Taming Her Bears: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance

by Jade Alters

  She halted and looked left and right, as though expecting her enemy to step out of the brush. I sniffed the air. Nothing but the woodland scents and the thin flavor of wafting smoke. We were getting closer. Satisfied we were alone, she continued. “He was busted about a dozen years back. They gave him ten years for human trafficking., but he was out in three and deported back to Russia, where he was supposed to stay. Now he’s back, and his game is more ruthless. He’s catering to a clientele that wants wholesome, naïve country girls. They don’t have to be virgins, just healthy, pretty and innocent. They pay very high prices for first use.”

  It was a good thing she didn’t see my response. She didn’t see my eyes turning red with fury; nor did she see my lips curling back or hear the deep rumble in my throat, because Lee shouted at the same time, “The motherfucker! We don’t have enough girls to go around as it is, and this son-of-a-bitch is stealing them? Roy, the Russians are stealing our girls!”

  “And selling them,” Roy reminded him grimly.

  “Son-of-a-bitch.” Lee did a little hop that was something like a jig, his hands stuck in his pockets and his hair falling into his eyes as he tried to make himself smaller in front of the lady than his six-foot-two frame would allow. “And the show girls think a Coast Guard captain is involved? With all due respect, Trooper Ivanova, but that just isn’t true. Only a man with a death wish and a bone to pick with nature joins the Alaska Coast Guard. It’s never about the money.”

  A gust of wind carried the smoke close enough for even Natalia to notice. Captain Josh bundled some dead branches together in the shape of a lean-to and squatted inside. “We’re getting more rain. Roy, you and Lee finish up this shelter and wait here with Trooper Ivanova. Darkhorse and I will go down to the burn zone. Or are you still unconvinced we’re on your side, Ms. Ivanova?”

  She laughed a little nervously. “I think you are. Either that, or you are very good actors.”

  He barely waited for her answer but took off at a clip, with me right behind him. I could feel his urgency as much as I could feel my own. He wanted to shift. He wanted it with every cell in his body, but he wanted to talk strategy first. He stopped close to the edge of the burn, where scorched prairie grass mixed with curling black stalks of winter fireweed before being drowned by the rain. “You check the outside perimeter. I’ll swim out to the chopper to see what we can salvage.”

  “Natalia thinks we should rescue the radio equipment.”

  He nodded. “Good idea. It won’t work until it’s completely dried out, and even then, with the salt…”

  “We can clean it all up,” I promised. “Just find that can of grease Roy uses all the time to keep those blades chopping. Oh, and if you find any energy bars… for the girl, you know. She might not approve of the way we go fishing.”

  “Do you think she approves of us at all?”

  “Yeah.” I checked the lump at the back of my hand. The swelling was going down. “She beat me with a stick. That’s approval.”

  He chewed on a brush willow twig, thinking about this. “That’s pretty hot.” He took off his shirt. “Are you ready?”

  I was ready. I couldn’t strip off my clothes fast enough. The blood was pounding in my head, screaming for release, and my muscles swelled. I was bursting with eighteen-hundred pounds of vengeance. I wanted to destroy every slave trader on earth. I rose to my hind legs and tilted my head back, a huge rumble thumping first deep in my chest, then rising into my throat and exploding into the air.

  Natalia

  I had made one major error in judgment, and that error had landed me on this rock. I didn’t want to make another, but it was very difficult not to trust this team. They were erratic. Alaskan women see all kinds, from near-sighted accountants to three-hundred-pound mountain men who hit town once a year, trashed every bar in it, and returned to the hills for another 360 days.

  They all do their strutting, but this was more machismo than rodeo cowboys. They swaggered. They flexed their admittedly impressive muscles. Even Lee, who crouched and seemed so bashful when he spoke to me, reared up to his full height around the others, threw out his shoulders and puffed up his chest. It seemed like a lot, but it was all show. They were posturing. If they were mobsters, they would have taken me down in their first five minutes here.

  Apart from being built like a calendar display of the hottest coast guards, they had heads as thick as poured concrete. With skulls like that, I doubted there was much room for anything more complicated in their emotional vocabulary than direct responses. I hit Darkhorse hard enough to make most men see Tweety Birds, and all he did was stumble and grab his head. And he was naked. Brown as a winter berry, two hundred pounds of muscle and sinew wrapped into one of the most gorgeous hunks of male anatomy I’ve ever seen. The trust issue was nearly completely blown away by the turned-on issue.

  There was something submissive about their behavior, and that was a turn-on, too. It was the submissiveness of strong men who respected women, who would rather do harm to themselves rather than see any harm come to a woman. Lee was the one who’d finally persuaded me their concern was genuine. He was a little slow on the uptake, but his indignation was real once he understood Alaska’s girls were being whisked away. A mobster couldn’t have pulled it off. Not like that.

  I think of the two youngest as “the boys.” I know they are both a little older than me, but ages blur in a land where you know everybody for two hundred miles around on a first-name basis. They reminded me of college students working up the nerve to ask for that first date. Old enough to know how it should be done, young enough to have had no real-life experience. The boys were making the lean-to as comfortable as possible, weaving branches together until it made a nice, dry burrow against the trees. We sat in it and listened to the rain.

  We had barely gotten comfortable, however, when a thunderous roar shattered the air, followed by another. I shrank between Lee and Roy, my blood turning to ice. “Two bears,” I whispered hoarsely. “I didn’t even know this island had bears.”

  “They swim,” said Roy, then added quickly, “but don’t worry. We’re experts on bears. We can keep them away from you.”

  They were so self-assured, I had to say something. “Are you Davy Crockett now? I don’t see any automatic weapons.”

  “We’re better than Davy Crockett,” Lee put in boastfully. “Davy Crockett can’t do the things we can.”

  Roy reached behind me to cuff the chief petty officer’s head. “Don’t be an idiot. We’re not Davy Crockett.”

  Lee shifted so Roy’s hand couldn’t reach him and repeated stubbornly, “We’re better than Crockett. Could Davy Crockett break an oil barge loose from the ice and tow it fifty nautical miles to the nearest harbor? He couldn’t. We can.”

  Despite trying to discover ill will, I laughed. “Towing a barge out of the ice is not the same as standing down a bear.”

  “That’s right,” he agreed. “It’s harder.”

  As I said, they were erratic. I listened to them talking about the missions they had gone on until it became a lazy drone that blended with the rain. I had quit paying much attention. To hear Lee talk, they had personally hauled the towlines, not the boat, and had tracked enemies of the state hundreds of miles through the Arctic without so much as snow machines or communication devices. What amused me was that Roy didn’t contradict him, not even when he said the team had once carried the victims of a plane crash seventy miles on their backs through a raging snowstorm. In fact, he’d beamed with pride.

  They were cute, like butter and jam for your toast—you don’t want just one or the other; you want them both. I was sure they were close to the same age, but other than that, they were completely different. Roy was Nordic, either Scandinavian or Swedish. His face was a bit round, his hair highlighted with copper tones, his eyes a mild, muted color. He thought carefully before he spoke, and when he did speak, he studied me as though he wasn’t sure he had said the right thing.

  Lee was Native. He wore
his hair just a little too short to keep it all back in a ponytail, but he tried anyway, the locks in front dangling persistently near his eyes. He had no awkwardness around women. He had no awkwardness around anyone, as far as I could perceive. He assumed we all wanted and enjoyed the same things. This worked well enough for me, provided he didn’t think everyone enjoyed deep sea diving into icy waters or whatever else this strange crew did in the frozen Arctic.

  When Captain Josh and Darkhorse returned, they were carrying a flat metal tray by its handles. The tray had been piled high with items and covered with a tarp. In a rush of relief, I realized just how worried I had been in the back of my mind. They hadn’t betrayed my trust, and they had come back safely. The odd part was, it hadn’t been their trust I had worried about at all—it had been their safety.

  They set the tray down as though presenting a treasure to the king. “What did you find?” I asked, eager for further proof these were indeed my benefactors.

  Captain Josh pulled off the top. “The two-way radio, although it got a little wet. Roy needs to check it out before we fire it up. Waterproof matches. Two flashlights. First aid kit. Bunsen burner. All the blankets were wet, so I didn’t bother with them. Oh, and energy bars. We keep a lot of different kinds.”

  I grabbed two of them without looking at the labels. “I’m starving. I can’t believe you dived into the ocean in this weather.” I saw Lee grinning from ear to ear. I bit into a fruity granola bar, savoring the sweet, nutty texture. “Yes,” I agreed, turning to him, knowing what he was about to say. “That’s better than Davy Crockett.”

  Their food stash included jerky, candy bars, crackers and squeeze cheese, as well. I hadn’t had a bite since the day before and felt like I couldn’t stop eating, but the men hardly ate at all. Since they were big, strapping guys who I knew for a fact hadn’t had a meal since washing up out of the ocean, this seemed odd.

  “Aren’t you going to dig in?” I asked.

  “We’ll eat later,” said Captain Josh. “We like to go fishing.”

  “I guess I shouldn’t fill myself up too much, then, should I?” But I wondered how they went fishing; I didn’t see any tackle.

  Darkhorse added to the pile—a few pieces of cutlery, a motorcycle key, and a girl’s silver bracelet. “Our evidence. The speed boats were gone. I don’t think they’ll be back until the weather clears, but they will be back. They’ll want to clean the last of the evidence.”

  Captain Josh had started fooling around with the Bunsen burner. It was a little damp and reluctant to spark, but after a few sputters, a bright, cheery flame shone.

  “The water’s too choppy for light boats.” He looked thoughtful. “We’ll stay the night here, but tomorrow morning, I want to cross the island. There was a beachfront cabin about fourteen miles south of here. It’s shelter. Radio reception will be better, as it faces Valdez.” He studied me over the flame. “We can protect you better.”

  “What if Denisovich has control over the whole island?” I asked worriedly.

  I don’t know what made Captain Josh grin that way. It was nearly the same self-satisfied expression Lee had used, but more ferocious, embracing danger into his arms without a concern he could possibly lose. “He doesn’t,” he said, and because he gave a low belly laugh, the others laughed with him. I would say they were cocksure, except they swam away from a helicopter crash, in frigid water, as though they were stunt-diving off the coast of Hawaii. They were either the best survivalists I had ever seen or the biggest fools for having no real survival tools, such as knives or guns. And they stared down bears. The Inuit had a name for them, but I had never believed it.

  The Bunsen burner was giving out just enough warmth to dry out the lean-to and make me feel like a human being again. Darkhorse draped the tarp over my shoulders and I warmed up even more. “You have an odd name,” I told him conversationally. “Moses Darkhorse. This isn’t horse country.”

  The flame reflected in his eyes danced. “My father was a Sioux, my mother a Jew. We came up here from the Dakotas when I was three.”

  “And you, Captain Josh?” The full belly, the warmth, and the dryness were making me sleepy.

  “I was born in Kodiak. The ocean is in my veins.”

  My lids dropped heavily. I laid back, covered by the tarp, and began to drowse. I felt the men tuck in around me on both sides, protecting me with their body heat. It was enough at first, especially after the hours spent in the drizzling rain. It was nice to have an overhead shelter. It was nice to have warm, peaceful bodies sleeping next to me, but the wind changed, driving in colder temperatures.

  Before turning in for the night, the captain had turned off the Bunsen burner to save on fuel. The new wind blew through the opening of the shelter, a draft stealing up from behind the box where the burner sat. The rain turned to snow and piled along the entrance. Shivering in my sleep, I dreamed I was lying on a frozen lake and couldn’t get up. I put my hands between my legs, trying to keep them from freezing. In my dream, something soft and warm pulled me under the lake, where I fell into a pile of fur-covered cushions.

  The furs were thick and luxurious. As I sank deeper, they piled around me, shielding me from the cold. The sensation was so strong, I slept deeply through the night. I woke only when I began to feel chilly again. Roy and Lee were sitting on either side of me, deep in some sort of discussion on whale language, and Darkhorse was at the Bunsen burner, frying fish for breakfast. “Did you spear them?” I asked, puzzled. I still hadn’t seen any sign of fishing tackle.

  “Yeah,” he answered without looking up.

  “Better than…” Lee murmured.

  I turned to him. “Don’t say it.”

  The fish had fried to a delicate brown by the time Captain Josh returned, carrying a bag made from fishing net. He looked very pleased with himself. “It never fails,” he said. “Campers put things into the creek to stay cool and then forget about them.” He opened the bag. Inside were close to a dozen canned sodas and juices.

  “No beer?” asked Darkhorse with dismay.

  Captain Josh shrugged, then opened a soda and guzzled it down. “They probably drank them all first. That’s why they forgot about these.” He burped and rubbed his belly. “Love that carbonated water. Anyway, that’s not all!” He reached inside his hoodie pocket and carefully pulled out a tightly wrapped plastic bag. He unfolded it like unfolding the petals to a flower. “Eggs!”

  The eggs were still in their carton. They had apparently been tied up in the plastic bag and secured to a branch, and a long piece of frayed string was attached to it. The string looked like it had been snapped instead of cut. More of their caveman-style performance. I was getting used to it. They may be the nitty-grittiest men I’d ever met, but man, were they magnificent.

  If I was going to be on a wilderness island with winter kicking at the door, I’d rather be there with them than anyone else I knew. Who else would be able to drum up fish and eggs after wrecking their helicopter and spending the night in the snowstorm? A genie in a bottle couldn’t do much better.

  The juice was ice-cold. It was a wonder it hadn’t frozen through. I sipped at it while I huddled closer to the Bunsen burner, waiting for the food to cook. Having Roy and Lee around was nice. They didn’t have enough experience with women to be designing or cunning or glib. We women come by those traits early.

  The older men get, the better they are at getting it down – at least you hope. Out-designing and out-maneuvering even the most cunning of women. Darkhorse and Captain Josh were older men, probably in their mid-thirties. They were high-ranking officers and they had been around. Not like men from the city, but men who’d had a few serious relationships. I instinctively put men like that on my watch list. They could be real date material, or they could be the kind you see only twice a year.

  They were date material, both of them. With each fresh bite of fish, each drop of juice, I grew more aware of their resourcefulness and how completely at home they were in the wilderness. They
were completely relaxed, despite the still-falling snow and wind chill. Darkhorse was the shortest of the four, although he was by no means short. The rest were over six feet tall; he was perhaps an inch or two under. You could see his Jewish heritage in the shape of his nose and chin, but his hair was blue-black and straight, and he had very light facial hair. It was a nice combination, made even nicer by my visual knowledge of his entire anatomy—plus, there was just something very appealing about a well-built man who won’t defend himself against a berserk woman with a stick.

  It took a little longer to thaw toward Captain Josh. He was an authority figure, and I didn’t have a lot of patience for authority figures right now. I had been trying for months to push an investigation into the girls that were disappearing along the coast, but had been dismissed by the leading authorities every time. That the Coast Guard hadn’t even been alerted only proved my point—it didn’t make me any less angry. His recovery efforts, though, had been amazing. Because of him, I was in a lean-to made of branches. I had slept well. There was a Bunsen burner in front of me and warm food in my stomach.

  Captain Josh gave us twenty minutes to digest the food, then said, “Break camp”. We dismantled the branches and picked up the evidence of our overnight stay. It warmed up enough during the day for the snow to turn back to rain, but it was still icy cold and clung to the skin. It was difficult to walk. After several miles, I began to feel numb. I wasn’t dressed for this much exposure. All I was wearing were my boots, jeans, and a light jacket over a knitted top. None of it was rain gear. I didn’t even have a hat. The tarp I had used during the night was needed for sheltering the salvage from the chopper.

  I trudged along, growing colder and less energized with each mile. I wanted to lie down. I wanted to curl up and sleep for just a little while. I wanted to be carried back into the dream of luxurious furs. I sank to my knees and refused to get up, no matter how much they shouted. Sleep was good. Sleep eased the pain.