Hare Today Bear Tomorrow (Mating Call Dating Agency, #1)

by Lynn Red

  Hare Today, Bear Tomorrow

  The Mating Call Dating Agency

  Alpha Werebear Romance

  Also by Lynn Red

  Jamesburg Shifter Romance

  Bear Me Away (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  Kendal Creek Bears

  Can’t Bear To Run

  Can’t Bear to Hide

  Mating Call Dating Agency

  Hare Today Bear Tomorrow

  The Broken Pine Bears

  Two Bears are Better Than One (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Romance)

  Between a Bear and a Hard Place (Alpha Werebear Romance)

  The Jamesburg Shifters

  Bearing It All (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  Bear With Me (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  Bearly Breathing (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance)

  Bearly Hanging On

  Bear Your Teeth (Alpha Werebear Paranormal Shifter Romance)

  The Jamesburg Shifters Volume 2

  The Jamesburg Shifters Volume 1 (BBW Alpha Werewolf Werebear Paranormal Romance)

  To Catch a Wolf (BBW Werewolf Shifter Romance)

  Standalone

  Lion In Wait (A Paranormal Alpha Lion Romance)

  Werewolf Wedding

  Horns for the Harem Girl

  Watch for more at Lynn Red’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Also By Lynn Red

  Hare Today Bear Tomorrow (Mating Call Dating Agency, #1)

  (c) 2015 | Lynn Red

  1

  2

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  4

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  6

  7

  8

  9

  SPECIAL EXCERPTS | Can’t Bear to Run

  Lion in Wait

  Bearly Hanging On

  To Catch a Wolf

  Two Bears are Better than One

  Also By Lynn Red

  About the Author

  Thank you so much for taking the time to check out my new book! Click here to subscribe to my mailing list to keep up to date on all my new releases, giveaways, and free books!

  (c) 2015

  Lynn Red

  1

  Stacy Graves sat glaring at the athletic tape on his wrists. Clenching his huge fists, the muscles in his forearms tested the tape. It squeaked softly as it stretched and when he relaxed his hands, he also let out a sigh.

  His shaggy, curly, brown hair hung around his face, framing his burning blue eyes.

  Outside of the locker room, a huge noise went up. The crowd in White Creek was always rowdy, but this was something else entirely.

  “Head on square, Graves,” he said to himself in the empty room. He reached down and tightened the laces on his boots. “Keep your brain in check or you’re gonna end up eating a clothesline for dinner and ending up flat on your ass.”

  “When’s the last time a clothesline flattened you out, big guy?”

  “Hey Rush,” Stacy grunted. “When did you get here?”

  “About five seconds ago. You still thinking about the impending march of time bearing down on you? None of us are getting any younger, but you’re getting older faster than most of us.” Rush sat down on the bench beside his best friend. Stacy was two heads taller than his friend, and about twice as thick, too. “I’m just kidding, by the way. That was a joke.”

  “Nah,” Stacy growled, as he pulled his hair into a loose ponytail. “Just thinkin’ about, I don’t know, settling down, I guess. You ever think of getting off the road and finding yourself a cute little jackal and having a brood of… whatever jackal babies are called?”

  Rush slumped his shoulders and let out a sigh. “Nah, the one ex-wife and the two pups I already have are plenty. But you do need someone. The saddest thing in the world is a mateless bear.”

  “It’s not like I’m pining or anything,” Stacy said. “Just thinking.”

  “Right,” Rush said with a grin. “You’re not pining at all. You’re not sitting alone in a locker room studying the tape on your wrists like it was some kind of artistic masterpiece. You’re totally not pining at all. Totally not pining.”

  “Well what the hell would I do about it anyway?” Stacy asked, shrugging his massive shoulders. “Ain’t like we have much time for all that.”

  “Oh pal, you gotta do something. I can’t have my tag team partner moping around all night. That just won’t do. Anyway, we’re in your hometown, surely there’s somewhere you can meet someone? A bar after the show?”

  “I’m too old for all that. The music irritates me. Bars are always so loud you can’t even hear yourself think.”

  The two sat silently for a moment. The crowd noise from outside swelled and receded. The main event was coming up, and when it did, Stacy knew he’d have to just grin and bear it, even if he didn’t much feel like working the mat.

  “Hey, what about this?” Rush elbowed the bear and showed him the screen of his phone. “Mating Call Dating Agency. Sounds kind of old-school in the day of internet dating and all those creepy hookup sites, but if you’re too old for bars, you’re too old for Tinder.”

  Stacy stared at the screen for a second. “I don’t know,” he said. “Seems kind of desperate doesn’t it? I mean, why can’t I find someone on my own? Why do I need some matchmaker to do it for me?”

  “Right,” Rush said. “Look at the line of women outside the door. Oh wait, no, we’re two dudes sitting shirtless in a locker room. Yeah, why would you ever need help?”

  Stacy let out a booming laugh. “Maybe,” he said. “I’ll think about it.”

  “Don’t think,” Rush said. “Just do it. I already pushed the call button. You have to talk now.”

  “Oh what the hell? I’m not talking to some—hello?”

  “Mating Call Dating Agency, where every shifter finds a mate. What can I do for you?” The receptionist’s voice was musical, almost sing-songy.

  “I, uh,” Stacy stammered. “Nothing, my buddy just called you guys. I don’t know why.”

  Rush was getting red in the face from forcing himself to control his laughter.

  “Probably because he’s actually a good friend, and knows you need help to find someone that’ll make you happy? I’m Dora, by the way. Do I have that about right?”

  “Yes!” Rush shouted, loudly enough that she heard him through the phone.

  “Er, well, yeah, I guess,” Stacy said. “I’m not very experienced with this sort of thing.”

  “Well, with us, you won’t ever be very experienced with it. We’re good at what we do. Now, if you’ve got a second, I need to ask you a few questions to make sure you’re not some kind of psychopath. What do you do for fun?”

  “And now, the fight you’ve been waiting for!” Blared over the arena’s loudspeakers. “The big, bad bear and the wily jackal! This is a night you’ll never forget!”

  “I can’t right now,” Stacy said. “I’ve gotta go, er, work. Can I just come by tomorrow?”

  As their entrance music began to thump and pound through the speakers, and the audience’s excited cheer erupted, Rush was grabbing Stacy and pulling him to his feet. “I’ll make sure he gets there,” Rush said into the phone. “Half-past ten.”

  “Got you down,” Dora said, although from the noise on the line she was barely audible. “And don’t be late. Eve hates it when people are late.”

  2

  Yvette Lorraine – Eve to her friends and Ms. Eve to her clients – plucked a golf ball-sized hunk of chewing gum out of her mouth and deposited it in the ashtray that had been sitting on her desk in t
he same place for the better part of fifteen years.

  “Eve, we got someone coming in,” the voice on the intercom belonged to her best friend, confidant, and infallible office manager, Dora Long. Dora’s voice crackled a bit. Eve thought she should probably call an electrician at some point to get that fixed, but she was terrified at the notion of actually having to bring Mating Call Dating Agency’s building up to code. That was something that needed to wait until some tiger-shifting billionaire got a wife through her place and ended up so happy with the whole thing that he offered to pay for it all.

  Right, she thought. As if we could get anything coming through here except janitors and lawn keepers. Not that there’s anything wrong with either of them, but damn… sometime it’d just be nice to have someone in a dapper suit stroll through the door. Then again, I guess that type hardly needs matchmakers. “A girl can always dream,” she said with a sigh, not really aware that she was speaking out loud.

  “Huh? Are you daydreaming about billionaires again?” Dora asked, a twitch of fun sarcasm tipping her words.

  “Yeah, maybe so, but I’m allowed,” Eve replied. “Anyway, what do we have coming in? I know I’m supposed to say ‘who’ but when they all turn into animals, my grammar gets all confused.”

  “You’re a walking dictionary,” Dora said, her teeth clicking together – squirrels are as squirrels do – and noisily thumbed through her notepad. She refused to keep her appointments on a computer or a phone, because she never quite believed they weren’t going to come to life and attack. She’d maybe watched The Terminator a few times too many, but what the hell, she’d never lost track of what she was doing, even when the computers crashed.

  The door clanged open, and a deep, gruff voice came through the intercom and caressed Eve’s ears. All these years of matchmaking, and she’d never found the time to get herself a bear… or a lion, or a, well, anything really. It just wasn’t ever in the cards. She found her peace in helping other people find happiness, and that was good enough.

  Her interview process was part of the reason she’d been so successful, she figured. Eve didn’t let anyone walk out with a date that she didn’t think was a prize for someone. She prided herself on cautious dealing, and truth be told, she enjoyed the whole thing. It gave her a little shot of excitement to know someone’s life would be better because of what she did, and aside from that, she loved her ability to make the biggest, baddest guys on the planet squirm under her reading glasses.

  “Mr. Uh… what did you say your name was?” Dora asked. “The name I have on the paper isn’t the one you gave me.”

  The mystery suitor growled something that Eve couldn’t quite understand, but once again, his rumbling tone gave her a stir where it counted.

  “Right, okay, so Mr. Graves is here to see you for his interview.” Her voice lowered as footsteps tromped away. “He’s big, Eve. Really big. Don’t be alarmed.”

  “Can he hear you?” she asked. “We don’t want to offend a giant. Bear?”

  “Yeah, and… oh my lord what a bear.” Dora’s chair pushed back from her desk with a decided squeak, and a moment later, she poked her head into Eve’s office. “Here’s his file. I recommend not looking at it until he’s here. And sorry for the late notice, he called late last night and I sort of forgot until just now.”

  “That goes against every shred of paranoid caution in my body. Why the short notice?”

  Dora shook her head. “He’s a special one, this guy. Trust me. He’s got a kind smile, eyes that sort of twinkle in that way that tells you he’s used to getting his way, and… those traps. His shoulders touch his ears. Got anyone in your rolodex that wants a giant bear?”

  “Uh,” Eve snickered. “Yeah, I think at least three-quarters of this here rolodex wants a giant bear. Does he seem like a nice guy? Or one of those overblown bros? Tell me this,” she said when Dora was very obviously unable to formulate a reasonable answer. “Is he wearing a sideways baseball cap?”

  “His arms,” she said. “I don’t… I don’t think I’ve ever seen arms like this. And he’s not deformed or anything, it’s not like he’s been skipping leg day either. I bet he could pick up a semi.” Her face was glazed and slightly pallid. Eve couldn’t help but grin. She’d seen Dora fall for a client before, but never like this. At least, not in recent memory anyway.

  “Well, all right then,” Eve said, blinking and twisting her neck until it popped to the left, and then the right. “I’ll take your word for it. Send him in, I guess.”

  Dora stood there for a second, apparently staring right into the middle of Eve’s forehead. “Dora?” she asked. “Send him in?”

  “Oh… right,” Dora said. “Yeah, yeah of course. I’ll go out and get him.”

  As her friend turned and walked slowly out of the room, Eve giggled to herself as she kept repeating under-her-breath comments about the size and muscularity of the creature who she was expected to match with someone.

  “She’ll see you now,” Dora said. “Watch your head on that door, it’s… well, you’re…”

  A deep-throated, rumbling laugh preceded the giant mountain of muscle that stooped through Eve’s door and stood by the chair in front of her desk. Without thinking about it, Eve’s eyes stretched wide and she stared at the visitor. “Sit?”

  “Maybe not in that,” the big guy looked down at the office chair. “Mind if I grab that bench?”

  Before she could tell him that it was an extremely heavy bench made out of English oak and pig iron, the giant plucked it effortlessly off the ground, moved the chair aside with his foot, and plunked the bench down. He sat, crossing his enormous hands on the desk top as he sat forward.

  “Mr. Graves,” Eve said, and then cleared her throat. “H-how are you today?”

  “Sore,” he said in a voice that Eve imagined would be at home in one of those giant heads on Easter Island. “Work was rough last night. Two shows, those nights are never fun.”

  Nervously, she thumbed open his file and stared in disbelief. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m normally a lot more collected than this. It’s just—”

  “People tend to be surprised when they see me. I guess that’s why I do what I do.”

  “And what is it you do, exactly?” she asked. “This folder is remarkably bereft… devoid… uh… the folder’s pretty much empty.”

  “I know what bereft means.” He drew his lips into a smile that stretched from ear to ear, showing off the magical little dimples in each of his cheeks. His dark blue eyes twinkled in just the way Dora told her they did, and the curly dark hair framing his face seemed perfectly imperfect.

  “Sure,” she said. “Sorry.”

  He shook his head. “Don’t worry about it. As for what I do, I collect baseball cards even though I know they’re worthless. I paint, I write bad poetry… I’m kind of a geek, honestly.”

  Eve stared at the impossible specimen of a man in front of herself, and watched the muscles in his chest twitch when he repositioned his hands. She took note of what he’d said with a hand that shook more than it ever had before. “Okay,” she finally said, drawing a deep breath. “Cards, poetry,” she trailed off.

  “I travel a lot too, though I’m looking to cut back on that. Life on the road is fun and all, but after twelve years of it, I’m getting tired.”

  “Tired,” she said, “right. So what is it you’re tired of?”

  “Travelling so much. Three hundred shows a year, that kind of thing. Really drives a guy nuts after a while. And anyway, I’ve been alone most of my life. Recently, most of my friends have been getting married, having kids, all that sort of thing.”

  “Sure,” she said. “You’re feeling the mate clock ticking.”

  He smiled in response, lines danced on his shoulders.

  “How old are you, Mr. Graves?”

  “Stacy,” he said.

  “Huh?”

  “My name. It’s Stacy. Stacy Graves. But there probably aren’t five people on earth that actually call
me that.”

  “I can’t imagine they’d have the balls,” Eve said, before clapping her hand over her mouth. “Sorry, I—”

  The laugh that came out of Stacy Graves’s mouth hit Eve with the force of a sonic boom. “I like you,” he said. “I’m thirty-five, seven times world champion, three tag championships, and a couple of years fighting in a circus which… well, let’s just say I’m not proud of everything I’ve done.”

  “Hold on a second,” Eve said, feeling her blush subside. “World champion? At what? Tennis?”

  Another blast of laughter. “Never was good at that.”

  Something about his reticence to be direct with his profession made Eve quirk her head to the side. “Football? Boxing?”

  He shook his head. “Look, I’d rather not get into that whole thing. It tends to color people’s perception of me, and to be honest, I sorta want to avoid that.”

  “Well I need to know what your job is,” she said. “That’s one of the hundred-thousand things I use to make matches.”

  Stacy Graves took a deep breath. “Ever hear of this guy?” he pulled the phone out of his side pocket and pulled up a video. Eve gasped as a mountain of a man walked down an aisle, through four jets of pyrotechnical effects, and emerged on the other side. He jumped up onto the apron of a ring of some sort, and proceeded to manhandle a flamboyantly dressed opponent.

  She was shaking her head. “Is that guy dead?” She winced as the monolith in black trunks delivered a horrifying looking body slam and then pinned the other.

  “Frank? Nah, he’s one of my best friends. That guy can take a hit with the best of ‘em. Hell, one time he hit me with a bell and—you know, let’s save that.”

  “You’re a professional wrestler?” Eve said, the corners of her mouth twitching in a mixture of excitement, confusion and awe.

  “Like I said, seven time world champ. This isn’t going to hurt my chances with your agency, is it? People think of us like circus freaks sometimes and that’s—”

  Eve shook her head. “It’s awesome,” she said. “Of all the folks that have walked through that door, and all the ones I’ve imagined coming to get help with finding a mate, never in my entire life have I…” she cleared her throat to regain her composure. “Yes, right, so now that I’ve thoroughly embarrassed myself, I guess we can move along with things.”