The Right to Bear Arms: BBW Military Paranormal Romance (Wild Operatives, #1) (12 page)

“Where’s your daddy, boy?” He whined and turned tail to scramble out of the room. He led me to Russ, who sat in his recliner with a few square bandages on his abdomen. I had to presume more were on his back.

“Oh, thank God!”

“Daniella... You should be with the paramedics, darlin’. Are you okay?” He stood up from the chair to greet me, despite his pale features.

“Forget
me
, Russ. What about you? He shot you so many times! You need a doctor... you need... you need help.” Watching Mike shoot him had been traumatizing enough. Now I fretted over the very real possibility that he could bleed out before my very eyes.

“Shhh. Only twice, and it’s okay. I’m not gonna die over a couple bullets, I swear. An old Navy friend is on the way to help me out. I think there’s one lodged in me, so I’m not gonna have a happy evening here.”

Tears brimmed over my eyes at the sight of him. So bold, courageous, and dumb! My ex fills him with holes and he has the nerve to worry about me? Assured that he wouldn’t die on the spot in front of me, my mind latched on to the next conflict.

“Fine. Then you have to tell me what’s going on. I need to know what’s happening.” I needed to know why the animal I had loved, nurtured, and worried for turned out to be the man I adored. My hands trembled, and it was debatable whether the shake came from fear or rage.

“All right,” Russ agreed without argument. “But I need you to understand this first, Daniela. I planned to tell you everything tonight. All of it.”

“Tell me now.”

He sighed. “I’m a werebear. Thousands more like me exist around the world.”

I tried to moisten my lips with my tongue. “Like a werewolf?”

A faint smile ghosted its way across his lips. “Sorta like that, except we’re born this way. None of that biting nonsense.”

“I don’t... understand why you kept this from me so long.
You’re
my bear? You slept in my hammock. You ate the food I made for you. You did all of these things, but you couldn’t tell me you were a human being and able to understand every word I told you.”

“Dani—”

I held up a hand and cut him off. “I feel like the world’s biggest fool. I came back here afraid to find you a fucking cold corpse, but you’re moving better by the second. Were you even hurt at all? Are you faking that too?”

“No!” he shouted.

“How many lies have you told me?”

“I’ve never lied to you,” Russ insisted as he took a step toward me. He reached with one hand and I quickly back peddled away. Fresh tears sprang to my eyes. The trauma of the day should have dried them completely, but with my rising anger, I found myself wiping my face with my wrists all over again. “Dani... Baby, please.”

“Don’t
baby
me, Russ. How many lies have you told me?”

“None.” He glanced at his abdomen and peeled off the corner of the bandage. The wound appeared raw and tender, but at least a few days old. I stared at him. “Shapeshifters heal faster than humans, Dani.” I gazed into his brown eyes and saw my furry guardian protector who watched over me. He was still the Russ I’d come to love so much.

Together, we sat down on the sofa, close enough for our thighs to touch. This time when I shivered, the weight of his arm lowered around me instead of an impersonal blanket. Allowing Russ to pull me closer, I placed my cheek against his shoulder and closed my eyes.

“My mother is a bear shifter like me. I inherited this from her when I was born. Ian inherited his gift from his father and grandfather.” I jerked my head up to stare at him. “Yeah. Ian and Taylor both.”

“They’re bears like you?”

“No, not bears,” Russ answered. “They’ll probably be a bit ruffled when they learn I told you this, but I don’t want any more secrets between us. Ian’s a bald eagle and Taylor’s a cougar. All the members of my old squad are shifters of some kind, including the doc coming to patch me up.”

The words falling from his lips sounded preposterous but, at the same time, they were weighted with the absolute truth. His earnest and open expression told me he wasn’t making it all up. He wasn’t crazy and neither was I for the memory I had of him transforming.

“You didn’t think you should tell me this before?”

“I wanted to. Dani, please. Just imagine if every time one of us dated a girl, we told her about all this. That’s not how you keep a secret.”

The uneasy feeling in my gut diminished, leaving a cold ache in its place. He hadn’t trusted me, but we were still so new in our relationship that I couldn’t hold it against him completely. “What about the visits to my yard? You knew I was worried about my bear — about you.” The animal I had come to love was also the man I cared for, creating an overlap my heart couldn’t reconcile.

“I, uh...” Russell blushed and hung his head. “I’m sorry, Daniela. That first night I never really meant to fall asleep. Then you came outside with food, so brave and kind, not even a little afraid that there was a bear in your yard.”

“But why did you keep coming back?” Had he been watching me like some peeping Tom? I dismissed the absurd thought the moment it popped into my head. Russell wasn’t like that. “I just... I feel so stupid.”

“There’s no other way to tell you how sorry I am for deceiving you, Dani. I guess... I knew right then from the start that you were the woman for me. I couldn’t get you off my mind. When one of my kind meets our mate, it forms a connection nothing can shake. I never thought I’d have another like that after Katie died... then I met you. You, Dani. You’re the most important thing in my world. It just took me a while to realize it was happening again. I understand until tonight that my bear recognized you.”

I wanted to stay pissed, but his near brush with death smoothed the edge off my anger. Before I knew it, I was wrapping my arms around him tightly without regard to his healing injuries. I kissed his face and ran my fingers over his mussed waves.

“You could have died, you dumb, dumb man.” I dragged in a deep breath, which shuddered out of my lungs. My mind’s eye replaced the events in my head, showing me a bleeding bear, and then minutes later, a bleeding man amidst the carrot tops, riddled with bullet wounds in his powerful torso.

“And I could have lost you. I’d do it again without hesitation.”

“But you saved me, Russ. You came to my rescue and you saved me.”

“No, baby. You saved yourself. I just helped you to do it.”

2 Months Later

~Daniela~

T
rigger bounded back and forth between the porch and the open gate where the men brought up my leather sectional. Watching the three of them sweat under the noonday sun came as a reward for deferring to Russ’ old-fashioned terms. Women weren’t supposed to lift heavy things
if
a man could do it for them. I sipped lemonade and grinned as taut muscles shifted under suntanned flesh. They were a sexy gradient of skin tones, beginning with Russ’ country tan and ending with Taylor’s caramel brown. Ian was somewhere in between, the product of a mixed marriage with Native American blood. I’d finally dug that information out of him and made him promise to tell me stories about the Ojibwe Nation.

“Man, can we take a break yet? She’s been working us all day,” Taylor complained during the next trip to Russ’ truck, setting one of my boxes down too heavily. Glassware clinked from inside it.

“Hey, buddy. You break my expensive dishes and you can forget eating dinner. I’ll open you a can of tuna,” I called out in a teasing threat.

“Yes, ma’am!” Taylor quickly replied.

Russ was too much of a gentleman to allow me to participate in moving my belongings. When moving day came, he recruited his two pals to help instead.

“How the hell did you get so much stuff in eight months?” Ian asked. “Where did all of this come from?”

I nodded toward Russ, my enabler who either encouraged me to spend on a whim, or later returned to buy the things he saw me eyeballing too closely in the store. Protesting his frequent but generous purchases had been a waste of time. Russ insisted that he had earned the money, and if it couldn’t bring us happiness, what good was it to have it at all? Between all the new acquisitions and what I’d received after the divorce from friends and family helping me out with my new start in life, I had a truckload of boxes.

“Figures,” my former landlord grumbled.

At first, Ian wasn’t so happy about Russ deciding to spill the beans about their military group. He understood the reason, and knew it was inevitable, but it didn’t make him happy that a civilian knew about their world. I assuaged them of their worries by promising I’d never tell a soul, as long as they let me see them in their natural states, of course. They were as handsome as a bear, eagle, and mountain lion as they had been as men, only their fur and feathers permitted me to stroke them without shame.

“How soon do you need me to finish the clean-up on the house, Ian?” I asked him.

“Take your time. I’m not planning to rent it out again. Hell, I might move in myself and enjoy small-town life for a while. I haven’t lived here in years.”

“It’s a nice town,” I agreed.

While they worked, I whipped together a pan of chicken enchiladas and later baked sugar cookies to give the hard working fellas a carb rush. After they were gone, Russ and I returned to our porch where we opened a bottle of wine and watched the sunset. The moment was bittersweet, the beginning of a new life with a man I loved and a farewell to the single existence I created in the wake of my divorce.

Even my family loved him once they finally had the chance to meet him the night I killed Michael. He’d earned my father’s respect once we told him the gun Russ gave me was responsible for my dirtbag ex meeting his end. Then my mother hugged me tightly and Russ even tighter, because if not for his insistence on learning to use a weapon, I would have been dead. I had no idea how he kept a straight face through the pain.

Russ became quiet after his buddies were gone. He was throwing a ball across the yard for Trigger to chase and occasionally return to us; he was so silent I had to fret.

“You’re not regretting it, are you?” I asked suddenly to break the silence between us.

Russ laughed and patted my thigh. “Too late to change your mind now. I don’t think you could bribe Taylor to come back and move things again,” he teased.

“I know... I just... I’m glad for the chance to start over. What’s on your mind?”

Sensing the heavy emotion in my heart, or perhaps seeing it on my face, Russ turned to me and cupped one hand to my cheek. I turned my head and brushed my lips against his palm.

“You are. I was thinking about how much... I love you, Daniela, and I want you to be happy. Here with me and Trigger.”

A field of tears shimmered over my sight, distorting Russ from my vision. His thumb swept over my left cheek to clear it away once they began to fall. “

“I
am
happy.” Happier than I’d ever been. “Russ, I love you. I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

And I knew Russell would never become unworthy of that love. In the few months since our first date, my bear had more than proven he deserved every ounce of my affection.

Author’s Note:
Thank you from the bottom of my heart for reading my work. If you enjoyed this, please leave a review so that other readers can find my work. Reviews help authors continue to do what we love — write for you!

Did you love Russ and Dani? If you did, prepare to catch up with them in the next Wild Operatives novella,
Let Us Prey
as Ian finds a true love of his own.

All of my stories are connected. Stop and buy
Training the Alpha
, my werewolf paranormal romance starring Ian’s god daughter Ceres. It’s a ménage with a twist.

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Continue on for a look at the first chapter of
Saved by the Dragon
. Take a chance with Chloe and Saul to tide you over. Also available on Audiobook.