Billionaire Bear Shifters A Paranormal Romance Complete Series Boxset - Brittany White Page 0,68

the Strauss brothers.

Other than that, he couldn’t think of any danger. There was Michelle, who hadn’t seemed overly pleased about being dumped. It was unfortunate and all, but they had only gone on a few dates. He wouldn’t even classify it as a relationship.

“You never know,” Lydia said darkly. She looked up at him with big, worried eyes and he kissed her forehead.

Everything felt completely unresolved and yet, for the moment, he was just glad she was here. Naked in his arms was nice. He would’ve been happy if she was clothed and yelling at him. Only now, with Lydia again in his life had he realized how much he’d truly missed her. It was as if he was getting a major organ back. He felt like he could breathe again.

“I’ll talk about one thing,” Lydia said. She had a funny little smile on her face and her eyes were merry and teasing.

“What’s that?” His lips curved up as a smile snuck up on him out of anticipation.

“I’ll talk about how you used to be afraid of bees,” Lydia said this very seriously but when Eric sputtered and then groaned, slumping against her, she giggled. Her breasts shook under his cheek as she laughed and it felt like the kind of familiar and incredibly intimate moment that happened all the time between real couples.

The desperate urge to keep her here always just for this throbbed within him, but all he said was, “You’ll never let me live that down. I was a kid!”

“I was a kid too,” Lydia said lightly. She tangled her fingers in his hair, still a little damp from both sweat and product. But it felt good as she scratched his scalp and he rested his head on her chest. “I was a kid and I wasn’t afraid of bees.”

“I wasn’t afraid of bees as a human,” Eric murmured. He found her other hand and played with it. “I was only afraid as a bear. Because they kept stinging my nose when I was just a cub.”

“That’s because you always went after the beehives looking for honey, you doofus.”

“I like honey,” he whispered.

He imagined licking honey off of Lydia’s body and his cock twitched in interest.

“That’s why I used to call you Winnie.” She giggled, and though she had laughed several times since she’d come back, this was the first time she sounded just like her younger self.

But he liked this older Lydia too. This Lydia was less innocent and probably a little sadder. But she was smarter and she seemed braver and stronger even if she wasn’t quite as easy with a smile. They were all beautiful Lydias to him.

“Like Winnie the Pooh,” Eric whispered.

“Yes.” She kissed his hair and he closed his eyes, almost unable to bear looking at her again, he was so overcome with feeling for her.

Sometimes, he deliberately tried not to remember everything when he thought of her.

It could be overwhelming.

Suddenly, at the memory of that playful giggle, he was thirteen years-old and sneaking her into the house. He had grown up in a mansion on the outskirts of Elkswood, Oregon. They’d been surrounded by what Eric considered to be the most beautiful woods in the world. He loved Black Bear Lake and considered it his home now, but Elkswood would always hold a special place in his heart.

It wasn’t that he wasn’t allowed to be friends with somebody like Lydia. It was that his parents would keep talking about his position as an important shifter in the shifter community. They always managed to say things without really saying them. It was a trait that had always exhausted Eric. He’d been more than happy to follow new opportunities to Colorado with his brothers and get out from under his parents’ oppressive control.

But, every once in a while, his mother had come right out and let her true feelings be known.

“That girl’s sleuth is trash.”

“In the old days, they would have been our servants.”

“They can’t even assimilate. They don’t live like shifters, they live like animals.”

Lydia’s sleuth was known for causing trouble around Elkswood. In human form, they lived in rusted out shacks deep in the mountains and as bears they ran rampant. They were wild and uncaring about the human rules of law and convention that other shifters learned how to navigate. They rooted through trash and stole and got into fights. It had been an especially large sleuth too.

As bear sleuths could be any size group of multiple bears, Connor was