Bearing Your Burden (BBW Shifter Erotic Romance)

  BEARING YOUR BURDEN

  Violet Winters

  Bryan is a bear shifter who has had enough suffering in his forty years to last him ten lifetimes. He's retreated to his isolated mountain cabin and cut himself off from humanity, and all the pain they bring.

  So the last thing he needs is Lizbeth – the busty, sassy daughter of a long estranged friend – barging into his life and making a complete nuisance of herself.

  Or at least, that's how he sees it. Lizbeth has... other ideas.

  As things heat up between them, and he finds himself unable to draw his eyes away from those warm, luscious curves, Bryan can't stop himself from thinking:

  Maybe he's found someone to reignite the lustful passions he thought long-extinguished...

  And maybe, just maybe... he's found a mate for life...

  COPYRIGHT 2015

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, places, dialogue, and everything else are products of the author's imagination.

  Any resemblance to people or events, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  ...except for that bit about Donald Trump. That was totally on purpose.

  DISCLAIMER:

  All characters engaged in sexual, quasi-sexual, pseudo-sexual, or meta-sexual relations in this work are over 18 years of age, 100% consenting, not blood related, 100% human (at the time of copulation), and generally cool and snazzy individuals, withal.

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  At any rate – on to our feature presentation!

  Bryan Knudsen paced up and down the length of the living room. His great, gnarled hands were balled into fists, his wide brow creased in worry, his bare feet pounding on the floorboards.

  He'd laid those floorboards himself – cut each one of them out of living wood, honed them into long, solid perfection, and laid them out into the homely harmony of a cozy cabin in the remote wilderness.

  This was the only place on earth that was truly his. The only place he could be alone without feeling lonely, where he could avoid prying eyes, venomous tongues, and steel bars. The only place, in fact, where he could truly trust the floor to not suddenly open up and swallow him.

  But at this precise moment, this cabin wasn't quite the place of refuge it normally was for Bryan. Something had breached his defenses, and disturbed the peace and quiet of his mountain retreat.

  That something was 5-foot-4, big, busty, and called herself Lizbeth.

  Bryan rounded on her, for what seemed like the umpteenth time.

  “I don't care how long you've been on the road today. I don't care how hard it was to find me. I made it hard to find me for a reason! I want to be left alone!”

  All Lizbeth did in response was shift her weight on the wooden chair she was sitting on, and cock her head to one side. She leaned her cheek on one finger, creating a lovely dimple in the full, soft flesh.

  “Oh come on, Bryan... Don't be that way. At least let me stay the night before trying to send me away...”

  The powerful man in front of her, chest almost bursting from the seams of his roughspun shirt, stopped pacing again, and looked at her suspiciously.

  “If I let you spend the night here, you promise to go away in the morning?”

  “Of course not. But you're certainly welcome to try to convince me.” She smiled sweetly at him, and cocked her head playfully to the other side. “I find I'm easiest to convince after a big, cooked breakfast, so I hope you've done some shopping...”

  Bryan roared with frustration. He'd spent too long in the woods to be able to bandy about words with a slick, smart city girl like her.

  “Look, Mr. Knudsen – would you prefer it if I called you that? – I know you think that I'm just playing around with you... and, well, alright, I guess I am a little... but I wouldn't have come all the way here to the butt-end of nowhere if I wasn't serious. I really have nowhere else to go...”

  Bryan – though perhaps he'd prefer it if I called him Mr. Knudsen – hacked out a low laugh.

  “You really expect me to believe that the only place you could run away to is the cabin of a man you haven't seen in what, 8, 9 years? Don't you have any friends, family?”

  “None that I can trust, or that could keep me safe even if I did.”

  “And what makes you think you can trust me?”

  She just smiled again, coyly, bringing out the sparkle in her dark, brown eyes.

  “Don't you know it's rude to ask what a girl thinks of you – at least before the third date?”

  He wanted to bellow, and break something. Instead, he changed the subject.

  “Well... what makes you think this place is safe?”

  “You seemed to think so, or else you wouldn't have come here yourself.”

  “That's different.”

  “You're right. It is different. When you came here, you were alone. But now that I've come here, there'll be two of us – to help each other out, and keep each other from going crazy.”

  “I... you...”

  There was no way around this girl. She had a clever-sounding answer for everything, even if she was totally wrong, in ways she couldn't even imagine...

  All of a sudden, Bryan found he couldn't look at her any longer. Something in the way she looked at him – half-playful, half-entreating – and something in the innocent yet womanly quirk to her lips made him need to put some space between them, to clear his head.

  He turned his back to her, and walked over to the window, propping himself up against the frame, and looking out over wooded ravines and mountain lakes that seemed to stretch on forever.

  He drew some solace from that sight, like he always did, and managed to distract himself from his worries, for a short while. A few moments later, however, he was brought straight back to them, by the sound of a voice behind him.

  It was different to any time he had heard it today... small, unsure, vulnerable.

  “My... my father is going to marry me off.”

  She said the next words hurriedly, nervously.

  “I– I know it sounds ridiculous, in this day and age, but it's for all these weird legal reasons. He's embroiled in a bunch of cases, and even if he wins them, his reputation's pretty much ruined. He can't run the lab himself anymore, so the only way for him to maintain control of it is if I marry his assistant, and we inherit his shares... He said it doesn't have to be a real marriage; that we can live apart, and I can see other boys, but... but...”

  Her voice faltered for a moment, but she continued after a deep breath.

  “It's just... I don't want to be a puppet in his games anymore. I don't want to spend my life a prisoner to his experiments and his secrets. I know he's not an evil man, not really... but I know he puts his work ahead of everything, and has hurt a lot of people in the process. And I don't want to be a part of that. I mean... he must have hurt you, or else you wouldn't have left like you d–”

  “What would you know about that?!! What makes you think you can understand anything about me...”

  Bryan's massive chest heaved with ill-repressed fury, and his eyes stared do
wn at her like thunderheads. When he moved towards her, she thought – for the briefest of seconds – that he was going to hit her.

  She closed her eyes, reflexively.

  But the next second, he was past her – taking his long, heavy coat from the wall and making for the front door, throwing these words over his shoulder at her as he did so:

  “It seems I can't bring myself to kick you out, but there's no reason I have to stay here too. I might not come back for a day, or a month. But when I do, I want to see you gone.”

  The words sounded somewhat childish even to his ears. But he couldn't think of anything else to do.

  He had to admit that he wasn't totally unmoved by her plight. What she described sounded exactly like the kind of thing her father would do – and if Bryan knew anything about him, it's that the only way to stop him cajoling and manipulating you into doing what he wants is not have any contact with him at all.

  And for that matter, it's not as if he was totally unmoved by... well, her. Before he had known it, Lizbeth's infuriating stubbornness and playful jabs had become... a strange kind of fun.

  But he couldn't let her stay here... for her sake.

  He reached for the door, and the freedom of the forest.

  “Bryan, I... I know your secret.”

  Those words stopped him dead in his tracks, his hand inches from the doorknob.

  He turned around slowly, with what felt like all the weight of the world pressing down on him.

  “What... did you say?”

  Lizbeth had stood up, allowing her curves to stand out in more stark relief: the bulging fullness of her breasts, to the soft, inviting inward sweep of her waist, and down to the child-birthing breadth of her hips.

  Not that Bryan was focused on that, in this exact moment... he was too busy staring into her eyes, and his own murky past.

  “I... I saw you and dad arguing, the night you left...

  “I'd heard raised voices from the courtyard, and I wouldn't have gone down normally, because dad had always said I should never leave the living quarters at night... but I thought I recognized your voice, and you sounded so... sad... so I had to go and check, because... well, just because.

  “When I got downstairs, I saw you were trying to leave, and my dad was trying to stop you, but he's so much smaller than you, so there's no way he could have... so he brought down the shutters, locking you in...

  “That's when... that's when...”

  He knew what she was going to say before she said it. He remembered that night as though it were yesterday. If he had known she had been watching, he might well have just let her father have his way, and keep him as an oversized guinea pig forever...

  “That's when... you transformed. It was dark, and you moved so fast, so I couldn't see very well... But I heard you roar, and saw the hole you tore through the gate.

  “I don't know exactly what my father thought he could find out from you, or what he tried to do that would make you stop coming to see us. But I know what you are.

  “You're... you're a shifter, aren't you Bryan?”

  Even though he had known those words were coming, actually hearing them made him furious in a way he didn't think was possible. He felt the blood rise up to cloud his eyes, and the bile rise to the back of his throat. He had been discovered again. He would be rejected, hated... or, even worse, pitied.

  Dimly, he realized that the reason he was so consumed with rage was that, somewhere deep inside, he had entertained the idea that he might actually be able to live with this girl, to finally have a companion, a friend.

  That stupid dream had been crushed as soon as she had said those words. There was no way a sweet, innocent – if totally infuriating – girl like her could ever live with a monster like him.

  “You... knew that already? You knew I was a shifter?”

  “...Bryan? I'm sorry if you didn't want me to know, but I do, and I just thought... someone to sha–”

  “You came all the way here, alone in the woods with a man you barely know, with no one around for miles... knowing I was a shifter?!”

  He was advancing on her, menacingly. She retreated a step, involuntarily.

  She was scared – scared stiff – but even more than that, filled with a kind of panic, worried that he'd misunderstood, that she'd hurt him somehow.

  “Bryan, you... you're not someone I barely know. I know you...”

  “Why do you keep saying that?! How do you think you can know? How on earth do you think you can know... what it's like... to be like THIS?!!”

  There was a tearing sound, like someone had ripped a slit through the fabric of space. It was followed by a great rumbling, like an avalanche just out of your field of vision.

  And Bryan started to change.

  He opened his mouth, as if to scream, but instead, his teeth swelled and lengthened, like the fingers on his massive hand. His snout grew out to make room for them, then his head bulged outwards, doubling in size in a second.

  With a whoosh, like a stiff autumn breeze through long grasses, hair started to sprout, from his forehead, to his neck, and all the way down him.

  Bryan's clothes took the strain for a suspended moment, before shattering into fragments, as his fur-covered arms ballooned in hard muscle, and his legs doubled in girth. He grew wider, and thicker, until he filled the whole of Lizbeth's vision, and the crown of his head grazed the high rafters.

  Over Lizbeth towered the overwhelming presence of a monolithic bear. Its fur was as black as night, golden eyes radiating rage and pain. The claws on its monumental paws could skewer her in an instant.

  Some time later, what seemed like an eternity later, she remembered the basics of how to breathe.

  ///\

  \///

  What have I done...?

  Bryan stared at the little woman down below him, and finally, the self-hatred and frustration in him turned more into shame and regret, rather than anger.

  What had possessed him to do this to her? It was all over from the moment she said she knew he was a shifter, but this? From this, she might never recover...

  It dawned on him that he had done it to hurt her... to hurt her in the only way he could (for there was nothing in the world that could have made him strike her)... for having hurt him. For having given him hope, which she then cruelly took away from him along with the secrecy with which he shrouded his power. He had, for a few, brief minutes, allowed himself a dream he had repressed for so many years – that he could actually live with people... no, a person... again.

  But in the end, something like this would have happened. She would have caught a glimpse of it, and recoiled in horror. Or, even if she didn't... eventually, someone else might discover, and while their words or actions couldn't harm him anymore, they could harm her. So, it never could have worked. And so, he ruined it himself, before it even started...

  And he did so in the worst possible way... to punish her, because she had dared to make him dream... and more than anything else, to punish himself, because he had been stupid enough to let her.

  And now it was too late.

  He went down on all fours, so that his eyes were level with hers.

  In a deep, impossible voice – more landslide than growl – he spoke.

  “Is this what you think you knew, girl? Is this what you want to live with?!”

  \///

  ///\

  Lizbeth's mind was blank, her vision clouded in fear and blood pounding in her ears.

  All the breath had been squeezed out of her, and she only remained standing because she had backed herself into the table, and gripped at its sides.

  She had thought she would have been ready for something like this. She'd told herself she'd seen it before. But it was one thing to “see” it from afar, in the pitch black of night, for a second... and have it happen right in front of her now.

  She didn't scream and run out of the house... simply because she couldn't. She would have only been able to whimper, and f
all over. As it was, all she could do was stay rooted there, in horror...

  It was his eyes that snapped her out of it. She had been staring into his massive maw, and the long, thick, glistening teeth within it, as he spoke, and trying to push away fearful visions of it snapping her neck in two. She stared straight into the cold, uncaring law of nature, in all its bestial brutality.

  But when she flicked her glance upwards a moment – perhaps only to faint – she saw something else.

  Unmistakable pain, and sorrow, and loneliness. The things she'd seen in Bryan every time he'd come to see her and her father, all those years ago... every time he'd played with her, and given her advice, and not tried to judge or shame her.