Smolder: A Werebear + BBW Paranormal Romance (Bearpaw Ridge Firefighters Book 2)

by Sexton, Ophelia

"Hey," said Montoya, more loudly. "Are you okay? Do you need any help, sir?"

  The camera recorded another couple of seconds of Montoya moving out from the behind the tree; then the recording ended.

  Caitlyn sat frozen at her desk, her heart pounding. If this was a fake, it was a damned good one, worthy of a big-budget Hollywood special effects team.

  It couldn't possibly be real…could it?

  No, it had to be a hoax—but a really well-done one.

  More than anyone, Caitlyn knew that the video editing programs available to the general public were capable of all kinds of sophisticated special effects these days.

  But if the video had been a fake, then why had Montoya been killed twenty-four hours later, after supposedly filming it? Was someone trying set up his murder to look like a supernatural attack? Was someone trying to discredit Bertrand before the election?

  A hoax tied to a conspiracy to murder a police officer would make an even better story than just a "shapeshifters are REAL!" headline, thought Caitlyn.

  She reached for her phone and called Jake.

  "You watching the news?" he demanded, not bothering with a greeting.

  "That's why I called. Jake—" she swallowed, her throat dry with excitement and terror. "About the officer who was killed—I think it's the same Richard Montoya who sent us that video."

  "I was thinking the same thing." Jake paused, as if digesting the implications of that. "Have you watched it yet?"

  "Just finished," she told him. "Jake, if Sgt. Montoya's death is linked to what's on that video, then this is going to be huge. The biggest story we've ever done!"

  "So, did you identify the shapeshifter in the video?" Jake asked, in his most neutral tone.

  By which Caitlyn knew that Jake had recognized the man, just as she had.

  "Philippe Bertrand," she told Jake.

  "Yeah," Jake said, sounding shaken. "Caitlyn, we may have finally found the proof we've been searching for!"

  "I don't know," she said. "I mean, a guy who changes into a prehistoric beast? Did you see the teeth on that thing? And it was huge." Her heart was still beating fast, but with excitement now. "Look, we have to assume that video is a hoax. But the real story here is how it relates to Sgt. Montoya's murder…and to the mayoral race."

  And reporting a story like this could potentially make her career as a serious journalist.

  "But the news reported Sgt. Montoya was killed by some kind of animal," Jake said, apparently unwilling to give up on his pet theory so quickly. "Maybe a pack of dogs, maybe a cougar…maybe a shapeshifter in the shape of a sabertooth cat." He paused. "If Bertrand killed Montoya because he saw something he wasn't supposed to see, maybe Bertrand doesn't know that Montoya filmed him. We have to at least consider the possibility that the video isn't a fake."

  "But it probably is," Caitlyn said. "I mean, sabertooth cats died out thousands of years ago, right?"

  This was the way that their discussions always went—Jake wanting badly to believe in anything that remotely looked plausible, and Caitlyn skeptical, assuming everything they received was a hoax until proven otherwise.

  Remembering the sight of those huge, lethal fangs and the glowing golden eyes, she really hoped this one would turn out to be a fake.

  "Yeah. Okay, here's what I want you to do, Caitlyn," Jake said briskly. "I've changed my mind about Roger Pemberton's story. I want you to go to Bearpaw Ridge and investigate. See if there's anything to it."

  "What?" Caitlyn asked outraged. "Jake, you can't send me away, not now! This could be the biggest—"

  "—mistake that either of us ever makes," Jake finished grimly. "If someone…or something…killed Sgt. Montoya because of what he saw, what do you think it will do to us if it finds out that he filmed the encounter…and sent us a copy of the video?"

  Caitlyn swallowed hard. She wasn't going to let the biggest story of her career just slip away without a fight.

  But Jake had a point…and she had never heard him this freaked out before.

  "Okay," she said. "I'm not ready to believe in giant sabertooth tigers roaming Albuquerque, but I'm wondering why someone wanted Richard Montoya dead badly enough to fake this, uh, encounter."

  "So you agree that this could be very dangerous—" Jake began.

  "Tell you what, Jake," Caitlyn interrupted. "I'll upload the file to our cloud archive so that you'll have access to it, and I'll take the USB stick with me to Bearpaw Ridge. I can work on the Montoya story from there, while I'm hunting down leads on the Pemberton story."

  "Only if you promise to be really careful. Whoever's behind this is willing to go to extreme lengths to protect…something," Jake said, but she could hear the eagerness in his voice.

  He wanted this story even more than she did.

  "It'll be okay," she assured him. "It'll be better than okay. It's going to be great. Just think of it—we can run a Shapeshifters Are Real Special Edition and watch our server go down under a flood of clicks!"

  Jake chuckled, but it was only a faint echo of his usual hearty good humor.

  "All right," he conceded. "But be careful, okay? And leave as soon as you can…tonight if possible. And don't tell anyone—and I mean absolutely no one—about the video until we publish the story."

  "I'll leave first thing in the morning. How long should I plan to stay in the middle of nowhere, Idaho?" she asked him.

  "Leave now," Jake ordered her, his tone suddenly harsh. "And drive as far as you can before stopping. I want you to stay in Bearpaw Ridge until I tell you it's okay to come home again."

  Unseen by Jake, Caitlyn shook her head. Montoya's murder had really gotten to her boss. She had expected him to order her to charge full speed ahead on this story.

  "I'll leave in the morning," she said stubbornly. "I still need to do laundry and pack, I need to download a copy of Pemberton's court records, and I need a good night's sleep before I go on a long drive. But I'll leave as soon as I can, I promise." She paused, thinking. "But what about you?"

  "We're packing up the car as soon as I get off the phone. I think it's time we visited Jen's sister in Los Angeles." Jake heaved a gusty sigh. "Be safe, Caitlyn. And for God's sake, don't do anything stupid."

  "I won't," she promised him. "And you be careful too."

  Chapter Two – Upside Down

  There were three dogs standing in the middle of the highway.

  Caitlyn swerved to avoid them and knew instantly that she was in big trouble.

  She was exhausted from seventeen hours on the road. In hindsight, she probably shouldn't have tried to drive all the way from Albuquerque to Bearpaw Ridge in one shot.

  But somewhere around Salt Lake City, she had decided she didn't really want to stop in the middle of the afternoon to book a motel.

  Then, when she hit Pocatello and took a dinner break, she figured she might as well keep going. It was only another three or four hours north to Bearpaw Ridge.

  Now it was late at night, but she was in the home stretch. Just a few more miles to go until she reached her destination, according to the last highway sign she'd seen.

  She only hoped that she'd be able to find a hotel room this time of night.

  Then she saw the green-gold gleam of animal eyes up ahead, and an instant later, the three dogs standing in the middle of the road.

  For a moment, they stood frozen in the glare of her headlights.

  Then they leaped for the shoulder of the highway with primal grace. And she realized that they weren't dogs at all. Wolves!

  And that her car was veering off the road.

  Shit! Caitlyn, her reaction time dulled by fatigue, tried to correct her course with a frantic yank of her steering wheel.

  It only made things worse. She hit the brakes and heard an angry screech of tires.

  The last thing she remembered was a jolting bump as the car surged over the shoulder of the highway and plunged down a steep slope into darkness.

  * * *

  When the first responder ala
rm ringtone sounded on his smartphone sometime in the middle of the night, Mark Swanson came instantly awake. Adrenaline coursed through his veins, more potent than a triple shot of espresso.

  He was on call for the Bearpaw Ridge Fire Department this week and sleeping at a friend's house in town, because his own house was located twenty minutes out of town on his family's ranch. It had been a quiet week so far, and this was his last night on call.

  Mark reached for his phone and quickly called up the first responder app.

  Reported single vehicle accident on Hwy 93 just past the Cougar Creek Road turnoff. Witnesses saw a car go off the road.

  The app displayed the location of the reported accident and a map showing the fastest route to scene.

  As always, being called out to a car accident brought his father to mind, and the head-on collision that even a big, powerful bear shifter in his prime hadn't been able to survive.

  Mark had been a young boy when that wreck changed his life forever. As an adult, he sometimes reflected that it had motivated him to join Bearpaw Ridge's Fire Department as a volunteer firefighter and paramedic.

  He wondered if the same held true for his four brothers. All of them had volunteered for the BPRFD as soon as they were old enough to be accepted as firefighters.

  His second-youngest brother, Thor, now worked in Denver as a professional firefighter, but Mark and the rest of his brothers still served their community as volunteers.

  Mark dressed swiftly in his uniform of dark cotton pants and a dark blue T-shirt with the BPRFD logo on it, then ran over to the Bearpaw Ridge fire station, located three blocks away.

  His younger brother Evan was already there, clad in the stiff protective trousers called "bunkers," when Mark arrived in the truck bay, where rows of jackets, bunkers, and other personal protective equipment hung on racks along the walls.

  Evan raised his hand in acknowledgement of Mark's arrival and lifted two of the heavy insulated jackets off their hooks.

  Like all of the Swanson brothers, Evan was tall, dark-haired, and broad-shouldered, with a bear shifter's immense strength and quick reflexes, which helped when he was burdened with the full weight of a firefighter's personal protective equipment.

  "Fred's on his way," Evan reported, tossing Mark his jacket, which gleamed with strips of reflective tape and was labeled Swanson, M across the back. "And Dane's meeting us at the scene—he had to attend a calving, so he took his turn-outs and PPE gear with him."

  Mark shimmied into his bunker pants and pulled on the jacket as quickly as he could.

  Fred Barker, the town's electrician, arrived three minutes later. The older man looked as sleep-rumpled as the rest of them, but his eyes were bright and his step brisk.

  "I'll drive the paramedic van," he announced as he began to dress in his protective gear. "You boys can take the tanker."

  "Works for me," said Evan eagerly.

  Mark shot his younger brother a wry grin.

  "Sure. You wanna drive?" he asked Evan, knowing what the answer would be.

  Evan loved driving the big engine.

  As they sped down the length of Main Street, deserted at this late-night hour, Mark wondered what they would find when they arrived at the scene of the accident.

  Bearpaw Ridge was too small to have its own ambulance, so one would have to be dispatched from the nearest bigger town, either Salmon to the north or one of the towns further to the south. In any case, it would be at least twenty minutes and maybe as long as a half-hour before help arrived.

  Luckily, all of the BPRFD's volunteer firefighters were also trained as paramedics. It would be their job to stabilize the accident victims and administer what first aid they could before the ambulance arrived on the scene.

  If the injuries were critical, they could call for a medical helicopter, but depending where the accident had occurred, finding a safe place for the 'copter to land might be tricky.

  The accident site proved easy to find.

  The Jacobsen boys flagged them down on the highway just past the Cougar Creek Road turnoff.

  All three teenagers looked worried, scared, and more than a little guilty. They were blond-haired and blue-eyed, ranging in age from thirteen to seventeen, tanned and leanly fit from a life spent mostly outdoors, either as humans or in wolf-shape.

  Their family were among the founding settlers of Bearpaw Ridge, and their uncle, Bill Jacobsen, had served as Bearpaw Ridge's sheriff for the better part of two decades.

  As soon as Evan had parked the fire engine on the shoulder of the highway, Mark's older brother Dane roared up in his big white Ford pickup, its doors emblazoned with the Grizzly Creek Ranch logo.

  Mark scrambled out of the tanker to investigate the situation, Evan close behind him.

  "Hey, wait up," called Dane, pulling his jacket, gloves, and helmet out of his vehicle.

  He was already dressed in his boots and bunkers, so putting on the rest of his gear took less than a minute.

  "How'd Brenda's calving go?" Evan asked Dane as the three brothers crossed the highway, approaching the waiting teenagers.

  Dane shrugged. "I managed to turn the calf, so I don't think we'll have to call in the vet. I kicked Ash out of bed to keep an eye on Brenda. He wasn't happy."

  Ash was their youngest brother, who much preferred running his successful online gaming company to ranch work. But like the other Swanson brothers, he was a volunteer firefighter, and he knew that Dane had to drop everything and leave as soon as a call came in.

  Fred Barker, who had been following close behind the tanker truck, parked the paramedic van, got out the big, soft-sided first aid case, and followed them across the road to where the boys were waiting.

  All the vehicles left their lights flashing, to alert any other cars or trucks driving down on the road.

  "We didn't do anything!" blurted Ethan Jacobsen, the fifteen-year-old, as Mark and his brothers approached.

  All around them, the landscape was dark, with only a few lights visible in the distance and a star-filled moonless sky overhead.

  The cold night air stank of burned rubber, motor oil, coolant, and other vehicle fluids—the unmistakable hallmarks of a vehicle accident.

  Mark raised his brows inquiringly at Ethan's comment.

  "We just wanted to teach Aiden here how to hunt at night," added Michael, the oldest Jacobsen boy, pointing at his youngest brother. "And there's never any traffic out here at this hour," he added, sounding defensive.

  Michael's jeans and long-sleeved T-shirt were covered in dirt, as if he'd been crawling in it, and his hands were bleeding.

  "So you saw the accident?" Evan asked.

  All three boys flinched slightly. "Yeah," answered Michael.

  "Did you cause the accident?" Dane asked, shrewdly, running his flashlight over the paved surface of the road. Dark skid marks crossed the highway in a curving arc and disappeared at the edge.

  "We were crossing the highway in wolf-shape," Michael admitted. "And the car was going really fast when it came around the curve."

  "She says she's okay; she just can't get out of the car!" Ethan blurted. Like his brother, he, too, was covered in dirt.

  "She?" Mark asked, looking around.

  "Yeah, the lady who crashed. She's down there!" Michael pointed down into the darkness. "We went to see if she was okay, but we couldn't get her out of the car! It's upside-down!"

  His voice sounded ragged with guilt and desperation. And Mark suddenly realized why the boys were covered in dirt—they must have gone to find the wrecked car.

  "Well, that's why we're here," Mark told the boy as gently as he could. "You did the right thing by calling 911."

  He strode over to the edge of the shoulder, tailed by the others. The highway was raised on an embankment here to keep the road from washing out when the river swelled with runoff from the melting snow in the nearby mountains.

  Mark peered down into the darkness, playing his light over the pasture that stretched between the river a
nd the highway.

  Dane, Evan, and Fred quickly joined him, using their own lights.

  Broken safety glass embedded in the slope of the embankment glittered like gems in the beams of their flashlights as they swept the ground, looking for the car.

  Within seconds, they spotted the crumpled wreck of a red Honda Civic.

  The car had come to rest on its roof at the base of the embankment, all four tires in the air. It was badly dented, and most of the windows were shattered, but the passenger compartment looked essentially intact.

  If the driver was conscious and talking, there might be not be any serious injuries down there. The tension that Mark always felt on these types of calls eased a bit.

  The limp white fabric of a deflated airbag hung out the driver's side window.

  "How many people inside the car?" Fred asked Michael in an urgent tone.

  "Just one," Michael answered, beginning to scramble down the embankment ahead of the firefighters. He shouted in the direction of the wrecked car, "Ma'am, the firemen are here!"

  "Oh, thank God," said a female voice faintly from inside the car. "Someone get me out of here…please!"

  Moving as quickly as they could, Mark, Evan, and Fred slid and slithered down the steep slope of dirt and gravel to the field.

  Mark was the first to reach the upside-down Honda.

  He tried the driver's side door, but it was jammed shut. Luckily, the rear driver's side door opened when he tried the handle.

  He dropped to his stomach and peered through the window to assess the situation.

  Amidst the limp white fabric of deflated airbags, he saw a mass of blood-soaked blond hair hanging down from the driver's seat. He played his light quickly around the interior of the car but saw no signs of anyone else in the car.

  "Hey," he said to the driver, trying to sound reassuring. "My name's Mark, and I'm with the Bearpaw Ridge Fire Department—no, don't move your head, you don't want to mess up your neck if it's injured."

  "O-okay," the young woman said. She sounded dazed.

  He stripped off his heavy gloves, pulled on a pair of thin latex ones, and reached through the shattered driver's side window to take her hands. "Can you squeeze my fingers, please?"