Bear Lake, page 2
“Still time then.” Shane offered.
“Time?” Jackson turned his eyes and scowled at Shane. He kind of longed for the days when he’d been that damn relaxed in his life. Since Alex arrived he’d been all over the place.
“For you to mate her.” Shane kept his eyes front and centre. He didn’t have a problem fighting man or bear when challenged or drunk, but from the scent that was coming off Jackson his bear was fit to kill something or someone and he might have been slightly fucked in the head but he wasn’t suicidal.
“I’m not going to just…” The alpha was grunting and growling like his bear was going to tear from his body and start ripping into shit.
“Not what I meant.” Shane tossed back before that happened. “You know where I stand. She’d human, you can’t just carry her off and fuck her senseless, even if that’s what the pair of you need.”
“Yeah.” Jackson didn’t say any more than that. He stomped up the cabin stairs and disappeared inside with the heavy thud of his front door and Shane knew that conversation was over.
“He gone?” Chance poked his head out of his cabin on the other side of Shane’s, some twenty feet away, and asked on a whisper. Shane nodded his head and still heard the man sigh from that far away.
“You fucked up.” Shane offered quietly.
“I know.” Chance growled back. He’d gone to Alex’s house to make sure that she wasn’t about to do anything stupid and had found her fit to leave. He hadn’t thought it through, he’d just acted on instinct. Now his alpha was pissed at him and with good reason.
“This is why bears shouldn’t live in close proximity to each other. We’re too unpredictable, too prone to stupid shit to be able to co-habit with anyone but our one true fucking mate.” Shane bit out.
“I like having you guys around. It helps to be able to take my aggression away…”
“When we can beat the shit out of each other?” Shane finished that for him. He’d had the same thoughts. “Yeah. I hear that, brother.”
“I guess I should stay out of Jackson’s way for a bit…” Shane snorted a chuckle.
“Yeah, and then some.” Shane shook his head in disbelief. “What the fuck were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t. I saw Alex fitting to leave and I tried to stop her.” He scowled. “She attacked me first with a fucking bat and then some baton shit. My bear just…” He growled at his inability to control the beast within him. He regretted that he’d allowed his bear out, not that he could have kept the fucker inside.
“You couldn’t have hurt Alex or you’d be dead now.” Shane offered what he knew for sure. If Chance had hurt the alpha’s mate then Jackson’s bear wouldn’t have stopped until one of them was dead, and he’d lay odds that someone would have been Chance.
“I didn’t.” Chance’s hands fisted at his sides. “But I could have, Shane.” He knew the beast within him was capable of hurting people. The animal was truly unpredictable and it scared the hell out of him sometimes. He didn’t want to be like that, but he couldn’t find it within him to be able to control that wildness, that darkness that he had.
“Couldn’t we all, man?” Shane knew that feeling only too well. “We’re all fucked up. That’s why we’re here in the middle of shits-Ville, because we can’t trust ourselves to be around decent people.”
“What about Alex?”
“What about her?”
“What if she stays?” Chance could see both sides of the coin. He wanted the little human to mate with his alpha and yet it worried him some when she was around the clan. What if one of them hurt her, killed her?
“Once she’s mated then she’s part of this clan. We’ll all protect her from outsiders and from each other.” Shane was sure it would work like that. Unless they all went insane at the same damn time.
When Chance withdraw back into his trailer Shane knew that he was doing exactly the same thing that the alpha was. Thinking. They might have been thinking about the same problem, yet they were coming at it from two different angles.
~^~
Alex hadn’t bothered to drag her shit back into the house from the car because she wasn’t entirely sure if she was coming or going- literally. She’d come to this backwater town to escape the shit of her life and yet she’d found an even bigger pile of crap waiting for her. She was a mate to a bear shifter, how screw up was that?
Out of the damn frying pan and into the fire. The grass isn’t always greener… There were probably a million little crappy clichés that would probably fit the bill rather nicely to her woes, and as she tossed herself down on the lumpy sofa she tried to think of them all.
Jackson was a good man. He might have been a pain in the arse, overbearing, son of a bitch, and yet, deep down she knew that he was the kind of man who would die to protect her and not the kind to knock ten tons of shit out of her. How crazy was that? She’d run from a man who wanted to kill her, would kill her if he ever got another chance, and here she was with a man that could kill her with the swipe of his claws and yet it would never cross his mind.
Alex lifted her hands and ran her fingers through her hair, dragging it back from her face and lacing her fingers at the top of her head. She blew out to breath that she hadn’t quite released again since the moment that Jackson had disappeared into the woods. There was still an ache within her for him and she knew that was part of the mating process. That need to be near him, to be with him, because he’d told her.
He’d told her too damn much. He’d explained in great detail what it meant to be mated to a bear shifter. How they’d be mated, why he’d put his mark in her skin. What would happen if he lost control and bit her…
Alex groaned with the insanity of it all. Her eyes stung as they filled with tears and she bit down on her lip to try to keep them at bay. She didn’t cry for a man or over one. That wasn’t who she was. Those kinds of emotions had been beaten out of her long ago, so why the hell did she wanted to cry a river now?
Right now leaving wasn’t an option, but then neither was staying. How the hell could that be? She couldn’t commit to going or staying. That was screwed up beyond belief.
Alex dropped her hands and swung for the lamp on the side table. The sound of it hitting the floor and the glass shattering was music to her ears. She wanted to be a damn bear just so she could kill something.
She hated herself for feeling that way. She’d spent over a year with a man that had used any excuse or none at all to treat her like a punch bag. She’d spent six months learning to defend herself with an ex-soldier who had been recommended to her by a woman’s survivors group, and now here she was wanting to be a fucking bear so she could kill…?
With a rush of frustration she pushed up from the sofa and started to pace back and forth between the furniture. Her life was out of control once more, and yet unlike before that control was within her reach. It wasn’t some arsehole that had stolen her control, taken it away, it was just circumstance and her fear of something that she couldn’t really comprehend.
What the hell would it be like to be mated to Jackson? What would it be like to be loved so completely, so utterly that the man would lay his life down for you? How could she possibly surrender herself to a man’s will ever again?
Alex knew that if she stayed she would be his. Not just his girlfriend, his woman or his wife, but his mate, and that seemed so much more possessive than all of the above. Here was a man who was deadly in ways no human could ever be, and yet he ignited a fire within her that she couldn’t seem to put out.
Alex wrapped her arms around her body and moved to the window to stare out at the woods that stretched all the way back across the land to where the clan had their cabins. He was there, somewhere. She could feel him calling to her as if he was right beside her, but it wasn’t with words, it was just his presence, and it wasn’t something that she could shake off.
She couldn’t go back to her old life- that Alex was dead and buried. Luckily not in a physical sense, although it had come close. If she stayed then she’d be tied to Jackson for the rest of her life. Onwards and upwards?
~^~
Marcus wrapped an arm around the cutie at his side and copped a feel of a nice, fleshy cheek of her backside, and she giggled up at him from under those damn eyelashes that had to be weighing her lids down they were so thick and long. The woman wore more makeup that a commando going into night battle and yet she was warm, willing, and had the kind of killer body that he couldn’t wait to explore as his thrust his cock into her. He wasn’t looking for a mate like his alpha, he just really needed to get laid so that his bear was a little more chilled within him.
“What say we get the hell out of here and go to your place?” Marcus gave a gentle growl against her ear and she squealed accordingly. Woman liked his bear and that was a damn good thing because when he was screwing around his bear was front and centre.
“I’m just going to tell my girlfriends I’m going off with a big bear stranger, they’ll be very jealous.” She flashed him the kind of look that said she was going to go down and dirty on his arse the moment that he got her alone.
“How many girlfriends you got?” Marcus peered around the suit that just walked through the door of the bar and looked so out of place that it was laughable.
“Three.” She slipped her hips in between his open legs as he sat on the stool and brushed her hand against the hard swell of his cock. “And we like to do things together.” She gave him the kind of dirty giggle that made the hairs rise all over his body and his length twitched inside his pants.
“Well, I’d hate for anyone to feel left out.” Marcus growled again before he ran his tongue down her neck and nipped her shoulder. This wasn’t his mate and he had no intention of marking her as his, but that didn’t stop these shifter groupies from wanting to be nipped on.
“We do all live together.” She batted those silly eyelashes up and down and he was sure they were giving off a little fan of air.
“Well, sweetheart, if they all wanna get naked and have some bear fun, who am I to say no?” Marcus gave her a drop dead sexy grin that was assured to make her drop her panties. Not that he needed to worry, he was what she had come to this bar for. They were the good kind of bear hunters, and he was always willing to be chased by them.
“I’ll tell them to give us an hour and then come home.” She flashed those baby blues at him and he growled some more. Then she turned on those pointy big heels of hers and sauntered away, making sure that he caught the sway of her fine arse as she did. He grunted with anticipation. He knew right where his cock was going in the next hour and she was going to love every thick inch of it.
“I’m looking for a friend I lost touch with and someone said she’d moved here.” The suit spoke to Colin behind the bar and Marcus would normally have ignored the hell out of him, but it was the edge of deceit in his voice that caught his interest.
The guy flashed a photograph towards Colin and Marcus caught sight of the woman in the photograph. He frowned at the sight of her. His eyes snapped up towards the barman and he slowly shook his head from left to right. Colin shrugged his shoulders…
“I don’t think I’ve seen her, man. Maybe you could ask that dude, he’s always in here picking up the pretty girls.” Colin didn’t want to get involved. If he knew nothing then he could say nothing and nobody was going to put him in the spotlight. Smart guy.
The suit turned towards Marcus and gave him the once over from head to toe. Marcus caught it out of the corner of his eye. Then he slowly approached and Marcus felt his inner bear growl, neither man nor beast liked this guy one bit.
“Excuse me, the barman said you might be able to help me.” The suits eyes were piercing.
The man wasn’t big by bear standards, yet he did have some hefty shoulders on him and Marcus guessed that the guy liked to workout. He turned his gaze on him and held it there. He was slightly impressed when the suit didn’t look away. The man was either as hard as nails or a really stupid son of a bitch.
“Might.” Marcus put a little bear in his voice and the suit didn’t bat an eyelid. He turned the photograph of Alex towards him and Marcus shrugged.
“Don’t think so. She might have passed through.” He frowned for authenticity. “What’s her name?” He leaned in slightly as if he was taking a better look.
“Sarah.” The suit was watching him closely, but Marcus hadn’t expected her name to be Alex. Not after this guy came sniffing around after her. He gave nothing away.
“Nah. Leave your number with the Colin behind the bar, if she turns up I’ll give you a call.” Marcus said dismissively. “Speaking of which, I’d better call my woman and tell her I’m gonna be late tonight.” Marcus beamed at the group of excited woman across the bar. “You know how it is?” He chuckled before dropping down from his stool and walking away.
“No.” The suit answered and Marcus caught it but he didn’t turn back. He walked to the entrance and wrenched the mobile out of his back pocket. He had his alpha on speed dial and this was something that couldn’t wait until after he’d tasted each and every one of those sweet young women on his tongue.
“I’m not interested in any bullshit tonight, Marcus. Deal with whatever it is…” Jackson growled down the line.
“Ok, but I’m more than likely to eat the guy…” Marcus pulled the phone from his ear and heard his alpha growled long and hard down the line.
“Better be fucking good.” Jackson growled out. He was just about ready to lose his mind and Marcus was in line for the fallout if he was dicking him around.
“Not good. Some dick in a suit is at the bar looking for Alex…”
“What the…?”
“Only her name ain’t Alex, its Sarah.” Marcus informed him and heard something heavy hit something lighter and that something lighter was smashed into a million pieces.
“He still there?” Marcus heard the heavy thudding of his alpha’s feet stomping through his cabin before the front door squeaked open.
“Yeah, alpha. He ain’t going anywhere.” Marcus assured him.
“Don’t you fucking kill him until we find out who the fuck he is.”
“Got it. Just maim him, no killing.” Marcus grinned to himself as he hung up on his alpha.
The deep chuckle rolled through his chest as he turned his eyes from the suit back to his ladies. Then he sighed. He was going to have to wait just a little longer to sink himself into those sweethearts, but maybe he could have some other fun in the meantime.
He went back to the bar and placed himself on the stool nearest the door where he could oversee everything. When his little woman came sauntering back towards him and gave him excited expectant eyes he hated that he had to disappoint her. She accepted it well though, happy to wait for a taste of her bear shifter.
When she wrapped her arms around his neck, she was establishing dominance in her clan. He got that and he let it happen, it was just one night. Then she practically climbed up his body all on her own and wrapped her long legs around his hips. Now that he definitely liked. Scenting her arousal took his attention for a moment and when he looked up from the view he had down her low top at those luscious breasts his eyes scanned the room.
“Fuck.” He growled out as he pushed up to his feet and the little human female clung onto him for dear life. The suit was gone and his alpha was going to skin him alive with his claws.
Marcus reached up and unwound the woman from around him. He needed to make this right.
“Stay here, I’ll be back for you.” Marcus growled as he turned on his heels and started out of the door. His eyes scanned the car park and beyond. “Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” He growled out.
CHAPTER THREE
To say that Jackson wanted to rip Marcus’s arm off and beat him to death with it wasn’t an understatement. If it calmed his bear then that was all good, if it didn’t then he’d have the damn satisfaction of the act itself. Marcus dropped his eyes to the ground between them and slowly shook his head in his shame.
“One fucking second, Alpha. I looked away for one fucking second.” Marcus was more than happy for Jackson to go ballistic on his arse. He’d screwed up. Instead Jackson paced back and forth in the car park.
“Who the fuck is he?” Jackson growled out. “Who the fuck is Alex?” That was what Marcus had been wondering.
“Maybe we should go straight to the source, man?” Marcus shrugged his shoulders. One thing was sure. He wasn’t getting his cock loved tonight. Worst case scenario he would be roaming around Alex’s house making sure the suit didn’t show up there. He needed to make good.
“Shit.” Jackson growled. The last place he wanted to be was where Alex was if she still hadn’t made up her mind about him yet. But the need to protect her was clawing inside him wanting to be released. His bear was going crazy.
“Marcus…?” His little human had ventured outside looking for him and her eyes positively lit up when she saw that there were now two shifters.
“Sorry, baby. Clan needs me. Rain check.” He growled back gently and she gave him the kind of smile that made his length ache. She was going to be a really good time to be had.
“Ok.” She batted her eyelashes a couple more times and then disappeared back inside.
“Really? That’s what distracted you?” Jackson bit out as he started off for his truck. Marcus groaned as he rolled his head on his neck.
“I hate to say it, Jack, but before Alex showed up that would have distracted you too.” Marcus knew his alpha couldn’t deny it. He’d been the worst of them, needing to bury himself in a willing woman every night so that he could just to keep his bear level. Now his mate was around that need didn’t seem so prominent within him. His bear was waiting, restless, but controlled for now.
