A Taste of Honeybear Wine (BBW Bear Shifter Standalone Romance Novel) (Bearfield Book 2) (3 page)

He visited less often these days. His hopes of his father waking had diminished as the years passed. But stomping past the cave, on his way to break into the farmhouse, his thoughts couldn’t help but be pulled to his father. He said his
at leasts
as he passed.

“At least he didn’t die.”

“At least he isn’t in pain.”

“At least he’s dreaming.”

He’d wake one day—all of the bears did. It could be tomorrow or it could be in a hundred years.

* * *
 

It took Alison forever to fall asleep in the house. Even finding a bedroom took so much longer than she could have expected. Nearly every room was packed with boxes overflowing with notes and trinkets and junk. She found a closet that was literally stuffed full of Happy Meal toys from the eighties, still wrapped in plastic. Who does that?

Her grandfather’s bedroom wasn’t any better. She missed the bed the first time she peeked into the room—a wall of brown cardboard shipping boxes shielded it from view. But on her second pass through all the rooms, she discovered it. A queen-sized low-to-the-ground oak-framed little bit of comfort. At least her grandfather had good taste in beds. She thought about washing the sheets and comforter and pillow cases, but that would have meant going alone into the basement after dark and she’d seen too many horror films to even consider that. She’d do laundry in the morning, when the sun was up, with a shotgun. She didn’t want to be the brown girl who died in the opening scene, just so the audience would understand the true horror of the evil house when a pretty white family moved in.

Her family tree was a mix of black and white and Chinese and Native American roots. She had the kind of look that made people ask “Where are you
from
?” whenever they met her. “San Francisco?” she’d reply, but that was never good enough so she’d launch into a story about her black grandfather and her Chinese grandmother meeting in the city just after WWII. But as soon as people found out she was basically American and not from anyplace exotic, they lost interest in the story. Which was fine with Alison, because she hardly knew it herself. Her mother never spoke about her own parents and Alison’s father had split when she just a baby. She never heard his side of things.

Alison stripped the sheets off her grandfather’s bed—now
her
bed—and unrolled her old sleeping bag on top of the mattress. It was like camping indoors, but without the bugs or the raccoons stealing your food, or the fear of bears tromping by. She’d hoped that being on her own would free her, give her focus, but so far it’d sent her into a wicked spiral of self-doubt and regret. She’d even considered calling Drew. And that would have been a terrible idea.

Just as she’d fallen asleep, a sound woke her. It was the unmistakable sound of someone opening a creaky door in an old farmhouse. Her first ridiculous thought was that it was her grandfather’s ghost, come back to search through his boxes for some lost precious object. But that was silly. There was no such thing as ghosts. It was likely a squatter or a burglar or maybe a serial killer who preyed on single women in decrepit farmhouses.

It took Alison mere seconds to terrify herself with possibilities while the sounds of
something
walking around her new home drifted up to her. Whatever it was, it was heavy. The floors squeaked under Alison’s weight, but they shrieked under the intruder’s. A big man, Alison thought. Or maybe a bear. A bear could have smelled the food, pushed the back door open, and wandered in. Then she heard the intruder climb the stairs and knew it must be a man.

Alison could have hidden behind the pile of boxes. She was certain her grandfather would have. But that wasn’t how she was raised. If she let some strange man rob her house the first night she slept there, she would never feel safe again. She had to take a stand.

The old shotgun leaned against the wall near the door. Alison checked to make sure a shell was in the chamber, and went off to scare away whoever had the nerve to steal from her new home.

* * *
 

As Michael approached the farmhouse, he shifted into his man form. The old man had been into some weird stuff. There were rumors among the Bearfielders that the man was a sorcerer, that he was a demon, that he was a hunter and a spy secretly keeping tabs on the shifters in town. All of that sounded like bunk to Michael. But the old man had done something that kept shifters off his land as long as he lived. No one knew what. Behind the farmhouse were two of the largest beehives Michael had ever seen. More than once while tromping through the woods, searching for snacks, he’d smelled the honey in those hives and gone charging after it, only to be brought up short at Jackson’s property line.
 

It wasn’t like a wall or a force field or anything so blunt, but rather whatever Jackson did to keep people like Michael off his land just made it feel like a really bad idea to enter his property. It was as if his mind wanted to set foot on the old man’s lawn, but his legs refused the order.
 

When they were younger, he and Matt had tried many times to get into Farmer Jackson’s honey. The smell of it wafting across the valley drove them crazy with need. They’d tried getting a running start, pushing each other over the line, and once Matt had even rolled himself down the valley wall, crashing and thundering like a furry avalanche. He’d rolled clear over the property line, but as soon as his momentum arrested he’d run off it as if his tail was on fire.
 

But now that Jackson was dead, Michael could enter, though he still felt a heavy dread as he crossed the line, as if the magic was still there, waiting to rise up and shove Michael away. He sat and fished his shoes and flashlight out of the backpack. He’d have to enter the house and recon it as a man. His bear would crack the floors in two. Still, the bear in him was on point, keenly interested in every new thing around.
 

Michael entered through the back door into Jackson’s kitchen. Towers of canned food lined the walls. Michael’s heart sank. He’d known Jackson would have some cool stuff to paw through, but he hadn’t counted on the man being a hoarder. There was too much to go through in one night. He’d never find the good stuff if he had to look through ten thousand boxes.
 

Michael wasn’t only searching for treasure to sell. There were rumors that a special pendant—a necklace with an obsidian stone carved from the very heart of their mountain—was in Jackson’s possession. No one had seen it in a generation, but Shawna Killdeer had one of her visions about it and told Michael she’d seen it in an old lockbox, in one of the upper floors of Jackson’s house.

Now most of Shawna Killdeer’s visions were maddeningly vague. She’d say things like, “When the orange has sounded thrice and the young have supped with the old, then and only then shall the hatching begin!” And no one ever knew what that meant. But sometimes she’d see clearly, like for one moment the vision world came into sharp focus, and she’d speak plain and true.
 

The bear in Michael didn’t care about the pendant. It wanted to find food and game, to find someone soft and beautiful to rut with, to find treasures to sell. The idea that something could be valuable because it was useful was alien to the bear. You ate and drank and fucked and bartered and that was life, as far as his animal was concerned.
 

Michael walked through the house naked, but for his shoes and backpack. No signs of life. No one was here but him and it wasn’t like passing cars would see his flashlight. No one drove this road unless they were making deliveries. His bear wanted to open every box, to dump every container on the floor to root through, but Michael fought the urge. He climbed the steps to the upper floor, the old wood groaning and creaking underfoot. The house was crammed full of stuff—even the steps had boxes and bags on them—but it wasn’t dirty. It wasn’t moldy or decaying. It needed work—lots of work—but the house had good bones and had avoided the rot that could set in when the owners failed to keep up.

Michael found the upstairs office and decided to try there first. The room was dominated by an old oak desk that was over six feet wide and four feet deep. It was the kind of desk you imagined in an executive’s office, a hundred years ago—a desk like a tank. Accountant boxes filled the room, some spilled and disheveled with papers crashing out of them in frozen waves of white. Matt picked his way around the boxes, sat himself at the desk and began going through the drawers. Old photos watched him from gilded frames. Jackson had a family at one point. They’d never lived with him in Bearfield, but they’d visited enough times to make an impression and to add “has estranged family” to the official dossier on Jackson. Michael couldn’t resist wiping the dust off the largest of the framed photos. A happy family stared back at him, with Jackson in the middle looking younger than Michael had ever seen him. A woman who must have been his daughter hugged him, while at her feet seven girls played and wrestled and stuck out their tongues at the camera. What had happened between the old man and these women? Where’d they gone?

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?”