Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance) (A Jamesburg Shifter Romance) (3 page)

Absent mindedly, still letting her fantasies about this huge cowboy-esque bear take a little more control of her mind than she should have, Elena jotted down
‘tomatoes, stolen’
on her notepad.

“So, is this how you make your living?” Elena asked. She realized she was maybe interviewing him like she would a date, more than a client, but that seemed only to occur to her, since no one else – not even Paul – said anything.

“A living, and an eating,” West said. “Everything I eat, I grow. Or, most of it. Sometimes I get a veggie pizza delivered.”

“How does that work?” she followed up. “I’ve never heard of a strictly vegetarian bear before.”

Paul had a very serious look on his already very serious-looking face.

“I grow what I eat,” West said again. “Grain for bread, which survived the onslaught. But all my vegetables, except the mushrooms that I keep in the barn with the chickens, just destroyed.”

“So you eat the chickens too?”

West furrowed his brow. “I sell the eggs, I don’t eat the chickens.”

“But you raise them, so—”

“Chickens don’t come out of the ground.”

Elena cocked her head to the side. Something about the insistence in the big, muscled-up bear’s voice made her feel funny in the same places that watching him walk got her going. For a quick second, she had a flash of a fantasy where his voice was inches from her ear, and his kisses were trailing down her neck. He pushed the collar of her shirt open, kissing further as he swelled against her belly with his...

“Hello? Elena?”

She snapped back to reality when she heard West’s voice. “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I was coming up with hunches. That’s what we do in this business, you know, we come up with hunches.”

Paul shot her a glance. He had his tongue between his teeth, trying
really
hard not to start up with his half-snorting laugh. She
hated
that laugh, especially when it came at her expense.
Especially
when she walked right into it.

Distracting herself by looking very busy, Elena knelt down and plucked the half-buried carrot from the dirt. It was a stumpy, pitiful looking root, with a big, ugly knot on one side. “Looks like you, Paul,” she said as she dropped the carrot into a Ziploc bag onto which Elena had written “EVIDENCE” on the label section.

A string of slow days meant she had hundreds of the things, although she’d never actually used one before.

“Shouldn’t you leave that for the police?” Paul asked.

West turned, but Elena answered. “He didn’t call them, did he?”

“Nope,” Paul admitted.

“Then here we are, and here’s a carrot.” She handed it, inside the bag, to her partner. “That looks just like you.”

Paul winced, feigning injury at her words. “You kill me with your cruel, biting wit, El,” he said. West chuckled, and Elena smiled broadly, despite her best efforts. Paul folded the bag over, rolled the carrot up, and dropped it into one of the front pockets of his gray blazer. “Anything else we need to know?” he asked West, who was digging at something with the toe of his boot.

Elena immediately took over, completely ignoring her partner. “There are things we need to know. Your enemies – or possible enemies. People who might be angry at you, or jealous, or anything else. Are you married?” She’d already checked out his hand, but knew well enough not to trust that the presence or absence of a ring never told the whole story. “Engaged? Dating anyone?”

A skeptical look spread across West’s face. “I’m not sure if—”

“It is,” Paul cut in. “Necessary I mean. There’s a lot of things we have to check, and the first option we usually look after is an angry mate, spurned girlfriend, that kind of thing.” He gave Elena a look that said he knew exactly what she was doing.

Inwardly, she smiled, at least as much at his use of phrases like ‘we usually’ and ‘a lot of things we check’ because, after four years in business, this was probably the first case they’d ever had that was more complicated than following someone from bar to bar, and then taking a couple smooching pictures and getting a check.

“No,” West said, simply. He was staring pointedly at Elena. “Not married, not dating. Who has the time?” A smile crept across his lips, and a second later, that dimple popped back out. The dent in his cheek made her fingers tremble a little, until she balled up her fist. “And as far as anyone being jealous or angry,” he paused in the way people do when they’re about to avoid telling the truth.

“We need to know,” Elena said, picking up for her partner. “If we’re going to work for you, you have to be straight with us. Otherwise, this is pointless.”

West grunted, and shook his head. “No,” he said. “I’m just a simple farmer outside town. This is how I’ve been for a while.”

Those words –
a while
– made the tiny, white hairs on the back of Elena’s neck stand at attention, but she knew better than say anything just then. She jotted a couple more notes and then watched him again. She let her eyes settle on him for a second too long to be believable as a conversational move.

“I think that’s all we need,” she said.
Except for you
, she wanted to say.
Oh my God I am in big, big, big trouble
, she thought, somehow managing to not voice her feelings.

“There
is
one more thing, Princess Hurried,” Paul said – thankfully. “We need to talk about money.”

West shook his head and raised a hand. “Money doesn’t matter. I just want to know what happened to my... my plants.”

If he’s that possessive and protective about some cucumbers, imagine how he’d be about a mate? Imagine how he’d be about me
. Elena caught herself drifting into another ridiculous fantasy. Although when she looked back at him, and saw those dark blue eyes burning into her soul, maybe it wasn’t such a ridiculous, far-fetched fantasy after all.

She cleared her throat. “Uh, yeah okay so
now
I think this is all we need.”

West’s eyes lingered, just like hers, a little too long to have been completely business-like. He stuck his hand out. “Thanks,” he said. “Good to meet you.” Elena grabbed his hand, squeezed, and let the heat from his palm radiate up her arm.

She stared into his eyes, he gazed into hers. “You too,” she said.

Paul grabbed the back of her collar, tugging like a kid trying to get his parents’ attention. “That’s
all we need
,” he said, repeating her words. “Thanks for calling us, Mr. Westing, we’ll—”

“Just call me West,” the big bear said, shaking Paul’s hand, and once again letting his free arm brush against Elena. “And thanks.”

As soon as the fox and the bulldog turned away, Elena felt West’s eyes, imagined his hands, dreamed about how kissing those stubble-ringed lips would feel.

Big trouble? That didn’t even start to describe what kind of a mess Elena had dug herself. Catastrophe? That was a little closer.

But really, it was worse than any of that.

The sweet, wet heat creeping out of Elena’s core wasn’t simple lust, or regular old, run-of-the-mill horny fox-girl yearning. What she felt was far deeper, far more dangerous. What she was almost sure was clouding her mind was something she convinced herself a long time ago to give up on.

What was clouding Elena’s mind?

She shook her head, opened the Buick door, and crawled in. She couldn’t think about that. Wouldn’t think about it. Not while there was work to do.

“You sick?” Paul asked.

“No,” she said, “why?”

He shrugged, grinning. “No reason.” The grin on his face got wider and, as Elena stared at him, more irritating.

“What?” She asked again, insistently, before punching her partner in the arm. “Quit this high school shit. What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking two things,” he said. “First of all, that’s the only time you’ve opened the car door in about nine months. Last time was when you had the flu.”

Elena huffed. “So what? I don’t feel good,” she lied in the most obvious way possible. “So what’s the other thing?”

Paul looked at her through his narrowed eyes. “Oh nothing,” he said. “It’s just that in the ten years we’ve been friends, I don’t think I’ve
ever
seen you get more excited about the client than you were about the case.”

“That,” Elena started, and then turned her head. She stared out the window, watching the Jamesburg firs whiz past. A horse stared at the car as it went by, and for a second, she wondered if she knew him. She shook her head. “That, I guess, is probably fair. I’m in trouble, aren’t I, Bulldog?”

Paul snorted a laugh. “Never worse,” he said. “Never, ever worse.”

*

D
istracted as she was, Elena wasn’t going to let the burning, aching need for the giant farmer bear ruin her instincts. Back at the office, it didn’t take long for her to refocus, to re-center her thoughts.

This is how she did it, how she got her mind off all the terrible things that she ran from for most of her life. Even though Elena and Paul spent most of their time together verbally jousting, she appreciated every second of the time they were together.

Mostly because the rest of the time, she was alone.

Paul took off at half past seven. Elena said goodbye, promising to go home soon after, but both of them knew that was a lie.

Without work? There wasn’t a whole lot going on.

As soon as the door shut, and she heard the deadbolt slide into the lock, she stripped down to her bra. The old, 1980s style fan above her head shook with every spin. It was loud, but it was home – or at least as close as Elena had.

She pulled the pens out of her frosted copper hair, letting it fall around her shoulders in an orange waterfall, and then pulled it back into a ponytail to get it off her shoulders. Lifting her hair, she bent her head forward, letting the air from the
whop-whop-whopp
ing fan cool her neck. A deep breath filled her lungs, and a sigh relaxed her, although in the back of Elena’s mind, all she could think was West.

Ripping off the first page of her notebook, she took the slip of paper and put it on the top left corner of her desk. One after another, she laid the pages in a checkerboard of notes and diagrams. “Didn’t realize I made so many notes,” she told herself before taking a look around her informational treasure trove. “Where’s that carrot?”

It was, of course, where all vegetable related evidence should be – in the office fridge. Somehow, the carrot fell behind a half-empty twelve pack of Budweiser that Paul insisted on keeping around “just in case.” Elena snagged the carrot, and turned to head back to her desk before deciding that “just in case” meant “right now” and grabbed a beer.

Back at the desk, Elena produced a barely-used fingerprint kit and dusted the carrot in what she knew was a vain effort.

She turned the carrot around in her hands, studying the curvature, the bumps, the little bit of trace dirt still sticking to it, in the florescent lamp dangling from the ceiling.

“What’s this?” she touched her fingertip to a slightly discolored part, something that seemed like... a bite? Beside the first was a second. Two broad, square holes marked one side of the carrot. “How did I miss this?”

She got a Q-tip from her desk, swabbed the rim of the oxidized carrot. She stuck what she hoped was a useful saliva sample, in another of her marked Ziplocs. Putting that away, Elena hunted around for her fingerprinting kit, but it was nowhere to be seen.

For a lack of anything else to use, Elena took the ink pad she used for fingerprinting on the endless child ID cards she made to pay the bills. She squished the carrot against it, and then rolled the root onto her notepad. A second later, she was on the phone with Paul.

“You’ve got a what?” he asked.

“A bite,” she answered. “I’ve got tooth prints, bite marks.”

“Huh, well good work. Although I’m not sure exactly what this means. So someone bit that carrot, then stuck it in the ground?”

“Looks that way,” she said. “It’s weird, I know, but there you go. I didn’t notice until they started getting a little brown around the edges.”

“What is it?” he asked. “Can you tell?”

“Not exactly. They’re square, that’s for sure. Maybe an inch wide.”

Paul made a clicking sound with his tongue against his teeth. “This is going to sound crazy,” he said, “but what eats carrots?”

“No way,” Elena said. “You think this is some kind of calling card? That’s,” she paused. “I was going to say that’s insane, but then again I’m the one who found bite marks on a purposely planted carrot in the middle of a violently exploded garden.”

Paul snorted a laugh. “You need me to go back up there?”

“No, I’m just going to make a few more prints, maybe take a cast before this thing rots, and then I’ll get out of here.”

“Get yourself a drink, get yourself some ice cream, okay?” Paul asked. “You need to take time to think.”

“No,” Elena protested. “I’ve got to—”

“Do we need to do this again? Really? We always have this fight and you always lose. You did good work, now rest so you can do it again tomorrow without going nuts.”

She clenched her jaws. “Fine,” she finally said. “See you tomorrow.”

“Go home and dream of big bears, my friend,” Paul said with a wry laugh. “You deserve it.”

Elena laughed before she remembered to be irritated. “You deserve a mouthful of rotten kibble. Goodnight.”

The phone line clicked, and Elena pushed back in her chair, staring at the ceiling, smiling in spite of herself.

––––––––

S
itting back from her table, Petunia sighed with pleasure, swallowed, and then removed the dentures she had to use every time she ate.

Clicking her buckteeth together, and then picking out a piece of sinew from her deliciously rare steak, the unlikely carnivore set her meat-eating dentures on the tabletop. Her nose twitched. She wished it would stop – always had wished for it to stop – but she had other things to worry about right then.

Her eyes drank in the darkness. Pale blue because of a lack of pigment, Petunia Lewis’s irises sparkled as she waddled toward her bay windows and looked out at the green vines and rickety cages that lay in every direction from her house.