While they ate Mia’s pecan pie they went into the living room to sit around the Christmas tree to open the giant stack of presents under the tree. It glowed with twinkling lights that reflected off the multi-colored glass orbs. Ornaments hung from the green bows of the tree she and Connor had cut down together.
The children opened a new train set in a fury of paper. Charles got a new fishing pole. Stephanie gave her mother Kathy a brand new shotgun and Stephanie's husband gave her a beautiful new necklace. Everyone was overjoyed with their gifts but there was still one last tiny box under the tree. Connor picked it up and brought it over to Mia and handed it to her. She looked at the tiny box and back at Connor questioningly. What could it be?
Her curiosity was overwhelming as she ripped open the Santa covered wrapping paper to find a little velvet box inside. Her heart skipped a beat as she opened the box to reveal what was within. It was a glistening diamond engagement ring.
She couldn't have picked out a more beautiful ring. Yellow gold with a princess cut diamond; it looked like it was at least half a carat. Mia had never had anything so extravagant or beautiful in her life. While everyone else was laughing and talking and playing with their gifts, Connor slipped the ring on Mia’s finger.
“Mia Royce? Will you be my wife?”
“Oh yes, Connor. I'll be your wife. I'll be your mate. I'll be the mother of your child. As long as I'm with you, nothing can hurt me. I have everything I need.”
He leaned in and kissed her softly on the mouth. Joy to the World played on the stereo and the children danced around as their fathers played with the new train set on the floor. In that moment, Mia knew that fate had been on her side when it brought her home to Fate Mountain.
Beauty and the Bad Bearlionaire
Bonus Book Three
The last thing Matilda Swank wants is to go back to work for her mom at Fate Mountain Cleaning, but if she wants to save money for college, she doesn't have any other options. Billionaire James Hill is a grumpy bear with a bad habit. He needs a cleaning lady to take care of his estate, but when Matilda shows up at his door, he finds himself consumed by his inner demons. Can Matilda help James clean up his act and solve the mystery of Fate Mountain's notorious haunted mansion?
Chapter 1
Matilda Swank spread the Fate Mountain News across her table at the diner and groaned. Just as she’d suspected: there were absolutely no jobs available for a twenty-year-old would be archeology major with her limited job experience.
The waitress filled her white porcelain cup with black coffee and gazed down at Matilda with a motherly smile on her lips.
“What’s wrong, hun?” Lily asked.
Everyone on Fate Mountain knew Lily Keenan, the co-owner of Fate Mountain Diner. She stood above Matilda with coffee pot in hand and her order pad stuffed into the front pocket of her pink waitress uniform. Lily was a sweetheart, but Matilda doubted she could help her.
“I’m looking for a job. Now that I’m living back at home with my mom, I have to start all over.”
“Oh darn, I wish I had known. We just hired three new people over the holidays. There just aren’t any more open shifts.”
“That’s fine, Lily. I kind of figured that when I saw the new faces.”
“Maybe you can ask down at the lodge.”
“I’m afraid it’s the same story there. I can’t find anything. I’m going to have to go back to working for my mom.”
Matilda stared at the black liquid in her coffee cup and opened a few packets of sugar, dumping them inside.
“What’s so bad about that?” Lily asked.
Matilda gave Lily a shocked look that she instantly regretted. She should be grateful that her mom was helping her out so much. But when Matilda had left two years ago after high school, she’d never wanted to come back to this small town.
All this time, she’d been telling herself that she was saving money to finally go to college. Two years later, she wasn’t any closer to being able to go to school.
“It isn’t that I don’t like cleaning…” Matilda said, trying not to sound like an ungrateful brat.
“You’ve been gone a while. It’s natural to not want to go backward.”
Matilda let out a long sigh, feeling relieved that Lily understood where she was coming from.
“Exactly. I never wanted to be in this position.”
“Don’t get too down on yourself. Everyone needs help now and again.”
“I just wish things hadn’t turned out like this.”
“Broken relationships can take a lot out of you.”
“That’s an understatement.”
Lily gave her that sweet smile again and flicked her long blonde ponytail over her shoulder. Matilda knew that Lily had first hand experience with difficult relationships. Her relationship with her husband Shane had taken over a decade to work out in the end.
Unfortunately for Matilda, she doubted her own, now finished, relationship would ever work out like theirs had. Her ex-boyfriend had burned that bridge beyond repair. And as much as Matilda had wanted to believe it was true love in the beginning, she no longer believed it ever had been. There was only so much BS a girl could take.
“Everything will work out fine, hun,” Lily said, turning away. She stopped mid-stride and turned back to Matilda’s table. “Have you signed up for Mate.com?”
“God no,” Matilda said flatly.
“Just a thought,” Lily said with a smile as she walked down the aisle.
Mate.com was a shifter/human dating site that catered to male shifters and human women. It had been designed by Fate Mountain’s resident tech genius. But Matilda doubted it would do her any good.
After growing up around shifters on Fate Mountain all her life, she’d never met her fated mate. She really didn’t think she had one. Besides that, the absolute last thing she needed was to get into another romantic relationship right now. She had to focus on saving money for college and getting on with her life.
Matilda had a lot of respect for Lily. She’d known her for a long time through her mom, back before Matilda had left town. Her happy relationship with Shane was legendary. But Matilda knew that not everyone got that lucky.
She sighed and looked back down at her newspaper, hoping there would be more jobs the second time she looked. But just like before, there was nothing she was even remotely qualified for.
She chugged down her coffee and finished up the last bites of her apple pie before throwing some cash on the table and booking it out the front door of the cafe. Her crappy old Honda sat in the parking lot like a dirty white eyesore.
Matilda slid behind the wheel of her car and turned the engine on. Gripping the steering wheel, she gritted her teeth, realizing that she really did have no other options besides going back to work for her mom.
She drove across town and parked in front of her mom’s mid-century modern house. Her mom’s cleaning van was parked in the front driveway so Matilda parked on the street. She slid out of the car and trudged up the front walk to her mom’s house. Just as she was about to grip the doorknob, her mom flung open the door.
“Where were you?” her mom asked.
“I was getting a bite to eat and looking for a job in the paper.”
“Matilda. Why are you wasting your time looking in the paper? I can give you shifts right now. You’d be paid by the end of the week.”
“I know, mom. You’ve told me that like a thousand times.”
“Well, I’m reminding you for the thousand and first time. Are you ready to stop being stubborn and get to work?”
Her mom stood in the doorway, tall and curvy with long black hair that only had a tiny dusting of white around her temples. Matilda’s mom had once been considered a great beauty on Fate Mountain.
Most people didn’t understand why such a beautiful woman had settled for a life as a cleaner. But after Matilda’s father left, her mom had been determined to live life on her own terms. That meant running her own business and stayi
ng single.
Matilda respected her mom more than anyone, and that was why it was so hard for her to admit her mistakes and accept her mom’s help.
“Okay, okay. You win. I’ll take a job as a cleaning lady. When can I start?”
Chapter 2
James Hill poked the burning coals in his grand stone fireplace with an iron rod and frowned. This fireplace needed to be cleaned out. So did the stack of dishes piling up in the sink. Not to mention the floors, the carpets, his bedsheets, and the toilets.
Since his cleaning lady had quit last week, he hadn’t had anyone to tidy up his estate. He sure as hell wasn’t going to do it himself. He paid other people to do that sort of thing. Besides, he was far too busy. He had a full schedule of brooding, grumping, and trying to stay relatively sane.
The sanity part was something he rarely admitted to even himself. But ever since selling his tech company and moving to Fate Mountain, his grip on reality had been slipping further and further away.
That was another reason he needed a cleaning lady. With at least one other person around the estate every day, he felt a little less on edge, even though he assumed he would prefer to be alone. He’d realized almost as soon as he’d moved into his mansion that he couldn’t be there by himself all the time.
Since the Great War, he’d been having problems. A male shifter of a certain age, who had been drafted into the war ten years ago. James had served his time in the military. After the shifters had helped bring the war to an end, he’d been allowed to go home. But the memories wouldn’t rest while he slept at night.
The kinds of things he’d seen, he still couldn’t fully process. His inner bear certainly couldn’t. The poor beast had been broken beyond repair.
After the war, James had had to sell the multi-billion-dollar company he’d built. Even during his years of service, he hadn’t sold it. It was only when he had come back and tried to run it again that he finally realized he had to let it go.
Sitting in meetings or strategizing with coders drove him to the brink. He couldn’t deal with people being so close to him all the time, asking things, expecting things, looking at him.
Now, he was alone in this mansion and the sickness that had plagued him since the war was only getting worse. Sometimes he honestly believed the mansion was alive.
There had been stories about the mansion being haunted before he’d bought it. As a logical man, he hadn’t believed them. But every day his madness was growing.
At least having the cleaning lady around every day had helped him from spiraling into total insanity. With another person in the house, he could compartmentalize the things he was seeing as delusions. It helped keep him from being taken over by them. Without a cleaning lady around, the delusions were getting worse all the time.
It had been his fault she’d quit. He had to admit that to himself. He wasn’t exactly the easiest person to work for. James wasn’t sorry for his behavior, though. She never should have entered his private rooms without permission. Especially with him in there. He hated his private space to be violated. He’d yelled at her. But he still believed she deserved it.
Nevertheless, he was left with no one to clean up after him, and no one to add normalcy to his life. He wasn’t sure which he needed more.
He knew one thing for sure, he needed a new cleaning lady. He’d asked the cleaning company for a new girl, but they hadn’t been able to find anyone yet. All the other cleaning women refused to work for him. If there were another private cleaning company on Fate Mountain, he would have gone to them, but Fate Mountain Cleaning was the only game in town.
He knew he could always put an ad in the paper and hire someone directly, which he didn’t want to do. Hiring a person himself sounded like a nightmare he would really rather avoid.
James threw another log in the fire and flames popped and burst. He grimaced and then let out a long sigh, turning away from the fireplace. He walked through his large master bedroom, the dark oak bedposts spiraling up toward the thirteen-foot ceiling.
His brown leather couch was covered in throw blankets from where he had slept the night before. It had been a fitful night, and the mess on the sofa just reminded him how much he needed someone to come and take care of his mansion.
He scratched his ass under his gray flannel long underwear and trudged across the room in his fur-lined leather slippers.
He had taken off his shirt the night before, when he’d been drinking bourbon straight out of the bottle. This always happened to him this time of year. Spending another New Year’s alone always got to him.
The loneliness riled up his demons in the darkest recesses of his imagination. When he had passed out onto the cold stone fireplace he had actually imagined he’d seen the clock on the mantle look down at him through eyes in the nine and the three on the face of the clock. He’d had that particular delusion many times before.
But he didn’t want to think about that now. He was starving. His stomach grumbled and he patted it, contemplating what he might have for breakfast. While James didn’t enjoy going into town for groceries, he always had a fully stocked pantry and refrigerator. Even the baddest billionaire bear on the mountain had to keep his stomach full.
If there was one thing that a grumpy bear liked, it was food. He marched out of his bedroom, down the grand staircase, and into the well-appointed chef’s dream kitchen where his coffee was already brewed. Putting his coffee pot on a timer was one of the few things he managed to do for himself on a daily basis. That was aside from making sandwiches, and stews and chili in his crockpot.
James poured himself a cup of coffee and opened the refrigerator to look inside. As he was sipping the bright medium brew from the misty hills of Ecuador, he tried to decide if he would rather have French brie or German Gouda in his morning omelet.
Finally, James decided on the brie. He grabbed a dozen farm fresh eggs from a local chicken farm, rich cream, and the brie he’d had imported from France. He set it all on his black and gold-speckled granite countertop and grabbed a copper egg pan from the hanging pan rack above his six-burner gas stove.
James might be a grumpy bear, and as a retired billionaire there weren’t many things that he would get himself out of bed to do—but cooking was one of them, as long as he was able to still push away the dirty dishes and pots and pans to another part of the counter. He frowned at the mess. There wasn’t much counter space left.
James dropped a dab of butter into the pan and melted it before pouring in the eggs and adding the brie cheese. He went back to the fridge for some spinach and grabbed a package of English muffins, fresh from the bakery in town, and threw them in his toaster.
He tossed a handful of spinach into his omelet and flipped it. When the omelet was ready to slide on the plate, the toaster dinged and he pulled out the English muffins. He sat down at the table in his breakfast nook and slathered his muffins with butter and fresh jelly.
Looking out the window, he gazed onto the manicured grounds of his estate. Everything was covered in snow this time of year but soon the flowers would bloom and the grass would grow green in the meadows again.
It was loneliest up there on the mountain in winter, when even the forest creatures hid from view. Without the cleaning lady to come every day with her chatter and gossip, he had only his weekly deliveries to count on for company. Sometimes he contemplated going back to the city, but he knew he could never go back to where he’d come from. The time for that had passed.
James took a big bite of English muffin and followed it with a bite of his omelet. His stomach grumbled and his inner bear growled.
If James’s human was grumpy, his inner bear was even grumpier. The bear loved the forest and all the pleasures that went with allowing his primal urges to emerge in its natural habitat. But his inner grizzly also longed for the desires of the flesh, and James hadn’t seen an attractive female since he had left his company several years ago.
The cleaning lady had often chattered about joining the
dating website created by another fate mountain billionaire.
Mate.com catered to male shifters and curvy human females. Since there were so many more male shifters than female shifters, male shifters often had to find their fated mates among the humans.
But James couldn’t have a mate. His old maid could never understand that. And he didn’t want her to either. He didn’t want anyone to know about his curse. He didn’t want anyone to know that he was slowly losing his mind.
The only thing that made it any better was letting his bear loose in the forest to do whatever carnal thing a beast would do in the dark forest at night. Often James would come back and find himself naked, covered in blood, and lying on his back porch. So early the dew still clung to the grass and cold hung in the air. He knew it was animal blood, but he could rarely remember what had transpired the night before.
He tried to shove the thoughts from his mind as he ate his breakfast and gazed out on the snowy expanse of his estate. The frost on the statues had melted, exposing the cold gray faces of the stone figures. The chiseled man and shapely women gazed with vacant eyes over the snowy land. A chill went up his spine when he imagined he saw one of their faces tilt toward him and blink its eyes. James closed his eyes hard and when he opened them he took a long sip of hot coffee to warm himself.
If only he had someone in his life to reassure him that these things were not real. As much as he knew he could never invite anyone into his insanity, he longed for the human contact that would keep it at bay.
James grabbed his smartphone from the breakfast table and navigated toward that Mate.com website his cleaning lady had kept pestering him about. After answering a ridiculous questionnaire, he was invited to upload a photograph, but he chose not to. He didn’t even use his real name.
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