A Bear's Journey (Shifter Country Bears Book 4) Read online

  Instead, he called Craig.

  “I found her,” he said without preamble.

  For a moment, all he could hear was chainsaws in the background. Then Craig answered.

  “Her?”

  Jasper exhaled hard. It felt good to have finally told his mate.

  “Of course I’m sure. She’s in Granite Valley.”

  Craig shouted something to someone, and Jasper couldn’t quite make it out.

  “No she isn’t. We looked there. We practically turned over every rock and dragged the river.”

  The chainsaw sounds were muted now.

  “You make it sound so creepy,” Jasper said.

  “She wasn’t there,” Craig said. “We checked, you know we did.”

  “You don’t have to tell me,” Jasper said, half rolling his eyes.

  Craig hated being proven wrong. Really hated it.

  “Her name’s Olivia,” he offered. He felt his stomach tie itself in knots at the mere mention of the girl’s name. Despite himself, he saw her green eyes and gold-red hair in front of his face.

  What would she look like with her hair down? He wondered. What would she look like on her back, moaning—

  “Olivia,” said Craig. Jasper could picture his mate, sitting in his truck with his crew outside, staring ahead and saying the name to himself, over and over. “Where is she?”

  “I told you, she’s here.”

  “Is she there with you?”

  Jasper could practically see the other man stop in his tracks.

  “No,” said Jasper. “She kind of ran away from me, actually.”

  Craig growled into the phone.

  “We’re not wrong about her,” he said.

  “She was feral,” Jasper said.

  This was met with silence on the line, thought Jasper could hear Craig’s steps crunching over the leaves on the ground, as his mate considered this information.

  “Really feral,” he went on.

  “So?”

  Jasper swallowed. He felt like he wasn’t conveying the gravity of the situation very well over the phone.

  “Ten years feral.”

  Craig grunted. Jasper sat on an overstuffed leather couch, trying to look like a guy just having a phone conversation, not someone whose heart was desperately trying to escape his chest.

  “Let’s go find her,” Craig said. “You got that fancy phone on you? Google her.”

  “I’m not googling her in the middle of a donor event.”

  “Do you want her or not?”

  Jasper pressed one hand to his temple, trying not to growl in polite company. Two humans walked through the lobby, toward the elevators, and he nodded at them.

  “She’s not going to disappear overnight, Craig,” he said. “I think we need to talk about this first. There’s more.”

  “She disappeared before.”

  “That was different.”

  Jasper heard a car door open and seconds later, shut. Suddenly the background noise on Craig’s end was quieter.

  Jasper waited for Craig’s irritation to run its course.

  “Where was she?” Craig finally asked.

  “Sitting on a bench, eating lunch,” Jasper said, and then smiled. “I had these two old ladies with me, and I was so blown away that I almost didn’t say anything.”

  “What did she do?”

  She covered her mouth and closed her eyes. I think she might have had a panic attack, actually, Jasper thought.

  “Nothing, really,” he said.

  They’d talk about it later.

  “I’m heading back into town,” Craig said. “You?”

  “I think these ladies are getting tanked on martinis,” Jasper said. On cue, he heard a shriek of laughter from the bar. “I’ll probably call their drivers for them and head out. Want to get a drink at the usual?”

  “Sounds good,” Craig said, and Jasper heard the rumble of his truck engine starting up. “See you in thirty.”

  You didn’t tell him about the wolves, Jasper thought as the phone line went dead.

  I didn’t want to do it over the phone, he told himself.

  He stood, straightened his shirt, and walked back into the bar, a smile plastered on his face. When he walked through the door, both women squealed, and he noticed that they were each on a second martini.

  “Sorry about that,” he said. “Where were we?”

  Twenty minutes later, as promised, Jasper called Lois and Alice’s drivers, and they were both heading back to their mansions in the mountains overlooking Granite Valley. If he’d done his job, they’d be breaking out their checkbooks to donate to his dad’s campaign again. It had been a long twenty minutes, listening to gossip while all he wanted to do was shout I FOUND HER from the rooftops.

  Most days, Jasper liked this job. Sure, lots of people were quick to scream nepotism when they found out that he worked for his dad, but it was a hard job, and he was good at it. He’d grown up with a politician, a politician’s wife, and a Papa who’d gotten very good at deflecting the truth by the time his parents came out of the triad closet.

  Of course he was good at talking to rich people and convincing them that what he had to say was what they wanted to hear.

  Heart hammering, he pushed the door to the Bear’s Den open and was immediately greeted by the slight smell of stale beer, the red lights that surrounded the bar, and hair metal on the jukebox.

  Exactly where I want to be, he thought, pulling his button-down shirt out of his pants as he walked, undoing the first button as he did.

  Craig was already there, drinking a beer, and he gave his mate a quick on-the-lips kiss before sitting down next to him.

  “If we’re not going to go out and grab her right now, at least tell me what’s going on,” he said dryly.

  “She was feral,” Jasper said.

  “You told me that part,” Craig said, with a shrug.

  The bartender slid a paper coaster in front of Jasper. “Whacha want?” he asked. Dave the bartender was a paunchy human with a long, raggedy beard, best known for getting surprisingly good beers for a dive bar, and also for ruling the jukebox with an iron fist.

  “Anything new?” asked Jasper.

  “Got that fancy IPA from Russian River,” Dave said.

  Jasper’s eyebrows went up.

  “I’ll take it.”

  Dave pointed at Craig, whose beer was near the bottom.

  “Another Coors?”

  “You got it.”

  Dave left, and Craig gave Jasper a look.

  “So I like fancy beer,” Jasper said, summing up a conversation they’d had a thousand times.

  “She was feral,” Craig said, getting them back on track.

  “Right,” said Jasper, as Dave slid him the beer. “Really feral. Ten years feral.”

  “That is a long time,” said Craig. “Surprised she came out of it.”

  “She might have had to,” said Jasper, spinning the beer glass slowly between his fingers.

  Craig frowned.

  “There’s a rumor that she killed the two wolves.”

  Craig’s eyebrows shot up.

  “Shit,” he said.

  Shit is right, thought Jasper.

  He’d known about the dead wolves, of course. It made the front page of almost every paper in Cascadia when it happened, but in the total absence of evidence — and the complete unwillingness of the wolf pack to cooperate with the investigation — nothing had really happened.

  The humans had decided that a real bear killed the wolves. Shifters tended to think that those two wolves had deserved it. That didn’t mean that they’d forgotten, though.

  “No one’s proven it, obviously,” Jasper went on.

  He didn’t say, no one really has to. The pieces all fit into place perfectly if Olivia had done it while feral. It sounded to him like all of Granite Valley had already decided that the girl did it.

  “Well, fuck ‘em,” said Craig. “We can deal with all that later. Where is she?” />
  Jasper exhaled loudly.

  “That’s kind of the other thing,” he said. “I think she works at the library, but she sort of... ran away from me.”

  Craig gave his mate a long look that that hovered somewhere between disbelief and irritation.

  “What did you do?” he asked.

  “I gave her book back,” Jasper said. “Well, I tried.”

  “What do you mean, ran away from you?” Craig asked, his eyes narrowing.

  “Literally,” said Jasper. He took a long drink of his beer, the bitter liquid warming his throat. “I mean, the old ladies said something, I turned to answer them, and when I turned back, she was running.”

  “Next time we’ll try a football play,” Craig said, his eyes crinkling at the corners with a smile. “You say something polite, she runs, and then I pop out of the bushes and tackle her. Done.”

  Jasper laughed.

  “You’re a caveman,” he said.

  “You love it.”

  Craig and Jasper kissed, Craig’s beard tickling Jasper’s clean-shaven face. When they pulled apart, Jasper could see the muscles in Craig’s forearms bunching and jumping as he messed with his beer glass.

  “It’s driving me nuts to not get out there and track her down,” Craig admitted. “I just want to go house to house and rip the doors off the frames until we find her and...”

  His voice trailed off and he looked around the small bar, noticing Dave’s gaze.

  “I won’t really do it,” he said, raising his glass.

  Dave gave him a thumbs up.

  Jasper pulled the worn, ratty copy of A Wrinkle in Time from his inside jacket pocket and looked at it, rubbing his fingers gently over the cover.

  Craig took it from him, his thick fingers carefully turning the soft, time-worn pages.

  “Don’t you have a copy of this?” he asked.

  “It’s at my parents’ house.”

  Craig studied the back, taking a sip of his beer as he read.

  “I think I read this when I was a kid,” he said. “Good book.”

  Jasper nodded.

  “Let’s return it,” he said. “You working tomorrow?”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Me either.”

  Chapter Three

  Olivia

  Olivia drove around for hours, slowly losing herself on the twisting mountain roads of Granite County. Without realizing it, she drove to her other favorite place: a picnic area up high in the mountains, a quick walk from the road.

  The air was getting chilly, and up here all the smells of autumn were even more intense, but she walked in her practical shoes and her librarian-esque cardigan to a picnic table and laid down on it, looking at the sky between the massive evergreen trees.

  She closed her eyes as she felt the cool breeze across her face.

  I’m glad I’m human, she thought. I’ve got a house to go to with a fireplace and peanut butter sandwiches. No sleeping all day and then digging up grubs.

  Olivia took a few more deep breaths, then let herself think about the guy from earlier. Jasper, he’d said his name was. Even thinking about him made her stomach feel like it was turning in on itself. When she’d run, she’d reverted to pure instinct.

  For the past ten years, anything that made her feel that much had been danger, but now, alone in the mountains, she was completely positive that Jasper was anything but.

  Your therapist said you might be ready to form some new bonds, she thought.

  She thought of Jasper again, of running her nails down his bare back as he grunted into her neck, both of them sweaty.

  Alone in the forest, she blushed.

  I don’t think she meant that kind of bond, she reminded herself. I think she meant, like, new friends.

  Not that it mattered. The two older women he’d been with — probably his mom, she guessed, and an aunt or something? — had definitely known who she was, and she was certain that by now, Jasper was up-to-date on all things Olivia Lessing and wouldn’t want to have anything to do with her.

  After all, most of the people in Granite Valley didn’t. She wasn’t sure that she could blame them, especially since there were days that she barely wanted to have anything to do with herself. What kind of person couldn’t even remember if they’d killed two people?

  Some sort of maniac.

  Olivia stared into the sky for a while, repeating marshmallows, indoor plumbing to herself, and after a while, she pulled out her phone to check the time.

  Even though she didn’t have signal, she somehow had a voicemail from her mom. Olivia wasn’t surprised; in fact, it almost made sense that her mother could get a message through without a signal, just on pure force of will.

  I ought to drive down the mountain so I can check it, she thought to herself. She took another few deep breaths, hopped off the table, and went back to her car.

  She checked the voicemail as soon as she got off the mountain.

  “Hi, sweetie, it’s your mother! I’m just calling to remind you about the baby shower this afternoon, over at your cousin Ash and Hunter’s house. I thought you could wear that cute blue dress that we got a week or two ago when the Macy’s in Redding had that big sale, remember? Anyway, it’s at six and I promised everyone I’d bring my famous meatballs, so don’t be late, okay, honey? Also let me know how everything went at the library today, I’m so proud of you for taking the initiative and getting that job. Call me back! See you soon! Love you!”

  Olivia smiled. When she was a teenager, a voicemail like that would have made her furious — Mom, jeez, I can dress myself! — but as a formerly feral twenty-seven, she appreciated it more than anything. Yeah, her mom was kind of overbearing sometimes, but it was still a minor miracle that Olivia remembered that humans wore clothing some days.

  She’d completely forgotten about the baby shower, though. Or she’d forgotten that it was today, in only a couple of hours, and heavy dread started dragging on her heart.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t like babies, or her cousins and their mate. She just knew that there would be tons of people at the shower, plenty she didn’t know, and that lots of them would already have opinions about her.

  Olivia sighed and drove home, and tiny part of her brain thinking, I never had to go to a baby shower as a bear.

  Flush toilets, she reminded herself. Chocolate chip cookies. Beds.

  A few hours later, she stood off to the side at Ash, Hunter, and Cora’s house. The event seemed more like a cocktail party than a baby shower. At least there were no awkward games and no diaper cake, she thought.

  She’d spent the intervening hours Googling baby shower, and everything she’d found had made her a little nervous.

  “So, how’s the library?” asked Quinn, her other cousins’ mate.

  “I like it,” Olivia said, truthfully. “There’s a lot of repetition, and it’s mostly pretty soothing. It’s really satisfying to just put things where they belong all day.”

  Quinn nodded, then took another sip of her cocktail. The amethyst on her ring finger sparkled in the light, and Olivia watched it.

  I missed so much, she thought with a pang. They all found mates, even my brother.

  Kade was there somewhere, probably being grumpy in a corner. He wasn’t a people person, but he’d come out for his cousins, who were more like brothers.

  “Do you get to read a lot?” Quinn asked.

  “Only if I sneak off to do it,” Olivia said. “Which I do. Sometimes.”

  Quinn smiled. She didn’t quite look relaxed, but she looked like she was getting there. Olivia had never directly asked her about her life story, but she knew that she’d grown up in an anti-shifter group.

  “How’s the dating website?” Olivia asked.

  Quinn laughed.

  “It’s going really well, actually,” Quinn said. She did web design. “We just expanded again. An office is going up out in Cumberland in the next few months, and they’re going to start running in-person dating events on
the east coast.”

  “That’s great,” Olivia said.

  “If you ever want a subscription, I can hook you up for free,” Quinn said with a wink. “I mean, no rush, none at all, just offering. If you ever want.”

  She looked out over the crowd again, and Olivia thought she saw the other girl shrink back against the wall, just a little.

  “God knows I’m the last person who’d pressure you,” Quinn muttered.

  As if on cue, a woman with gray hair and a champagne flute in her hand came up to Quinn and put her hand on the girl’s arm.

  “I heard your good news!” she exclaimed, then, without asking, lifted Quinn’s ring hand into the air. “Oh, goodness, it’s beautiful!”

  “Thank you,” Quinn said.

  “Are we going to be throwing you a party like this any time soon?” the woman asked with a huge wink.

  Quinn threw Olivia a look, and Olivia had to fight down a smile.

  “We’re taking life one step at a time,” Quinn said very politely, and Olivia moved away. She felt a little bad that she was leaving Quinn alone with the vultures, but Quinn seemed to be able to handle herself.

  Instead, Olivia walked back toward the snack table for some more of those goat-cheese-and-smoked salmon pastries. In the past few months, Cora — the pregnant one — had suddenly discovered a near-insane love of baking, and had baked up an absolute storm for this party.

  Olivia didn’t mind. She also didn’t mind sitting around in Cora, Ash, and Hunter’s kitchen taste-testing the stuff.

  A few people stared as she walked past, and she ignored them as well as she could.

  It wasn’t enough.

  “That’s her,” whispered one woman. Olivia didn’t turn and look.

  “The one that killed those wolves?” a man’s voice said.

  “Yeah,” the woman said. “Can you believe they’d invite her to a baby shower, of all things?”

  “She should be locked away somewhere,” the man’s voice said.

  Walk on past, Olivia told herself, feeling the steel in her spine. Just walk on past.

  “Animal,” the woman said.

  Olivia whirled and closed the distance between them in moments, reveling in the sudden fear on the woman’s face.