Bearly Hanging On (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 6) Read online

  Also by Lynn Red

  Jamesburg Shifter Romance

  Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  The Alpha's Kiss

  Change For Me (Werewolf Romance)

  Shift Into Me (Alpha Werewolf Romance)

  Howl For Me (Alpha Werewolf Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  The Broken Pine Bears

  Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance)

  The Jamesburg Shifters

  Bearing It All (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  Bear With Me (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  Bearly Hanging On (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  The Jamesburg Shifters Volume 1 (BBW Alpha Werewolf Werebear Paranormal Romance)

  To Catch a Wolf (BBW Werewolf Shifter Romance)

  Standalone

  The Alpha's Kiss Complete Series (Alpha Werewolf Fated Mate Romance)

  Watch for more at Lynn Red’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Also By Lynn Red

  Dedication

  Bearly Hanging On | An Alpha Werebear Shifter Romance | by Lynn Red | A Jamesburg Shifters Novel

  Copyright 2014 Lynn Red | Connect with me online at my Facebook page: facebook.com/lynn.red.946 | Click here to sign up for my mailing list to get the latest news and exclusive excerpts, contests, and cover reveals! Or navigate to: http://eepurl.com/G1q2X

  -1- | “So this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic meeting about traffic lights. God almighty, kill me now. No wait, let me die slowly. That’d feel more right.” | -Jamie Ampton

  -2- | “I’m not even going to pretend that I know what happened to me, except... oh good God, there it goes again.” | -Jamie

  -3- | "Just when I think I'm out, they pull me—actually you know what? I'm just gonna not do that." | -Ryan Drake

  -4- | "That really didn't go the way I expected it to go." | -Ryan

  -5- | “There are three kinds of people in the world. There’s me, there’s you, and... wait no, there are a whole lot more than three.” | -Erik

  -6- | “Ain’t a thing in the world I can do about how I feel except pretend that I don’t feel it. That always turns out great.” | -Ryan

  -7- | “No, really, this is a brilliant idea. Really. I’m serious.” | -Ryan

  -8- | “This is a lot harder than it looks.” | -Jamie

  -9- | “I don’t know what I was expecting, but this probably wasn’t it.” | -Jamie

  -10- | “Don’t expect me to spend much time cleaning dishes I don’t use, got it?” | -Jamie

  -11- | “It had to happen sometime.” | -Jamie

  -12- | “Holy hell, you can hit a lot harder than I thought!” | -Ryan

  -13- | “Why does it always rain right when I need some sun in my life?” | -Jamie

  -14- | “Really, really not a morning person.” | -Jamie

  -15- | “Just a break. A little, small, short break. That’s all I’m asking.” | -Jamie

  -16- | “All I can think right now is that I really wish I could find a cow, and get a long, long drink.” | -Jamie

  -17- | “I wish they made high altitude heaters.” | -Jamie

  -18- | “Of all the things. How wonderful is this? How wonderfully fascinating IS this?” | -Agent Craig Branson

  -19- | “Here we are. And you know what? I don’t want to be anywhere else.” | -Jamie

  Bonus Excerpts | Two Bears are Better Than One | A Broken Pine Bears Ménage Novel

  Excerpt

  Bear With Me | A Jamesburg Shifters Novel

  Excerpt

  Further Reading: Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  Also By Lynn Red

  About the Author

  For my pack - I couldn't do it without you!

  LR

  Bearly Hanging On

  An Alpha Werebear Shifter Romance

  by Lynn Red

  A Jamesburg Shifters Novel

  Copyright 2014 Lynn Red

  Connect with me online at my Facebook page: facebook.com/lynn.red.946

  Click here to sign up for my mailing list to get the latest news and exclusive excerpts, contests, and cover reveals! Or navigate to: http://eepurl.com/G1q2X

  -1-

  “So this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic meeting about traffic lights. God almighty, kill me now. No wait, let me die slowly. That’d feel more right.”

  -Jamie Ampton

  “We need those lights! I can’t,” Professor Duggan, Jamesburg’s city planner cum hedgehog-shifting history professor, was getting very red in the face. Instead of finishing his sentence, he grabbed his suspenders, popped them against his chest, let out an irritated chuffing sound, and then popped them again.

  “You can’t... what?” Erik Danniken, Jamesburg’s alpha wolf, was rolling around on the exercise ball he’d decided he couldn’t live without. It had been two years since he and his mate went on a yoga retreat in San Diego. Jamie looked over at him, and couldn’t help but chuckle when Erik took a long, deep breath, and exhaled in a very practiced way.

  I’m just glad he finally gave up the yoga pants. I mean, I’m not going to pretend like he didn’t look good, but there’s nothing that says ‘unprofessional doofus’ like a werewolf giving speeches with a half-stock in his yoga pants. Or, at least, it looked like a half-stock...

  Duggan pursed his lips. The top one, and all but the middle of the bottom one, disappeared under his walrus-like mustache. On Erik’s face, a blissful smile and half-closed eyes were almost more irritating to the professor than the current rage he held for the lack of a four-way stop at the intersection of Pine and Beard streets. And then once you’re past the intersection they become Magnolia and Bondie, because when Jamesburg was built, no one cared what they named the streets. Or were they avenues? Or roads? No one could remember what sort of designation they had, which to the rest of the world is completely meaningless, but for Duggan it was like someone had just shot his mother, and then shot him, both in the ass, with a shotgun full of rock salt.

  He raised two balled up fists in the air and waved them around for a moment. “You just don’t understand! This is vital! Everyone on this council – Jamie, even you,” Duggan said with a deferential nod toward Jamie’s seat halfway around the table, “all want this town to be more acceptable? More modern? Whatever you want to call it.”

  Jamie sat forward, tucking one of her long, black, tendrils of hair back behind her ear. There were chopsticks holding her bun together, but the two lengths that framed her face just never seemed willing to stay pinned back. One of her wings extended involuntarily, and she decided to take the opportunity to extend the other one and enjoy a full stretch. Her tendons reached full extension. With a roll of her neck, she opened her mouth, and accidentally let out a yawn.

  Black holes don’t have the gravity of that yawn.

  “I’m... are you sleepy, Miss Ampton?” Duggan shot her a nasty glare, which she answered right back.

  “Well, it is almost three in the afternoon, and we’ve been yelling about a damn stoplight for the last six hours. Sorry,” she corrected herself, “I mean you have been yelling about a stoplight for the last six hours.”

  Just as Duggan was about to puff himself into another frenzy of fretful grunting and moaning, the do
or of the Jamesburg Courthouse’s singular conference room swung open with a long, slow creak. Behind it was a man who stood probably six and a half feet tall, broad across the shoulders, and with a beard that must have been growing for a month. Or, if he was a bear, it had been growing for about a day and a half.

  Jamie stared at him, her gaze cool and dispassionate as it always was, but if anyone was watching, they saw a little twinkle in one of her pale, slate-gray eyes. She watched the huge figure move into the room, silently pluck a seat from the pile of dis-used folding chairs and sit down on it, facing the dais.

  “Six hours in and finally someone from this town decides that traffic lights on dangerous intersections are important enough to pay attention to!” Duggan let out a triumphant sigh. “Finally!”

  “Oh, er,” the big guy grumbled. Jamie didn’t recognize him, and for someone who had been in Jamesburg for the last twenty years, not recognizing someone was kind of a big deal. People didn’t just move to Jamesburg on accident, or because they were looking for a job. People came to Jamesburg because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. They went to Jamesburg when they were against a wall, and needed one last chance.

  Or, in the case of the last couple that moved to town, because they were a rabbit and a bear shifter, and the town needed a dentist.

  Talk about serendipity.

  “Sorry,” the big stranger with the shaggy, tousled dark hair and the slight growth of beard said.

  Jamie was shaking her head. How good would that boy look if he didn’t have that horrible thing on his face? I just can’t do beards. Not since—

  “Is this not the place to go to complain?” He flashed a smile that said he was either kidding, or so good at being a jackass that he did it without any effort at all. “Someone told me that every Tuesday I could come talk about how obnoxious my neighbors were, said this was the place?”

  Erik rolled his eyes, and caught himself the second before his exercise ball went right out from under his ass. It wouldn’t be the first time, but it also wouldn’t ever stop being funny. Jamie shot a quick glance in his direction, silently hoping her gorgeous wolf boss would end up flat on his back, but it wasn’t to be.

  With a heavy sigh, he said, “Complainer’s court—ah, I mean, public issue discussions, those happen on Tuesdays.”

  He called it complainer’s court because that was a much more apt description, but that sort of savagely non-bureaucratic talk got Duggan all worked up. Of course, so did everything else.

  There was a kind of gruffness about the new, and only, audience member that sent a little wiggle up Jamie’s stomach. There were bear girls, there were wolf girls... and Jamie? For every second of her life right up until the present moment, she was definitely neither of them. Lithe, thin, and just a little pale, a vampire guy was just right for her.

  Then again, the last one was such a tremendous prick that maybe, she thought as she looked at this flannel-clad giant, maybe it was time for a change of heart.

  She felt a hot flush creep up her neck, looked away. Also bashful? Jamie was definitely not the bashful type.

  “It is Tuesday,” the man said. “And there are about forty people waiting outside down the hall.”

  Duggan looked down at his watch, and then flopped his head backward with a dramatically heavy sigh. “Why can’t we ever get anything done?”

  “Because you don’t ever shut up.” All eyes turned to Erik’s mate, Izzy, who was about five months pregnant, and as a human with a wolfy bun in the oven, she deserved to be every shred as irritated as she was. “Everything is always some kind of big argument, some big, dramatic to-do,” she laughed in the crazed, half-exasperated way that only a pregnant woman who needed both some water, and some damn chocolate, can do. Jamie understood, although not the pregnant part.

  Where most five-month-pregnant women of a height with Izzy would barely be showing, maybe, this one looked like she had a beach ball under her shirt. Poor thing is gonna be laid out for a month. Two months, three? I can’t remember how long wolf babies gestate. Probably a lot longer than you want. Just like everything else about them.

  Thankfully, the moment of distraction got Jamie’s thoughts off the lumberjack son of a bitch she couldn’t stop looking toward.

  Izzy teetered to her feet, and propped herself up on the table top. “I’m the damn treasurer, right?”

  A round of nods went around the room, because she was, in fact, the town’s treasurer. “Okay, good. Then we’re building stop lights. There’s no good damn reason not to, and if we do, Duggan will shut up, and Jenga’s zombies can stop playing crossing guard every day.”

  A long, low groan escaped the lips of an enormous, stitched-together zombie bear who sat at the end of the dais. The very similar looking woman beside him, who was wearing a flower-patterned muumuu, hit him with a closed fist in the side of the face. “Hush, Atlas!” she hissed. “This mean more time... for...” she started making googly eyes at her stitched-together mate.

  “Right, yes, yes, very good,” Jenga, their handler, and also the town’s witch doctor-slash-surgeon-slash-diet pill salesman, said. “Everybody will be better if they don’t have to picture the two of you droolin’ bears goin’ at it.”

  A shudder crept through the room, from everyone except Izzy, who looked like she was going to yurk, and Jamie, who started giggling. Getting the two zombies on the town council was one of the stranger decisions that had been made in the history of Jamesburg, but it made them really happy. It was sort of like when a fifth grader takes on the hallowed sash and pin of a Safety Patrol Guard. They aren’t going to be directing much traffic, but damn do they get all puffed up about it.

  It’s exactly the same, except the zombie bears did, in fact, direct traffic. They were incredibly good at standing in one place and doing the same thing for hour after hour without getting distracted or, apparently, even noticing the passage of time. Oh, and there also aren’t a whole lot of seven foot tall fifth graders put together like Frankenstein’s monster and reanimated. So there’s that.

  “So... I can complain now?”

  The bear, which is what he must have been, since he didn’t show any signs of being a science experiment, was looking straight at Jamie.

  Oh God, am I giving off some kind of pheromones that he smelled? Why is he staring at me and why am I not looking away? And why—why the hell am I really into the fact that all of this is happening?

  That flush from earlier came back. She wished suddenly she wasn’t wearing quite so low-collared a top as she was.

  Erik sighed, Izzy clicked her teeth together, Atlas drooled and Jenga’s knotted, stuff-filled beard jingled. “The stoplights are happening then?” Duggan asked.

  “Yes,” Izzy said with a sigh. “Although, I’m not going to allow you to get the ones with the backlit street names, those are just too stupid for words. We’re getting the standard deal – three lights, one green, one yellow and one red, facing in four directions.” She usually wasn’t this sharp tongued, but in this case, she was just saying what everyone else was thinking.

  “But, I—”

  “This is called compromise, Duggan,” Izzy said. She was very obviously finished with the compromising.

  Duggan grumbled, but didn’t pursue the luxury line stoplights he’d been wanting earlier. Top of the line luxury stoplights; there’s an idea crazier than Jamesburg, but not by much. Jamie looked over at the bear who had walked through that door and straight into her brain.

  What? Everyone’s known hearts don’t control the emotions since at least the Middle Ages. And as far as all that fate stuff goes? Even though her stomach was currently in a big knot, and she couldn’t stop blushing every time this jackass in the lumberjack outfit opened his mouth or smiled one of those smiles that produced a dimple in either cheek, she didn’t believe in fate.

  Or hell, even love, really.

  “So can I complain now?” he smiled again. Damn it, why can’t he stop smiling or anything. And why can’t I st
op staring at him?

  “Complain away, friend,” Erik said with a wave of his hand. “Although I don’t think I know your name, which is a little weird, considering how close I am to the people of this fine city.”

  “Can it, Clark Kent,” Izzy fired a shot with her eyes. “You’d forget my name if I didn’t make you—”

  “We can’t really talk about how you make me remember your name without getting in trouble again for public lewdness,” he corrected. Erik shot a sneer in her direction, and she was still glaring, but the looks both of them gave were looks that only lovers who never want anything but each other can manage.

  And good God did they ever want each other.

  They hadn’t stopped the slightly-embarrassing public displays of mutual ass-grabbing since Izzy got knocked up. Jamie looked over at the two sweethearts, and couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy.

  From the alpha’s administrative assistant to being full of his furry little cub. Life’s a funny damn thing sometimes, she thought with a wry grin, as she watched the bear cross, and then uncross his legs.

  “Anyway,” Erik said, his gaze lingering on his mate, his eyes dropping and then raising a little. “Tell us everything that’s bothering you.”

  “My shoulder hurts, my sex life sucks, and I want to get a new car I can’t afford,” he said.

  Oh yeah, of course he’s funny. I bet he cooks, too. And bakes. She felt herself swoon, and then immediately recoiled. Or he’s a giant asshole with a cocky streak a mile wide, and a brain the size of a walnut.

  “You can get a massage from Jenga’s zombie, the Tavern is right down the road from here and we’re all going to be there in – God willing – two hours, and as far as the car, I thought all you bears rode motorcycles.”

  “They’re not zombies!” Jenga protested, but as usual, no one listened.

  “Shoulder will heal, I don’t have to get a girl drunk to ask her out, and some of us like to drive cars that do something other than make us look manly.”