Free Bear In The Rough: Book 1: Treasure Hunt (BBW Bear Shifter Romance) by L. Foster Page A

dark.
     
                  My arms broadened, becoming hairy and bulky. Hair covered my face, my legs, my back. My legs became stout as tree trunks. My newly sensitive nose was full of the most peculiar sensations. My brain, suddenly free of the burdens of intellect, became a repository of primal urges. I was no longer conscious of an I. There was a lumbering thing standing straight up in the recesses of the cave, and it was me. It was hungry. It wanted to hunt, and eat, and copulate, and fight. And right now, more than anything else, it wanted to kill.
     
    I rose up on my hind legs. I stood face to face, paw to paw, with another bear. The only reality was the struggle, the struggle of flesh against flesh, of fur against fur, as both bears battled for supremacy, for turf, for possession of the pale woman who stood cowering in the cave’s entrance.
     
                  I thrashed at the she-bear with my left paw, landing a major blow on the back of her head. Fur, blood and fat went flying into the air.
     
                  Enraged, she swung one paw at me, then the other. I stumbled back, overwhelmed by the fury of this sudden assault. Seizing her advantage, she leapt on top of me, her snout aiming straight for my neck. The complexity of my feelings having been reduced to a pinch of their former selves, I felt only rage and fear and an all-conquering instinct for self-preservation.
     
                  I roared. With both paws I pushed her away, shoving her against the wall, which rattled slightly. Stalactites fell to left and right; one narrowly grazed my right paw and I yelled again, kicking it out of the way. The she-bear roared in return and for a moment the cave resounded with the sound of our yelling. Rocks fell. I could feel blood spurting from my neck and chest where I had been bitten by teeth and slashed at with claws. I felt dizzy, and dimly wondered which of us was more wounded. Blood gushed from the top of my skull, landing in drips and plops on the uneven ground.
     
                  Instinctively sensing that she was outmatched, the second bear sought a way of escape. I had pinned her to the wall. I could have killed her. But with the small part of me that was still human I sensed how unfair this would be—she wasn’t fighting an ordinary bear, but a man-bear with a cunning human intelligence. Even if she had had the upper hand at the beginning, her chances of victory had long evaporated. It was a core tenet of shifter philosophy that others of our kind, even if they lacked human intelligence, should never be killed except in extreme cases where we would die otherwise.
     
    There had been a moment when killing her might have been the only way to save myself and Liv from a gruesome fate, but that moment had passed. I lunged for her neck as though preparing the death-blow, then at the last second let out the loudest of all roars. She looked at me, confused. With my right paw, I knocked her towards the entrance, Olivia scurrying out of the way. Perhaps realizing this was her one chance of escape, the bear fled through the cave-mouth into the rainy dusk.
     
                  And then, I was a man again.
     
                  Cursing loudly, Liv ran towards me. My bear-mind was still transitioning back into my man-mind and I swiped at her with one hand, regretting it the moment it happened. Undaunted, she continued forward and grabbed both my arms. Coming from someone who had spent much of the day looking for ways to kill me in self-defense, this came as a bit of a shock.
     
    “Lie still!” she said. “I just want to see your cut! Lie still!”
     
                  It is a dangerous thing to advance on a man who has just shifted out of his bear form, and I think she knew this, but it never seemed to trouble her. Such was her determination and strength in that moment that I found myself pinned to the floor of the cave while