Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance) (A Jamesburg Shifter Romance) (13 page)

“That’s the wild part,” he said. “I got no clue. I agree there must be someone on the take, someone who stands to gain, but I gotta be honest with you. I got no clue. There’s something I ain’t seeing, but it’s because I’m just a poor, old beat cop. I don’t have anything to do with the smoky room, closed-door stuff, but I know it happens. All I can think is there’s some other food company wanting to make waves, and so they’re either hiring, or letting, this rogue bunny make a fuckin’ mess of the Cannery.”

He paused for a second. “Excuse my language.”

Elena snorted a laugh. “That’s the least of my worries. Well, listen, I – we – got some stuff from her house.”

“I can’t sanction break-ins, Elena, you know that. And did you say ‘we’? Who is we?”

“Oh, my, uh,” I paused. “I guess he’s my friend, now. West.”

“West? Like Thomas?”

My heart sank into my stomach. I’d totally forgotten, somehow. Maybe it was the excitement, maybe it was something else. Or maybe I was just an idiot.

“He’s a good man. One of the best. But if you’re around him, you already know that.” He didn’t say anything else for a moment. “But about the breaking-in business, I didn’t hear that from you.”

“You didn’t. In fact, you don’t even know I did it. But what you
can
do is give me about three hours in the PD’s lab.”

The way Ralph said “what” reminded Elena of a kid who just got told he was going to Disney World, except in an irritated way instead of elated. “How do you expect me to do that?”

“I don’t need much time, and it doesn’t need to be any particular time of day. Just, let me know when the techs are gone. No one will ever know. But I’ve got some samples that I need to analyze. Saliva, fingerprints, that kind of thing.”

“Why,” Ralph began, “do I feel like this is the beginning of a long and completely ridiculous relationship that’s going to cause me way more trouble than it’s worth about ninety percent of the time, but then that other ten percent will make it all worth it?”

Elena’s answer was a laugh. “So, you’ll do it for me?”

“Jesus,” he said. “They book it about seven most nights. Janitorial staff comes through around eleven or midnight, or later if they’re hanging out shooting the shit with the off-duty hyenas, which happens more than you’d think.”

“Great! I’ll pay you back at some point. I’ll think of something.”

“Yeah, sure, kid,” Ralph said. “Just do me one favor?”

“What’s that?”

“Don’t tell your partner I’m doing this, all right? I don’t want him getting all excited.”

“Deal,” Elena said, grinning wide.

––––––––

“U
sing stuff is about a million times better than the do-it-yourself spy kit I put together when I started.”

Elena clipped off the end of her long-stored Q-tip and dropped it in the saliva sample on the centrifuge. She added her distilled water, capped it, and jammed the whole works into what appeared to West to be a cousin to the vibrating bed he’d slept in once at a cheap motel. She extracted part of the resulting mixture, placed it in a tube, sealed the tube, and slid the thing into a very official looking envelope.

He stopped paying attention when she began the process on the second sample – the one from the teeth – but about fifteen minutes later, she was done with that one, too.

“So you just mail them off and hope there’s a match?” West asked, still not entirely sure why he’d been dragged along to play CSI. “And also hope the department doesn’t realize what you’re doing?”

“Yep!” Elena said. “I think of myself as a public servant. I pursue the greater good and it just so happens people pay me for my service. I’d do it anyway, whether or not I could eat, just to know I was doing a good turn for my fellow man.”

Somehow, she recited all that without taking her eyes off the centrifuge. When more strands appeared, she collected those, sealed them on a slide, and put it in a second envelope.

“You’ve practiced that. A lot, I’m guessing. And I thought you said you were a cheating mate chaser.”

“Uh-huh, and? I can’t think of a better public service than chasing down assholes.”

She went to work on the fingerprint. West watched in something approaching awe as Elena’s tiny, deft fingers moved the fingerprint to a scanner, and she busied herself fiddling with the knobs.

“Fair enough,” he said. “But... how do you know how to do all this shit?”

“What, this? The machines and all?” she asked. “Easy. They’re all automatic. I just push the buttons and screw around with the knobs to make it look like I’m doing something more complicated than I really am. Everything I need to know I learned from YouTube videos.”

As the machine whirred, a half smile quirked across Elena’s face. West, watching her, felt his heart skip a beat. When she acted like this, moving with a purpose, in a way he’d never been able to move, not even in his best days, he couldn’t stop looking at her.

“Besides,” she finally said, “there are instructions on the side.”

Snapped out of his longing daydream, West spoke up. “I learned how to use one of those paint sprayers with a video. And how to fix my washing machine. I might be able to grow anything from a seed to a massive vegetable, but I didn’t know anything about sump filters and how to clean them until I saw ToolMan251 fix a washer like mine.”

“Crazy, isn’t it?” she asked. “What the hell did we do ten years ago?”

“Well,” West said, “I usually blacked out and beat people half to death. What about you?”

“Ran from every problem I ever had,” Elena answered. It was easy to talk about serious things when her hands were busy and she had an excuse not to look her mate in the face. She didn’t have to see the way his expression changed and hope she wasn’t saying anything that was going to ruin things.

He didn’t respond, he just rested his hand on the small of Elena’s stooped back. She took it to mean
“go on, talk if you want
” which is exactly what she needed to hear.

“I had a lot of chances when I was a kit,” she said. “I fucked all of them up. I’d get started on something – one thing I remember in particular. When I was in college, there was a project, for my history class. The class was about Ancient Greeks. Taught by the funniest little hedgehog. Anyway, we had a project.”

The scanner made a beeping noise. Elena opened the cover, moved the fingerprint to the next part of the device – which West then realized was labeled “2” and had a dotted image of a slide to match up – then shut the door and continued the scan.

He smiled to himself, but didn’t want to interrupt.

“This project, we were supposed to write a lesson about whatever, and then give it using the Socratic Method. You know, where you ask people questions and argue with them until they arrive at the right answer?”

“Yeah,” West said, though he didn’t actually. Gently, he kept stroking the small of her back, though somehow her shirt had crept up a bit, so his fingertips brushed her bare skin.

Something on the scanner beeped again, though it started back on its own. To West, this was all a bunch of voodoo that didn’t make any sense, but Elena was pretty clearly unimpressed with even the highest tech boops and bleeps.

“So I had this assignment, and I started on it, and then a few days later, Duggan – that’s the professor – he told us that because of time constraints, we were doing them as group projects. Six groups of five each. No big deal, right?”

Getting a little more of skin-on-skin with each pass of his hand, West shrugged and grunted in a way that said “no big deal.” He thought about leaning down and kissing the tiny hairs on her bare skin, but decided maybe this wasn’t the time or the place for a make out session that would probably get a lot hotter than just some casual necking.

“It crushed me like a bulldozer. I couldn’t handle it. I mean, what if I said something stupid and the group got a lower grade? What if I, I dunno, completely screwed up some important fact or point of our presentation? I’d let all those people down.”

“What was the project
about
?”

“That’s the best part. I got no clue. Not a single idea. The only thing I remember is the anxiety. The way every day I went to class, or the little group meetings, how I felt like I was drowning. And that’s not some bullshit comparison – I’ve drowned before. I was sixteen, knocked myself out on a diving board, and came to in the middle of fighting for air. I had no idea which way was up, where I was, and then I just felt like my lungs were burning. Then someone pulled me out, sucked on my face for a second and I threw up.”

West had to laugh at that, and good thing, because she did too. “That’s a shockingly accurate way to describe receiving CPR,” he said. He dared to dip his finger a bit further down Elena’s back.

“There was that, and then there was this project,” she continued. “It felt exactly the same way. Finally, I just let it get the best of me. I quit going to class, stopped answering calls, and eventually,” she paused, and then stopped talking.

“Yeah?”

“You’re going to think I’m the world’s biggest basket case,” she said.

“Nah,” West said, in that delicious drawl. “Ally Sheedy, she’s the basket case. I’ve seen the movie.”

“Oh my God, he
isn’t
an alien,” Elena said, smiling playfully. The scanner blooped, and she adjusted it. “This might change your mind. I felt – shit, feel – so stupid. So this was one project, right? One simple project. Even if it sucked, who cares? And looking back, I understand that. But in the moment? I couldn’t face those people, or the vague, improbable possibility of ever letting them down. I just quit.”

“Like, school?”

“Yup. But I was too scared even to go to the registrar and
actually
quit. So I just stopped going. Flunked three classes, and somehow got an “A” and a “B” in the other two. Never did quite figure that one out.”

The scanner beeped, prompting Elena to move the slide to the “3a” position. She pressed the button and sighed as it started whirring, and ran her hand through her hair. This was the first time since they’d met that West saw her without something holding her hair up, at least when she was clothed. The white frosting in her copper-colored hair sparkled under the florescent light.

“You’re incredible,” he said flatly. “All this stuff you know, it’s—”

“I’m nothing incredible,” she shot back. “All I do is watch videos and fake it until I make it. Although in my life? I’ve mostly never made it.”

“I wanted you for longer than you know,” West said, finally admitting the words he thought every time they were together. “I watched you, I couldn’t help it. The first time I saw you, I knew it was—”

“Wait,” Elena said, her voice quickening. “You don’t have to say anything if you don’t want to. We all do crazy stuff when we fall in,” she trailed off, not quite sure it was time, not yet.

West squeezed his eyes shut. He shouldn’t have said anything. It just slipped out. He knew better than to admit the truth, but there it was. The bear was out of the bag.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t help myself. I saw you just doing normal things. I was in town for supplies, and saw you leaving your office. Your hair was down, and you were talking to your partner – smiling – and I knew right then that I
had
to have you. You were the one I spent all those long, lonely years hunting.”

The scanner beeped again, and as she moved the slide to “3b,” Elena kept watching West. He couldn’t tell what the look was supposed to be, but she was certainly concentrating on
something
.

“How?” she asked. Her voice had gone cold, like she was suddenly speaking as an analytical scientist. “How did I never notice?”

West shrugged. “I never made much noise. I’d just watch, and think. But I knew – or thought anyway – that I was just being stupid. I’m a lonely bear, out in the world, with a rage problem and a chip on my shoulder. I stay alone so I don’t hurt anyone. Looking at you, though? Just watching you? Just imagining you made my heart slow down. You made me calmer than digging vegetables ever did.”

She was still watching his face, and he was still trying to figure out what she was thinking.

For a second, she looked like she was going to speak, but just closed her mouth instead. “It’s done,” she said.

It’s done
. The words had a finality to them that made West wince. “I had a feeling,” he said.

“The scanner? Is finished? What else would I mean?”

Was this it? Did she
really
not care that he’d contented himself with watching from the bushes, with what amounted to stalking her?

“You’re not angry?” he asked.

She shrugged. “I’m just amazed more than anything. I mean, my whole life is dedicated to sneaking around and staying out of sight, and a four hundred pound hunk of man-bear managed to keep away from me? Maybe I’m not as good at this as I thought.”

Without going further, she turned back to the scanner. “Holy shit,” she said.

“What is it?” West realized he was still stroking her back, and she still hadn’t said anything about it. He flattened his hand against her skin and watched over her shoulder. “Elena?”

He was talking, but she wasn’t listening. Not right then. Elena’s mind was fourteen light years from earth, completely absorbed in the image appearing on the screen. It was like something out of a sci-fi movie made in the 80s about the twenty-first century. A raised, three-dimensional model of the fingerprint showed up.

“Pressure,” she said, but not to anyone in particular. “The colors are the different pressures, and that shows how hard the fingerprint pressed into the glass. The red ones are higher, blue are lower, and...”

It started whirring again, buzzing and beeping. The highly non-futuristic green light on the front of the eggshell colored computer tower blinked madly. In the bottom quadrant of the screen, thousands of pictures flicked by at blinding speed.

Every time the computer stopped flipping through the images, Elena jotted down a number with a pen she fished out from behind her ear.