Boarlander Boss Bear (Boarlander Bears Book 1) (5 page)

Harrison Lang was the most dangerous man she’d ever met.

Audrey stared at the dingy, white, closed blinds of the single window and considered asking him to leave. She could tell him she wasn’t into him, she couldn’t do this anymore, or she’d simply been too hurt by the website betrayal.

But when she looked back at him, his eyes were steady, his palm still out, waiting, as if he really wanted to see this part of her. And if she didn’t do this now, she might never let anyone in.

“Please don’t laugh.”

“I won’t. I saw the first three pages, and they were really good. Sit by me and explain them.”

Reluctantly, she handed him the heavy scrapbook and sank onto the bed next to him.

The front cover had cutout letters of her name on a blue background and a white housecat with black stripes she’d glued to the tame-looking critter.

Harrison pointed to it with his eyebrows arched up in question.

“The scrapbooking supply store didn’t have tigers so I had to make one.”

“Please fucking tell me you’re a white tiger.”

Her face cracked in a grin, and she closed her eyes to stifle the giddy sound in her throat. No one in her life had ever sounded hopeful about such things. “Yes,” she admitted in a whisper.

“Daaaaaamn. Woman, do you know how rare you are?”

“Well, yes, because I tried to track down a mate who was a tiger like me because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. I didn’t know at the time if hooking up with a human was…you know.”

“Was what?”

“Taboo or gross.”

“It’s not. Shifters and humans hook up all the time. Creed’s mate, Gia, is totally human, and she gave him a little bear cub.”

“I figured that part out when I got ahold of the only other registered tiger. He was awful. He was interested in one thing. He was obsessed with talking about when I would go into heat.”

“Why?”

Audrey pressed her cool palms against the fire in her cheeks and said low, “Because I become crazy for sex, or mating, or whatever you call it. I guess it’s a big cat shifter thing. Anyway, I stopped talking to him when he turned raunchy.”

“Okay, you and I are going to talk more about your heat when you aren’t the color of a cherry Popsicle. Page one.” He flipped past the cover page to the first spread.

It was a series of pictures of her when she was born. Her dad hugged her close in one snapshot, and in another, her mother held her. Audrey was tiny and red cheeked, crying, and her mom’s head was angled down. All she could tell from this picture was that her mom had the same hair color as her. Her birthday was at the bottom in bubble letters.

Audrey pointed to the picture on the right. “That right there is the only picture I have of my mom.”

Harrison jerked his gaze to her. “Seriously? You can’t even see her face.”

“She didn’t like pictures. Dad said it was because she was like me, a tiger, and she liked to stay hidden. He snuck this one and gave it to me when I was seven and wouldn’t quit asking about her.”

“Why did she leave?”

“I think that some people are meant to be parents, and some are not. She had trouble staying in one place. Trouble staying sober. My dad said he was afraid to leave me alone with her when I was a baby, and when she left, it broke his heart, but he knew it was probably best for me. He wanted me to have stability, and she wasn’t capable of giving it.”

“Yeah, but your entire shifter heritage left with your mom.”

Audrey shrugged helplessly. “That was the bad part, but the good part was that my dad knew exactly what I was from day one, and he moved us out to Buffalo Gap, bought some land, and raised me as well as he could. He kept everything as normal as possible. I went to school with other kids and had a parent who was completely devoted to being mom and dad. I had a good childhood. It was just missing her.”

Harrison turned the page. There was a picture of her at Kindergarten graduation with a big, gap-toothed grin and pigtails. “You have freckles,” he murmured, gripping the book.

“Yeah, under my make-up, I’m freckled. Polka dots and stripes,” she said with a nervous laugh.

This spread was on a purple background with cartoon diplomas and graduation caps glued in the top left corner. A picture at the bottom showed her dressed in her tiny cap and gown, up on Dad’s shoulders, arms wrapped around his face while he cheesed through his giant mustache at the camera.

“He’s a good man,” Harrison said.

“He’s the best. He was the one who encouraged me to sign up on Bangaboarlander. Not to actually bang a Boarlander, but to hopefully meet people like me. He didn’t like that I felt so alone.”

Harrison sighed and wrapped his arm around her shoulders as she flipped to the next page. It was a picture taken at her eighth birthday party. Dad had invited her entire second-grade class out to their trailer and set up rope swings in the tree out front and a slip-n-slide on the lawn, and he’d done a big barbecue cookout for all the kids’ parents so they could watch their kids playing. In the picture, all the kids were standing in front of her house with pointy party hats and grins and peace signs, while Audrey stood on the very outskirt, her lips barely lifted in a smile and her eyes looking hollow.

“You lived in a trailer?” Harrison asked, pointing to the old singlewide she’d grown up in. Dad lived there still.

“Yeah, it was the only way dad could afford the land for me to Change safely. It was hard for me to connect with other kids. I was always afraid they would figure out I was a monster, so it was hard keeping friends and fitting in.”

“You look sad.”

“I had fun, but I felt sick as all get-out. I hadn’t Changed in a long time, and I fought my cat hard that entire party. I was so scared she would come out in front of everyone. I Changed on accident about an hour after everyone left. That was the last birthday party we did with my classmates. Too risky. I think my dad was just desperately trying to integrate me into my class and the town.”

She flipped through more pages, explaining as she went. Some were of school events, cheerleader tryouts, a birthday card Mom sent her one year, a letter from her dad on the day of her high school graduation telling her how proud he was. Her diploma, a copy of her first paycheck from Donna’s Diner, an employee-of-the-month award, a receipt with a nice note from a regular customer. There was a spread with pictures she hadn’t known her dad had taken of her over the years. There was one a year since, from ages five to eighteen, swinging on the same tree swing. He gifted them to her for her twentieth birthday. “For the scrapbook,” he’d declared. In each one, she’d grown, but one thing was always the same—her smile.

“You were happy there,” Harrison said, pointing to the last picture of her, mid-laugh, hair flying behind her as she kicked her legs to go higher.

“Yeah. It was my little paradise. Dad made it a happy place.”

“Happy but lonely.”

Her voice would tremble if she said anything, so instead, she nodded and turned the page. This was the second to last spread of the book. It was green, her favorite color. She fingered the picture of January, her ex-boyfriend’s three-year-old girl. “I was lonely until this page,” she said, her eyes burning.

Harrison hugged her closer. “Who is this?”

“I started dating someone I’d grown up with. A human. His name was Rhett, and he shared custody of his kid. This is January. I loved her. Love her still. She felt like mine for the year Rhett and I were together.”

Harrison fingered the piece of tape with a torn picture still attached. She’d ripped out of her book the photo of her and Rhett grinning for the camera the day he’d let her down. January still deserved to be in it, though.

“Why did you stop dating him?”

“It wasn’t my choice.” She flipped to the next page. Across the top was the date she’d Changed in the car and been outed as a tiger shifter. The rest of the spread was covered in layers of newspaper clippings, all about her, and all with that awful picture of her tranquilized and semiconscious on the pavement. “Less than a thousand people live there, so this was huge news. I was forced to register, and Rhett came over right after it happened and said he didn’t want January around someone like me. He said it was wrong for us to be together, and he didn’t want me anymore. He asked for his ring back.” She swallowed hard and closed the book on Harrison’s lap. “And that was that. The tiger took everything.” A long snarl vibrated in her chest, but she didn’t stifle it. Both she and her animal had been devastated in the aftermath.

Harrison set the book aside and wrapped her up in a hug, pulling her tight against his chest as he rocked them back and forth slowly. “The town would’ve gotten used to you eventually, Audrey. Humans aren’t bad. They’re just scared of what they don’t understand.”

“
You
don’t understand. It’s not the same out there in the world for people like us. If there is only one shifter, people don’t get used to them. It only works if there are big groups and humans willing to accept them or move away. I saved all year to move to Breckenridge, Colorado because the Breck Crew have paved the way for a really accepting community. I thought I could be safe and happy there. Like people wouldn’t stare at me, whisper, and shield their kids when I passed them on the street. I thought maybe if I was part of a pro-shifter community, I could feel normal. When you responded to my message on the matchmaking site, I thought it was a sign that my life was moving in a different direction. Maybe a better direction than I imagined.”

“So you spent your savings to come here and meet me.”

“Yeah. Pretty pathetic, huh?”

Harrison rested his cheek against her hair and murmured, “Hell no. It’s brave. You wanted a different life, and you went after it. There’s nothing pathetic about that, Audrey. What you’ve done is admirable.”

He felt so good, so strong, holding her like this. Like everything hadn’t gotten messed up. She inhaled his scent—shaving cream and crisp, masculine soap—and closed her eyes just to get lost in this moment. She might never get another like this, where she felt utterly safe.

Harrison eased back by inches, and his lips were so close. She could hear the hitch in his breathing as he froze there, hesitating.
Kiss me.

He lifted his lightened gaze from her lips to her eyes, then closed the last bit of space between them. His mouth turned soft, kneading against her, drinking her in. Audrey gripped his T-shirt and parted her lips slightly. Harrison slipped his tongue inside and brushed against hers, just barely, then withdrew with a sexy smack. It had ended too soon, so she waited a moment too long to open her eyes.

Harrison was looking at her with the strangest expression. Confusion mixed with wonder.

“Did I do it wrong?”

He barked a laugh and pulled her hand against his crotch. His boner was back and bigger than ever. “Woman, you did nothing wrong. I just don’t want to push too hard too fast.”

“Too hard, too fast,” she repeated in a dreamy voice as she brushed her hand up the hard length of his dick.

Harrison let off a tiny moan and relaxed back on locked arms, pushing his hips up to meet her touch. “You’re purring.”

Startled, Audrey stifled the sound in her throat and jerked her hand away from him. “I’m not some housecat and technically, big cats don’t purr,” she rushed out. “We snarl, and sometimes it just sounds happier than other times.” She winced at how lame she was being right now.

“That sounded like a purr to me.” Harrison caught her fingertips and brushed his lips against them with a wicked smile. “I love that sound,” he growled out, eyes locked on hers.

She relaxed and let off a soft, happy, vibrating noise, just for him, because she trusted him. Because he had seen her scrapbook, seen the parts of her life she kept hidden, and had somehow made her feel better…and stronger. He made her feel like a tigress instead of a kitten.

She would reward him for empowering her instead of putting her down.

Carefully, she knelt between his legs and popped the button of his jeans. Her fingers shook, and she winced.
Be the tiger.
When she looked up at him, his eyes were bright and hungry. Warmth pooled between her legs as he leaned back on one locked arm and brushed her hair from her face with the other.

The corner of his lips lifted in a sexy smile. “Are you going to go and change everything between us?”

“Do you want that?” she asked tentatively as she unzipped his jeans.

“I wanted to take this as slowly as you need.” He let off a sigh and rocked his hips forward as she pulled his pants down, unsheathing his erection. “I wanted to do this right.”

“This feels right to me,” she whispered.

“One rule,” he gritted out as she ran her fingertips up the length of his hard shaft. “Don’t give me your back.”

Frowning up at him, she asked, “What do you mean?”

“I mean, if you don’t want a claiming mark from me, don’t let me have your back. This feels different. It feels big with you.” His voice was completely inhuman now. Rough and deep. She loved it.

She didn’t know rules about claiming marks, as he called them, but she would ask him about that later. Right now, she would be careful not to give him her back, and enjoy this intimacy. She’d fallen twice for him—the first time in the messages on the website, and now, as she got to know the real man behind Harrison’s stoic mask, she fell even deeper.