Page 102 of Cross To Bear

I understood that now, because as I moved the lens around his body, it was hard to know what to shoot. Those long, slender fingers, veins roping over the backs of his hands. The colourful tattoos that stood out so starkly against his pale skin, all the way up his forearms. The rapid shift of his cobblestone abs. I got closer and closer, taking shot after shot, my knees pressing into the soft vinyl of the lounge to take more. His lips twitched, a dimple appearing and disappearing, as those blue eyes sparked with a hectic light, right before he let out a long sigh.

“A mate bond takes a bear shifter right up to the edge and gets him ready to jump,” he told me in a much quieter voice. “It forces him to pay so much attention to his prospective mate. Instinctively, he wants to do what she wants more of and less of what she dislikes and I think I know what you want now.”

His hands slapped down on my thighs, pulling me forward so I straddled him, right as he reared up. The camera was superfluous now. Any kind of enforced distance had been obliterated, but still I clung to the device.

“You need to know me, just like I did you.”

“Yes…”

“Well, grab your camera tight, love, because I’ll tell you anything you want and you can take a million photos as I do. And later, when you’re back in your bedroom, you can pore over them, just like I did my drawings, looking for more clues. My full name is Cayden Harris.”

I snorted and let the camera drop.

“This feels like an interrogation.”

“Maybe it is.” He shrugged. “Maybe it isn’t, but I’ve got nothing to hide. Take your photos, Maddie.”

I wasn’t in control now, though had I ever been? I pressed my finger down on the button, and he spoke.

“My dads are all old school bikers. Bad ones. One percenters, back in the day, before they met my mum. She was a barmaid in a small town they passed through and they… just knew she was the one. Understandably, she didn’t want to get mixed up with the likes of them, so they had to make some major changes.”

My camera lens caught his wince.

“It meant getting out of the club they were in, which was a painful process, then securing their sleuth against possible blowback. They were out from under the protection of a club, so some people saw them as fair game. Then they had to try and go straight, which was harder than they thought. Even the bear community in town wasn’t real keen to give them a chance when it came to employment. But… they worked it out and had me.”

He smiled, his eyes brightening.

“My childhood was pretty straightforward. When Mum worked out the way the bear community operated, she threw herself into things wholeheartedly.” His grin widened. “Anything for her baby.” Then it faded slightly. “Mum wanted a whole brood, enough to have her own MC running out of the house, but… she could only ever have me. So if I was to be her only child, she was determined I’d have all the benefits of being a shifter. I went to the same schools as all the other sons of bear shifters, even if it took her an hour’s drive each way to get me there. I made friends with the kinds of guys she wanted me mixing with, but when it came time to form a sleuth…”

All the good humour went out of him, replaced by something much more serious.

“It was the other guys I met at motorcycle shows that I went to with my dads that I felt a bond with. Bjorn’s dads had always been pretty straight, which reassured Mum. Razor a lot less so, though he talked her around. And then there was Hawk.”

His lips moved, as if he was supposed to smile, but he couldn’t bring himself to.

“We call each other brother, because that’s the bond we have, but Hawk? He’s my half-brother. Same dads, different mum. Amber was a club chick, one that was passed from one bloke to the next, and my dads had their turn with her for a while. She was passed onto another club before she could tell my dads they had a son. And honestly, I’m not sure she knew enough about any of them to identify who the father was.”

He shook his head sharply.

“Amber didn’t do right by Hawk. She barely looked after him, relying on some of the old ladies in the clubs to do the real work of raising him, but when it became clear he was probably going to have a bear, he got sent to my school. I saw this big kid, hanging back in the schoolyard and I just knew…”

Crash blinked, seeing me again now.

“Like I did when I met you. I knew he and I were born to stick together, just as I know that when you’re ready, we’ll do the same.”

He reached up and pulled the camera from my grip and then set it down on the floor beside him.

“There’s no big secret to me, no massive trauma being hidden or pain I need to get past. I grew up in a fairly functional family, surrounded by people that loved me, so much so that when I found my half-brother, they gathered around him and tried to do their best to make up for the love he didn’t get.”

His hands rose and fell.

“I’ve always been good at art, which was hard for my dads to get their heads around, until I started drawing the kind of stuff that made sense to them. The first bike I painted was one of theirs. They got me an apprenticeship as a panel beater when I was old enough to leave school and, like Razor and Hawk, I worked at Bjorn’s dads’ garage during my training. I grew up, learned my trade, fucked up a whole lot and messed around with enough girls to work out what I liked and disliked.”

His gaze heated up exponentially, as his mouth moved closer, almost near enough to kiss.

“I like taking control of a girl’s pleasure. Making her feel so fucking good, like she just wants to burst, but not letting her do that until she’s done.” I flushed bright red, remembering exactly what he meant. “I’ll do that for you, over and over, Maddie, but…”

Was this the point the other shoe dropped? I felt like I’d been waiting for this the entire time. My camera lens jerked up, and he noted that with a wry smile.

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