Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance) (A Jamesburg Shifter Romance) (9 page)

“You’ve been what?” he asked. His voice a low, sensuous growl. “I need you, Elena. I knew it since the first time we met. You made my heart pound, you somehow made me relax. I’ve... I’ve never felt that peace, that ease. I won’t let you get away.”

Her heart thudded in her temples. “I’m,” she started, and then stopped again, taking a breath. “I’ve been thinking the same thing. I can’t work, I can’t sleep – I mean, not like I sleep much anyway, but, I’m a mess.”

She pushed open the front door, and took a deep breath of the morning. Her coffee cup trembled in her hands. The morning was chill, especially for early summer, but the bracing cool was welcome. “I want you too, I’m just scared to admit it to myself.”

Her voice was tight in her throat. She needed something – anything – to rip through the tension between them before she caught a terminal case of panic.

“Why aren’t you wearing any pants?” West asked, a smile apparent in his voice.

She looked up, and there he was, standing beside a pickup truck she somehow didn’t hear, and somehow didn’t see when she wandered out.

“I,” she dropped the phone, and her cup of coffee, but finished speaking anyway. “Don’t think I care.”

His arms around her, his lips on her neck, on her cheek, on her lips. Elena lifted one of her legs, brushing her thigh against the rough denim wrapped around West’s muscled leg. She craned her neck, cupping his face in her hands, and opened her eyes to stare into his.

“I make you calm,” she said. “And you make me not give the first shit that I’m standing outside in my panties, making out with someone I hardly know.”

He lifted her off her feet, grabbed the door handle and swung it open. “You’re not outside anymore,” he whispered. “But that other part? I’m not gonna do anything to stop that.”

––––––––

S
he heard her phone ringing from outside, but it was
really
hard for Elena to care.

“How are your hands so smooth?” she asked, in between desperate kisses, as he ran them first down her back, and then under her shirt. “All that work you do, how is,” she gasped when he slid a hand down the back of her panties. “Oh! You’re not wasting any time, huh?”

“I wear gloves,” he said. “It’s important to use moisturizer when you’re outside all the time.”

She threw her head back in the first honest belly laugh she’d had in a long, long time, and when West sucked a kiss behind her ear, just like she’d imagined, Elena’s laughing turned to a drawn out, pleasured moan.

“I knew you’d make noises like that,” he whispered. His breath ran down her throat, caressing her chest. “The first time I saw you, the first time I fell in love, I knew you’d make a noise like that.”

Love
, Elena fluttered.
He said... love?

But just like the ringing phone, right then, she didn’t worry too much about particulars. She moved her hands down his sides and pushed the flannel button-down up before falling to a knee and kissing the light dusting of hair above his navel. “I can’t believe I’m doing this,” she said, in a breathy groan. “Usually I don’t even watch TV before seven.”

She giggled again as he grabbed a handful of her white-frosted hair, and forced her to look up at him. The determination in his movement, his power, his presence, stunned her for a moment.
What did I do to wander into someone like this? What kind of karma have I unknowingly built up?
As she stared at his eyes – darker, and a little stormier than they were when she met him before – she realized this wasn’t just someone she wanted. This wasn’t just a need that her body ached to feel.

This? It went deeper. It went all the way to the center of her being.

And the way he was looking back? How he tilted his head just a little, studying her face like he never wanted to forget? She knew right then that he felt the same way.

Words didn’t come to Elena, nor West. Anything either one of them said wouldn’t have matched the tightness in Elena’s chest, or the possessive, protective desire in West’s eyes. She just looked at him, and he stared into her soul.

Moments later, Elena popped the buttons running down the front of West’s snug-fitting 501’s and started to tug. The smile on his face was intoxicating, the smell of him in the air gave her a start that ran all the way down her back and up her stomach.

“Is this what you want?” he asked. “I won’t let you be afraid. I won’t let you worry.”

Elena smiled as she tugged his jeans down around that muscled ass. “I don’t think you can promise that,” she said. “But you can promise to,” she couldn’t say it. She just couldn’t.
Love
, the word she’d thought so often, felt so deep in her heart. She just couldn’t say it, not right then.

Her lips closed around his tip, her tongue flickering along his underside. He leaned his head back, letting his hands relax, dropping her hair back in a cascade around her shoulders. His fingers settled on her shoulders, squeezing gently, rhythmically in time with the movement of Elena’s hands.

“You ever do
this
before seven?” he asked, smiling broadly. “God... you’re...”

“First time for everything,” she whispered. Hissing softly against him, Elena pushed his cock backward against his body and licked all the way up. Finally, as his legs began to tremble, she painted one last lap down, then up, before she kissed back up his bare belly. The rippling muscles of his stomach pushed back against her fingers.

He cupped her face in his hands, absently curling his thumbs against her cheeks. “I can’t believe you walked into my life. I can’t believe all the things that led to this.”

“I can’t believe you showed up at my house before the sun came up,” Elena said, kissing his navel and giggling. “But I can’t say I mind.”

“Yeah,” he said, lifting her to her feet and flattening his erection between their bodies. “I didn’t think you would.” He bent to kiss her, once on either side of the neck. “Rip my shirt,” he whispered in her left ear, before sucking a kiss behind it. “Grab it, pull it, rip it, I don’t care. I need to feel your skin against mine. I need to feel you naked against me. Don’t make me wait. I’ve waited all my life for you.”

Elena stared at him for a moment, and then just grabbed his collar and yanked. In that one moment, that single second, she made a decision. She wasn’t going to half-ass this, wasn’t going to back off. For once, she was going to stick to it and see it through.

Gritting her teeth, Elena yanked again, ripping the first three buttons open. A remnant thread from one of the buttonholes hung down, sticking to her cheek. When she looked back to his face, West was smiling, his dimples framing his beautiful lips. “I want you to kiss me,” she said, her voice breathy and hungry. “I want you to kiss me and hold me and scratch me and bite me and...”

“And what?” West asked when she trailed off. “What else do you want? I’ll give you everything. I’ll do anything you want. Anything in the world.”

She grabbed ahold of his waist and pulled herself to her feet, stretched as tall as she could. “I want you,” she paused again, blushing furiously despite everything she’d just done. “I’ve never really come out and asked for this before.”

“Say it,” West said. It wasn’t a question. “Tell me what you want and I’ll give you anything. But you have to ask.”

“I want to feel you,” she gulped. “Inside me.”

His dark blue eyes were a hurricane. His kiss a vicious, hungry, violent tornado that stirred her lust, and more than that, her love, and her sense of security and safety, when he took her in his arms, crushed her to his chest, and kissed her so deep it forced her head backwards.

She grabbed him hard, digging in her nails and breathing his air, inhaling his scent.

Elena felt him swell against her stomach. She gripped him as tightly as she could. Outside, she heard the phone ring again, from where it was lying on the rubber substrate in her rosebush. “That might be important,” she whispered, desperately kissing West’s neck again and then going weak in the knees when he kissed her back.

“This important?” he reached down, shoved her panties aside and slid a finger into her.

She giggled, and then moaned, and then felt herself turn into jelly in his hand. As Elena felt herself melt into him, as she felt their bodies slide together, and her soul twist around his, she shook her head.

Elena opened her legs, letting them drape over either side of West’s massive thigh as he pushed his fingers deeper. She lay her head back against the wall, relishing the rough prickling against her scalp, and let him carry her away into a place of vulnerable warmth, open and pure.

He lifted his knee against her, giving Elena a break from needing her legs – as if they were much use anyway – and ground his palm into her clit. A yelp escaped her lips, then a moan, and then a trickle of heat escaped from deep inside.

Somehow, she managed to slide the hand she wasn’t using to hold onto West’s neck, back down around his hardness. She quailed as he answered by sliding a second finger in beside the first, spreading them out, slowly bringing her closer to the edge.

Every few seconds, he’d stop to kiss her, and she’d pull on him harder, hoping she could somehow make him feel as good as he was her.

“Let me see those eyes,” West growled.

Elena’s half open eyes, her slack mouth, the way she kept habitually biting her lip, it made West long to feel the rest of her, to feel them move together, him inside her.

Her pulling turned desperate and urgent. She dipped his cock down between her legs, and let her sex wet his length, massaging him against herself, against his hand. His heat, burning through her, the sweet, perfect friction, it was all too much, too soon.

“Is it okay,” she whispered, before a pulse of ecstasy stopped her voice for a moment.

“Anything is okay,” he said, pushing her harder to the edge of climax. “Anything at all.”

She bit her lip again, chewing gently, and then with more force. The pain, the pleasure, it all came together, and involuntarily, Elena’s body jerked, and then convulsed. Cool, then hot, spread from her middle outward, just like it had the night before in her fantasy. West turned his hand slightly, lingering when she squealed.

“I want you in me,” she whispered, “but I’m scared to...”

West bent, sucking her ear, then her neck. “We got all the time in the world,” he breathed into her ear. “No reason to—”

He twitched in her hand, swelled, and then at exactly the same moment as every muscle in Elena’s body went tight, he – and she – hissed in simultaneous release.

“Yes!” she cried out. “Oh, oh my God yes! Hold me, hold me, never let me go!”

As her climax wracked her body, West’s hot gasps caressed the side of her face, and his heat against her skin drove her even higher. Words turned to groaning, and groans turned to wild, halting gulps of air.

He shoved her backward, hard against the wall. It scratched, it pricked, and as he surged, so did she.

In the afterglow, the two of them just breathed each other in, just held on to make sure what had happened was real. When he finally let her down to the ground, Elena’s muscles all ached sweetly, longing for him to be back where he was supposed to be.

With wide open eyes, she looked at West. He returned the stare, saying nothing. Words didn’t need to happen. The breathing, the gentle caressing of her naked skin with his fingertips said all that could be said.

Outside in the fake woodchips, Elena’s phone rang again.

“I guess I’m going to have to stop staring at you at some point,” she said with a smile. “No matter how much I—”

He enveloped her with another kiss, stealing her breath, stealing her voice, and wrapping her in the strength of his huge arms. For what seemed a blissed eternity, she let him take her away one last time.

When he released, she took a step backward, thumping softly against the wall. Sweat ran in tiny streams down either side of West’s neck. Her wetness glistened on his thigh, his dried on her fingers. “Work is gonna be a lot harder today,” he said. “I figured doing this might give me a little break from
imagining
doing it all the time.”

Elena blushed heavily. “Of all the times to blush,” she said. “I have to do it
after
you make me scream.”

He shrugged, giving her that half-smile that worked evil miracles in Elena’s soul. “Something about planting peppers just loses a lot of excitement after something like that.”

With a finger hooked into his newly buttoned jeans, Elena pulled West in for one last, lingering kiss. “You go work, I’ll go work,” she said. “And I’ll call you tonight?”

“If that’s the way it’s gotta be,” he said, smiling back as he went to the door. “Then I’ll just have to live with it.”

As the screen rattled with impact, Elena pulled her shirt down, and this time, remembered to slip on some jeans before heading out. The world seemed a little brighter, a bit clearer maybe, than it had been just minutes before. It felt right, somehow, like something that she’d just found the keys she’d been looking for all weekend, or like she happened to find her credit card right before she called to cancel. She took a deep breath, and let it out slowly.

The room still smelled like him – like his leather gloves, and his sweat and his hard masculinity. But then, hanging in the air with it, was her. Her scent, mixed with his.

Slowly, it faded, and she smiled longingly.

She trekked outside, feet scrunching first on the grass and then on the rubber. She clenched her toes, digging in, then hopped up on the landscaping timber around the bed. She felt nimble and alive.
That
was different.

With a flick of her foot, she tossed her phone in the air, and grabbed it as it fell.

Immediately, that warmth trickled away. Eight calls, two from Ralph, five from Paul and one from an unknown number. There was a lot of bullshit, but as she flipped through the voicemails, one thing stuck out.

“We know where she is,”
Ralph said in one of his voice mails.
“But we can’t prove anything. Can’t tie her to anything. Also, we found something else.”