Jessica Sims: Bear Naked

When you’re twenty-six years old, you’re old enough to know it’s a bad idea to listen at doorways. But when you’re a were-bear with super-enhanced hearing, and your name comes up during a meeting of the clan families? You kinda have to stop and listen.

I’d known there was a meeting of the bear clan elders in my father’s basement office that evening, but I hadn’t realized they were meeting about me . I paused at the doorway at the top of the basement stairs, frowning. Maybe I was imagining things. Maybe they weren’t talking about me after all.

“It’s clear that Nikolina’s going to go into heat in the next month or two,” I heard Janna Bjorn say. “The men are starting to notice her scent a lot more. We need to solve this problem.”

An embarrassed flush crept over my face. Okay, so they were definitely talking about me. I paused at the top of the stairs, my glass of water in hand, and grew completely still, listening.

“Does she realize that she’s going to?” Minda Tolfson asked. “How sheltered is she?”

I realized this was directed at my father a moment after he began to bluster and mumble through an answer. God, how embarrassing.

I knew I was going into heat. I wasn’t stupid. I had shifter cousins and had grown up in the were-bear community. I knew what it meant when I started having wet dreams every night, got totally aroused over everything, and my hormones were out of control. I’d figured it out when I’d gone to the grocery store and cleaned out an entire shelf of chocolate bars.

I just hadn’t brought it up to anyone else yet, because I hadn’t quite figured out what I was going to do .

Going into heat meant I was ovulating. Like our wild counterparts, if I went into heat, it meant babies. Shifter females had a very lax reproductive system; we only went into heat a few times in our lives. Each time, a shifter female had to consider more than just her own wants and needs. If she went on birth control and elected not to have the baby, there was a chance she was depriving her already small clan of another member.

I could elect not to have the baby, I supposed, but…I was in limbo as it was.

“What about Ramsey? Can’t someone go back and round him up now that we need him?”

I heard Janna Bjorn snort. “That errant boy has taken a mate. A werewolf.” She sneered the word. “He’s not asked to rejoin the clan, and I don’t see that he’d ever be allowed with a mate like that.”

I tried not to flinch at the sound of Ramsey Bjorn’s name. Tried, and failed. Stinking Ramsey Bjorn. I hated the man. He was the cause of my predicament. The bear clans were five families from Norway who had emigrated into the Ozark hills of Arkansas back at the turn of the century. Since bear shifters were rare, we stuck together. We kept the old ways. Old names, old habits, old everything. Our families had grown up intertwined, and a bear shifter knew from birth exactly who he or she was destined to marry. It ensured bloodlines stayed strong and family trees didn’t get too inbred.

Ramsey Bjorn had been my betrothed since I’d been born. He was the only possible mate for me out of our small clans. He was blond, tall, surly, and we’d never been all that friendly. Never really had to. It was just assumed that we’d rub along until we got married.

Ramsey had also been exiled at fifteen when he’d sided with a were-cougar ambassador over his own family. The bear clan didn’t forget things like that. If there was one thing that was pounded into a were-bear’s head, it was that family was everything. Ramsey had betrayed his, so he’d been exiled. Now, years had passed and it seemed that he wouldn’t be coming back at all.

I was screwed. No mate? No family. I’d be condemned to be a spinster for the rest of my life, simply because there was no one eligible for me to marry. Everyone else was related or…human. And a were-bear simply couldn’t marry a human. They couldn’t know about our animal side, and they’d never, ever understand it.

And I wanted a family, desperately. I’d been on the outside looking in for what felt like forever. I was included in family events, but I was treated like a twelve-year-old daughter, not a grown woman. Why? Because I wasn’t married. Sometimes, the bear clan could be a little backward.

Okay, a lot backward. But if I rebelled, I’d be exiled, and the bear clan was all I had.

Someone downstairs spoke again.

“If Ramsey has a mate, do you think she would mind if he made a…” a throat cleared. “A donation?”

“Would you mind if it was your mate?”

I flinched again. Jesus.

“Good point.”

“So do we have anyone that’s unmated and unrelated? What about Kristof?”

“Cousin,” my father answered. “Too close to kin.”

“And Dag?”

“Second cousin.”

“Mattias?”

My jaw dropped. Mattias was sixty if he was a day.

“He’s a widower,” my father said, considering. “But Nikolina is young. Far too young for one such as Mattias.”

“Sigurd Aasen,” Janna said in a stern voice. “We do not have many options here. Your daughter is twenty-six and unmarried. She is about to go into heat, and we have no mate for her. This is critical. We cannot have her elect to not have the baby. Our clan is too small as it is.”

“As is evidenced by the fact that there is no one for her,” Minda pointed out. “So what do we do?”

“What about the married men?” Jokkum Hanssen finally spoke up.

“What about them?” Janna’s voice was stern.

I pressed closer to the door. Yes, what about the married men? I wanted to hear this, too. Not that there were any married men I wanted to sleep with, but I was curious where he was going with this.

“Why don’t we have one of them…you know. Take one for the team.”

Take one for the team?

My jaw dropped. They talked of impregnating me like they would mopping the floors or taking out the trash. This wasn’t a volunteer situation. This was my body.

“Nikolina is not unattractive. I have seen some of the men watching her lately. I know there are some that would not object to mating with her simply for the sake of a child.”

Janna snorted. “Some like yourself, Jokkum?”

“If I must.”

I wrinkled my nose in disgust. Jokkum was older than me and had a beer gut. He also drank too much.

“That still does not solve the problem of her being unmated,” Minda pointed out.

“This is the twentieth century,” my father said. “She can be an unmated mother. Lots of humans do it.”

“Or we can place the child with the father’s family,” Jokkum said. “Or someone can take her as a second wife, as the Mormons do.”

I wanted to point out that the Mormons didn’t really do that anymore, and gross .

“And what about Nikolina’s choice in such things? She is my daughter and I am responsible for her. All of the choices you present here are not good ones for our family.”

You go, Daddy , I thought to myself. You tell ‘em. It would have been nice if he’d have defended me a bit more instead of the family, but I’d take what I could get.

“Gunnar Ludvik, you are quiet,” Janna said. “What are your thoughts?”

I heard Gunnar clear his throat. The quietest clan leader, he was a man my father’s age with a kind smile and sad brown eyes. I liked Gunnar best of all the elders, save my father, of course. “I was simply thinking that this would be easier for everyone if my boy Leif was here.”