. She rested her index finger on the trigger, just in case the insanely handsome naked man that had appeared in her home at night did anything weird.
“I have so many questions for you right now,” she said. And Alison was surprised to find herself smiling at the man.
“Michael,” he said.
“No, my name is Alison.”
“My name is Michael. Ask away. I won’t move until you feel safe.”
“Why naked? If you were going to rob a house, why naked? Is it because of fiber samples?”
He nodded, considering the question. “Well, firstly, I wasn’t here to rob anyone. I didn’t even know anyone was here. I thought the estate was going to auction because they couldn’t find old man Jackson’s heirs.”
“I’m his heir,” Alison said, letting go of the gun just long enough to wave at Michael. “Hi.”
“Hi yourself.” He smiled wider and Alison felt her knees shake. A sensual heat pulsed deep inside her. It’d been months since she and Drew had last had sex. She just couldn’t stand getting naked in front of him anymore. Every time her ex had seen her body he’d pursed his lips like she was serving him a plate of lima beans. When someone rejects you enough times, you just stop trying. But this man, the way he looked at her body, he was like a man in the desert staring at an oasis.
“You were explaining why you were naked?”
“I can’t explain that.”
“I do have a gun.”
“Do you often shoot people who can’t explain themselves?”
“I’m considering it going forward.”
“What do you do, Alison?”
“Tell me: why naked?”
He shrugged. The shadows on his muscles writhed and Alison found herself biting her lip to keep from sighing in appreciation. If Netflix had a show that was just this man, like, breathing and shrugging and turning slightly this way and that, she would never ever leave the TV. It was hypnotic. The tingle in her toes and lips was increasing. It was almost a shiver now.
“Did you know my grandfather?”
“Not really. We’d spoken a few times. He came by my shop once or twice, when he needed something. But he kept to himself. I think Major Joe was the only one he really had any contact with in town.”
“Major Joe?”
“He’s our postman. Your grandpa did a lot of mail business.” Michael shrugged again, his beautiful muscles bunching and rolling hypnotically. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“Excuse me?” An intense heat burned in Alison’s face. And in her blood. And everywhere else, too. She felt too hot, too dizzy. Just being near this man was making her drunk.
“I’m not seeing anyone, in case you were curious.” His smile faded and his entire being took on a serious cast. Alison had the feeling of suddenly being sized up as prey by some wild animal. Her mouth went dry. She wanted to run far away, as fast as she could. She wanted to drop to the ground and pretend to be dead. She wanted to kneel down before him and lick her way up his thighs.
By trade, Alison was a field botanist. She’d worked for a pharmaceutical firm for a few years out of college, before layoffs and the recession cost her the job. She’d specialized in creeping around the woods, searching for heirloom varieties of herbs. More than once she’d been so busy, lying on her belly in the mud, examining the leaves of some plant, that she hadn’t heard the approach of a big predator. She’d faced down wolves and mountain lions in California, gators in Missouri, and once a panther in Florida. The same prickling sensation that had alerted her all too late to the animals was tiptoeing down her spine as she faced Michael.
As pretty as the man was, he was dangerous. He was naked and in her home. The spell he’d cast over her broke. She still felt a molten attraction to the man, but something about him clearly wasn’t right.
Normal men don’t break into homes naked. Or at all, really.
What exactly were you doing here?” Alison asked.
“I was scouting your grandpa’s house before the auction. Trying to find the best things so I could bid accordingly.”
“There’s not going to be an auction,” Alison said.
“Well, yeah, I know that now. You really should have responded to the attorney’s inquiries.”
“I don’t know anything about that. But if he contacted my mother, she would have ignored him. She hates attorneys.”
“I don’t like wearing pants,” Michael said. “I still do it. Sometimes.” There was something in his eyes. Something he wasn’t telling her. Alison fixed him with her stare, the gun still held in her hands. “Okay, yeah, there’s something else. Your grandpa, he has something that belongs to my family. A pendant in the shape of a bear carved from basalt. It’s rough looking, but important to us.”
“S
entimental value?” Alison asked. She knew that people too often made that claim to disguise actual value. And if she could find treasure to sell in the house, she could get out from under her mother’s thumb and maybe, if she was lucky, convert the farmhouse into the brewery she’d been imagining.
“Sentimental? I guess. But mostly I want it because it’s magic.” He said it calmly, as if he was saying the sky was blue or that tacos were his favorite food.
“Magic?”
“Magic.”
Alison sighed. “Why are the pretty ones always crazy?”
“You think I’m pretty?” Michael grinned back at her. Why wasn’t he cold? Alison was freezing and she was fully dressed and wearing a sweater.
“Have you seen you? You know you’re pretty. Even worse, you’re annoyingly pretty.” Alison tried to shrug but her finger slipped and the shotgun roared to life in her hands, bucking and jerking and spraying fire across the room. It leapt out of her hands with the force of the kickback, throwing itself down the long hall behind her.
Michael stumbled backwards, his face so surprised it would have been comical if she hadn’t just basically killed him. She met the most handsome man in the world and then accidentally killed him. Her mother would love this.
The buckshot from the gun sent glass shards flying, smashed the window behind Michael, and generally ripped up mounds of her grandfather’s hoarded books and papers. A thin cloud of gun smoke hung in the air and Alison’s ears rang with the lingering thunder of the accidental shot.
She raced over to Michael to inspect the damage, running her hands up and down his firm taut chest. His skin radiated a comfortable warmth that made her eyes feel heavy even then.
She couldn’t find any wounds.
“I don’t see any blood,” she said.
“I’m fine. I think the buckshot missed me.”
“At this range? Look at the room! The room is destroyed but you seem fine. Maybe I just can’t see them.” Alison grabbed his hand. An electric spark leapt between them and the fire inside her swirled and thickened into something primal. “Come with me to the bathroom. There’s better light in there.”
“Really, I’m fine.”
“You broke into my house. If you don’t want me to press charges, come right now.”
Up close he was even taller than she’d thought. Alison wasn’t short by any means, and her curvy figure made her seem taller than she was, but next to Michael she felt positively petite. She liked it. She liked it a lot.
The big man sighed. “Okay, but really. I think it missed.”
Alison dragged him down the hall, weaving between stacks of antique china, a pile of old street signs leaning against the railing in a rusty mess, and around a bleary-eyed, fluffy, squashed-face old cat who stared at them with a look somewhere between disdain and boredom.
“Oh, hello!” Alison said. “I didn’t know a cat lived here.” In response, the old cat rolled his eyes and padded off into the office they’d just left.
Michael sniffed. “I was wondering why there weren’t mice or spider webs everywhere.”
“But the kitchen—all of the boxed food had been gnawed open—what else could it have been if not mice?”
“Maybe the cat did it? Your grandpa’s been gone weeks and no one knew a cat lived here. The mangy thing must have gotten hungry enough to play rat.”
“Don’t talk about him like that.” Alison frowned, pushing open a door to locate the bathroom. She’d found it once, but the house was a maze of junk piles and she had the feeling that they were shifting around when she wasn’t looking.
“You just met him, and already you’re feeling protective? He’s just an old mouser and by his size, a pretty good one at that.”
Alison had always wanted a cat. Drew had said no. Firmly, absolutely no. He wasn’t even allergic, he just thought of cats as starter babies and that was a road he never wanted to walk down. “If we have a cat,” he’d told Alison, “we get tied down. We can’t travel. We have to be home by a certain time to feed it or water it. No, that’s not for me. Besides, you don’t want to become one of those weird cat ladies, do you?” It turned out she did. She really did. Drew had been so opposed to putting down roots, to joining any community, to having anything permanent in his life—besides Alison, for a while—that he’d convinced her it was what she’d wanted as well. Just one more falsehood she’d accepted as truth, because he’d filled her ears with it every day. What else had he said to her that was wrong? Maybe—just maybe—she wasn’t too chubby to be loved? Maybe finding a place to call home wasn’t a death sentence?
She’d been in her grandfather’s house for less than twelve hours, and aside from accidentally shooting a beautiful man with a shotgun, she’d been happy. Oddly, disproportionately happy. Going through his things was an amazing treasure hunt. She still hadn’t found the lockbox her mother demanded, but she’d found so much else. Vintage jazz records. A signed photo of Elvis and Grandpa Jackson shaking hands. A medal of honor from World War II. He’d lived an amazing life, for a while at least. Then something had changed for him and he’d been too scared to leave his home. Alison didn’t know what it was—it wasn’t like the man had left a journal lying about with ominous passages detailing his descent into madness—but something had happened to her grandfather. She was sure of it. There were signs of it in his things, some date, twenty-ish years ago, when he went from being a cranky old man to being a recluse. While searching his home, Alison had come across receipts—vast boxes of receipts. Given enough time she knew she could piece together a story from them, a timeline of his activities, but she didn’t have time.
If she didn’t find her mother’s lockbox, she’d be turned out of the house. Her mother would hire a firm to come in and clean it and anything that wasn’t what she was after would be junked or sold off. And then the house would be sold off. Her mother would be richer, but all of this sense of history, of family, would be gone. Her grandfather was her people. He was her blood. Knowing him and the history he’d carved for himself in Bearfield was a way to know herself better.
After opening what felt like every door on the upper floor twice, Alison finally found the bathroom. It was neater than the rest of the house, though still crammed full of stuff. It was just that the stuff in the bathroom was all bathroom-related, so it had a more organized approach to mess. There were massive piles of toilet paper rolls, stacks of clean towels covered in cat hair, and enough medical supplies to treat an army.
“Wow,” Michael said when he saw the extent of her grandfather’s overstocking habit. “Was your grandpa expecting the apocalypse? I’ve seen hospitals with fewer boxes of bandages.”
Alison turned to the man. Somehow she’d forgotten he was naked, in the frustration of trying to find her way through the maze of her grandfather’s house. But here in the bathroom, with the fluorescent lights casting their harsh glare on every surface, she had no choice but to confront Michael’s body head on. She tried hard not to look down, to stare at his long thick dangling—no, better not to look.
Maybe just one look?
Just one look to get it out of her system? Yes, that was surely the way to go. She’d seen naked bodies before. She’d even thought Drew’s physique impressive at one point, before she realized what a garbage soul he had beneath his gym-toned muscles. But Michael’s body was different. He didn’t have that puffy gym rat figure that looked like at any moment it was going to deflate noisily and messily. No, he had a body that looked earned through years of lifting heavy things because he needed to. Maybe the guy lifted cars for a living? Or threw houses around? Maybe he wrestled bears? Alison found her eyes drawn to the clean lines of muscle that defined Michael’s body. He had a light smattering of hair on his chest and legs, and a thick black thatch surrounding the part she was trying desperately not to think about. Because whenever she did think about it—that overly large organ between his legs—she could feel the heat in her body rise to threatening levels. If she thought about it to
o much, the heat would win and she’d have to reach out and touch it and that would not be good. No guy who looked like Michael would want anything to do with her. She was sure of that.
Alison closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The man smelled maddeningly good, like eucalyptus and vanilla and honest sweat, with just a touch of gunpowder from where she’d shot him at point blank range with her grandfather’s shotgun.
Right. The shotgun.
“You have no wounds. Not even a scratch.”
“Like I said, it must have missed me.”
“Something is not right here. You have smudges from the powder, but no burns. How is that possible?”
The big man smiled boyishly and shrugged, like he’d just been caught stealing cookies and not surviving what should have been a horrible mistake.
In the hall, the old cat shrieked. The sound of dishes smashing, of someone stumbling and then cursing, echoed throughout the house.
Alison shot Michael a look. “Do you have an accomplice?”
They both ran into the hall, where a thin man with greasy black hair was trying to disentangle the old cat from his leg. The man was short and stooped, but in the dim light it was difficult to make out his face. Something rattled under his arm as he jumped and swung his leg about, trying to shake the cat off. For his part, the old mouser hissed and yowled and raked the man’s legs with his hind claws and sunk his teeth into the thief’s leg.
“Hey!” Michael yelled, pointing at the man. “Drop that box!”
The dark stranger’s head snapped up and fixed Michael and Alison with a lopsided sneer. He had bright eyes that shone blankly in a pointy face dominated by a comically large nose. The stranger held the box up for all to see—it was unmistakably the lockbox Alison’s mother had described—and then swung it down at the old cat, batting the animal off his leg with a resounding crack.
Alison ran down the hall toward the man. She didn’t know what she was going to do if she caught him, but the sight of him hitting her cat filled her with such outrage that she found herself acting without thinking. The dark stranger turned and ran, weaving lithely around the piles of junk and then tipping them behind him as he ran down the length of the house toward the office. Alison tried to chase after him, stepping carefully and then boldly on the mess of spilled books, shattered plates, cans of old forks and every other damn thing her grandpa had left strewn about. She did fine for about five steps, and then a pile of glossy magazines slid under her feet and she toppled over, her hip slamming into the railing, her arms pinwheeling, and then that terrible feeling came over her where she knew she was going to fall over the railing, down the stairwell, to her death. She shrieked and then, just as she was going over, strong arms caught her in a crushingly warm embrace.
A Taste of Honeybear Wine (BBW Bear Shifter Standalone Romance Novel) (Bearfield Book 2) Page 3