Boarlander Cursed Bear (Boarlander Bears Book 5) (7 page)

Clinton surprised her by slipping his big, calloused hand over her thigh. The butterflies went to flapping in her stomach so hard she tensed her muscles and swallowed a happy squeak. How did he do this to her? How did he get such a reaction from her body with a simple touch? She was the fuse of a firecracker waiting to be lit, and he was the damned match.

“Is this okay?” he asked low, gray eyes worried as he dared to take his attention off the road for a second.

She pursed her lips to stifle her smile because it was a very serious question to him. Clinton—stompy, brash, mouthy, dominant Clinton—was making sure he was allowed to touch her. The smile slipped from her lips. His consideration reflected how deeply Amber had hurt him that he was this careful with consent for any kind of intimacy.

Someday, she wanted to know everything. She wanted to know about his first time, the pain, the insecurities, and the long-term damage it had done to him. With God as her witness, she swore she would make his life easier. She wanted to shoulder the burden of that pain. But right now, she didn’t know if she could be strong enough to ask the questions and hear the answers without falling apart. Clinton deserved strong support. He deserved a listening ear and gentle hugs, not her tears, not having to console her when he was the one who’d lived through it.

She needed to be better for him. Braver and stronger. Clinton deserved someone in his life who was stable, and capable of propping him up when he was weak.

“Clinton,” she said, turning her shoulders toward him and curling her legs onto the passenger’s seat. She lifted his hand to her lips and kissed his knuckles softly before she rested his palm back on her thigh. “You can touch me how you like. I love that you make sure I’m okay, but here’s what you do to me when you touch me. I get this beautiful breathless feeling, and I get so happy. I feel warm and safe, and sometimes when you brush my arm or my leg, you get this little smile, and it’s so…” Perfect, heart stopping, dashing.

“So what?” Clinton asked over the soft drone of the radio.

“It’s hard to explain. It’s like going to the store and an old friend taps you on the shoulder. You turn around and realize how much you’ve missed them, how happy you are to see them right there in that moment.” She swallowed hard and rested her cheek against the seat. “Your smile feels like home.”

Clinton exhaled a shaky breath before flashing her that smile again. The one where just the corners of his mouth curved up slightly. He didn’t do huge grins yet, but he would, and when he did, she knew he would be stunning.

“I like the way you say things,” he said low.

She crossed her eyes and puffed her cheeks out in a silly face, and his smile reached his eyes. He lifted her wrist to his lips and let them linger there, right over her pulse.

God, he was handsome. T-shirt clinging to his defined chest, one arm draped over the wheel as he drove them to his trailer park, the sunlight streaming through the window, hitting his eyes just right. They were a darker gray now, which told her his bear was content. And even though she hadn’t met his animal yet, she already loved him, because he was a part of Clinton. Alyssa had fallen so hard. This wasn’t like her. She wasn’t Safety First anymore. She wasn’t the responsible one. Now she was Adventuresome Alyssa, because Clinton brought something out in her that wanted to live. That wanted to take risks and shake things up. He made her feel daring, and for the first time since she could remember, she was excited her days here weren’t planned out and identical to the ones before.

She wasn’t ready to go back home.

Her attention drifted to the towering pine trees that lined the road and blurred by. The landscape suddenly turned to a clearing, and what she saw there had her gasping and leaning forward in her seat. Clinton tossed her a worried look, but slowed and pulled over to the side of the road.

The entire clearing was scorched, the earth blackened. “Is this…?”

“Yes.” Clinton’s gaze drifted to the burned wreckage. “This is where IESA made their last move. They tried to kill Kirk’s mate, Ally, so it would start a war with the shifters. Her death was meant to unify humans against us. She got hurt. Has a limp now from chemical burns. I see Kirk watching her walk sometimes, and his eyes go all wrecked. He almost didn’t get her out of there.”

“I saw on the news that some of the shifters here were fighting the fire.”

“I was there. They used accelerant during a hot month, and it could’ve taken every inch of Damon’s mountains. All three trailer parks, Asheland, Grayland, Boarland. Mates. Kids. IESA put everything we’ve built here at risk, but that’s what they’ve always done. Too many mates got the government’s attention. I used to be so fuckin’ scared of attention on this place. I didn’t want humans taking notice of the pairings here. Of the babies. We were safer when it was just a few bachelor groups.”

“You didn’t want women up here?”

“Hell no. Women bring trouble. Bring pain. I wanted my friends to be safe.
I
wanted to be safe.”

Shit. “Because you were a breeder?”

Clinton just stared out the window at the scorched earth, his only movement a small muscle that jumped in his jaw.

“How long?”

Clinton offered her the empty smile she hated—the plastered one he used to shut down. “Two years. I escaped when I was twenty. After I killed Amber, I wasn’t safe to be paired with another mate. Maybe they were going to put me down, I don’t know, but one of the observers decided she was going to
save
me. Our handlers never wore nametags, but she told me her name was Alice. So she snuck me out one night, and drove me across a state border. I still don’t know why she did it. When I was in there, she’d been the meanest. The most brutal. Maybe she had to turn off her humanity to do a job like that. And I remember in the car, she was crying. Just tears rollin’ down her face, and I asked why she’d done it. And she said she’d seen enough. That she couldn’t watch it anymore. I asked why she was crying over someone like me, and she said she wasn’t. She said she was crying because they would kill her for destroying their program. She’d drugged her co-workers with the same shit they were pumping into the shifters to keep us calm. She’d unlocked all the cages, and disabled the alarms so the other test subjects could get out. There was a silverback in there they called Beast, and there is a hundred percent chance he killed every one of those lab workers before he left. He’d been in there the longest. He was even more fucked up than me. I don’t know if Alice knew, but she’d probably granted him vengeance he’d been planning since the day they’d taken him from his family group and brought him in.” Clinton cracked his knuckles loudly. “After I got out, I tracked down my parents. They’d moved to a new state to distance themselves from the fallout, and nothing was familiar. Not even me. I got tired of seeing the worry in their eyes—like their baby had been switched at birth and they didn’t know if they could love the one they had. So I found a crew of bachelor bears. Fucked that up, moved to another, and another. Ended up in Damon’s mountains, back near my hometown, because I heard an alpha was willing to take problem bears and was trying not to put them down.”

“Put them down?”

“We police our own. Crazy shifters are killed by an alpha. I knew if I was lucky, Creed would let me go out with honor, but he was too damned patient. Believed in me, or some hippy dippy shit. The Gray Backs started pairing up, and I was pissed because I’d finally found a place I felt okay, and they were ruining it. They were drawing too much attention, breeding. Our population was exploding, and I could see it coming.” He dragged sad eyes to her. “I just had this feeling that we would burn, but this time it would be the end of everything because it wasn’t just a bunch of bachelors. It would be their mates and kids. Their families. It would be me losing more people I…”

“Love.”

Clinton winced and shook his head. “I don’t use that word.”

“Why not?”

He kissed her wrist again and pulled back onto the main road. “Because nothing hurts worse than love.”

****

She’d wanted to argue with him. She’d wanted to tell Clinton that rejection hurt, but that love was the greatest feeling in the world. But the more she thought about it, the more she considered the possibility that perhaps love really had poisoned him. He had an animal side that had been manipulated to bond to a woman who abused him. And that’s what he’d known of love. It wasn’t real love by any normal standards, but to Clinton, that’s what he knew of it. If she had been hurt sexually and emotionally over and over and over by someone calling what they were doing “love,” then perhaps she would hate the idea of it, too.

But a tiny, selfish part of her was saddened by the thought that she might very well never hear those three coveted words from his lips.

Alyssa hated Amber with the heat of a trillion meteors. A surprising, beastly corner of her heart was glad Clinton had given her a bear and killed her. Amber deserved to die at the hands of the boy she had destroyed.

Boarland Mobile Park
read the sign over the white gravel road. As her gaze landed on the largest singlewide trailer facing them, she couldn’t help but smile at the strange sensation that came over her. That must be 1010. It was cute that Bash thought it had magic, and even cuter that Clinton wanted her to stay there for undisclosed reasons. Perhaps he believed in magic, too.

Clinton’s leg bounced in quick succession, as if he was nervous, so she rested her hand on his powerful thigh and gave him an encouraging smile. “I’ve already met the Boarlanders. I like them.”

“Yeah,” he said noncommittally. “Everything will be okay.” It sounded like he was trying to convince himself more than her, though.

Clinton drove to the back of the park to a small trailer sitting catty-corner to 1010. The words
FUCK THE NEW RULES
had been burned neatly into the weedy yard. Stunned, she got out and made her way to the scorch marks.

“Don’t judge.” Clinton’s voice was soft, pleading.

“I’m actually really impressed with how perfect this looks. Is the font Times New Roman?”

Clinton looked uncertain and suspicious all at once. “Yes.”

“How did you perfectly burn an actual font into the yard?”

“Thank you!” He held his hands out and yelled it louder. “Thank you! Finally, someone sees the effort in my artwork. I spent an entire week pissing on Harrison’s front lawn last month. An
entire week
, every piss, just so I could kill his grass into the perfect shape of a penis, and not a single one of these assholes complimented it.” Clinton sauntered toward the beat-up old trailer and muttered, “They all just bitched about me acting out again.”

Alyssa laughed hard, and damn it felt good after the emotional roller coaster of a morning they’d had. She could just imagine him out there in the middle of the night drawing a cartoon penis on his alpha’s sod. It was new enough still to show the squares of grass in perfect lines in front of each trailer. Except for Clinton’s. Apparently he’d refused to conform. She giggled again.
That’s my man.

Clinton’s trailer was a patch-work wreck. A third of it had been destroyed at some point, but it had been repaired, and that part spray-painted in camouflage shades of green. The front door, which looked new and had been stained a rich, chestnut brown, boasted the neatly written words,
Fuck off
, in red spray paint.

The other trailers in the park were white, with matching porches and new roofs and lush landscaping, but Clinton’s was a disaster. Bright side—at least she would never mistake which was his.

“So you know,” Clinton muttered, his hand resting on the doorknob, “no woman has ever been in my house.”

“Good. I like that I’m your first lady visitor.”

He hesitated another few seconds, then pushed the door open. And as Alyssa stepped inside, she was shocked to her marrow at what she found. She’d expected the bachelor pad to look like a tornado had hit it, but he’d turned the place into a mountain cabin on the inside, complete with log walls, exposed rafters, and furniture in burgundy and green moose and bear patterns. The living space was small, but open to the kitchen to give a feeling of openness. And the kitchen itself was incredible. She ran her finger along the brown, black, and gold swirls of the polished granite countertops. It even had a massive dark bronze farm sink, and a set of earth-toned hand-thrown dishes sat in a drying rack on the counter.

When she turned back to Clinton, her face must’ve been frozen into a mask of shock because he crossed his arms over his chest and shifted his weight to the side, the picture of discomfort. “Everyone else was making nice houses, and Bash gave me a budget. I don’t give a shit about the outside, but this space is for me.”

“Clinton,” she huffed on a breath. “I
love
your home.”

A quick glance at her, and then there was that slight smile again. “It’s pretty fuckin’ awesome, right?”

“Really awesome! Look!” She jammed her finger across the living room. “You have a hammock! Inside!”

She was stunned when Clinton flashed a bigger smile. Straight white teeth peeked out from behind his beard, and his grin crinkled his dancing eyes slightly in the corners. Clinton was the most beautiful man she’d ever seen.