ROMANCE: SHIFTER: Shifter to the Max Collection (Dragon, Bear, Wolf and Panther Shifter Romances) (Paranormal Fantasy Romance Collection) (32 page)
Authors: C.J. Ayers
Curvy Elie Barner left Hemford, Colorado the moment she graduated high school and hasn’t looked back. Until now. After ten years away, she’s returned to find that Hemford isn’t any bigger than it used to be, and not much has changed…
Not much, that is, except her childhood best friend, Jake Framer.
Jake Framer has obviously changed significantly. He's no longer the rail-thin, scrawny boy Elie remembers. In fact, Jake has developed into a strikingly handsome, heavily-muscled, hulking giant of a man.
But, even though they were inseparable throughout grade school and high school, things between Elie and Jake ended on a rocky note.
That very last hour together, right before Emily was to leave town, Jake asked her to marry him.
And Elie shot him down cold.
Now, 10 years later, Elie thinks she may be ready to settle down. But does Jake still harbor any feelings for his once best friend who so harshly rejected his heart?
And what will happen to Elie’s feelings for Jake once she discovers that he isn’t quite the man he used to be—he’s not even the human that he used to be?
Hint: There’s nothing a small mountain town loves quite like a bear hunt
Elie’s old Outback rocked to a stop at the curb; her parent’s house was just as she recalled. It sat there, at the end of the lane, waiting like a dinner plate left out for one lonely straggler. She’d always been that straggler. How many plates had been wrapped in Saran-wrap and lovingly set aside for her while she ran around town? How many nights had she wandered in still smelling like “Mr. Jock” or “Motorcycle Boy’s” cologne in high school?
The engine clucked gently as she rolled forward again towards her driveway.
Hemford was just the same as she remembered, if a little dirtier. Her thick and curvy frame had gotten a few appreciative stares when she stopped for gas at the Texaco, dressed in clean jeans, a low-cut top, and her aviators. The mountain air felt glorious after the smog of Denver, and she’d tugged her long hair loose and rolled down the window an hour after the hills started rising underneath her wheels. She couldn’t blame the small-town loggers and good ol’ boys for staring at a fresh face—and everything attached to it—when Hemford was so isolated, so… untouchable.
It was so green. The Rockies were lovely this time of year, early summer, when life came roaring back in rivers and new things flourished. Elie wondered if she was one of those new things as she joggled open the car door; it creaked so loudly, Grandma Earline in the city cemetery twelve blocks away probably grimaced.
There was a minor vortex of motion in the thick bushes to the left of the neat little house, and Elie nearly had an MI when a big running form on four legs came shooting like a ski-ball toward her car.
“Jasper!” she laughed. The big German shep was gyrating with delight; it turns out, dogs really don’t ever forget. He whuffed and whined, licking her hands and trying to get his tongue to her face. Elie crouched down and hugged him, burying her face in his fur. His muzzle had grown speckled and gray; guiltily, she wondered what he thought of her long absence.
“Oh, Elie! I thought I heard a car.”
She looked up, and her heart twisted.
“Hi, Mom,” Elie stood up and met her mother halfway across the lawn. They hugged. Unlike Hemford’s stagnation, unlike Jasper’s gray whiskers… Elie felt no change, and it felt right.
Alison Barner beamed at her daughter; Elie always hoped she’d look like her mother, when the time came. Strong and sprightly, and a little taller than Elie herself, Alison was in fine health. She was dressed in casual denim and a button-front shirt with the sleeves rolled up; she’d tried to brush them off, but bits of dirt still clung here and there where she’d clearly been digging in the garden. Nothing could have been lovelier. Even the lines of sliver picked out in her dark hair were glorious, under the hail of spring sunlight.
“Well, let’s get you inside.” Alison—Alie—opened the back door of the Outback and helped her daughter truck in her big duffel bag. Elie let her, picking up her smaller bag and her school bag. If there was one thing Elie and Alison shared in eerie communion, it was a need to feel capable. A need to feel needed.
“How’s school?”
Elie gulped.
“I passed my finals,” Elie replied. Of course she did. She knew how the school rituals went, how to pass the tests. Most of her classmates were nineteen-year-olds. She was pushing thirty.
“When do you pick classes for next semester?” Alison was asking these questions cheerfully over her shoulder as she and Elie eased through the too-narrow entry hall. Her parents had bantered about widening the entry into a full foyer for as long as Elie could remember—so far, it was still just barely three feet across, a perpetual reminder to eat your greens and sometimes skip dessert.
“I’d be a returning student, so I can pick them out in a couple weeks.”
To this, Elie’s mother didn’t respond. It wasn’t accidental; a deaf man could have heard the falter in her suddenly-thin voice. But she didn’t push. That was something everyone around Elie, everyone who
stayed
around Elie, soon learned.
“When’s Dad coming home?” Elie changed the subject without grace and without excuse, but her mother let it happen. As she walked the duffel bag up the stairs in the back of the kitchen, she called back down.
“He’s taking Friday off so we can go out together, so he thought he’d stay a little later today. He’s loving the foreman work; it’s been getting tough, the last few years, working the trucks. This is much easier on his knee.”
Elie glanced up at the wall over the kitchen table; there hung a pictured history of the Barner family, including a military portrait of her father. It was taken when he retired from the Air Force; his knee had been smashed—a stupid industrial accident in the carrier—and he’d been honorably discharged. The Force would send him a monthly check until the day he died, but Brent Barner wasn’t fond of early retirement and had leapt into the logging mill, which welcomed him as a fellow Hemford-ite and mountain son.
Logging. That’s what everyone in Hemford did. Even Elie had considered it, before she ran away to France with her high school girlfriends.
Her mother came back down the stairs. “I made up the bed in your old room. Well… it’s a guest room, now, but I hope you’ll still feel like home.”
Elie smiled. It already felt like home.
Jasper wagged his tail loudly against the doorframe and sat practically on her feet, gazing up at her admiringly.
The silence spun outward like a wild spool of thread, and Elie twisted her lips.
“How long were you thinking of staying?” Alison asked finally.
The air became oppressive. Such an innocent, justified question, but it shot a jolt of adrenaline through Elie.
“I don’t know,” she shrugged. Why did it sound so defensive?
“You can stay as long as you like,” Alison replied putting her hands on her hips. “We aren’t going to make you sign a lease.”
“I know that,” Elie snapped irritably.
Why did it sound so defensive!
Alison didn’t reply. She walked across the kitchen to the fridge and pulled out a pitcher of lemonade.
“Out comes the lemonade,” Elie muttered.
“Elinor Barner,” Alison’s voice was warning and command in one, even all these years later. “It was a simple question.”
It
was
a simple question, one that Elie had no idea how to answer. Twenty-eight years old, and she didn’t know how to admit that she still didn’t know—anything. She’d run to France because she didn’t know. She’d tried New York because she didn’t know. She’d tried University of Denver because she didn’t know. And with thirty looming near, the feeling that she didn’t know was strangling.
“I’m going to go out for a walk.” Elie turned on her heel and let herself out. Jasper didn’t follow; he just hung his head and looked at Alison as if to ask, ‘How long this time?’
Ringer’s Bar was about the only kind of bar that you had any hope of finding in middle America in a town whose population couldn’t even fill Disney World. It was the town bar. As in, the only bar in the town. Elie walked into it knowing what she would find, and happy to find it: dark anonymity, muffled under the sound of a stereo bellowing Hank Jr. and Willy Nelson.
The multitude of likely-looking single men was a little off-putting. She’d just as soon be alone, but one bar in town made for slim options.
The narrow panel-top bar itself was probably the safest harbor; she took an isolated corner stool and slipped her dusty jacket over the back. Dusty? It was dusty, wasn’t it? She batted some of it off, but it hardly bothered her. Dusty felt… safe. Like home.
“Just a Coors, thanks,” she waved to the bartender, an ashen old biker-babe who’d lost track of the years that had flown by- the years since she could wear a tank top without a bra. But she smiled and waved back and reached for the cooler.
As she waited, Elie turned her mother’s question over in her mind. From a distance, it didn’t seem so threatening. She wasn’t any closer to an answer, but at least it wasn’t choking her.
Truthfully, Elie was thinking about staying in Hemford for longer than a few weeks. Maybe longer than a few months. Maybe she wasn’t going back to Denver.
She accepted her Coors with a sigh.
“Haven’t seen you around here.”
“Wish that had continued,” she answered, taking a swig.
She turned to look at the intruder on her private brooding. Now, he wasn’t too bad; tall and handsome, with a molded jaw and striking eyes. She’d seen that look in the eyes of men time and time again, and she propped her chin on her elbow.
Elie had chosen a seat that was awkwardly placed for someone to try and shimmy closer, but try he did. In the dim light, his hair might have been sandy brown—but then, it might also have been blonde. Nothing like a dimly lit smoky bar to alter perception. There was no mistaking his slim legs in those tight jeans, or the soft leather of his jacket.
“Are you new in town?” he asked. He made himself comfortable in the seat next to hers. Elie laughed.
“Are you? I’ve never seen you before.”
He shrugged. “A little. So you’ve been to Hemford before?” He waved at the bartender; she nodded and reached for a glass.
“I was born here.” Elie sipped off her beer and admired his profile. He had nice shoulders, and certainly a face worth taking a second look at. Plus, he didn’t look like a mill-worker, so it was unlikely he’d inadvertently blab to her father at work tomorrow.
He stuck out a hand. “I’m Bryan.”
“Elie.” She took his hand and tried to shake it, but he pulled it to his lips and kissed it in a gallant gesture that seemed fully out of place and time. She laughed again; he was entertaining, at least. He probably lived in a mobile home, but that wasn’t a terrible thing in Hemford.
They passed a half hour, then another hour. Elie wasn’t about to get sloshed hanging out with a total stranger. At least, she hadn’t planned to, but having this total stranger take off his jacket so he could show her the tattoo on his shoulder hadn’t been part of the plan, either. Elie made it through two and a half Coors bottles before she realized the turn of her stomach wasn’t the butterflies of infatuation. Bleh—she’d never been able to drink more than a couple.
“Hey, I don’t live far from here.”
Here it was. Elie grinned at him knowingly.
“Did you need a ride?” she teased.
“Of a sort.” He smiled half a smile and his hand found her thigh. “Not the kind that needs a car, though. Actually, I thought you might want a ride—my bike’s out front.”
The hand on her thigh pressed upward an inch, then another. He was leaning quite close now, and he smelled like Axe and dust. Elie could already see her lips on his ear, his jaw, his neck…
She leaned over and kissed his cheek. “You know, I think I could use one.”
It was twilight outside; that was early mountain sunset for you. It wouldn’t get truly dark for another couple hours. Elie and Bryan, arm-in-arm, crossed the dirt parking lot to where his motorcycle sat waiting. Elie could count the things she knew about motorcycles on one hand, but she knew a Harley when she saw one. It sat low to the ground with a classy black and orange tank, and Bryan climbed on first.
It had been years since Elie had ridden a motorcycle, but riding passenger was not difficult to figure out. She swung a leg over the seat and snugged comfortably against Bryan’s back. He was just as slim and hard as his jeans suggested, and she hoped he didn’t live too far away.
“Hey! Mosley!”
Bryan froze and turned, reluctantly, towards the shout.
Elie looked, too. Approaching the bike were two men, and in the half-light it was a minute before she recognized the flat-brimmed hats and the shine of badges at their waists. Sheriff’s department.
“Uh… how can I help you boys tonight?”
“Don’t give us that ‘boys’ song and dance, Mosley.” One was quite old, and one was catching up, and the elder threw a droll and unimpressed glare over Bryan’s windshield. “We have some questions for you. Why don’t you come along with us, now.”
It wasn’t a question; Elie sat there awkwardly, thinking about a good way to excuse herself. A second ago, she’d been gleefully planning an evening with a hot man on a bike. Things were starting to look like the opening minutes on an episode of
Cops
.
“Is there a problem?”
Uh-oh. Elie knew a dodging question when she heard it—it takes a thief to know one, and all that.
“There ain’t no reason to get into details here in front of your lady, we just need you to come with us to the station, Mosley,” the younger deputy added in amiably. His thumbs were hooked casually in his belt; Elie tried to find their squad car, but then she remembered this wasn’t Denver. Their squad car was a pickup with a light rack rigged up on top and the Sheriff’s department seal decal on each door.
Even getting shaken down by the cops was a quaint experience here.
Quaint, but not the least bit attractive. Elie stepped off the bike. “I’ll catch you later,” she waved as she walked away. Bryan looked like he wanted to argue, but the deputies didn’t, so Elie was left in peace to stride off into the pre-darkness.
She was shaking a little; maybe it was colder than she’d thought it would be. She hugged her jacket closer and walked on, away from the main street, away from the lights. There were a good many residential neighborhoods here, and her parents’ was perhaps a mile off. It wasn’t far at all to walk, even in the dark.
