Page 43 of Renaissance Bear

It was too early to go solve a mystery anyway. Alis slid her hand backward between their bodies and curled her fingers around Jon's cock, waking him all the way up with a, "Jesus Christ, yes,God," that turned a perfect morning into an even better one. They were still up and leaving the fairgrounds long before most employees were starting to arrive, and if they were both wearing yesterday's rumpled clothes, nobody in Renaissance batted an eye to have a man in a tunic and pirate pants and a woman in a kirtled dress show up for coffee and croissants at a local cafe.

"I had a thought," Alis said over the coffee. They'd taken a table outside, as far away from the other morning customers as they could. Jon lifted sleepy brown eyes to her, the sunlight brightening them to almost gold, and she had a lot of other thoughts, none of which were about the topic she'd meant to bring up. She ended up smiling foolishly at him. "Has anybody ever told you how incredibly handsome you are?"

"My mom, but I think she may be biased."

"Well, I'm not, and you are. You should be, I don't know. Modeling for a fireman's calendar, or something."

Jon laughed quietly and brought his coffee up to his face, mostly to inhale its scent, as far as she could tell. "I'm not a fireman."

"I hate to break it to you, man, but neither are most of those models." At his expression of genuine surprise, she giggled. "You didn't really think every firehouse in the country had a dozen impossibly hot, stacked men waiting around for their close-up, did you?"

"I kinda did!"

"Okay, well, let's pretend I haven't broken your illusions and go back to my thought that wasnotabout hot men."

"If we have to." He smiled over the coffee, which he still seemed to be intent on inhaling rather than drinking.

"I was thinking we could go out to the mayor's house and see if you could pick up a scent there. Just in case."

Jon regarded her thoughtfully. "Gus is a shifter, too, you know. The police officer from City Hall that we talked to."

"Implying he could have gone and sniffed around, but were the other people with him shifters, or would he have been constrained by having to pretend to be human while they searched? Also, he sent other people to the mayor's house, he didn't go himself."

"YouareMiss Marple."

"I'm much hotter than Miss Marple." Alis made a face. "At least, I hope I am. Can't I be, I don't know, Enola Holmes or something? Miss Fisher, maybe? Although Enola's too young," she muttered to herself. "And with Miss Fisher it depends on whether you go with the age the character is in the books, or the age of the actress who played her. The book character's the right age but honestly it made way more sense for her to be the age the actress was."

Jon blinked at her slowly over the coffee cup and Alis glared half-heartedly in return. "I take it you don't actually watch many murder mystery shows. Or read them."

"I'm afraid my murder mystery repertoire is limited to Miss Marple, Jessica Fletcher, and Sherlock Holmes. Oh, and Hercule Poirot, but I think having two Agatha Christie characters in there is cheating, or something. Who's Enola?" he asked, sounding legitimately fascinated.

"Sherlock's non-canonical younger sister, from a modern young adult series that was made into a series of television movies. They're kind of great, actually," Alis said, distracted. "Both the books and the movies. A lot of fun. Oh, and you should read the Murder Most Unladylike series, they're wonderful. And?—"

Jon was grinning now. A huge happy cat-in-the-sunshine kind of smile. Or bear in the sunshine, Alis guessed. "How do you know all this?"

"I teach third grade!"

"And memorize murder mysteries! Youwillsolve this whole mess!"

"Only if it's structured like an Arthur Conan Doyle book," Alis said wryly. "Anyway, yes, no? Is it a good idea or a bad one? Sniffing around, I mean."

"Oh! Good one. Although if he's got neighbors, or if the cops are there to keep an eye on the place, a bear sniffing around is not subtle. It'd help if I was a raccoon or something."

Alis couldn't help a laugh. "Raccoons are not nearly as sexy as bears. Stick with what works."

"See, why is that? Why are bears sexy and raccoons aren't? Why does that matter? Isn't being a shifter the sexy part?" They finished their coffee and croissants, which weren't nearly as good as yesterday's cinnamon rolls, and threw the remains away before heading for the truck.

"I have no answer for that," Alis admitted. "I guess it's that bears are big dangerous predators and we live in a society that tells us big dangerous men are hot?"

"I'mnot dangerous!"

Alis eyed him and Jon looked a bit abashed as they drove through town. "All right, I guess I could be. But I'm not one of those assholes who goes around snarling and pushing people around and treating women like crap, which seems to be a big part of the whole sexy dangerous guy thing."

"Did I mention society is broken? No, it's the Beauty and the Beast thing, the 'I can make him better,' although let me point out that Beauty does not make the Beast better. He does that himself, even in the earliest versions of the story. He wants to be worthy of her, so he works on himself. That's the only way people change, is if they want to."

"I feel I've stepped into a hot button topic."

Alis smirked. "I could go on about this one for hours, but I'll spare you."

---