Page 73 of Choose the Bears

“You’re what…?” She stared down at it. “Saving me a plate?”

“You need to eat,” I replied with a shrug. “And if you cooked, you deserve more than scraps.”

“You can come and eat with us.”

Her focus shifted then to Lucas, and I caught the moment her gaze softened.

“OK.” She nodded to herself. “Some roast potatoes then, please. They’re really good if I say so myself.”

“They look good.”

Kyle reached out to pluck one from the bowl, but she smacked the back of his hand with her tongs.

“Don’t touch the food with your hands like an animal…” This was it, the moment when she realised, because on some level she already did. I saw it in the way she straightened abruptly, her eyes flicking from me to the rest of my sleuth, but whatever instinct was kicking in, she shoved it back down. “Using the serving spoons like a civilised person.”

But we weren’t civilised. Underneath this skin suit lurked an animal, one whose heart beat for her and only her, and I hoped… I hoped she wouldn’t run screaming when she met him.

As we walked over to an empty table, I couldn’t help but remember. The bear shifter community told its history via stories because the gods knew we couldn’t write it down. There were tales of the trials we went through to earn our mates, the lengths we would go to, and most had a happy ending.

Most.

But at the end of the night, when the shadows grew long and strange things shifted in the darkness, the elders might speak. Ofwomen who rejected the mate bond, who saw what was on offer and shook their head, or worse, left screaming, never to return. They were cautionary tales, ones each boy was told to make clear that nothing was certain. I’d been able to live with it then, the idea that someone I cared about being taken from me a familiar one. But having my family torn from me was different to this. I barely remembered them, and what I did was largely confined to the photographs I’d been given. Imogen, though…

When I looked across a crowded dining room to watch her at work, she stopped mid conversation with one of the workers, somehow sensing my attention. Our eyes locked, and we shared something then. Something complex, a tangled mess of curiosity and fear, wariness and pain, and a whole lot of other things I couldn’t decipher, not without talking to her.

“Tonight,” I said, to my sleuth mates, to myself. “We tell Imogen what we are tonight.”

Chapter 38

Imogen

Care Bear stare, that’s what my friends at school used to call dudes who’d stare at you across a crowded room but never actually approach. I was getting that from Asher right now, his gaze almost as tangible as physical touch. It dragged me away from my job, from what I was doing, stopping me midway through a conversation with one of the clients, having me pause when I was depositing meat on people’s plates.

Making me constantly aware of him.

As if that wasn’t always the case.

They were like bright points in the darkness, drawing my attention by default, because everything else faded away.

Including Hannah and her kids.

“Immie!”

I was forced to jerk my attention away from Asher, somehow able to see those blue eyes of his long after I turned to face Kaleb, smiling at the little boy’s enthusiastic greeting.

“Hey, buddy. Want some roast lamb?”

He sucked in a breath, ready to reply, but Ava moved forward with two plates held out.

“He does, please, Imogen.”

There was something so formal, so correct about the girl, but her gaze was something else. Hope and not a little fear there, which she quickly blinked away.

“Don’t want meat,” Kaleb declared. “Pancakes! Pancakes!”

Ava frowned, her expression growing stormy as she tried to deal with something beyond her pay grade.

“Bears eat meat not pancakes,” I said with a shrug, placing meat on both plates, a bit less on the one that would be Kaleb’s. “They don’t get all big and strong on pancakes. Protein is what gives you big muscles.”

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