A Bear's Protection Read online

  Ash could see Cora chewing on her nails through her side view mirror.

  Then, as he watched, another vehicle appeared in the distance, coming from behind them, and Cora’s face changed. She took her finger out of her mouth slowly, her eyes never leaving the car in her mirror, and she seemed to almost shrink into her headrest, her face going pale.

  The vehicle, a green sedan, just drove on past.

  As soon as she saw the back of it, Cora propped one elbow against the open window of her car, squeezing the bridge of her nose between her thumb and forefinger again.

  Ash frowned, and the low-level alarm that had been going off in his head all along got stronger. As both a sheriff’s deputy and a grizzly shifter, he had an excellent sense for danger.

  And he was certain that Cora was in danger of some kind.

  He straightened his tie and got out of the car.

  Chapter Three

  Cora

  Cora sat in the car, feeling like an idiot. She tried to breathe deeply, her eyes closed, but the feeling of panic just wouldn’t subside.

  She’d panicked when the cop pulled her over. The moment the lights went off behind her, she was completely and totally convinced that it was Neil, who’d somehow gotten a sheriff’s car.

  Then, to make matters worse, as soon as she’d pulled over she’d jumped out of the car, determined that if she was going to die, she was at least going to try to do something about it.

  Instead of Neil, her stalker, she’d been standing in front of the hottest man she’d ever seen in real life. He had dark brown hair, sideburns, and light blue eyes. Even at a distance, he towered over her, and his officer’s uniform didn’t hide his thick, sturdy muscles even a little bit.

  Besides, Cora had always liked a man in uniform.

  And then, just as she was chastising herself in the car, she’d seen that car. That car that she was absolutely, completely positive was Neil’s, closing in on her while she was a sitting duck on the side of the highway.

  Of course it hadn’t been. Neil didn’t know that she’d moved and not left a forwarding address. There was no way he could follow her all the way to Cascadia, clear across the country, was there?

  You’re safe now, she told herself. She could see the officer, sitting in his car, doing something or other — probably checking that she wasn’t on the run or something.

  Safe and in the land of sexy police officers.

  She smiled, just a little, and then something occurred to her.

  I bet he’s a shifter, she thought, and a little thrill went through her.

  She’d never really met a shifter before — at least, not that she’d known. When they first revealed themselves, about twenty years ago, Cora had only been five, but she remembered pointing at people on the street and asking her parents whether that man or that lady was a shifter.

  After all, shifters tended to have certain physical characteristics, but it was still impossible to really tell. But Officer Sexy, as Cora had dubbed him, was tall, dark, and wide — textbook grizzly shifter.

  I hope I didn’t offend him or something, she thought. He was taking kind of a long time back there, and she started to worry. What if he’d found all her restraining orders against Neil? They couldn’t prevent her from moving to Cascadia for being a nuisance, could they?

  Then, finally, he got out of his car, adjusted his collar, and walked back toward her.

  Cora started to sweat, just a little. Now that she was okay, the reality of getting a traffic ticket was sinking in. She hadn’t even been in the state for fifteen minutes, and she was already breaking the law.

  Maybe this whole thing is off to a bad start, she thought, watching Officer Sexy come even with her trunk. I could move somewhere else, after all. Even though my job is here.

  “You’re clean,” the officer said.

  Cora looked up at him, and tried not to act weird. He was just so fucking handsome, and she always got nervous around really handsome men, and then she got weird.

  “And here I thought I was pretty dirty,” she said.

  Goddammit, she thought. Why can’t I just be normal?

  The officer’s eyebrows went up, just slightly.

  “Is there something else I should know?” he asked. He was still holding her license and registration in his hand, just outside her car.

  “No, no, not at all,” she said, wishing she hadn’t made that idiotic joke. “Sorry.”

  He handed her paperwork back, and watched disapprovingly as she shoved it all into her glovebox, then crammed her glovebox closed.

  She waited for him to hand her a ticket for a couple hundred dollars, squinting up at his backlit figure.

  Instead, he leaned his hands against her open window, peering into her car.

  “I’m just going to give you a warning this time,” he told her.

  Cora’s eyes went wide.

  “Really?” she said, excitedly.

  He smiled, and she melted a little bit inside. Not only was he devastatingly sexy, he had one of those warm, sincere smiles. Somehow, he made Cora feel like she was exactly at home, even here, in this strange place.

  “Really,” he said, seeming amused at her. “You were going at least twenty-five over, so I really shouldn’t, but a ticket seems like a terrible way to welcome you to our fair state.”

  He said “our” fair state, Cora thought. He’s definitely a shifter, right?

  “Thank you so much,” she said. “I promise I’ll never speed again.”

  “I don’t believe you,” he said, grinning that same grin. “But next time you get pulled over, just don’t tell them I let you off, all right?”

  Then he winked at her.

  Cora’s mouth went dry.

  “Of course not,” she said, struggling to keep her composure.

  Then he paused, looking at her for a moment, like he had something else to say but wasn’t sure how to get it out.

  “What part of Cascadia are you moving to?” he asked.

  “Granite Valley,” she said. “I just got a job there.”

  He nodded. Then, his face went serious.

  “Are you sure that you’re not in any trouble?” he asked, his blue eyes piercing straight through her.

  Cora had the wild, unbidden urge to leap from her car and bury herself in his thick, burly arms. She was totally certain that someone like Officer Sexy could protect her from a scumbag like Neil with one arm tied behind his back.

  It wasn’t his problem, though, and she could hardly make herself the problem of someone she’d just met.

  “Not at all,” she said, forcing a smile.

  His eyes narrowed for just a moment, and then he reached into his pocket.

  “Just in case,” he said, slowly, “I’m going to give you my card.”

  He wrote something on the back.

  “My cell number,” he said. “Call me. Any time. Day or night. It doesn’t matter.”

  He handed her the card, and Cora looked up into his eyes.

  For a moment, she was struck by the intensity of his gaze — he wasn’t kidding when he said any time, day or night. She didn’t know how she knew, but she did: if she called him, he’d come, no questions asked.

  “Thanks,” she said, feeling a little breathless.

  Then, he was all professionalism again, tipping his hat at her and nodded.

  “Have a safe drive, Miss,” he said. “And welcome to Cascadia.”

  As he walked back to his police cruiser, she looked at his card.

  Ash Spencer, Granite County Deputy, the card said.

  The drive north was stunningly beautiful as the nearly-deserted highway wound around tall mountains and between big, thick pine trees. The towns were small and quaint, exactly the sort of mountain villages that she had pictured.

  Cora turned off the air conditioning, set the cruise control at seventy-three miles per hour, and wound down her windows. Her hair was going to be a nightmare when she got to her motel, but she didn’t care.
/>   She’d made it to Cascadia. Here, she was free.

  Still, doubts began to creep in.

  What if Neil found her, somehow? Would he really want to travel all the way across the country just to creep her out, or would he just move onto someone else in the DC area?

  And what had she been thinking flirting with that police officer? The last time she’d had any kind of relationship, even one that consisted entirely of two not-great dates, it had led to months of stalking.

  Plus, he was a shifter, and even though she’d scolded her sister for calling them sex perverts, there was something a little odd about their family structure. The thought of being in a three-way relationship was just... different.

  You don’t need a man right now, she reminded herself. You need calm, rest, and relaxation.

  Unbidden, his handsome face with that warm smile floated into her mind.

  Rest and relaxation! she reminded herself.

  To distract herself, she turned the radio up and sang along at the top of her lungs, zooming along the highway.

  To put it politely, the Little Hill Inn was quaint. To put it less politely, it was shabby. Clean, but shabby, and run by an elderly man who seemed to know exactly where to hit every piece of plumbing and machinery to make it work again.

  Exhausted after her long drive, Cora flopped onto the double bed in her room, covered in a dark green bedspread, and flipped through the books in the room. Mostly they were tourist stuff: restaurants in Granite Valley, places to see, hikes she could take. It seemed like a very nice, if slightly small, town in the mountains - population of about ten thousand, smaller than Charlesville.

  She’d come here for a break, though, she reminded herself.

  The literature did give a brief overview of Cascadia and its split from California and Oregon, a topic that Cora already knew plenty about.

  About twenty years ago, shifters had suddenly burst onto the national scene — literally. When a senator was giving a stump speech somewhere in Appalachia, one of the audience members, a guy in his early twenties, had suddenly shifted into a mountain lion and slaughtered the senator.

  It had caused an absolute uproar.

  At the time, most of the American public had no idea that there were people who could turn into animals. Shifters tended to live in more rural areas, mostly in the mountains, away from humans.

  Then, after about a year, just as people were calming down and starting to accept shifters, another bombshell dropped: the basis of shifter family life wasn’t a couple, but a triad.

  The American public, prudish at best and puritanical at worst, had flipped.

  Two men and one woman, all in a relationship together?

  Talking heads on TV had ranted about a moral panic, about allowing shifters to teach children or coach school teams, or even allowing them to live in the same neighborhoods as regular humans. Religious figures argued that shifters heralded the coming apocalypse. Legislators constantly tried to pass laws limiting shifter rights. Protestors picketed outside courthouses and boycotted shifter-run companies.

  Thankfully, cooler heads had prevailed, though it had taken a while.

  The cooler heads had also pointed out that shifters, particularly if they lived as triads, had different legal needs from humans. There had been a lot of politics, a lot of debate, and a lot of Thanksgiving dinners ruined by bickering, but in 1999, three shifter states had been founded where the majority of shifters lived.

  There was Cumberland, formerly western North Carolina, eastern Tennessee, and parts of southern Virginia and Kentucky.

  Then there was Meriweather, comprising parts of Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming.

  And finally, there was Cascadia, taken from northern California and southern Oregon.

  Cora rolled onto her back, staring at the ceiling. Her stomach growled, but she really, really didn’t want to leave the bed right then — she’d driven for nearly twelve hours, gotten pulled over, and she was still practically jumping out of her skin every time she pulled over at a rest area.

  You’re okay, she told herself again. He’s not coming after you.

  Growl.

  “Fine,” Cora said out loud, rolling herself off the bed. “We’ll get pizza.”

  Before she left, she washed her face and looked at her reflection in the long mirror on the back of the bathroom door.

  She wasn’t thrilled by what she saw, but it wasn’t bad, either. Now that she was in Cascadia, safe and away from Neil, she could hopefully stop stress-eating and maybe drop a few pounds.

  As long as they didn’t come off her tits or ass. Those, she wanted to keep.

  Chapter Four

  Hunter

  Hunter scrubbed down in the back room of his clinic, tossing his hair net, face mask, and gloves into the garbage.

  Slowly, he washed his hands and then his face, his chin-length hair still pulled back into a small ponytail. Then, for a long time, he stared at the water running into the big industrial sink until the pink tinge was gone and it ran clear.

  Stop wasting water, he thought, and turned the tap off.

  He hadn’t been able to save the coyote. He’d known that the coyote was beyond saving the moment that he saw it, of course — its body twisted and horrible, its back broken, internal bleeding. But he’d still tried, and it had been a long, precarious two hours until, at last, its pulse had faded completely, right there on his operating table.

  Hunter hated that part of his job. Even though it wasn’t his fault — after all, he hadn’t hit the coyote with his car, that was for sure — he still felt guilty about the fragile little life that had snuffed out only a few minutes ago.

  The Granite Valley Animal Clinic would treat any kind of animal, but its specialty was wildlife. He had a long-standing contract with the Forest Service, so when they found injured animals — bear cubs on the verge of dehydration, hawks with broken wings, mangy bobcats — they brought them in to him.

  He also treated a lot of shifters. Not in their human form, of course; Granite Valley had a perfectly good hospital for that. But sometimes, things happened: shifters in bear form got shot, shifters in hawk form ate poisoned rodents. Shifters in coyote form got hit by cars.

  Luckily, Hunter was pretty sure that the coyote hadn’t been a shifter.

  It was impossible to tell biologically, of course, but there were almost always clues. Shifters tended to have much better teeth than regular animals, for example, and their claws and paws had less wear-and-tear. Stuff like spaghetti or potato chips in the stomach was always a dead giveaway, if he got called on to do an autopsy.

  He shook his head, trying to clear it, and headed to his locker. His practice was pretty small, of course, so the lockers were more of a courtesy than anything. His receptionist and assistants weren’t going to steal his stuff.

  As he put on his jeans and shirt, he felt his phone buzz in his pocket, and pulled it out.

  It was Ash, his mate.

  “Hey,” he said. “I was just finishing up.”

  “Same,” said Ash, and Hunter could hear the chatter of the police radio in the background. He could just imagine the other man, driving with one hand, phone in the other, uniform still on.

  “I was just about to call you. I’ve had a hell of a day. You want to get pizza and beers in town instead of leftovers again?”

  “Hell yes,” said Ash. “Just let me get back to the station and change. I’ll meet you at Tony’s in thirty.”

  “You don’t have to change,” said Hunter. His low, gravelly voice echoed through the tiny-but-empty locker room. “I like your uniform.”

  His bear stirred inside him, just at the thought of Ash in that Sheriff’s uniform, the sharp beige fabric barely able to hide the hard, rippling muscle underneath.

  He smiled.

  “It’s against regulation,” Ash said. “You know that.”

  Hunter laughed, leaning against the wall.

  “Someday I’m gonna get you to lighten up,” he said.


  Ash just sighed.

  “Tony’s in thirty,” he said.

  “You got it,” said Hunter, and ended the call.

  Then he grabbed his wallet and keys, locked his locker, and headed out the back door of the Granite Valley Animal Hospital.

  Tony’s had been serving greasy, delicious pizza to the inhabitants of Granite Valley for as long as either Hunter or Ash could remember. It looked like it had been there since time immemorial: red-and-white checkerboard tablecloths, high-backed red vinyl booths, men shouting at each other in the back, and a jukebox up front.

  Hunter got there first and spent a while flipping through the music selections, even though he’d known them by heart for years. The most recent song on it was at least fifteen years old, so it wasn’t like there were many updates.

  Just as the opening strains of Beggar’s Banquet started coming from the ancient speakers, Ash walked through the front door in his civilian clothes, well-fitting jeans and a black t-shirt.

  Hunter couldn’t really complain.

  After they sat down, the waitress, Gloria, didn’t even bother coming out from behind the counter.

  “You guys want the usual?” she shouted.

  “Of course!” Hunter shouted back.

  “And two beers,” Ash added.

  “We just got a new keg of Sierra Nevada,” Gloria shouted, then turned away.

  Hunter rubbed his temples.

  “Bad day?” asked Ash.

  “Bad ending,” said Hunter. “The first six hours were actually fine. I made a few livestock calls out to Long Prairie” — that was the wolf shifter town — “and then fixed a raven with a broken wing.”

  “That sounds all right,” said Ash.

  Gloria showed up with the beers, one in each hand, and set the frosty glasses in front of the two men. They each took a long swallow.

  “Then, I got a call about a coyote that got hit by a car,” Hunter went on. “Forest Service brought it in right away, on a truck, and I took one look at it and just knew, right away, that this poor thing wasn’t gonna make it.”