Page 19 of Marked By The Grouchy Grizzly

She slips onto my chair and tucks her hands into the groove of her inner thighs, watching me as I get the needles and colors ready.

“Are you going to be okay with a little pain?” I ask. “I don’t want to hurt you. That’s the last thing in the world I want.”

“I’ll be okay,” she says, smiling. “A little pain never hurt anybody. Is that a saying?”

I laugh as I dip my needle into the ink and press the button to collect it. “I don’t think so.”

She turns around and I get a whiff of her vanilla conditioner. My bear grumbles, content at being surrounded by her alluring scent. Every breath I take fills me with tingles.

I start the tattoo and she takes it like a champ, only letting out the occasional whimper when I’m too rough. It breaks my heart, but it also turns me on. The sounds she’s making are so fucking sexy. The whimpers, gasps, and little moans are exactly what I’m going to hear when I fuck her.

“Distract me,” she says as I trace the stem of the lily.

I need a little distraction too. I can’t stop thinking of this girl naked.

“Tell me about yourself,” I say.

“What do you want to know?”

“Everything.”

She chuckles. “I just graduated from University.”

“Congratulations,” I say, already so proud of her. I knew my girl would be a smart one. “What was it like?”

She tells me all about her time at Gonzaga University in Spokane and how she’s unsure of where to go and what to do now that it’s over. Her family is in Florida, but she’s not sure if she wants to go back.

“You’re not going back home, are you?” I ask, the desperation clear in my voice. I can handle having her ninety minutes away—as horrible as that would be—but on the other side of the country in Florida? I couldn’t… I’d have to go with her. I’d follow her anywhere.

“I don’t think so,” she says. “My parents are divorced and they’re both settled in now. My mom got an apartment with my stepdad, and my father has a younger wife and two new kids. I love them all, but a house with toddlers in it isn’t the place for me anymore.”

“I think you should move here,” I say.

She laughs. “Move into the tattoo shop?”

“In with me.”

She shakes her head and laughs. “Are all bear shifters this crazy?”

“When they meet their mate, yeah.”

She looks over her shoulder at me and I get lost in those gorgeous brown eyes. She’s stunning. She’s mesmerizing. I can’t handle it.

How am I ever supposed to get anything done with her around?

“I need to knowa little bitmore about you before I agree tothat,” she says with a grin. “Tell me about your life. Those were your siblings?”

I tell her all about Magnus and Victoria and our life in Montana. About our parents, building our cabins, opening the tattoo shop, and anything else she wants to know.

I don’t think I’ve ever talked this much in my whole life, but I keep going like an open book, telling her anything she wants to know.

“How did all three of you get into tattooing?” she asks.

“My mom is an artist,” I tell her. “She’s always painting and drawing and working on her art, so we were always around art supplies growing up. We all got pretty good.”

“Did she do tattoos as well?”

“No,” I say, grinning when I recall the memory. “Magnus bought an old tattoo machine at a yard sale when he was a teenager and brought it home. We thought it was the coolest thing and we learned how to use it, tattooing on pig carcasses, fruit, fake skin, our legs, our friends, anything really. Victoria is six years younger than me—she’s twenty-one now—so she was always trying to hang out with us. She was watching the whole time and when we finally let her have a turn, we were shocked to find out that she was the best one out of the three of us.”

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