“Hello,” she said uncertainly. “I was wondering if I could get some coffee.”
Everyone kept staring at her. Anna suddenly didn’t feel so confident in her belief that the Pine Springs citizens were overreacting when they said the people on Bear Mountain were strange.
Finally, Poppy broke the silence. “Are you lost, Hun? I can give you directions back to Pine Springs. You’ll want to get going quickly, though. Storm’s coming in, and even our boys aren’t quick enough to plow faster than the blizzard that’s coming.”
“Actually, I’m not lost. I was trying to find a good spot to take some photos.” Anna patted the large messenger bag that held her camera. “I was hoping someone in here might be able to tell me if there are any good spots farther up the mountain. Maybe somewhere that has a view of the entire valley below?”
The man whose coffee Poppy had been filling hadn’t bothered to turn around at first, even when everyone else was staring at Anna. But now, he turned and raised an eyebrow.
Anna felt her stomach do an unexpected flip-flop. She’d never seen anyone quite as handsome as him. From the back, he’d looked attractive enough. He had broad shoulders and dark brown, wavy hair. But from the front, he looked good enough to leave her speechless. His thick beard covered the lower half of his face, but the skin of his forehead and upper cheek somehow looked tanned even though he lived on a snow-covered mountain and it was the middle of winter. His eyes were a startling shade of blue that seemed to see right through Anna. She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another, but refused to look away. She wasn’t going to be intimidated by someone just because he was the biggest, burliest, handsomest man she’d ever seen.
“Didn’t you hear what Poppy said?” he asked in a gruff voice. “Blizzard’s coming in. You don’t want to go up the mountain right now. You want to go down. And if you don’t go down now, your ass is gonna be stuck here for a couple days, at least. There aren’t any hotels on Bear Mountain, so I hope you enjoy sleeping in your car in below freezing temperatures.”
Anna frowned. “Actually, I checked the weather before I started driving. There isn’t any snow in the forecast for the next several days.”
That comment brought laughter from nearly everyone in the diner.
“Did you hear that, Joel?” someone shouted. “This little tourist pansy thinks she knows better than you whether a blizzard’s coming in or not.”
Anna’s cheeks burned, although she couldn’t be sure whether it was from anger or embarrassment. The man, presumably named Joel, merely shook his head and turned around so that his back was facing her once again.
“You’ll get off the mountain now, if you know what’s good for you,” he said over his shoulder. The rest of the diner kept right on laughing, until Poppy yelled at them to be quiet.
“You all hush now,” she ordered. “Have some manners. It’s not this poor girl’s fault that she didn’t grow up on the mountain and doesn’t know about the weather.”
Poppy was trying to be nice, but her comment still rubbed Anna the wrong way. Anna might not have grown up on a mountain, but she did know how to check the weather. And she was pretty sure that the National Weather Center could predict a blizzard better than a group of snotty know-it-alls in a mountain diner.
“Never mind,” she said. “I’ll pass on that coffee. I prefer my caffeine without a side of snark.”
Anna turned on her heel and stormed out of the diner. Poppy called after her, trying to apologize and warning her that she really did need to get off the mountain now or she’d be stuck. Anna ignored her and did her best to slam the door behind her. She didn’t even notice the cold as she walked to her vehicle. She was so angry at being laughed at by an entire diner of people that she couldn’t be bothered to pull her hood tighter around her face.
She jumped into her little rental SUV, muttering under her breath that these people had obviously never been taught that if you can’t say something nice you shouldn’t say something at all. The vehicle protested at being asked to start up again. She cursed at it and turned the key over and over until the engine finally whined to life.
Anna glanced at the clock on the dashboard. She was making good time. As long as the roads stayed clear, she should make it to the top of the mountain in slightly less than the three hours that her maps app had predicted.
She glanced up at the sky. It was a brilliant, deep shade of winter blue. The sun shone brightly, providing plenty of light, if not warmth. Not a cloud could be seen. It certainly didn’t look like a blizzard was coming any time soon.
Just to be sure, Anna pulled out her phone and double checked the weather forecast. Nothing had changed since she’d checked about two hours ago. The National Weather Service still promised bitter cold but brilliant sunshine for Bear Mountain.
“I trust the National Weather Service over those fools,” Anna said aloud.
She put her SUV in reverse and pulled out of her parking spot a little too quickly. The vehicle skidded on a small icy spot, but she quickly regained control of it.
Calm down, she told herself. It’s not worth getting yourself all worked up over a bunch of people you don’t even know and will probably never see again. Besides, they can’t stop you from heading up the mountain. They can laugh at you all they want, but they can’t keep you from driving up a perfectly safe road.
Her little pep talk to herself complete, Anna pulled out of the Bear Paw Diner’s parking lot and started driving in the direction of Bear Mountain’s summit. In her rearview mirror, she saw Joel exiting the diner.
Her heart did a little flip-flop in her chest again, but she ignored it. Joel might be handsome, but she didn’t go for the obnoxious type. Anna did her best to push Joel and the rest of Bear Mountain’s residents out of her mind as she headed to the summit to find some spectacular vistas to photograph.
Chapter Three
Joel Bennett watched with sharp eyes as the tourist girl sped out of the parking lot and headed in the direction of the summit.
“Fool,” he muttered under his breath.
She was in for a rude awakening. He’d seen this sort of thing dozens of times. Every now and then, one of the tourists from Pine Springs would decide they wanted to head up to Bear Mountain’s peak. Sometimes, like this girl, they wanted to take photographs. Other times, they seemed to want to get to the top just for the pure bragging rights. Since not that many people came to Bear Mountain, everyone in Pine Springs always seemed impressed by a tourist who’d gone to the top.
But the weather here could be unpredictable, to put it mildly. Joel had seen this mountain go from blue skies to blizzards in the span of less than half an hour. The tourists all thought they were so smart with their fancy cell phones and weather apps, but they didn’t understand that Bear Mountain was different.
The mountain didn’t care what the weather apps said. The mountain had its own rules.
Luckily for Joel and everyone else in the village of Bear Mountain, shifters had a good sense of the weather. Joel’s inner bear could tell when a blizzard was coming—even when the fancy meteorologists couldn’t.
Joel’s bear had never been wrong, and he was sure it wasn’t wrong now. That tourist girl with her ridiculously inadequate parka was going to be turning around within thirty minutes. If she had any sense, she’d turn around in time to get back down the mountain before the blizzard really hit. If she insisted on being stubborn, and tried to keep going too long, she would only be able to make it back here to the village.
Despite what Joel had said about her having to spend the blizzard in her car, he knew that the people of Bear Mountain wouldn’t make her do that. Someone would take her in, grudgingly. They’d let her shelter in their house until the blizzard passed, but they wouldn’t be happy about it. None of the bear shifters here wanted full humans in their houses. Trying to keep your bear side a secret from a full human was a pain in the ass.
It wasn’t impossible. Full humans tended not to see what was right in
front of their eyes. Still, it was a bother.
Joel knew that there were bear shifters that lived permanently in towns made up of mostly full humans, but he didn’t understand how they did it. He could act “normal” for short periods of time. In the summer, when he worked as a handyman down in the valley, he did his best to blend in. That wasn’t always easy for someone as tall and husky as he was. But he did his best, and he could manage it for short amounts of time. It was a necessary evil to be able to work in Pine Springs, and he appreciated the work. All those summer jobs gave him enough money so that he could spend the winter on the mountain, far away from all the full humans.
Well, far away from most of the full humans. There were always the overly zealous tourists who came through, but they learned soon enough that life on the mountain wasn’t a game.
Joel climbed into his truck and started driving in the direction of the summit as well. His cabin was about five miles up the road from Bear Mountain Village. He liked things that way. He could completely isolate himself when he wanted to, but when he was ready for a little bit of social interaction, he could easily drive down to the village and hop into the Bear Paw Diner to see what the latest village gossip was.
Joel went through times when he felt lonely, but he knew all he had to do was head down to the diner and he’d forget about his loneliness for a bit. Some people had church. Joel had the diner. Being there reminded him that the world was bigger than just him. It reminded him that there were plenty of fellow bear shifters who were worse off than him. At least he had plenty of money thanks to his summer jobs. He wouldn’t have minded a mate and a couple of cubs, but he figured that would come with time. He’d been so busy over the last several years building up his business that he hadn’t had time to date.
Now that he was becoming more established with repeat customers, he was wondering if it was time to slow down a bit and make time for a family. The only trouble was, none of the girls in town had ever really sparked anything in him. Oh, they were pretty enough, to be sure. But none of them made his inner bear truly come alive.
Which was why it was so strange that he’d felt a jolt of electricity when his eyes met the tourist girl’s.
His bear had tried to rear up within him, telling him that he needed to claim her. Joel figured that he needed to let his bear out to run a bit. If he was going crazy enough to think that a tourist who couldn’t even respect the weather on the mountain was his fated lifemate, then it had definitely been too long since he’d shifted.
That wasn’t all that surprising. Joel usually spent most of the winter shifting into bear form and running through the snow-covered forests. But this winter, he’d decided to do some remodeling on his cabin. Winter wasn’t the best time for construction, true. But in the summer, Joel was too busy in the valley to take care of his own house. He’d put up with the annoyance of working in the cold and snow so that he could finally get the addition to the cabin done that he wanted. But all that work had meant that he hadn’t spent as much time roaming the woods as usual.
Today, he would remedy that. He didn’t want to start working on his remodel when the blizzard was blowing in, anyway. It was a good day to let his bear out to run.
Ten minutes later, Joel had arrived home and was stripping down naked just inside his back door. Once his clothes were all off, he stepped onto his back porch. He closed the door behind him, but didn’t lock it. There was no need to lock doors here on Bear Mountain. Crime was virtually nonexistent. Oh sure, there was the occasional teenager who acted like a teenager did and tried to break into this house or that house. But it never took long for the village to set them straight.
Joel actually shivered a bit as he stepped off his porch. The cold hardly ever got to him, but even a bear shifter like himself couldn’t take temperatures this low while completely naked. That was all right. He wasn’t going to be naked for long.
Joel threw his head back and let out a mighty roar, then let his bear begin to take over. He felt a giddy sensation of freedom as his human skin began to thicken into the tougher skin of a bear. No feeling in the world could compare. His body grew and stretched, morphing into the larger, stronger body of a grizzly. His hands gave way to bear paws, complete with long, fearsome claws. His human head became the head of a bear, and his teeth stretched out into long, sharp weapons that no one in Pine Springs would have dared to mess with.
Of course, no one in Pine Springs knew that Bear Mountain was full of actual bear shifters. They only knew that the people of Bear Mountain were strange and kept to themselves. Every time Joel shifted, he liked to imagine what expression would be on the faces of the Pine Springs residents if they saw him shifting.
But Joel would never actually let them see that. He’d been warned many times about the headaches Bear Mountain would face if it ever got out that shifters were real and lived there. Still, it was fun to fantasize about freaking out those judgmental Pine Springs weaklings.
But today, as Joel’s arms and legs quickly became covered in thick bear fur, all thoughts of Pine Springs were quickly forgotten. Joel breathed in deeply, relishing the way his larger bear lungs filled with fresh mountain air. A storm was definitely coming within the next ten minutes, but that was all right. His thick bear skin and tough bear fur could handle whatever weather this mountain could throw at him.
With a happy roar, Joel began to run, tearing through the familiar forest. He’d run through here thousands of times, and he knew exactly where each branch and bush was located. He’d grown up on this mountain, and he sometimes felt like he didn’t know where his own body ended and the body of the mountain began.
As Joel ran, the sky began darkening overhead. Clouds begin rolling in with speed that would’ve been alarming for any tourist, or even any Pine Springs resident. Weather was different here on the mountain. It could be sunny and relatively warm down in the valley, but the mountain had its own rules. Joel wanted to laugh as he thought of the tourist girl from the diner. No doubt, she was turning around right now to head back to the valley.
That was just as well. Joel didn’t want to see her again. He found it unsettling the way his bear had reacted, and he did not want to experience that again.
No shifter on Bear Mountain had ever taken a full human for a mate, and there was no way that Joel was fated for a human. Not him, the burliest shifter of them all. No, he was sure he was meant for one of the female bears in town. There were plenty of them that would be good catches. He’d just been too busy working to notice. His inner bear had known he wasn’t ready.
Now that work was slowing down, surely one of those female bears would awaken his inner bear. Joel smiled to himself at this thought, and ran even faster through the darkening woods.
The first flakes of snow were starting to fall. He knew that within minutes, that snow would be falling even heavier. By the time he got back to his cabin, he was sure the tourist girl would be halfway back to Pine Springs.
Good riddance.
Chapter Four
The higher up the mountain Anna drove her rental vehicle, the more it protested. Her rental was a small SUV that had four-wheel-drive, but she wasn’t sure that the four-wheel-drive had ever actually been used. The vehicle was driving like it had never done anything more than cross town in Pine Springs. It certainly wasn’t happy about being asked to climb up Bear Mountain.
Nevertheless, Anna continued driving higher and higher. She stopped a few times to get out and look over the side of the steep drop off right next to the winding mountain road. There weren’t any guardrails, and Anna shivered thinking about what would happen if she hit a patch of black ice and went sliding.
She drove even slower after that, taking her time as she navigated the seemingly endless curves that snaked their way up the mountain. She’d made it about three-quarters of the way to the top when the clouds started rolling in.
There were only a few of them at first, so she didn’t worry. But as the minutes ticked by, the clouds started appearing
with surprising speed. Anna briefly wondered if perhaps everyone in the diner had been correct, and that a blizzard was indeed on the way. But as quickly as the thought came, she pushed it away. She’d checked the weather carefully, and there weren’t any storms coming. This must just be a couple clouds rolling through.
Anna pressed on, and was glad she did. Fifteen minutes later, she came to a spot where the road curved in a way that gave her a perfect view of the nearby mountains and the valley below. She could even see Snowshoe Lake from up here, although it looked tiny from this vantage point.
“Bingo. This is exactly what I wanted.”
She climbed out of her car, leaving it running for fear that if she turned it off it wouldn’t start again, and began to take pictures. She was trying to learn the ins and outs of her camera’s settings, but it hadn’t been easy. She did the best she could, hoping that when she reviewed these pictures later, she would have something worth printing.
Taking photos with huge gloves on proved to be a challenge, so she tried taking the gloves off. That only lasted about a minute before she couldn’t stand the cold anymore and put her gloves back on. The conditions weren’t ideal, but that was alright. She would do the best she could, and consider the challenges as part of the experience. Anna wanted to remember struggling for this picture. She wanted to remember that she had taken things into her own hands and made the journey up the mountain to find the perfect vantage point for a photo.
As she snapped a few more shots, she saw a handful of snowflakes starting to fall. She frowned and looked up at the sky. Almost no blue could be seen above the mountain anymore. It looked like the sun was still shining down in Pine Springs, but unforgiving, gray clouds covered Bear Mountain itself.
Anna shrugged off the uneasy feeling slowly taking root in her mind, and raised her camera to take another picture. But this time, when she pushed the shutter button, nothing happened. She looked down at the camera, and saw a small snowflake icon flashing on the digital display. Her camera had become too cold to function.
Rescued on Bear Mountain Page 2