Free Finding Alien Love (SciFi Alien Romance) by Meg Ripley

weren’t many people either in the town of Green Tree or in general who would deliberately trouble a pair of fully-grown brown bears in their nocturnal search for food.
    So what? He sent the thought in Dov’s direction, sniffing the air once more. He caught a fleeting scent—berries, sharp and sweetly pungent in the humid night air of the forest—and turned in that direction. He coughed, alerting his friend to the proximity of food as he approached the bushes, illuminated faintly by the waxing moon’s light.
    Dov had been his friend for as long as Ben could remember; the two of them had undergone their first, ritual transformation together, they worked on the logging crew together, and even when the rest of the clan was busy with other things—spending time with family members, going out to take in the few diversions that the little logging town offered, or, as was the case with their Alpha, staying in for the night with a mate—he and Dov found their way into the woods together, exploring what the night held for inquisitive animals that had no need to fear predators.
    Ben began to mine the bushes for ripe berries, his keen nose and keener instincts tugging him away from those still green. After a moment, Dov joined him, shifting down onto his rump to eat in comfort. They exchanged soft growling chuffs, enjoying the sweet-tart taste of the fruit as eagerly as any bear could. The only thing better would have been honey; but Ben had no interest in dealing with bees that night, and he knew Dov didn’t either. Unlike real bears, they had the advanced thinking skills and the money to buy honey if they wanted it; there was little sense in raiding a hive when there were jars and jars of honey at the local market.
    I smell her. That woman—the new one. The fragmented thoughts, filtering through Ben’s mind from Dov’s, were accompanied by a faint image; a short, curvy woman, who had moved into town only a few weeks before, hired by the logging company to do administrative work. Ben had met her briefly; he had been careful not to get too close to the woman—her pheromones, feminine and possibly fertile, would have been nothing but an incitement to him, and he knew, as everyone in the Nita clan did, that the animal instincts had to be kept in check amongst the “normal” humans of the town. She had honey-colored hair kept tightly in a bun dead center at the back of her skull, and a slightly tightly wound air about her that put Ben on alert.
    Of course, Ben thought as he meditatively munched on wild berries, sinking down onto his hindquarters in the filtered moonlight, there were plenty of members of the clan who were not quite so careful; they went out to the bars every night, picking up whatever girl would come home with them and showing up the next morning as likely as not with a hangover. He let out a snort of disgust. Since the few women who had been born into the clan were closely related to its other members, they had been married off—a decision by the Alpha, though not one that had met with universal approval. Ben himself could feel the low, pulsing animal lust inside of himself on a near-constant basis: the need to mate, to claim a female as his own. For werebears such as himself, mating was a permanent attachment. The less steady members of the clan, slightly younger—some of them just old enough to drink—were willing to slake that desire as best as they could with one-night stands, taking care of the physical problem.
    But Ben held himself back, and Dov had taken the same cue; when they had first been inducted into the Nita clan formally, as teenaged werebears, they had agreed that they would follow their Alpha’s edicts as long as they weren’t harmful, and Ben had never gone back on his word in his entire life. He didn’t intend to start doing it just because he had the mating itch.
    Next to him, Dov let out a soft trill. Coming our way. Ben sighed; they would have to decide whether it was worth it to