Alpha Rancher Bear: BWWM Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance (Bears of Pinerock County Book 3) (4 page)

"You first," she said, offering him a smile of her own.

"I was just going to ask if you wanted to come in and have a cup of coffee before you drive back down."

"I would absolutely
love
to."

Charmian stepped cautiously across Alec's doorstep. She felt a little like she was trespassing, which was ridiculous because not only did she have an invitation, but she was used to going into strangers' houses. She did it all the time as part of her job.

But she didn't usually go into bachelors' houses. That's what was different this time. In the course of her job, she dealt almost exclusively with women. All the men she talked to were husbands and boyfriends.

Gosh, no wonder my dating life has been a dismal wasteland for my entire adult life.

The house was a lot nicer inside than she was expecting. It wasn't fancy, of course, but everything was solidly built, the sort of construction that was made to last through the generations. The hardwood floors were polished to a shine, with rag rugs on them that looked handmade. All the furniture was big and solid—but of course, if Remy and Alec were typical of the rest of the Circle B bears, they probably needed big furniture.

Unlike a stereotypical bachelor pad, there was very little clutter. The messiest thing in the room was a desk in front of the big picture window looking out on a white pasture; it was covered with papers, with a laptop computer open on top of it.

After the chill outside, which even the Jeep's heater could not dispel, the room felt almost oppressively hot. Charmian stomped the snow off her boots in front of the door and took them off, leaving her in sock feet on the chilly wood floor.

"You can hang your coat by the stove," Alec said. "I'll get coffee. Do you, uh, take anything in it?"

"A little sugar, please."

He nodded and vanished through an open door to the right.

Stove? No wonder it was so warm in here. There was an old-fashioned, iron-sided wood stove near the window and the desk, pumping out heat. Hooks on the wall beside the stove had other people's coats hanging on them, and there was a line strung above the stovetop where several pairs of gloves and mittens were clothespinned.

She hung up her coat and padded over to the window to look outside. There wasn't much to see except for snow. A scattering of black dots in the pasture were probably Black Angus cattle.

"The view is much better on a sunny day," Alec said behind her, and she jumped. "The mountains are so sharp and clear, it's like they touch the sky."

"That's one of the things I love most about living here. There's so much gorgeous scenery. I love the mountains."

She accepted the cup of coffee he handed her and took a sip. It was good coffee, she discovered, not the overbrewed mud she had smiled and accepted at many ranchers' homes. For most ranchers, all they asked of their coffee was that it should be a) hot, b) plentiful, and c) strong. But Alec's coffee tasted like it was gourmet quality, and somehow, without even asking, he had sweetened it exactly the right amount.

Alec, it seemed, had hidden depths.

He had already retreated to stand by the stove, as if he didn't want to stay too close to her. "Are you local?" he asked. "Grew up around here, I mean."

"Over near Farmington. My dad was the vet out there."

"Wait—Doc Russell?" Alec looked suddenly interested. "You're Doc Russell's daughter?"

Charmian couldn't help laughing. Everyone knew her dad. "Yes. I'm surprised you didn't recognize the name. And ..." She waved a hand at herself. "There aren't all that many black families in the county."

"I didn't know Doc Russell had a daughter. We usually went to Doc Henderson for the cattle because he used to be friends with my dad, but we had to call your dad a couple of times. He seemed like a good guy." Alec hesitated. "Er ... I hope he's not ... I know he sold his practice, but ..."

"Oh, Dad's fine. He and Mom moved down to Florida a couple of years ago. He said he was too old to take the winters up here anymore."

Alec nodded. A hint of sorrow flashed through his eyes, and she wondered if his parents were dead. He seemed young for it; he was only about her age, maybe a couple years younger, and her parents were still in good health, barely retirement age. Still, he hadn't said anything about them, and they didn't seem to be living on the ranch.

Charmian hastily hunted around for a tactful way to ask.

"Do you live here alone? In the house, I mean," she corrected herself. Of course he wasn't alone, with Remy and Saffron right across the yard, and apparently other families as well.

"I share the house with Cody, my cousin. Used to be me and my brother Axl, but he found Tara and they moved into Cody's house across the yard, and Cody moved up here."

"How many of you are there? I've met Remy—he usually brings in Saffron to her appointments. But I don't know any of the others. I'm starting to lose track."

"There's really just two sets of cousins." Alec seemed to relax a bit, warming to the topic. "Me and my brother Axl, and our cousins Cody and Remy. And Remy and Axl's mates, of course, Saffron and Tara. There's one more member of the clan who's not related to us, and that's the hired man, Gannon. He lives in a cabin in the upper pasture."

She looked out again at the snow. "Even in this weather?"

"Oh, that doesn't bother him at all. The cabin is the original one my great-grandparents built when they first moved here, and it's as snug a den as any bear could ask for." Another of those almost-smiles touched his mouth. "If you like the mountains, you would probably like it up at the cabin."

"I'd love to see it." The words slipped out before she knew it.

And, at the same time, she became aware of something else. During the conversation, he'd been drifting closer to her—or maybe she had been moving closer to him, as the ice between them thawed. Now she realized she was standing so near that she could have reached out and touched him, if she had wanted to.

Oh, did she want to. Every time he moved, his shoulders flexed under that shirt. He had full lips, something she hadn't been able to appreciate as they were usually tightened as if he was trying to hold back a snarl—or a smile. But now she couldn't stop thinking about how those lips would feel on hers, capturing her mouth with their heat—

Alec took a step back, and she let out the breath she'd been holding. Of course nothing was going to happen between them. Even when he got friendly, it was as if he didn't want to get too close to her. As if she was the only one who felt that magnetic attraction between them.

"Do you, uh ..." He made a vague gesture with the hand holding his coffee cup. "Do you want to see the rest of the house?"

The way he asked was almost shy, as if he was afraid she'd say no.

"I'd love to."

Again that almost imperceptible brightening. "My grandfather built this house," Alec explained as he led the way into the kitchen. "This part of it, anyway. My dad added onto it later, when he married Mom. But this is all the old part of the house here."

While he put their coffee cups in the sink, Charmian looked around the kitchen. It had a very pleasant, homey feeling to it. The walls were painted a warm yellow, and there was a massive cookstove, clearly a relic of the past century. Like everything else in the house, the stove was tidy and well maintained, polished to a shine.

"There's a workshop off the side of the house here. That's one of Dad's additions." Alec opened a door and a cool draft blew into the kitchen. The heat was turned way down in the attached room. Charmian leaned past him and saw woodworking equipment: table saws, a vise, a lathe, and other tools she couldn't name.

"We do the major repair work, on the trucks and so forth, in the main barn. But it's nice to have an attached shop for tinkering. There are a lot of things that need to be fixed around a farm."

He looked down at her as he spoke. She hadn't even thought about their proximity, just leaned around him, and now she was so close she could feel the heat of his body, could even feel the slight vibration as his deep voice rumbled in his chest.

"What ..." Her voice emerged as a squeak. She firmly got a grip on it. "What's that?"

She pointed at a large angular object leaned up against one of the workbenches, the first distraction she clapped her eyes on. It was about four feet long.

"Windmill blade." A keen spark of fascination kindled in his eyes. "I'm trying to rig up an independent power source for the ranch so that we don't have so many power blackouts. Do you want to see?"

She wanted to stay here in the doorway, pressed up against him, but he was already moving past her, as if relieved to have an excuse to be away from her. And yet, the look he gave her was inviting, with another of those little glimmers of light in his eyes, like distant lightning flickering through the irises.

Nothing like mixed signals, buddy,
she thought, following him to the workbench. She wasn't going to be able to stay here much longer, because the more she was around him, the more turned on she got. At some point, if this kept up, she was just going to fling herself on him and start tearing his clothes off.

Alec picked up the windmill blade as if it weighed nothing, and held it out to her. "Power outages up here can last for weeks. We're set up for it; we can heat the house with the wood stove, and we have lanterns and so forth. But it's a pain, especially when it happens during calving season."

Because he seemed to expect her to take it, she let him put it in her hands. It was actually much lighter than it looked. It seemed to be a sheet of aluminum, cut from a bigger piece, with the edges folded over and hammered down so they wouldn't be sharp. That was an oddly careful little detail for something that was going to be on top of a windmill tower.

But then, that was Alec. Even just from the little she'd seen, she had already gotten an overall impression of a neat and careful person, holding something much wilder and more out of control inside. He was the kind of person who would pick up clutter so no one tripped over it, make sure every vehicle on the ranch was in top running order, and take good care of all the people and animals who were his responsibility.

She could relate. It was exactly what she did at the clinic.

But lurking underneath all that caution was a wild side, waiting to surge up. Had Alec ever been able to just give in to that part of himself? she wondered. She still didn't know about his parents, but he seemed to be in charge at the ranch, and from the way he acted, she'd lay odds that he was the eldest of the siblings and cousins. Everything about him spoke of responsibility that he'd grown up with, a subtle awareness of hierarchy setting him apart even from those closest to him.

Charmian didn't have any shifters in her family, but she had met a number of them in the course of her work, including Saffron and Remy. And all of them, no matter how polite and tame on the surface, had something wild in them. Maybe, she thought, that was why Alec always seemed to be pushing something inside himself down when he was around her. It wasn't that he wasn't attracted to her; it was that he was afraid to give in to it. He'd spent a lifetime learning to harness and control the wild beast in him, and he still seemed to be ... not afraid, perhaps, but a little wary of it.

Well,
she
wasn't afraid. She might not have a beast in her, but something wild surged up anyway, a reckless eagerness to explore Alec's feral side along with him.

She realized she and Alec had been staring at each other for much longer than was polite. He was the one who broke the accidental staring contest, taking back the windmill blade and turning away from her. "Got a little burr on the corner there ..." he murmured, running his thumb over it. He almost sounded like he was talking to himself, turning so she couldn't see his face. Dismissing her. "Need to fix that."

Like she was going to let him get away with
that
. "Is it working yet?" she asked, stepping a little closer. "Your windmill, I mean."

He glanced at her, and then away. "Not really a yes or no question."

"So give me the long answer." She moved in on him, closing the distance until her arm brushed his.

This time, he didn't pull away, though he turned to lay the windmill blade down on a workbench beside some broken ones.

"I can charge batteries with it, but I'm still having trouble getting it to operate continually in bad weather. Of course, that's exactly when you need it. The blades tend to ice up and break in the wind."

Charmian ran her thumb over the sheared-off edge of one of the other blades. It was a slightly different shape than the one she'd been holding, longer and thinner, but she could see from the ragged edge that part of it had snapped off.

Looking along the bench, she saw a startling variety of different styles and materials. Some of the test blades were made of wood, others of plastic or metal. Most were visibly broken or damaged in some way.

"You've been working on this for a long time."

"Not that long. I like tinkering with things around the ranch, making them work better." He picked up one of the wooden vanes and rubbed at the splintered edge.

"Where's the windmill going to be?"

"It's already there." He went to a small window in the wall behind the table saw, and rubbed with his sleeve at the fog on the inside. "You can see it better from the big window in the living room."