A Slice of Honeybear Pie (BWWM Paranormal BBW Bear Shifter Romance) (Bearfield Book 1) (3 page)

“What’s your favorite food?” Mina asked. Looking at his body, she would have guessed he existed solely on egg whites and push-ups.
 

Matt’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh man, now that is a difficult question. I like strawberries. And pancakes. A buttery grilled cheese with pickles is pretty nice. A big San Francisco burrito full of guacamole and sour cream and rice and cheese is always good. But I’d have to say that my all time favorite food of foods, would have to be pie.”

“What kind of pie?” Mina sensed some leverage. The man had a taste for sweet things and if there was one thing she knew how to do better than anyone, it was make sweet things.

“Oh any kind of pie is great. Banana cream pie, strawberry pie, apple pie. Even a shepherd’s pie is great, especially with buttery mashed potatoes on top.”

“You ever tried honeybear pie?”

Matt’s eyes sparkled with desire. He literally licked his lips and shook his head.

“You get me out of here and I will bake you the sweetest honeybear pie you’ve ever had.”

Their eyes met and Mina could feel the electricity moving between them. She wanted him. Every atom of her body burned for him. It was bizarre. She’d never felt such overpowering attraction to anyone. She wanted him to rip her shirt off and lick honey off her breasts. She wanted him to bury his handsome mouth in her sex and devour her until her toes curled and she screamed to the heavens.

She needed to get the hell away from him.

“Give me two minutes,” Matt said, then left the room.

Chapter 3

Bearly Keeping It Together

Heading to the car, Mina fought the urge to sprint off into the woods. Just being outside in the fresh air made her feel a thousand times better. She could run. She could always run. She might not get anywhere and the woods might be full of bears and rattlesnakes and Harker’s men, but the illusion of freedom was a comfort.
 

She’d hoped that being out of the stuffy office-bedroom, being away from the amazing smell of Matt, would let her get her aching, yearning need for the man under control. Like maybe it was a chemical thing, and if she couldn’t smell him she wouldn’t feel the overpowering urge to drop her panties for him? But it was no use. He was in her. Well, not in her in her, but his scent was like a drug in her system and she wanted to rub her face all over his chest and smooth her fingers all over his hard muscles and open herself for him.

As the sun rose, Bearfield took Mina’s breath away. The town was nestled in a crook near the top of a mountain, with the rolling valleys full of redwoods and sequoias stretching out in all directions. The sun broke over the distant mountains, casting russet shadows across the deep greens of the forest. Here and there below them, Mina could pick out rustic homes amongst the trees. Thin mountain roads wove their way across the face of the rock, almost invisible. This place held secrets.
 

Mina had always found the countryside alien. She’d grown up in Chicago, moved to San Francisco after college. She was a city girl in her bones. She’d seen the greatest cities of the world—New York, Tokyo, Barcelona, Paris. What could the countryside possible offer that was better?
 

She glanced over at Matt, standing by the police station door, soothing the old sheriff with his honeyed words and she had an idea of the sweet things the country hid. Maybe there were reasons to embrace other ways of life?

Matt smiled at the sheriff, clomped him on the back with one big hand and walked back over to where Mina stood next to the Jeep.
 

“He’s not happy about this, but he’s released you into my care. He’ll hold off on filing charges or reports for twenty-four hours, but a wrecked car needs to be reported. The car has a vin number and anyone looking for you who has access to the system will know you were here.” The man shrugged. “Just try not to commit any felonies for the next day or two, okay?”

“I can’t make any promises.” She meant it to come light and flirty, but there was a darkness in her tone she couldn’t hide. If Harker’s men came for her, she’d defend herself. She had no choice.

“Keep saying things like that,” Matt said, “and I’ll have to give you back to old Petey.”

“Mina.”

“Excuse me?”

“My name is Mina.” She felt a heat rise in her cheeks as she said it.

“Mina,” Matt said again, grinning at the name. “That’s beautiful.”

He opened the door for her like a gentleman, giving a slight nod to her as she clambered up into the seat. The car smelled like him in all the best possible ways. You can tell a lot about a person from the state of their car. Harker’s car had been slick and shiny and silent, like a shark. He’d avoided any personal details inside so it always had that temporary feeling of a rental. Mina’s car, if we’re being honest, had always been a bit of a mess, with tissues and loose change and scribbled notes stuffed into the cupholders. Matt’s Jeep was organized and clean, but still felt lived in. He had an old coffee mug on the floor emblazoned with the logo of someplace called the Bearfield Lodge. He had a stack of business cards with his name on them in a little plastic pocket affixed to the dash. The seat was cozy and the whole inside smelled like a pine forest and sex appeal, it made her dizzy every time she breathed in.
 

Matt swung into the Jeep in one practiced move. “My brother’s salvage yard is just around the mountain from here,” he said. “And it’s near the grocery. Do you need anything special for this pie?”

Gangsters were after here, and this infuriating man was focused on the pie? “Do you have good apples?”

“Yep, from an orchard just down the river from here.”

“Do you have flour and sugar and butter and salt?”

“Who doesn’t?” he said. Harker doesn’t, Mina knew. She should never have gotten into business with the man, let alone into his bed, after seeing his empty kitchen. He had salt and condiments and packaged ramen. The man was worth tens of millions, but he had no food in his house.

“The recipe gets its name from one of those little plastic bears full of honey. Do you have one of those?”

“No, but I have some pretty good honey.” Matt grinned at her like he was telling a great joke. Then when she didn’t laugh or smile back, he added, “I have a beehive out back of my property. Fresh honey, whenever you want it.”

“That’ll do,” Mina said. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass of the window and watched Bearfield slowly reveal itself to her. “That’ll do nicely.”

# # #
 

They drove in silence for the first mile. Every time Matt opened his mouth to make small talk, Mina cut him off. “I’ll tell you everything after we get the item from my car.”

Her heart beat slower, her skin lost some of the tang of fear. She was calming down around him, but just a little.

“Okay, well then I’ll talk. My brother’s place, well, it’s a bit shabby. Of the three of us he’s the least interested in appearances. I swear, if we show up before noon and he’s wearing clothes it’ll be a miracle. We could always go get breakfast first and then come back once he’s put himself together a bit?” His bear sat up and took notice at the mention of breakfast. They didn’t always agree, his bear and him, but there were a few areas where they were in total harmony.
 

“Car first,” Mina said, though the fire was out of her words. A wistfulness played in her eyes as she watched the trees and curves of the village fly past.

Matt fought to keep his eyes on the road. He wanted to watch her curves, to see the light that played in her eyes. He felt like he could spend a hundred years studying her face and never grow bored of it. What was this?

“When we show up and you see the full Michael Morrissey experience, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Mina tore her gaze away from the hypnotic roll of the woods and fixed it on Matt. “Is he as big as you?”

“He’s the runt of the family, but our brother Marcus is bigger than both of us.”

“What’s he do?”

“Construction, mostly. Living out here, the work isn’t always steady, so a lot of guys have multiple gigs they work. Take Michael, for example. In any other town he’d just be a mechanic, but out here he’s a mechanic and a wrecker driver and runs a salvage yard and refinishes furniture and sells gas on the side.” Matt shrugged, “It’s the country way.”

“It’s like running a restaurant,” Mina offered. “You think at first you’ll just be the chef, or maybe designing the menus, but then you find yourself hiring people and managing them. And you have to literally design your menus so that they can be printed out and actual people can read them. You have to source your ingredients and pay invoices and all of a sudden you realize it’s been three weeks and you haven’t cooked once.”

“So that’s what you do?” Matt asked, caution in his voice. “You run a restaurant.”

“I used to. I was good at it, too. But then . . . “ her voice trailed off. “I’ll tell you more once we get the flash drive.”

# # #
 

The sign above the salvage yard said, “Morrissey and Sons Salvage.” The sign was a large plate of rusted metal with the words cut out of it in a slagged rough hand. Beyond the sign was a wooden shack that looked like it predated the gold rush with walls patched up with whatever was at hand at the time. Mina looked and saw a coffee can that had been pressed flat and affixed over a hole with glue and duct tape. The shack’s exterior was rough and sloppy but the yard was neatly organized. She’d never seen a salvage operation before, but had imagined it like a towering junkyard full of cars and trash. The reality was more like a yard sale run by an obsessive.
 

Boxes and drawers and buckets stood in neat rows, each sporting a tidily hand-lettered sign explaining what was inside and listing a price. “Glass door knobs, $1.” And, “Ancient Cell Phones, $2.” And so on, forming hundreds of precise rows leading out from the shack like tiny soldiers on parade. Not a single screw was out of place and not a single speck of trash marred the grassy lawn.
 

The door to the shack flew open and out strode the second largest man Mina had ever seen. He was naked but for a pair of work boots and aviator sunglasses perched on his handsome, aquiline nose. The man’s body was impossible to take in all at once, and not just because he was so big. Michael Morrissey was shorter than his brother, Matthew, but also not nearly as wide. The man had a more compact build and sandy blonde hair. Streaks of grease and dirt marked his well-muscled delicious body almost like tiger stripes. Mina tried hard not to stare at his cock, but it was impossible not to. The man was HUNG, there was no better way to say it. No wonder he walked around naked all the time.

“Matt,” the naked man nodded, sipping coffee out of a
world’s sexiest grandma
mug loudly. “The car’s out back. Help yourself to it but let me know if it’s a junker. She’s got some good bones under all that flash. I could really have some fun with it.” Michael’s eyes sparkled darkly as he spoke, fixed on Mina’s. She knew he wasn’t talking about the car and felt a mixture of heat at being so openly admired and anger at being treated like something the guy could call dibs on.

“Mikey, put some damn clothes on. There’s a lady present.”

“I know,” the younger brother smirked, “that’s why I’m naked.” He sipped his coffee again then turned and went back into his junkyard shack, giving Mina a very full view of his taut, perfectly sculpted rear end. Only when the door closed did Mina finally exhale. She hadn’t even realized she’d been holding her breath.

Matt sighed loudly, in that way every older brother did when confronted with the shenanigans of his younger, cooler brother. “Let’s go around back. That’s where he keeps the cars.”

Mina followed Matt’s lead, picking her way between the neatly spaced buckets of staplers and picture frames and drawer pulls. She couldn’t help herself from watching her attorney’s ass as he walked. Would he look as good naked? Could that even be possible? Michael was possibly the hottest man she’d ever laid eyes on in person. She had no doubt from the glint in his eyes that if she turned up on his doorstep he would take her in and rock her world until the sun came up. First Harker, then Matt and now his brother.
 

Why was her life all of a sudden full of beautiful, crazy men?

“You say your other brother is even bigger than you two?”

A prickliness radiated from Matt. “Yeah, the guy is like twice my size. He can’t even fit in a normal car. He has all his shoes special made by a blacksmith. He doesn’t even wear normal clothes, just a tent with a belt around it.” He turned back and smiled at her.
 

“Oh ha ha,” she said, sticking her tongue out at him and then laughing.

“My god you have a sexy laugh,” Matt said.

Mina felt the heat rush back into her. Being around this man was dangerous. If she got through the day with her panties intact it would be a miracle. What was going on with her? It was like there was a connection between them, deep in her bones, boiling in her blood.

She was saved from tearing her clothes off and begging him to have his way with her by the sight of her poor battered and squashed car. “Oh no, the poor thing. What have I done to you?” She ran to her car and ran her hand along the dented top.

“You’re lucky to have survived this,” Matt said. He walked around the car and inspected it for danger. “The corner where you lost control, we’ve been trying to get a sign up there for years. You’re not the first tourist to go over the edge. Not even the second this year alone.”

The doors were horribly bent and completely impossible to open. The windshield was shattered but in place.The whole car looked like it’d been stepped on by a giant and then kicked down a hill and then rubbed all over with scouring pads.

“This was my first car.” Mina patted the hood affectionately, like she was saying good bye to a favorite dog. “I bought it when I made head pastry chef at
Sweet Surrender
.” She bent over and kissed the hood. It was like a friend was dead because of her negligence. The tears she’d been holding back for days finally erupted, spilling down her cheeks in a scalding rain.