Free Some Bear to Love: BBW Bear Shifter (BWWM) Romance Standalone by Terry Bolryder Page B

his suite.
    He waited for her reaction to his obvious nautical obsession. From old nautical paintings he’d bid for on eBay to the small ships in a bottle he’d assembled to the spartan decorations around the huge suite, he wasn’t sure how she’d take it.
    But he needn’t have wondered. She grinned and tapped his shoulder for him to let her down and then wandered around the apartment, looking here and there and touching this and that. She walked into his bedroom, and he held his breath while he waited for her to come out.
    When she did, she tilted her head and gave him an appraising look. He waited for her judgment.
    She grinned. “It’s so you.”
    He smiled. That was the perfect comment. She seemed to get who he was and be perfectly fine with that. She might be the first person in his life to do so. Everyone else would tell him to calm down, to be less restless, to stop doing everything at work and nothing outside of it, and to think of something other than the ocean.
    But she simply understood what it meant to him, and it made him love her. It somehow made sense that he’d made love to her for the first time on the ocean, rocking in a boat together. But what did she love?
    She walked out to look at the view. It wasn’t fancy. The suite was very high up so the beach and the people on it were blurry and small. But the view of the ocean? Unbeatable, rippling in blues and greens out into eternity, or at least until it met the silvery line of the horizon.
    He joined her and leaned on the railing. The wind brought her scent to him and breathed it deeply, knowing it was going to be one of the things he missed most about her when she was gone.
    She looked at him and the sunset reflected in her gray eyes. He could see himself in them, reflected just as he was, and it made him want to be a better man. A better person. And worthy of her.
    But these were silly thoughts. They were just two people who would give in to their animal urges for a week and then go back to being the rational beings they were.
    They had nothing in common. They didn’t make any sense together. But somehow he still wanted to know everything about her.
    He brushed her hair back and pressed a kiss to the base of her ear where it met her jaw, and she shuddered against him. “What do you love, Kim?”
    “What do you mean?” she said huskily as he continued to kiss along the shell of her ear. She gasped as he ran his tongue along the inside.
    “I mean, you know what I love. The ocean. What do you love?”
    She frowned for a moment, as if she’d never considered it. Then she sighed as his fingers played at the nape of her neck, tickling her lightly. “I guess adventure,” she gasped out. He stopped teasing so she could finish what she meant to say. He wanted to hear all of it.
    “I guess I always want to have adventures. I never want that to stop.”
    “Even when you’re mated?” he asked.
    “Especially then,” she said. “I guess I’ll just have to hope the man I marry has a sense of adventure. He’ll be a bear, so that’ll probably work for him.”
    “You’re a bear too, correct?” he asked.
    She nodded. “Brown. You?”
    “Polar,” he said. “Probably some Kodiak in there too. We don’t know that much about my mother’s side of things.”
    A normal person might have left it there, assuming there was something painful about his mother he didn’t want to talk about, but not Kim.
    “Why not?” she asked. “What happened? I mean, you don’t have to tell me, but I’d feel dumb if I didn’t ask.”
    “Kind of rude,” he said.
    “Maybe,” she said. “But I’d rather seem rude than disinterested.”
    He raised an eyebrow. “As if anyone could ever think you disinterested,” he teased in a low voice.
    She grinned and he found himself loving that smile. It was lighting his world, like a sunrise on the ocean, and he wanted to keep it around forever.
    He kissed down her neck to her back and then along her shoulders, moving her