BAD BOY ROMANCE: DIESEL: Contemporary Bad Boy Biker MC Romance (Box Set) (New Adult Sports Romance Short Stories Boxset) (117 page)

There was no guarantee that the war wouldn’t come back. The Assassins would always hunt them. But Jenna was one of them now, and Bruce could hold onto her for as long as he lived, without feeling guilty about being torn between his Family and his humans.

Murray had stayed true to his word and kept the humans in the night of the full moon. No one had been harmed or even suspected anything.

Bruce and Jenna moved back to town where they were welcomed with open arms. They’d been missed, and they were accepted back into the community like they hadn’t been gone at all. Jenna got her job at the salon back and Bruce worked at the lumberyard again.

But now, when night fell and Bruce walked into the forest to join his Family up in the mountains, Jenna went with him. When the monsters went out to hunt she stayed behind with Dwayne and he taught her how to tap into her sense of power and magic that she already felt. One day she was going to start getting visions, Dwayne said to Bruce once. He’d had a vision about it.

Bruce was just happy that he didn’t have to be so torn anymore. He’d come to the small human town to run away from his past. He’d joined the humans because he hadn’t been able to live in complete isolation, and he’d met a woman that had stolen his heart. It had been five years with a hell of a lot of ups and downs, but they were together now.

The pack accepted his wife, left his people alone, and the Assassins gave Williamsburg a wide berth for now. Things were going well. The shifters protected Jenna as if she were one of them. In a way, she was more one of them than one of the villagers.

Bruce was in the forest after his hunt one morning just before sunrise. He’d hunted most of the night and he was waiting for the power to subside, stop humming in his veins, before he headed home to Jenna. She was waiting for him.

Dwayne found him between the trees and leaned against a trunk like he had all the time in the world. Bruce knew by now that he had something on his mind.

“Things are better now,” the psychic said after a while. “I was wrong about Jenna.”

Bruce shook his head. “Not wrong, like you said. Just vague.” Dwayne nodded. The picture he’d given Bruce had been accurate, the Assassin just hadn’t been in it. Neither of them had spoken about it since the war.

“You’re bringing this up for a reason,” Bruce said. Dwayne nodded.

“I’m never wrong,” he said.

“I know,” Bruce answered.

“You’re going to be a father,” Dwayne said and looked at Bruce with eyes that were empty pits of black. Bruce got that shiver down his spine that accompanied that look. He frowned.

“Jenna hasn’t told me anything,” he countered.

Dwayne shrugged. “She doesn’t know yet.”

He walked into the trees and disappeared as the sun broke over the horizon and set the world on fire.

Chapter 1

Time is relative. Three months without Jenna, when everything had gone haywire in their relationship, had felt like years. And six years had flown by in the blink of an eye.

When Dwayne had told Bruce that Jenna was pregnant, he’d believed him. Dwayne had been right about everything he’d seen in his visions of the future since Bruce had met him when he’d come to Williamsburg first.

Everything except one. There had been that incident where Dwayne had seen Jenna with a blade and Tara, the alpha, on the ground during a war. Instead of killing Tara, like Dwayne had thought, Jenna had saved her.

And that was where everything had changed.

Jenna had been adopted by the pack even though she was just a human. She was officially Bruce’s mate and they treated and respected her as such. And when the baby had come along during the following fall it just hadn’t been that much of a surprise.

Bruce stepped out of the trees in the inky black of night. It wasn’t going to hold – it was already heading toward dawn and the darkness had an unstable quality to it just because the sun broke over the horizon. Bruce took a deep breath, the cold morning air burning his lungs on the way in.

It was in the middle of summer, but mornings in the Syracuse Mountains were always cold. Even on the hottest days, the highest peaks were still snow capped and ominous in the distance.

Bruce felt the surge of power rushing through his veins. He’d the night hunting as a bear to keep his energy up. There was a time when things started going wrong when there weren’t enough animals to feed the small pack of shifters that lived in the mountains above Williamsburg, and their existence was threatened by the Assassins. But since Jenna had saved Tara, the pack had healed itself.

Even after they lost Stephen. And with that, it had seemed like the land had healed itself, too. The animals had come pack as if they knew that pack needed to be fed. The trees seemed greener than ever, the mountainside was lush, and even the village had good crops and healthy livestock.

Life was good.

Bruce followed the dim trail that led down the mountain, curling around boulders and trees until it led him to the back of the village. His cabin was the last one of the row of cabins where the town’s folk lived. A little out of the way, but not too far removed from Williamsburg and its people. Bruce and Jenna lived in the cabin just far enough removed from Bruce to be able to shift into a bear without being noticed, and Jenna had come to love the peace and quiet.

And now, after they’d had little Sax, it wasn’t that lonely after all.

Saxon was a big personality in a small body. He was five years old, and he’d been different than any of the other people in the village from the start. He played in the group with the other kids when Jenna took him to playschool three times a week, but it seemed like he did it to humor them more than himself.

He asked questions that normal children wouldn’t think of. It wasn’t surprising, of course. The child of a shifter wasn’t going to be normal. But Jenna’s human influence meant that Saxon was human too, and even though he was different, Bruce was relieved he was safe. There were enough dangers out there for a regular human, without throwing the war between the shifters and the Assassins into it.

A child was the quickest to die in a war like that. If they could catch the shifters before they were big and strong they could stop them from becoming more. It made sense. And it made Bruce nervous. No, as a human, with Jenna, Saxon was safe. She understood enough about Shifter life to keep the boy out of harm’s way and still give him the human life he deserved.

When Bruce pushed open the door to the cabin, Saxon ran to him on bear feet. His dark hair bounced as he ran and his green eyes were shimmering. It thudded on the wooden floor and Bruce scooped him up. Saxon’s mouth was open in a silent squeal. Jenna was still sleeping.

“How’s my boy?” Bruce asked in a whisper when he put Sax down again.

“Good,” Saxon answered. “I’m coloring.”

“Let’s see it,” Bruce said and followed Saxon to where he’d been sitting on the floor with pictures and crayons scattered all around him. There were marks on the raw wood where he’d colored off the edge of the page, but Bruce wasn’t going to say something about it. Everyone had to know that falling off the edge wasn’t always a bad thing.

Bruce picked up the picture and studied it with mock interest. It was a stick figure with red and yellow scratched all over it.

“Tell me about this wonderful picture,” he said.

“It’s a fireman.”

Right. Bruce saw it now.

“From the story mommy read me last night.”

Bruce put his hand on Saxon’s hair. “This is amazing. So artistic! Is that what you want to be one day? A fireman?”

Saxon shook his head and shuffled the papers around until he found another picture. A round shape with brown all over it and sharp teeth on the face.

“I want to be a bear, like you!”

Bruce smiled, but his gut twisted for no reason at all. It wasn’t going to happen.

“Not everyone gets to be an animal too,” Bruce said. “Every person has something special, and one day you’ll find what yours is.”

“Why can’t it be the same as yours?” Saxon asked.

Bruce forced a smile. “Because you have your own kind of special. You can’t have the same kind as me, then it’s not special anymore.”

Saxon thought about it for a moment and then shook his head.

“I still want to be like you,” he said.

Bruce got up and held out his hand so Saxon would take it. The boy got up by himself.

“How about we make mommy breakfast?”

Saxon smiled and followed Bruce to the small kitchen. They were making eggs and bacon when Jenna walked into the kitchen. Her red hair was a wild mess from sleeping and her eyes were soft and smiling when she watched Saxon mix eggs in the pan and spill it over the edge.

“What are my two men doing?” she asked.

“We’re trying to make you breakfast in bed,” Bruce said and walked over to Jenna, kissing her. He loved it when she’d just woken up. She was soft and cuddly then, with the lines on her face a little softened and worries of the day still invisible.

“It smells really good,” she said. “When did you get big enough to be so good in the kitchen, Sax?”

He smiled at her and she smiled back. Bruce could almost see the bond between them. It was the kind of bond the pack shared, and he shared with Jenna as his mate. It was rare of two humans to bond like that, but nothing in their household was normal anymore.

“Can I go play outside?” Saxon asked. Bruce listened and heard the other kids in the street. He glanced at Jenna who nodded once.

“Go on, I’ll finish the egg,” he said and Saxon ran out of the kitchen.

“Stay out of Mrs. Smith’s garden,” Jenna called after him. That was probably exactly where the kids were going to end up. Bruce smiled and picked up the spatula.

“I was thinking of taking Saxon out with me tonight,” he said. He concentrated on the eggs, watching them intently. He felt Jenna’s eyes burning his back, but he refused to turn around.

“How many times are we going to talk about this?” Jenna asked. “Knowing daddy is a bear and seeing the change are two different things. You don’t look like the pictures he sees all the time. You’re a scary predator.”

“He keeps saying he wants to be like me. If I take him with me, and show him what it’s really like, maybe he won’t want it anymore.”

“So you want to scare him to death to put him off it?” Jenna asked and Bruce finally turned around, pulling the pan off the stove as he did.

“Either that, or he’ll feel part of it and then stop saying it.”

Jenna shook her head, crossing her arms in front of her on the table where she was sitting.

“He’s too young, Bruce. Besides, it’s not wrong for him to want to be like you. He’s a boy and you’re his hero. This is normal.”

Bruce was edgy. It wasn’t irritation, but he was struggling with the topic. It felt like an itch he couldn’t scratch and the kitchen suddenly felt very small and stuffy.

“Nothing in this house is normal, Jen,” he said.

Her face became hard and stony.

“This is normal for
us
. This is what we do. We’ve all adapted to this life that we’re living here, and there’s no reason to upset it all.”

“Who says it’s going to be an upset?” Bruce asked. He was aware that he was starting to raise his voice, but he felt trapped and a trapped animal was never a good thing.

“Don’t shout at me,” Jenna said. Bruce rolled his eyes. He wasn’t shouting yet. They stared at each other, the atmosphere suddenly so thick around them and loaded with the potential to turn very ugly. But Jenna sighed and her face softened, and just like the energy in the room drained again and there was space to breathe. She got up, walked around the table and put her arms around Bruce. He pulled her tightly against his body and marveled at how perfectly she fit against him.

“It’s too soon, Bruce,” she said against his chest. Bruce put his chin on her head. Maybe she was right. Having a child was scary. He didn’t know how to bring the two worlds together. It was okay when it was Jenna, who’d chosen to be part of a group of people that she had nothing in common with. Even the danger, the war that had taken place so many years ago and Jenna had beheaded an Assassin, was a choice. She didn’t have to come back.

But Saxon hadn’t had a choice. He was born in a life that was exceedingly difficult, and he was already so different from his friends that Bruce was scared he wouldn’t fit in anywhere. He wasn’t going to fit in with the pack, and he wasn’t going to fit in with the humans, not if he wanted to be an animal instead. Not if he wasn’t one already.

“I just don’t know how to protect him,” Bruce finally said.

“You don’t have to do it alone. We’re both here. And what’s there to protect him from? He’s a little human boy with an eccentric father. It’s not going to kill him.”

Jenna was right, of course. There wasn’t that much that could happen to a human boy living in a small town in the mountains. Not if the human boy had normal human parents. But he didn’t have normal human parents, did he? No, Saxon had Bruce for a father, and Bruce was a shapeshifter.

The one thing Bruce wasn’t able to admit to Jenna was that he was scared he wouldn’t be able to protect Saxon from the shifter world he would inevitably meet. From the dangers, that might take his father away from him.

And most of all, from his father, the bear shifter, himself.

It was almost full moon. Bruce could feel it crawling under his skin, a knowledge that was inside of him. When the sun set again, the moon would be full. Bruce pulled away from Jenna and dished up breakfast. They sat together at the kitchen table and ate.

“Why don’t you and Saxon go visit Murray tonight?” Bruce asked.

Jenna nodded. It wasn’t necessary to say why, anymore. Murray didn’t know about shifters, or if it did he didn’t mention it. But he knew more about the preternatural world than the other villagers, and if Jenna and Saxon were going to be safe anywhere during full moon, it would be there.

“I miss the days when I could come with you,” Jenna said. In the beginning, she used to join Bruce in his trek up to the plateau and see the other shifters before they split up to hunt for the night. Dwayne used to teach her how to access her feelings. It was just the edge of being a psychic, but it was better than nothing.

Since Saxon had been born she’d only been a couple of times, either when Saxon was young enough not to know what was going on, or when they’d managed to organize a babysitter.

“The pack misses you, too,” Bruce said. “Rosa was asking after you.”

Jenna nodded and took another bite. Rosa had lost Stephen during the war where Jenna had saved Tara. Somehow Jenna blamed herself for not being able to save Stephen too, even though it hadn’t been her fault at all.

It hadn’t even been her war.

She’d become fast friends were Rosa, for some reason she was the only one that could get through to her. Maybe it was because she was only a human and not a threat. Or maybe it was because she was a woman with a heart.

“Maybe when Sax is old enough,” Bruce said. They could both go up with him, then. Jenna hesitated before she nodded.

“Maybe,” she said.

When it was time for Bruce to leave Jenna and Saxon were in the kitchen again, baking a cake.

“I have to get going,” Bruce said when he stood in the door. During full moon, he wanted to be on the plateau before the night fell.

“Be safe,” Jenna said, leaning against him without touching him with her flour hands and tipping her head up for a kiss.

Saxon jumped off his chair and grabbed onto Bruce, making small flour hand prints all over his pants.

“Be good, listen to mommy, and have fun with uncle Murray,” Bruce said. Saxon nodded.

“Tonight is itchy, isn’t it daddy?” Saxon said. Bruce frowned, glanced up at Jenna. She just shrugged. It wasn’t the first time Saxon had said something like that.

“I’m going to be late,” Bruce said without answering Saxon and then left the house. He started walking up into the trees. The night really was itchy, he thought. He could feel it prickling against his skin, tingling along his spine, and every time he took a breath it was like the air was alive. He climbed over the boulders and followed the path he always took.