Page 2 of Laid Bear

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“Still not awake yet? How much longer do you think she’ll be out?” Heath leaned against the doorway, his arms folded and eyes narrowed in concentrated scrutiny on the prone woman in bed.

Gavin dabbed a damp washcloth over his patient’s forehead. “Don’t know. She banged her skull pretty good, but she’s responding to the medicine better than I expected.”

“You sure giving her our medicine is the right thing to do? Her system may reject it. She may be our onida, but she’s not a shifter like us.”

“True, but remember, because our forefather’s genetic code was bred into her ancestors, her immune system should be able to handle more than the average human’s, enabling her to sustain the potency of our medicine.”

Heath walked farther into the room, his frown deepening. “Even still, isn’t that risky?”

Gavin nodded but buried his own anxiety. While he was almost certain she’d be fine, there were still some variables that tinged his thoughts with a little doubt. “Yes. I took a chance, I know, but she’s recovering beautifully, just as I suspected she would. She’s a fighter, this one. The swelling’s gone down and the gash over her eye is healing nicely. Her bones may take another day or so to mend. I won’t know for sure until she wakes up, but if need be, I’ll mix another batch of the potion and utilize my healing abilities. The combination of the two should do the trick.”

A soft moan escaped her full lips as she moved her head from side to side beneath Gavin’s careful ministrations. Other than that, she remained asleep. She’d been out for the past four days since she’d hit him with her car, subsequently crashing it.

In most circumstances, Gavin would have put her in his pickup and taken her on the half-hour drive to the hospital, but from the moment he laid eyes on her—inhaled her scent—he was hard pressed to let her go. He knew right away she was an onida—wife, a descendant of those who were specifically bred to mate with his kind. Her scent gave her away. From what he knew of the legends, an unmated onida secreted pheromones that drove Kelowna males wild with lust, and filled them with an instant need to claim her. It was how Gavin felt times one thousand.

A surge of protectiveness like nothing he’d ever experienced had hit him harder than a ton of bricks, making him realize right away what she was. His pulse raced, his body vibrated with emotion and his cock stiffened. The sight of her, the smell of her, the feel of her skin told him she was the woman he and his cousins had been waiting for.

She even had a birthmark on her left hip that resembled a bear’s head. Yes, she was definitely the one. The woman they’d dreamed of. Their mate. Unable to help himself, he grazed her cheek with the back of his hand, reveling in the softness of her rich brown skin that reminded him of dark chocolatey concoction. Her body, though banged and bruised, was a thing of perfection with long limbs and a voluptuous frame.

When Gavin examined her to determine her injuries, it had been necessary to strip her. As a healer, he was used to seeing naked bodies of all shapes, sizes and colors but none of them had affected him the way this woman’s had. From her larger than average breasts capped with blackberry-colored nipples, wide hips, thick thighs and round high ass, he couldn’t take his eyes off her. The neatly groomed thatch of hair covering her pussy made his cock hard when he’d gotten a peek of it. She was what some would consider full-figured, but with her height, she was perfectly proportioned and toned as if she worked out or was just naturally fit. The dark beauty seemed to be made especially for them.

God, she was gorgeous with her large eyes, which he knew were brown from the brief minute she’d opened them as he tended to her wounds. Her nose was wide with a rounded tip that suited her face. Those full sensual lips had him fantasizing about what they’d taste like and how soft they’d be beneath his—he was dying to kiss them.

His gaze slid over her face and rested on the remarkable color of her hair that framed her face against the stark white pillow. Gavin fingered one of her golden locks that were a hue between brown and blonde. The color was unusual for someone with her skin tone, but it suited her. Whether she dyed her hair pink, green or blue, she’d still be gorgeous to him. He also liked the way the neat little dreadlocks formed around her head in an array of spirals and curls. When she was fully recovered and realized she belonged to them, he’d enjoy grabbing onto her luxuriantly thick hair as he rode her hard and long. His dick stirred in anticipation.

He realized they had a ways to go before that point, but he wouldn’t deny what he knew almost from the moment he laid eyes on her. She was theirs.

Gavin snapped out of his deep contemplation when Heath waved a hand in his face. “Earth to Gavin.”

Gavin reluctantly dragged his gaze away from their mate to turn his attention to his cousin. “I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

“I’ve been talking to you for the last minute. You were spacing out.”

“It’s hard to think when she’s around. Life is about to change for me, you and Logan.”

Heath chuckled. “Yep. Guess our bachelor days are over. It’s so strange that up until you found her, we had considered finding our own wives and giving up on the idea of finding the one made specifically for us.”

“I know. It’s almost like her appearance in our lives is like some divine intervention.”

Heath sighed. “Exactly. I just wish she would wake up. There’s so many things I want to ask her. What she likes? What’s her favorite food, color, song? I want to shake her awake and demand she talk to me but that would just be crazy. Being patient is for the birds. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve stopped in here, waiting for her to wake up and acknowledge us, ya know?”

A smirk tilted Gavin’s lips. “Tell me about it. Logan has been roaming the house like a caged beast. He’s not the most patient person on his best day, but I think if our little Goldilocks doesn’t wake up soon, there’s no telling what Logan will do. He wanted me to give her more of the potion right away to speed up the healing process. I knew she’d be able to handle our medicine, but I’m not going to push it by giving her too much of it at once. Where is he now, by the way?”

“He went out for a run, said her scent was driving him crazy. You’d think he never had a woman before from the way he’s carrying on.”

Gavin nodded in understanding. “He hasn’t had this woman. But you’re right. If Logan goes all alpha on her, he may frighten her.”

“He was on to something though. When she wakes up, we should start as we intend to go. She’ll have to get used to us.”

“Oh yeah? And exactly how do we broach that subject? ‘Hi, I’m Gavin and these are my cousins, Heath and Logan. We can shift into bears, and by the way, you’re our mate and we expect you to deal with it because you have no choice.” He snorted. “That’ll go over well.”

Heath rubbed his chin as frown lines deepened in his face. “I see your point, but she’ll have to know sooner or later, and I prefer sooner. We’ll give her time to adjust to the idea, of course, but I don’t see the point in wasting time. We only have a month before we head back home. I don’t want to spend the bulk of it tiptoeing around what we are. It’s fortunate we even found her. I thought…” Heath broke off as his voice flooded with emotion.

Gavin knew exactly how his cousin felt. There weren’t many of his kind left because of the shortage of females who could carry their seed. He and his cousins were descended from the Kelowna clan, a group of sentient bears who had at one point lived peacefully among humans. As time passed and the environment changed with industrialization and the influx of hostile humans, their kind suffered. Diseases their systems could not handle were introduced to them, leaving only the strong to survive. Most babies came out stillborn and a large portion of their females didn’t survive childbirth.

It came to a point where the males outnumbered the females in alarming proportions. As a solution to their crisis, elders of the Kelowna reached out to the humans who knew of their existence for help. Thus began an attempt to successfully breed with humans to save their race. Of the successful attempts, two types of babies were born. The first, a newly evolved breed that could take the shape of bear and human—what the modern Kelowna now were. The second type was the onida, mostly human, without the ability to shift but able to mate and breed healthy offspring with the Kelowna.

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