Page 10 of A Bear in a Birdbath

What did that even mean? He thought that the flamingo-flinging woman was his mate, but was it possible that the slight figure behind her was as well?

His cave bear was certainly convinced.

Our mates! Our mates! Our mates!

Will you stop that?!

The first woman was advancing on him now, clearly invested in protecting her companion. “We have to get out of here!” she called back over her shoulder.

“I’ll let you go!” Bruno tried to say, but his cave bear wanted no part of that, and he found himself wrestling his own inner animal so that the words came out, “Highlight Lego!”

She was in grappling range now, and Bruno was distracted by the idea of hand-to-hand, remembering the feel of her generous breast under his fingers. “Plato amigo!” he tried again.

Our mates! Our mates! Our mates!

“You can’t go!”

Of all the words to get right, those were the wrong ones.

The woman bearing down on him clearly took that as a threat, and she reached for the nearest weapon at hand.

It was Frank’s vintage popcorn machine.

10

EVA

“You knocked him out!” Eva exclaimed, abandoning her pilfered papers to ensure that Margo hadn’t killed the poor man.

The man who had filled the doorway with his horrifying—and yet oddly not at all horrifying—form lay stretched out face down on the floor with the broken parts of the popcorn machine all around him. Eva tried in vain to turn him over to assess him for injury. He’d have a headache, for sure.

“Well, you weren’t willing to leave, and I couldn’t exactly fight him and football carry you out of here at the same time,” Margo snarled back. “You’re slippery!”

Despite the gravity of the moment—they’d just been caught red-handed in the act of trespassing and attempted theft and knocked out some poor brute wearing a Wilson Kinetics badge—Eva’s brain got stuck on the idea of what, exactly, was slippery right now.

She shook her head. “You don’t understand,” she wailed. “This isn’t your problem.”

“It could be,” Margo insisted. “If you’d trust your friends.”

Friends.

Kissing friends? Eva’s lips still burned with need but neither of them seemed willing to speak of it. Did Margo regret it?

Eva gave up trying to roll the man over. He had a strong, steady pulse, at least, and was breathing. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this,” she explained reluctantly. “I have…some debt to pay off, and a guy I know sent me to find Frank Wilson’s plans for next year’s sculpture so that a rival company can beat them to the punch with a line of knock-offs.”

“I didn’t realize that lawn ornaments were such a cutthroat business. Did you find it?”

“I don’t know that there’s anything here,” Eva said in despair. “It’s mostly bad love poetry and cupcake recipes.”

Margo signed in defeat. “I’ll…I’ll help you look. It will go faster with two sets of hands.”

She turned on the overhead light, which did a much better job of illuminating the files than Eva’s flashlight, and if their pitched battle hadn’t drawn the guards, probably the light wouldn’t, either.

Margo nudged the man out of the way so that she could close the door.

It was much faster to go through the files with Margo, but if Frank had made notes about the next sculpture, neither of them had any luck finding them. There were copies of flyers for extravagant staff picnics and blank employee of the month certificates, ticket stubs for the zoo, and program books from comedy events. Frank had notes about Anita, a draft of a best man’s speech for Tobias, shopping lists, and a lot of things that made no sense, like “Winged gorilla mud wrestling.” (His handwriting was also very terrible.)

Eva took photographs of some of the most indecipherable parts.

---