by J. K Harper
Most of all, Cortez was fulfilled with his new job at the lodge. She'd known that he could do anything he put his mind to, even if he didn't believe it. But seeing him absolutely shine in his new position took her breath away with how proud she was of him.
“Oh yeah,” he added, very casually. “I think I'll join the search and rescue team again. They told me they'd kept a spot open for me, but I knew I wasn't ready. Now, though,” he squeezed her hand, raised it to his mouth for a soft kiss, “I am.”
Her heart pounding with pride and joy, she held his hand tightly while they looked down at the lights below. "I told you that you were worth rescuing, Cortez."
"You can't rescue me, Haley." His voice was so low it was more like vibration than sound. "No one can."
Haley's heart squeezed, exploded into beating, squeezed again. Breathless, aching, she choked out, "What? I refuse to believe that! You're not beyond saving."
He shook his head and reached his other hand out to catch up both of hers. Holding them close, his palms against hers, his fingers gently stroked her hands. "That's not what I meant. I mean that I'm the only one who can rescue me. I can't rescue you either, Haley. No matter how much I want to. Because I know that you're the only one who can rescue yourself. And you have the strength to do it,” he added firmly, smiling gently at her.
Haley couldn't get any words out as she stared at him, the serious expression on his face at odds with the surge of hope in his eyes. "Then I don't completely understand what you mean,” she said cautiously.
His teeth gleamed softly in the low light as he smiled. "I can only save myself, and you can only save yourself." Another tight, loving press on her hands. "What I'm hoping is that we can do that together. Side by side. I give you strength, and you give me strength. We'll battle our respective shit together, anything else that comes up.” He took a breath, still smiling at her. “I’m with you every step of the way as you rescue yourself, just like you're with me every step of the way as I rescue myself.”
He leaned over to brush his lips over hers, then murmured against her mouth. “You and me together, Haley. I believe in the power of us. Mates.”
Tears welled in her eyes, spilled over. Her throat was so tight, her chest full, her body overwhelmed by the astonishing joy that ripped through her. She managed to choke out, “So do I,” before the tears just flowed out of her eyes like someone had turned on a tap.
He swallowed and muttered, “Ah, hell, woman, you're gonna make me get all mushy too.” But his face shone with that sexy smile, the sort of pure joy that was once-in-a-lifetime brilliant. “I love you, Haley.”
“I love you too, Cortez,” she whispered back, tears running freely down her smiling face. Then she laughed and flung her arms around him, kissing him with all her strength as he kissed her back with all of his strength.
Mates. Joyful and together always with their once-in-a-lifetime, forever love.
* * *
Thank you so much for reading Rescue Bear! I adored writing about Cortez & Haley’s journey to love and self-acceptance.
What's next for the Silvertip Shifters? Riley & Marisa’s story in RANGER BEAR: RILEY. Read on for a sneak peek of RANGER BEAR!
Join my newsletter to hear about new releases!
Tap here for a list of all my books.
Be sure to read more Silvertip Shifters:
Hunter’s Moon: Quentin - Quentin & Abby
Mountain Bear’s Baby: Shane - Shane & Jessie
Taming Her Bear: Beckett - Beckett & Pix
Rescue Bear: Cortez - Cortez & Haley
Ranger Bear: Riley - Riley & Marisa
Firefighter Bear: Slade - Slade & Everly
Superstar Bear: Bodhi - Bodhi & McKenna
Christmas Night Bear: Wyatt - Wyatt & Brynna
* * *
Turn the page for a sneak peek of RANGER BEAR: RILEY.
Sneak Peek! Ranger Bear: Riley
1
The sickening crack of a rifle shot split open the night, its echo booming through the sky.
“Mama!” The agonized little shriek sliced through Riley’s head.
“No!” He sat bolt upright in bed. Leaping out of it in one move, heart walloping in his chest, he landed on his feet with a heavy thud.
Gasping for breath, coated in sweat, he looked around wild-eyed. His bear slammed around inside his head, snarling, fully alert and ready to defend his home.
Silence greeted him. Soft, peaceful quiet.
Riley blinked as awareness slowly surfaced. He was safe in his room, surrounded by the pre-dawn dim. The stillness. The calm. Through the slightly open window, a cold winter breeze whispered. For several long seconds, he stayed motionless, listening for any sounds of danger. He heard only his own harsh breathing.
Finally, he swiped his hand over his eyes, hard, clenching his teeth over a groan.
A nightmare.
A nightmare about something he had never actually heard or seen. A nightmare he hadn’t had for a long time. For many years, it had haunted him daily before it faded to a less insistent horror. But the past few months had brought it back with alarming frequency and intensity.
After another long moment in which he thoroughly steadied his breathing, he turned to a chest of drawers against the far wall and yanked one open with unnecessary force. Shoving his hand in and coming out with a pair of loose black workout pants, he pulled them on.
Feet still bare, he padded quietly out into the hallway, heading down to Finn and Laney’s rooms. His ears still rang with both the gunshot and the growled cry of his own voice. Afraid he’d actually yelled out loud, he wanted to be sure he hadn’t woken his children.
Carefully opening the door to Finn’s room and tucking his head around it to look in, relief instantly blanketed him as he saw his son. Finn had kicked off most of his covers, as usual. He was sprawled on the bed, facedown with his head turned to one side, looking like some sort of giant starfish. His quiet, even breathing filled the room in the cadence of peaceful sleep. Smiling faintly, Riley gently closed the door and went to Laney’s room.
His daughter was securely snuggled under her comforter, sleeping on her side with one arm flung out, both legs scissored forward at the hips as if she were sleeping mid-stretch. Her face in the early morning light, peaceful as she very gently snored, looked so much like her mother’s that Riley’s jaw tightened. His heart exploded with love for both his children as it did each time he saw them like this: vulnerable. Targeted for death by some people in this world simply for being different.
Merely because they were shifters, just like their murdered mother.
Soundlessly shutting his daughter’s door, Riley exhaled a slow breath as he went downstairs, shoving away the ancient fears. He needed to focus on the here and now. Right now, he needed to work out. Right now, he needed to break a sweat. Right now, he needed to get himself back into balance.
The workout room at the back of the cabin he and his children called home, the small but impressive place he had built by hand years ago, wasn’t a gym in the traditional sense. It held only a large mat and was bordered by the floor-to-ceiling window on the east end that looked out over the San Juan Mountains into which the cabin nestled deeply.
Not bothering to turn on the light since the sun would be fully up not too long from now, and also because Riley’s eyesight was much sharper than any pure human’s, he walked to the center of the mat and stood for many seconds with his head bowed, his arms down along his sides, his bare feet firmly planted. He took a long, deep breath, trying to inhale peace and balance and certainty. Then, he exhaled a long breath out, expelling the rage and unsettled feeling the nightmare had left him with. Again and again he practiced his breathing, focusing solely on his body, on this moment.
His bear whispered inside him, just as present and just as soothed by Riley’s actions. It was a serenity Riley had worked on for years now. It was a tentative one, held together only by relentless practice and grasping at hope.
&nbs
p; “If you don’t do something, your bear’s going to rip you apart, Ri.” The long-ago wisdom of his best friend, Joe, whispered in his mind. “Find something before that happens.”
He had. It had taken a long time and a lot of painful figuring out, but finally he’d settled on something that seemed to help. He’d taken up aikido in the hopes it would help settle the seemingly endless rage and grief over his mate, the mother of his cubs, the only woman he had ever loved, having been ripped from their lives. It took the edge off the restlessness, the rage, so he kept it up for years. Not only for his sake, but for that of his children. They deserved to have a father who wasn’t completely driven by grief.
They deserved to have a father who wouldn’t also be ripped away from them simply because he couldn’t hold it together.
For his bear’s sake, he kept his job as a backcountry ranger in the mountains. It gave him a lot of alone time roaming through the wild lands, often in his animal form. That time was pure necessity for his soundness of mind, and it grew more essential with each passing day.
His practice, his job, and the daily needs of his two children often seemed to be the only things keeping Riley Walker on this side of sanity, and he damn well knew it.
“Good job, boss,” he murmured to himself. “Good job, bear.”
Quietly, he snorted. Good thing no one was around to hear him talking to himself. It was a kind of dumb little mantra, but he liked to say it to himself, out loud, every day.
He needed the reminder he was doing okay.
The past haunted him still, to the point he privately was afraid he’d never truly shake it. Secretly, he hated it—the constant belief no one except his immediate clan could really be trusted. He wanted to trust more than just his family, more than just those in town he knew well. Yet his instinctive suspicion of strangers remained a deep-rooted uneasiness he couldn’t dispel no matter how hard he tried. He’d finally given up, accepting he would always be suspicious of those he didn’t know.
Keeping his bear on this side of sanity, though—that was harder. Much harder. The giant creature he shared his body and soul with got more aggressive with each passing year, no matter what Riley did to keep a leash on that side of himself. The aikido helped, the meditation helped, the long runs in the mountains helped. But his bear was a hairsbreadth away from being totally uncontrolled. Every day, he had to work to not lose that last bit of lucid connection with his animal.
One of these days, that control would finally sever.
Riley didn’t know what the fuck he would do then. Shifters with out-of-control animals had to be put down. They were far too dangerous to the human world. To the shifter world. But he could never allow that. Not when he was a father. Not while he had two children who were like his own heart walking around outside his body.
They’d lost one parent. He’d vowed on that terrible day they would never lose another.
Not today, bear, he thought grimly to himself. Not today.
His bear simply rumbled inside him, content at the moment with Riley’s deep breathing practice and centered mind. Riley shoved away all thoughts and focused on the moment. The physical here and now.
After he finished long minutes of deep, deliberate breathing, he opened his eyes. The sound of the nightmare gunshot had finally faded away from his head, thank fuck. With relentless intensity, he began his daily aikido practice, moving from stance to stance, he and his bear flowing together through the moves. In this way, they were completely connected. Briefly, but it was there.
Thirty minutes later, covered in a sheen of sweat, he finished. Walking over to a set of cupboards against the wall, he pulled out a towel and wiped his face and neck with it. The sun had just risen, pretty orange and pink dawn colors gently flooding in through the east-facing window. Riley walked over to it, absently rubbing the towel over his sweaty head. He cocked his ears for any noise, but the house was still peacefully silent.
Being a Saturday morning, his children would easily sleep for at least another hour and a half. Since the mountains were still in the depths of winter, Finn and Laney were soundly caught by the instinctive hibernation habits that made bear shifter children exceptionally deep sleepers in the long, cold months. He snorted quietly. His kids also were like any others their age on the teetering cusp between childhood and teenagerhood. They were big fans of sleep in general.
Next to the window, he watched the sunrise with sincere appreciation for its beauty. It slowly illuminated the woods outside the window, which were still patched with snow. The landscape showed few signs of life, which tended to come late here at this high mountain altitude.
As he mentally went through his plans for the coming day, Riley suddenly froze.
In a corner of the woods visible through the window, his eyes tracked deliberate movement.
Automatically stiffening, he quickly relaxed when he recognized his brother Quentin’s mate, Abby. In her wolf form, she trotted by on her morning run.
Movement behind her froze him again. When he realized what it was, he felt his face go blank as his mind suddenly churned. His bear snorted and growled deep inside him, the balance he’d gained through practice sloughing off at Riley’s newly ruffled thoughts.
A female mountain lion followed like a whispered shadow behind Abby, her huge paws probably moving soundlessly over the forest floor, her movements controlled and wary. Riley sucked in a breath.
Marisa. The shifter who had dragged all the trouble here a few weeks ago. The sexy, broken, bizarrely intriguing woman he’d been unable to stop thinking about despite his utter confusion at why.
He watched her, his body utterly still. Humans tended to be number one on Riley’s hate list, but some shifters ended up there too. He didn’t know Marisa well enough to hate her, but he knew she came from bad, broken stock. That alone was enough to put her on his suspicious to-be-watched list.
Outcast shifters weren’t to be trusted any more than unknown humans were.
He didn’t care that she was here at the Silvertip Lodge, protected by the Silvertip clan, which was Riley’s family, and particularly mothered over by Abby. None of that meant he had to trust her.
She supposedly had been an innocent pawn in everything that had gone down less than two weeks ago, had been used and abused by the shifters she’d fallen in with merely due to the circumstances of her birth. Outcast shifters sometimes had children and raised them in the lawless life they knew. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t possibly faking her plight somewhat or that there wasn’t actually some sort of secret plan for her to worm her way in here and pave the way for another attack. She came from the sort of shifters who were always looking for a way to grift or outright threaten anyone they came across. Upstanding citizens of the shifter world they were not.
Even so, Riley couldn’t help it. The woman was flat out fascinating to him, both as her mountain lion and as a woman. As a human, she was really pretty, although she never smiled and generally looked both troubled and wary. Her prettiness could be a cover for damaged and duplicitous or cruel and evil. Riley had absolutely nothing to base it on, nothing logical anyway, as Abby had tartly pointed out to him several times.
“Seriously, Riley,” his brother’s mate would say, her eyes narrowed at him in warning, “you need to be nicer to her. She doesn’t deserve to have you glaring at her all the time.”
Softly, he humphed to himself. He shouldn’t have to have a reason to doubt and distrust. He knew better than many here that this was a world of exceptional danger. Sticking to their own was the safest course.
Marisa was definitely not part of Riley’s clan. She didn’t belong here. She was an outsider.
Then why, damn it, did he find her so damned interesting?
His jaw tightened as he recalled how he first met her: in the massive fight to help save his brother Cortez’s mate Haley during what everyone now called the bridge battle. Marisa had howled in a lion’s hair-raising screech of despair when the man she’d loved had been kill
ed. Riley had been ready to fight her, to meet the challenge he was sure she would offer in the face of her lover’s death.
Instead, she just gave up then and there, collapsing into her human form and breaking down into terrible sobs that wrenched at his heart despite the bloodlust that had come with the fight to protect his family, his clan, and all the residents of the town.
Then, she had looked up at him. Her desperate whisper still haunted him. “Kill me. Please, just kill me.”
Shocked, he’d refused. What the hell had happened to her, living with crazy outcast shifters, that she wanted to die? He couldn’t tell if her animal was out of control, but if it was, she’d likely hide it from everyone as much as she could. Just as he did.
He still sometimes thought of how small and broken, how vulnerable, she’d looked when Abby and a few others had gathered her up and led her away, her stumbling bare feet leaving bright red bloody tracks on the snow. He couldn’t imagine ever killing someone so haunted. So clearly in need of protection. So damned beautiful despite the anguish marking her features.
As if she could hear his distrustful thoughts, could sense his memories, Marisa abruptly turned her tawny gold head toward his cabin as she padded by.
She looked right at him where he stood in the window. Her gait faltered slightly, but she didn’t slow as she trotted after Abby, who hadn’t noticed him. He stared, caught by the beautiful lion’s smooth, if guarded, stride. Marisa gazed back at him with her golden eyes, keeping him in her sights until just before she disappeared into the woods. At the last moment, she raised her lip in a snarl at him. A warning.