Free So Much To Bear: Shifting Devotions (Werebear Erotic Romance) by Bethany Rousseau Page A

drop you off at a hotel there and expect you to be able to thrive on your own.” Damon shrugged.
     
    “Why not?” he asked her, his hands trailing over her body in a possessive, loving caress. “After all, I’m catching on pretty quickly here.” Jennifer thought about the fact that—for at least her first few weeks away at college, when she had left home for the first time—she had, herself been bewildered by the city. It had taken her a while to get to know the landmarks, to adjust to how far away everything seemed to be, the shift in prices, all of the myriad of differences compared to the small town she had known all of her life. How much more difficult would it be for Damon, who had never really been used to regular human society, who had grown up in the woods with his fellow were-bears for company and who had had an instinctive distrust of all regular humans right up until they had come together? Damon would be eaten alive, Jennifer thought. The shopkeepers would take advantage of him, he’d get lost on the bus—the only thing she wasn’t particularly worried about was the possibility of him being attacked or injured by someone else; Damon could certainly fend for himself.
     
    “I have an idea,” Jennifer said, kissing Damon lightly on the lips. “We’ll check out from here and we’ll go into the city together tomorrow. We’ll rent a room and I’ll spend the next couple of days teaching you about city life and how to get around, so you won’t be stuck at the hotel all day while I’m in school.” There were plenty of other girls on campus whose dorm rooms were more or less a formality. While the housing rules prevented keeping any guests in the dorm for longer than a few nights—and guests who were not relatives could be declined by the administration at any time—there were no rules about how many nights a week, month, or semester a girl had to stay in the dorms. As long as the room was empty on move-out day, and as long as the fees were paid, the administration didn’t care whether someone was or was not actually sleeping in their own bed. Jennifer could get Damon situated, and then meet up with him wherever they managed to find him a place to stay, as often as possible. She counted her blessings that she didn’t have any late-night classes like one of her roommates had had the previous semester.
     
    “Is it really so different?” Damon asked her. Jennifer was delighted by his curiosity, his hunger to learn more about the broader world. She thought it was interesting—almost amusing—that in spite of the fact that he was unquestionably partly an animal, he was courteous and polite as a default, pleasant to every clerk, cashier, waiter, or other employee they ever had to deal with. It certainly smoothed the way among the employees they had dealt with in the town so close to her own, but in the city Damon would need to cultivate more of an ability to draw on his territorial, stern bear traits.
     
    “It’s hard to explain just the magnitude of how different it is.” The university wasn’t in a huge city—it wasn’t a New York, or even a Chicago or Miami, but it was a major metropolitan area, and Jennifer didn’t want Damon to be miserable—culture-shocked, trapped in a hotel room because he didn’t know how to get around, dependent on her not only for love but also for money, entertainment, and everything else. She knew too that—since Damon had always been self-sufficient, trapping and gathering his own food, washing his own clothes by hand, building his own furniture—he would resent like hell a lifestyle that didn’t afford him the opportunity to move about freely and make his own choices. But she wanted to make sure that he knew what choices there were, how they worked, what was at stake. Eventually they would integrate him completely into society, and he could get a job, they could get an apartment together—somewhere. Since Damon didn’t have a degree, his ability to get