Bear the Heat (Mating Call Dating Agency, #3) Read online

  “And yeah, I really need to stop talking to my goddamn car.”

  “Rory?” a voice from the open front door came, loud and clear. “I need your help!”

  Instinctually, she kicked open her Acura’s door, which had been kicked open so many times that a spider’s web of cracks and splits were all over the driver’s side door. As soon as she hopped out of the car and balanced on the curb on just her big toes—there are other benefits to mink-hood aside from the sense of smell—her boss tottered out of the house, shirtless.

  “Oh my God, Monte!” she shouted, running to his side. “What happened? Are you okay? Do you need an ambulance?”

  That’s when she noticed the truly horrific, eye-abusing, monstrosity around his neck. “Wait, why the hell are you wearing a tie covered in naked hula dancers?” She paused for a second, then grabbed the fat end of the tie and held it up in her hand, as though inspecting it more carefully in the sunlight would reveal she’d somehow mistaken what was printed on it.

  No such luck.

  “I need an explanation, and I need it now, otherwise I’m not calling the ambulance, I’m calling the guys in the white suits with the long-handled butterfly nets. You can’t be serious about wearing this out of the house, especially not if you’re going on a...”

  “Date?” they both said at the same time.

  Rory blinked her eyes hard and then pinched the bridge of her nose. “No, no, no,” she said. “No, this can’t be happening. I am not seeing this right now.”

  The end of the tie lay lazily on top of Monte’s slight potbelly. “What? What’s so wrong with me having a date? Dora’s a nice girl and she makes me laugh and—”

  “No, that part makes me happy,” Rory said. “Really happy. No, what I’m talking about is this thing on your neck. Honey, if you came to a date with me wearing that thing, I’d start looking for the Candid Camera crew.”

  “Really?” he asked, innocently. “I thought it was kinda funny.”

  “Yeah,” she answered sharply. “I think I finally realized why it took this long for you to get a date. Come on in here. I might not be able to make sure you two hit it off, but I can damn sure prevent her spitting a drink all over you as she laughs, and then running away.”

  “That was sorta harsh,” Monte said, but as Rory entered his house ahead of him, he smiled. “But thanks, I couldn’t do it without you.”

  6

  “This is really, really cute,” Rory said.

  “The tie? I thought—”

  “Oh yeah no. God no,” she said after a brief pause. “That tie... I hope you got that in a raffle at a tiki bar. I’m not even sure how that thing got made without someone throwing up on it.”

  She started laughing, and then got the idea that maybe her friend was somehow actually attached to that horror show of an accoutrement. On the one hand, I’m doing him a favor, she thought. But on the other... I mean I’m attached to my Welcome Back, Kotter lunchbox, so it’s not like everyone makes the most rational choices all the time.

  “I bought it when I was on vacation in Key West,” he said. “I went into something called a pie shop, and was a little surprised to find that they weren’t selling dessert.” He paused for a moment, considering his thoughts. “Or rather they were, just not the kind you eat. Wait, no, I suppose you could eat it, but,” he blustered to a halt. When Rory looked at him next, after emerging from his closet with four different ties, he was bright red.

  “So you found a hooker hangout? Red light district?” she asked, loving the shade he was turning. “I gotta admit, calling it a pie store is fairly ingenious. So, how’d you like it?”

  “The pie? I, uh... I mean, I had good pie, but not... there,” he started sputtering. “Look! I didn’t make whoopie with any hookers, okay! I just bought the tie because I needed to use their restroom and didn’t want to be one of those people who just go into a place to use the john.”

  “That’s my Monte,” Rory said with a smile. “Never wanting to offend a hooker.”

  Sailing right past the fact that poor Monte had managed to turn almost purple, Rory buttoned the cuffs of his shirt wrists, and wrapped one of her ties around his neck. “This one’s pretty good. The blue matches the shirt, but,” she scrunched up her lips and frowned. “Nope, won’t work.”

  “Why not?” he asked. “You said it’s nice and I need to get going. I’m meeting Dora at Chez Justine in a half hour.”

  “Doesn’t match your face,” she said, trying to hold back the laughter as she turned him to the mirror. “Those two shades of purple don’t really work together. I think we better go with a red.”

  “Oh, damn it!” Monte threw up his hands in an incredibly overdramatic gesture. “I’ll never understand how you can keep yourself from laughing like that. It’s like you’re Bob Newhart except actually funny.”

  A shadow fell over Rory’s face as she sat down and saw the picture of Monte, and his wife and kids on the dresser top. “How do you do it?” she asked.

  “Well first you take down your pants, and then you ask the other person if it’s okay. Then you’ll take down their drawers.”

  Rory smiled, but her eyes were distant. “You just said ‘drawers’,” she said flatly, and laughed softly. “No, I mean... when your wife died, you didn’t really miss a beat.”

  Monte shrugged. “I missed a lot of them. I screwed up so many cases that I can’t really keep count. And past that, I was a goddamn train wreck for years. But now, having the twins helps a lot. They remind me of her, you know?”

  Nodding slowly, Rory had a thought, but hardly wanted to share it, because it was more than a little morbid, and definitely not fitting for the light mood of jocular sexual humor they’d fallen into, like they always did. But then, Monte sat down next to her and put an arm around Rory’s shoulder. “You mean how do I date Dora?”

  “Er, well yeah. I mean, I’ve heard you talk about Ella and sometimes it’s like she’s still alive.”

  Monte ran his hand through his smoothed down hair. “It is,” he said. “But other times it’s very lonely. When the twins started high school, they started badgering me to see someone. That’s not a pun,” he said with a grin. “Those two girls are more perceptive than I give them credit for. Always have been, I guess. It was hard on them, you know, coming up and losing their mom. I think in the back of my mind I always denied myself that sort of comfort because I knew... or I thought, anyway, that it would upset them.”

  “It doesn’t?” she asked. “I mean they are smarter than you, so that makes sense.”

  The two of them smiled for a moment. “They are that,” Monte finally said. “But look, there comes a time when you either have to just give up on yourself and get buried in whatever—school, work, your quest to single handedly eat an entire gallon of moose tracks ice cream in one sitting—and really those are your only choices.”

  “I almost made it,” she said. “Got close anyway.”

  “And then you threw up. But listen to me. I don’t know where this is going with Dora. She’s wonderful, she makes me laugh, and for some reason she seems to like me. But I can’t worry about the future anymore. At some point, it just makes no damn sense to keep worrying about things you don’t know are going to happen.”

  They sat silently for a moment, Monte examining his tie in the mirror, and Rory processing what he’d just said. “I think I know what you mean,” she said. “I really, really do.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. Over the six years of their working relationship, Monte had proven to have a preternatural ability to tell when something was bothering Rory. To be fair, she didn’t do much to hide it, but still. “You got that look on your face.”

  Rory stretched her fingers out, then clenched them into fists so that they popped. “Nothing, really,” she said.

  “Uh-huh. Do you think you’re going to actually get that one over on me? Do you actually think I’m that dumb?” He reached over and tousled her hair. Monte was the only person on the planet
who was allowed to get away with that and keep the tousling hand. “Come on, spill it. Is it about that firebear?”

  The sidelong glance that Rory gave her old friend told the whole story. “I think I’m crazy,” she said flatly. “I mean, I made out with him behind that house when I went to check and see if I could find any accelerant.”

  “Did you?”

  “Well yeah, I just said I made out wi—”

  “Bad joke,” Monte said. “Sorry, I figured if you were busy making out with him, you probably didn’t find any chemicals in the carpet. Although if anyone could manage to do both those things at the same time, it’s you.”

  “He got a tick.” Rory had a flat, almost defeated tone in her voice that Monte didn’t like one damn bit. “And I fell for him when he passed out. And also I didn’t find any chemicals in the carpet, but the fusebox outside was completely missing. Well I mean the box was there but the actual fuses were gone. And there were, you know, big claw marks on the wall like someone had torn them out.”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Monte said. “The fusebox was what? Please tell me you put in a report about that. I mean even if it was just some random thing, that’s still not exactly what you expect to see in a normal fuse box situation. Also, you’re gonna have to tell me that story some time,” he said. “You’re not crazy. You’re the smartest mink I know. That came out wrong, but you know what I mean.”

  Rory looked over at him for just a moment before glancing back at her toes. She wiggled them. “I feel like my brain is out of pace with the rest of me. As far as the fuse thing, yeah I put in a report, and even filed one of those things with the PD for them to go and re-check the scene.”

  He sat for a moment, thinking and plucking at his chin whiskers. “Your brain is out front, or your heart is out front and you aren’t used to your brain not leading the charge?” He paused a moment to make sure she wasn’t going to respond. “I’m guessing from the haunting silence hanging in the air that either choice A – I’m right, or choice B – you’ve gone mute somehow. Either that, or the improbability of you filing police paperwork without my hounding you has somehow broken your brain completely.”

  Rory giggled softly, shaking her head. “You know, the whole thing is ridiculous. I’m the sciency girl without a clue in the world how emotions work. You remember that Star Trek episode where Data starts to tell jokes, and everyone’s really uncomfortable because he’s not supposed to laugh? That’s me. Except I’m not as creepy as a laughing robot.”

  “Android,” Monte corrected.

  She looked at him. “Huh?”

  “Android. Data was an android, not a robot. Er, although yeah, I guess you just sprung the nerd trap on me, right? I read that term on the internet. I hear that’s what kids are saying these days.”

  She laid her head on Monte’s shoulder and hugged him. “Thanks for listening to me yammer,” she said.

  “I think you’re going to be just fine,” he said. “You always seem to figure out what you’re doing. And without telling you what to do, because I’m not your conscience, even if I feel like it sometimes, I’ll tell you this – a lot of times, our brain gets in the way. Sometimes the best thing you can do is stop thinking, and just feel.”

  Rory stared at her hands for just a moment. “Put on that purple tie. We’ve got work to do.”

  “Yes we do, young lady,” Monte said. “Let’s do it.” He paused, standing stock still like he wandered into a closed glass door at just the same time he got a static electrical jolt. “Don’t worry about things,” he said at a distance.

  “What? What things?”

  Monte shook his head. “Nothing much. I was just thinking about what you said there. About the family business, and wanting something you thought you’d never have and all that. Just let things be the way they are, you know?”

  “Not so much,” Rory said, even though from the tone of her voice it was completely obvious she did. “I try not to worry about things in general.”

  Monte snorted a laugh. “Yeah, of course, how could I be so stupid as to think you were an anxious as all hell mink?”

  She shook her head, smiling wistfully into the distance. It was one of those times she was looking at someone, but not really; her gaze was about thirty feet behind Monte’s head. “You think I’m crazy?”

  “No,” he said quickly. “We—my wife and I—dated for about six weeks before we got hitched. Ran off to Vegas when she started getting panic attacks from wedding planning. A very nice Elvis whose name was—is, I guess—Roy, did the deed, and then we got a whole lot of free drinks and comped buffets. There’s a tip for you, if you ever go to Vegas, just tell everyone you were just married. They eat that shit up.”

  “Really? Six weeks?”

  “Yeah, and I fell in love with her after about twenty minutes. We went to a Rocky Horror Picture Show production, of all things. I think that I sorta fell for her when she agreed to actually go out on a date with a guy wearing torn up fishnets and a really bad pancake makeup job.” When he noticed he was being watched with a bemused, sidelong glance, he added a little more. “Look, it was college, you know? Things were different back then. People were experimenting more with... uh, well just experimenting. Let’s leave it at that.”

  “Yeah,” Rory chuckled softly. “Sounds like a deal. But seriously, you don’t think I’m crazy?”

  “Oh shit, I know you’re crazy. But you’re the good kind of crazy. You have to be in order to solve the cases you do and root through all the shit you do without falling apart all over the place constantly.”

  “That’s another thing,” she said. “This arson case. I went out there to check it out, and Breaker showed up a few seconds later. He was looking for the fuse box, and when we found it, there wasn’t anything there. Well, except the claw marks trailing down the side of the house.”

  A little work chat always got the two of them into a very X-Files mood. “What do you make of it? You’re the fire whisperer. Have there ever been any other fires at that house? Or maybe some angry exchange that led to someone wanting to burn the house down? Ex-mate or something feeling crazy and getting drunk? I mean, that could explain the torn-up fusebox. You’d need to see the shifter registry for that though. It’d have to be a bear...”

  “Or a lion,” Rory said. “Deep gouges, four of them. I don’t know, it’s hard to tell just from looking at some rips in the siding.” Rory shook her head. “I don’t know, but I can find out tomorrow. I might be able to get into the records office after hours, but somehow I don’t think breaking into a police precinct is the best idea. Even if I do work there.”

  “Yeah, probably true,” Monte said. “And anyway, we both have other things to think about tonight.”

  Rory smiled. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. The case can wait.”

  “And that,” Monte said, “is how I know you’re in love. You’ve never said that before.”

  *

  The thing about a fire is that it’s always going to burn out. Eventually. At some point, it’ll go away and the only thing left will be ashes and, if you’re lucky, the shape of the thing that burned remains; just a charred, blackened version of the thing that once stood.

  Breaker shook his head, wondering why on earth he was constantly thinking about a girl he’d just met instead of keeping his mind on work. Except maybe, he thought, it was because he wasn’t thinking about work in the first place. And after all, since when had he become a wannabe-CSI bear? Maybe, just maybe, it had more to do with her than Breaker was willing to admit to himself.

  “Yo, you in there, Break?” it was Daniels, who had snuck up on Breaker as the big bear stared into a very large pot of uncooked ground beef. “I thought we talked about the safety hazard of serving raw ground beef from the Winn-Dixie bargain bin last time we did this.”

  “Just thinkin’,” Breaker said with a smile on his face. “You know, lost in my own head.”

  “You? Zoned out? You don’t say. But anyway, what the hell are you doi
ng here tonight? You’re not back on shift until Friday.”

  Breaker shrugged, still staring at the meat. “I just needed to give my head time to wrap around something.”

  “This got anything to do with that girl? The CSI genius? Mulder and Scully, you know, were always in love. They just never—”

  “They never let themselves do anything about it because they were too professional. But, bright side of that is that I don’t think there’s anything in the White Creek bylaws that prevents firefighters and police department auxiliary employees from getting after it.”

  “Subtle, aren’t you, Yogi?” Daniels asked.

  “Don’t start with the Yogi stuff.” Of all the obnoxious firefighter jokes that they all told almost constantly, the Yogi the Bear ones were the most irritating. It wasn’t because they hurt his feelings or anything – they just weren’t funny. And besides that, who made Yogi Bear references in this day and age? It just seemed strange. And, yeah, not funny. Breaker hadn’t ever once shanghaied a park ranger to steal a picnic basket. Who wanted picnic baskets anyway? Cold sandwiches, some soft apples and whatever else? No thanks, not for this bear.

  “I didn’t mean to get to you,” Daniels said, apparently sensing the strange detour his friend’s brain had taken. “But you never did say what it was you were thinking about. This is your day off, after all, and I know you’re not the liveliest bear in the woods, but still, hanging around the firehouse on the day you usually sit at home and watch Family Feud reruns just ain’t like you, Break.”

  The big bear snorted a laugh. He wasn’t giving up that easily though. He never did, not where the obnoxious inconvenience of his emotions was up for grabs. If there were a signpost pointing to open emotional discussion, Breaker’s would be about a thousand miles in the other direction.