Read A Taste of Honeybear Wine (BBW Bear Shifter Standalone Romance Novel) (Bearfield Book 2) for Free Online

shotgun.
    “You have no wounds. Not even a scratch.”
    “Like I said, it must have missed me.”
    “Something is not right here. You have smudges from the powder, but no burns. How is that possible?”
    The big man smiled boyishly and shrugged, like he’d just been caught stealing cookies and not surviving what should have been a horrible mistake.
    In the hall, the old cat shrieked. The sound of dishes smashing, of someone stumbling and then cursing, echoed throughout the house.
    Alison shot Michael a look. “Do you have an accomplice?”
    They both ran into the hall, where a thin man with greasy black hair was trying to disentangle the old cat from his leg. The man was short and stooped, but in the dim light it was difficult to make out his face. Something rattled under his arm as he jumped and swung his leg about, trying to shake the cat off. For his part, the old mouser hissed and yowled and raked the man’s legs with his hind claws and sunk his teeth into the thief’s leg.
    “Hey!” Michael yelled, pointing at the man. “Drop that box!”
    The dark stranger’s head snapped up and fixed Michael and Alison with a lopsided sneer. He had bright eyes that shone blankly in a pointy face dominated by a comically large nose. The stranger held the box up for all to see—it was unmistakably the lockbox Alison’s mother had described—and then swung it down at the old cat, batting the animal off his leg with a resounding crack.
    Alison ran down the hall toward the man. She didn’t know what she was going to do if she caught him, but the sight of him hitting her cat filled her with such outrage that she found herself acting without thinking. The dark stranger turned and ran, weaving lithely around the piles of junk and then tipping them behind him as he ran down the length of the house toward the office. Alison tried to chase after him, stepping carefully and then boldly on the mess of spilled books, shattered plates, cans of old forks and every other damn thing her grandpa had left strewn about. She did fine for about five steps, and then a pile of glossy magazines slid under her feet and she toppled over, her hip slamming into the railing, her arms pinwheeling, and then that terrible feeling came over her where she knew she was going to fall over the railing, down the stairwell, to her death. She shrieked and then, just as she was going over, strong arms caught her in a crushingly warm embrace.
    “I’ve got you,” Michael said, cradling her in his arms.  
    She should have thanked him, or swooned so she could trick him into kissing her, but instead she said, “The lockbox.”
    With Alison still in his arms, Michael chased the thief. He carried her like she weighed nothing. It was unreal. The big man bounded down the hall, his feet finding the perfect place to step with preternatural grace.  
    A smashing sound came from the office. Broken glass.
    As Alison and Michael entered the room, the dark stranger with the big nose was perched on the window sill. He was tying loops of twine around the lockbox. He glanced up, winked, and then—where a man had been a second before—a bedraggled raven stood on the frame of the window. The bird hopped onto the lockbox, seized the twine in its claws, and then took off into the night air, cawing in what sounded like laughter.

Chapter 3
    Bearly Arrested

    “I’m sorry to have to do this, son,” Old Pete said, “but you’re under arrest.”
    For Michael it wasn’t really a surprise. Alison had been livid after that fucking raven shifter nearly got her killed and then stole the lockbox. He knew better than to try and calm her down or convince her she’d seen something other than a greasy man from Rook’s Roost shift into his mangy bird form and fly away with the box that both of them were after. Any other woman in the world and Michael would have smiled at her, charmed her, kissed her softly all the way back to her bedroom and then eased her panties off. She would have