Shifter Spring Fever, Part One

Please Note: This short story is part of a longer short story series and is preceded by the stories Hot Bear Summer, Cozy Bear Autumn, and Wild Bear Winter. I recommend reading these stories first if you have not yet!

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Eric Hunt couldn’t help tapping his foot nervously up and down as he waited for the gas pump to fill his truck. He knew he was probably only imagining it, but it felt like everything, including the gas pumps, ran so slowly in the small town of Wood Canyon.

No wonder my brother likes small town life, Eric thought, feeling a small twinge of affection for his half-brother, Andy. Eric had always considered Andy the more rational of the two of them, the more logical one who could just roll with whatever life tossed his way. Small town life, with its unhurried, unbothered pace, fit Andy.

It did not fit Eric, especially not now, when the slow as molasses gas pump was taking ten years to fill his empty tank. Eric would have just kept driving the last ten miles of his journey and filled his tank another time, but he feared he might literally not make it. He’d been running on fumes far too long, and those fumes would run out eventually.

Eric needed to get to his brother A.S.A.P., and having to push a truck ten miles down the highway didn’t seem like the best way to do that.

“I’m coming, Andy. Just hold on,” Eric muttered.

At half a tank full, Eric finally gave up. He felt it was a waste to take the time to stop and not fill the tank all the way, but his patience couldn’t deal with the trickling gas pump any longer. He’d fill the truck up all the way another day, hoping that all the gas pumps in Wood Canyon weren’t like this. Surely, this one must be defective or something? They couldn’t all be this bad.

Even easygoing Andy wouldn’t have been able to handle that.

Andy.

Thinking of his brother made Eric’s heart tighten a bit in his chest. He hoped his brother was doing okay, given the circumstances.

Two days earlier, Eric had gotten a call from Andy’s lifemate, Julia, begging him to come see Andy and help out with Andy’s kayak shop. Andy, it seemed, had fallen off the roof of his small shop building while working on some roofing repairs, and he’d broken his leg quite badly. If he hadn’t been a shifter, he probably wouldn’t be alive anymore at all, but thankfully, shifters were strong and resilient, and they generally healed quite quickly.

Even a shifter couldn’t escape completely unscathed when tumbling off a roof, however. Julia told Eric that Andy’s doctors expected him to need a few months to fully recover. She said Andy had scoffed at the idea, and had expected to be back at work in a manner of days.

He’d been wrong about that, and had finally admitted that he could use some help running his kayak rental business while he healed up. Eric knew that Andy must be in pretty awful shape if he’d not only agreed to ask for help, but had also let Julia be the one to make the call. Andy wasn’t normally the type to let his lifemate take care of making phone calls for him, so the fact that he had meant he must be in a lot of pain.

Eric had instantly slipped into worried, protective older brother mode, and he’d told Julia he’d get there as fast as he could and stay for as long as they needed him. It had been a long drive, but it was almost over, and Eric felt a mixture of apprehension and excitement when he turned into the driveway of his brother’s kayak shop.

He couldn’t wait to see his brother and give him a hug. They might only be half-brothers, but they had always been close. Eric hated that they no longer lived in the same city, and even though the circumstances weren’t ideal, Eric couldn’t deny that he was glad for an excuse to come visit his brother.

He just hoped his brother wasn’t as bad off as Julia seemed to think. He felt uneasy when he thought about how distraught she had sounded on the phone. Eric reminded himself that Julia, although she was Andy’s lifemate and loved him dearly, was fairly new to the world of shifters. She probably just didn’t understand that Andy was likely far better off than he looked. Shifters could recover so quickly, and usually if an injury didn’t actually kill them, everything would be just fine.

Except, when Eric walked into the cozy apartment above the kayak shop where Andy lived, he realized that things were quite far from fine.

Julia greeted Eric’s knock on the door with a smile, but with a firm finger to her lips, telling him to be quiet.

“He’s asleep,” she whispered. “And it’s been hard for him to get any rest, with the amount of pain he’s been in. I don’t want to wake him before he wakes himself.”

Eric nodded. “Of course. Can I at least peek in on him?”

Julia’s tired smile widened. “Only after you give me a hug, brother.”

Eric smiled back at her, and wrapped her in a big hug. He had only met her once before, but he could tell she was far more stressed now than she’d been the previous time. He felt a twinge of alarm at how skinny and frail she felt when he hugged her, but he said nothing. If she was really so stressed, she surely didn’t need him to point it out.

And Andy surely wasn’t doing well.

Eric’s worst fears were confirmed when he peeked in on his sleeping brother and saw how bandaged up he was. Both his legs were in casts, and one arm appeared to be in a partial cast as well. He had bandages and angry red marks all over, and what Eric could see of Andy’s face was quite pale.

“Wow. You weren’t kidding,” Eric whispered to Julia. “He’s quite banged up.”

Julia nodded, tears flooding her eyes even though he could tell she was trying to blink them away. “He didn’t want me to call you. He said he’d be fine and he didn’t want to worry you. But I can tell he’s just putting on a brave face. He needs you. And…he needs help with his shop. He has savings and can afford to keep it shut for a little while, but not for an indefinite amount of time. Especially not now, at the beginning of the spring season when things are just starting to warm up and we can finally open for business again.”

Eric placed a reassuring hand on Julia’s shoulder. “You did the right thing, calling me. I can work remotely on my graphic design business, and I’m happy to help him keep things with the kayak rentals afloat. Andy just needs to focus on getting better.”

Julia sniffed and tried to blink away the rest of her tears. Eric wished he knew what to say to make her feel better. He’d never been particularly talented at dealing with women, and he didn’t know Julia all that well yet. But his brother meant everything to him, and so Eric wanted to do his best to help not just his brother but his brother’s lifemate as well.

Thankfully, Eric didn’t have to figure things out on his own, because at that very moment, he heard someone enter the kayak shop from below and call up.

“Jules? Are you up there? I’m here!”

Julia’s face instantly relaxed. “That’d be Em, one of my best friends. She’s been helping out with the shop and stuff around the house as much as she can. It’s pretty amazing how much she’s managed to do, considering that she’s also running her own bookshop.”

“She sounds like a good friend,” Eric said, trying to keep his voice calm. In reality, he was anything but calm.

His inner bear had just started going absolutely wild, clawing to be let out and demanding that he run down and claim this “Em” woman.

Ridiculous, he told his inner bear. I’ve never even seen her.

But his inner bear continued to go wild, and it was all Eric could do to keep a semblance of calm on his face. Luckily, Julia was distracted by her excitement that her friend had arrived, and she headed toward the stairs at an almost-run.

Eric took one more glance back at his brother, who was still soundly sleeping, and then followed Julia to the stairs.

“Em” turned out to be short for Emily, and Eric had to admit that his bear hadn’t been a complete idiot for wanting to claim her.

She was objectively the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.

He could tell she was tired, just like Julia was obviously tired. But despite her apparent exhaustion, Emily’s eyes still sparkled with warmth as she introduced herself to Eric.

“So you’re the brother, huh?” she said as she shook his hand. “You don’t look much like him.”

“Half-brother, technically. We have the same mother but different fathers, and we both take after our respective fathers. That’s why we don’t look like we’re related.” Eric wondered as he made this explanation whether Emily felt the same jolt of electricity he did when their palms touched. She must not have, because her warm expression and bright smile never changed in the slightest.

“I hope I didn’t sound like I was trying to be nosy!” Emily said, her cheeks turning slightly pink. “I was just surprised because I guess I expected a clone of Andy.”

Eric smiled at her, trying to convey that he wasn’t offended in the least. “It’s fine. I didn’t take your question as nosiness at all. Besides, I know you must be a decent human being if Julia considers you a good friend.”

And if my inner bear seems to think that he needs to claim you.

Eric felt his inner bear growl in response, but he did his best to ignore it. It didn’t matter how nice and beautiful Emily might be. She couldn’t possibly be his lifemate. She was a full human, and didn’t even know that bear shifters existed. Julia had warned him that no one except her friends Lola and Tasha knew about bear shifters, and that he shouldn’t mention shifting in front of any of her other friends who came by. Eric was slightly surprised that one of Julia’s best friends didn’t know that Andy was a bear shifter, but perhaps he shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t all that uncommon for even close friends to not know that a person was a shifter. After all, telling any full human, even a good friend, was always a risk.

If Julia hadn’t seen fit to tell Emily, then Eric sure wasn’t going to bring it up. And the fact that Julia hadn’t told her made him think that his inner bear had lost its mind in thinking he should claim Emily.

Claiming a woman who didn’t know about shifters would bring up a whole mess of problems, and a mess of problems was the last thing Eric needed at that moment.

Eric realized that Julia was talking, apparently to him, and he tried to pay attention.

“—has been coming to help me and will now be coming every day to help you.”

Eric forced his gaze over to Julia. “Sorry, what?”

His heart pounded, and he felt himself breaking out into a nervous sweat. He had a deep sense of foreboding that Julia had just given him a piece of news he wasn’t going to like.

Julia laughed, sounding tired but amused. “You must be really worn out from your trip. I was just trying to tell you that Emily has been coming over to help as much as she can, and has promised she’s going to keep coming over to help you every day.”

Alarm bells went off in Eric’s brain. “Oh, goodness! That won’t be necessary. I’m sure I can figure things out on my own.”

Emily was smiling and shaking her head. “Running a shop is harder than you might think,” she said without a hint of condescension. “It’ll make things easier for everyone if someone shows you the ropes, and I don’t mind.”

Eric could only gape in Emily’s direction. He probably looked like an electrocuted fish with his mouth hanging wide open like that, but he couldn’t bring himself to care.

Not when he’d just learned that he’d be forced to spend time one on one with a woman his inner bear was going wild over. He looked at Julia, his eyes wide, hoping she would realize what a bad idea this was.

But of course, Julia had no idea that anything was the matter. She was too tired from dealing with everything related to Andy to notice things like the fact that Eric could not be left alone with a woman as tempting as Emily.

He swung his gaze back to Emily, unable to believe that she couldn’t see how she was affecting him. Surely, she was just playing coy.

Down, boy, he said to his inner bear. But of course, his inner bear had no intentions of listening. It kept roaring within him, insisting he claim Emily.

Emily smiled at him, apparently having no idea what was running through his mind. Of course she had no idea that he had an inner bear that was trying to claw its way out to her. But he found it hard to believe that she couldn’t sense at least how turned on he felt in her presence. The air between them felt positively electric.

“Do you want to get started now?” she asked.

“Huh?” was Eric’s very sophisticated reply. He felt like such an idiot, but his brain didn’t seem to be working. How could it be, when the most beautiful creature he’d ever seen in his life stood in front of him?

Emily laughed, the sound of it like the musical tinkling of beautiful bells. “Do you want to start learning how to run the front counter of the kayak store? I’ve been helping Julia out with it, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it. I could teach you now, if you’re not too tired from your trip.”

Eric suddenly found that he was anything but tired. It didn’t matter that he’d just driven what felt like a bazillion miles, and that his brother was clearly suffering more than Julia had been willing to let on.

He felt energized and alive. He felt hopeful.

He felt the way one could feel only when their lifemate had appeared in their life for the very first time.

Impossible, he told himself. And yet, deep down, he knew that he wouldn’t be feeling this way if there wasn’t at least a little bit of a possibility that his future was about to intertwine with Emily’s in the most beautiful way.

“Lead on,” he said, gesturing toward the front room. Emily flashed him a smile that lit up the whole room, then turned and led him onward.

* * *

Emily took several deep breaths as surreptitiously as she could and hoped that the loud pounding of her heart wasn’t as audible to Eric as it was to her own ears.

Her heart had been doing all sorts of wild flip-flops ever since she walked into Andy’s Kayak Shop and saw Eric standing there. She absolutely did not believe in love at first sight, no matter how many romance novels she sold at her bookstore.

But she could not deny that she had fallen into lust at first sight.

How could she not? She’d been expecting Eric to look similar to Andy, and, while no one would deny that Andy was objectively good-looking, he wasn’t exactly Emily’s type.

Eric, on the other hand, looked exactly like what Emily would have imagined if she had closed her eyes and tried to picture “dream man.” Except he was no dream. He was standing there, right next to her, smelling vaguely of pine and cedar.

She had been trying to act normal and not at all affected by him ever since Julia had introduced them, but she wasn’t sure she was doing all that great a job of it. Eric kept looking at her with the most intense gaze she’d ever seen, and that was saying something, because Andy could also be very intense, as could their friends Dane and Max. Perhaps the difference, though, was that none of those men had ever been looking at Emily when their gazes turned intense. Eric, however, kept looking directly at Emily, not breaking eye contact.

If she wasn’t careful, she’d lose herself in those deep green eyes of his.

Emily could feel her cheeks heating, and she worried that she was going to start blushing. She coughed awkwardly and cleared her throat, then pushed away from the cash register where she’d been trying to distract herself from thoughts of Eric by focusing on showing him how the thing worked.

“Want to see the kayaks?” she asked. Her voice probably sounded so overly enthusiastic as to be fake, but she didn’t care. She just needed an excuse to get outside and get some fresh air before the heat Eric was making her feel made her spontaneously combust.

He stared at her a few beats before answering, and she was sure he was going to make some comment about how she was obviously into him. She started to panic, wondering what she would say. She couldn’t own up to that fact, mostly because she was absolutely not interested in dating any man, let alone a man who was only in Wood Canyon temporarily while his brother healed up

Thankfully, she didn’t have to say anything, because Eric finally looked away and shrugged. “Sure,” he said in that gravelly-deep sexy voice of his. “Let’s go see the kayaks.

The fresh air did help calm Emily somewhat. She gulped in deep lungfuls of it, and reminded herself to focus on what was important: taking care of her own health, taking care of her bookstore, and helping Julia with Andy’s store so Andy could get better. Nowhere on her list of important things to do was anything even remotely related to “find a man,” and Emily had no intention of adding anything like that.

She had long believed that romance only worked out in novels, usually those of the fairy tale variety. It didn’t matter that her friends Julia, Lola, and Tasha had all found men that seemed to truly love them and be committed to forever with them. Emily still considered good men an anomaly, and romance something she would never find for herself.

Eric might be handsome, and he might be a good guy who had dropped everything to come help out his brother, but that didn’t mean Emily should start falling head over heels for him. It didn’t mean that he was the kind of guy who would stick around and be there for her for the long haul.

Emily had had her heart broken enough times, and seen friends have their hearts broken enough times, to know better than to trust a man just because he had a handsome face and seemed nice.

“So,” she said, gesturing toward the kayaks that lay on the sandy shore, waiting to be rented and used for tours. “These are the kayaks. Some people take them out on their own for self-guided tours, but others like to have Andy come along and do a guided tour. Of course, he can’t do that right now, but Julia has been practicing to lead some tours. Maybe you’re interested in trying to be a tour guide as well?”

Eric turned his deep green eyes toward her, contemplating. “Maybe. Have you thought about trying?”

Emily threw back her head and laughed. “Unfortunately, I don’t have time to do tours, with all my other work to do at the bookstore. And besides that, I don’t think I’d be very good at it.”

This seemed to amuse Eric. “But you think I would?”

Emily shrugged. “You’re big, and have a commanding presence.”

Eric raised an eyebrow, and Emily realized she probably sounded ridiculous. Had she really just called him “big?”

“What I mean…” she stammered, “Is that you’re similar to Andy in you’d probably be able to hold people’s attention and that would make you good at tours. Me? I’m just a tiny girl with not much to say. No one would be interested in a tour by me.”

Eric kept his eyebrow raised and took a step closer to her. “Something tells me that you actually have a lot to say.”

He was so close she could smell his pine and cedar scent again. She tried to breathe normally and act nonchalant as she shrugged. “Just because I own a bookstore and literally sell words for a living doesn’t mean that I personally have a lot to say.”

One side of his lips quirked up. “I guess I’ll see about that, won’t I, since it looks like we’re going to be spending a lot of time together while my brother recovers.”

He winked at her, and then turned to walk back toward the house. Emily’s heart pounded as she watched him go, and only when her lungs started screaming for air did she realize that she had been holding her breath. She gasped for air, then took several deep breaths as she tried to calm herself.

Eric had seemed to be implying more with his words than just their face-value meaning. Had that been passion she saw in his eyes? Despite his stoic, stern demeanor, did he feel the electricity in the air between them, too?

Emily swallowed hard as she began slowly following him back to the kayak house.

No matter how much she tried to tell herself that she didn’t believe in romance, she couldn’t deny that she was just a teensy bit excited over the fact that Eric was going to be forced to spend a lot of time with her over the next several weeks.

If she was going to be working double shifts trying to keep her own store afloat and help out her friend, no one could blame her for having a little fun while doing it, could they?

And staring at Eric was definitely fun.

She just had to make sure she kept things on the “fun” level, and didn’t let any truly serious feelings develop. She could do that, though. She was the queen of saying no to any and all serious romance, and everyone knew it.

Everyone, she supposed, but Eric.

This was going to be an interesting spring.

 

*** Thank you for reading! CLICK HERE to read Part Two of the Shifter Spring Fever story! ***