“Of course.” As if he was going to let her traipse around the woods alone in the dark. Besides, it was one chance to finally be alone with her. “I’m your mate.” His bear wholeheartedly agreed.
“Yay!” She leaned down and kissed him on the cheek. “Let me go get the axe, and I’ll meet you outside!”
As soon as J.D. was out of earshot, Gabriel turned to him. “Ooh boy. Good luck with that.”
“Good luck?” He stood up and brushed some lint off his jeans. “We’re just going out to chop down a tree. How hard could it be?”
Gabriel and Damon looked at each other, then burst out laughing.
Cam frowned. This does not bode well.
Cam felt like they’d been outside for hours, though his watch said it had only been fifty-five minutes since they had left the cabin. No wonder those two laughed at me like hyenas.
He and J.D. started walking into the woods behind Damon’s home. The damn place was teeming with pine trees, yet J.D. refused to stop until they found “the perfect one.”
“How about that one?” Cam asked, pointing to a five-foot-tall spruce. “That’s a good one.”
J.D. wrinkled her nose. “Too short.”
He glanced around and nodded at a six-foot scotch pine.
“Too stubby. C’mon, champ,” she waved at him to keep following her. “The best ones are deeper in the forest.”
Grumbling to himself, he trudged after her. He made a few more suggestions, but she vetoed all of them. They were “too tall” or “not tall enough” or “too crooked” or “too bushy.”
“This one.” He grabbed the branch of a white pine. “This one’s perfect.”
Her eyes narrowed at his selection, and she tapped a finger on her chin as she contemplated on it. “Hmmm.”
“What does hmmm mean?” he asked, impatient.
“It is the right height. And the right bushiness. But it’s too … piney.”
“Too piney?” he exclaimed, throwing the axe on the ground. “It’s a pine tree. They’re all bloody pine trees! Of course they’re going to be piney! What else would they be?”
“Jesus, Cam, I can practically see the steam coming out of your ears.” She laughed out loud. “You look like you’re going to have a heart attack.”
“Confound it, woman, you’re going to give me one if you don’t choose a damn tree!”
She sighed and walked over to him, then reached up to touch the side of his face. “Please Cam, it has to be perfect. This is a special tree.”
“Special?”
“Yeah. It’s our first tree together.”
“Our tree?” He blinked.
“Yeah, I mean … first one we’re getting as mates.” Her lips curled up into a smile. “If you’ll just be a little more patient with me, I’ll give you something you want.”
Now she was talking. “Oh really? What would that be?”
“Well … how about I show you my animal?”
His bear very much liked that idea. And frankly, so did he. It felt like a step in the right direction. “All right. But I want payment first.”
“Payment?”
He crossed his arms over his chest. “You heard me. I’ve been mucking about the woods looking for your tree for an hour. I want to see it. Your animal. Time to pay the piper.”
“Fine.” She shoved the sleeves of her jumper up to her elbows. “Stand back.”
Obeying, he took a step back. His polar bear stood up on its hind legs, excited. He, too, felt the crackle of electricity in the air as he waited with bated breath, his eyes never leaving hers.
Fur sprouted on her face as her long hair receded under her cap. He expected her limbs to stretch and grow, but to his surprise, they began to shrink instead. Moments later, she was gone, and only a heap of clothing and her trucker cap were left on the ground. “J.D.?” he called. His polar bear paced, feeling uneasy that their mate was gone.
Something moved from under the pile of clothing. Bending down, he pulled the cap away. “J.D.?”
Two hazel blinked up at him, gray specks twinkling in the moonlight. A small feline padded out from the neckline of J.D.’s Christmas jumper, revealing more of itself. It had vertical horizontal stripes along its neck, front paws, and tail, but spots all around its body. "Felis nigripes,” he whispered. “The African black-footed cat. Hello,” he greeted, giving it a scratch on the head. “Oh!”
The little creature—measuring less than fifteen inches tall—crawled up his arm, then rubbed its little head against his chin. “There, there … aren’t you a pretty thing.”