Table of Contents
COPYRIGHT
BOOKS BY ISADORA MONTROSE
BEAR SKIN
SEXY SNEAK PEAK
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
JENNA’S KNITTING SECRET
ABOUT ISADORA
ALSO BY ISADORA MONTROSE
Bear Skin ©Copyright Isadora Montrose 2016
Cover Art by Resplendent Media ©Copyright 2016
This is a work of fiction. All characters, places and events are from the author’s imagination and should not be confused with fact. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, events or places is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any material form, whether by printing, photocopying, scanning or otherwise without the written permission of the author, Isadora Montrose.
Warning: This book contains sexually explicit content which is only suitable for mature readers.
Books by Isadora Montrose
Bear Necessities
Bear Possibilities
Bear Affinities
Bear Infinities
Bear Fursuits Books 1-4
Bear Cubs for Christmas (available only in Bear Fursuits Books 1-4 Bundle)
Bearly Begun
Bearly Enough
Bearly Ever
Bearly Forever
Bearly Beloved
Bear Skin: A Billionaire Oil Bearons Romance
Dragon’s Treasure
Dragon’s Successor
Brides for the Bachelor Bears Books 0-4 Bundle
Bearly a Bride (available in Brides for the Bachelor Bears and Hot Shifter Nights)
Dragon’s Pleasure
Bear Pause: A Billionaire Oil Bearons Romance
Amazon Author Page: https://amazon.com/author/isadoramontrose
BEAR SKIN
A BILLIONAIRE OIL BEARONS ROMANCE
BOOK 5
BEAR FURSUITS
by
Isadora Montrose
SEXY SNEAK PEAK
The door opened as he was striking it and he stumbled forward into warmth and paradise. The cozy interior of the cabin was glowing softly and a tall angel in a celestial blue robe stood welcoming him. A dark braid lay over one round shoulder. Rosy cheeks and lips bloomed in the lantern light. She looked like all his fantasies rolled into one. He took another step.
The room before him was comfy cozy. A big bear sized couch and chair. A big round wooden table and four sturdy chairs. Rag rugs on the glowing wooden floor. Bear heaven. With his own built-for-bear angel. He opened his mouth to speak and toppled forward like one of the ponderosa pines blocking the roads.
When he woke up, he knew that he had died after all. But strangely enough he had gone to glory. He was warm, and that was a good feeling. And his built-for-bear angel was lying naked in his arms. Who knew angels felt so good? Her soft buttocks were cradling him like they had been made for that purpose. His arms were around her waist and her warm skin was soft and resilient under his kneading fingers.
His hands were warm. He had thought death was cold. But he was warm. And horny. And somehow he had been given this wonderful, warm and cushiony angel, who smelled like his every fantasy come true. He moved his hand upward and brushed against a big, malleable breast. The satiny skin filled him with delight. He kissed the nape of her neck where her braid had fallen away and heard her murmurous sigh of pleasure.
They were enveloped by some light and puffy blanket. The folds caught under them as he tried to turn his angel to face him. His arms were weak. He guessed that was part of being dead. Only his favorite muscle seemed ready to work. He kissed the top of his angel’s spine again but she didn’t wake. She smelled of bear. Female bear. His own personal reward.
CHAPTER ONE
“Does Uncle Jeremy know you’re heading out?” Laura asked her cousin Zeke Bascom as he loaded his camping gear into the bed of his big red pickup.
Zeke grunted. The harsh planes of his face were grim. Under the fatigues he was wearing, his huge, hard-muscled body was stiff with suppressed fury . He concentrated on arranging his stuff efficiently and didn’t answer.
“And,” Laura probed, handing him a duffel that bulged with canned goods.
“He knows. And he isn’t happy.” Zeke admitted without looking up. He stuffed his bedroll against the box of tools he had moved to accommodate the duffel, and made some space for a second duffel.
Zeke’s beat up old Ford was parked in the circular forecourt of his father’s palatial house, a blemish on its perfect landscaping. Laura’s Quarter Horse Dakota was tied to the cast iron hitching post that Zeke’s latest stepmother, Diana, had left by the porch steps as a nod to the family’s ranching history.
Laura and Zeke’s great-grandfather Clive Bascom had bought the Double B Ranch back in 1946 when he got out of the army. Clive had added to his land until he owned pretty much all the land surrounding Success, Colorado. Finding oil on their ranch had catapulted the Bascoms into the oil business in the fifties. Clive had turned B and B Oil into the largest privately held oil company in the U.S..
Jeremy Bascom’s house was the only one visible in the undulating, snow covered prairie that surrounded the two cousins. But the Double B Ranch was big enough to conceal the several others which had been built by the different branches of the extended clan. Laura had ridden over from the original ranch house which she had shared with her great-grandfather until his death two months ago. Now she, her father and her older brother had made it their home base.
“Will you be back for Christmas Day?” Laura pressed Zeke.
Her cousin’s hard face got harder. “Nope.”
Laura’s cheerfulness vanished. “I was kind of looking forward to having you to buffer me from Calvin’s latest arm candy.” Calvin was her brother.
Zeke turned to Laura and gave her shoulder a comforting squeeze. “Sorry,” he said. “I can’t take it any longer. I’m sick of the squabbling and the nagging. Since I came home, it’s been endless. Clive’s death has just made it worse.” His voice tapered off. “I told you the day the will was read that it would set us all at each other’s throats. Was I right? Or was I right?”
Laura nodded sadly. “I still hoped you’d be here for Christmas.”
“Is Calvin’s girl that bad?” he asked.
“Haven’t you met her?”
Zeke shook his head. “Nope. I’ve stayed away from Cal. He and Pat just want to hash over that blasted will — as if talking about it could fix it.”
Laura grimaced. “Tiffany is another one of Cal’s anorexic models. You know the type. This one is supposed to be an investment banker.” Her voice was dubious. “So far she has given me a couple of books worth of advice on losing weight, and another of fashion advice.”
Zeke looked, really looked, at his cousin. She was four or five years younger than him, and the closest thing he had to a sister. Her Junoesque frame was thick with solid muscle, and her opulent curves fit her six foot body. She had been r
unning the Double B Ranch for the better part of a decade, and she was the strongest woman he knew, which was saying something, since the army was full of fit females.
Today she was dressed for work in heavy flannel-lined jeans and chaps. Her torso was kept warm by a puffy blue parka and a windproof vest. Her ancient cream colored Stetson probably sat over a woolen watch cap. She looked pretty rectangular in her get-up, but it was December in Colorado.
There was two feet of snow on the ground and a brisk wind, and the prospect of more snow. Laura was dressed to get through a hard day of locating stray cattle on horseback and bringing them to shelter. To Zeke’s eye she looked exactly the way a hard working rancher should look. And she always looked beautiful to him.
But his cousin Calvin, Laura’s brother, liked his woman city bred. Cal pretty much ran B & B Oil, even though his Uncle Gilbert was still the CEO. Calvin and Zeke’s twin brother Patrick were the smoothest bears he had ever set eyes on. And he didn’t mean that as a compliment. They shared a baffling taste for stick insects with his father Jeremy. At least it baffled Zeke.
Zeke preferred his women with hips and breasts and a whole lot of love handles for a bear to grab hold of. Women who looked just like Laura. What his father saw in his last three wives, Zeke would never know. Susan, Zara and Diana all looked like clones to him. And he was willing to bet that Jeremy was well on the way to replacing his present wife, Diana, with yet another identical sack of bone and gristle.
And he was also willing to bet Cal’s investment banker was yet another skinny bitch. “Ignore Tiffany,” he advised Laura. “You look the way a woman ought to look. And I know you can sit in the saddle all day and all night if you need to. If you lost weight, you’d just lose muscle.”
Laura snorted. “You know that, and I know that, but the constant little digs and helpful suggestions get to me. And examining my dinner plate! Even if I wanted to, I couldn’t be out looking for stock in this weather on salad and a slice of poached chicken.”
“Is that what Tiffany eats?” Zeke was amused. “I bet Rosa isn’t impressed.” Rosa was the ranch house cook.
Laura laughed. “She’s not. But she brings Tiffany what she asks for, and feeds Cal and me proper meals. It’s really Calvin that’s the problem. He’s brought her home for one thing, and one thing only. Outside of that he doesn’t even want to talk to her. Come supper time he leaves her for me to deal with. And all he and Daddy talk about is the will. I’m dreading Christmas Day.”
“I can’t stay, Laura.” Zeke said apologetically. “I just can’t. If I have to have one more conversation about how to get my fair share of Great-granddaddy Clive’s billions, I will kill someone. I really will.” His big, broad face was lined and drawn.
Laura put her hand on his arm. “Not yourself?” she asked softly.
“Hope not.”
Laura’s pretty face grew grave. “I need you too much,” she said. “You stay in one piece.”
Zeke nodded at her once. Commitment made.
“When’s your leave up?” she asked.
“It’s not. Col. Rivera called me to inform me that my papers are in the mail. Doctors have suggested that I be given a medical discharge. I’m on terminal leave as of last Wednesday.”
“Oh, Zeke, I’m so sorry,” Laura said. “Does your daddy know?”
Zeke shook his dark head. His hair was still cut military short, but the snowflakes drifting slowly down from the grey sky had started it curling anyway. “And I’d prefer if he didn’t know it.”
“I won’t betray your confidence,” she said hurt.
“I know, Lauralee.” Zeke used her childhood name.
Laura looked at her big, tough cousin. If the Rangers were forcing him to retire, he was going to be lost. Since high school when he had gone away to West Point, the army had pretty much replaced Zeke’s dysfunctional family. To her anxious eyes, Zeke looked perfectly fine — big, strong, muscular. But something terrible had happened on his last mission. Not that he had said word one to her — or anyone else — about it.
“Uncle Jeremy has never understood that you’re not like Patrick or Calvin,” Laura told him softly. “You can’t be cooped up in an office all day looking at stock reports. You’d go nuts. Granddaddy Clive had no business trying to manipulate you into working for B & B.” Her face was hurt and angry. “He should never have written all those conditions into his will.”
“Look at what he did to you?” responded Zeke with equal bitterness. “Leaving you only a life interest in the ranch — with a reversion to Nolan and Petal. After sucking up your life to run the Double B. He literally promised the ranch to you — you know he did. And neither Nolan or Petal is a Bascom nor a bear! And neither one has the bittiest idea of how to run it.”
“Nolan and Petal may be Belingtons, but they are Clive’s great-grandchildren the same as the rest of us,” Laura reminded him. “And they only get the ranch if I don’t marry and have a child.”
Zeke swore. “Before you’re thirty-five! As if any marriage or kid you had after that wouldn’t be real. And if Aunt Babs was Edward Bascom’s daughter, I’ll eat my hat.” He lowered the lid of his truck bed secured it and turned to look hard at his cousin. “You know what really pisses me off?”
“What?”
“The Belingtons acting like it’s a done deal that they inherit the Double D. Asking questions — as if they know a Holstein from a Longhorn. Don’t you let that clause or those ninnies stampede you into marrying some two-bit loser. You wait for the right man.”
“I’ll try.” Laura sighed. “You know I’m contesting the will. We’re hoping the judge will remove that provision. Our lawyers say it’s too restrictive and a judge might agree. The worst part is all this wrangling. It’s going to be some weird Christmas, with nobody speaking to anybody.”
“I know, Lauralee. We’re all squealing like feral hogs fighting over a carcass. It’s as bad or worse here. Jeremy hasn’t been any too pleased with me since I refused to join the court challenge. And Pat’s almost as mad.
“But you know how I feel, honey. If Granddaddy Clive wants to try to bribe me from the grave, he can go right ahead. It was his money. But I didn’t dance to his tune while he was alive, and I have no reason to start now.”
Zeke walked toward the driver’s side door and opened it. “I’m with Uncle Gil on this,” he reminded his cousin. “Clive’s money was his to do with as he pleased. And that wicked old reprobate pleased to set us all against each other.”
He turned back to Laura as if he had just thought of something. “You aren’t mad at me, because I wouldn’t join the rest of you?” he asked a little anxiously. “I agree that the way the ranch was left was totally unfair to you.”
Laura shook her head. “I understand. You took a stand on principle. And you have lots of those. Don’t you care if you don’t get your inheritance?” she asked.
“Laura, honey, I got news for you,” Zeke told her with amusement in his deep voice. For just a moment his brown eyes sparkled as they had used to. “Living on the interest from a half billion dollar trust fund isn’t any kind of a hardship. My trust fund is plenty. Millions of Americans would bless themselves to get one percent of that every year, free and clear, without lifting a finger.”
“I want mine,” she said emphatically.
“Breeding Quarter Horses is an expensive hobby. I know you spend your money on the stud. And that you want to expand.” Zeke chuckled at her sheepish expression. He bent and kissed her cheek. “Good-bye, and Merry Christmas. I’ll be seeing you in the new year.”
“Have you got your cell with you?” Suddenly she was worried. “There’s a blizzard predicted.”
Zeke shook his head and grinned for the first time. “Not where I’m going.”
“I thought you were going into the foothills, to camp by the river,” Laura said in surprise.
“Nope. I’m heading to Washington State. I’m going to camp up in the mountains. Maybe look up some of those long lost h
illbilly cousins of ours in Kittitas County.”
“I think we’re the long lost cousins,” she corrected him. “It was Granddaddy Clive who ran off from Washington State to Colorado.”
CHAPTER TWO
“I hate to send you out again in this weather,” Jack Enright told his cousin Jenna Bascom.
Jenna smiled and held firm. “I appreciate you and Hannah letting me use your house as a way station. If I hadn’t had a safe place to change and a truck to borrow, I wouldn’t have been able to keep the clinic open this week. Or check on my house-bounds.”
“I know we’re not very organized at present,” Jack rumbled as he rubbed the back of the tiny infant on his broad shoulder. He was rewarded by a milky belch and a small body relaxing into deeper sleep. “But you are welcome to spend the next few days here. It’s going to be rough going up mountain — even for a bear.”
Jenna was a tall, robust woman with the dark hair and heavy frame of her bearshifter clan. She shook her head decisively. “I appreciate the offer. But I want to spend the night in my own home — sleep in my own bed. You guys will be all right on your own. Just keep those babies warm and make sure Hannah stays hydrated and eats enough. Nursing triplets is a drain.”
“At least eat before you go,” Jack urged her. “You have quite a hike ahead of you — in the pouring rain. And it’s gotten colder since this morning. And I’ll bet you skipped lunch.”
“If I leave right now, I’ll be at my cabin before dark,” Jenna said without admitting his guess was right. “You go catch forty winks yourself — before Hannah and the triplets wake up and it starts over.”
“Okay, you win.” Jack transferred his son to the crook of his arm and bent to give Jen’s cheek a kiss. “Happy New Year,” he said. “May the new year bring you luck and love.”
“Luck and love,” echoed Jenna. “Now shoo, and let the lady undress.”
Jack grinned at her and went through the mudroom door closing it behind him. Jen stripped off her jeans and sweater and folded them neatly into one of the empty cubes on the wall. She tucked her underthings into tidy rectangles and placed them beneath her sweater. The mirror over the mudroom bench showed her a vigorous, dark haired Amazon with generous breasts and hips and very long legs, but she wasted no time admiring her body.
Bear Skin (BBW / Bearshifter Romance): A Billionaire Oil Bearons Romance (Bear Fursuits Book 5) Page 1