Page 4 of More Than I Can Bear

Because here’s the thing. Kaine had been fucking furious that Adam had found Freya first, becoming incandescent when he found out his brother had claimed her, but I wasn’t. And the minute we’d walked into that cafe, all the noise and chatter had dropped away and I’d had this moment where all I could see was her. I’d stood there like a fucking dickhead, just staring at her as she laughed with her colleagues. My eyes had eaten up the sight of her in big gulps, a visual meal which was all I could give the bear to keep him under control.

For now.

But going back there later, when I was tired after a long day of fighting the bear—because in his head, there wasn’t anything that he couldn’t sort out by fighting, feeding or… fucking—it was a recipe for disaster.

Because while I’d painstakingly been drawing Freya, as my hand had moved over the paper, my mind had emptied of everything but the fantasy of her spread across the table in front of me. The lights would’ve been turned down, the open sign flipped and in my head, it would’ve been just her and just me. I’d have done everything Adam had, and more, if I’d been left to my own devices. And then where would we be?

“You sure?” When Kaine looked at me, it was like his eyes sliced through my bullshit, straight into the core of me, and I didn’t like that much at all. He was one of only two blokes I considered close friends, but no one—and I mean no one—got that deep. I straightened up and stared right back, letting the bear shift forward.

“I’m sure,” I replied, with all the confidence I didn’t feel, holding his gaze until he nodded.

“Make sure she gets to her car safely, or the train station…” He frowned. “Nah, fuck that, offer her a lift… Shit.” We were Freya’s mates and would move heaven and earth to make sure she was safe, but she didn’t know that yet. Kaine stared at me again. “Make sure she gets home in one piece. Tail her if you have to.”

Hunt my mate, dog her steps while sticking to the shadows, only to slip free if anyone dared mess with her? Suddenly that internal no became a yes.

“Go to your dinner tonight,” I replied. “I’ve got this.”

I carried that certainty inside me all the way back to the building site, until I heard a familiar snide voice.

“Have a nice lunch with your boyfriend, Rowdy?”

A lot of foreigners seem to think Aussie blokes are all like Hugh Jackman or someone but, most of them, in my experience, were like this little prick. Macca was one of the plasterers, putting up the sheets of gyprock over the wooden trusses me and my team had put up. But, like a fucking dog, the smaller the pup, the bigger the bark. Maybe in modern terms Macca might’ve been seen as a short king, but really he was just a little cu—

“Do you order for him?” Macca asked, snickering to his buddies, but their eyes were trained on me, looking for an opening. “Or are you the bitch in the relationship?”

I stepped up to him slowly, knowing from experience how this shit went. Dickheads like this needed to run their mouths constantly to try and shut up the voice inside them that screamed about their inadequacies. Shutting it with my fist would achieve a desirable outcome, in the short term. But this wasn’t school anymore. An assault charge was not something I wanted or needed. At the same time, though, I couldn’t back off. One little sign of weakness, that’s what he was looking for; because if he found mine, he could ignore his own.

“Why you wanna know?” I asked. “You looking to join us?”

“Fuck, no,” he spluttered, his shit-eating grin getting wiped away as his mates cackled. Made me wonder if jackal shifters were a thing. But although his shifty little eyes flicked around to check out the mood in the room, they came back to settle on me. “If it don’t have tits, I’m not interested.”

“And if she does, I bet she walks the other way when she sees the likes of you,” I shot back to the continued sound of his buddies’ amusement.

I had him beat and we both knew it. It was obvious when he puffed himself up, trying to make himself look bigger, like a cat would. But bear beats cat every time. I smirked down at the little prick, just to rub in that last hit, then turned to go.

Never give your enemy your back, my dads always said, but with a piece of shit like Macca? I figured I was safe. But right as I went to go back to work, he piped up again.

“Least I don’t have to put out an APB for a girl after I’ve fucked her, like your mate, Goldilocks.” He meant Adam and that had me freezing mid-step. “If she sucked my knob and fucked off before I woke up, I’d be down the pub celebrating, not panting after some bitch—”

“What did you fucking say?”

The bear was taking control. I could feel his paw push my hand as it snapped out and around Macca’s throat, making his little buddies start to squawk. None of them dared step in though, not even when I lifted the dumb fuck off his feet.

“You… fucking… her… too?” Macca croaked out, the wild smile on his face somewhat marred as he went bright red.

“River.”

Kaine was there, along with half the building site. School, work, it was all the same. The little meerkats all came running when shit was going down, grateful for a break from the monotony of work. But my sleuthmate just stood there, arms crossed, waiting for me to make the right decision.

Even though I didn’t want to.

I threw the fucking prick backwards because I was pissed off that we’d both lost. Macca had been on a fishing expedition, looking for bait that would make me bite and I’d just given him exactly what he needed to rile me up, even while I handed his arse to him. As he lay sprawled on the ground, Kaine stepped forward.

“I realise my brother has splashed his love life all over the papers and TV, but if you’re here to act like a bunch of gossipy teenage girls, you can get the fuck off my building site,” he growled at everyone. “You wanna keep up-to-date with what Adam’s doing? Read the fucking paper. You want a job? Start showing me you deserve to be here.”

And that’s why he was the one that called the shots in our sleuth. Keep your head while all others around you are losing theirs, our English teacher used to say all the time, and Kaine was the one who seemed to have taken that to heart. He walked toward me, his gaze softening as he approached me. But he didn’t get too close. He couldn’t stand side by side with me because of dickheads like Macca. The sort of idiots whose most important relationships were with their buddies, yet when they were together they spent way too much energy pointing the finger and taunting people they assumed were gay.

“You OK?” he asked me as I fought to catch my breath. Black fur prickled over my forearms, forcing me to shove my sleeves down. “How’s your control?”

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