The Bear's Arranged Bride: A Steamy Paranormal Romance (Bears With Money Book 8) Read online

  The Bear's

  Arranged Bride

  Bears With Money

  AMY STAR

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  Summary

  Sherry – I can't believe my father has arranged for me to get married. Does he not realize that people don't do that anymore?

  However, it is not all bad. Jaxon is so handsome and we used to fuck years ago.

  It might actually be fun to do it again a few times.

  That is before we get our marriage annulled and go our separate ways..

  Jaxon – So it seems like I am getting married to Sherry.

  It could be worse. At least I know she is a demon in the sack.

  But even though we have history, Sherry has no idea about my furry secret.

  And I wonder if she found out, would it put her off? Or just turn her on even more?

  This is a steamy Werebear paranormal romance full of twists and turns. This is to be read by adults only, 21+.

  Copyright Notice

  The Bear’s Arranged Bride © 2018, Amy Star

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

  This book contains material protected under International and Federal Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from the author / publisher.

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Epilogue

  Chapter1

  It was her college graduation party—two years late. Sherry McCabe had taken six years to finish up her Bachelor’s degree while working her way through school. Now, however, it was done. She was twenty-four years old and officially a college graduate. She had come home to Smithintown to a party that her parents were throwing for her. Some of Sherry’s high-school friends who still lived in or near the area were attending. Everyone was having a great time. Everything was as wonderful and happy and joyful as could be expected. There was a big dinner and a cake, and balloons and cards (some of them even containing money!) and presents and music. Her father bought a case of wine, which everyone was enjoying. Sherry, her parents, her relatives, and her friends were having as great a time as they could ever have wanted to have—and then, he showed up.

  No one had thought to invite him. No one was even aware that he was back home. After he and Sherry graduated high school, she had gone off to college out of town, away from the valley where Smithintown lay between the mountains, and he had enlisted in the Air Force and been posted overseas. He and Sherry had not even spoken or corresponded in years. Thus, no one expected to see him. Everyone was sitting around the dining room table, enjoying the cake that Andrea and Vic McCabe had ordered from the town bakery, and Sherry was busily opening her presents between bites of the cake. She sliced open one envelope from her uncle and aunt and pulled out a very fancy card stuffed with a very generous check, and after nearly choking on a bite of cake when she saw the figure on the check, she dropped everything and ran across the room, beaming with delight, to plant sticky kisses on and collect big warm hugs from the two relatives in question. While all this was going on and her friends applauded, Andrea just barely heard the doorbell ring and went out of the dining room to answer it.

  A few minutes later, Andrea was back at the threshold of the dining room, making loud Ahems and tinkling a fork on the edge of a wine glass to get everyone’s attention. And when the congratulatory hubbub died down, and Sherry’s attention and everyone else’s turned at last to Andrea, Sherry’s mother announced, “Honey, you have one more guest tonight. He’s come a pretty long way to see you.”

  Sherry glanced around the room, very curious. Everyone they had invited was already here, had been here since this afternoon. The whole guest list was in attendance; no one had failed to show up. Mildly bemused, she asked, “Who is it, Mom?”

  Instead of answering in words, her mother simply stood to one side—and in he walked, dressed in a flannel shirt, leather vest, and denim jeans, looking even more wonderful than he had looked when Sherry last saw him six years ago, at the end of their high school senior summer.

  Sherry’s eyes widened. Her jaw dropped. She glanced at her girlfriends around the room and saw the same expressions on their faces that she felt on her own. A collective gasp sounded, an intake of surprised air that sounded as if it could suck up all the oxygen and leave the entire party staggering. Sherry looked from her stunned girlfriends to her startled father to her smiling mother and then back to the new arrival as he stood there in the threshold of the dining room, grinning warmly at her.

  Jaxon Michaels had not changed a bit in six years, except to get even handsomer and hotter than he was on that last late-August day after they had graduated high school. His hair was shorter now because of his time in the military, but it was already filling out and just gradually starting to become the way it had been back then. His sexily arched eyebrows sat over eyes the color of dark, dark coffee. The brown hair, short now but thickening back to its original length, matched the eyes. The face was as pouty-handsome now in early manhood as it had been in late boyhood. A short, scruffy growth of beard shadowed the upper lip and lower jaw. Sherry imagined the body that must lie under the clothes. It was tight and sexy and hairy enough when they were just eighteen. The six years from late adolescence to early manhood—in the Air Force, yet—must have made it even more so.

  Looking over at Sherry, with her blue eyes sparkling and her medium-brown hair tumbling over her shoulders, Jaxon recalled the days of their teen years just as vividly as Sherry did. He smiled and held out his arms to her. “So, do I get a hug or what?”

  To the sound of excited, delighted squealing from her girlfriends and a chorus of Aaawwws from her parents and relatives, Sherry ran around the dining room table and practically flung herself into Jaxon’s waiting arms. He wrapped her up in the biceps and forearms that had held her so many times when they were younger and crushed her to his leather-jacketed chest. Sherry buried her head on his shoulder and took in the feeling and the scent of him that she remembered so well. “Oh Jaxon…Jaxon,” was all she could say.

  Jaxon rocked her in his arms as if no time had passed at all. “Happy graduation,” he said.

  Sherry and Jaxon stayed that way long enough for laughter to well up in the room around them. Eventually, Andrea came over to them and asked, “Jaxon, would you like a piece of cake?”
r />   Embarrassed only at the room’s reactions to their embrace, not at the length of time they’d been hugging, Sherry and Jaxon pulled out of the hug—but Jaxon instinctively kept an arm around her waist as if they had never been apart. “Sure, Mrs. McCabe, I’d love one,” he said. But the way he looked when he glanced over at Sherry suggested that he thought he already had the sweetest thing in the room.

  The party made room for Jaxon, and he and Sherry sat together at the head of the table, Jaxon with a big hunk of chocolate and vanilla layer cake swathed with frosting in front of him. Sherry took a fork, and together they started to whittle away at the cake, grinning as if they were still sixteen-year-old kids in school. They hardly knew anyone else was present. Even Sherry’s girlfriends practically disappeared, for all they knew. Standing nearby, watching his daughter with Jaxon and thinking they looked almost exactly the way they did at Sherry’s sixteenth birthday party (except Jaxon’s hair had been longer), Vic McCabe ventured, “So, Jaxon, we haven’t seen much of you since you went into the service. How did you like the Air Force?”

  Jaxon somewhat reluctantly took his eyes from Sherry and the cake to address her father politely. “The Air Force was good, Sir. I worked hard, got in better shape, learned a lot, made a lot of good friends. It was good for me. I’m glad to be home, though.”

  “That’s good to hear,” said Vic. “And am I getting it right that you were in a special unit made up of your own people?”

  “Uh, no, Sir, that’s not exactly how it worked. The whole unit wasn’t made of Ursans. But all the Ursans in the Air Force know who each other are, and they all look out for each other. I always knew where to find a buddy or an officer I could call on for help. We were all pretty tight, and we got along with everybody else.”

  Everybody else, of course, meant “humans.” Her mind awash in memories—so many memories—Sherry recalled all the times she had seen Jaxon and other Ursans in Smithintown when they let themselves physically go “the other way.” Jaxon was still a little different from the rest of them. When Ursans hit their teens, they usually started to “fill out” physically, but not Jaxon. Instead of getting burly and husky, Jaxon just grew more muscular. That was the thing that had attracted her about him: the fact that he matured differently than others of his kind. Sitting there, admiring him, Sherry could tell that nothing had changed about him in that regard. He still was neither husky nor burly. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on him. It was all just muscle—muscle, she knew, that was liberally brushed and dusted with hair. How well she remembered…

  “And you were stationed where?” Vic continued.

  “Croughton. Croughton AFB. It’s one of the Air Force’s communications stations over there. One of the main ones, actually.”

  “Sounds like a pretty responsible position,” said Vic.

  “It is,” said Jaxon. “It’s responsible for about a third of the U.S.’s military communications over there. It’s kind of a hub, I guess.”

  “Sounds like it. I can see it was a good thing for you to be doing. The responsibility did you good. You look…settled, I guess. Is that the word? Settled…?”

  “I learned a lot,” Jaxon said. “I think I grew up a lot.” He paused and seemed to turn inward for a moment, as if he were seeing things that no one else could see, things in himself that no one else could know. Sherry noticed a subtle change come over him. He seemed to be not really, completely there for a moment. Some piece of him, some part of him, almost seemed to be still over there, across the ocean, as if he had left it there—or as if it were still attached to him, tethered to him across thousands of miles. Almost wistfully, Jaxon said, “I grew up a whole lot.”

  “Being in the service will do that for you,” Vic said.

  “Hmph!” said Sherry. “Being in college will do that for you.”

  Snapping back to the here and now, Jaxon flashed that grin of his at her again. “You had yourself figured out when we were Juniors in high school. Did you stay in biology or switch majors?”

  “No, I stayed in biology. Got my degree in Biology and Biomedicine.”

  “Get out!” he said. “Biomedicine? So, what then? You’re gonna go to med school next?”

  “And rack up all those loans? And go through everything you’ve got to go through to be an M.D.? No, thank you! I’ll be perfectly happy with a research job in a lab somewhere!”

  “Bet you’ve got job offers already,” Jaxon guessed. “I remember you were the one that got me through Freshman Biology.”

  They both laughed a little at that. Fresh again in Sherry’s mind and Jaxon’s were all the things that the two of them had gotten each other through, all the things they had learned together as only a young boy and his girlfriend could learn as each other’s first love. Their learning had not happened only in class and over homework. And it had not been all academic. Much of it, so much of it, was very practical and very hands-on. Hands among other things.

  “I talked to some recruiters from different places,” said Sherry. “You know, when you’re a senior in college and you’ve kept up your GPA, the headhunters come looking for you. I went to some recruitment things, and I had people come around.”

  “Yeah? Any good possibilities?”

  “Some, I think. Nothing really definite yet. Some that I liked, but I’m not really sure. I’ll find the right thing. Or it’ll find me.”

  “Yeah,” said Jaxon. Anything more that he might have said, and anything more that Sherry might have added, dwindled away—until Jaxon mentioned, “You know, there’s something I ought to tell you. I wanted to come over and congratulate you about your graduation and all, but there was something else I needed to talk to you about.”

  “What’s that?” she asked, as curious now about what he had to say as she was when her mother announced his arrival.

  “We shouldn’t really talk about it here,” Jaxon told her. “Is there someplace else we can talk? Someplace where it’ll be just you and me?”

  “Jaxon, this sounds kind of serious. Is anything wrong?”

  As reassuringly as he could, Jaxon replied, “There’s nothing wrong, not really. It’s just…something I need to tell you, and…it really shouldn’t wait. It’s getting a little…urgent.”

  Sherry grew more concerned now at the way this sounded. “Jaxon,” she asked, “are you all right? You’re not sick or anything, are you? You’re okay, right?”

  “I’m fine. I’m good,” he said. “There’s just…some news I got. It’s kind of why I came home. I need to tell you about it, just the two of us. Can we just go somewhere?”

  “Yes, sure,” Sherry said. “No one’s using the back porch right now; everybody’s in here. We can go out there, and it’ll be more private.” She got up, and he rose with her. “Come on,” she said, “out back.”

  Jaxon already knew the way, but he followed her. Vic watched the kids exit out the back of the dining room, and Andrea came out of the kitchen and stood with him, just catching the sight of them leaving.

  “Where are they going?” Andrea asked.

  “Out to the back porch,” said Vic. “Jaxon said he had something important to tell her.”

  Andrea looked to where her daughter and the young man went and felt a little twinge of anxiety. She softly said to Vic, “You remember what we heard a little while back, about what happened to Humbert Michaels?”

  “I remember,” said Vic.

  “What do you think? Do you think it’s about him?”

  “I don’t know. They’ve been pretty close-mouthed about it, the way they are about things like that. No one’s seen much of him lately. We’ve only really seen the rest of the family, not Humbert, since that news got out.”

  A little more concerned, Andrea looked her husband in the eye and asked, “You don’t think it could be about…that…do you? Do you think Humbert…do you think they still remember about…?”

  “I don’t know,” Vic said again. “It could be. It’s not the kind of thing people talk about much
anymore. And it’s not really the kind of thing people do much anymore. But you know how Humbert always was. He always was kind of… ‘old school’.”

  “Of course, I know he was. But Vic, you don’t really think…?”

  Vic patted her on the arm. “Let’s not go getting excited yet. We don’t know what this is about—yet. After Jaxon tells Sherry, she’ll tell us. Then, if there’s anything to worry about…,” he paused meaningfully, “…we’ll deal with that when we come to it.”

  Andrea McCabe just sighed. Her daughter was just twenty-four and just out of school. There was no reason necessarily to conclude that Jaxon’s news, whatever it was, might have anything to do with that. But the fact was that the McCabes still remembered it. And if they remembered, certainly Humbert Michaels remembered.

  _______________

  Outside, the fireflies had just started flashing in the gathering dusk off the porch of the McCabes’ house. Sherry let Jaxon step out onto the porch and closed the door after them. And then, when they were alone, she asked, “So, what’s this about?”