Bearly Hanging On (The Jamesburg Shifters #6)
By Lynn Red
-1-
“So this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a bureaucratic meeting about traffic lights. God almighty, kill me now. No wait, let me die slowly. That’d feel more right.”
-Jamie Ampton
“We need those lights! I can’t,” Professor Duggan, Jamesburg’s city planner cum hedgehog-shifting history professor, was getting very red in the face. Instead of finishing his sentence, he grabbed his suspenders, popped them against his chest, let out an irritated chuffing sound, and then popped them again.
“You can’t... what?” Erik Danniken, Jamesburg’s alpha wolf, was rolling around on the exercise ball he’d decided he couldn’t live without. It had been two years since he and his mate went on a yoga retreat in San Diego. Jamie looked over at him, and couldn’t help but chuckle when Erik took a long, deep breath, and exhaled in a very practiced way.
I’m just glad he finally gave up the yoga pants. I mean, I’m not going to pretend like he didn’t look good, but there’s nothing that says ‘unprofessional doofus’ like a werewolf giving speeches with a half-stock in his yoga pants. Or, at least, it looked like a half-stock...
Duggan pursed his lips. The top one, and all but the middle of the bottom one, disappeared under his walrus-like mustache. On Erik’s face, a blissful smile and half-closed eyes were almost more irritating to the professor than the current rage he held for the lack of a four-way stop at the intersection of Pine and Beard streets. And then once you’re past the intersection they become Magnolia and Bondie, because when Jamesburg was built, no one cared what they named the streets. Or were they avenues? Or roads? No one could remember what sort of designation they had, which to the rest of the world is completely meaningless, but for Duggan it was like someone had just shot his mother, and then shot him, both in the ass, with a shotgun full of rock salt.
He raised two balled up fists in the air and waved them around for a moment. “You just don’t understand! This is vital! Everyone on this council – Jamie, even you,” Duggan said with a deferential nod toward Jamie’s seat halfway around the table, “all want this town to be more acceptable? More modern? Whatever you want to call it.”
Jamie sat forward, tucking one of her long, black, tendrils of hair back behind her ear. There were chopsticks holding her bun together, but the two lengths that framed her face just never seemed willing to stay pinned back. One of her wings extended involuntarily, and she decided to take the opportunity to extend the other one and enjoy a full stretch. Her tendons reached full extension. With a roll of her neck, she opened her mouth, and accidentally let out a yawn.
Black holes don’t have the gravity of that yawn.
“I’m... are you sleepy, Miss Ampton?” Duggan shot her a nasty glare, which she answered right back.
“Well, it is almost three in the afternoon, and we’ve been yelling about a damn stoplight for the last six hours. Sorry,” she corrected herself, “I mean you have been yelling about a stoplight for the last six hours.”
Just as Duggan was about to puff himself into another frenzy of fretful grunting and moaning, the door of the Jamesburg Courthouse’s singular conference room swung open with a long, slow creak. Behind it was a man who stood probably six and a half feet tall, broad across the shoulders, and with a beard that must have been growing for a month. Or, if he was a bear, it had been growing for about a day and a half.
Jamie stared at him, her gaze cool and dispassionate as it always was, but if anyone was watching, they saw a little twinkle in one of her pale, slate-gray eyes. She watched the huge figure move into the room, silently pluck a seat from the pile of dis-used folding chairs and sit down on it, facing the dais.
“Six hours in and finally someone from this town decides that traffic lights on dangerous intersections are important enough to pay attention to!” Duggan let out a triumphant sigh. “Finally!”
“Oh, er,” the big guy grumbled. Jamie didn’t recognize him, and for someone who had been in Jamesburg for the last twenty years, not recognizing someone was kind of a big deal. People didn’t just move to Jamesburg on accident, or because they were looking for a job. People came to Jamesburg because they didn’t have anywhere else to go. They went to Jamesburg when they were against a wall, and needed one last chance.
Or, in the case of the last couple that moved to town, because they were a rabbit and a bear shifter, and the town needed a dentist.
Talk about serendipity.
“Sorry,” the big stranger with the shaggy, tousled dark hair and the slight growth of beard said.
Jamie was shaking her head. How good would that boy look if he didn’t have that horrible thing on his face? I just can’t do beards. Not since—
“Is this not the place to go to complain?” He flashed a smile that said he was either kidding, or so good at being a jackass that he did it without any effort at all. “Someone told me that every Tuesday I could come talk about how obnoxious my neighbors were, said this was the place?”
Erik rolled his eyes, and caught himself the second before his exercise ball went right out from under his ass. It wouldn’t be the first time, but it also wouldn’t ever stop being funny. Jamie shot a quick glance in his direction, silently hoping her gorgeous wolf boss would end up flat on his back, but it wasn’t to be.