CHAPTER ONE
He could hear the river now, even though the dripping trees hid it. He prided himself on his sense of direction, but he had no idea where he was. He couldn’t be lost. He had left Jenna and Zeke’s house only minutes ago. If he could just see the damned sky, he’d be able to figure out where in hell he was.
After seven grueling months in Syria, it had seemed like a good idea to visit his only brother. The lush, green Pacific Northwest had sounded like heaven after an eternity of breathing dust and being shelled. A good place to recuperate from being wounded. But the deep woods that surrounded Zeke’s place made him claustrophobic. A fellow who had been raised in Colorado needed to be able to see the damned sky.
The forest opened abruptly. The river appeared in the gap. Patrick Bascom stood on a small rise gazing down into the water. Clear blue water flecked with white foam glittered under a cloudless sky. Sunshine had at last come to the rain forest. The river burbled and swirled into a whirlpool before cascading over a jumble of rocks into a waterfall. Pretty as all get out. It made sense of his twin’s enthusiasm for his new home.
The wind brought him the scent of various animals. His unwilling brain effortlessly sorted them out. Squirrel, chipmunk, deer, and female black bear. Overhead blue jays darted and chattered and screeched. On a willow that dipped its branches into the high water, an oriole sang of longing and joy. The oriole was darting around shaping its little dangling nest which would be invisible when the willow finished leafing out.
Patrick sat cross-legged on a mossy rock and drank in the loveliness of the clearing. The scent of female bear was coming from the small cinnamon-colored bear cavorting underneath the willow. She had come into season, and her frolic was part fishing and part play. He didn’t want to be able to know these things just by smelling, but instincts you couldn’t change, even if you could conceal them beneath a civilized veneer.
He decided not to worry about his primitive bear side. If ever there was a place where it was appropriate, surely this unspoiled forest was the place. The pretty little female executed a rapid series of somersaults before she entered the current of the whirlpool. If she wasn’t careful, she was going to come to grief.
The center of the pool was a rapidly swirling funnel. It would suck the bear down and keep her. Should he intervene? Or let nature take its course? American black bears were endangered. Hell, all bears were endangered. This little female did not look robust enough to deal with the suction created by the whirlpool.
He was halfway down the slope before he realized his feet had made the decision for him. He found the trail that led down to the bank without any difficulty. He had to bend double to make it through the bushes up to the rock fall where the water cascaded. But here the ground leveled out and a small bank of gravel provided easy access to the water.
Carried by the current, the female was swimming in ever faster circles. She didn’t seem to notice him, probably because the wind was blowing his human scent away. Possibly because she was too busy trying to save her life.
Patrick stripped and piled his clothes haphazardly. His change to bear was hard. He hated it. Not just the barbarity of his bear senses, but the sheer physical torment of having his bones wrenched into new shapes. It was excruciating. He heard a roar and realized it as his own agonized bellowing. He snapped his great jaws shut on the unmanly noise before launching himself into the water after the little female. She made a startled, friendly noise when she glimpsed him. Her black eyes blinked at him flirtatiously and she panted and chuffed.
She dived down deep into the heart of the whirlpool. Patrick gave chase. One part of him wanted to rescue her, the other part just wanted to catch her. She was stronger than she had seemed when he was watching from the rock. With a muscular flip, she did a backward somersault in the heart of the whirlpool and swam away. When she broke the surface, she peeped coyly over her shoulder at him. His nose told him she too was a bear shifter.
The female was an expert swimmer, and she led him on a merry chase. He exerted his full strength to get her within paws’ reach. Tantalizingly, she remained just out of range of his great paws. Without warning, she reversed direction and came up underneath him and knocked him ass over teakettle. He spun through the air and landed on his back in a sort of reverse bellyflop. The little female scrambled up the rocks on the other side of the stream and stood mouth open, taunting him, chortling with happiness. He didn’t think – he acted.
He followed her out of the water and into the trees. He didn’t even realize he was changing as he went. He saw pink-skinned, damp, and naked, the vixen who had brazenly accosted him in French Town. Like all those blasted Duprés, Heather had been after money.
Heather Dupre’s long dark hair was wet. It dripped down her tall, big-breasted body. Her lushness beckoned him. One hand pretended to cover the glories of her bosom, while the other imperfectly covered her sex. It was obvious what he was being offered. But he was no boy to be ambushed by a gold digger. He advanced on her and seized her round and pearly shoulders.
His mouth crashed down on hers. She was as eager as he was. Her arms went around his neck and held him close. Her nipples were like two hard berries poking him in the chest. The smell of her arousal was like madness in his brain. It drove all common sense from his mind and rendered him speechless.
There was one startled moment of hesitation before she let him deep into her mouth and sucked wildly and wantonly on his tongue, grinding her mound against him. His tongue scoured the inside of her mouth, tasting and dueling.
He hoisted her by her voluptuous bottom and held her with her feet dangling, moving her so that her sex massaged his engorged cock. The relief was stupendous. She moaned into his mouth.
Patrick looked around wildly for someplace to lay his prize down. Beneath an oak tree a patch of green moss glowed. He set the Dupré female down on her back and she squirmed into place. Her plump arms extended to grasp him. Her knees came up in invitation.
“Now?” he growled.
Her blue eyes widened. “Yes,” she whispered so softly for once he was glad of his sensitive bear hearing.
He spread her legs wide so he could see her moist and glistening sex. He probed with his forefinger and pressed upward. She was soft, swollen, pink and slick. Her passage clenched around his finger. He pressed harder and at the same time moved his thumb through her pussy juice to moisten it before he made circles around her clit. She screamed. The cries echoed around the forest and were answered by the raucous calls of the jays. He was inside her before the noise had died away.
Her thighs were thick, muscular, and strong. They grasped his hips snugly. Her heels pressed into the dents above his buttocks increasing his arousal. Everything inside him clenched tight. They rocked together fiercely.
He tried to continue his thrusting, but his climax overwhelmed him. He collapsed onto her soft and plushy body, shouting against the side of her head. After a long moment of enjoying the softness of her relaxed and satiated female flesh, her hands pushed at his shoulders and he rolled off her body and lay panting beside her.
“Oh,” she sobbed. “Oh, what have we done?”
As if she had not lain in wait for him. He wasn’t going to fall for such a blatant trick. Patrick sprang to his feet. “It was good for me too. But I’ll have to say goodbye now. My clothes are on the other side of the creek.”
She cowered on her knees, hands covering her mouth. “Is that all you have to say to me?”
“Thank you, Miss Dupré,” Patrick drawled. “I don’t know when I’ve had such a pleasant time.” He sauntered back to the stream, and swam across to the other shore. When he had put his clothes back on, he glanced across the water, but Heather Dupré had vanished.
* * *
“What happened to you, Heather?” Amber demanded.
Heather wasn’t surprised that her twin had noticed she was upset. But she wasn’t ready to talk about her encounter in the woods. She shook her head and tried to smile. She had obviously lost her mind. Not that Patrick Bascom wasn’t just as much to blame.
She changed the subject. “Do you think we have enough berries to make a start tonight?”
Amber peered into the two flat baskets of salmonberries that Heather had picked before her swim. She stirred them gently with a finger. “I think so. I picked up apple cider vinegar from the store on my way home. And we have brown sugar and salt, so we’re set.” She opened the cupboards underneath the kitchen counter one after the other. “I don’t remember where the jam kettle is.”
“It’s in the cupboard beside the fridge. At the back,” Heather tried to act normal.
Naturally, Amber knew she was upset. Even if they hadn’t been identical twins, they were sisters and best friends. She felt changed by the episode with Patrick. It wasn’t just losing her virginity. Everything inside her felt raw and scoured, not because he had been rough, but because her feelings left her bewildered.
She didn’t understand. She hated Patrick Bascom as passionately as she had desired him earlier. As soon as he had appeared in the river, she had known. This was the male fate had selected for her. She had immediately known who he was – she had a bear nose after all. But she had suppressed how rude and unpleasant a man he was and acted like a randy idiot.
Not that it was entirely her fault. What kind of jackass watched a female bear shifter dancing alone in the forest in the springtime – in mating season – and joined her, when he didn’t have honorable intentions? Not that she wanted a jerk like Patrick Bascom to have any kind of intentions whatsoever. All the nasty words he had flung at her just for asking about their inheritance were engraved in her memory.
As passionately as she had sported with him this afternoon, she now wished she hadn’t danced the bedtime tango with him. Hadn’t set eyes on him in bear. He should have gone away as soon as he saw her in bear during mating season.
Not only did Patrick Bascom have no manners, he didn’t know how to behave. If she had not been beguiled by his smell, she would never have done any such foolish thing. How could she have given herself to such a jerkwad? How could he smell so right and be so wrong?
“Got it,” said Amber hauling the huge, black enamel canner out. “Should we wash the salmonberries first? I always think they get soggy when you wet them. And they don’t seem sandy or dirty.”
“Aunt Carol says that the boiling vinegar kills all the germs.” Heather tried to sound normal. “She doesn’t wash them first. But we do have to take the stems off. I’ll get started while you sterilize the jars.” She sat down at the table and began the slow task of pulling the small green leaves off the top of the tiny berries.
It took all evening, even though they only made sandwiches for supper. But by bedtime, they had three dozen small jars of pickles. “Have you thought where we’re going to keep them?” Heather asked.
“We’ll have to put them in boxes, and put them under a bed while they cure. There isn’t anywhere else in this place.”
Amber was right. The little apartment above Miller’s Hardware Store where they both worked had only one bedroom, no hall closet, and was cramped for two people. And they could barely afford the rent. But it was better than living with Aunt Marlene and Uncle Bobby.
“We can get boxes from work,” she said to Amber. “They can stay on the table until tomorrow night to cool. I think we should buy some fancy labels and make them look special.”
“If we put circles of fabric and tie them on with ribbon, they’ll look like presents. I’ll bet we can ask as much as five dollars a jar.” Amber rinsed dish soap off the big enamel pot and set it in the dish rack. “I have that print fabric I bought to make cushions, we could use that.”
“And we have a whole spool of white curl ribbon,” Heather recalled. “I think it’s on the top shelf of the bedroom closet. I’ll go get it. You know, we wouldn’t have to buy fancy labels, if we made tags out of old cards. I’ll bet Aunt Debbie has a boxful somewhere that she’d let us have. All we would need was a pen and a hole punch and we wouldn’t have to buy those.”
Not quite two hundred dollars for a whole afternoon and evening’s work. No matter how hard they tried, they were never going to be able to leave French Town for Portland. Not in this lifetime. They would be stuck here forever with no prospects whatsoever.
Amber gleefully high-fived Heather. “Way to go, sis.”
Heather kept her doubts to herself. Let Amber be happy for once.