Bear Arms (Alpha Werebear Shapeshifter Romance) (Mating Call Dating Agency Book 4) Read online

  “My favorite part of infomercials is always when they show a person using a different product really badly. Like, have you seen the Magic Wallet thing? On the commercial, they show someone managing to spill all his credit cards when he tries to cram his wallet in his pocket and then—”

  “There’s that woman who tries to open her pocketbook and flings shit all over the place?” she asked. “I may or may not have seen my fair share of horrible late night TV.”

  “Oh my God,” he sat up. “So you’re some kind of rabbit-shifting... I’m gonna date myself really, really badly here, but... Ron Popeil?”

  “I don’t know if I’ve ever been called Ron Popeil, but I kinda dig it. I just wish I could figure out some way to feature spray-on bald-spot coverer on my channel. Or the blog, or the DVDs or...” suddenly, she was getting tired just thinking about it.

  “You must be busy as hell,” he said, taking a sip of his Sam Adams and not really thinking about what he was saying. It was just idle chatter, the sort that most people make and don’t even consider until someone else responds. “All those people watching. Wow.”

  She started clicking her teeth together. It was something Lexie had always done, but didn’t realize she did audibly. It might’ve been his bear hearing that clued him in, but when he started looking concerned, she cut herself off. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to hit any raw nerves,” he said. “I just think it’s awesome.”

  “No,” Lexie said, still trying to calm her nerves. She took a nice, long drink. “It’s not that. It’s just that I get into these black holes where all I can think of is putting out more stuff. Another video, another blog, another video, another blog. And... here I am bitching about my incredibly cushy, incredibly lucky job to a guy who really doesn’t need to listen to my bitching.”

  He just smiled in a way that told Lexie it was fine. “It’s... I’m not really one to do a lot of comparison bitching,” he said. “Truth be told, my time out in the desert was more weird than bad. I spent a lot of time in camps, trying to train people and when I wasn’t doing that, I was fixing tanks or choppers or, well, pretty much anything else they brought me to fix.”

  She let out a long sigh, which he listened to, and then stood up, taking her hand. “Listen to me,” he said, “I had a good run over there. To be honest with you though? I can’t imagine having to show up on the internet and entertain people like that. It gives me the shakes just to think about.”

  As though to emphasize his point, he tucked one of Lexie’s fallen blonde curls behind her ear. “Seriously. That’s a bigger nightmare to me than living in some barracks and never seeming to have a shower except during leave. Seriously,” he added, to make sure she understood. “And I’m not just saying this to calm you down.”

  “You calmed me down about eight seconds ago,” Lexie said. “I was just thinking about how nice your hands feel on my face.”

  She blushed deeply, slightly amazed that she’d said anything like that.

  “Good,” was his reply. Soft and gentle, just like his fingers curling against her cheeks, and then running behind her ear, down the line of her jaw. He leaned closer, whispered that he couldn’t believe he was doing anything like this, and let his lips gently brush against Lexie’s for just a second, before gripping her in a kiss that forced her head backward, against the soft give of her leather sofa.

  “If this keeps going,” she said, “we’re never going to make that minigolf date.”

  “Do you care?” another kiss sent a chill up Lexie’s back, prickling the hairs on the nape of her neck and making her arch against his body. She felt every inch of his muscled chest flex underneath his loose hanging shirt, and for a moment, had to fight herself to keep from ripping it off him. And then for a split second, she considered that maybe she should fight so much.

  Her fingernails rasped softly over the cotton shirt, and she smiled, just staring at Blake’s eyes as they glittered with a combination of mischief and something she couldn’t quite place. “How do you keep doing that with your eyes?”

  “Doing what?” Blake did it again. His eyes glittered with flecks of gold and green that cast a soft spell on Lexie’s mind. When he noticed her staring at him with a slightly slackened jaw, he grinned. “Oh that, I dunno, it’s just something that happens sometimes. Actually that’s not true. It’s something that happens when I’m with someone I can’t stop thinking about. It’s been so long, so, so long since I felt like this. I can’t remember if I ever have.”

  As the two of them sat motionless, staring into one another’s eyes and both wondering at exactly the same time if they’d somehow wandered into a time warp where nothing existed except the two of them, Lexie’s phone buzzed on the table, jarring them both back to reality.

  “Son of a bitch,” Lexie said, laughing under her breath. “I almost forgot this thing existed. I almost forgot everything existed.”

  He still had his arm around her shoulders and his eyes trained on hers. It was like he was making sure to remember every single detail in case it all ended without a trace. “Well,” he said, “I guess we should probably go. We’ve got all the time in the world for us, you know.”

  “We... do?”

  For some reason, his saying that sent a shock moving through Lexie’s core. “I mean... how do you know?”

  Blake just smiled. “Sometimes you just do, you know?”

  She smiled back and stretched over him for the phone. For a moment she loitered over his lap, wanting once again to rip his clothes off and have her way with him, especially when she felt his heat underneath his jeans. Lexie didn’t say anything, but she certainly took note of the way he felt and how it made her feel to have him right there with her.

  She grabbed the phone a second later, hoping he hadn’t noticed her little respite on his lap... or maybe hoping he did. She let out a frustrated chuff and swiped the screen. As luck would have it, Eve had switched her tack from text message to call, and so when she moved her finger across the screen, it answered immediately.

  “Hey!” Eve said. “Stop it! I said quit! I’m trying to talk on the phone you old horn dog!” she was laughing, and then giggling, but she finally stopped. “Sorry, Morales is acting... well, like we’re a couple horny teenagers. This bear won’t keep his damn paws off me!”

  “Oh,” Lexie said, confused as to how she was supposed to react. “Well, I’m glad you’re having fun. So are we, Blake is... well, he’s...”

  She looked over at her bear, and realized that she’d just thought of him as her bear. Just the thought of such weird intimacy shot a shiver arching through her body that had electric tingles following in its wake.

  “So you like him? I figured you would. I mean, what the hell, who wouldn’t like a guy like him? Oh shut up, Moe! I like you too, yeah, yeah, quit pawing me!” She was giggling again, trying her best to keep her voice straight, but it was obviously not the easiest thing in the world to do. She laughed again, took a deep breath and apologized again.

  The next few moments of conversation were spent with Lexie looking at Blake, watching his eyes, his lips, and trilling with excitement every time he curled his fingertips against the bare skin between the waistband of her jeans and the bottom of her shirt, where they’d settled. She thought that maybe the shirt had gotten sentient and pulled itself up.

  Eve, for her part, just kept talking about how much fun dinner was, and how it worked out for the best that they couldn’t make dinner, but that both she and Morales really wanted to have them along for the minigolf part of the date.

  “Are you sure?” Lexie asked her, sort of hoping she’d relent and say they’d rather go home and get it on instead. “I mean if you guys just want more time by yourselves we’re fine. We haven’t even broken out the Scotch yet.”

  Eve howled with laughter. “She said they haven’t broken out the Scotch yet,” she said with her hand evidently over the phone’s receiver. “I think they’re getting on really well—stop that! Save it for later, you pervert!”
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br />   Just hearing Eve squealing with laughter was a good thing. But, Lexie still wasn’t sure why she, of all people, was of such interest to the great matron of White Creek mating, as to merit a double date. Everyone knew beyond all doubt that she never did things like that.

  “Say, Eve?” Lexie asked. “Why do you want to double with us? I mean, I really appreciate it and I’m glad to get to know you better and all that, but I’m just sort of confused.”

  “Why?” Eve asked as she cackled again. “I want to learn how to take Mating Call on the internet. I’m kidding, but not really. Also I figured it’d be fun. I don’t know, I’m not as stiff and stodgy as everyone thinks. Stop it! Oh... Okay, jeez, you can keep doing that.” She cleared her throat. “Er, sorry, he... well... I better save that information for Dora.”

  “Well I’m flattered,” Lexie said, trying to make sense of Eve’s last cryptic comment. “I mean, sure, we’re ready to go, are you guys heading over there? I know it’s been a couple hours, so—”

  “Ralph’s Fun Pit,” Eve said. “Stop that! Or don’t. Okay, don’t.” she cleared her throat again. “Remember, as everything with Mating Call, it’s on the house. So all you two have to do is show up and manage to keep your hands off each other for an eighteen-hole round of mini-golf. If you get arrested for PDA or hiding off in the side of the course to go at it, we’re not responsible for any of those fees, although just between us, I’d probably chip in to cover the lawyer, because that’d be fuckin’ hilarious.”

  Lexie couldn’t help but laugh at the stream of consciousness apparently escaping from Eve’s mouth. The whole thing was so surreal, so wonderfully strange, that her standard dose of self-doubt and confusion didn’t have time to take hold. I’m just going along for this damn ride, she thought. If nothing else happens with any of this, then at least we had a good night.

  Blake was still watching her, though his eyes were tracing the line of her jaw and her collarbones. She turned over and draped her legs across his thighs. It was just so comfortable. Everything about him was just so comfortable and safe.

  In the back of her mind, she thought something was going to have to eventually go wrong. Something was going to have to put a little spike in between them. Whatever it was, she hoped, they could get past it. She’d already decided, probably when they sat down and watched Trek five minutes after meeting one another that no matter what happened, this one was worth trying to keep.

  After a few more brief instructions, including a strange request to stop by the Mating Call offices to pick up a box that Eve had forgotten on her desk, the phones were hung up and everyone went back to their barely resisted sexual tension.

  Blake had his fingertips resting on the back of Lexie’s head, his fingers curling gently against the tiny hairs on the top of her neck. “So, minigolf?” he asked. “I’m kind of a beast with a multicolored putter, you know. I think you might want to watch out because I’m gonna destroy every last one of you.”

  Suddenly, Lexie had a thought that seized her. “There’s gotta be something wrong with you,” she said abruptly. “I mean, I’m crazy in about four thousand different ways. There must be something about you that isn’t perfect because God’s honest truth, you being this nice and patient and beautiful is starting to unnerve me a little.”

  She almost immediately regretted she’d said anything, but from the look on Blake’s face, from the way he sank away from her just a tad, and from how he pulled his fingers off her head, it was a question he had been expecting, but hoped not to come.

  “Well,” he began, and let his voice trail off into the ethers. “I can tell you right now that I’m not perfect. Sometimes I’m not even sure I’m good.”

  The former glitter in his eyes washed away. Instead, when Lexie next looked into them, the blue was stormy and restrained. There was something buried deep in there and he didn’t want it to come out. At least, not yet; not like this.

  “I can’t tell you exactly,” he said. “My brain goes in a lot of directions and they aren’t all good ones. I get doubts, I get afraid just like anyone else. But I try to keep my mind focused on going ahead. Going forward is the only thing that keeps me going sometimes. And sometimes I get these dark thoughts. Very dark ones.”

  He trailed off again, watching Lexie’s eyes. “But when I walked in that door, and I saw your face, I forgot all of that. This is the first,” he looked down, checking his watch, “two hours and change that I haven’t thought about what’s coming up over the next hump. Morales, my old CO, my roommate, the guy I bought the garage with, he’s been my lifeline for a while since we came back here, and he’s the only one whose seen me in the depths of my fear.”

  At some point, Lexie realized, she had either taken his hand, or he took hers. Their fingers intertwined and she stared at him for a long moment. “A lot of times, I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “Hell, I don’t even know why I’m afraid.”

  He fell silent and Lexie just sat there holding onto him. After a few moments, a thought sprung up in her mind. “You know, I think I kind of understand that,” she said. “I mean, it’s not the same thing, not really, but I can’t shake the feeling that my life is just not real, you know? All this shit I’ve bought, all the people who yell at me for new releases and tell me how awesome I am, I think that either I’m making them all up, or at some point in the near future they’ll figure out I’m a hack and that’ll be that.”

  They sat, just holding hands, just existing, for the space of a few breaths. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “It just all seems like days come and go and feelings come and go but nothing makes much sense.” His pause was pointed, especially when his gaze bore deeply into Lexie’s soul. “Until now. Somehow, it does make sense now, as ridiculous as it might sound.”

  “Do you want to make a DVD with me?” she blurted, out of nowhere. It sounded strange, but he understood that was somehow her way of opening up her entire world to him with one fell swoop. “Well not a whole DVD, I mean just a couple little bumper videos to go in between things I already recorded.”

  He looked dumbfounded, but he was smiling. “I mean, I guess? I don’t know what the hell to do on a DVD critiquing crafts projects. It does sound kinda fun though. But...why me?”

  Lexie shrugged and shifted her body so that she was nestled between Blake’s arm and his chest. She grabbed his hand again and wrapped it around herself feeling so perfectly content and so completely safe that she could have admitted anything in the world right then and felt perfectly fine doing it.

  “My editor... or my agent, whatever she’s doing this month, gave me the idea. She said that my viewers want more personal stuff from me. Like they want to get to know me, right? Although I think they’re crazy, because for me, that’s like getting to know too much about a movie you love, you know?”

  He lifted an eyebrow, looked down at her as she talked, and kissed the top of Lexie’s head. It was such a simple gesture, one that if it were between two lovers who’d known each other forever would have been as natural as shaking hands.

  But these two? Two hours.

  Lexie’s thoughts began to race, but they were racing to a good place. A very, very good place. “How did you mean that?” she asked. “The kiss on the head, I mean.”

  “Oh, well, I don’t know, just seemed like the thing to do. It was like when you see a couple dogs walking around and one of them sorta turns around and licks the other one’s ass.”

  He screwed up his face, promptly turned purplish red, and started laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. “I mean, shit, not that what I did was like licking an ass. Your ass,” he corrected. “No ass licking,” he said, obviously so flustered he was getting deeper into a hole. An...ass...hole.

  Lexie did her best to keep her cool, but this was too much, way too quickly. She started giggling madly, the sort of giggling that makes a person snort, snuffle and sneeze. Before long, the two of them were just a mess. She was howling, clutching her stomach and doubled over. B
lake’s entire head was turning purple, even his scalp that she could see through his close-cropped hair. He clutched for her, and started wheezing.

  “No ass licking?” she asked, though it took several long seconds for her to get the whole question out. “But what if—”

  “Okay, okay,” Blake said, trying as hard as he could to catch his breath. Finally, he managed, but not without significant effort. He took two deep breaths, let them out slowly and placed his hands on Lexie’s shoulders. He looked straight into her eyes and heightened the gravity, the drama, of the situation, which given the context was all the more ridiculous. How he deadpanned this, she didn’t know, but Lexie tried her very best to play along. “Right, now that we’re calm, I need to ask some serious questions.”

  “Go on,” Lexie said, trembling and biting down on her lip to keep from breaking up yet again. “I’m listening.”

  “Right, good. Now look here. We’ve had some pretty serious discussions in the last couple of hours, and there’s the looming danger of minigolf with people I don’t know on the horizon. Should I go on, or are you having some kind of conniption?”

  Lexie just couldn’t handle it. A bellow of laughter blasted out of her, and for a moment, it was all she could do to keep breathing in between the shrieks. Finally, she managed to stop again, and she was still utterly amazed that he was able to keep up the charade. “Nope,” she said, “under control. Now back to the ass licking.”

  He tried real hard to pretend to ignore her comment, but he broke character for about a half-second, and cracked a grin. “Now what I was going to say is that I don’t pass judgment on anyone, but I’d prefer to have a complete prohibition on ass licking while we’re playing minigolf. Can we agree on that? Afterwards, I mean, whatever you’re into, I’m not gonna judge.”

  That was that.

  The laughter exploded again, the two of them hacking and wheezing and coughing. “Okay, fine,” Lexie finally said. “I promise, no ass licking on the golf course.”