The next morning, the men had shifter practice with Martine while the three women did some shopping and errands that needed to be done.

“Fine,” Thea had said to Jack, one finger in his chest. “But don’t think just because you’re spending the day being all macho and bear shifter-ish that this means you don’t have to make dinner. The girls did all the kitchen crap last night. Boys’ turn.”

The three bear shifters had raised their hands in surrender.

Now they were out in the field next to Jean Luc’s house, shielded from the road by a copse of trees, sweating their balls off. This bear shifter thing was a hell of a lot of work. And none of them were very good at it.

It was hour three and Martine was still attempting to teach them how to shift on command. “The thing is, you three are all so connected that I’m sure if one of you can figure out how to do it, the others will be able to get it.”

“I just don’t understand what we’re trying to do here,” Jack said calmly, swiping at sweat that was threatening to get in his eyes. “You’re saying that we need to clear our minds, but also concentrate, to relax, but to also be ready. To try and trigger it, but also to just let it come. It’s all a little counter-intuitive.”

“I know,” Martine said, frustrated with herself. “I wish I could explain it better. It’s just that I never had to learn how to do it. I was born knowing how. Shifting into my hawk form is as simple as…” She trailed off, looking at their defeated expressions. She realized, a little belatedly, that this wasn’t the time to be talking about how easy this all was for her. “Never mind. What do you say to a break? Lunch and a swim, maybe? We can pick it up again in the afternoon.”

The three men agreed, all of them exhausted and frustrated and even more exhausted and frustrated because they were tuned in to one another’s feelings as well.

Jean Luc couldn’t help but feel a little bit of relief that the bear shifter lesson had been so physically and emotionally demanding because he hadn’t had any time to think about Celia. Who had been on his mind a lot over the last few days. Something had changed with her, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. She’d opened up a little, shown him some of the sweetness she’d been showing everyone else this whole time.

And she’d made him laugh. Really hard. He hadn’t laughed that hard since Hugo. He liked her. Wanted to be around her a little more. Jack and Tre were his friends, sure, but it was almost more like a forced brotherhood. They hadn’t gravitated toward one another because they had sensed they’d be compatible. No. They’d been forced together via circumstance. That wasn’t to say that Jean Luc didn’t like the other two. He really liked them, and was glad to see that the three of them were becoming friends. But becoming friends with Celia was a whole other piece of pie. He was becoming friends with her for no reason other than that they liked each other. And that felt good. Really good. He’d been lonely for so long that he hadn’t even realized it after a while. It was just his everyday existence. Making friends with Celia was gratifying. It felt like stretching a muscle that hadn’t been stretched in a really long time.

Also, it didn’t exactly hurt that she was cute. And interesting. Tattoos and piercings and crazy hair weren’t exactly his thing—he generally preferred women who looked a lot more like Caroline. Classic-looking and put together. Manicure and pastels. Celia wasn’t anything like that at all. Which was why Jean Luc wasn’t worried about messing up the group dynamic by getting a crush on her. She was cute and attractive, but just a friend. Even if it had made his heart race to have her cold little toes snuggled up under his leg. That didn’t mean anything.

They made their way back to the house and saw that the van was back in the driveway. The girls were home from town and had hopefully picked up everything they were going to need for the next few days. None of them liked being separated.

“Swim?” Tre asked Jean Luc and Jack. The three of them had sweated through their T-shirts.

“As long as there’s beer,” Jack said, groaning as he cracked his neck from one side to the other.

“You’re speaking my language, old man,” Tre said, a cocky grin on his face as he threw an arm around Jack’s shoulder. The two of them scuffled a bit as they entered the house through the side door and made straight for the kitchen. Tre grabbed a beer apiece for him and Jack and tossed Jean Luc a bottle of water. They knew he didn’t drink.

Jean Luc screwed the top off the bottle and was chugging water that he pretty much completely aspirated as something caught his eye out on pool deck. Jean Luc coughed and squinted and tried to figure out what the hell he was looking at. There was a woman dipping her foot into the pool. She wore a tiny red bikini and had her back to the house. Her waist pinched in tight but her ass was really a sight to behold, barely contained by the string bikini. And when she turned, he saw that her boobs were pretty much in the same boat, smashing themselves against her bathing suit.

It took a full three seconds for him to be able to lift his eyes high enough to realize that he recognized the tattoos across her collar bones. It took three more seconds for his eyes to make it to Celia’s face.

“You alright, my dude?” Tre asked, slapping a still-coughing Jean Luc on the back and raising his eyebrows at Jack. They both hid their smiles at Jean Luc’s reaction to Celia in a bathing suit.

They hadn’t discussed it amongst themselves, but come on, they had a mainline to Jean Luc’s emotions. They could tell the kid had a little bit of a sweet tooth when it came to Celia. Just like they could also tell that Jean Luc hadn’t really realized that said sweet tooth existed. Apparently he was a master of denial.

“Yeah, yeah. I’m fine.” He turned away from the window, toward the dim kitchen, but all he could see was Celia in that bathing suit. A hundred of her, in every place he looked, like she’d burned a silhouette into his eye. “Just swallowed the wrong way is all.”

“You ready for that swim?” Jack asked casually, cutting a sly eye toward Tre, who sucked his lips into his mouth to keep from smiling.

Jean Luc cleared his throat. Of course he was, why wouldn’t he be? He wasn’t a dorky high-schooler anymore. He could handle sharing a pool with a girl in a bathing suit without making a fool of himself. He was a former NFL quarterback. He’d had threesomes for God’s sake! There’d been a time in his life when he was tripping over pussy. One woman in a pool with friends around was not reason enough to go take a cold shower and hide in his bedroom for the rest of the day. He was a grown man. “Yeah.”

Celia felt the eyes before she saw them. She dunked herself underwater and came up ten feet over from where she started, treading water in the deep end. She hoped the water obscured her body just a little bit, which was ridiculous considering she’d just bought this bathing suit in the hopes that it would show off her body.

She turned toward the house and saw Jean Luc standing there, swim trunks on and a towel in his hand. No shirt. She slipped a few inches down in the water and quickly swam to the side. If he was coming to join her in the pool then she was definitely gonna need to hold on to the side.

Jack and Tre appeared behind Jean Luc and she couldn’t help but feel twin spears of relief and disappointment. Did she want to be half naked and alone with Jean Luc? Hell yeah. Did it terrify her to be alone and half naked with Jean Luc? Double hell yeah.

Tre tossed his towel aside and did a running cannon ball into the deep end. Celia laughed and scraped water off of her face.

“I give it a 6.8,” she told him as he surfaced, tossing the water out of his hair.

“6.8?!” he demanded. “That was perfect form! Hell of a splash, too.”             

“Son,” Jack called from the pool deck, “that was child’s play.” He took his jump at a full sprint, pulled into a long, golden jackknife and made a splash at least four feet higher than Tre’s.

Celia laughed and treaded water while she held up eight fingers. “Solid 8, cowboy.”

At this point, Caroline and Thea had wandered out to watch, both of them in bathing suits as well.

“8?!” Jack argued, in the exact same tone as Tre had. “That was at least a nine. Look! The deck chairs are wet.”

Celia, gathering her courage, pulled herself out of the water and sat on the edge of the pool. She slicked water out of her silver hair and leaned back on the palms of her hands, letting the sun touch all over her skin. She could feel his eyes on her. “What is it about men that they immediately have to argue their scores?” she asked Jack, purposefully avoiding Jean Luc’s eyes. “An 8 is a perfectly respectable score. You should be proud of it, not pouting you didn’t score higher.”

Caroline, in a demure little white bikini with a little gold clasp between her breasts, sat down next to Celia, dipping her feet in. “I think it’s a caveman thing,” Caroline mused.

“Caveman thing?” Thea asked, slipping her feet out of her flip flops. She looked around and frowned when she didn’t see Martine out there with them. Ah well. “It’s not a caveman thing, it’s a dick-swinging thing.”

“What?” Caroline asked in laughing, blushing delight. The thought had never even occurred to her that in a man’s mysterious mind splash size might correlate with dick size.

“Yeah,” Thea said, adjusting her basic, black one-piece and making Jack swallow about a gallon of pool water. “It’s like ‘look at how much of a he-man I am. Me splash, you swoon.’”

“So,” Jack called from the water, “you’re saying that as a woman, you have no urge to show us up and make a bigger splash? Or did you just make all that up because you know your splash can’t compare to mine?”

Thea’s smile flattened into a line. “For the record, I know that you’re baiting me. And also for the record, my splash is bigger than yours.” Thea took a running leap and splashed into the water like a torpedo. It wasn’t a wider splash than Jack’s but it certainly was taller.

“Wow!” Caroline called. “That was incredible.”

“Yes,” Celia agreed. “Definitely a nine.”

“A nine?!” Tre and Jack shouted at the same time.

“No way,” Tre shook his head. “That’s just some girl power agenda you’re pushing. There’s no way that was a nine.”

“I stand by my scoring abilities,” Celia shrugged. She even had the audacity to check out her nails as she spoke, like she was bored by the entire affair.

“It’s up to you, Goliath,” Tre called to Jean Luc, still standing on the pool deck. “Use your size for good. Redeem us!”

Jean Luc shook his head, like they were all being so childish he couldn’t even believe it. He turned away. For a moment, Celia’s stomach dropped, foolishness beginning to creep over her. They were acting like kids, she supposed. And she’d intended to come out here and be flirty and sexy, not act like a kid. But that line of thought evaporated in a cloud of delight as Jean Luc turned back to the group, a crazy grin on his face, and launched himself toward the pool.

Athlete that he was, he got way more height in his jump than any of the others had. He seemed almost to hang, suspended, in the air for a moment. When he hit the water, there was the illusion that there wasn’t even going to be a splash—the water just trembled. And then it came. The splash to end all splashes.

Even the kitchen window was dripping with pool water as he came up sputtering and laughing.

“Ho-ly shit!” Jack crowed.

“You soaked me!” Caroline called, squeezing water out of her previously dry hair.

“Alright,” Thea called, floating on her back. “I can admit that Jean Luc’s dick is bigger than mine.”

Jean Luc went bright pink and laughed. He looked around the pool, treading water. “Damn. We’re gonna have to add water with the hose. We took a good foot out of it.”

“You took a good foot out of it,” Celia said, swishing her feet in the water. She held her breath as he swam over to her. He rested his folded forearms on the side of the pool, his muscles flexing and shadowed in the sun.

Jean Luc shirtless was quite a thing to behold. Gorgeous and tempting. Jean Luc shirtless and wet? Well, damn. Celia commanded herself not to press her legs together. His face was a foot from her hips. She was positive he would notice. She just needed to play it cool. Play. It. Cool.

“Well, as long as I’m already wet,” Caroline said, shrugging, and she launched herself off the side and into the pool where she and Tre immediately started tossing a blow-up ball back and forth. Jack and Thea lounged over by the pool stairs, flirting and touching.

Jean Luc looked up at Celia out of the corner of his eye. There was something about the contrast of the red against that peachy skin of hers. It was… damn. Made her look like candy. And she was so small, he’d never quite counted her as having curves before. But he supposed it was all in proportion, because the rounded lines out from her collarbones, the press of her breasts against one another, that soft stomach and the flare of her hips, those were curves. Even if she could probably fit in his pocket. Something about that combination, tiny and curvy, just made his heart bang in his ribs.

She still wasn’t looking at him. Usually that wouldn’t have bothered him. People were allowed to think their own thoughts and ignore him as much as they wanted. In fact, he usually preferred it. But right now, he really wanted her eyes, her attention. So, he said the first thing that came to mind. Without thinking at all how it was going to sound.

“So, did I get you wet too?”

Her mouth dropped open as she swung around to look at him. “Excuse me?”

“I—Jesus. Not what I—damn it.” He plunked his bright red face into his elbow and let out a long, slow breath.

“Wow,” Celia said, delighting in Jean Luc’s clumsy flirtation with her. She was ninety percent sure she and her skimpy bikini had just lured him across the pool to her. It was a good feeling. It was a really good feeling. Even the tips of his ears were red. And that was a good feeling, too. Something clicked into place. “Woooooowwwww. I totally believe you now.”

“Believe me about what?” he asked, lifting his head just enough to peer at her out of the side of his eye again. Like looking at her dead-on was too embarrassing.

“That you were totally a dork in high school.”

He scrubbed a hand over his face. “Yeah, I just didn’t think I was such a dork in my adult life as well.”

“Yeah, I didn’t either. I thought for sure that Jean Luc LaTour would have smoother moves.” She said his name in the way he had yesterday, when he’d said that people thought of him as a brand.

If it was possible, he went a deeper red. “I have moves.” He glanced at her out of the corner of his eye again and played with some loose pebbles on the pool deck.

He was off his game, flirting like a high-schooler and it made Celia feel like she was ten feet tall. And a perfect ten. A knock-out. She had never felt more in control of a situation with a man or more hot in her entire life. Jean Luc LaTour was blushing like a schoolboy and barely able to look at her. Bow down, bitches.

“Really? Not convinced.” She resisted the urge to look at her nails again. She figured that might be pushing this persona a little too far.

“Are you saying that I should convince you?”

This time, it was Celia who was looking at him out of the corner of her eye, not quite able to look him dead on. Her mouth went dry. Was he just flirting? Talking? Or was he asking permission to take things a step further? It was really hard to tell. The only thing Celia knew for sure was that she was about ten seconds away from having a squee-based panic attack and blowing this sexy-red-bikini-don’t-care persona to all hell.

She called on a deep reserve of confidence that she hadn’t previously known she had. “Not sure I can be convinced at this point. I’ve already seen your beret.”

With that, Jean Luc did three things. He laughed, blushed, and lunged forward, his strong arms banding around her waist. He easily plucked her up off the edge of the pool and plunged backwards with her pressed tight against him. They submerged, all bubbles and blue water. He released her and Celia swam toward the sunlight.

Celia automatically checked her bathing suit to make sure everything was in place as she broke the surface and gasped for air. She came up laughing and so did he. It was like the sudden cold water had shocked her out of her momentum. Watching him laugh and slough water off his face, she suddenly remembered who she was and who he was. But before the weight of her status versus his could weigh her down, she remembered that she’d just totally befuddled him. She didn’t think she had the skills or the energy to do it twice in a row, but for a moment, she’d made him blush. And that was enough for now. She ducked back under the water and came up on the shallow side, her hands in the air.

“Open!” she called, and held her arms up for the inflatable beach ball. Tre launched it across the pool and she caught it, a huge smile on her face. Thea called out behind her and the game evolved from there. Riding the impossible high of flirting with Jean Luc, Celia spent hours playing with her friends.