ROMANCE: SHIFTER: Shifter to the Max Collection (Dragon, Bear, Wolf and Panther Shifter Romances) (Paranormal Fantasy Romance Collection) (35 page)

Two days later, Elie was still hiding under a quilt in her old bedroom, snug and safe as a princess in a tower and nervous as a hen in a fox den. Clouds had rolled in without rain, just hanging overhead like a shroud over the Rockies, holding in heat and bringing up the humidity. With it came a persistent chill. Alison and Brent Barner had chalked up Elie’s behavior to a bit of a cold and she didn’t correct them.

She’d lived in a hazy state of half-waking, half-sleeping since the night before last. It played over and over again, the events between hearing the bear through the forest on the dark lakeshore and getting back into her car. Fur and teeth vanishing into human form. Jake stumbling out of the lake towards her. Him naked in the moonlight; there was no reason to pretend she wasn’t partial to that one, but it couldn’t blot out the insanity of the entire affair.

People didn’t turn into bears. Bears didn’t turn into people.

There was a knock on the front door downstairs; Elie’s heart flopped in her chest and she held very still, waiting.

Murmured voices. One of them, certainly her mother’s. The other… Elie already knew, but wanted to hope it wasn’t…

Should she have warned her parents? Elie hadn’t told them a thing, but what if…

There were steps tracking through the house, and Alison politely commenting on Elie’s feeling under the weather and how she hadn’t left her room all day, or all yesterday. They were at the stairs!

It would be stupid to hide under the bed, right? Elie briefly considered the closet, but the stairs were too short for that and before she could have dashed across the room, Elie’s door creaked opened and Alison poked her head in.

“Hey… how are you feeling? Better?”

Elie peered over the quilt and shook her head.

Alison nodded. “Well, you have a visitor here, so I’ll send him up with some soup.”

“No! Mom—!” But Alison knew, and she had already pulled in the door coyly. Elie grumbled and sat up. At least she was already clothed. Now she had to wait for the hum of the microwave to end in a piercing beep, knowing that when the sound wafted upstairs, someone else would soon be coming with it.

Dismally, Elie waited, head under the quilt. Maybe if he came up and she ignored him, he’d just go away.

She heard the door creak open.

Her room was carpeted, and she could barely hear his footsteps as he crossed the floor, but she knew he was there. In her mind’s eye, Elie could see him, standing over her bed, looking down at the quilt with those soft brown eyes. He’d be wearing jeans again, like he always did, and a button-down shirt, or maybe a t-shirt that squeezed his big arms and oak-tree chest.

He sneezed and something sniffing and cold poked rudely under her quilt.

“Goddammit, Jasper!” Elie pushed his nose away, giggling. The shepherd grew more interested as she began to move, and his whole face came to see her in her blanket sanctuary. “Your nose is freezing! Get out of here!” Elie sat up and threw the quilt back.

Jake was standing in the open doorway, a bowl of soup in one hand and the doorknob in the other. Elie froze, even as Jasper clambered into bed with her and settled absurdly across her lap. At thirteen years old, he still thought he was puppy-sized.

“Glad to see you’re doing ok,” Jake offered, not moving from the door.

Elie nodded stiffly. “Yeah, I’m ok. Just a little cough and cold. Not a big deal.”

He was staring an awfully long time, and the intensity of his eyes on her was making Elie woozy. Maybe she really was sick.

“Did—did you need something?” she asked innocently.

Jake shut the door.

“You know why I’m here,” he said quietly. He set the soup down on her bedside table and stood by her, just as Elie had imagined him doing minutes ago. The trace of stubble on his jaw was darker than his hair, black rather than dark brown. “I need to know what you saw.”

Elie swallowed dryly. “Here,” she patted the bed beside her. “Sit…”

He didn’t seem to want to at first; the discomfort at Elie’s suggestion was practically visible in the air. But sit, he did.

“I saw…” Elie paused, reflecting. Her voice was so quiet a lurker under the bed wouldn’t have been able to hear it; Elie didn’t want to speak too loudly, in case Alison got it into her head to ‘accidentally’ overhear their conversation. Scalding hot men visiting their daughter in bed was too much for any mother to resist listening in on, if the opportunity came. She looked him in the eye. “Jake… I saw a bear. It changed into a human. That human was… you.”

Jake let out a long, slow breath, as if he’d been holding it.

“Have you told anyone else?” he asked in a calm so forced, his jaw twitched.

Elie shook her head. “No, and I’m not going to. You’re right. If anyone knew, you’d end up in a—a FBI quarantine cell or a laboratory or something. I won’t tell anyone, ever. I swear.”

And Elie meant it, with all her heart. She of all people knew what it was to want to keep your business to yourself.

Jake didn’t seem to have an answer. Maybe he hadn’t expected such easy compliance. He turned out to be wearing the t-shirt today, and Elie watched as his shoulders lowered, bit by bit, and his face relaxed.

“I’m glad to hear it,” he murmured finally.

Elie was feeling more and more acutely how little clothing she had on. She pulled the quilt around her waist a little tighter, but it didn’t help the lack of a bra, which was obvious through her old, ragged Five Finger Death Punch tee. Elie winced; maybe she should buy a couple blouses, or at least shirts that didn’t have holes worn in them.

“So why did you show up as a bear if you didn’t want me to see?” Elie asked, adjusting her arms and trying to keep the shirt from clinging to the round swell of her breasts too tightly.

“What?”

“Well, you knew I was going to be there. Why the hell did you come as a bear if you didn’t want me to know?”

He frowned. “Why would I’ve known you were going to be there?”

“Because I left you a note,” Elie explained in disbelief. “I left it right on your front door.”

“Oh. I never use my front door; my workshop is in the garage, so I always just go in through there…”

Elie rolled her eyes, more at herself than anything. Of course he never used his front door. Of course anything that could go wrong had gone wrong. Stupid Murphy’s Law.

But now, there was one more topic, one more elephant in the room, and Elie badly wanted to begin the subject, if only she could do it gently. Well, she’d try, anyway.

“Jake?” He looked up at her, and Elie wondered if she really wanted to ask this next question. She figured she’d better do it quick before she changed her mind. “Can you tell me? I mean, what happened? What happens to you?”

He looked at her thoughtfully; Elie thought this was better, at least, than him storming out at the audacity of her question.

“You know,” he said, “you’re the only person I ever talked to about it at all.”

Elie smiled a bit. “I might as well know the whole story.”

Jake reached over and patted Jasper’s head; the dog quivered a little and whined, but didn’t resist the attention.

“Jasper’s a real good dog,” Jake pointed out. “Most dogs—especially the little ones—don’t like me much now.”

Elie snorted. “Jasper’s a wuss. Someone could come in to rob the house and murder us all and he’d either hide under the table or wag his tail and beg for pets.”

Jake laughed; he had seemed to relax almost back to his normal self. “Well. I… actually I’d like it a lot, to tell someone what happened. Been carrying it too long, you know…

“I guess it all started the year I got to the city. I just wanted to try something new. You’d run off to France, and I thought that was way too far for me, but just down the mountain wasn’t too much. I could still drive home when I wanted—just an hour or so away. Was tough in the winter, though.”

“Is that when you learned about craft beer?” Elie teased.

“Yep, that, and some other things,” Jake sighed. “I was working with a construction company building apartments, and I would go out with the guys. Especially a couple guys that just sort of… They were different, that’s all. I didn’t really understand it, but they would talk to me now and then, and they seemed like nice fellas.”

“Seemed?”

“Seemed,” Jake agreed. “Now, my Mom didn’t raise an idiot, I don’t sucker up to anybody just because they pat me on the back or buy me a beer. But I went out with these two—won’t even mention their damn names—because they liked to hike and camp, see, and well that was just perfect for me.”

Jake twisted his mouth in reminiscence. Shook his head. “I figure you probably felt just like I did the first time I saw them change. Except when they turned, they came after me. I thought they wanted to tear me apart, but they just wanted to infect me. They made me like them, and those bastards didn’t even ask.”

His fists were clenched on his knees; Elie couldn’t blame him. “If it’d been me, I’d’ve torn their damn heads off,” Elie snapped indignantly; she forgot, for a moment, about being quiet. “I can’t even believe how—how—! They didn’t think that maybe they should ask you before pulling a stunt like that?!”

“If they told me before, they said, they couldn’t have been sure I wouldn’t give them away,” Jake explained in a low voice. “And I told them to do some things that I won’t repeat. I told them to get lost, and I didn’t ever want to see them again. Of course, I worked with them, but I told them not to say a damn word to me, and they didn’t.

“I felt like I was going crazy, though, Elie. I don’t know how to explain it. You know those people who hear voices in their head? I felt like that. For weeks. Not like a voice, but like… like a… a feeling like something else was in my head following me. Stalking me. And every day I was terrified some men in black suits were gonna show up and ask me kindly to please come along with them, they have some questions, so on.

“I know I was paranoid, and they started to notice it at the jobsite. Eventually I turned in my two weeks. I was afraid I was gonna end up getting someone killed. My boss didn’t say anything—he was a great guy, Mack—but I knew he was relieved I quit. I’d been drinking a lot, since alcohol seemed to keep the feeling away, and I’d shown up to work drunk twice. He would’ve had to fire me soon, and he hated to put a guy out of work.

“I hadn’t changed, because I was doing everything I could to stop it. I thought if I got out of the city I’d calm down and it might go away, but I’d seen the other two change and deep down I knew it was coming. And I knew I needed to be away from people when it did.”

He fell silent; Jasper wriggled a bit and Elie scratched his big ears.

“So you came home,” Elie murmured.

Jake nodded and Elie caught his eyes drop—for a fraction of a second—to the holes in her thin t-shirt. Then he was looking her in the eye again. “I’ve been here ever since.”

Elie nodded and found herself patting him on the leg, like a pal. She winced.

To her shock, Jake set a hand over hers. “I… I actually like it there, if it’s all the same.”

Heat flew up into Elie’s face and neck, but she didn’t remove her hand; Jake was smiling, just a little, now, just enough to make her heart race. His thigh under her fingers tightened and flexed as Jake moved nearer, leaned closer.

His beard brushed her neck first, and Elie shivered pleasantly. And then his lips. Hot and hard and relentless, they kissed and teased a line from her collarbones to her ear.

“Jake…” Was it meant to be halting or sighing? Elie’s voice breathed out in a mix of the two. Jake paused and looked up at her.

When he paused, she was able think clearly, and she took her hand from his thigh. Jake reddened.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, blushing. He drew away quickly, as if afraid she might lash out. “I could just smell… I mean I could smell the lust on you, and I figured—” He skidded to a halt and just stared at the floor, jaw working restlessly. His eyes didn’t meet hers.

Anger was in there, but Elie was feeling far too many things to do justice with a one-word reply. Anger, confusion, lust, yes there was lust, and fear. Could he smell that, too?

“Look, Jake, I won’t tell your secret,” she whispered. “But I… This is all… I don’t know. I just don’t know.”

Jasper lifted his head and looked at her balefully, but Elie couldn’t stop now. “This is a lot to take in,” she went on, pulling the quilt up over her chest. “Hell, are you going to make me one, too?”

Jake’s mouth dropped open. He looked up at her. “It’s not the clap!” he whispered back. “It’s not sexually transmitted!”

Elie gasped; Jake’s brown eyes had melted into glimmering gold, like amber. He saw her reaction and looked away quickly. She was shaking; was he going to change? Here? Now?

“Look, I’m sorry, but I don’t think… I don’t think I can do this.”

Jake stood abruptly. “That’s fine. That’s just fine. First, I wasn’t enough for you. Now, I’m too much.” He crossed the room in three long steps and whipped the door open.

Elie felt certain that she should stop him, but she didn’t. Jasper looked up at her and whined some more, and downstairs, she heard Jake making excuses to her mother for his sudden departure, and then the final closing of the front door. It seemed to echo, and for a while, no other sound broke the silence.