Bear Arms (Alpha Werebear Shapeshifter Romance) (Mating Call Dating Agency Book 4) (8 page)

Eve howled with laughter. “She said they haven’t broken out the Scotch yet,” she said with her hand evidently over the phone’s receiver. “I think they’re getting on really well—
stop that! Save it for later, you pervert!
”

Just hearing Eve squealing with laughter was a good thing. But, Lexie still wasn’t sure why she, of all people, was of such interest to the great matron of White Creek mating, as to merit a double date. Everyone knew beyond all doubt that she
never
did things like that.

“Say, Eve?” Lexie asked. “Why do you want to double with us? I mean, I really appreciate it and I’m glad to get to know you better and all that, but I’m just sort of confused.”

“Why?” Eve asked as she cackled again. “I want to learn how to take Mating Call on the internet. I’m kidding, but not really. Also I figured it’d be fun. I don’t know, I’m not as stiff and stodgy as everyone thinks.
Stop it! Oh... Okay, jeez, you can keep doing that
.” She cleared her throat. “Er, sorry, he... well... I better save that information for Dora.”

“Well I’m flattered,” Lexie said, trying to make sense of Eve’s last cryptic comment. “I mean, sure, we’re ready to go, are you guys heading over there? I know it’s been a couple hours, so—”

“Ralph’s Fun Pit,” Eve said. “
Stop that! Or don’t. Okay, don’t
.” she cleared her throat again. “Remember, as everything with Mating Call, it’s on the house. So all you two have to do is show up and manage to keep your hands off each other for an eighteen-hole round of mini-golf. If you get arrested for PDA or hiding off in the side of the course to go at it, we’re not responsible for any of those fees, although just between us, I’d probably chip in to cover the lawyer, because that’d be fuckin’ hilarious.”

Lexie couldn’t help but laugh at the stream of consciousness apparently escaping from Eve’s mouth. The whole thing was so surreal, so wonderfully strange, that her standard dose of self-doubt and confusion didn’t have time to take hold.
I’m just going along for this damn ride
, she thought.
If nothing else happens with any of this, then at least we had a good night
.

Blake was still watching her, though his eyes were tracing the line of her jaw and her collarbones. She turned over and draped her legs across his thighs. It was just so
comfortable
. Everything about him was just so comfortable and safe.

In the back of her mind, she thought something was going to have to eventually go wrong. Something was going to have to put a little spike in between them. Whatever it was, she hoped, they could get past it. She’d already decided, probably when they sat down and watched
Trek
five minutes after meeting one another that no matter what happened, this one was worth trying to keep.

After a few more brief instructions, including a strange request to stop by the Mating Call offices to pick up a box that Eve had forgotten on her desk, the phones were hung up and everyone went back to their barely resisted sexual tension.

Blake had his fingertips resting on the back of Lexie’s head, his fingers curling gently against the tiny hairs on the top of her neck. “So, minigolf?” he asked. “I’m kind of a beast with a multicolored putter, you know. I think you might want to watch out because I’m gonna destroy every last one of you.”

Suddenly, Lexie had a thought that seized her. “There’s
gotta
be something wrong with you,” she said abruptly. “I mean, I’m crazy in about four thousand different ways. There must be something about you that isn’t perfect because God’s honest truth, you being this nice and patient and beautiful is starting to unnerve me a little.”

She almost immediately regretted she’d said anything, but from the look on Blake’s face, from the way he sank away from her just a tad, and from how he pulled his fingers off her head, it was a question he had been expecting, but hoped not to come.

“Well,” he began, and let his voice trail off into the ethers. “I can tell you right now that I’m not perfect. Sometimes I’m not even sure I’m good.”

The former glitter in his eyes washed away. Instead, when Lexie next looked into them, the blue was stormy and restrained. There was something buried deep in there and he didn’t want it to come out. At least, not yet; not like this.

“I can’t tell you exactly,” he said. “My brain goes in a lot of directions and they aren’t all good ones. I get doubts, I get afraid just like anyone else. But I try to keep my mind focused on going ahead. Going forward is the only thing that
keeps
me going sometimes. And sometimes I get these dark thoughts. Very dark ones.”

He trailed off again, watching Lexie’s eyes. “But when I walked in that door, and I saw your face, I forgot all of that. This is the first,” he looked down, checking his watch, “two hours and change that I haven’t thought about what’s coming up over the next hump. Morales, my old CO, my roommate, the guy I bought the garage with, he’s been my lifeline for a while since we came back here, and he’s the only one whose seen me in the depths of my fear.”

At some point, Lexie realized, she had either taken his hand, or he took hers. Their fingers intertwined and she stared at him for a long moment. “A lot of times, I don’t know what’s going on,” he said. “Hell, I don’t even know
why
I’m afraid.”

He fell silent and Lexie just sat there holding onto him. After a few moments, a thought sprung up in her mind. “You know, I think I kind of understand that,” she said. “I mean, it’s not the same thing, not really, but I can’t shake the feeling that my life is just not real, you know? All this shit I’ve bought, all the people who yell at me for new releases and tell me how awesome I am, I think that either I’m making them all up, or at some point in the near future they’ll figure out I’m a hack and that’ll be that.”

They sat, just holding hands, just existing, for the space of a few breaths. “I don’t know,” he finally said. “It just all seems like days come and go and feelings come and go but nothing makes much sense.” His pause was pointed, especially when his gaze bore deeply into Lexie’s soul. “Until now. Somehow, it
does
make sense now, as ridiculous as it might sound.”

“Do you want to make a DVD with me?” she blurted, out of nowhere. It sounded strange, but he understood that was somehow her way of opening up her entire world to him with one fell swoop. “Well not a whole DVD, I mean just a couple little bumper videos to go in between things I already recorded.”

He looked dumbfounded, but he was smiling. “I mean, I guess? I don’t know what the hell to do on a DVD critiquing crafts projects. It does sound kinda fun though. But...why me?”

Lexie shrugged and shifted her body so that she was nestled between Blake’s arm and his chest. She grabbed his hand again and wrapped it around herself feeling so perfectly content and so completely safe that she could have admitted anything in the world right then and felt perfectly fine doing it.

“My editor... or my agent, whatever she’s doing this month, gave me the idea. She said that my viewers want more personal stuff from me. Like they want to get to know me, right? Although I think they’re crazy, because for me, that’s like getting to know too much about a movie you love, you know?”

He lifted an eyebrow, looked down at her as she talked, and kissed the top of Lexie’s head. It was such a simple gesture, one that if it were between two lovers who’d known each other forever would have been as natural as shaking hands.

But these two? Two hours.

Lexie’s thoughts began to race, but they were racing to a good place. A very, very good place. “How did you mean that?” she asked. “The kiss on the head, I mean.”

“Oh, well, I don’t know, just seemed like the thing to do. It was like when you see a couple dogs walking around and one of them sorta turns around and licks the other one’s ass.”

He screwed up his face, promptly turned purplish red, and started laughing so hard he couldn’t breathe. “I mean, shit, not that what I did was like licking an ass. Your ass,” he corrected. “No ass licking,” he said, obviously so flustered he was getting deeper into a hole. An...ass...hole.

Lexie did her best to keep her cool, but this was too much, way too quickly. She started giggling madly, the sort of giggling that makes a person snort, snuffle and sneeze. Before long, the two of them were just a mess. She was howling, clutching her stomach and doubled over. Blake’s entire head was turning purple, even his scalp that she could see through his close-cropped hair. He clutched for her, and started wheezing.

“No ass licking?” she asked, though it took several long seconds for her to get the whole question out. “But what if—”

“Okay, okay,” Blake said, trying as hard as he could to catch his breath. Finally, he managed, but not without significant effort. He took two deep breaths, let them out slowly and placed his hands on Lexie’s shoulders. He looked straight into her eyes and heightened the gravity, the drama, of the situation, which given the context was all the more ridiculous. How he deadpanned this, she didn’t know, but Lexie tried her very best to play along. “Right, now that we’re calm, I need to ask some serious questions.”

“Go on,” Lexie said, trembling and biting down on her lip to keep from breaking up yet again. “I’m listening.”

“Right, good. Now look here. We’ve had some pretty serious discussions in the last couple of hours, and there’s the looming danger of minigolf with people I don’t know on the horizon. Should I go on, or are you having some kind of conniption?”

Lexie just couldn’t handle it. A bellow of laughter blasted out of her, and for a moment, it was all she could do to keep breathing in between the shrieks. Finally, she managed to stop again, and she was still utterly amazed that he was able to keep up the charade. “Nope,” she said, “under control. Now back to the ass licking.”

He tried real hard to pretend to ignore her comment, but he broke character for about a half-second, and cracked a grin. “Now what I was going to say is that I don’t pass judgment on anyone, but I’d prefer to have a complete prohibition on ass licking while we’re playing minigolf. Can we agree on that? Afterwards, I mean, whatever you’re into, I’m not gonna judge.”

That was that.

The laughter exploded again, the two of them hacking and wheezing and coughing. “Okay, fine,” Lexie finally said. “I promise, no ass licking on the golf course.”

The two of them relaxed back into the couch, almost like neither one of them wanted to interrupt their physical closeness, the strange emotional bond they’d built in just a few minutes. She felt closer to him than anyone else in memory, recent or otherwise. He didn’t want to get anywhere that wasn’t right beside her, but they had to. They had to get up and they had to go to a place with balls and holes, but no ass licking.

Finally, Blake pushed himself off the couch. The motion he made was more of a peeling one than standing, and he held his hand out for Lexie. She took it and joined him standing. A moment later, he had his arm around her back, and he was holding her like they were about to tango.

“Shall we, my dear?”

“Shall we what?” she asked, blushing and smiling at the same time.

“Shall we golf?”

She snorted a laugh, at which he cracked a grin. “Balls in holes,” he said. “Let’s go put some balls in holes.”

––––––––

“H
ello?” Lexie knocked harder on the front door of the Mating Call building, and cupped her hands around her eyes to try and peer inside. As far as she could tell nothing was going on in there, and worse still, there weren’t any lights or movement to indicate someone was actually
in
the building.

She looked back at Blake where he was sitting in his truck. He had a kind of star-struck, blissed-out look on his face that gave her a little shot of both confidence and warmth squirming out from her center. Just knowing that a guy like him would sit in his car and simply stare at her while she was doing nothing of interest was pretty great.

He’s really just watching me
, she thought,
just sitting in his car and watching. I have no idea what I’ve done to get this guy under whatever sort of witchcrafty hex I put on him, but... hey, what the hell, when something at Golden Corral actually tastes good, you don’t question it, do you
?

She giggled to herself as she turned back to the door.  “Hello? Anyone in there?” she banged again and when the deadbolt slid out of the doorframe with a violent
click!
she just about pissed her pants. She went to knock again, even with the door swinging open, and instead of her knuckles meeting glass, they met empty air and she stumbled straight through the opening, wheeled her feet like Wile E. Coyote falling off a cliff.

“Hi!” Dora chirped, and then immediately grabbed ahold of one of Lexie’s flailing arms. With something approaching superhuman dexterity, the squirrel-shifting office manager laughed, repositioned herself and helped Lexie find the floor again. “How’re you?” she asked, not missing a single beat.

“Uh, hi!” Lexie said, slightly out of breath and entirely amazed at the series of events that occurred seconds before. “That was incredible.”

Dora shrugged, flicked on the overhead light, and returned to her visitor with a smile. “I’m used to catching people when they fall.”

A few seconds of eye contact followed, Lexie thinking she heard more in that brief statement than just the words Dora spoke, and then the two parted. “Well,” Lexie said. “Either way, I appreciate you not letting me face plant on the tiles. That would have put a damper on the whole date thing.”

“Oh I doubt a broken nose and a busted lip would do much to stop that guy.”

Questioning, Lexie looked back out the front door and could just barely make out Blake, who was still watching, and still had that same dumbfounded look of being completely content on his face. “You know,” she said, turning back to Dora, “I think you might be right. Still I’d like to avoid busting my head open just in general.”

“That’s probably a fairly good policy. So, what brings you here at quarter-past nine?”