Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance) (A Jamesburg Shifter Romance) Read Free Page B

judgmental glance.
    West, apparently not having heard that, continued. “Anyway, yeah, that’s about the short of it. I’ve never kept carrots, and here, look at this, it’s almost as strange.” He walked past the two investigators, letting his hand brush gently against Elena’s arm as he did. Whether or not it was a conscious motion, a wash of goosebumps slid up her arm and disappeared underneath her button-down. She felt sweet in places, and salty in others. None of those places had felt very much for a very long time.
    “Tomatoes,” he said. “Picked clean. Only thing taken. The rest, just,” his voice faded out, absorbed by the din of chirping birds. There was an emotional thickness to his tone that was a little surprising, but all things considered, made sense.
    Absent mindedly, still letting her fantasies about this huge cowboy-esque bear take a little more control of her mind than she should have, Elena jotted down ‘tomatoes, stolen’ on her notepad.
    “So, is this how you make your living?” Elena asked. She realized she was maybe interviewing him like she would a date, more than a client, but that seemed only to occur to her, since no one else – not even Paul – said anything.
    “A living, and an eating,” West said. “Everything I eat, I grow. Or, most of it. Sometimes I get a veggie pizza delivered.”
    “How does that work?” she followed up. “I’ve never heard of a strictly vegetarian bear before.”
    Paul had a very serious look on his already very serious-looking face.
    “I grow what I eat,” West said again. “Grain for bread, which survived the onslaught. But all my vegetables, except the mushrooms that I keep in the barn with the chickens, just destroyed.”
    “So you eat the chickens too?”
    West furrowed his brow. “I sell the eggs, I don’t eat the chickens.”
    “But you raise them, so—”
    “Chickens don’t come out of the ground.”
    Elena cocked her head to the side. Something about the insistence in the big, muscled-up bear’s voice made her feel funny in the same places that watching him walk got her going. For a quick second, she had a flash of a fantasy where his voice was inches from her ear, and his kisses were trailing down her neck. He pushed the collar of her shirt open, kissing further as he swelled against her belly with his...
    “Hello? Elena?”
    She snapped back to reality when she heard West’s voice. “Sorry,” she said, shaking her head. “I was coming up with hunches. That’s what we do in this business, you know, we come up with hunches.”
    Paul shot her a glance. He had his tongue between his teeth, trying really hard not to start up with his half-snorting laugh. She hated that laugh, especially when it came at her expense. Especially when she walked right into it.
    Distracting herself by looking very busy, Elena knelt down and plucked the half-buried carrot from the dirt. It was a stumpy, pitiful looking root, with a big, ugly knot on one side. “Looks like you, Paul,” she said as she dropped the carrot into a Ziploc bag onto which Elena had written “EVIDENCE” on the label section.
    A string of slow days meant she had hundreds of the things, although she’d never actually used one before.
    “Shouldn’t you leave that for the police?” Paul asked.
    West turned, but Elena answered. “He didn’t call them, did he?”
    “Nope,” Paul admitted.
    “Then here we are, and here’s a carrot.” She handed it, inside the bag, to her partner. “That looks just like you.”
    Paul winced, feigning injury at her words. “You kill me with your cruel, biting wit, El,” he said. West chuckled, and Elena smiled broadly, despite her best efforts. Paul folded the bag over, rolled the carrot up, and dropped it into one of the front pockets of his gray blazer. “Anything else we need to know?” he asked West, who was digging at something with the toe of his boot.
    Elena immediately took over, completely ignoring her partner. “There are