by A. B Lee
She’d heard about shifters, good in bed, bodies to die for, and then she’d heard about shifter groupies. She definitely wasn’t a groupie.
Rayner didn’t care what was waiting for her outside that door. If the man got the wrong idea, then she’d put him down and take her chances outside with the furball.
~
~
~
Roland wasn’t taking any chances with Bowie’s bear. The beast could be totally out there on his own planet sometimes, and Roland liked everything on his body where it was supposed to be.
He climbed up onto the roof of his brother’s cabin and sat down with his legs dangling over the edge. He waited for the bear to do one more lap of honor around the clearing, and then he made himself known.
“Hey! Dumbass!” He called out and watched the bear slam on the brakes.
Bowie’s head came up, he sniffed the air, and his eyes slowly locked onto Roland. He growled.
‘Get off my roof.’ Bowie used the link between them to make his feelings known.
“Make me,” Roland challenged. “Oh, wait, you can’t. You’ve got your big, fat, dumbass bear on.”
‘Get off my damn roof, Roland. I’m warning you…’
“Oh, warning me. And what’s your dumbass bear gonna do – climb up?” Roland chuckled again and stomped all over Bowie’s last nerve.
‘I’m gonna rip your head off and shove it up your ass.’
“Let’s go. If you think you’re man enough.” He slapped his hand across his mouth and chuckled harder. “Wait – man enough? Not right now, you’re not, right?”
‘I know what you’re doing, and it’s not gonna work.’
“Too bad. I was looking forward to kicking your butt.” Roland shrugged his broad shoulders. Then he reached out and yanked the side guttering away from the roof.
Bowie’s bear roared in rage. Roland reached up and scratched his head as if he couldn’t quite make out what he’d done.
“This is supposed to come off, right?”
‘I’m gonna kill you!’
“Sure, you are.”
‘You’re a dead man!’
“I have no problem with you trying,” Roland called back.
‘Get down here!’
“I like the view.”
‘You’re dead – you’re so damn dead…’
“You said that, but I don’t see it happening.”
Roland ripped off a section of the guttering and tossed it down at Bowie. It thumped off the bear’s head to land at his paws.
“Whoops.” Roland chuckled as his brother’s bear danced around the clearing like it couldn’t make out which end was his head and which was his tail.
‘You’re dead. So dead.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
~
Time was money, and Rayner valued both. While she was stuck in the middle of shits-ville, she wasn’t earning a damn thing.
She needed two things; firstly, she needed the damn bear outside to shift back into his human form. Secondly, she needed to get her money and be gone.
She didn’t know a lot about mates, especially, mates and bears, but what she did know was that Dane was going to follow her around like a stray dog if the Internet was anything to go by. That was going to be a headache that she just didn’t need either.
“You know, your brother owes money,” Rayner said, and watched as Dane drew up to his full height, pulled his shoulders back, and tossed a look at her over his broad shoulder.
“And your boss isn’t going to stop sending people until he gets paid?” Dane growled.
He really needed to kick Bowie’s backside up and down the mountain just for bringing trouble to their door. As if being a shifter just wasn’t trouble enough.
The man just had to have a new truck, didn’t matter how much they told him he couldn’t get it; he’d gone out and got it anyway.
Now Dane knew how he’d afforded it. Idiot.
“I can buy you some time,” Rayner offered.
“Let me guess — you need to act fast?” Dane almost chuckled to himself on that one.
“I do.”
“So you need to get off this mountain?” Dane said as thoughtfully as he could manage.
“That would be a good idea. It’s kind of hard to get a signal up here,” Rayner offered back.
“Then I should come with you.” Dane tossed another look back over his shoulder at her, and he found that she was mulling that one over.
“That might not be the best idea. My boss is an asshole, and we wouldn’t want to make the situation any worse.”
Rayner shrugged for her own benefit in backing up her story more than for his benefit because he wasn’t even looking at her at the time. She needed to be plausible as the man seemed to have something of a nose when it came to detecting bullshit.
“Yeah, I’d hate for this to go wrong.” Dane almost chuckled.
She was trying, he’d give her that, and yet, she was failing miserably because he was onto her game.
“We wouldn’t want Bowie to get in any deeper,” she offered.
“I wasn’t talking about Bowie. I was talking about us. We wouldn’t want us to go wrong.”
Dane was having the hardest time not chuckling at her antics. She told a good story, but she’d forgotten one thing, he could scent the deceit coming from her.
Rayner bit down on a curse. The man couldn’t see the wood for the trees, and no wonder if he thought he’d get laid at the end of it.
Mates — she really needed to check that out. How the hell was she supposed to know if he was on the level?
For all, she knew he could just have been another jerk spinning a story to get his brother out of the crap he’d got himself into. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d heard a story, a fairytale, pure bullshit.
Rayner guessed at that point what she didn’t know wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass. That was probably a good thing as the man had some damn fangs on him.
She guessed time would tell, or, it would all come out in the wash, or some cliché like that. But the truth was that she wasn’t waiting around to find out.
That man was smoking hot, and being locked up in a cabin with him wasn’t the best idea on the planet. Sure, she could keep her hands to herself, and he didn’t look the type to push things where she didn’t want them to go — and she knew that type — she’d dealt with everyone in her line of work, but he seemed different.
Still, you couldn’t put your hand in the cookie jar if that damn jar wasn’t in front of you in the first place.
~
~
~
“You need to shake off your bear, Bowie,” Roland said.
He was still kicking up his heels as he sat on the roof of his brother’s cabin and waited for the man to calm the hell down. His brother was highly strung, and today wasn’t a good day, not when a human female had trespassed on their land.
Lucky them — Dane had found his mate. What that meant to Roland was that Bowie needed to get over himself and realize that the human female was staying.
That was if Dane could woo his mate. The jury was still out on that one, but Roland had hope.
One of them needed to find a mate and a chance at a normal life — he didn’t think it was going to be the psycho bear brother. He’d kind of had a little bit of hope that it might have been him, well, not really, because out of the three of them; Dane was the more likely to be able to woo a mate.
Bowie was unstable, Roland was all about playing the game for the hell of it, and Dane was the glue that held them together. It was only right that the man found some happiness.
That female seemed nuts enough to be able to handle a bear shifter. He could be wrong — he sometimes was — but she seemed to have a strength about her that a human female would need to be around any of them and their monsters.
Roland had to guess that Dane would be moving away. He didn’t expect the man to bring up a family around Bowie and his damn bear. That
would be playing with fire, and you didn’t play with fire around family.
“Shake it off — put the bear back in its cage,” he called down to his brother and got a hard warning growl in return. “Didn’t think so.” Roland sighed.
Now he was going to have to go down there and beat the bear back into its cage. Yeah, that human female definitely needed to be strong if she wanted to be around them.
~
~
~
Dane heard the sound of his brothers bears going at it, and he had the damn urge to leave them to it and kill whichever one came out alive. The truth was; that would have solved all of his problems right there.
The fact of the matter was that he’d sworn to protect those knuckleheads, try to keep them alive as long as possible, and not to let them kill anyone unnecessarily.
It was a damn job that took everything he had, including an ounce of flesh every once in a while. He had the scars to prove it running over his skin like patchwork.
But they were his clan, his kin, family, and without family, he would have lost his mind years ago.
“Stay here, don’t run,” Dane tossed the words back over his shoulder by way of a warning to his mate, but even as he did, something told him that she wasn’t planning on sticking around.
“Fight club?” Rayner had heard the fighting as well. It wasn’t exactly something that you could miss, a couple of bears roaring at each other and the sound of things breaking.
Little wonder that the place was a dump if they fought each other.
She watched Dane stalk towards the front door, stripping his shirt off over his head as he went, and she was more than prepared to be impressed by his naked torso.
Instead, the sight of the deep scars across his skin, over his back, across his ribs, and up over those broad shoulders made her heart hit her ribs and a weight drop in her stomach.
Rayner pushed forward on the couch and up to her feet to follow on his heels as he stalked out if the cabin. It didn’t matter to her that he’d slammed the door closed behind him, because she wasn’t the kind of women that let a little thing like symbolism get in the way of doing what she needed to do, and she had the damndest need to protect him from himself.
CHAPTER EIGHT
~
Rayner had thought that there wouldn’t have been anything that could possibly make her take her eyes off the two giant bears that were going at it as if they really meant to kill each other, but she was wrong.
Dane’s naked body called to her eyes and her imagination in ways that she had never felt before.
The healed wounds down his back didn’t stop at his backside, they carried on down his legs and over his hips and thighs, and she had to wonder just what kind of a screwed up place she’d walked into.
Anger rippled inside of her, but she didn’t have a chance to question it because Dane’s bear burst from within him, and he rushed at his brothers the way a fireman rushes into a burning building when everyone else runs the other way.
The sight of the three bears going hell for leather chilled her inside at the same time as it fascinated her to watch. Those beasts didn’t hold back as they tore chunks out of each other.
Not for the first time; Rayner felt that strange protective gene come to life within her. When one of the bears that she assumed was Bowie’s, because that was the one fighting both of the others came near her, she reached for the coin cosh at her waist and fisted it.
She took a swing at the same time that the bear spun towards her as he sensed her there. A swing and a hit right across his snout, and he roared with the anger of a thousand suns that were imploding.
Rayner caught sight of the paw as it came at her, fast and hard, and she tried to duck but didn’t do a great job of it. The pain wracked her body like wildfire through her nerves as the razor-sharp claws embedded in the flesh of her upper arm and tore through it.
There was one almighty roar, and she turned her head and snapped her gaze around just in time to see Dane’s bear take Bowie’s down. There was a sickening crunch that sounded like a bone breaking to her ears, and Bowie’s bear roared in pain.
Dane’s beast wasn’t done. The attack was fast and furious, his front claws took turns at the beast’s flesh, and he was unrelenting.
“Stop!” Rayner screamed out, only realizing that she had forced the words out past her pain when she heard her voice.
Dane pulled back from the bloodied and torn bear. His head slowly turned towards her, and his black eyes took her in.
Even she could see that his bear had lost control, and she didn’t know much about bears, but that furious and sustained attack was definitely punishment, and very heartfelt.
Dane shifted back into his human form. All that he wanted to do was run off into the woods, and hide his shame from his mate at her obvious disgust in him.
He’d lost it in front of his human mate, and with that loss of temper for his brother’s actions, he’d probably lost any chance that he might have had of convincing her to be his. How else could he expect things to go?
She’d seen him in his beast, and she’d seen him at his worst – almost. If she hadn’t of intervened when she had then he might just have killed his brother, ripped his throat out, and put an end to the man’s misery on the planet.
“You’re hurt,” Dane growled as he stalked toward her.
He could still feel the bear’s fur just beneath his skin, and he couldn’t have kept that sound from his voice if he’d wanted to.
It was probably better for the both of them if he didn’t try to make out that he was normal, that she’d seen him at his worst. Because now she knew what kind of life he led, what kind of a life she would have with him if she was his mate, and it wasn’t pretty.
“I’ve had worse,” she lied.
She’d had her fair share of knocks, cuts, and she’d even taken a knife to the side once, but she’d never felt a pain like it before. It felt like waves of white-hot fire that seemed to be spreading outwards.
“What the hell were you thinking coming outside?” Dane growled in his misery as he fisted her torn jacket and ripped it apart at the seams. He carefully pulled the leather down her arm to expose the wound.
He cursed and spat out a constant stream of words that would make a nun blush as he fingered around the slash wounds and tried to figure how deep they went.
Rayner watched him intently, even when the sound of Bowie shifting into his human form and dragging his bloodied and broken body up as best he could snatched her attention for a brief moment, she returned her gaze right back to Dane again.
“Get away from me,” Bowie growled, and he thumped away Roland’s hand as the man tried to be a crutch for his broken leg.
“Fine, dumbass, drag that damn leg behind you,” Roland growled out, tossing up a hand in anger at his sibling, and turning his attention towards the mates. “She needs a hospital.”
“I know,” Dane growled back over his shoulder.
“Not in this lifetime,” Rayner snorted her contempt for that theory. She hated hospitals. Not only that but she wasn’t in the right mood to list the cause of injury.
“I’ll take her in my truck,” Dane growled, reaching for his discarded shirt and flicking it out to get rid of any dirt that might have been on it before he wrapped it around the cuts.
“What are you – stupid?” Rayner demanded, and that brought the man’s eyes to hers rather rapidly.
“Real damn stupid for letting you stay on my land, around my psycho brother, around me,” Dane was almost talking to himself. He was listing his failings in the man department, the mate department, and the damn alpha department.
He’d screwed up big time, but he’d make it right.
He’d make sure that she got fixed up and then he’d walk away from her, leave her to her life, her normal existence, without the burden of him. It was all he could do.
She didn’t belong in his world, and he’d be kidding himself to think that she would, could,
or should have been there.
“That’s great – you have your pity party, I can wait,” Rayner bit out as she rolled her eyes at his attitude.
“Hello!” Roland chuckled to himself as he lifted a hand and ran it through his mass of tangled hair.
Dane hadn’t taken his eyes off his mate.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Dane growled.
“Think about it, Butthead. If I show up at the hospital with these wounds then somebody is going to ask questions — somebody is going to recognize claw marks — somebody is going to have to report it to the police.” Rayner knew how it went from there.
Shifters had rights, but those rights didn’t amount to a hill of beans, not when they’d attacked a human.
“She’s not wrong…” Roland offered, and Dane did look at him that time as he growled at his brother.
“I know she’s not damn wrong — but she’s hurt, and she needs care, and Bowie’s brought this on himself.”
Dane could see the big picture, of course, he could. But if he had to choose between his mate and his brother — there was no choice — she would always come first.
“And I was stupid enough to get in the way of three big ass idiots who were tearing the stuffing out of each other.” Rayner caught her breath when Dane turned his gaze back to her. “I won’t make that mistake again.”
There it was. Dane didn’t need to walk away from her; she would do it for him.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” Dane growled.
“Or … and I hate to mention it — but there’s always Giles,” Roland said, and he knew his brother’s reaction before the words had even settled on the air between them.
“No damn way,” Dane growled.
“Who is Giles?” Rayner demanded.
If they knew a friendly neighborhood Doctor that wouldn’t report the incident to the police, then she was all in.
“No,” Dane growled.
“I’d say it’s less of a who and more of a what.” Roland offered her an apologetic look; it wasn’t one that he shared with his brother. “And if you want your mate to be truly healed…” He left it there, hanging in the air, and gave the mates something to think about.