“It’s hard to believe we came this far,” she said, her belly pressing against him as they danced.
“I have everything in the world I’ve ever wanted.”
“And more,” Rosa breathed.
Heath pulled her into his chest and danced with her across the floor. When the song came to an end, they took their seats at the banquet table. Maria was to Rosa’s right and Heath was to her left.
The bear clans and the people of Fate Mountain had brought her into their lives and their world and had given her the best life she could imagine. She had her mate, and her sister, and a beautiful baby on the way. Now Rosa also had a bear inside her too. Something she never would have even dreamed could happen when she started out on the journey to find Maria.
Her courage and intuition and had brought her to this place. Not only had she helped solve an institutional crime ring, but she’d found love, a home, and a family.
The servers brought everyone a plate and the real feast began. Soon the toasts started. Rollo got up and congratulated Heath for his marriage and baby but also commended him for his heroic work on the Bear Patrol.
Then Maria stood and lifted her glass. Rosa had told Maria she could have one glass of champagne for the celebration. Rosa couldn’t be more proud of Maria. She’d been doing so well in school and she was already advancing to the next level.
“My sister is my hero,” Maria started. “When everyone told her I had ran away, my sister never stopped fighting for me. She followed clues all the way up the coast, and against all odds came to Fate Mountain to find me here. I’m awed by my sister’s instinct and her courage. If I can be half the woman she is, I’ll have done a good job. Now my sister has a mate of her own and a baby on the way. I know that it is a dream come true for her. On this day, when she and Heath are finally making it official, I’m so happy for all of us. I know we’re going to have an awesome future and an awesome family. Thank you Heath and Rosa for never giving up on me and never giving up on love.”
Rosa felt her heart burst and her tears flow down her cheeks. She stood up to hug her sister and the two of them cried hot tears for a moment, holding each other tight. They were best friends to the end and Rosa was so grateful her sister was healing after everything she’d been through. They would have a beautiful future. She knew it in the depths of her soul.
They sat back down and Rosa took a long sip of bubbling apple cider. She couldn’t believe her dreams were coming true around her. Heath squeezed her hand and leaned in to kiss her softly on the lips. She smiled into his warm eyes, smelling the scent of his body as she leaned close.
Later, after the cake and presents, the happy couple went upstairs to the honeymoon suite on the top floor of Fate Mountain Lodge. It looked out onto the silvery waters of Lake Fate under the full moonlight.
Rosa’s bear rumbled in her mind, content and happy to be in her mate’s arms. They stood on the balcony, Heath with his arms wrapped around her waist from behind. His hands rested on her belly, and he kissed the back of her neck.
“The world is a beautiful place, babe,” he whispered. “More beautiful every day I’m in it with you.”
“Together we have a chance to do this life right, and there’s no one I’d rather do it with than you. You’ve given me everything. You fill me up to the brim. I’m overflowing.”
“I know, babe. I feel the same way.”
They held each other in the moonlight. Somewhere in the distance, a night bird sang over the lake waters far below. The stars twinkled in the night sky, brightened by the radiance of the moon.
They had everything they needed in that moment. They had the world in their hands.
They had each other.
Tech Bear
Fate Always Wins
An unexpected discovery ...
Lifelong techies Raven and Damien have been online video-game friends for years. When Damien asks Raven to sign up for a shifter-human dating website, she learns that the man she’s been crushing on all this time is her fated mate -- and the cop whose database she’s been hacking in search of her long-lost mother.
A difficult delay ...
Damien is thrilled to learn that Raven is meant to be his. He’s been waiting so long to find his mate, and it’s all he can do not to buy a ring and pop the question so they can settle down and start a family. Patience isn’t easy, but he’ll find it for the woman of his dreams.
A deepening mystery
Raven can’t surrender her heart until she understands who she is. As her quest for answers brings her closer to the truth, can she trust her mate with her secret? Or will it keep them apart forever?
Chapter 1
Tech Bear Damien Fellows slapped his laptop closed and looked up at his boss.
“Of course I’ll be at the Thanksgiving celebration at the lodge,” Damien said, knowing he had narrowly missed his chief seeing he was playing video games at work.
“Just checking,” Rollo said. “Zoe is determined to have the Rescue Bears and Bear Patrol at the lodge for Thanksgiving dinner.”
“I’ll be there,” Damien said.
Rollo nodded at Damien and left the room, closing the door behind him. Damien let out a long sigh and opened his laptop again. He focused on the screen and moved his mouse, clicking his hot keys as he moved through his favorite video game, Dragon Lands.
His paladin avatar raised his sword and slashed at a zombie as he made his way through an area full of undead. He’d been playing Dragon Lands for seven years, and he had to admit to himself that it had become a bit of an obsession.
After seven years at one game, a techie like him probably should have moved on to greener pastures, but something about Dragon Lands always kept him coming back for more. Maybe it was a new expansion with more epic gear and more challenging dungeons.
Or maybe it was the fact that he had been playing in the same guild the whole time. Even when he’d been in the military. During the Great War, Damien had played his paladin with the same people that he played with today.
The zombie slashed back at him and hit for two thousand damage. Even with his heavy plate-metal armor, the hit took a lot of his hit points. He gritted his teeth. Leveling up was more challenging than it had been in the last expansion. He had to complete all the quests in this zone before he was qualified to go on to the next one.
He popped one of his cool-downs, and it took out the zombie in one hit. After casting a healing spell on himself, he continued down the path through the undead area. There were mobs on either side, but Damien activated his mount, a horse with a purple inscribed blanket and an ornate bridle, and hurried along the path toward the next spot on his mini-map. It was the next location for the quest he was trying to complete. He’d already picked up seven severed zombie hands and needed three more to complete the quest.
Where was Raven?
That elf rogue was supposed to be online by now to help them with this quest. Damien rode his horse over the rugged terrain under the gray skies of the undead area and came to a spooky castle up the trail on top of a hillside in the distance.
Just as he was checking his mini-map again for the location of the quest, he heard the hard drive on his police computer grind from a quick activation. He turned away from the game and examined the screens on the desk behind him.
Tech Bear had his own office in the Fate Mountain Police Department. It was covered in computers and monitors to keep track of all the investigations he was involved in. Lately, things on Fate Mountain had been fairly calm. He hadn’t had a lot of work to do.
Rollo had proven to be an excellent chief of police, and even though many humans in the area weren’t on board with a shifter police department, Rollo was working hard to overcome the public relations problems they’d had early on.
This time of year, when everyone was preparing for the holidays and the upcoming winter season on the mountain, crime was at an all-time low. But that didn’t explain why Damien’s computer was suddenly going haywire, as if ma
ssive amounts of data were running through his system.
His eyes shot wide open with shock when he realized what was happening. Someone had hacked into his system! He could see them trying to access the random-probability generator that Corey Bright of the Bright Institute and the inventor of Mate.com had allowed him to use for the police department. Damien and Corey had worked together many times on investigations for the Rescue Bears and for the police department.
Damien might have been a genius in many circles and was definitely, in his opinion, the smartest guy on the police department, but when he compared himself to somebody like Corey Bright, they weren’t even in the same league. That was how Damien felt, anyway. Every time he accessed Corey’s random-probability generator, it reminded him that there was someone close to him that was even more ingenious then he was. Damien tried not to let it get to him, but he didn’t always succeed.
Rushing to stop whatever leaks in his security had been breached, Damien typed away on his keyboard, trying to find the intruder. This guy was good; his tracks were completely covered. If it hadn’t been for Damien’s hard drive activating, he might not have seen the intruder in the first place. How had this guy gotten in?
Damien had the best security on Fate Mountain, except for maybe Corey Bright and the Bright Institute. The intruder had given up trying to access the random-probability generator and was now delving into old case files from decades ago.
Damien continued chasing the intruder down, trying to push the user out of the system by force. It must have worked, because the data access quickly slowed and stopped. Damien tried every trick in the book to capture the intruder’s access point, but as quickly as the hacker had arrived, he disappeared.
“Dammit!” Damien growled.
How had he been so stupid as to allow somebody into the system? Sure, he had been sitting here playing Dragon Lands, but that didn’t mean he was lazy or incompetent. This hacker had been after something, and Damien was determined to figure out what.
He continued trying to chase down the IP address of the intruder, using all of his own hacking skills to follow the trail through the Internet. Every time he found a source, it was rerouted to another computer. The intruder jumped from country to country, rerouting through vast systems. It was easy to say that the trail went cold rather quickly.
Damien gritted his teeth, growled, and smashed his fist on his desk. Feeling like an idiot, he went back to his own system and tried to shore up whatever weaknesses he had that had allowed the hacker in in the first place.
He went through every safety measure he knew and then some, double-checking and changing all his passwords. When he had tightened his security, he went into the system and started investigating the old files the hacker had been accessing. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense. The hacker had access to some cold cases but nothing that was related to anything else. The hacker had tried to use the random-probability generator but had not been able to break through Damien’s security measures.
Damien let out a deep breath. At least one of his firewalls had worked today. He already had to live in the shadow of a genius like Corey Bright—his ego really couldn’t take being bested by a hacker in his own system.
He swiveled his chair, feeling irritable and hungry. When he looked back at his game, he noticed a chat bubble in the window. It was Raven, the elf rogue he’d been waiting for.
“What took you so long?” Damien typed in game chat.
“I had business to take care of,” said Raven. “So, Tech Bear Paladin, how many severed zombie hands have you found so far?”
“I only have seven. I need three more.”
“I haven’t even started this quest yet.”
“I’ll help you get started if you help me finish.”
Tech Bear Paladin and Raven the elf rogue worked together to hack through the undead zombies. Having Raven here with him in the Blighted Castle made quick work of the zombies. They both had ten severed hands in no time. This was why Damien loved playing with Raven so much. She was one of the best players he had ever played with, and they had been at it since day one. After all this time, he still couldn’t resist her.
Damien was old enough and experienced enough to know that in-game romances happened all the time. It was highly likely that Raven was not what she appeared to be, but something about her made him feel that she was a lot like her avatar. Every time they played together, they laughed and joked and had a great time.
Hanging out with Raven tended to be better than any dates he’d been on in a long time. If she were a real woman, then he would have to hang up his alpha-male card because he was damn attracted to her, even if he only knew her as an avatar.
“You are pretty slow on your healing-wave spells,” Raven said, teasing him.
“I’m not responsible for healing your rogue ass,” Damien typed back.
“Since when?” Raven retorted. “You have like no DPS, so you might as well do something useful for once.”
Damien chuckled at her retort. This was part of why he was so attracted to her. She always kept him on his toes. She was probably one of the quickest-witted people he spent his time with. He couldn’t resist a woman like that. Maybe he was fooling himself, but he wanted to meet her more than was probably wise.
“We’ve been playing video games together for a long time,” he typed in-game.
“Too long,” Raven said. “I should probably get a better partner.”
“If you got a different partner, who would heal you when you pulled an entire room of mobs?”
“You aren’t the only healer out there,” Raven teased.
“You know you love me,” Tech Bear Paladin said.
“You’re right. I do,” Raven admitted.
“This is going to sound crazy, but…”
He wasn’t sure how to say it. He hesitated for several long minutes until she responded.
“Everything you say sounds crazy,” she said.
“I really want to meet you, Raven,” he said. “I feel like there’s something special between us. Like you could be my fated mate.”
“So you really are a shifter in real life?”
“Yes, I am, and almost every shifter I know has found their mate through this website, Mate.com,” he said, typing out the link for her.
“Are you kidding me?” she said, her avatar laughing hysterically in his face.
The elf threw her head back and roared with laughter, holding her dual daggers at her hips. She was wearing a leather-bra-and-bikini-underwear armor set that showed off most of her dark-brown elf skin. Even as an avatar, she was smoking hot.
“Yeah, it was a joke,” Damien said, trying to save face.
“Are you on there?” she asked finally, her avatar making a rude gesture.
“Yeah, I’ve been on there for years,” Damien said. “But only because most of the other shifters I know are on there. It’s pretty lame, right?”
“I might just sign up so I can see what you look like in real life,” Raven said.
“Maybe you should,” Damien said, hope returning to his heart.
He hadn’t been so embarrassed in as long as he could remember. This wasn’t going at all as he had hoped. Raven was actively mocking him, which he should have expected, knowing Raven. He had been hoping it would go much differently. Still, she had jokingly suggested that she would sign up just to see what he looked like in real life. That was something.
“Maybe I will, Tech Bear Paladin,” she said. “Maybe I will.”
Chapter 2
Raven pushed away from her desk, frowning. Why had he had to go and ask her to join Mate.com? She’d been playing Dragon Lands with Tech Bear Paladin for the last seven years. She had to admit to herself that the guy was actually one of her best friends, if not the best friend she had.
They’d never met in person. She’d never seen a picture of him, and she didn’t even know his real name. Raven had used her own name when setting up her character profile seven years ago. But t
hat was because she had a cool-ass name. All this time, she’d hidden in her anonymity behind the screen. Now the one person she had in the world to depend on wanted to change their relationship. Things were working fine the way they were. Why did he want to go and change it?
She stood from her desk and swept her long braided locks over her shoulder as she trudged into her small kitchen in the tiny apartment she rented on Fate Mountain. She’d been living here for the last few months, searching for evidence of her long-lost mother.
Twenty years ago, when Raven was just five years old, her mother had disappeared. Raven had little memory of her life before her mother left her with a neighbor one day. After that, she’d ended up in foster care for the rest of her childhood. What Raven did remember was her mother’s love. For that reason, she would never give up looking for her.
Raven poured herself another cup of coffee, watching the black liquid fill the white porcelain cup. Unlike the black and white colors of her coffee and her cup, her world was not so perfectly delineated. Raven’s world was shades of gray: morally, physically, emotionally.
Growing up in foster care and having been abandoned by a mother she knew loved her, Raven had spent her entire life not really knowing who she was. That was why she’d come to Fate Mountain. That was why she’d hacked into the Fate Mountain Police Department’s databases, looking for information on her mother.
She poured cream and sugar into her coffee and took a long swig, enjoying the nutty flavor of the full-bodied roast. Raven always liked to load up on coffee before, during, and after a hacking session.
The shades of gray that she lived in were taking over her reality, and she couldn’t tell what was right and wrong anymore. She wasn’t sure if she felt guilty about breaking the law or if she even should feel guilty. She had called the police department anonymously two years ago, asking if they had any information on her mother. That was before the current shifter police chief was in charge, but Raven doubted anything had changed much since then.
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