Bear Arms (Alpha Werebear Shapeshifter Romance) (Mating Call Dating Agency Book 4) (2 page)

*

M
orning, and a very hungover Morales, came too early for comfort. The pair had another garage to poke around, to see if this was the one for them to use as the basis for their business.

Blake was hunched over the stove, slowly melting butter, when his friend marched into the room and promptly slumped into a chair. “Coffee,” Morales groaned, rather like a zombie needing his daily brain fix. “If there’s no coffee I’ll... I’ll... well go get some I guess, but I won’t be happy about it.”

Blake grunted a laugh and poured a very large mug full of muddy, almost motor oil-esque coffee. “How many eggs you want?” the answer was a grunt. “Bacon?” Another grunt came, this one more obviously irritated than the last, also accompanied by a soft
yurk
sound. “Right... sausage? I’ve got link and patty, or uh... I guess we can go get some menudo?”

In one long quaff, Morales drank down the steaming coffee. “This might be the only time in my entire life that none of that stuff sounds good. I don’t think I’ve ever had a hangover like this before.” He rubbed his forehead. “I didn’t say anything stupid last night when I came in, did I?”

“Nah,” Blake said. “Just told me you met a girl from a dating agency and that I should talk to her to find myself a mate.”

The two bears stared at each other over the rims of their coffee cups. “So, uh,” Blake started, “I might have given it some thought after you went to sleep last night.”

“Yeah?” Morales slid his coffee cup back down the table. “Talk. And also give me a refill. She was a hell of a woman, too. I’ve never met anyone who managed to talk me in so many circles. I think I might be in love. Or that could just be the caffeine buzz hitting. Anyway, your turn, talk.”

Blake poured the coffee and handed the mug back to his friend. “Oh, nothing major. I was just thinking that maybe it
would
be a good idea if I went on a few dates. If nothing else, it’ll keep me out of trouble, right?”

“Or get you into it,” Morales said with a wry smile. “Either way, I gave her your number and answered a few questions,” anticipating what was about to happen, he raised his hands defensively. “Come on! Cut me a break, I was trying to get with someone too. And I figured you wouldn’t mind. I mean, being my non-present wingman, you know?”

Blake sighed, but he couldn’t hide the smile. “Yeah, yeah, Morales,” he said. “Any buildings we’re looking at today? I gotta keep my mind off kicking your ass.”

“Three of them out past the highway,” Morales said. “And just so you know, the only way you’d
ever
kick my ass was if I was this hungover, so you’re in luck.”

The two of them laughed, finished their coffee, and hit the door.

The day was mostly dull, mostly routine, but for the life of him, Blake could
not
get the call out of his mind that he knew—hoped—was coming.

––––––––

“S
on of a
bitch
!” Alexis Headly pulled out yet another knotted stitch from the pot holder she was attempting to knit. Her fingers worked clumsily, slowly, and somehow, as she tried to cinch the next loop, it went around her pinky and before she knew what the hell she was doing, she managed to knit her own finger into the side of her pot holder.

“
It’s so easy that even a bear can do it!
” the YouTube video she had playing on her tablet informed her. “
See how easy it—
”

“Shut up!” Lexie wrenched the conjoined potholder off of her hand, and threw first the project and second the tablet, across the room. Almost as a second thought, she stood up from her desk, plucked up the tablet, and downvoted the video. She was just about to add a nasty comment about the whole ‘so easy a bear could do it’ thing, when she realized what she was becoming.

“I’m my own enemy,” she said to her tablet. “I’m becoming an evil YouTube commenter. God almighty what’s happening to me? At least I left the white supremacy out of it like I keep finding in the worst of those comments.”

After catching her breath for a second, and pushing the hulk-like anger back under the cute, slightly fluffy, unassuming body she wore, she plodded back over to make another cup of coffee in the cheap French press she’d bought on a whim. Well, whim isn’t exactly the right word. She’d bought it in an attempt to save money instead of using a Keurig for her normal six-to-eight cups of coffee per day, but she generally only used it once or twice, since it was so much more of a pain in her bunny ass to go through all the fiddling and diddling necessary to make a good cup.

Lexie watched the steam waft off the falling coffee as she poured it from high up into her Superman mug. She got that thing from her last boyfriend, along with an unhealthy dose of body image issues. The mug, though, she liked. When she finally kicked him to the curb, he’d forgotten to take the mug, and she just never bothered to mention it.

Something about claiming that mug from him gave her a shot of confidence, like she’d really conquered the demon in her guts that told her over and over how she wasn’t good enough, despite all the evidence to the contrary.

At thirty, she was one of the premiere arts and crafts bloggers in the Wild West world of the internet. That was even more unbelievable, because she was both terrible at, and hated, arts and crafts.

Sitting down at her desk, she blew a cloud of steam off her cup and took a drink.
How I Turned My Thumb Into a Potholder
, she typed out. After staring at the words for a second, she sort of winced. “Way too long,” she said with a frown. “Needs more punch.”

Fuck Knitting
, she wrote. That one got her laughing hard enough to get a trickle of coffee going down the side of her chin. She deleted that one too, knowing full well she’d offend at least ten percent of her audience. She might be a proud artist, but she also needed to pay the bills.

The Potholder That Made Me Hate Myself
, she typed. “Is the sarcasm obvious enough?” she asked her old, square, fat computer monitor. Both the screen and the tower on the desk beside it were remnants of a long-gone age. The cream-colored eggshell plastic on the case and screen hadn’t been available since, she figured, about 1997. But then, the two-hundred dollar keyboard she typed on was a sort of funny counterpoint to the ancient PC.

About ten minutes of pure channeled hatred and rage later, she had banged out the rough draft of a thousand-word short post. They didn’t always come that easily, but when they did, those tended to be the articles that made her the most cash. She was just about to start editing when she decided against it.

“Sometimes, editing just ruins the feeling of frothing hatred,” she said to her empty sunroom. “Sometimes you just have to run with it, and be prepared for any embarrassing Freudian slips you might have stuck in there.”

Instead of a full edit she made herself just scan the article to make sure she hadn’t accidentally inserted an angry diatribe about her ex in there. When she got into those zen-like Writing Zones, she hardly remembered what she produced. It was like she channeled some kind of universal consciousness and just acted as the vessel of record. Satisfied she hadn’t named any names she didn’t mean to name, she added a few links to knitting videos that might actually help the knitting-disabled. She always made sure to keep things positive, to end everything she did on a high note with a happy tone.

After all, the last thing the world needed, Lexie figured, was another pissed off internet troll trying to make a quick buck by ruining someone else’s good name. Her mouse pointer hovered over the POST button on the screen, and she was just about to publish, when she decided to change a few words in the center. “I don’t think ‘ass bazooka of hell’ is the right way to describe something. Just a little bit
too
aggressive,” she mumbled. ‘Disappointing’ was what she chose instead. It wasn’t quite as honest, but then again, too much honesty isn’t always the best thing in the world.

“Ass hell doom!” she shouted, almost falling backward over her chair, as the phone she’d forgotten was on her desk started loudly chiming with the default ring tone. She clutched her chest and got herself right before picking up the receiver. “Eve?” she asked the screen. “Could it really be?”

“Hello?” she asked after whipping open her flip phone. “Eve?”

“None other,” a voice announced from the other end. “Listen, Lexie, I think I’ve found someone for you. But—”

“You... did?” Lexie was almost beside herself. “I mean, that sounded a lot more pathetic than it is. I’m just surprised, is all.”

There was a hint of cockiness in the voice that replied. “Yeah well, I’m pretty good at what I do, I like to think,” Eve replied. “Anyway, he’s a former soldier, about to open a mechanic garage with his friend... and let me tell you, his friend isn’t anything to shy away from looking at either.”

For a moment, Lexie wasn’t quite sure how to take that. “Wait, are you telling me we’re double dating? I’ve known you long enough to know you don’t say things unless they have a real purpose.”

“Yes,” Eve said haltingly, “I mean no. Well yes, you’re right that I don’t mince words but no, we’re not double dating. That’d be a pretty awful conflict of interest.” In the background, Lexie could swear she heard soft laughter from the other end of the phone. “And anyway, I don’t need a wing woman. But listen, I wanted to get your phone number updated for him. The last one I have was no good. When I called it, someone named Mike Truckler answered and asked if I was calling from Walgreen’s with his blood pressure meds. I figured you hadn’t shacked up with a geriatric, so I doubted you still had that number.”

Lexie laughed. “Yeah, well, may as well have been calling about
my
blood pressure meds. I’m getting higher-strung with every day that passes. But yeah, this is the new one. Wait a second, how did you get this number if—”

“Like I said,” Eve pronounced, “good at my job.” She sounded distant, almost distracted. There was a long pause. “Right,” Eve finally said, “so, I’ll be going now. I’ve got to, uh, get ready for something.”

Lexie cocked her head to the side. One of the perks of being a rabbit-shifter was that she could hear like a rabbit. She easily picked up on vocal cues most people, hell most shifters, never would. “Are you okay?” she asked. “You sound kind of... uh... I don’t know exactly, but something sounds off.”

“Oh no, it’s nothing,” Eve said. “I’m trying to force the memory of an old boyfriend out of my head so I can finally get up and move on with my life. So, I might just have a date and I fell in love with a guy I met at a bar last night who may or may not be the friend of the man I’m matching you with. Although I assure you one has nothing to do with the other. It just so happens that he’s perfect for me – I mean really perfect... er, I mean for you. I’m babbling, aren’t I?”

“I’m happy for you, Eve,” Lexie said without any further judgment or comment. “And thanks. I’m looking forward to the call.”

The two hung up, and as Lexie stared at the post she’d just made, it suddenly seemed like it was way, way angrier than she meant to be.

She left it though, because what the hell – the owner of the
I Hate Arts and Crafts
blog couldn’t exactly go all soft and mushy, could she? Gotta pay the bills, gotta pay them bills.

*

L
exie just sat down with a steaming mug of Earl Grey and turned on the fourth season of
X-Files
on Netflix when the phone rang again. Again might be a slight exaggeration, as it was about ten hours since the last time it caught her attention. She reached over to the end table beside her couch and groped around as Mulder made a funny quip about aliens and the government.

After briefly skirting her hand around the entire table, and knocking a forgotten cup of water onto the floor, she pulled her attention from the TV and registered that the phone was, in fact, in the kitchen about forty feet from where she was sitting. Heaving a sigh, Lexie pushed herself up off the couch.

What if it’s him
? She thought which lit a fire under her ass. As she stumbled toward the phone and kept turning back to look at the screen, her feet got tangled up with each other. Like a lizard who had somehow got his own tail stuck in his mouth when eating a cricket, she was nothing but a ball of clumsily falling momentum. Just when she thought she’d hit the deck, she caught one of her fake trees with an outstretched hand and righted herself for about a half second before her feet looped around again.

She tumbled forward, one leg somehow going around behind the other, and she found herself falling almost straight onto her face.

With a desperate turn that would have made a falling house cat proud, she turned a shoulder, hit the floor and rolled forward, springing back to her feet right in front of the breakfast bar where the phone was sitting and ringing.

Lexie snatched it up, flipped open the cover and announced how awesome she was to whoever it was on the other end. She hadn’t even considered it was someone other than her best friend Ariana, who she was expecting to hear from, since they had a standing late-night movie date every Thursday.

“I’m seriously Spider-Man,” Lexie said. “If I’d managed to video this, I would get more views than that stupid video of the surprised cat. I mean, this was awesome. I fell over, grabbed a tree, fell again and rolled to my feet right in front of the bar. I’m the coolest—”

“Sounds like it,” a voice, a very growly, deep voice, said. “And from what you just said, and from how Eve described you, I’m pretty sure I found Alexis Headly?”

Just imagining the face and the body that must’ve gone with a voice like that, Lexie was having a little trouble calming herself down. Her brain flooded itself with a series of images as she tried to decide on the spur of the moment, what sort of creature she’d been attached to.

“Hello?” he asked again. The rumble, the deep-throated growl in his voice sent a trill of excitement squirming up Lexie’s back. A trail of goose bumps followed the charge, and when it got to the back of her neck, she felt the hairs stand up as her ears pricked. The man let out a long, low whistle.