A Taste of Honeybear Wine (BBW Bear Shifter Standalone Romance Novel) (Bearfield Book 2) (2 page)

“Let’s check the back door,” Alison said to the raven watching her. “The whole house can’t be this full.” She wished Chloe had come with her. She could have used the moral support or maybe the backup.
 

The front hall was the worst, by far, but every room was a junk heap. Entering through the rear of the house, Alison found herself in a kitchen overflowing with canned food, canned soda, and piles of mouse-eaten boxes. She explored the house, tiptoeing as if she was going to wake a monster, opening each door with trepidation.
 

“What if behind the next door I find a skeleton tied to a bed?” Alison said to the empty house. But the room held crates of old photos.

“What if the next room has like a trap that fires a shotgun at me?” Alison asked the empty house. But the room was full of antique toys.

“What if the next room smells just really, really bad?” But the next room offered up velvet-lined cases displaying silvered daggers and firearms.

Three floors and a basement and an attic, completely packed with things. Alison didn’t know if she was more crushed at the amount of work it would take to fix the house, or more excited about the potential money to be found in selling off her grandfather’s things. She was a cocktail of one part exhaustion, two parts excitement, three parts despair and a dash of self-loathing.
 

A text from Chloe appeared on her phone. “Good luck tonight.” And then another, “Watch out for bears.”
 

“I’ll be fine.” Alison responded. “Don’t worry. What are the odds I’d see a bear?”

# # #
 

Michael couldn’t stop thinking about breaking into Old Farmer Jackson’s house.
 

When he woke in the morning, it was the first thought he had.

When he opened his junk shop and meticulously arranged his treasures in orderly rows outside for the tourists and locals to browse—his brother Matt jokingly referred to it as
yard sale chic
—Michael thought about breaking into the house.

When a call came in for someone who needed automotive assistance, or a tow, or who wanted an oil change—Michael rushed to help, but the whole time he dreamed about breaking into that house and rifling through the old man’s things. Michael had many jobs. He wore many hats. In a town as small as Bearfield, he needed to in order to make ends meet. But also, he loved it. And his bear loved it, too.

The bear in Michael craved the
seeking
and the
finding
. Running the junk shop was just an aftereffect of his primal need to sniff out treasure. It was what made him different from his brothers. While on the outside they were all tall, muscular, handsome men, on the inside they couldn’t have been less alike, especially their bears. Where Matt loved to sleep and eat and joke and make peace, and Marcus loved the kill and the fight and all of the cultural duties of the alpha, Michael craved the hunt.
 

He didn’t care about killing the game, that was Marcus’s thing.

He didn’t care about eating the kill, that was all Matt.

Michael wanted to track a deer across miles of wilderness. He wanted to wander as far as he could, learning the roll of the land. He wanted to hunt for treasures in people’s basement sales. He wanted to peer at a car engine and find the secret flaw. He wanted to survey the pretty tourists at the Lodge night after night, finding just the perfect girl to take to bed and then leaving before the sun rose. He wanted to find treasure.

And the old Jackson farmhouse was the biggest treasure he’d sniffed out in his lifetime.

The old man, Carlisle Jackson—the oldest human in Bearfield up until last month—had kicked it and his estate was unclaimed. The estate’s status should have been a secret, but Matt had accidentally tipped Michael off, not that he’d realized it. His brother was the de facto executor of Jackson’s will and had been complaining about how the next of kin was impossible to find. It was shop talk. Matt was blowing off steam on his lunch break over a plate of pancakes at Red Redwood’s Redwood Diner just off Strawberry Lane. It was one of two diners in town, and the other was Marcus’ territory so Matt and Michael avoided it. The big, quiet man liked his solitude more than anything. Seeing his brothers once a month on hunting night was enough for him.
 

The estate news was harmless shop talk to Matt, but it set Michael’s nose to twitching.
 

No heirs and no next of kin meant an auction for the goods in the house. Jackson had been pushing a hundred years old when he passed, or maybe he was older. No one knew and Jackson certainly never told anyone. The old man had a personality like a sack full of rattlesnakes. The idea that he could’ve had a wife and children at some point filled Michael with a mixture of awe and dread. What kind of woman could love a man that ill tempered? Let alone have children with him?
 

Jackson’s father, an escaped slave, had settled in Bearfield during the Civil War. He’d helped found the town and by all accounts had been a charming, generous person. He’d shocked everyone when he’d announced at the age of eighty-something that his pretty young wife was pregnant.
 

The more Michael thought about the estate—the old Victorian house built right at the base of the mountain, the possibility of Civil War-era antiques languishing inside—the hungrier he got. There was nothing Michael or his bear liked more than a good treasure hunt. They were foragers at heart, built to search through miles of wilderness to find the sweetest streams, the tastiest salmon, and the sweetest berries.
 

Or in this case, more wonderful antiques for Michael to sell either online or to the tourist trade that came through his shop.

He couldn’t stop thinking about breaking in, because tonight was the night he was going to do it.

He just needed to get through the day first, and that meant smiling while Marcie Jackson—no relation to the old man—talked at him about his brother and his brother’s new mate.

He couldn’t blame Marcie—the whole town was in a tizzy over Matt and Mina.

For the record, Michael was happy his brother was in love and that he’d found someone like Mina to share his life with. They were perfect for each other. He just wished everyone would shut up about it and stop shooting glances at him in that when-is-it-your-turn way.

It’d been so long since a fated mate had been found in Bearfield that the people—at least the ones in the know—couldn’t contain their excitement. There hadn’t been any proper bear cubs born since Michael, and the prospect of new little ones to dote on and raise was just too much for the good people of Bearfield. When they gushed to Michael about their joy they tried not to look askance at Marcus’s son, but the boy wasn’t a shifter. No matter how kind or smart or hardworking a kid he was, he’d never be the same as a bear in the town’s eyes. Michael felt for the kid. He knew what it was like to be the odd man out.

Marcie Jackson came round Michael’s salvage yard, fundraising for a renovation of the old schoolhouse. “It’d be so nice to have a fresh coat of paint on the place,” she said, picking up some drawer pulls hand-carved from antlers and turning them over in her hands like as if today was the day she’d actually buy something. “New children in town are special. Especially these children.”

“They aren’t even mated yet,” Michael said, sitting on his porch. The day was too nice for Marcie Jackson to spoil it with her busybodying. “It could be a false alarm. False mating happens, like with Marcus.” Michael sipped tea out of a mason jar and let the sun warm his face. Marcie might pretend she was going to buy something, but he knew the truth. She was there to gab about Matt’s maybe one day future kids who may or may not end up being shifters. There were too many maybes for him to get worked up over.

Marcie pursed her lips. She was a cousin of his, once removed or second cousin or something. He could never keep it straight. Half of Bearfield was his blood relation and a tenth of them knew his secret. “They’ll be mated. I can feel it in my blood,” Marcie Jackson said as if that was proof enough. She was plump and dressed in a pink Sunday pantsuit with white polka dots. She looked like an underripe strawberry tottering about on white heels. She’d been Michael’s grade school teacher and he’d never quite forgiven her for it. “Shawna Killdeer had a
vision
.” The woman’s eyes went wide as she said it, as if Shawna having another vague dream was unimpeachable evidence.

Wherever Michael went in Bearfield, the story was the same. Not everyone in town knew about the Morrissey boys and their predilection for occasionally turning into bears, but enough did to create a thick cloud of nattering gossip around Michael’s head.

“Hush,” the women of Bearfield told him as he bumped into them at the library, as he changed their oil, as they picked through the treasures he painstakingly arranged outside his shack. “This time it’s real. Matt and Mina have a real mate connection. We can feel it. Just look at them, you can see how in love they are. They’re practically floating!”

Michael saw how in love they were and he wanted nothing to do with it.

During the brothers’ monthly hunt, with the full moon overhead singing its song in their ears, Matt spent almost the entire hunt in man form, blathering on and on about Mina. Her skin was perfect and sweet to smell. Her ideas were bold and amazing. The way she laughed made birds sick with jealousy, blah blah blah. As Michael and Marcus stalked their game, Matt would not shut up.

The only reason they caught any deer at all that night was because the dumb animals were lulled to sleep by Matt’s boring stories.
 

If that was love, count Michael out. He’d seen how love had destroyed Marcus and he couldn’t bear watching it de-claw his other brother.

Love was the enemy.

He’d take his buffet of sexy tourists at the Lodge over love any day, thank you very much.

Michael waited until nightfall to make his move on the old man’s farm. He wasn’t going to steal anything. He was no thief. He just wanted to scope out the contents so he knew which lots to bid on. With a house as big as this, and no next of kin presenting themselves to the courts, the contents would be auctioned in vague heaps by weight—twenty-pound lots or fifty-pound lots unless the contents were obvious. The court didn’t care about value, they just wanted to empty the place out so they could sell it off. But if Michael could figure out which boxes held the real stuff, or even maybe arrange it so the best things were hidden in the worst boxes, he could make off with a fortune in antiques for a song. His bear nearly roared in excitement.
 

Michael had a backpack rigged up with bungie cords for shoulder straps. He stuffed the important things inside: shoes, a flashlight, his phone and wallet, and a notebook with attached pen for inventorying the house. He stripped down to his skin, looped the cords over his shoulders and let the shift take him. One second he was a man and the next he was a thin bear with golden fur and lively eyes, wearing a backpack.
 

Driving anywhere in Bearfield was a pain, especially at night during the tourist season. The roads meandered and looped, taking their time winding down the mountain. It was so much faster to just bear out and crash through the woods like a giant hairy cannonball. How could his brothers spend so much time as men when being a bear felt so right? As a bear, Michael could see so much more clearly. Every droplet of dew on the leaves sparkled like stars in the night. He could hear the scuttle of squirrels and voles and the thousand crawling critters that lived in Bearfield fleeing before him. The scents of the night air painted a portrait he couldn’t even describe as a man. How could they give this up to waddle around on two feet?

The path from his junk shop to the Jackson farm took him past the pile of boulders and scree that marked the entrance to the elders’ cave. His sensitive ears picked up the rumbling snore of the bears within. His nose caught their scent and the scent of Ernie Gonzalez, tonight’s watchman. Ernie was just inside the cave, pretending to watch some nature documentary while he actually slept. Everyone on the Bearfield Elders Committee took turns watching the cave. It wouldn’t do to have any hiking tourists stumble in and find the giant cavern full of sleeping bears. Also, if one of those bears should awaken after decades of slumber, they needed a friendly face to greet them, to remind them they were human.
 

Michael’s own father was in that cave, and had been for almost twenty years. There’d been an accident. Hunters in the woods had stumbled on Michael’s parents. His mother didn’t make it, and his father had slipped away into the long sleep. Michael had been only a child when he helped Matt and Marcus carry their father into the cave. It’d taken all three of them sweating and straining to haul the giant bear in, though in retrospect Michael realized his own strength probably hadn’t helped much. His father wasn’t the biggest bear in the cave, but he wasn’t far off. At the center of the den was a giant white bear—not a polar bear, just a white bear. He’d been there so long no one even knew his name. Some of the more superstitious types claimed he was the great bear spirit himself, slumbering in peace, protected by the people of Bearfield, and in return he gave them prosperity and safety and power. Michael didn’t know anything about that. He knew what he did—the shapeshifting—was magic, but he never thought much past it. He’d been able to shift since he was a boy and didn’t ever question it.
 

As a child, Michael would venture into the cave some nights, sneaking past whoever was on watch, padding in on his quiet feet. He’d walk the winding path down through the darkness until he found his father. Michael would curl up next to him and then he’d tell him about his day. He’d kept at it until Marcus found him one night, asleep on top of their father. It’d been Marcus’s night for watchman. He’d picked Michael up and carried him home on his wide bear back. Michael had woken up in a bed in his brother’s home. They’d never spoken about it—Marcus wasn’t the type to share feelings—but from that day on Michael had lived under Marcus’s roof, growing up with Marcus’ son, Sebastian, as a brother.