by Anya Nowlan
Bear’s Christmas Bride
Shifter Grove Brides
Anya Nowlan
Contents
A Little Taste…
Copyright
1. Finn
2. Christine
3. Finn
4. Christine
5. Finn
6. Christine
7. Christine
8. Finn
9. Christine
10. Christine
11. Finn
12. Christine
Epilogue
Bear My Heir Excerpt
Want More?
About the Author
Thank you for reading!
A Little Taste…
“Thank you,” she said, hoisting on her coat again and not bothering to do it up in the front.
She walked to the door, managing to stay completely perpendicular to the ground this time by her own strength. The door, however, wouldn’t budge. She pushed on it once, twice, and before she could launch into curses, she felt Finn leaning over her and making the door knob do a little click and then fall outward.
“It wasn’t opening,” she sighed.
“It does that,” he said with a shrug.
But he was still right there, leaning over her, so close. Her eyes met his and her breath seemed to completely catch in her throat, with her animal telling her to go for what so obviously at that moment seemed to be hers for the taking. Before she could really launch into the argument she knew she was going to have with herself later, she leaned into Finn.
And he didn’t back away.
Instead, he wrapped his arms around her in the most protective way Christine could have ever imagined, and kissed her deeply on the lips. He hugged her tightly and almost lifted her from the ground as her hands went to his neck and she kissed him back eagerly.
He tasted of whiskey and something that she would happily dub pure masculinity. It was intoxicating and as she kissed him and breathed him in, she could tell that her eyes were turning a stark gold.
For a moment, there were no consequences, no worries, no nothing. Just him, and her, and that kiss that felt like it would go on forever. He was gentle but commanding and his mouth seemed to be made to kiss hers. It was the kind of kiss chemistry you don’t even know exists… until you do.
It was Finn who pulled away first and they stared at one another with wide eyes full of surprise, both seeming to be as taken aback as the other by what had just happened.
“I-” Christine gasped, taking a quick step back and slamming into one of the cabinets instead in the cramped space of the trailer.
“Christine,” Finn started, but he didn’t seem to have a follow-up to it.
Whatever thought he had, it vanished as she looked at him, half expecting him to solve this mess they’d just created for one another by something, anything, that he could say, and half convinced that he couldn’t.
“I’m sorry. I need to go,” she mumbled, pushing past him in a mad dash, her whole face feeling like it must have been beet red.
Copyright © 2016 Anya Nowlan
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
Bear’s Christmas Bride
Shifter Grove Brides
All rights reserved.
No part of this work may be used, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means by anyone but the purchaser for their own personal use. This book may not be reproduced in any form without the express written permission of Anya Nowlan. Any reproduction or other unauthorized use of the material is prohibited without the express written permission of the author.
Cover © Jack of Covers
1
Finn
“Would you look where you’re going with that?” Finn huffed, catching the tail end of a roof beam that Jayce was carrying through the carcass of a house on his shoulder, whistling a tune that sounded eerily like Jingle Bells. “And quit that damn racket. Some of us are trying to work in peace here.”
“Sure thing, boss,” Jayce chuckled, the wide-built werelion continuing down deeper into the large building, still whistling.
“I can hear that!” Finn yelled after him, pushing his hard hat down on his head tighter. “Can’t go two damn paces without someone breaking into song. It’s like a damn Disney production here.”
“If that’s true, then who are you supposed to play?” a voice called from above, making Finn glance up.
It was Daley, a werepanther, who was swinging his legs off of one of the beams, twirling a hammer in his hands like it was a baton or something. His green eyes were lit with amusement and it wasn’t hard for Finn to tell that his general grouchiness was well-received by his crew.
If he was in a crap mood, that meant everyone else got to be wise-asses. The universe couldn’t accept a vacuum, after all.
“I’m your conscience. Which is telling you to get back to work.”
“What if I don’t have one of those?” Daley asked with a chuckle, the young worker keen on testing his luck, and Finn’s patience on this particularly fine morning.
“Then I might just have to come up there and surgically implant you one,” Finn grumbled, but he couldn’t escape showing the slightest twitch of the corner of his mouth.
“Sure thing, old man,” Daley said, getting up and walking across the beams with the grace of… well, a big cat.
That was the thing with shifter work crews. Safety regulations could be a lot laxer at times, though you always had to be prepared for a random large predator falling down from the skies.
“I’m three years older than you, kid!” Finn yelled after him, shaking his head as he trudged deeper into the house.
It was a fine, large building, with aims to be one of the nicer ranch houses in Shifter Grove. The architecture was unique to the area, with large, sweeping arches, and domed ceilings that were going to be a bitch to build, but Finn was sure it would give the house a lot of attitude when it was all said and done.
He loved places with a soul and though you could barely see the one this house was going to have because they weren’t even done with roofing it yet, he could tell that this was going to be a good one.
Whoever designed it did a bang-up job, he mused, catching up to Jayce now.
He and two other men were hauling the beam up in what was supposed to be the ‘main study’ as the plans said. All of the rooms in the house had excruciatingly pretentious call signs and the crew had taken great joy in mocking them amongst themselves, which didn’t mean they weren’t still doing their job the way it needed to be done.
Finn grabbed the side of the heavy beam and pushed it upwards, where it was caught by Tom and Clark, werewolf twins who had been working for the company for a long while now. In fact, everyone on the site had been in Shifter Grove for longer than Finn had, but that didn’t seem to mean much at all to anyone.
As long as you did your work, you were treated as one of the crew. And considering how fast Finn had built a rapport with his crew, he felt like things were going well.
“You got it?” he asked as Tom let the beam fall on the sturdy carcass of what would be the second floor.
“Yup, we’re good, boss,” Clark called down, giving half a salute.
“You worried we’d miss you too much if you stayed away for a second?” Jayce asked, wiping sweat from his brow with a wide g
rin on his face.
“I’m afraid you’ll bring my house down before it ever had a chance to get up, is what I’m afraid of,” the werebear grumbled in response, scruffing a hand through the hair peeking out from under his helmet.
It had been a long day, and a cold day, but that was to be expected for December in the foothills of Idaho. They only had so much light to work with and they had to make the best of it.
Somewhere outside, Finn could hear the telltale signs of a car’s transmission being tortured with short shifts. He frowned, but thought nothing of it as the sound stopped.
Must be one of the delivery guys, he thought.
They were expecting tiles for the bathrooms that day, so he began heading casually towards the front of the house, tucking his hands in his pockets. Behind him, he could hear Jayce start whistling again.
Can’t escape Christmas no matter where I go, Finn thought with some resignation.
He was halfway to where he was going when a whole new kind of sound, scratching and scathing in its unique way, caught his ear. It was the sound of a displeased woman, and any man’s insides could turn to ice and lead at the sound of it.
Finn Themps was no exception in this case.
“What the,” he mumbled to himself, scowling as he trudged directly towards the sound, his heavy steps pounding through the house.
“This is all wrong,” a voice gasped from behind a partition wall, almost stopping Finn dead in his tracks.
She was clearly upset, whoever she was. But that voice? Hell, if she would have told him to jump, his bear might have just talked him into doing it, figuring out the ‘how high’ part later.
Instead, he came to the doorway that separated the front hall from the rest of the house, coming face to face with an aggravated, gorgeous little creature. She was standing in the middle of the room, clutching a tablet of some sort, wrapped up in a winter coat that looked both too big, and too expensive.
Even under that pile of fabric, Finn could tell that she had a body any shifter could easily be convinced to kill for, because the belt pulled around her waist hinted at plenty of curves. His bear growled within him, and the man almost did the same.
“Are you the one who is in charge?” she demanded, her pretty, but currently fairly annoying, voice scratching at his ears.
“I am. And you would be?” he asked, cocking a brow at her as he folded his arms across his wide chest.
Giving her his best authoritative glare, he found her not shying back half a step. The little ball of fluff and fire stepped up to him instead and practically shoved the tablet in his face. He had to jerk his head back a little so she wouldn’t hit him in the nose with it. In her defense, she was about a foot shorter than he was at 6’4’’, so maybe the whole judging distances thing didn’t work so well from down low.
“Never mind who I am. Do you know that you’ve gotten the arch all wrong!?” she asked, flabbergasted.
Blonde curls of honey peeked out from under her turquoise hat, lined with what looked to be rabbit fur. She clearly had to be new in town, because everyone had learned right quick that wearing furs was not a good idea in a community of shifters and humans trying to live together peacefully.
Her eyes were big and blue and expressive, and she had a button nose and rosy cheeks, probably because of how obviously upset she currently was. A light smattering of freckles was obvious on her nose and cheeks, and Finn got the feeling that she wasn’t proud of those by the way she’d tried to cover them up with make-up.
Regardless, she was just about the most breathtaking woman he’d ever seen. And that was probably the only reason he hadn’t picked her up by the scruff and kicked her out of his construction site.
“Ma’am, you’re not authorized to be here,” Finn said, taking a step closer and with that finally making her stumble a step back, lest she be run over by him.
“Oh, yes, I am,” she huffed, her cheeks getting even redder now.
And cuter, Finn added in his head.
They were starting to get an audience. The men had stopped what they were doing and slowly gathered around, watching the show with muffled commentary of their own. Their little intruder seemed entirely nonplussed by that.
“And why would that be?” Finn asked, scowling at her.
She stood up straighter. That scowl always worked to bring people down a peg or two and the fact that it wasn’t, was… well, if nothing else, then at least surprising.
“Because I designed it!” she said, dropping the first bomb.
Finn’s brows shot up.
“You designed it?” he asked, incredulous.
In retrospect, he might have wanted to phrase it a little differently. He’d just been admiring the architecture and now, being faced with this bundled up angel of a creature with the attitude of a real headache, he might have not expressed himself in the best way he could. She picked up on his surprise immediately, her eyes narrowing.
“Yes. And you’re doing a rotten job at getting it right. If that’s not enough, I’m also paying for it, so… so, yeah.”
Finn’s nostrils flared. He could hear chuckles around himself, but all he could really see was red. Well, maybe a little bit of affectionate pink too, but mostly red.
Walking straight up to her, whoever she was, he bent over so he could look her in the eye. A growl was rumbling in his throat and only then did he realize that she wasn’t just any woman (or any woman with a kicker of an attitude), but she was a shifter, too.
That’s something to worry about later.
“Ma’am, you’re going to turn around and leave my construction site, or I’m going to have to escort you out for safety reasons. And trust me, you wouldn’t like me escorting you out.”
“What?!” she gasped, those blue eyes of her growing even wider.
Dammit, why’d she have to be so damn… Beautiful? Breathtaking? Aggravating? Irritating? Infuriating?
All of the above worked.
“You can’t make me go! I designed it and you’re working for me!”
“False,” Finn declared, straightening up.
He put his big palms on her shoulders and spun her around suddenly, making her gasp. It was a nice sound, far nicer than all the shrill screaming that he’d been forced to endure so far.
“We work for Warfang Construction. Any issues you might have must be taken up with the executives of said company. Unauthorized persons are to be removed from the premises and fined for trespassing.”
With that, Finn picked her up by the waist and unceremoniously carried her out of the house like a lost kitten.
“Put me down! Put me down right now,” she screeched.
Finn dropped her gently in the snow right off the front porch. Roars of laughter followed him but all Finn could hear was the way her heart thudded in her chest, like a bird fluttering against a cage.
His hands tingled a little after he put her down, but he didn’t have time to focus on it because she whirled around, probably ready to hurl insults at him. So he crossed his arms over his chest again, secretly clenching his hands into fists to make them shake a little less. He hadn’t even really touched her and yet he felt like he’d just come to contact with the damn meaning of life itself.
“Yes?” he asked casually, cocking a brow at her.
She was beet red in the face now, fuming.
“You’ll be sorry for that,” she said, her bottom lip quivering.
His moment of victory was soured, but before Finn could say anything, she’d whirled around and stomped towards a little red car that looked like it was in no way ready to conquer the mountainous, icy roads around Shifter Grove.
Shaking his head, Finn turned around and headed back into the house. His enchanted audience was still there.
“What?” he asked. “Don’t you lot have work to do?”
At least his scowl worked on them. They scattered like rats.
A moment later, he could hear that torturous sound of a transmission being violently disman
tled from the inside.
He got the distinct feeling that this little scene would come to haunt him real soon.
2
Christine
Exactly what I needed. Not only are they building my house wrong, but they’re mocking me in the process, Christine thought, hours after leaving the build site of the soon-to-be Mayer residence.
She had just stepped out of the offices of Warfang Construction, and she didn’t feel any mellowed out for it. Though she had a perfectly pleasant conversation with the Warfang twins and their wife, the owners of the company and generally good people, she couldn’t exactly get over the treatment she’d received in the hands of the foreman.
Finn Themps, she thought, the name along bringing distaste and bitterness into her mouth.
Christine stuck her tongue out for a moment and made the most wretched face she could, after making sure no one was around, of course.
With that out of the way, she could take a breath and trudge over to her car again. Though the moment she climbed into the driver’s seat, the little bit of respite she’d felt after her moment of rebellion seemed to waft away immediately.
“What kind of a place doesn’t have automatic transmission cars?” she lamented to no one but herself, starting the car after not one, but two failed attempts at it.
Tyler Warfang waved at her cheerily as he climbed into his vehicle, a big truck, and took off. He’d promised to go have a word with Finn while she looked for a place to stay for the next few weeks. What had started as a quick visit to see how her soon-to-be seasonal home was doing, was turning into an unexpected ‘vacation’.
The car engine finally rumbled to life and Christine took her phone. She looked up Cisco’s number and called him, the phone connecting over Bluetooth as she started slowly and painfully making her way towards the one inn that the Warfangs could direct her to.