Shifters of Grrr 1 (80 page)

While romanticizing my newfound editor, I found myself wondering who was currently warming his bed. The thought instantly made my knickers even damper.
Oh to be that lucky woman!

An hour later, our breakfast eaten and paid for, he’d politely excused himself after a firm handshake, promising to have the edited version for me to review. To my delight, we’d agreed to meet up again at the café the next day.
 

Walking back to my place, eager to collapse into the warm, inviting womb of my bed, I was tingly with his lingering effect.

Had I found an editor? Or my future husband?

*
 
*
 
*

After breakfast with Abe, I slept to mid-afternoon. In my dreams, I’d encountered a grizzly bear. A great, big, giant of a bear who’d come upon me while I was picnicking at some National forest, probably somewhere like
Yellowstone National Park
. Somewhere I’d never been and would likely never go. I wasn’t the great outdoors type.
 

The bear had sniffed and grunted around my food, scavenging for something to eat. Oddly, I wasn’t afraid of it and extended my hand, offering it a honey-covered treat of some sort that made absolute sense to do in the dream, but would have been utter suicide, of course, in real life.

It’d licked the treat salaciously from my palm and fingers, its sweet, pink bear tongue delighting in the yummy flavor. It’d grunted with approval, then snorting, blowing some dust up. Then, it’d sat across from me, on his haunches, as if to join me for my picnic. Which I’d found to be terribly funny and began to laugh. One of those belly laughs that makes you almost want to cry, they feel so good.
 

Then, I’d woken up.
 

I laid there, remembering the silly dream. In my entire last year of writing shifter stories, I’d never actually dreamed about the animals that I incorporated in my books. Not like that, at least. More like nightmares.
 

And now, today – after meeting Abe, I had a grizzly bear dream? Really?

Wondering what it meant, I picked up a novel lying half-open where I’d left it. Other than going to the gym for a swim later, there was precious little the world required of me today. My book finished, one way or the other, the edit underway – I had nothing but time for the rest of the day, which was more than fine by me. I wanted to read.
 

So, I read.
 

For all the contemporary
erom
I wrote, I was a lover of the classics. There was no such thing as reading too much by
Jane Austen
or rereading
Jane Eyre
every year, in my world. A hopeless romantic, it was what had gotten me in trouble in the first place. And into the profession of writing full-time.

Besides needing to pay the bills, a working girl can dream, right? That
Mr. Darcy
and all the many other book boyfriends out there, exist? Somewhere, somehow? Which begged the question… What happens when a live, in-the-flesh, honest-to-god, real man and potential mate appears suddenly in your life? What does a heroine do?
 

Mark him? No wait, that’s what the male does, not the female!

Because suddenly, I felt as if I’d been transported into one of my stories. Or someone’s story, for the matter.
 

As I read, the rain pattering against my flat’s windows, making the day ripe for a stay-in-bed-and-read-fest, my thoughts wandered back to Abe constantly. All the little things flashing before my mind’s eye. His disarming smile. The sexy grin. The twinkle in his eyes, those hands and his chin. The brown eyes, the jawline. The shoulders, the graze of his fingertips on my ear-top when he’d tucked my hair behind it…
 

His overall demeanor, really. The whole package. I barely knew him and I was besotted. Completely.
How was that even possible? We’d barely just met?

Sure, we all read about it. Insta-love. Hell, I made a living writing about it, but did I actually believe that it happened? I guess I’d just thought it was like fiction. You know, make believe. And here the universe was out to prove me wrong.
 

God, I could only hope so.
 

In some ways, the writer’s life is so solitary that when my phone rings, it surprises me. The outside world has a way of intruding on your inside world and short of the fridge being absolutely empty of food, do you pull yourself together to go outside and face the world and join reality. Briefly.

As sparingly as possible in my case.
 

Weaving make-believe and pretend into fiction was a time-consuming love affair of its own kind. One that I was an expert at, apparently. If I was capable of suspending my disbelief for the love of a good story, then why would it be so hard for me to believe that I’d found a man, to be truly interested in?
 

That sat on my chest, like an elephant. I bolted up in my bed.
 

It wasn’t so hard to believe… which made me wonder, did I need to fire my new editor? End this working relationship straight-away so we could pursue a relationship outside of the arrangement of a work-related one?
 

I almost picked up my phone to do exactly that, but stopped.

This would be true, only if he was interested too. Was he interested? I sighed and leaned back against my bed’s headboard. I’d always been a bit too impulsive. And I knew that right now, I was headed in that direction. In danger of making an ardent fool of myself if I didn’t just wait this out.
 

Allow some time to pass and not ruin it before it even had a chance to get started. When I got like this, there was only one thing to do. Work out. Go for a swim. Take a walk. Get some fresh air. That was exactly what I was going to do next.
 

After I finished reading the next chapter in my book.

Chapter Two

(( 2 ))

ABE

Once done with breakfast, I walked a few blocks away, to a nearby independent coffee-shop that I liked to frequent, so that I could start straightaway on the edit for my new client. Settling in at a cozy spot, tucked up front, in the apex where the window and wall met, a perfect spot for people-watching, I mused on the woman and author I’d just met and had breakfast with.

She was beguilingly lovely and utterly oblivious to herself. She burned bright with the creative mania of a writer intensely absorbed in her fictional worlds and universe. Without a laptop, pen, pencil or typewriter – she would simply be another escapist fool hell-bent on getting away from reality.
 

And this was exactly why I was so charmed by her. Her creative mind hinted at places tucked away, barely revealed and full of heat, longing and passion.
 

How I knew all of this about her – I couldn’t say, but I’d felt it. From the moment we’d laid eyes on one another. That intense charge and connection between us, brimming just beneath the surface.

I sighed and took a healthy slurp of my coffee, the caffeinated brown nectar I enjoyed the most of all beverages. Well, maybe except for beer. Breathing it in, I thought about her scent. So feminine, soft, sweet – erotically enticing. I found myself imagining licking parts of her tucked away, deep within her inner folds.

My manhood was waking up and I suddenly realized I’d need to get my mind out of the gutter so as not to have a raging boner in a public place. It had been too long. Too long since sex.

My divorce had been difficult but necessary.
 

It was a simple case of getting married too fast, too soon at far too young an age. She’d just been a month or two over twenty when I’d proposed and eloped with her. I was only eight years older than her, but that made all the difference as each year passed. She’d felt robbed of her chance to get to know herself better and become her own person.
 

Thankfully, we’d opted to wait to have children, so that made our separation and subsequent divorce much cleaner.
 

For that, I was immensely grateful.
 

In the end, the woman I’d fallen in love with was no longer in love with me and I’d done the right thing by her. I walked away from everything we’d built together. I let her have it all. Just gave it to her, didn’t even challenge her attorney at all. Signed the dotted line, picked up what belongings I truly wanted and left. At first, I’d stayed with a friend in
Jackson Hole
, enjoying the posh
Rocky Mountain
town.
 

Granted, not having to be monogamous and sex-starved since we’d long since stopped having it, I fell into a pattern of casual sex for a couple years. Which was nice. Okay, more than nice.
 

I kept my heart at a distance, but enjoyed the raw, primal companionship that sex offers.

Then I got the itch. The urge to find my real mate. My true mate. Bear nature and all.

I didn’t want to have just sex any longer, I wanted a partner again. A companion. A mate to mate with. One to keep. Call my own. A wife. I wanted children. Yes, it was old-school. And traditional. But romantic and simple.
 

Starting over, I’d decided I would need to take some risks. Get outside my comfort zone. Be brave and go somewhere I’d never been before. Of all the East Coast cities, Boston appealed the most to me. Maybe it had to do with
Red Sox
and the history. Or the weather and collegiate influence. Maybe all of it. So I went. Which was hilarious, at first, in retrospect.
 

A shifter like me, in the city!?

Ha!

But I’d done it. Because waiting any longer wasn’t going to work. I was fighting against my bear nature to be more alone, stand-offish and reclusive. Everything in me screamed –
find a cave already!!

Sure, it was that time of year when my kind would stock and store up, disappear for a deep, winter’s sleep and burrow away somewhere safe, dark, earthy and dry to slumber away the darkest part of winter until early spring. A
Rocky Mountain
shifter, I’d been incredibly reluctant to move to a thriving metropolis area, but I’d trusted my gut that for some reason, I needed to make my way to the East Coast to find my match. My partner and better half.
 

My mate.
 

I opened Cassidy’s manuscript, scrolled to page one and began to read. After meeting her for breakfast, having a better sense of her persona, I wanted to start from the beginning again, even though I’d already started reading her book.

I reminisced a bit, observing her squirm as she’d explained why she wrote shifter
erom
, the term the industry used for erotic romance. How it had started as a way to pay the bills, then turned into a lotto ticket of hard work plus some publishing good fortune along with right timing. That she still had literary ambitions.
 

Cute. Charming. Amusing…

I wasn’t one to judge. I admired the writer’s gift and talent to weave realities from words, grammar, sentences, paragraphs and chapters that turned into stories of every imaginable kind. It was a noble profession, a respected art-form, and it required a brave tenacity to be willing to put out to the world a title that was worth reading.
 

Because criticism was as intense as the sharp, hard surface of a diamond-cut jewel. Unforgiving, unrelenting, cruel and very rarely fair. Readers were sometimes an assumptive, apathetic bunch. But when that
sweet-spot
was found, when the story captured a reader’s mind and heart – then magic happened.
 

As I read, I was pulled in. I’d suspend my inner editor for the first complete read-through and then I’d allow the red-ink to fly. Although she only needed and was paying for me to edit the three final chapters, I’d decided to do both. Considering that Charlene had already done a final edit, I wasn’t convinced she’d made the most of Cassidy’s book.
 

I’d run the risk of doing a full edit as well as the partial she required. This way, she could get a feel for my editing technique. Hopefully, she’d appreciate my style, my approach?
 

Besides, Charlene had confided in me that she had grown tired of editing all of Cassidy’s shifter titles, no matter how reliable and consistent the stream of income was. She needed a break and was hoping I’d consider filling in the gap. She didn’t want to leave Cassidy hanging or hurt her feelings.
 
Maybe we could finesse a transition without Charlene realizing it?

The day passed from mid-morning light to the twilight of evening before I left the coffee shop, having ordered a sandwich mid-afternoon to pull me through from the big breakfast I’d eaten, to the salmon, baked potato and asparagus dinner I would cook for myself once I got home.
 

Done with reading her story, I’d shifted into editor mode and was already halfway done. I’d give it a break, enjoy my dinner and then continue on into the night after taking a nap. Rising from the table and gathering up my belongings, I noticed that the tall, slender barista behind the counter was watching me closely. She’d flirted a bit when I’d placed my order.

It was always a bit awkward and flattering. But how does a man, a bear like me explain to women;
Sorry, you’re not my type. I like plus-sized women with soft, sweet, feminine curves. Creatures ample with cleavage, hips and ass. Lane Bryant women… Women like Cassidy, for example.