Page 12 of Bear for the Holidays

I love you,he didn’t say, because he could see she wasn’t ready for that. It made sense, and at the same time, it made him restless. He could deal with restlessness.

“I like you too,” he said. “Now let me cook, or we’ll never get breakfast.”

It brought him a peace he couldn’t have imagined before today, the familiar ritual of cracking eggs in a bowl and setting bacon on the pan to sizzle, but doing it for his mate. As he worked, he sneaked a glance at her only to find that she was watching him without embarrassment, a thoughtful look on her face. Sitting on the counter by his side, they were just about at eye level, and he had to resist the urge to lean in and drop a kiss at the corner of her beautiful mouth.

“What?” he asked.

“You look really zen doing that. Is it just that you love breakfast or is there something else?”

He hesitated for a moment and shrugged. Outside, the snow was falling harder. The ground had already disappeared under the white.

“It’s you,” he said, whisking the eggs with some salt. “It’s that I’m doing this for you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“Don’t need a personal introduction to the sun, either.”

“Romantic. Actually,isthis romantic, this true mates thing?”

He blinked at her.

“Of course it is. What else could it be?”

“Mating potential,” she said promptly. “Like maybe it’s a thing where shifters can only have babies with their true mates, and so they need to find them so they can keep the species going.”

“That’s sort of horrifying. Also very sci-fi.”

“You turn into a grizzly bear in complete defiance of the law of conservation of mass.”

“Fair enough. No, it’s not a mating potential thing. It doesn’t have anything to do with kids, and while some people have guessed it might be some kind of early evolutionary trigger designed to keep us all going, it might not have anything to do with science either. It’s just this thing that happens.”

“That’s not good enough,” Deanna said in frustration, and if he was honest, he couldn’t blame her.

“Are you doing okay with all of this?” he asked gently.

“No. At least, that’s what I want to say. I shouldn’t be okay with this. I should probably be backing away slowly and holing up for the winter until things make more sense in spring.”

“I know a few good hollows around here,” Nik offered. “Nice deep ones, warm. I could bring you salmon and granola bars and things every day.”

As he’d hoped, it made her smile, her dark eyes shining like stars.

“You’d do that for me,” she said, and it wasn’t a question.

“I might like it better if you let me in with you, but yes.”

“Hm. I like salmon, and I tolerate granola bars when there’s nothing else to eat.”

“All right. What else should I bring you when you’ve forsaken the world to go live in the mountaintops?”

“Well, fruit of all sorts. My mom’s caramelized pork with ginger. Peach soda, for a treat. And steak.”

He pointed at himself, inquisitively, and she nodded.

“I mean, also steak-steak. Rare, please and thank you.”

“Sounds perfect.”

She did.

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