BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) (109 page)

“You look great, by the way,” he said to Jenna and she felt heat on her cheeks, a blush creeping in. Darren led her to the door. He’d reserved a table and they were taken to it right away. When the seating hostess disappeared, Jenna rubbed her palms on her jeans. She adjusted the already straight cutlery and then readjusted it. She looked around the restaurant. There were others there, couples mostly and the air was filled with a gentle hum of conversation.

It felt like a date. She didn’t want to be on a date. She didn’t know what was going on in her head anymore. Or in her heart, and Darren was good-looking and attentive and that just made everything feel so much worse.

“Darren…” she said and looked up at him. His eyes were like ice, a very light blue that felt like they looked right into her soul.

“I don’t know how to do this,” she ended her sentence, going in a completely different direction than she’d meant. She’d wanted to say that she didn’t want anything romantic with this man. But that would be a lie because the way he was looking at her gave her butterflies.

She wanted to say that she wasn’t available, but that would be a lie too because she didn’t know what she was anymore and saying she was not available felt so permanent.

“There’s nothing to know,” he said.  “We’re just two really good looking people spending time together.” He flashed her a lopsided grin when he said it that buzzed through her own body. “It’s just the first night. Dinner. Drinks. That’s it.”

She nodded slowly. Right, dinner and drinks. It didn’t have to be anything serious. It didn’t have to be anything at all. They were just two people – really good-looking people – spending some time together. She took a deep breath. Darren
was
really good looking. He had a high cheekbones, a square jaw, nose straight as an arrow. And those eyes, it felt like he could see right to the core of her.

He reached over the table and put his hand on hers. The contact was so gentle she had to look down to see if he was touching her. A slight humming surged through her body like she was a tuning fork picking up on the right frequency. She suddenly thought of Bruce, of the power she felt when she was with him. Images flashed through her mind of him as a bear, shifting. And the pack, chasing her. The fear. The awe. The knowledge.

She shook her head and pulled her hand away, slowly so it wasn’t offensive. For a moment, it had felt like something had been drawn out of her. But when he looked at Darren he was smiling, gentle as his touch had been, and she let it go.

Chapter 3

The bond was faint. It was so faint, Bruce wasn’t sure that he was going to find Jenna if he followed it. When he focused on her, he could just feel it, almost like a memory rather than something that was real. He didn’t understand what had caused the bond to fade so much. Since Jenna had disappeared the bond had been almost non-existent, even though they hadn’t gotten divorced. Even though the mating was still in effect.

It was almost like she was blocking him off.

Bruce closed his eyes and focused on Jenna again. He’d been practicing it all day, and still it was so faint he could barely trace it. But he didn’t want to wait any longer. He wanted to find her,
had
to find her. He was incomplete without her.

When night finally fell, he moved into the trees and turned his attention inward. The shift started and he felt his body break and rebuild itself. It was always uncomfortable as if his human could never really get used to his animal. When he was a bear he shook himself. He headed out, instead of going to the plateau for their meeting.

He was only going to deal with them after he got back. He didn’t want another fight, not now. He needed his strength. He didn’t believe that the tug he’d felt was accidental, and if it had been about an attack on Jenna then he had to get there as soon as he could. Wherever ‘there’ was.

He took the same route Jenna had taken, following the stream. He kept next to it until it wound to the left in a sharp bend. Instead of veering left, too, he turned right. When he came closer to Williamsburg something tugged at him, something keen and familiar and felt like home. He wanted to go into the village. He was drawn to the place that was his home for so long. But he forced the feeling away and avoided the town.

He just had to keep going.

A shadow stepped out into the night and he pulled up short, sniffing the air. Family, his nose told him. But not a shifter. Dwayne.

“You’re going to find her,” he said. A statement, not a question. Bruce didn’t bother shifting back to talk to Dwayne. As a bear, the bond was stronger. Dwayne sighed like he’d known Bruce was going to do it all along, even though he thought Bruce was an idiot.

“You’re going to run into trouble. Don’t let your love for Jenna get in the way.”

The only thing in my way is you, Bruce thought but of course, he couldn’t say it to Dwayne, so he pushed passed him. Maybe Dwayne had read it in his mind, anyway.

“Are you willing to give all of us up for her?” Dwayne called after Bruce, but he just kept going. He wasn’t going to stop and try to justify himself. He was doing the right thing. Going after Jenna wasn’t going to put the Family in danger. He didn’t need a psychic to mess with his head now.

Bruce followed the bond. It was dim, and as a person he knew he would have lost it altogether. But he managed to find it every time.

It took him four days before he reached the city. It would have been easier if he traveled as a human did, catching rides or getting on buses. He had to stay away from human settlements altogether because he wasn’t in bear-country anymore. But he was risking being a bear for long periods of time so he could find her.

He stood on a ridge a couple of miles outside of town and looked at the twinkling lights that blinked throughout the night. Even though the night was black, it seemed as though El Verano was awake.

Bruce took a deep breath and took another step, drawing closer. He was a human now, and he was going to stay that way. Bears didn’t come this close to the city and he didn’t want to be seen.

It took him another couple of hours to get into the city, and by the time he walked down the streets it was daylight, with people milling around everywhere.

It had been years since he’d lived in a city. He had seen this kind of bustle before, he knew what it was like. And still it felt like it was all going too fast. He had gotten used to the slow life, and liked it more.

The bond was stronger now. He could sense her, somewhere in the middle of all the chaos. He kept walking, following his gut, and finally ended up in a neighborhood that didn’t look too good. The roads were dirty, the people that hung around in the streets looked like they were looking for trouble. This wasn’t a safe place for Jenna.

Maybe that was what Bruce had been feeling. The danger. 

The bond led him to an apartment building and he knew it was hers. She was up there somewhere. He glanced at the rows of windows, identifying the floors one by one, and his eyes rested on the fourth floor.

That was her floor. He knew it. 

He wanted to go up there. He wanted to talk to her, hold her in his arms, know that she was alright. He wanted to know that she didn’t hate him. Even if that meant that she didn’t want to be with him. The door to the apartment building opened, and Jenna stepped out as if she was summoned.

Bruce’s breath caught in his throat.

She looked different. Her hair was shorter, a different style. She wore clothes that worked in the city – jeans that were a lot tighter than she used to wear and a blouse that buttoned up with black low heels. She was smiling and her face made Bruce’s chest constrict.

She stopped on the curb and looked up and down the road. A taxi came past and she looked like she wanted to flag it down, but then she changed her mind and started walking. Bruce was relieved. It was going to be easier to follow her on foot than if she got in a car.

She made her way through the neighborhood. As she walked, stares followed her. Men looked her up and down like she was something they wanted, and it pissed Bruce off. He wanted to rearrange their faces. The bond was supposed to give her an aura of ‘taken’, but she’d decided against it. It was only Bruce, the mated male without his mate.

He let her go when she walked into a yard of a retirement home and closed the front door. He needed a strategy, a place to stay so he could keep an eye on her for a while. He couldn’t just hang around the streets. He found a motel not too far from Jenna’s neighborhood and paid for a room in cash. It was drab, decorated in faded shades of brown and beige. But it would do.

Anything was better than the cave.

The sun was starting to set when something suddenly felt off. Something was very wrong. Bruce was in his room, and he strained his ears, tried to listen for something that would give away danger. But there was nothing, just the gentle hum in the background of cars driving, people going about their tasks.

The feeling got worse. Bruce felt sick to his stomach and that hollow feeling opened up in his chest again, a sharp pain in his sternum. He put his hand over it, but the pain was off-center this time. Where before, when Jenna had left, it had been smack in the middle of his chest, now the pain was to the left, over his heart.

Bruce got up and walked to the door, opening it. He looked around. The motel parking lot was empty save for a white Jetta that stood in front of the last door and a human walking across to the main building with a leaf blower. The sun was so low it cast long thin shadows across everything. Shadows that held foreboding.

Bruce closed the door again and leaned against it, closing his eyes. The sense that something was wrong wasn’t just around him, it was
in
him, like it had crawled underneath his skin and seeped into his blood. It swirled through his body, a panic, an alarm.

He turned his attention to Jenna, and that was where it was. Pain flooded through him the same time the bond tugged violently. Bruce didn’t think. He left his room at a run and set course straight through the city. Jenna wasn’t home. The bond was leading him away from the apartment block where he lived, out of the ugly neighborhood. Bruce jogged along a main road. No one seemed to notice his urgency or care. He’d forgotten how much cities were every-man-for-himself.

Whatever had Bruce all tied up in a knot was getting worse. It pressed down harder and harder on him, making it impossible to breathe. He gasped for breath as he ran and it did nothing for him.

His muscles started screaming at him, his body got heavier, but he pushed on. This was Jenna. He had to get to her. Whatever was going on was going on
now
and if he waited he might be too late.

And then, not only would he die without her – one half ripped away from him – but he would never forgive himself if something happened to her. Because underneath all the pain and the panic and the pressing danger was the knowledge that this – everything she’d been through the past five years actually – was his fault.

When he finally found the source of whatever it was he was feeling, he stopped in his tracks, confused. It was in a nice area of town, with shops and restaurants on both sides of the road. People were walking and laughing and a general feeling of happiness hung in the air. Nothing that shouted danger.

He took a deep breath, trying to stabilize his breathing. He focused on the bond. It was there and it was humming. Like a gentle buzz of electricity was running through it. Like some other energy was linked up to the bond.

He followed it, knew he would find her now that he’d found the bond again, now that the panic was over.

She was inside a restaurant. She wore a red dress that made her hair seem impossibly red, too. Her hand was on the table, and another man’s hand was on hers. A waiter was in the way, blocking the rest of them from view.

When the man moved, Bruce saw the full picture and stilled.

Jenna was leaning forward, kissing someone. Kissing someone
else.
Her eyes were closed and in leaning forward, her dress had gaped at the neck so that the swells of her breasts were just visible.

Bruce felt a low growl roll from his throat. He looked left and right to makes sure none of the passersby heard it. There were couples everywhere as if they were trying to rub it in his face that he was the third wheel and his mate was with someone else.

He turned his eyes back to them. They’d stopped kissing, but the humming was still there. He could feel it, washing through him, trying to access the power that was his shifting ability. Trying to access the bear.

And the bear was willing to come out and play. Seeing someone else with his woman was enough to make any mated shifter murderous.

Bruce took a deep breath and turned his back on what he was seeing. If he ran in there now, it was going to be a problem. He was going to lose all control and a rampant bear in a city restaurant was nothing short of a disaster. No, Bruce had to wait. He had to bide his time until he could get that lowlife alone.

Three hours. That was how long Bruce paced up and down the road, walking from one end to the other and back so it wouldn’t seem suspicious. He could barely think straight. In his head, the bear was roaring
mine, mine, mine
and he had his hands full holding onto his humanity.

Finally, they came out. The Imposter pulled Jenna closer with a smile that made her melt. Bruce could feel it through the bond, the butterflies, the anticipation, the nauseating attraction. The man planted his lips on Jenna’s folding her body against his like it was his to have. When he let her go her eyes were shimmering and she smiled.

He flagged down a taxi, told the driver the address through the open window and helped her in. When the taxi left he started walking.

Bruce followed him. Two blocks further and the Imposter turned right into an alley that took them away from the crowded road and into the darkness that vibrated with power and potential. Bruce’s power. His intention’s potential.

He moved faster than any human could and caught up to the guy. He grabbed him by the neck and swung him around and then into a wall, slamming his back against the bricks so hard the man was winded.

Bruce wanted to shout obscenities at this man for being with his woman, but his vision had gone, his eyes had flashed white light with rage and there was nothing to say. He stormed the guy with a growl that was everything but human and punched him in the face. The man, still trying to catch his breath, made a strangled sound and tumbled to the ground.

Bruce stopped. He was breathing hard and the rage inside him had fermented into pure hatred, but he wasn’t going to keep going at this guy. He was just a poor human who’d had the misfortune of choosing Jenna to court. And Bruce was a shifter that at the end of the day still knew his own strength, knew that he could kill this man if he wasn’t careful.

The Imposter got up, coughing and wheezing. He held his stomach like that was where Bruce had punched him. His eye was swollen and already heading towards and angry purple.

Bruce clenched his hands into fists and tried to keep the anger at bay. He pushed the flashed of Jenna kissing this guy out of his mind, forced himself to see the reality, the damage he’d already done. It was enough. He had to keep telling himself it was enough. In the human world, self-control was a bitch.

Hands suddenly grabbed Bruce from behind. Not just two, or four, but more. They weren’t alone in the alley anymore. Bruce’s first thought was that it was law enforcement, that somehow, someone had seen what he’d done.

But then the hands roughly shoved him against the opposite wall he’d used for his target, and they pinned him there.

There were four men in the alley, besides the Imposter, and they all had eyes that were like glittering jewels. Emerald green, Sapphire blue, Amber yellow. And the electric blue of the man he’d attacked.