A Taste of Honeybear Wine (BBW Bear Shifter Standalone Romance Novel) (Bearfield Book 2) Read Online Free PDF Page B

disproportionately happy. Going through his things was an amazing treasure hunt. She still hadn’t found the lockbox her mother demanded, but she’d found so much else. Vintage jazz records. A signed photo of Elvis and Grandpa Jackson shaking hands. A medal of honor from World War II. He’d lived an amazing life, for a while at least. Then something had changed for him and he’d been too scared to leave his home. Alison didn’t know what it was—it wasn’t like the man had left a journal lying about with ominous passages detailing his descent into madness—but something had happened to her grandfather. She was sure of it. There were signs of it in his things, some date, twenty-ish years ago, when he went from being a cranky old man to being a recluse. While searching his home, Alison had come across receipts—vast boxes of receipts. Given enough time she knew she could piece together a story from them, a timeline of his activities, but she didn’t have time.  
    If she didn’t find her mother’s lockbox, she’d be turned out of the house. Her mother would hire a firm to come in and clean it and anything that wasn’t what she was after would be junked or sold off. And then the house would be sold off. Her mother would be richer, but all of this sense of history, of family, would be gone. Her grandfather was her people. He was her blood. Knowing him and the history he’d carved for himself in Bearfield was a way to know herself better.  
    After opening what felt like every door on the upper floor twice, Alison finally found the bathroom. It was neater than the rest of the house, though still crammed full of stuff. It was just that the stuff in the bathroom was all bathroom-related, so it had a more organized approach to mess. There were massive piles of toilet paper rolls, stacks of clean towels covered in cat hair, and enough medical supplies to treat an army.
    “Wow,” Michael said when he saw the extent of her grandfather’s overstocking habit. “Was your grandpa expecting the apocalypse? I’ve seen hospitals with fewer boxes of bandages.”
    Alison turned to the man. Somehow she’d forgotten he was naked, in the frustration of trying to find her way through the maze of her grandfather’s house. But here in the bathroom, with the fluorescent lights casting their harsh glare on every surface, she had no choice but to confront Michael’s body head on. She tried hard not to look down, to stare at his long thick dangling—no, better not to look.  
    Maybe just one look?  
    Just one look to get it out of her system? Yes, that was surely the way to go. She’d seen naked bodies before. She’d even thought Drew’s physique impressive at one point, before she realized what a garbage soul he had beneath his gym-toned muscles. But Michael’s body was different. He didn’t have that puffy gym rat figure that looked like at any moment it was going to deflate noisily and messily. No, he had a body that looked earned through years of lifting heavy things because he needed to. Maybe the guy lifted cars for a living? Or threw houses around? Maybe he wrestled bears? Alison found her eyes drawn to the clean lines of muscle that defined Michael’s body. He had a light smattering of hair on his chest and legs, and a thick black thatch surrounding the part she was trying desperately not to think about. Because whenever she did think about it—that overly large organ between his legs—she could feel the heat in her body rise to threatening levels. If she thought about it too much, the heat would win and she’d have to reach out and touch it and that would not be good. No guy who looked like Michael would want anything to do with her. She was sure of that.  
    Alison closed her eyes and took a deep breath. The man smelled maddeningly good, like eucalyptus and vanilla and honest sweat, with just a touch of gunpowder from where she’d shot him at point blank range with her grandfather’s shotgun.
    Right. The