by Bianca D’Arc
Tales of the Were ~ Grizzly Cove
Lion in Waiting
by
Bianca D’Arc
Two injured shifters get a second chance at life…and love.
Matilda escaped into the wild to lick her wounds and heal as best she can from captivity and torture at the hands of people who hunt shifters and imprison them. She is a lioness, but her natural confidence has been shaken by the experience. What she needs is a second chance to live, to heal, and to find her lioness’s roar once more.
Georgio is a bear of a man who has seen and done things in foreign lands that have changed him forever. It takes a lot to harm a shifter of his strength, but being blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device just about did the job. He is looking for his lost sense of purpose, and something drives him to keep looking for the lost lioness when everyone else gives up.
When these two heart-wounded shifters finally meet, it’s just possible they will find their second chances start with each other. But the hunters are still hunting Matilda and they’re going after her only human friend to try to recapture her. Surprises, secrets, and reclusive billionaires notwithstanding, the bear and the lioness will have to come to terms with their sizzling attraction, and bruised hearts, if they’re going to forge a new future together.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locale or organizations is entirely coincidental.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Copyright ©2020 Bianca D’Arc
Published by Hawk Publishing, LLC
New York
All Rights Are Reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
Dedication
Many thanks to Peggy McChesney, who has been a good friend over these many years. Thank you for always being willing to give me a quick opinion.
With grateful thanks to my family, especially Dad, who continues to teach me life lessons even as he enjoys his 95th year on this planet. I’m blessed to have him in my life. (Even though he’ll never read any of my romance books!) Love you, Dad.
Table of Contents
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
Epilogue
About the Author
Other Books by Bianca D’Arc
Chapter One
Matilda shifted back into her lioness form and slunk back through the small opening in the rock wall that she had found months ago. It led to a cave, which she had turned into a den. The hidden space helped soothe her anxiety about being discovered in this strange wilderness. Her lioness preferred open grasslands and warm sun, but that was pretty hard to find in the Pacific Northwest, where it rained. A lot. At least the cave she’d found stayed dry.
She’d been abducted away from her home in Southern California along with her little brother. They’d been held in a menagerie in Oregon with other animals—many of them shifters of different types. Something had happened a few months ago, and they’d been able to escape. Someone had arranged for a distraction that allowed her and her little brother to flee, along with a koala shifter, of all things, into the forest.
Whatever had caused the distraction, she’d never known. The other shifters had all gone out a different way, but she and the two males had taken a side exit all on their own. The koala shifter had taken his human form, as had Eamon, her brother. Neither the koala nor the seal form her brother took could make good time in the forest, though the koala could probably have used his climbing skills to stay hidden in the canopy. Still, the man had shifted and grabbed some jumpsuits off a rack for them all to wear on the way out, so they wouldn’t have to traipse around naked.
The only problem was, she couldn’t shift. Not then. Not with the cuts in her abdomen barely closed. The koala-man had looked at her with compassionate eyes, and she knew he would take care of Eamon, no matter what. The man had stayed in human form and run alongside them, encouraging them both in a strong Aussie accent, until she could go no farther.
She’d hidden in a thicket and told Eamon to go on without her, using only the gestures that her feline body could make, hoping he would understand. It had broken her heart—probably Eamon’s, too—but he had left. The koala-man had promised to send help back for her once Eamon was safe, and they’d gone, leaving her panting in the brush, hoping she could stay hidden from the pursuit that had to be coming after them.
If any of those bastards from the menagerie had dared to cross her path, she’d have pounced on them. No way would she let them recapture Eamon, even if she’d had to die trying to keep them from his path.
But it hadn’t come to that. Pursuit had followed, but at a distance. They’d fallen for one of the false trails they had laid down and had bypassed Matilda’s location completely. That, it turned out, was all to the good, because she’d passed out not long after her brother and the man left her.
Pain, blood loss and malnourishment had taken their toll, and she’d succumbed to unconsciousness for far longer than was safe. Thankfully, nobody had found her in her little hidden thicket of brush, and she’d just stayed there for most of the next twenty-four, or so, hours. She couldn’t be sure of the time, exactly. It had a way of blurring on her when she was in pain.
Pain had been her constant companion in those early days of her freedom. She’d eventually left her hiding place, under cover of darkness, to hunt. She’d found a rabbit, which wasn’t nearly enough to satiate her, but it was something. And she hadn’t eaten in a very long time.
She’d eaten a little, drank from a clear mountain stream, then looked for another place to hide before the sun came up. This pattern had repeated for several days—maybe weeks—before she stumbled upon the small opening that led to a fascinating subterranean world. Her cat form was healing slowly, and her human mind was lulled by the cat’s presence, but she was alert enough to recognize where she was, after a while.
Not her geographic location. She wasn’t sure if she was still in Oregon or had slipped into one of the neighboring states while she’d roamed. What she was more certain of was that she was in an abandoned gold mine. There were old carts on rusty rails and a dark tunnel leading down into the earth beyond the small cave she’d claimed for her own.
She decided she liked the seclusion of this place, and she still needed time to heal, though she was getting stronger every day. Still, she needed more time. She was confident—though she didn’t know how she knew—that Eamon was safe. She needed to get back to him, but she had to do it in as smart a way as possible. Going out into the unknown forest, injured and weak, was not an
option. She would put in the time to get stronger and heal more.
The first step would be to hunt bigger game. She put her plan into action that very night and brought down a deer. For the first time since being captured, she ate until she was full, and her cat was content. When morning came, she was back in her den, and a few hours later, she tried shifting to her human form.
Oh, it had hurt. Searing pain had marked her first shift back to human shape in weeks—maybe months. But she was so glad to be in her other form, again. She had almost been afraid she’d be unable to change. There were tales of shifters who stayed in their beast form so long they lost the ability to be human. She didn’t want that to happen to her. And the magic of the shift had the added bonus of helping heal some of the grievous injuries that had been done to her.
She spent the day inside the cave, trying to clean it up a bit and make it more habitable by the light coming in through the small opening. She was able to scavenge some items that had been left behind by the miners, including a few old oil lamps, some cooking odds and ends and even some canvas. She thought she might find more if she ventured farther down the mineshaft, but she counted herself lucky to find so much she could use on her first foray.
By nightfall, she had set up a camp of sorts inside the shelter of the cave. She had a cooking area rigged up with a metal grate that would serve to hold things over the fire—if she dared build a fire. That night, she shifted into her lioness form and scouted the area around her campsite. She hunted, again, and took the chance of shifting back to human form to gather items from the forest that she could use.
The canvas tarp became a bed stuffed with soft pine boughs. She still slept in her fur for warmth, but she was a lot more comfortable. Over time, she scouted farther out and down the mountain ridge on which her cave was located. She found signs of human habitation, including a few houses spread far apart.
Outside one of the houses, laundry flapped on a line, and the lioness snagged a few items that her human half needed if she was going to interact with humans at some point in the future. Matilda was afraid of doing so. She didn’t know this area, and she had no idea who was innocent and who might be on the side of the bastards who had captured her and Eamon. But she knew she had to try. When she was stronger, she would watch carefully and take a chance, because in order to get back to her brother, at some point, she’d have to reclaim her humanity fully. And that meant re-entering the human world and interacting with them, again.
But not yet. Not until she was stronger.
It was taking a long time to heal. A lot longer than simple injuries should have taken. Matilda knew bad things had been done to her in the menagerie. Surgical things. She didn’t know the full extent of what they’d done to her. She couldn’t think about it, or panic would overtake her.
She got the shakes, now, when she thought about her captivity. Post-traumatic stress. She’d heard the term but never thought she’d experience the malady. But she was pretty sure that’s what it was. Panic attacks. Anxiety. Fear. Things no lioness should feel. Ever.
Matilda was feeling them, and it scared the hell out of her. Would she ever be able to reclaim the fearless woman she’d been?
*
Georgio Basset cursed under his breath. His bum leg was giving him trouble, but he refused to give in to the weakness. He’d been blown up and put back together, then shipped back stateside, but he would not allow physical weakness to impact the life he was trying so hard to reclaim.
Part of that was walking through the woods on two legs or four, doing his best to get back to what he had been. The soldier. The man. The search-and-rescue expert of the Grizzly Cove team.
He had a self-appointed task, and he wasn’t going to give up until he discovered—one way or the other—what had become of the Kinkaid Clan’s lost lioness. The others had given up long ago, but Georgio would not give up or give in to the weakness that still plagued his limbs after one too many injuries. Just as his mind would not give in to the fear riding him that he would never be whole, again.
Before he’d been blown up by a roadside bomb, he’d been held prisoner by barbaric tribesmen who had tortured him. They’d known he was a shifter, and they’d used poisonous silver on him, to keep him under their control. They’d been savage, but when his unit had finally found him after weeks of torture and captivity in a small cage, the terrorists had been the ones savaged. They’d been torn apart until not one was left alive.
The shapeshifters who had retired from the military and settled in Grizzly Cove had been incensed when they’d found their comrade, Georgio. So incensed that they’d killed all the captors and ripped them apart.
On the one hand, Georgio was grateful that his friends had taken revenge for him. He was glad those bastards were dead. They’d been beyond cruel, and the pain they’d caused him had damaged him—possibly permanently. On the other hand, he would’ve liked to kill just one of them himself. He’d been rescued, but he’d been too weak to do much of anything to effect his own rescue, and then, just a short time later, he’d been blown up by an encounter with a roadside bomb.
It had all been just too much. Georgio had come home to the States and stayed. He’d bought land in Washington State, on the coast where Big John had already planned to build the town of Grizzly Cove. John and the others had been buying up the land for years, with the idea that they’d all retire there when they left the military.
Georgio had taken his discharge and retreated to his parcel of land, even before the others had joined him and started building the new town. He’d concentrated on building his den and rebuilding his life.
The others had come, eventually, and he’d been glad to see them all. They were his brothers, but the experiences he’d had in the desert had forever changed him. Things had happened. Things had been done to him. Things that scarred his spirit and injured his soul. Things he had to work through before he could, just possibly, rejoin life fully.
One of the things he felt strongly about doing was finding the lioness. The woman’s plight spoke to him on a basic level. She’d been captured. Most likely tortured. She’d escaped into the unfamiliar woods and had not been seen since.
The moment Georgio had heard her story, he’d decided he had to do his best to try to find her. At first, he’d joined small groups of shifters who had gone out into the forest to look for her. Eventually, they’d all given up and gone on to other tasks, but Georgio had kept going out, hiking farther afield each time. He’d become a one-man search party that wouldn’t give up until he learned what had become of the woman.
There was something about her story, and the photos he’d seen of her from before her disappearance, that had spoken to him on a basic level. His bear growled inside him, interested in the fate of the lost lioness, when it had been mostly ambivalent to all of his other rescues. It was as if the bear recognized something about the lioness’s spirit. Something important.
Georgio wasn’t sure what it was all about, but he felt compelled to keep searching for her. He knew he could find her. He wanted desperately to be the one to find her…and hopefully figure out what it was about this woman he’d never met, that acted so deeply on his innermost thoughts.
While he was hiking through the woods far from Grizzly Cove, he was also keeping his eyes open. He’d been trained in reconnaissance, and he was making notes on human settlements in the wild places where shifters might want to roam. He’d already found at least three cabins where mountain men were living off the land, far from other humans. He’d crossed paths with a few older shifter trails but hadn’t met any in the flesh.
As an apex predator, he wasn’t too worried about any shifter he might encounter in the woods. Most wouldn’t mess with him if they had mischief in mind. Folks thought twice about getting on a grizzly’s bad side, which Georgio figured was all to the good in his case. He wasn’t out here to make friends, or enemies. He was on a mission. Looking for the woman and any other useful information he could pass along to the un
it back in Grizzly Cove.
Each of his scouting trips took him farther away from his den for longer amounts of time. He figured this was a positive step. He’d become a little too comfortable in his cozy den with the exercise pool and every amenity he could want. What he needed to further his recovery was hard work and open spaces. He needed to let his bear out to roam the woods and allow his human side the solitude and healing peace of nature.
He thought maybe it was working. Each day he spent out in the forest, he felt a little better. He was moving better, too. His bum leg would stiffen up from time to time, but less so now than when he’d started on this quest. The exercise was working. He just knew it.
The only disappointment was that he’d yet to find anything more about the lioness. He only knew what everyone in Grizzly Cove already knew. An illegal private zoo had been holding a bunch of shifters captive in the woods of Oregon. The crazy koala who had escaped and found his way to Grizzly Cove had told the story of the lioness and a selkie boy he’d escaped with. The seal shifter had been found, safe and sound, down the coast in California, but the lioness had disappeared without a trace.
Georgio vowed to solve the mystery of her disappearance, no matter how long it took.
*
Matilda approached Frank’s cabin cautiously, as she always did. She’d come to know the reclusive mountain man over the past few weeks, and he hadn’t asked too many questions about how she’d come to be out in the middle of nowhere on her own. He’d accepted her story about being on a camping holiday with little comment, though she knew it was a pretty thin story. For one thing, she didn’t have adequate clothing—just the outfit she’d stolen off the line of someone’s wash on the other side of the mountain ridge.