Claimed By My Bear Stepbrother: A BBW Paranormal Shape Shifter Romance Standalone (2 page)

Chapter 4

She was sitting on the bed in a dark room, the only light coming from outside the window. Her eyes had dried up and it seemed that the infinite source of tears had finally been used up. It was a shattering moment. She hadn’t even bothered to turn on the light in the room.

Several times since she had been cooped up in this room, the reality had sunk in and it was more terrible every time: I am stuck in a faraway place where no one can find me and I don’t know how long I will be a prisoner to my half-brother.

There were moments of hope interspersed with despair: Emma and Jack would surely miss me, they would look for me or something. But these moments were short lived.

She was sure that Nathan would cover his tracks and explain her absence in a rational way. It was when thoughts like this crossed her mind that everything seemed to be dark and unconquerable.

She cried some more. Clearly, there was no upper limit to the amount of tears a person can shed.

It was fully dark outside when the room opened and she saw Nathan standing there, lit up from the light from the corridor. His silhouette was strangely fascinating.

“Food is ready,” he said softly and walked out.

Anna didn’t come down to eat.

By the next morning, her decision not to eat seemed like a stupid one. She was hungry beyond anything she has ever experienced. She kept looking at the wall clock; it was nine in the morning. Must be nearly time for breakfast, she thought. The door was unlocked and Nathan materialized in the doorway.

“Breakfast is here. Come if you want to,” he said and left.

His tone was cold and Anna was sure that he was stung by her refusal to come downstairs. This time hunger trumped everything and she went down. The table was set and all sorts of breakfast food covered it, including, strangely a tea saucer.

She sat down timidly. He had already started breakfast. She started as well. For a few minutes, there was silence except the clatter of knives and forks on plates. But she wanted answers, still.

“How long do you plan to keep me here?” she asked him.

“As long as it takes,” he said, not taking his eyes off the food.

“That’s not an answer. I want a number,” she said, more confidently than she felt.

He stopped eating and looked at her. Anna felt color rising up her neck. His gaze seemed to have a strange effect on her. She tried to strengthen her resolve and confront him but she knew it was a fighting battle.

“You leave when I tell you to leave,” he said and thumped his hand on the table which shook with the force of his smack.

Silence took its place in between them. He had stopped eating and was looking at her. Her chest was heaving up and down, red color on her face. After a few seconds, he resumed eating.

“You will have no problem living here,” he said, in an even voice, without emotions as if by pretending that this was not odd would make it so.

“You will have ample supplies: food, television,” he said.

“But it is not
living,”
she said, her own anger rising to match his. He could not just sit there and pretend to play house.

“It will have to make do,” he said. “I will be back in the afternoon.”

He rose to leave. A sudden thought came to her mind.

“What about my mom and your dad? Won’t they look for me? What would you tell them?”

He stopped in his tracks but did not turn around.

“Don’t you worry about that.”

Chapter 5

A couple of weeks passed and Anna was getting more and more perturbed by the solitude. Oddly, it was those few moments when Nathan was with her that she started looking forward to.

She didn’t know if it was because he was the only contact she had with the outside world or because she had started to know him better. While she was at Jack’s mansion (as she always called it in her mind), she had thought of him as a stranger.

She saw him rarely and even then at a distance and for a few minutes. He was like a phantom. Now he was the only constant she had in her life. It was a humbling feeling.

One night after a month had passed in her captivity, she was woken by a sudden noise downstairs. Nathan had not come by that whole day and for dinner either.

A thousand different thoughts had played in her head but she tried to keep the most obvious one out:
this is the night.
Sure enough, when the noise sounded, she woke up with a start and was initially too terrified to leave her bed.

Then there was a loud moan.
Human moan.
She could not just sit there and not do anything. She decided to brace herself and go see what the sound was all about.

She came out of the room, an eerie light illuminating the hallway.
First quarter.
She made her way downstairs to the main hall and there in the middle of the hall was Nathan, bloody and almost unconscious.

She ran to him and saw that his body was covered in gashes and cuts and he was shivering. She didn’t know what to do. It was a first for her.

“Nathan,
Nathan!”
she called to him, as his eyes closed and he seemed to go in total darkness. “Come on, Nathan.”

He opened his eyes momentarily and pointed to the kitchen door.

Anna ran to the kitchen and at first she didn’t see anything. Then she started opening cabinets and to her surprise she saw a first aid kit. She grabbed it, not sure what she would do with it and ran back.

Nathan was barely awake now.

Nathan was covered in sheets and lying on the couch in the main hall. Anna had a wet towel with her and had placed it on Nathan’s forehead.

There was a cup of coffee on the table. Nathan woke up and groggily put his arm out in the world. Anna who was not sure what he wanted, thrust a glass of water in his hands and he drank it quickly. He seemed to be gaining some strength.

“Here, have some coffee,” Anna said when Nathan seemed to understand his surroundings.

“Thanks,” he murmured, looking at Anna.

“What happened?” she asked.

He didn’t answer at first but then realizing that she probably saved his life and he owed her answers.

“You probably don’t realize it but last night was the first quarter. And the woods were not particularly kind this time.”

It was all he said and silence fell between them. Anna wanted to talk to him; to know what happened, what demons he fought and how he remembered what he did when he was a bear.

“How do you do it?” she said, in a small voice.

“Do what?” Nathan said, sitting up, putting the sheet around his shoulders tightly and it struck him for the first time that he was naked beneath all those sheets. His face grew red.

“Being like this,” Anna said. “How do you keep up with reality?”

“This is my reality,” he said in a slow voice. “As much as I try to escape from it, this is it. I have to live with it.”

“What if you hurt someone? Someone you love?”

The thought seemed to scare him. “I haven’t yet.”

“Yeah,” Anna said. “But what if you did?”

“I don’t want to think about it,” he said.

He seemed to be lost in thought as if the idea that he could hurt somebody was genuinely frightening.

Anna didn’t understand that Nathan was thinking about her at the moment. He was looking at her while he sipped the coffee prepared by her, covered in sheets and bandages that had all been worked by her.

“Thanks for this,” he said, indicating the coffee. “I don’t deserve this.”

Anna didn’t say anything. It would be a lie if she said that for one moment she didn’t think about just running outside when she saw Nathan on the floor, bloody and fighting for his life. It was an easy opportunity. She could run away and he would never find her. But living with him, even under such drastic circumstances created a bond between them. She couldn’t leave if she wanted to.

“I understand your actions,” she said, slowly. “I might hate them, but I understand them.”

Nathan looked at her with something like awe in his eyes. He felt humbled and dirty.

“The thing is,” he began. “I don’t want to do this.”

“I understand,” she cut across him.

“But let me say it, still,” he said and she fell silent. “It would be a lie if I said that what started like something desolate has turned into a pleasure for me.”

She didn’t know what to say. What was happening? What was he talking about? Pleasure, what?

“The best part of my day,” Nathan continued, “is when I look at you. My whole day is just a huge prelude the point I will meet you. Do you understand?”

Now Anna’s color was rising. She was looking at Nathan who seemed to be strangely interested in his coffee.

“What are you going on about?” she said. Anna had a good idea what this was all about and pangs of it had been felt in her heart as well, but hearing it said aloud was entirely different.

“Only that I know that this hasn’t been easy and this isn’t right in any sense,” he said, now trying to say all the things he wanted to say before he ran out of courage.

“But this is what it is. I can’t hold you forever; I know that and the time may come when I will let you go. But it is becoming harder, day after day, night after night.”

She felt her jaw drop. She hadn’t counted on this reaction of his. He was her half-brother and despite being unrealistically good looking, she always thought there were boundaries, no matter how much she wanted to climb them.

“I don’t know what to say,” she said and she meant it. It was one of those moments when words fail you. Before she could formulate a proper response, he kissed her. Taking her by surprise, she didn’t do anything but then she let it happen.

The kiss deepened, her hands found his naked flesh and his hands were somewhere in her hair. Her eyes were closed but she could feel every fiber in her body. His skin was soft to touch and unusually warm.

The kiss was over but the feeling wasn’t. She was consumed beyond measure: here was her half-brother, a person who was her captive, who had taken her freedom and she was nursing him and potentially harboring romantic thoughts about him. What was more; she just kissed him and liked it a lot.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t know what came over me.”

“Don’t be,” she said, taking his face in her hands and leaning in for another kiss.
What was going on?

This time the kiss was much more exploring. Their hands explored their bodies, their lips explored each other. She was lost in the moment, her heart fluttering like a butterfly that had seen light for the first time, unsure of its starkness and only reveling in its beauty.

Nathan had no idea she felt like this as well. For so long now, he thought that she hated him and for good reason. Every day he thought about letting her go and almost had at one time two days ago but the thought of not seeing her daily was just too much to bear.

They would both go back to their normal lives, or as normal as life gets for him and he would rarely see her and that bothered him.

The kiss broke this time and Nathan felt dazed. This was surreal. Here was the girl he had looked from a distance, in his arms, who happened to be his half-sister and captive.
Nothing about this is not weird.

Not a stitch of clothing covered their bodies except the sheets, which were previously placed around Nathan. Anna’s head was lying on Nathan’s chest and the floor of the hall was littered with her clothes.

After the last kiss ended, she had removed her clothes and Nathan was more than willing. She pushed him on his back and kissed him, hard. It was a hot, demanding kiss.

The pent up energy of the two weeks, the slow burn drama, the strangeness, it all had seemed to crash in that moment as their lips met. Nathan’s hand grabbed her ass as her breasts dug into his chest, sending sensations down his spine the likes of which he had rarely experienced, man or animal. It didn’t take long for them to take the next step, and in that moment, they were one body, one soul.

“Wow,” Anna said against his chest. “You
are
an animal.”

They both chuckled and she kissed his smooth chest. “And so damn sexy.”

He flipped her over, something that his recent injuries made somewhat painful but he was willing to bear that pain….for her.

She was pinned down on the couch, her eyes looking deep into his. She wasn’t sure what had transpired between them that led to their being naked on the couch but nothing felt more right. She was happy and that was all that mattered.

He was worried that this was too good to be true and that it would shatter when he went back to the real world. He was wrong.

Chapter 6

They were going off back the way they came through. The path was the same, the journey was different. Anna was smiling. Nathan was holding her hand as they drove through the trees and the mountains which on the last trip had been a messenger of doom for Anna.

She looked at Nathan and smiled, thinking that how quickly things change, and how people you once knew nothing about become indispensable to you.

It was a discovery she made last night, in the throes of passion with Nathan that this was it: she could not spend her life without him.

“What are you thinking about?” he said, looking at her watching the scenery run back.

“You,” she said, truthfully.

He chuckled. He didn’t doubt for a moment that it wasn’t the truth because he had not been able to think about anything else since the last night.

“How are we going to make it work?” he said, thinking practically.

“I don’t want to think about that,” Anna said. “I don’t want to think about Jack and my mom at the moment and how we would explain this. All I can say is that: this is what I want. I can’t live without you.”

He knew that there was nothing he could say to equal that, so he didn’t. But his grip on her hand became just a tad bit tighter.