A Taste of Honeybear Wine (BBW Bear Shifter Standalone Romance Novel) (Bearfield Book 2) (8 page)

Chapter 5

Bearly There

Her lips were soft and yielding, just like the rest of her. Michael held Alison’s ass in his hands as he pressed her against the raw stone of the mountain and kissed her like he was dying and she was the only water in the world. His body was trembling with need. Being close to her, smelling her, hearing the music of her voice drove his bear into a frenzy. The bear wanted to mate—it cared about nothing else. Michael had never been especially good about controlling his bear. Marcus kept his on the tightest leash possible. Matt and his bear were so simpatico that control wasn’t even an issue—they always wanted the same things. But Michael, his bear was wilder. He was younger and still trying to get mastery of it.
 

Alison wrapped her legs around his waist and her arms around his neck, holding on to him tightly. She kissed him back, her tongue tasting his and liking what it found. A low growl rumbled in his throat and he felt himself growing uncomfortably hard in his jeans. He was grinding against her, wishing he could make her pants and his vanish by sheer friction. It would be so easy to reach down and ease his pants off, to free himself right here, to take her on the soft ground.

Alison moaned as he kissed his way down her neck. He wanted to rip her shirt open, to gather her breasts in his hands and taste her skin.
 

“Stop,” she said. “We can’t do this.”

No
, his bear roared.
She is our mate
.
We will take her
. Michael closed his eyes and put her down. He held his breath as he stepped away from her. He was the master of his bear. It wouldn’t control him, not now. In the wild, bears mated for a season. They fucked and ran, leaving the female behind to deal with the offspring. He couldn’t do that. Wouldn’t do that. His bear didn’t even really want that. His kind, the bear shifters, mated for life. When they found their true mate, it was for ever and ever. It was one of the ways that his human side strengthened the bear. He had cunning, sure. He could use tools. He could make plans and follow through. But also he could fall in love. Wild bears didn’t. The man and the bear joined together were greater than either separate, their strengths were magnified, and their weaknesses diminished. But it wasn’t always easy.

“You have to back away from me. Your scent is driving me crazy.” Michael fell to his knees, trying to keep his head. The bear roared with fury at being denied its mate and it wanted out. It wanted to shift, but if he shifted now he’d lose Alison forever. He knew it.

“My scent? I don’t even wear perfume.”

“Back away,” Michael growled, his voice deepening as the shift threatened to come on.

“Wait, just a sec,” Alison said. She ran twenty feet away, to a clump of purple flowers that to Michael looked like mountain weeds. She grabbed a handful of the flowers and their unopened pods, crushed them in her hands and then rubbed the mash across her neck and arms. Almost immediately her scent vanished, replaced by something earthier and pungent. Michael’s head cleared and his bear calmed down.

“What is that stuff?”

“Salvia clevelandii,” she said with a grin. “Musk sage. It’s like a stinkier wild cousin to the normal household sage.” She picked one of the purple flowers and sucked from the stem of it. “Also the nectar is delicious. It grows just everywhere around here and people overlook it because it’s kind of a shabby flower, but it’s delightful and very useful. Bees go crazy over it and make lovely sage honey. In fact, I have an amazing recipe for sage honey mead. I haven’t made it since college, but if we find a local hive or apiarist I’d love to make you a bottle.”

Michael watched her, how animated she was when she discussed all she knew. It was like her mask of shyness fell away then and revealed the truly gorgeous woman beneath. He could listen to her talk forever. He hoped he’d have the chance.

“Try one,” she said, offering him a delicate purple sage flower. The stem of it was like a narrow cocktail straw and he sipped the sage-flavored nectar from it. “That’s really tasty.”

“Right? The woods are full of so many secret amazing things.” Her smile dazzled him.

“If I didn’t think it’d kill me, I’d kiss the hell out of you right now.”

“What even is this?” Alison asked. “This thing between us? I can feel it, like a connection. An energy here,” she tapped her heart, “that wants to be close to you.”

“Do you believe in love at first sight?”

“I believe in chemical attraction. In hormones. In dopamine and oxytocin. But this feels different. I feel like I’ve been waiting to know you my entire life.” Her warm brown eyes grew larger as she said it. Her pulse raced. Her full lips parted and when her tongue darted out to moisten them Michael had to stifle a groan.

“This is love at first sight.”

Take her
, his bear roared.
Even under the smell of the mountain weeds, you can scent her desire for you. Take her now. Claim her as yours!

Somewhere above a raven cawed raucously and his bear went still. It was the call of a hunting party.

“We have to go,” he said. “The ravens know we’re here, and we need to present ourselves before they decide we’re spies.”
 

Hand in hand they ran into the woods. Even though the maps said they were still within the borders of Bearfield, everyone around knew this was raven territory. Rook’s Roost was the spire’s name, a name that predated the shifters moving in. But the ravens loved irony, loved anything that could be bent to more than one use. The temptation of the name was too great for them, when they came to Michael’s father seeking asylum.

The trees in the Rookswood were larger than normal, with leaves wider than Michael’s hand and trunks so thick four men holding hands couldn’t reach around them. Old Jack Harper, who ran the hardware store in town, claimed the ravens fed the trees shifter blood. He said they performed sacrifices of their kin who broke one of their many laws. But Maggie Mayhew, Jack’s wife and head of the Ladies Quilting Society, said that the trees grew larger here because their roots had found the great bear spirit under the earth and his strength nourished them and made them wild strong. Michael didn’t know what the truth was, he just knew that it creeped him out. He’d only been in the Rookswood once before, as a child with his father, but the size of the trees made him feel like a child again, lost in the deep dark wood.

“These are all magnificent,” Alison said in wonder. She kept stopping, kneeling, picking up leaves and studying them. She didn’t see the hunting party creeping above them in the branches. Hell, Michael couldn’t see them either, but he could hear them. He could scent them. Three young raven shifters, wearing something smooth that slithered on their skin. Two females and one male. When was the last time they’d even seen a bear shifter?
 

Alison opened her purse to stuff one of the dinner-plate-sized oak leaves inside but Michael caught her hand.

“Don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Steal from the Raven Queen.”

“I’m not
stealing
anything. And anyway it’s just a leaf.” There was a fire in her eyes. An indignant strength exploded inside her. Even through the stink of the musk sage Michael could smell the adrenaline on her skin. She was stronger than she looked and quick to defend herself. Good.

“To you, it’s a leaf. To me, it’s a leaf. But to the Queen of these woods, it’s a pretext. These ravens, they’re tricksters. They once made Augusta Brown serve them for a month and a day because they accused her of stealing their words without permission.” When Alison blinked at him uncomprehendingly, Michael added, “Because she runs our little town paper and she quoted three of them who were in town getting supplies. Afterwards, Marcus and the Queen sat down with an attorney—Matt, actually—and drew up a giant contract between the ravens and the b—” He almost said the
bear
word.

“The ravens and the bees?”

“Between them and us,” Michael said, shrugging sheepishly. He was never a very good liar. He didn’t really see the point in it.
 

Alison put the leaf back down exactly where she’d found it and they continued down the winding narrow path.
 

“What’s in the contract?”

“Stuff like, you can’t accuse people of stealing your air if they breathe near you. Or stealing your words because they overhear you. You can’t come into town and run con games on the tourists—that was a hard one. Whatever shenanigans they get up to, they don’t do it in Bearfield proper. Maybe they go over to Santa Rosa or down to the city. But the point is, we can’t give them any excuse to take offense and we can’t make any deals or bets with them.”

“They sound like fairies, from the old stories. My gran, my dad’s mother, grew up in England. She was from Kenya originally, but—y’know, it’s a long story—the point is she grew up with all of these old stories about fairies and boggins and redcaps and she’d tell us all about them on the dark winter nights when she visited. The ravens sound like they could have given the old sidhe courts a run for their money.”

A woman’s voice, strong and deep, rang out. “A high compliment, my lady. For that alone you have earned safe passage for yourself and your furry companion.” Michael looked around, but couldn’t see anyone. The hunting party was far behind them, in the high branches of an elm. The voice came from someone else, someone he couldn’t see or hear or scent.

“Umm, thank you?” Alison said and then curtsied. “It was a gift freely given.”

The woman’s voice laughed, the deepness turning into a harsh squawking cry. “Approach my citadel, Alison of the Meadows. You have our blessing.”

Alison shot Michael a look, but he didn’t know what it meant. It was portentous. Did she know what she was doing? Was the queen’s blessing a trick to give the inexperienced mortal the shine of authority, so that she’d blunder into some raven’s trick? Michael didn’t have the head for this. He wasn’t a tricky guy at heart. He was a seeker, a finder, and a hunter. They should have sent someone else to negotiate. He was going to screw it up.

As they walked deeper into the Rookswood, the path enveloped them. Overhead, the tree branches merged, forming at first a light canopy filtering the noonday sun into a dappling of golden green, and then forming a roof above them. So slowly they barely noticed it, the path between trees had transformed into a tunnel of wood and sticks and roots, the ground raw dirt underfoot and the sun nowhere to be seen. The trail threatened to become too dark for Alison to see, but then they encountered the first of the ravens’ lights.

A dollar store lantern, battery powered, with bits of colored glass and feathers and red string dangling from it hung before them. It looked like a preschool class project. Like someone gave twelve toddlers a bucket of broken glass, a bucket of glue and the cheapest plastic lantern they could find.

“Amazing,” Alison said. She was clearly fighting the urge to reach out and touch it, to see what it was made of. “I suppose taking a picture of this with my phone would be cause for offense, yeah?”

“Definitely,” Michael agreed.
 

Nearby, a raven laughed.

The path wound deeper, moving underground into the earth itself. The lanterns grew more frequent, until the tunnel was lined with their gaudy splendor. Between the lanterns, in the dirt walls of the tunnel cave, chunks of shattered mirror were embedded next to shattered TV screens and smashed cell phones and bits of tinsel or aluminum foil. If it was silver and shiny, the ravens had stolen it and jammed it into their walls.

And then they were through the tunnel, in a clearing, blinking in the sunlight. Before them stood the prominence of Rook’s Roost, citadel of the ravens. At the base of the mountain two large doors covered in shattered glass and mirrors stood wide open. Farther out, a village of small houses clustered. Fifteen or twenty homes that looked like turn of the century workman cottages, the one-room affairs with kitchenettes and bathrooms stuffed inside that dotted coastal California. They were cozy and—like everything else the ravens touched—bedazzled to hell and back.
 

Michael couldn’t sense anyone in the homes. The air was ripe with the ravens’ scent, but it was old. Stale.

“Please enter, travelers,” the woman’s voice beckoned from inside the mountain.
 

Alison reached out and took Michael’s hand. Hers was trembling. Fear had hold of her. Her pupils were pinpricks, her breath came in short shallow gasps, her heart raced like a hummingbird’s.
 

He was such a dope. He’d been so busy focusing on himself, on the ravens, that he hadn’t stopped to consider any of this from her perspective. Just yesterday she was a nearly broke academic city girl who had just inherited a dilapidated house in the country, and literally the next day she was walking through a magical forest with a strange man—a strange ridiculously hot man, let’s be honest—who said he loved her and who had already came on way too strong, and now here she was facing some evil trickster queen. No wonder she was panicking.

Michael stepped in front of Alison, facing her. He cupped the back of her head in his large hand and planted a tender kiss on her lips. “Hey,” he said. “It’s going to be okay. I’m here.” She blinked at him. He could smell the arousal and the fear fighting each other. She’d sweated off most of the musk sage, but his bear was calmer now. It’d gotten used to her scent slowly.
 

“What’s going to happen? I literally have no idea what I’m doing or why I agreed to this.”

“Just focus on the house. On your plans. What are you going to call this brewery?”

“It’s a bed and brew, but I thought I’d give them each different names.” She smiled at him and his heart exploded into a thousand ragged pieces. It was a simple smile, guileless, without fear or agenda. And the warmth of it was almost too much to bear. Could he really be her mate? She was smarter than him, better educated. He was just a podunk mechanic who sold junk in front of his house. What could he offer her, really, besides his body?