Free Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) by Lynn Red Page B

his nose and sniffed. Only the vaguest hint of the aroma of the person who’d worn it remained. Lifting his head to the sky and closing his eyes, he took another, longer sniff. Sticking out his tongue, he touched the back of the stone – the part that would have rested against Clea’s ear – and let her scent and her taste fill him.
    This was it.
    He knew it before he smelled, before he tasted, but afterwards he was sure.
    As sure as the night was dark, and as sure as beavers were bat-shit crazy, he had found his mate.
    Briefly, Orion considered putting the earring back in his pocket, but that was too risky. Instead he wandered back to the riverbank, back to where he kept his very limited worldly possessions. Opening one of his two books – a textbook about Dentistry – he rotated the earring like a tiny drill until it pierced the cover. Then, he mashed it in deep enough that there was no chance of it escaping.
    Immediately, he knew where he had to go. He had to face his fears if he was going to have his mate. He had to return to a place he’d avoided for as long as possible. Living the outlaw life, it was easy – he couldn’t go into many towns at all without raising the ire of the local authorities even though he himself hadn’t committed any horrible crimes. Just being associated was enough, and the fact that he was an enforcer? Hard to explain to cops that he only “enforced” against other gangs.
    He had to face his fears to find his mate – to have what he knew deep in his heart was his fate.
    He had to go to Jamesburg.

-8-
“What the hell am I doing? Oh right, I’m forcing fate to do what I want. And if that doesn’t work? No time to think about that. It will. It has to.”
-Orion Samuelsson
    ––––––––
    S lowly, he worked the tip of his knife around the Dirty Devils patch that was stitched into his jacket. Orion checked his work, and found he was about halfway through the surgery.
    He loved the jacket – his mom gave it to him more years ago than he cared to remember. She was sick, and he was around twenty. Life wasn’t particularly good, but it wasn’t all that bad, either. Things were just hard. Money was tight, his father was an asshole, and his mom had finally gotten sick of Mitch’s shit.
    She ran, and Mitch didn’t bother to chase her. He just let them go. That was his last act of brutality against the two of them, his just letting them go. It showed how little he actually cared, maybe, or maybe it showed that he knew Orion would come crawling back.
    Orion popped another stitch, then another. Orion’s running from his father was the event, the exclamation point that led into the next sentence. His plucking the threads out of this jacket, and peeling this damn brand away, this was all the words that set the scene.
    He was out. Like out, out.
    And everything had changed. In the blink of an eye, the time it took for a tree to fall and for me to catch it, every single thing in my world changed. He shook his huge head, sending his shaggy curls back and forth. Not everything. Not the danger from my father.
    “Blood in, blood out,” he read off his Devils brand as he popped two more stitches. “Yeah. But it doesn’t say whose blood.”
    Orion touched the spider web of scars on his cheek.
    “Mom,” he said, staring down at the patch. The pinprick holes in the jacket were just like the scars on his face. A reminder of a time he didn’t want to forget, but that he’d rather die than relive.
    He closed his pale, brown eyes, and watched the scene play out on the inside of his eyelids. Drawing a breath, Orion still smelled the brownies she baked when he felt awful, the way the chocolate chips that somehow didn’t melt completely in the oven popped in his mouth. It wasn’t even imagination – the sensations were real. He remembered how she touched his face after the burn, how she nursed him back to health, and how she never let him believe he was ugly – no matter what his