Bear Your Teeth (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Shifter Romance) (8 page)

“Ung, God yes,” she whispered. “If I didn’t think you’d kill me I’d ask for another one.”

Thor snorted a laugh, and answered by rotating his fingers inside her, smiling as she rolled her eyes back in her head, tugged on his cock, and tried to reach him with her flailing tongue. He moved closer and let her take him in.

The slow dance quickened for a moment before both of them realized the tempo was too much, and they slowed again. “How did you know I was here?” Rika asked, as the thought occurred to her for some reason when she slid her lips back.

“Followed you,” was his answer.

Before she could say anything else, those big, beautiful fingers went so deep she felt him in her deepest parts, and his palm flattened against her clit. He ground at her, smiling as she lost control. Involuntarily, Rika seemed to smile and gasp in alternating time. His fingers pumped harder and deeper, in time with her heart.

The fist on Thor’s cock moved faster, faster, in time with his breathing, and just when she felt him surge and swell, Paprika’s sex clenched down hard on his fingers. She closed her lips around him, flicked her tongue, and at exactly the same time, both of them gave in.

The world went swirling, white and black up and down. His taste warmed her all the way down, his fingers ground out pleasure she’d never imagined before. Every inch of Rika’s body was all prickles and goosebumps. When he finally pulled away, his fingers left an aching void that she longed to have filled. “Don’t ever stop doing that,” she whispered, with her eyes still closed. “Okay?”

He snorted another laugh, but didn’t speak. Admittedly, there wasn’t a whole lot to say. Thor drew himself up, his knees sliding behind Rika’s, and draped an arm over her side, tickling her navel with his fingertips.

His touch was like a dream, fleeting and soft, fading with each passing moment until his hand lay still against her belly, warming Paprika all the way through.

She opened one of her eyes, peeking to make sure she hadn’t imagined the whole thing. The huge bear was staring back, his expression hard and steel. He looked so determined, so unlike his normal joking, light-hearted self, that she wondered if something was wrong. But, not wanting to know the answer, she just stayed quiet, although she remembered to open her other eye a second later.

Depth perception: a good thing.

“You ever jump off a high dive when you were a kid?” he asked, breaking the comfortable silence.

“Like at a swimming pool? Or metaphorically?”

“I’m going for a metaphor eventually, but let’s do literal, first.”

She smiled. “You
are
overeducated, aren’t you? Okay well, uh... yeah I have. Not many times, but a few.”

“Okay, how about a cliff? Like cliff diving. Ever done that?”

She shook her head, making a red coil fall down across her face, which he pushed back behind her ear without ever taking his gaze away from peering into her soul. “Nuh-uh. Never even been to a place where you
can
cliff dive.”

“Would you?”

“Jump off a cliff into an ocean? I guess, I mean, I do all kinds of stupid shit on a pretty regular basis.”

His eyes were focused on hers, but there was something far off in Thor’s expression. “My mom told me when I left for college that I wasn’t welcome back on the commune.” He paused, Rika sucked her bottom lip between her teeth, chewing at it to fidget. “She said I betrayed the family, said I was going to kill my dad, that he’d never forgive me, all this stuff.”

“What a bitch,” Rika said, entranced by his words. “Who would tell their kid that?”

“Someone who is afraid of the world,” he answered. “Someone who hasn’t known anything but what they know for so long that everything else seems alien. Someone who doesn’t want to deal with a world they can’t control.”

She let a half-hearted grunt of accession, and started rubbing a lock of bear hair between her thumb and forefinger. “But your own mom?”

“Well, me and twelve other cubs. That’s kind of important. I wasn’t all that special to them, except that I helped with the babies and I helped with the farm and all that.”

“You make it sound like you were some kind of farm hand, more than a kid.”

“In a way, I was.” Those dark brown eyes seemed to go all stormy. The intensity of Thor’s expression got Rika all excited again, enough that she had to chide herself to stop, at least until the story was over. She contented herself with squeezing one of his shoulders. At least that gesture could be taken as a show of solidarity. Grabbing his junk, not so much.

“It isn’t that they didn’t love me,” he continued. “It’s just that life is different out there.”

“Where is it?”

“The commune?”

Paprika nodded.

“Oh, uh, near the Colorado-New Mexico border. I helped winter prep, I helped farm and ranch, and everything else, but in the end, I just couldn’t stay.”

“It sounds kinda,” Rika chewed her lip again, searching for the right word. “Idyllic? I mean, it seems like a thing people to do run away, you know? Like what people say about Alaska, how the only way anyone moves there is if they’re running away from something in a place where life is normal.”

He thought long and hard, a furrow creasing his brow. “In a way, I guess. Although my parents weren’t criminals or anything, they just—“

“All this time,” she interrupted, “I thought you meant your parents were like my mom. Too excited about Whole Foods, real into protesting against Monsanto and complaining about GMOs and, apparently, drinking entire bottles of white wine mixed with sports drink powder. I had no idea.”

The squeezing of his shoulder had turned from flimsy cover for touching him to genuine concern. “I can’t even imagine that sort of thing is legal.”

Thor smiled, briefly. “I mean, it’s New Mexico. Plenty of things there are legal simply by virtue of the police having no way in hell of doing any actual policing.”

“Makes sense. So they just kicked you out?”

He nodded. “I didn’t hear from any of them for the eight years I was in school and the three I’ve been in The Falls. Not a single fuckin’ word.”

She stared, blankly, vaguely aware she was shaking her head.

“Anyway, I heard from my dad last night.”

A tear slid down the bear’s face, but he didn’t change his expression one bit. Rika had a feeling what was coming, but she chose for once not to jump to any conclusions, or fill in someone else’s words in her own head before they said them for themselves. Sounds like a small thing, but for her, that was practically landing on Mars. She swiped the tear off his cheek, her thumb tip rasping over stubble. He kissed her wrist when it came into range of those perfect, red lips.

“She died three days ago. The same day I decided to move, and conned you into going with me. I didn’t find out until last night, but... yeah.”

“Holy
shit
,” Rika whispered. This didn’t seem like an ‘I’m sorry’ moment, judging by the steel in Thor’s face. She drew him closer anyway, cradling his huge head against her naked chest. Wetness from his tears ran down and soaked into the roots underneath. “Is there anything I can do?”

“You can continue to not say you’re sorry,” he said with a hint of a smile. “And you can continue to just stay here and let me stare at you. I don’t know why, I don’t know what happened, but the universe sent you to me, and I think this pretty much proves I’m not insane.”

“Well you
did
stalk me into the woods.”

She worried for a second that joking wasn’t the right thing to do, but when he cracked another smile, she relaxed. “I feel like I’m in the middle of an ocean and just happened to find a skipper,” Thor said.

“You... what?”

Clearing his throat, Thor scrunched up his eyebrows. “You know, a skipper, like on a boat? So I found a boat, but instead of having to steer it myself – which I don’t know how to do – I found you, and you already know, and so,” he trailed off.

“I know that look,” she said. “And I know the rambling.” Without another word, she pulled him against her chest again, and just let him sob.

His huge body shook, he gripped her closer and tighter, like he was using her for an anchor. She had no idea why he would, but the things he said had made sense, in a backward, kind of upside down way. And it wasn’t like she didn’t feel the same sorts of things for him.

He cleared his throat again and apologized. She shushed him with a kiss.

“My dad was sick my whole life. He died three months before I turned eighteen, and all anyone ever told me was how sorry they were.”

Thor fell silent, looking relieved to have someone else talking instead.

“‘I’m sorry he was so sick,’ they’d say, or shit like how they were sorry for how badly I was hurting. You know what the truth was? I’ve never told anyone this, but,” she took a deep breath. A tear of her own rolled down her cheek. Why the hell was she so open with this guy? Had just those few encounters turned her into an open book? Maybe it was
his
being so raw that got her to realize there was more to this than just some passing thing.

“Truth is, I didn’t even know my dad. He wasn’t ever really a person to me. He was just always sick. I know that makes me sound like an asshole, I know it, but hear me out.”

“No it doesn’t,” he cut in. “I’m a doctor, remember? I know there’s that thing about dentists and doctors being different, but trust me, I’ve seen some shit.”

Paprika swallowed hard. “He was just there. He was conscious, but he was always looped on pain killers, and in the brief moments of lucidity he had where we were alone, it was like he didn’t even really know what to make of me. I loved him, you know? I loved him because through all of it, he was a good guy and took care of me the best he could, but I didn’t even fucking
know
him.”

Thor was nodding, brushing the tears away from Rika’s eyes.

“I couldn’t tell you what his favorite movie was, I don’t know if he liked football. Anyway, that was a really long way of saying that I didn’t cry. I didn’t cry until I saw my mom laughing like two weeks later.”

“My dad was laughing too,” Thor said. “It wasn’t... I mean not like big, loud guffaws, but I could tell that something had switched in his brain.”

“Was she sick? Like long term?”

He shook his head, and then sniffed. And then he started nodding. “I guess, I don’t know, really. They weren’t really clear on the whole medical sciences thing. He said she’d been coughing for a while but nothing worked. I didn’t bother asking if he took her to a doctor because, well, yeah, no reason to rub salt in an open wound.

“But he sounded... I don’t know, lighter? Like he was relieved, at least. That’s a horrible thing to say, it’s—“

“Normal,” Rika cut him off. “My shrink spent about five years telling me that before I let myself believe her. And it’s normal for you too. Whatever you think, whatever you feel, is normal, even if you think you’re the biggest asshole in the world for whatever it is you feel.”

For a few moments that stretched on and on, neither of them spoke, they were both enthralled in their own heads, searching feelings and trying to untangle the yarn. He stood up, unexpectedly.

“You ever seen a bear cry?” he asked, obviously embarrassed.

“No,” Rika said. “But I’ve also never loved one before.” As soon as the words were out of her mouth, they couldn’t go back in, but she had no idea she was even thinking them before they escaped.

The look on Thor’s face was a mixture of relief, panic, confusion and pain. All of it, like she’d just said, completely normal. “Love,” he said, trailing off into a vague, confused smile. Truthfully he looked like he’d been injected with half a gallon of morphine, as his cloudy eyes moved back and forth, surveying the little outcropping. “I need to do some thinking. Is that okay?”

“Well yeah,” she said, “of course.”

But before she could finish the sentence, her bear was a bear again, crashing through the woods.

A long sigh, followed with a tremble, escaped Paprika’s lips. “I just told him I loved him,” she said, blowing a puff of air that knocked a curl out of her face. “I told him I loved him, I told him about my dad, and I told him about every damn thing else I could think of. What the hell am I going to do now?”

She hopped down off her little platform, sure to tuck Henry into her fanny pack and secure it around her waist before she started down the trail. The cool wind, blowing through the whistling pines, calmed a little of her nervousness, but not until she was bounding along through the underbrush, back toward home, did her thoughts really rest.

––––––––

T
wo days after their intense exchange in the woods, Rika realized that she wasn’t going to sit around and wait. Healing took time, she knew that, but she also knew that getting out of your own head is a real good thing when the world has just turned into a confused mishmash of weird feelings and fear.

His office line rang and rang, but no one picked up. Not until the third time she tried, which was about ten minutes after she saw her mom come down the stairs, post Jane Fonda, looking as worn out as if she’d just had eight or ten orgasms in the woods, caused by a bear.

“Doctor Melton’s... you know what? Who cares? That’s you, right, Paprika?”

“I, er,” Rika’s voice caught in her throat. “Well yeah? Abby, is everything okay?”

“Look, T told me about you two, with the kissing and everything. You know him as well as anyone in this town except me, which is honestly pretty sad, seeing as how you’ve had a completely unreasonable number of nearly-sexual run-ins and haven’t shared so much as a meal. You shifter types always confuse me, but when it comes to one that looks like him? I totally get it.”

Near-sexual? Guess she hasn’t heard about the last one.
“Yeah,” Rika said, embarrassment obvious in her up-turned voice. “Listen, I was just worried about him. He told me about his mom and then he ran off in the woods and I haven’t heard from him since.”

“Shit,” Abby cursed, a bitter laugh following her swear. “I hadn’t until about thirty minutes ago. Hurricane Thor came through just as your last call was filling my ears with the dulcet tones of train engines.”