A Taste of Honeybear Wine (BBW Bear Shifter Standalone Romance Novel) (Bearfield Book 2) (7 page)

“I will?” She should have found the idea alarming, but instead it thrilled her. Magic was real. She’d seen it and it’d left a hole in her brain. It didn’t scare her, it
fascinated her
. She probed the hole in her recollection like a tongue feeling a loose tooth. In her heart, she was a scientist. An experimenter. It’s what attracted her to brewing in the first place. She was a terrible cook, a horrible cook. She made the kind of food that chefs spoke to each other about in hushed tones over campfires. But brewing? Brewing was science.
Science you could drink
. She was all about that.

But wait. “Why will I get used to it?”

Matt and Michael exchanged a look—a heavy portentous look—in the rearview mirror.

“Bearfield’s a magical place, is why,” Matt said.

“Stuff happens here,” Michael agreed.

“So are there more shifters?” Alison asked.

“We really can’t say,” Matt said, biting his lip.

“But yes. Totally.” Michael said, an excitement bubbling in his voice. “What do you think of that?”

“It doesn’t feel real. I mean, I know I saw something, but even telling me that the thief guy changed into a raven doesn’t process right. It’s as if you just said the moon’s real first name is Jonathan. I can nod and agree but I have no idea what to do with that information. There are men who change into ravens or ravens who change into men. And also some dogs are secretly cats wearing little suits. It all sounds ridiculous.”

Michael sighed heavily. “Yeah, that’s what I thought too.”

They drove in silence for a while. The winding roads were empty and quiet, and then occasionally tourist cars or trucks came screaming past. But then silence again. The passenger window fronted on the raw face of the mountain, which displayed gray and red stripes to Alison, as if the stone was some old animal asleep for millennia. On the other side was a steep drop leading to the sea of forest that blanketed this region of Northern California, broken only by telephone poles, the occasional rooftop, and a few stray lakes. As they curved around the face of the mountain, the sun fell behind them, and in the distant misty shadows Alison saw what had to be Rook’s Roost.

Calling it a mountain hardly seemed fair, especially compared to the great lumbering beast they were driving on. Calling the Roost a mountain was like calling a child “mister” or “sir,” perfectly acceptable but also rather patronizing.
 

A blade of dark basalt stood alone on the horizon, taller than Bear Mountain but grotesquely thin. If Bear Mountain was a humped slumbering beast, comforting and strong, then Rook’s Roost was a raised sword poised near that beast’s head. Trees erupted from every nook and cranny, spindly branches reaching out over the expanse like they were begging for help. At the very peak stood a massive oak tree, most of it lost in fog, but Alison recognized the profile. And unless her eyes were playing tricks on her, it was larger than it should be. Impossibly large.
 

“Do you have binoculars?” she asked, breaking the silence with a distracted tone. She reached out to accept them without tearing her attention from the oak. She could swear she saw movement in the branches. But when no binoculars were pressed into her grip she turned and remembered where she was. Her eyes fell on Michael and her breath fled her body. He was watching her intently with his golden-brown eyes. No, watching was the wrong word. He was undressing her with his eyes. Undressing her, lifting her up onto his lap, and taking her right here in his brother’s Jeep—with his eyes. No man had looked at Alison that way in such a long time. It did things to her—wicked, delicious, wet things.

Matt sniffed and then shot a glance at Alison and Michael. “Okay, we’re here. Try to keep it together until you get the box back, yeah?” He sniffed again and frowned. “Michael?” he said. But his brother didn’t answer. The younger man was nearly panting, his eyes heavy with lust. “Michael,” Matt said again, but this time a growl reverberated in his voice, so deep and strong that the whole Jeep shook, the mirrors vibrated, and loose change in a cupholder buzzed in sympathy.

“Sorry,” Michael grinned. “My mind was elsewhere.”

Alison knew where his mind had been, and she wanted to go to that place.

Matt left them at the edge of the road, on a bluff overlooking the forest, with Rook’s Roost just a valley away. Only a thousand feet down, then a half mile hike through untamed wilderness, and then up the weirdest, most unwelcoming rock Alison had ever seen. No sweat. The old thrill she used to get from exploring the woods was there again, like that wild college friend who always talked you into closing out the bar even though you had an early class the next day. There was fear, too. Alison never especially liked heights, but it was worth it to push through. Not just for the lockbox and for the house, though that prize would have been enough. And not just because if she didn’t get her mother’s property back her mother would find a way to get Michael incarcerated, though that was reason enough as well. But the best reason was that for the first time in years, she didn’t hear Drew’s voice in the back of her head telling her she needed to lose weight, that she wasn’t good enough, that she was boring. She’d lived with the echo of his disdain rattling around in her head for so long and now that it was gone she felt like winter had finally been driven away by spring. Snow was melting. Flowers were blossoming. The land was hungry for seeds.

She was happy and she didn’t know what to do with it.

“How do we get there?” Alison asked Michael. She stood at the edge of the road, a metal guard rail separating her from a nasty fall. “Do you have a jetpack? A flying horse?”

“Sadly, no. But I do have an old hiking trail. Well, maybe an old native trail. It’s hard to tell the difference these days.” He pointed down and Alison saw it, just barely. It was so narrow that it looked like a trick of the light. The path couldn’t have been more than three feet wide, with no handrails. It was a scratch in the face of the cliff, not a path.

“We can’t walk that. It’s impossible.”

“I’ve done it before.”

“You said it’d been years since you were here last.”

“It has.”

“Were you as big back then as you are now ?”

“Probably not, but it’s easier than it looks. Watch.” Michael stepped over the guardrail, took five steps and vanished from sight in a puff of dust and crumbling rock. Alison’s heart leapt. She took one halting step forward and looked down, only to see Michael standing and smiling up at her from the safety of the ledge.

“It’s narrow, but strong.”

“You scared me,” she said, easing herself down onto the path next to him.

“I’m not going to die today, Alison.” He offered a hand to steady her, pulling her close to him once she gained her feet. Looking up into his eyes, she lost her breath again. He was just too pretty, too sexy. Every time their eyes met it was like being punched with his handsomeness.
 

“How do you know?”

“Because I haven’t kissed you yet.”

Alison glanced around. They were in the chilly shadow of the mountain, on the far western side. A thousand-foot drop greeted her on one side and a rock wall slick with foggy condensation on the other. It was so not the place for kissing.

“Maybe once we get down from here. Maybe.” She couldn’t keep the excitement from her voice.

Michael walked the cliff face with a jaunty step, whistling some song that Alison could only guess the tune of. He was a truly awful whistler. Occasionally he would stop and smile and wave at the promontory of Rook’s Roost, like it was an old friend he’d seen across a party. After the third such stoppage, Alison had to ask what he was doing.

“Are you practicing saying hello to someone? You look mental.”

“We’re being watched. I’m trying to be friendly. I really don’t want these dudes to get the wrong idea about us.”

“What are they, like some backwoods hillbilly clan?”

“Nah,” Michael said. “They’re just old-school shifters. They believe in keeping away from normal people, doing their own thing. Just because they live out here on their own, don’t assume they’re uncultured. These ravens are more like some, what do you call it, survivalist group? Preppers? They have all these ideas about the end of the world and they have enough supplies cached away to live on their own for centuries. They’re a bit like a cult and a bit like some old royal family in a forgotten country.” He shrugged and Alison noted—not for the first time—that his wide, strong shoulders were wider and probably stronger than the path under their feet. “It’s hard to explain. They have their own thing going on and we leave them in peace, but occasionally the younger ones come into town and cause trouble. So most of our town’s impressions of these guys are pretty heavily colored by the teenagers just acting like teenagers.”

“Like how my mom thinks your whole town is full of nudist burglars?”
 

Michael winced. “Yeah, about that. I really am sorry. If I’d known the house belonged to someone I never would have gone in.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Alison said. “I enjoyed the show.” She needed to keep talking. To keep it light and bouncy and flirty. Flirting kept her mind off the stones that shifted under her feet, off the sagging cliff wall, the slick rock face, the thousand-foot plunge into a sea of splinters. Keep talking, she told herself. Keep talking, don’t look down.

So she did. All the way down the path Alison told Michael about her dream to open a brewery using old techniques and modern technology to make microbrews for the discerning traveller. She told him, obliquely, about Drew and watched with satisfaction as the man’s shoulders tensed at the mention of a boyfriend and then eased down when the word
ex
came out. She and Drew had stayed at a Bed & Brew on the east coast, on vacation visiting his family. The place had been delightfully raucous, with sawdust on the floor and a band playing the kind of bass-heavy music that got everyone’s butt shaking. Everyone but Drew. Drew didn’t dance. The food had been decent enough, but the beer had been lackluster. Thin and hoppy and bitter, without any of the complexity that a good brewer could bring to the mash. The night had been one of joy, tempered with an insidious disappointment, both in the beer and in Drew. The man had cared too much about appearances to dance. If he’d danced, he might have looked foolish. Someone might have snapped a pic of him and put it on Facebook. His world was full of
mights
and
maybes
and
what if I look dumb doing thats
.
 

“Do you dance?” Alison blurted out, surprising Michael.

“Sure. Not well, but I dance. Especially in the kitchen.” The path was so narrow that he couldn’t even really turn to look at her, so he pitched his voice off the raw rock of the mountain, half twisting so he saw her out of the corner of his eye. “There’s not really any good place around here to go dancing, except like weddings.”

Weddings. What an ominous word. Drew had tossed the idea around so many times, dangling it like a carrot. If she lost weight, he might propose. If he got the promotion, he might propose. If she ditched her research job and got some proper job with big pharma, he might propose. At some point the carrot became the stick and the idea of marrying Drew had felt like a punishment, not a reward. Her mother, too, used the word as a weapon. Cut your hair or no man will marry you. Wear skirts and heels or no man will marry you. Stop eating butter and bread and chocolate and beer or no man will marry you. The word was an end state, a victory condition, a shiny bauble seized for the win. Maybe that was why her mother had been married seven times. She saw matrimony as a destination, not as a journey. Alison didn’t want that. If she got married, it would have to be as part of the next phase of her life, not some vague trophy grasped and put on a shelf somewhere.

Marriage wasn’t a beer. It wasn’t some product that you sweat over and cooked up and then consumed. No, it was alchemy. It was taking two disparate ingredients and merging them together in just the right way at just the right time so that you got something new and wonderful and delicious out of it that lasted forever.

“Speaking of weddings,” Alison said, enjoying how Michael stumbled slightly at the word. “My sister is getting married next month and I need a date. If we get through this whole thing and you aren’t in jail and I’m not disowned, would you go with me?”

“I broke into your house naked and you’re asking me out on a date?”

“Well, when you put it like that.”

“Of course I’ll go.”

“You’ll have to wear clothes.”

“Never mind then. I thought it was one of those naked weddings.”

“The nakedness happens afterwards,” Alison said without thinking, and then felt her cheeks burn with embarrassment. “I mean, like the newlyweds. The newlyweds get naked. And other people too, probably.” She thought of Michael’s naked body. She’d sort of been thinking about it a lot since witnessing it last night. But every time she did it was like all of her thoughts sat down in silence to appreciate the beauty of it and her brain sort of switched off.

“I suppose I could put clothes on. Just this once. Does it have to be a full-on tux, or can I wear one of those ironic tuxedo t-shirts?”

“It depends on how much you want my mother to kill you.”

Michael laughed, his voice booming out over the forest, startling a flock of starlings who took to the air in annoyance. For the rest of the way down, he took a turn talking. Telling Alison about his wrecker, his auto shop, and his real passion in antiquing. He didn’t call it that, of course, no straight man ever said the word
antiquing
. But it was what he described, combing through estate sales and auctions for treasures he could polish, repair and sell. The man’s face lit up with a gorgeous light as he described the very best scores he’d made in the few short years he’d been in business, and before she knew it, they were at the bottom of the cliff, facing the wall of forest that surrounded the Roost.

“Are your feet on solid ground?” Michael asked.

“Yes, why?” Alison said, turning to face him, bracing herself for the punch of handsomeness that was coming. She was prepared this time for his golden eyes, his pouty lips, the dusting of stubble on his square jaw. But she wasn’t prepared when he picked her up, pressed her against the mountain and kissed her.