Naughty But Nice: A Bear Shifter Christmas Romance Read online

  “So, you girls don’t stop by here much anymore,” my dad said. “We miss seeing you. If our own daughter won’t come home, at least we can feel like a part of her has.”

  I gasped openly at my father. I felt like he’d just punched me in the gut. I tried to laugh it off while letting him know that he had just hurt me a bit. “Wow, that was harsh.”

  “But seriously,” Jackie said after a moment, after the laughter had died down. “What happened to you? I mean, we saw you at graduation, then the party, and then you were just gone. We’ve barely heard from you since. That really hurt, Angie.” I could see tears in her eyes.

  I tried to fight my own impulse to cry. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry. I… after all that happened…. I just felt broken. I needed a new start and I was desperate for some change. The best way for me to do that was to leave everything that reminded me of here in the past. And I’m sorry, but that included you as well. I never wanted to hurt any of you. I was just trying to protect myself.”

  I wiped tears from my eyes as I stood up and went over to hug my friends. We all embraced and it felt so good to be there with them again. I knew this was coming and though I’d feared it, I was glad to have it all going behind me. It was important to get past it so that I could move on.

  “Well, let’s get on with some better cheer,” Heather said practically reading my mind. She wiped her eyes and sniffed a few times before breaking out into that big, wide smile of hers.

  I loved seeing her that way. She was so gorgeous, so welcoming. It felt right being with her and my other friends. I felt like I really belonged here with them and I wanted Nia to feel included with that. It was kind of like bridging the past with the present. For the first time all week, I felt like I’d made the right decision. I was starting to see how useless it was to run from your problems. They would always be there nipping at your heels, doing their best to catch you and drag you down to the ground.

  No. You had to turn around and face them head on.

  “So, what else is new?” I asked. “I’d love to catch up on what everyone else is doing now, not because I want to hang with them, but because I am just that curious and nosey to see how awful their lives are turning out.”

  My friends all laughed. “Well, if you really want to find the scoop, you need to go down to Bobby’s,” Jackie said. “If anyone is going to have the most up to date info, then Charlene is the girl to talk to.”

  My eyes went wide. “Charlene?” I asked. “Charlene Finnigran?”

  “Yep, the one and only,” she said.

  Charlene was the girl in school who was kind of friends with everyone. She never fit into any particular group, but she was more or less liked by everyone. It was a weird thing. I didn’t really know her that well, but I’d heard somewhere that she had actually started working at Bobby’s Tavern. Bobby’s was one of the most popular bars in town.

  It was decorated with pentagrams, wolf’s heads were mounted on the walls, and it was always decked out in a modern day Goth, even though that many Goth people didn’t hang out there. The real goths around town, and even people heavily into the occult around these parts, didn’t really go in there that much. It was more of a goof and it was an excellent place for the college kids to hang out.

  “Wow,” I said. “Do I really want to see her? She was pretty cold to me in high school. I think she always had a huge thing for Oren, and when he went out with me it just seemed that she went completely off the rails and tried to do everything in her power to make sure that I paid for it. She would give me dirty looks whenever she could, she put sand in my locker once, and she even called the house and said she was going to have me killed a few times. I don’t want to see her.”

  “Wow, I never knew about some of that,” Lori said.

  “Well, she has changed now. She dated Oren right after graduation for that summer, and I hear that he was an abusive ass to her. I think she changed her tune, because after that was over she just started to become much sweeter and kinder.”

  “I hear she went to some counseling,” Heather said.

  “I can’t believe that Oren has never been in serious trouble with the law,” my mother said. “It’s like he can do no wrong in the eyes of the law.”

  “Well, his uncle is Sherriff,” I said. “Remember?”

  “Ah, that’s right,” my mother replied. “That’s how it is. I can’t believe I forgot that.”

  “You know, Oren tried out for the police academy several times, but he kept failing the psych evaluation and the physical. His knee is trashed, even after a few surgeries. Plus he hits the bottle as much as he hits women,” Heather said.

  “Well, he doesn’t hit women anymore because women won’t show him the time of day in this town. Even the newbies that are arriving to the school. They learn quickly about his reputation. Now, he just goes to the bars and drinks himself silly every single night. He gets picked up for drunk and disorderly more than anyone.”

  “I hate this, but I do feel sorry for him,” I said. “Is that weird? I mean, after what he did to me?”

  “Yeah, a little,” Nia said. “This guy trashed your name to the whole school, right? If I were in your shoes I’d be laughing my ass off at his misfortune. But I guess I’m more coldhearted than you are.”

  I took the last sip of my coffee and then sighed. I was already very tired. It had been a long day. I needed a good shower and a good nap.

  “Well, are you going to meet us at the bar tonight?”

  I sighed. I glanced over at Nia, who seemed eager to go. I groaned out loud, but found myself saying, “Yes. I’ll be there.”

  “Great!”

  Heather hugged me tightly and Lori gave me a high five. “Alright.”

  It was nice seeing my friends so happy, but I had a feeling that I would probably regret this.

  Chapter Six

  Tyler

  “Tyler!”

  My grandmother wrapped her arms around me and pulled me closely. It felt good to be embraced by her again. I had definitely been away from home for far too long. I missed seeing my grandmother, and though I had offered to have her the transport to visit me, my grandmother refused. She was not one for travelling and she felt that I should come home more to embrace my roots and not forget where I came from. She was always worried about me getting a swelled head. I tried to make sure she knew I would always diligently fight against my ego, but she just missed seeing me.

  “Hi grandma,” I said. I kissed her on the forehead and she let go of me. She still had a lot of strength left in her arms as that bear hug had just proven. Even though she was getting on in years, she would never admit it and to look at her you wouldn’t either. She was just as spry as she ever was, and it amazed me how much work she still did. My grandmother volunteered her time everywhere. “Idle hands are the Devil’s plaything,” she would always tell me. I was inclined to believe her. When I found myself with too much time on my hands, I tended to shirk off work, found it hard to get motivated again, drank too much, and went out clubbing too many nights a week. But I was always able to rope myself back within a week or two.

  I hated being away from work right now. I knew I had to find that balance, but I’ve always been an extremist. I have a real problem with moderation. It just doesn’t suit me.

  My grandmother led me into the living room where she had some tea and cookies laid out. She urged me to sit while she poured the tea. I grabbed a sugar cookie and started to nibble on it. I didn’t often indulge my sweet tooth, but it was refreshing at that moment as I bit into the cookie and felt my cheeks tingling with delight.

  “So, how have you been, Stranger?” My grandmother asked with a wide smile. She always said that to me when I came home and it had stopped being funny a long time ago. I humored her and smiled with it, though.

  “I’m good,” I replied.

  “How’s work?”

  “Good. Busy.”

  “Yeah, because you try to do it all yourself. I’m
not sure why you even have employees. You know, nobody ever got to the top all by themselves.”

  “True, but I got pretty far that way. I guess it’s tough for me to hand over the reins to someone else on occasion. It’s driving me nuts right now. How are things with you? You still playing bingo every Thursday with your friends?”

  “I am. They never beat me. I’m the champ. And my bowling team is set to have a great season as well.”

  “Good,” I replied. “That’s fantastic. So, the tree looks fantastic.” My grandmother always put up a really nice fake Christmas tree every single year. She’d used the same one for a good ten years now. She would add different decorations to it every single year as well, usually with some sort of a theme. I was trying to figure out what this year’s was.

  I glanced at the brightly lit tree in the corner and scanned it from top to bottom. The bottom was wrapped in purple lights and the top was wrapped in yellow ones. The middle section was an odd mixture of both woven between each other.

  My grandmother noticed me looking at it. “Ah, that is the coming together theme,” she said. “Or if you can think of a better name, I am all ears. But I have the yellow to signify hope and the purple to signify change. Then they come together to create a harmony of love and light that will lead towards positive changes in the coming year.”

  “I see,” I said. It was pretty nice. My grandmother was a very deep thinker. She’d read about every book on philosophy ever written, and she was also very much into the New Age movement, Astrology, Reiki, and she went to have her fortune told at least once a month. But she had to go to a different teller to see if everything was still aligning. Most of the time she swore it was.

  “Have you been aligning your chakras? I can sense an imbalance between them. Your energy shoots out from your body in every direction and fills the universe with negativity which it will give back to you tenfold.”

  “I know,” I said. “I have been. I’ve been meditating every day, I’ve been doing my best to align my chakras at least once a week, and I’ve never felt better. I know all too well the problem with having an imbalance.”

  I didn’t actually believe any of that hooey, but my grandmother did with all her heart and so I humored her. I think she knew deep down that I didn’t share her beliefs, but we kept up the ruse anyway.

  “Once a week is not enough,” she said. “You need to purge the energy every single day. It is important.”

  “I know,” I replied. “I’ve been too busy. But I’ll get on that.”

  I tended to have a bit more faith in some of this type of stuff a lot more than I used too, though. Mostly, it was because I was now a supernatural human being. I was a bear shifter. My grandmother knew nothing about this at all, of course. I wasn’t going to tell her. I figured she’d be fine with it, but I didn’t want to take that chance that it might change things between us, or that she would become obsessive about finding a cure that did not exist, or that she would start to hunt down evil shifters. I hated to admit it, but most of my kind tended to become corrupted by their newfound power. That was what happened to human beings who were suddenly much more than human. Power was a virus and it infected and spread through someone like wildfire.

  “I’ll bet,” she said. “I know sometimes you think I’m some harpy old woman, but I’ve been around the block a lot more times than you have. I just may have seen a thing or two you haven’t.”

  “Right,” I agreed with her. “So, have you been keeping tabs of Cameron and Drake?” I asked. Cameron and Drake were a few of my best friends from high school. Hell, they were my only friends at the time. They were both such smart guys, but they felt trapped in this town.

  “A little bit,” she said. “I’ve run into their parents on occasion. They are both doing fine. From what I know, they are both going to be here this year. They come and visit often. They weren’t run out of town the way you allowed yourself to be.”

  I sighed. “We’ve been through this. I was not run out of town. I left willingly. They didn’t have quite as hard of a time here as I did. This town did not fit well with me. I had to leave to find somewhere I do fit in.”

  “Well, that may be so, but you can take the time to come back here a lot more than you do. I know it and you do, too. I’m not saying I blame you for wanting to get away, to get out there and see the world, but this is your home and you shouldn’t let anyone make you feel like you don’t deserve to come back to it as often as you want to.”

  “I know,” I said. “I shouldn’t have let that happen. I’m different now. I do want to start coming home more often, but I am also pretty busy. It just took me several years to get to the point that the wounds of the past aren’t still burning like I threw salt on them when I even think about coming back to this place.”

  “I hate to know how much pain this place gave you,” she said. “I wished you’d told me more about what was going on when you were in high school. I could have helped.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think you could have. It was better for me to keep it to myself. If you’d tried to get involved, it would have only made it worse.”

  “Well, you have the last laugh now. You are so much more successful than all of them.”

  “I know, but it doesn’t make me feel any better on that front. I didn’t achieve the success to spite them; I did it because I wanted to achieve something for me.”

  “Well, you have. I can’t tell you how proud I am of you. Your folks would be proud, and so would be your grandfather.”

  I smiled as I tried to fight back the urge to cry.

  “I wish I could remember them better,” I said. “I mean, I think of my parents at least once a day, but it’s always the same memories. Like, why can’t I remember more? It is just still frames and certain memories that you have. That is hard to take. If I’d known back then that every single memory was so precious, I would have tried harder to file certain things away in my head. I’m afraid as time goes on that I’m going to forget more. Will that happen do you think?”

  I wiped a tear from my eye and shoved another cookie into my mouth.

  My grandmother leaned forward and smiled. “No. You may only be scratching the surface of what you remember. But every so often some random thing will spark access to another memory and you will recall that joyful moment, that time with them, and you will remember it fully. When that happens, embrace that moment.”

  She came over and wrapped me in a big hug once again. I tried to hold off the tears. Sometimes I think this is why I tried to stay away from home for so long. It filled me with pain at what I’d lost.

  My phone buzzed just then. I pulled it out of my pocket and saw that I had a text message. “Hey, man. It’s Cam. Long time, no see. Look, I heard you were coming back in town and me and Drake are both wanting to hang out. You should meet us at the bar tonight. It should be a blast.”

  I smiled. “How did he get my number?”

  My grandmother smiled and held up her hands. “I have no clue…”

  “Ok, well that’s a total lie,” I replied.

  “Sue me. Are you going to go? I think it would be good for you.”

  “I thought you and I would hang out here and just enjoy some time together.”

  “Nah. We’ve got all week. Besides, I go to bed way earlier than you. Why don’t you go out and have some fun?”

  “Yeah, I might as well,” I said.

  I’d been avoiding this for far too long. What was it going to hurt? Besides, the fun of seeing my good friends again was exciting. I wanted to pick their brains and see what they were up to, but of course I knew it would be a bit of an awkward reunion. I had ignored their requests on social media, and I had never given them my new phone number. So now, I would be walking back in like nothing had ever happened.

  It was going to be an interesting evening.

  “Chug it down!”

  Cameron yelled in my ear loudly as he pounded the table. I poured the large mug of beer down my throat an
d listened as my friends cheered me on. As the last drops fell out of the glass, I felt victorious. I slammed the mug down on the table and held my hands up in the air.

  Both Cameron and Drake high fived me hard.

  “Yeah, that’s our boy!” Drake yelled. “Man, this is just like old times. Remember those Friday nights hanging out and playing Magic? This is so fun.”

  I smiled. “Yeah, it’s been great.”

  It was, too. I wasn’t sure what to expect as I entered the bar that night, but the moment I did and I saw my two best friends sitting at a table in the corner drinking beers, it all clicked together. Any animosity between us for the way I had cut them out of my life was instantly gone. It was like we’d just spent a few days apart and now it was time to get ready for a new semester or something.

  Drake waved to the waitress for some more beer. I was amazed at how much Drake and Cameron both looked exactly the same. It had been over four years, and apparently I was the only one who had changed drastically.

  “Wow, man,” Cameron said. “I can’t believe that you are so rich and successful. It must be nice having anything you want. And any woman you want. Tell me, how much sex are you drowning in every single night?”

  I laughed. “Same old Cameron. You are such a horndog. But no, I’m not going out bedding different women all the time. I’ve had a few good relationships, but I’ve been single for a while now. I work too much to really do anything else.”

  “Ah, man. That is sad,” Drake said. “I was hoping to hear all about your debauchery lifestyle.”

  “There is none,” I said. “I’m pretty boring. I work and I do physical things. I’m pretty active. But I don’t have time for relationships, and one night stands have never been my deal. How about you guys? Special ladies in your lives?”

  “Well, I’m dating a great girl named, Sharon. I’ll probably end up marrying her,” Cameron said.

  “Wow, that’s amazing. I’m very happy for you,” I said.