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  Turning to face him, I gave him my best good-girl smile and said, “I think maybe we haven’t got off to the best start. Let me introduce myself, you can do the same and we can start over, what do you say?” I reached my hand towards him. He jumped back so fast it was like a blur in a martial arts movie effect.

  I didn’t know whether I was more shocked by the rudeness, the extraordinary force or just the sheer baffling how-the-fuck-did-he-do-that of his reaction. He glowered at me and snarled, hulking in an angry crouch, “Don’t try to touch me.”

  Okay, mister, I thought, You’re so very special that you can’t risk contamination from ordinary mortals. It occurred to me that perhaps this applied especially to plain girls who were frumpy and slightly round. I know, I’ve seen it all before.

  Guys who loooove ’em some soft curves, but only alone in the in dark. They can’t risk being seen with you in daylight, or any kind of light, come to that. Then there are the mothers who think their precious toddler might catch the fat bug if they get too near. Potential employers who fear you might breach their building regulations and bring the mezzanine crashing into the foyer.

  I’ve seen dread of the womanly curve drive folks to do some very strange things, but this instant backward leaping was a new one, even for me. Perhaps he has a dreadful allergy to cellulite, can’t come within three or four inches or he bounces away.

  And, like with the paranoid moms and the guys who pretend to live in the dark, I’m used to letting the implied personal affront bounce off me.

  “Please, don’t be upset,” it was the closest to a kind thing he’d said since we met. He did effortlessly rescue me from a bear, I reminded myself, but I doubted that was an act of particular kindness. Most likely his insurers laid out a scale of costs for having guests mauled, maimed or devoured.

  “It’s… ” he seemed to be hunting for an explanation. It didn’t look like he got a lot of practice in doing that. His brows furrowed in waves while he thought. “It’s a skin condition,” he said.

  I wasn’t ready for that. It was so ridiculous that a wide eyed explosive ‘pah!’ got out of me before I could stop it. I thought about trying to pretend it was a sneeze. Well, it wouldn’t be any more absurd than his ‘skin condition,’ but I didn’t go there.

  Saying ‘pah!’ to a billionaire is probably a high-risk strategy, but it was done and there it was.

  He at least had the grace to scowl like a sulky teenager caught with his hand in a place where it shouldn’t oughta be.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s start over. It’s a great idea of yours. No touching, though.”

  “Alright. You first.”

  “I’m – well you know who I am,” he watched as I drew a long breath in, my lips tightened and my head shook slowly. He said, “Oh, you really want to play the game? Alright.” His voice and his eyes hardened, “I’m Bernhard Grarr, owner, CEO and chief engineer of Grarr Tech, and president of the Grarr Group of equity funds.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Mr Grarr. I’m Maxi Cuddles, graduate student and president of no corporations, institutions or funds, here to interview you on behalf of Trudi Bumpshutz’s blog, Hot Property.”

  Trying to be polite and making nice with him made me even more wound me up than I was before. There was a pause. Not the kind of a pause that old friends, close family or a familiar, supportive group might fall into. An awkward pause with a hum of tension.

  Rather than risk more rough handling from Mr Grarr’s manners, I decided to try and take the initiative.

  “This is a beautiful building, Mr Grarr. Is this your home?”

  “Yes.”

  “Which I’m guessing you commissioned and built.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Did you take much of a hand in the design?”

  “Yes.”

  I hadn’t much experience as an interviewer but I had helped Trudi to edit some of the interviews for her site. I knew how just scintillating it was going to be for the followers of her blog to read a column of synonyms for ‘yes.’ Supposing he said, ‘no’ once? The thrill would be just devastating.

  I changed tack. “Do any of the rooms have chairs, Mr Grarr?”

  “Yes. Most of them do.”

  I looked at him and raised an eyebrow. He wasn’t getting it. “Are many of the chairs comfortable?”

  “Yes.” He said, “All of them.”

  “As comfortable as standing on stone in a hallway, more comfortable or less, would you say?”

  He frowned. “Much more. Would you like to sit down, Ms Cuddles?” He had a very attractive frown. I counted that a plus, because I was confident of seeing many more frowns.

  “Why thank you, Mr Grarr. What an excellent idea.”

  He frowned, “Why did you not ask?”

  Bernhard Grarr showed me into a large room lined in pale wood. The walls were plain with no windows. It was brightly lit from the high glass roof. Three pale chairs were arranged around a low wooden table. At the far end was a door like the one we entered through.

  As the door opened I thought I must be looking into a huge mirror. But then, where was my reflection? If he had a reflection and I didn’t, that would mean that I was a vampire. Or something. This whole thing was too confusing.

  Through the door stepped another of Bernhard, an exact replica. I decided that they must be twins. The proximity of one of them had been hard enough to deal with. Now two? I could wind up hospitalized.

  He came towards me and my knees weakened as he spoke, “Is this Trudi Bumpschutz? I didn’t think she would be nearly so… beautiful.”

  “No, this is Trudi Bumpschutz’s impostor who she sends for interviews she can’t be bothered to do herself. This is Ms Cuddles.”

  Benjy said, “Bernhard, you’re joking. Tell me you’re joking.”

  “Maxi Cuddles. Ms Cuddles, this is my brother Benjy.”

  He stood in front of me and towered over me. A perfect mirror of Bernhard, yet something was distinct in the look in his eye, the slight turn of amusement on the corners of his mouth. In his voice he carried a faint trickle of playfulness.

  He looked me over. I felt his eyes lap me up from head to toe and back. He didn’t miss a detail. As his eyes feasted on my lips, his tongue flicked out to lick his own.

  After he toured my face he looked slowly and deliberately at my neck and my throat. He followed the slopes down to my creamy, fluttering cleavage. Inspecting my breasts was an unhurried affair and it involved two distinct sighs on his part.

  My heart pounded so hard that I thought it might jump out and into his hands.

  “But she’s gorgeous, Bernhard.”

  “Yes, Benjy. I know.” He did? That was the first I’d heard of it.

  “Has Mischa seem her? More important has he sniffed her?”

  “Seen, yes. Not sniffed, except from a distance.” Who was Mischa and when had he seen me?

  Benjy came closer and instinctively I reached out to shake his hand. His hand snatched away and I remembered what Bernhard had said. No touching. Did they both live in mortal dread of the chubby gene? As fast as he pulled back his arm, my fingertips had touched the back of his hand. A great flash of shock poured through me like thick, cool alcohol.

  Benjy’s hand and his forearm swelled enormously. It was such a sudden and extreme reaction that I thought I must be imagining it, but as his flesh was blanketed in a dark mist, the sleeve of his shirt tore. It looked as though thick fur sprouted from his arm and his knuckles seemed to swell up.

  For an instant, his hand look like a huge rounded paw. His fingernails crackled and appeared to sprout, like claws.

  “Benjy!” At the crack of Bernhard’s voice, Benjy shrank away. He crouched as he turned to leave, but he seemed to be getting bigger. I wondered if the altitude was having an effect on me.

  The dark mist swirled around Benjy as he scuttled back through the far door and out.

  “You must forgive my brother. He’s… he’s been stressed lately.”


  I’ve been stressed lately, I thought, But I never sprouted fur and claws. We sat at opposite sides of the table. My hunch was that the secretive Mr Grarr wouldn’t be forthcoming or open up too much about his transformative twin. I thought I would attempt to start with something general and neutral.

  “Why did you want to do this interview in the first place?”

  “I didn’t. Mr Hiram Bottram told me I have to do it.” Well, at least I got a clear and direct answer. I pressed on.

  “Who’s he?”

  “Mister Hiram Bottram graduated top of his class at Princeton in corporate law, and top of his class at Harvard in business administration. He left his post-graduate neuropsychology class to set up the web site Tinglz,”

  “Tinglz? The dating site?”

  “That’s what it is, yes.”

  “He’s some kind of a genius.”

  “We don’t like that word, ‘genius.’”

  “Why?”

  “Because it doesn’t mean anything. It only ever means that somebody is better at doing something than the person who is calling them a genius. There’s no test you can give that will tell you reliably and repeatably that this person is a genius and this person is not.”

  “But it means somebody with exceptional intelligence.”

  “I know what people think it means. It’s what they used to call us all the time, ‘Oh, he’s a genius. They’re all geniuses.’”

  “‘We?’ ‘Us?’”

  “Yes, my brothers and I when we were at school. It’s one of the names that people called us.” The scowl folded deep furrows in his brow. He was pant-wettingly gorgeous. ‘Brothers,’ I noticed. Plural. “But don’t interrupt, please, I haven’t finished answering your question. Mister Hiram Bottram is the leading expert in social media and image presentation, so I engaged Mister Hiram Bottram to be in charge of my image presentation because I need a public image. The reason I need a public image is because I have to float a part of my business on the New York Stock Exchange in order to raise some capital. According to Mister Hiram Bottram, the New York Stock Exchange wont buy shares in my business unless I have an image. So that is who he is, and that is why I am doing this interview.”

  “Not because you want to do it.”

  “No. How long will you need to be here to do the interview?”

  “I don’t know. Until I can find a story.”

  “That’s it, isn’t it. That’s always it. Everybody wants a story. I don’t see why. And I don’t understand why people want a story that’s been made up and distorted when a simple presentation of the facts is always better.”

  “Tell me about your brothers. I didn’t know you had brothers.”

  “Nobody knows. Nobody’s supposed to know. We don’t tell anyone about it. People ask too many questions as it is. You’re asking too many questions.” I hadn’t started. This was going to be pretty hard work. And I wasn’t even going to get paid for it. “Now you know, so I suppose I have to tell you so you don’t keep asking questions about it, but you mustn’t put it in your interview. You mustn’t say anything in your interview about my brothers, or even that I have brothers.”

  “O-kay…”

  “You have to give me your word. You have to promise me that you aren’t going say anything about me having any brothers. Not to anybody, not only in your interview but to anybody at all. You have to give me your word that you wont, and if you do, I will have to make something bad happen to you.”

  “That’s quite a hard thing to promise.”

  “No, it isn’t. It’s not hard, you just say ‘I promise not to reveal anything to anybody about Bernhard Grarr having any brothers, and I give my word.’”

  “But you know that I’m here to get a story, and that’s certainly the most interesting thing that I’ve learned about you yet.”

  “How can it be interesting when you don’t know anything about my brothers? They’re both exactly like me. They look exactly like me. We’re identical. So what could be interesting about them that isn’t equally interesting about me?”

  Instinctively, my follow up would have been, So, do you sprout fur in a magical smoke-haze, too? But I knew that I didn’t have him on my side yet, and that would hardly take us in the right direction.

  His eyes really did smolder. It was very distracting.

  “Well, the fact that there are three of you is pretty interesting. And, plus the fact that you have brothers is very interesting, because nobody knows it. I was reading up about you all last night and I didn’t see a word about any brothers.”

  “Alright, so it’s interesting and it’s doubly interesting because nobody knows it. So I shall have to tell you or show you some more interesting things than that, and they will have to be very interesting and be things that people don’t know. And then you wont have to tell anybody about my having brothers.”

  “I’m guessing you don’t meet a lot of people up here.”

  “Of course not. When we were growing up we met people all the time. That is why we bought this mountain and had a home built for ourselves up here.”

  “You don’t like people.”

  “I like people. As long as I don’t have to meet them.”

  “You’re meeting me.”

  “I’m meeting you because I have to meet you, although it wasn’t you I was supposed to meet, it was Trudi, your friend who is not even your boss. This meeting is a step that is necessary to progress to the floatation on the New York Stock Exchange which is very important to me. And besides, I don’t dislike you very much yet.”

  “Have you always disliked meeting people?”

  “Of course. We wouldn’t have become software developers if we wanted to meet people. And we wouldn’t have progressed to high frequency stock trading if we wanted to meet people. Software development and high frequency stock trading are both things that need lots of hours of concentrated work and aren’t at all suitable for people with social lives. That is why not everybody can be a software developer or a high frequency stock trader.”

  “I don’t think that’s the only reason.”

  “Are you a software developer, Ms Cuddles?”

  “No.”

  “Are you a high frequency stock trader?”

  “No.”

  “So you don’t know, Ms Cuddles. You shouldn’t say things that you don’t know.”

  “But I didn’t say I knew. I said it’s what I thought.”

  “They’re the same thing.”

  “No they’re not.”

  “Tell me what the difference is then.”

  “What I think is like a hypothesis. Something I can test. It may turn out to be true, it may not. What I know is something I’m sure of.” I looked up at the skylight. “I know that the sky is blue. I can see it. I think it probably gets cold up here.”

  He scowled. I did love that scowl. “But whether it gets cold is something you can easily find out. You don’t need to make idle speculation. You can find out by asking me, because I know.”