First Bear: BBW Shapeshifter BWWM Werebear Paranormal Romance (Wild Alpha Shifters Book 1) (8 page)

Wait for it, Jada… Wait for it.

Now.

Jada stabbed up with the tire iron. Straight into his shoulder.

“Bitch!”

Croyston staggered backward. She’d stabbed him with the heavy tool, but she hadn’t buried it in him like she’d hoped. Croyston came back down at her, swiping at the side of her head with his open palm. Ow. That hurt. Jada stabbed toward him again. But Croyston grabbed hold of her wrist this time.

“I’ll show you, you ungrateful bitch.”

Croyston was bleeding from his shoulder now and Jada kicked at him, right in the left leg. He staggered back as she climbed out of the trunk. If she was going to get out of there, she knew she needed to move. Croyston grabbed her, but she booted him away again. Then she pulled herself up and ran. She made good progress, too. Forty feet, fifty feet…

“You won’t get away!” Croyston called out.

Boom!
A gun blasted out. Jada stopped in her tracks. She turned.

“Get on the ground,” Croyston said.

Jada did little to conceal her contempt. “Why? You can’t take it when a woman rejects you? What are you going to do? Shoot me?”

Jada tried to sound braver than she felt. This was a very bad day and it was getting worse by the minute. Croyston approached with his pistol.

“Yeah. Maybe I will shoot you. But I’m going to teach you a lesson you’ll never forget first.”

“I don’t know how a man like you thinks he can teach anyone anything.”

“Then why don’t you get down on the ground and find out?”

Jada didn’t know what she was going to do. Run from the gun? One thing she knew for sure was she wasn’t going to get on the ground. Not for this little coward. But what choice did she have? He limped toward her, bleeding from the shoulder. She had hurt him, but she hadn’t hurt him badly enough to stop him. At that moment, Jada wished she was anywhere else. She wished Brandon had spent the night. Then they would have gone to work together. She would have picked up her dry cleaning with him. She would never have been ambushed by this monster…

Think, Jada, think. Running isn’t the right thing to do. Not right now
. What she needed to do was calm down. Collect herself. She needed to figure a way out of this thing. Jada kept her voice level. “How can I help you, Mr. Croyston?” she said, just as if she was back at the service desk.

“You can’t help me, bitch.”

He was close now. Close enough that she could smell him. His sour skin. His body odor. She closed her eyes. No knight in shining armor was going to rescue her. Not out in the middle of nowhere. It was her wits against his. She could do this. After all, she still had a little something up her sleeve—the screwdriver from the toolkit. But she would have to wait for him to get close. Really close…

“Why don’t you come over here, Ray?” Jada said, remembering her attacker’s first name. “Come over here and we’ll talk about it.”

Jada gently grasped the handle of the screwdriver hidden up her sleeve. That’s it. Just a little closer, asshole.

ROAR!

Jada almost jumped out of her pants.
What the hell?
A giant brown grizzly bear was barreling down on both of them.
Could this day get any worse?

Jada screamed.

Croyston turned.

And the grizzly pounced.

************************

Brandon’s bear saw Jada standing. He felt relief. That meant he wasn’t too late. Jada was alive. But now was not the time to rest. The man had a gun. He was a danger. He needed to be eliminated. The man fired directly at him, but Brandon’s bear continued on his path. He heard another pop, like the gun had gone off a second time, but he paid it no heed. He clawed the man down to the ground, holding him to the road with a single paw.

“Nice bear,” Jada whispered.

Brandon’s bear looked up. Jada held a screwdriver out at arm’s length. She looked scared, scratch that, she looked terrified. He couldn’t let her see what would happen next. But it had to happen. Brandon’s bear knew no other way. Brandon’s bear averted his gaze from Jada and dragged her attacker into the woods. The man screamed and yelled, but Brandon’s bear didn’t care. The man had threatened Jada. He expected that the man had meant to kill her. But Brandon’s bear wouldn’t allow that. Brandon’s bear knew no mercy. He knew only the law of the wild.

When Brandon’s bear finished, he had blood on his snout, but it was done. He was surrounded by forest, the road a short distance away. He shifted back. Now he had to help Jada.

“No way,” Jada said.

Brandon turned. He was naked and sweating and cold. His feet were bare and his arm was bleeding slightly. The shot had grazed him, but of more immediate concern was Jada. She must have followed him into the woods. She stared at him wide-eyed.

“Jada, are you all right?”

“Whoa. You don’t get to ask that. Not until you tell me what just happened.”

“Croyston attacked you. He was going to kill you.”

“I got that part.”

Brandon indicated his arm. “I got shot.”

“I see that, too.”

Brandon glanced down at his shivering, naked form.

“I’m a bear,” he said. “That’s what I wanted to tell you. I can turn into a bear.”

“Yeah,” Jada said. “That’s the part I was talking about.”

“Let me take you home,” Brandon said. “You need to see a doctor.”

Jada eyed him warily. He could tell that she was scared. Who wouldn’t be after what she had been through? And then seeing him shift? He needed to let her know that he was no threat to her, that everything was all right.

“Jada?”

She inched away from him, screwdriver at the ready.

“Just stay where you are, Brandon.”

************************

One eye on Brandon, Jada warily approached the car. She recognized it as Croyston’s second vehicle: a BMW sedan. They had done service work on it before. She got inside. Good. The keys were there. Thank goodness for small miracles. She watched Brandon in the rearview mirror. Had she really just seen what she thought she’d seen? Had she just watched that grizzly bear transform into Brandon Heller? She needed to calm down. She needed to center herself. But Brandon needed her help. He was bleeding from his left arm. She needed to get him to a hospital. What was she? Nuts? There was no way she going to let him into the car after what had just happened. Not a chance. Nobody would do that. That would be crazy.

Jada fired up the car and peeled out of there, leaving Brandon in her dust. If she had seen what she thought she had just seen, he wasn’t getting anywhere near her. Maybe that wasn’t Brandon in the rearview mirror at all. Maybe it was some kind of weird vision. A monster? Who knew what kind of thing? She kept driving. But maybe it really was Brandon. Maybe he really needed her help. What to do? The one thing she knew was she needed to get to the police station. She glanced in her rearview mirror again.
Ah, hell…
He looked so forlorn back there, this giant hunk of a man standing naked and dejected in the middle of the road. Jada stomped on the brakes. She threw the car into reverse and rolled down the window.

“Get in,” Jada said.

“Are you sure?” Brandon asked.

“Get in, before I change my mind.”

Chapter Seven

Jada drove to the rear of the dealership and grabbed Brandon a set of blue mechanic’s coveralls. Then she asked him to get out of the car. She needed to go to the police station, she needed to tell her story, and she needed to think. She wasn’t sure, but she thought she might even need to go to the hospital. One thing she was sure of was that she wanted to be in the company of people she could trust, and right now, Brandon Heller was definitely not one of those
people.

Jada explained what had happened to the police officer. Wild Summit had a small police department and she knew the man in passing. She found it harder than she thought to tell her story, but she told it all. She explained how Ray Croyston had surprised her outside the dry cleaner’s, and how she had woken up in the trunk of his car. She told him how Croyston had brought her to the old mine site and shot at her, and how the brown bear had attacked Croyston. About all she left out was Brandon Heller. And truthfully, she wasn’t sure how she could begin to tell them that part of the story. Not without sounding completely insane.

Jada went home to discover her broken door. Her landlord, fortunately, was already at work fixing it. When he was done, she shut herself inside with the express purpose of talking to nobody until she could get her head around what had just happened. Sure, she had been abducted by a loon. But don’t forget the real elephant in the room.

Brandon Heller.

Brandon Heller was a bear.

The man was a bear!

Jada had to sit down just to think about it. Brandon was hurt. She hoped he had gotten attention for that arm. Maybe she should have been nicer about that. But get real. He was a bear! Amanda had left at least ten messages for her. She wanted to call her back, but what was she supposed to tell her? She felt so alone. If this was Brandon’s secret then she didn’t want to betray it. But she didn’t want to keep it, either. Part of her wished she had never found out.

Sure, the whole bear thing wasn’t totally out of the blue. She had seen something in the rearview mirror the day Brandon had arrived in town, but it didn’t look like anything more than a flash of fur. She had dismissed it. But now, if she really thought about it, what she had seen was a bear. A man turning into a bear.

Growing up in Wild Summit, there had always been rumors. Rumors of men and women who transformed into animals. Shifters they were called, but she thought they were just rumors. After all, this was the modern world. The age of the Internet, and cell phones, and social media—not of men turning into bears. The thought of the whole thing frightened her, but if she were to be honest with herself, it excited her a little, too. And then, on another level, somewhere deep within herself, the idea seemed entirely natural—like something she’d always known but had somehow forgotten. Jada heard a knock at her door. Probably Amanda.

“Come in,” Jada said.

“I didn’t know how you’d be feeling. Flowers or muffins? So I brought both,” the husky voice said.

Brandon. Beautiful, sexy Brandon stood there in her doorway, all man, a muffin basket in one hand and a bouquet of roses in the other.

“It’s you,” Jada said.

“Jada. I’m sorry you had to see what you saw.”

“Which part?”

“All of it. I wanted to tell you about it. I wanted you to understand.”

“Brandon?”

“Yes, Jada?”

“Right now, I don’t understand anything.”

“Then I’ll wait until you do.”

“You’re going to be waiting a long time,” Jada said.

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Really, and why not?”

“Because you and I are forever.”

“Maybe so,” Jada said. “But as of now? You and I are a long ways apart.”

“I’ll give you whatever space you need. Just tell me when you’re ready.”

Brandon put the bouquet down on the table and the muffin basket on the counter. Then he turned and walked away.

************************

Days passed. Then weeks. But Brandon didn’t hear from Jada. He did, however, stay true to his promise. He gave her the space she needed. Brandon knew that things hadn’t gone well with Jada. In fact, they couldn’t have gone much worse. Brandon mulled it over for the millionth time. He had wanted to reveal himself to Jada in a safe, non-confrontational setting. He had wanted to show her his bear when she was ready. Instead, she had watched him tear the life from a man. A bad man to be sure, but she had watched his grizzly claws and mouth destroy that man and he had no doubt that it would give her nightmares. It didn’t matter that he had done it for her. The damage was done. He had shown his bear in the worst possible light. How did he expect her to react?

And that was without even getting into the details. Jada had lied for him, he knew she had. She hadn’t told the police about his shift. True, it was a lie of omission, but it was a lie, nonetheless, and that was a position he did not wish to have put Jada in. Not before they were mated. Not ever if it could be avoided.

Every time he thought of Croyston, Brandon got angrier and angrier. That evil man had caused a world of grief for Jada and for him. But did he deserve to die? Brandon pushed the thought from his mind. His bear had wanted justice. It was the law of the wild.

Brandon’s arm had healed. The bullet had grazed him, but shifters mended quickly. The question now was how to mend fences with Jada. How to regain the trust that had so tragically been lost? And maybe more importantly, how to do so when he hadn’t seen her for so long.

Brandon lumbered through the forest in his bear form as he considered the problem. He knew that Jada had taken a week off work initially, but he believed she was back now. Amanda, Greg, his father, everybody had been understanding in her time of need. Wild Summit was a community that could really pull together when the situation called for it. But it didn’t leave Brandon any closer to figuring things out. Jada was his one and only. But if she couldn’t see that, if all she could see was a murderous bear with blood dripping from its maw, they would never be together. Their love would remain only an idea.

Brandon found his bear wandering toward the hot spring. Toward that place that the two of them were together in such a raw, pure way. The babble of the brook called to him. The dappled sunlight led him forward. Without really thinking about it, without consciously knowing what he was doing, he found himself wading into the spring. He imagined Jada’s warmth and her smooth flesh, he could still smell her delicious scent even after so many weeks had passed. The waters of the spring were hot, too hot for his grizzly coat and bulk, so he closed his eyes and shifted. He sank a little deeper into the naturally heated waters, luxuriating in their warmth.

“Brandon,” a sweet voice whispered.

It sounded like a dream. He knew that voice. Was he allowing himself to imagine it to give his soul the comfort it needed?

“Brandon, it’s me.”