by Maria Amor
TALL, DARK &
POLAR
A PARANORMAL BEAR SHIFTER ROMANCE
MARIA AMOR
Copyright ©2015 by Maria Amor
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
Curvy Susan always wondered if she would recognize her destiny if he ever walked into her life. Little did she know, her destiny was Tall, Dark & Polar!
Polar Bear Shifter Marduke is one of the last remaining survivors of his people and likes to keep himself to himself. But the day he first saw Susan was the day that everything changed.
When Marduke saved Sarah from a terrible fate they both began to realize it was actually fate that had brought them together.
However, for them to remain together Sarah has to step into his world and embrace the shifter lifestyle.
Can she really handle being a Polar Bears mate?
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
Had Susan known she would be facing a full-grown polar bear, she would have never signed onto the ship. It seemed like a good job: cook on a ship heading above Hudson Bay, just a few hands and a group of scientists. She had found the job while scanning for work at her local job board. Being an unemployed single woman in the northwest territories of Canada wasn’t the most exciting way to live your life.
She had considered moving south where the pay was better and the air warmer. But she had inherited her mother’s house in Rankin Inlet and wanted to stay there. Owning your own home was something few people her age could brag about and she didn’t want to give it up. But the job options in her town were few and declining. There really hadn’t been much work since the mine closed years ago.
Having grown up in the area, she didn’t mind the freezing cold which began in October. In November the bay started to freeze and everyone settled in for a long winter.
Most of her neighbors were Inuit, Susan was one of the few Europeans in her neighborhood. The other kids would sometimes joke about her inability to handle the cold when she was little but she’d grown accustomed to the taunts. Her father had worked for the Canadian government when he met Susan’s mother, whose parents were missionaries. He left town for another posting when Susan was just a baby and only saw her periodically. He managed to send enough money to her mother to support them both, but he never came back.
Susan had planned to attend culinary school after she turned eighteen, but her mother lacked the money to send her away. Since she liked to cook, she stayed with her mother, helping her in the restaurant her mother owned. Susan had grown up cooking breakfast and continued working the grill after she graduated but dreamed of taking a big chef job in one of the southern towns.
Boyfriends, who usually drove trailer trucks, came and went with the spring thaw. She would spend the evenings online, looking for something else, perhaps a job where she could move away and send money home.
Then, her mother died unexpectedly when Susan was twenty-two. The woman had always been a chain smoker and the cigarettes finally caught up with her. In her will, she left the restaurant and house to her only child and daughter. Susan’s father sent a sympathy card but never showed up to the funeral.
Susan couldn’t bear to run the restaurant without her mother and so decided to sell it. She considered selling the house, but it was the only thing she had of any value from her mother’s estate. She had enough money to live on for six months, and then the bills would start piling up. She needed to find a steady income and to keep the house. But there wasn’t anything in town for her. She attended training sessions at the local employment center, but nothing looked promising.
One day she received a call from the job center.
“Susan,” the career officer said on the other end of the line. “I think we might have something for you.”
“Please tell me it isn’t another cannery job a thousand miles away,” she sighed on her end.
“You used to run your mother’s restaurant, right?”
“Kinda. She made all the orders and I cooked and took care of the inventory.”
“Close enough. I’ve got something that is good for six months. It’ll involve some travel but the pay is great.”
He mentioned a figure, which made her want to hear more. It would be enough to live on for a year, maybe even travel afterward and make some more cash.
“It’s a geophysical expedition headed up north of the bay toward the Arctic Circle,” he explained. “They’ve got an ice breaker and a full crew, but they need somebody to cook. Are you still interested?”
Of course she was. Get out of town and travel with some hunks on a ship? And be paid serious money? She would be crazy to turn it down.
Susan had no trouble passing the physical, although she was cautioned to watch her weight. She’d become a little curvy over the years, but the extra pounds helped in the north against the cold. Her boyfriends didn’t seem to mind, it gave them a little more warmth at night.
Next, she had to meet the people in charge of the expedition, who had flown up to the town to get everything ready. They were all academics from Toronto and seemed nice enough. Susan liked the crew better who were weathered sailing men who fished for crab in the rough seas off the coast of Alaska. This was a different kind of job for them but the captain of the boat needed some extra money for next year and chartering to the scientists was one way to earn it.
So, two weeks after hearing about the job, she found herself headed north through the freezing waters of Hudson Bay. It was already December and the boat was traveling behind an ice-breaker to get into the deep, unfrozen part. Susan was already decked out in her whites, working alone in the kitchen on the evening meal. The days had dropped to just about nothing, the darkness settling in as they went further north.
She enjoyed the attention of the crew. Being one of the few women on board had its advantages and the men refused to let her lift anything heavy. She never lacked for company in the break room.
It was on the third day out, while playing a game of cards with one the engine room men, she finally asked what the scientists were trying to find.
“Dunno,” the man, who was called Elliot, responded. “Something to do with wind currents and tracking polar bear movements up north.”
“Polar bears?” Susan said, almost dropping the cards. “We’re going to be looking for polar bears?”
Susan had grown up being warned about the big white creatures. They had a bad tendency to wander into town looking for food. The bears could easily reach nine hundred pounds and viewed anything smaller than themselves as a potential meal. You didn’t go looking for polar bears and prayed they didn’t go looking for you.
“Oh, we don’t h
ave to worry,” mentioned Joe, another ship’s hand. “We don’t even have to leave the boat. They’re going to be sending up a balloon or something when we reach the place we’re going. I think they want to see if the bears can be tracked from a balloon.”
Susan breathed easier and went back to her card game. Elliot already had lost a few rounds to her and was going to owe her some favors. She suspected he intentionally lost. He was a few years older than her and cute.
Susan was washing her hands in the prep room when another one of the crew came by and told her they were going to launch the balloon.
“We finally got to where they wanted to go,” he told her. “You want to come out on the deck and see what they are doing?”
Bored, since it would be hours before she needed to do anything else, Susan told him “yes”. Well, she could go looking for Elliot, he did owe her some attention. She was having a hard time making up her mind between Elliot or another crewman, but the trip wouldn’t last forever.
Susan put on her parka and went out into the freezing cold.
On the deck of the ship, a team was assembling the balloon. Normally, someone told her, it wouldn’t be launched on the water; too many things could go wrong. But today, they were going to try it from the ship. It would be a test run to see if the balloon could be launched this way in the future. The bears they were trying to study were moving along the coast and the balloon would make it easy to follow them.
“Dr. Jones,” the ship’s captain said to an older man in glasses, “This is Susan Rasmonoff, she’s the cook. I told the crew to invite her out to see the balloon launch.”
“Glad to meet you, Susan,” the older man said. “So you are the one I have to thank for all the good food on board?”
Susan laughed. “Glad you like it, sir. I take pride in my work.”
“I’m glad someone does,” a voice sounded behind her. “The damn university didn’t bother to send us half of the telemetry we need.”
Susan turned around to see a tall, blond woman, about thirty years old looking at a clipboard. She wore goggles to protect her eyes against the wind and an expensive looking arctic suit.
“This is Dr. Matteson,” the captain introduced the new figure. “She’s the one tracking the bears.”
“Only if we get that balloon up,” the woman continued. “I can’t get enough precision from the satellite, so we need it.”
By now, the balloon crew had unpacked it and the crew was hooking up the liquid propane to get it heated. It took them another two hours to prepare the balloon, but soon, it was spread across the deck and hooked to the gondola basket, ready to take to the sky. They stood back and admired their work. The balloon was tethered to the ship, but wind was picking up. Good thing this was a small test flight, or they would lose it to the sky.
Both of the scientists began unpacking instruments inside the basket below the balloon. Most of the gear had been packed with the cold weather in mind and didn’t take long to unpack.
Susan stood back and watched the balloon crew at work. They knew exactly what they were doing and hooked the basket, made to withstand the cold, up to the balloon itself. The burner fired once the liquid propane was turned on, the gasbag inflated and the balloon rose a few feet off the deck.
“Wind is kicking up,” the captain noted. “You might want to do this tomorrow.”
“My budget allows for so much time and no more,” Dr. Matteson snapped at him. “I have to get this thing up or else.”
The captain looked down at the deck. “Your funeral.”
“Hey Susan, check this out,” It was Elliot, inside the basket. “You should see all they have in this thing.”
She looked to the captain and the scientist who were preoccupied with some sheets of paper. The captain nodded. Susan went over to the basket and climbed inside. Once inside, Elliot pulled her down below visual level.
‘What do you think,” he tried to whisper in her ear. “We could sneak out here some night and do it in the air.”
“Lighten up, lover boy,” Susan said, pushing him away. “You’d be done before we were two feet in the air. Just like last time.”
Elliot laughed and tried to smack her butt. She avoided the slap. This turned out to be the wrong thing to do as Elliot’s hand connected with one of the key valves on the burner. The flames from the burner roared and the balloon began to rise quickly. Susan and Elliot suddenly realized they were in a balloon headed up, which they had no idea how to control.
Elliot let out a stream of curses and tumbled over the side of the balloon as it rose into the air. Susan was stunned by what was happening and too terrified to move. When she finally realized what was going on, it was too far to the ground to jump out of the basket. She looked over the edge of the basket, holding on in fear, as it continued to climb.
Then the balloon stopped. She exhaled, remembering the balloon was tethered and this was a test run. They would get her down; surely, the balloon was still attached to the ship and wasn’t going anywhere. It couldn’t carry too much fuel; it would eventually come down one way or another. She peered over the edge again. On the deck of the ship she could make out a mob of people scrambling to get her back down. The rope was tight, and she could feel the balloon moving back down. Susan said a prayer of thankfulness and wondered how she was going to explain what happened. Elliot was good at making up excuses.
And then a strong gust of wind struck the balloon, snapping the tether clean. The balloon was free to roam without any constraint. The last thing Susan saw of the ship was it vanishing in the distance, as the balloon swept inland across the ice.
She remembered little about the balloon flight, other than being terrified to the point of losing her memory. It shot through the sky, which was dark even at the early hour and drifted along with the wind. She had no means to control the balloon and didn’t know how to use the instruments in the basket to call for help. Susan fell to the floor and huddled in a fetal position. Worse of all, she had left her cell phone in her cabin.
Then the flames jetting out of the burner stopped. The balloon had used all the fuel in its tank, but she had no idea where she was. The wind had carried her miles from the site. What would happen now, with nothing to keep the balloon up?
The balloon began to fall out of the sky. She held on to a strap on the basket and screamed as it began to fall faster and faster. There was a moment of silence and the basket slammed into the ground, bouncing as the limp balloon carried it along with the wind. Susan continued to scream as she was repeatedly bounced over the frozen ground. Then the basket quit moving.
Hurt and bloody, she managed to crawl out of the basket as it started moving again, pulled along by the gas bag and wind. She knew some bones were broken, but she was alive. Huddling on the ice, Susan looked up through a haze of pain and watched the balloon slide away across the frozen wasteland. At least she was out of it.
“They have to find me,” she said to herself. “They’ll track the balloon. The stuff was in there to track it.”
She wrapped her parka around her and felt the cold sear into her bones. She wouldn’t last long out there. But it was starting to get a little bit warmer, so maybe she was okay.
And then she saw the bear: a full grown, massive adult polar bear and it was looking right at her. But the eyes, the eyes of the bear didn’t show the blind savagery she feared. They were kind eyes, the eyes of someone who cared and would take her to safety.
And then everything went blank.
CHAPTER TWO
Susan remembered very little about what happened to her after she saw the bear. All she could remember was someone dragging her along the ice, out of the way of the howling storm. She remembered a glove grabbing her parka and pulling it slowly as she slid over the frozen surfaces. She was delirious and couldn’t remember how she had arrived where she was. All Susan could think about was the ship and why hadn’t the crew come to fetch her? Then the pain overwhelmed her body and she blanked out.
&nbs
p; Slowly, her senses returned to her. Susan was in a deep dark sleep. Her mother talked to her and told Susan everything was going to be alright and she would find herself with people who, although different, would help her. Susan saw her father getting old and fat, watching TV and wasting his life in front of a porn DVD when he should have stayed with his wife and daughter. She wanted to reach out and help him, tell the man she forgave him for everything, but he couldn’t hear her.
Then the shadows of her mind faded again and she slowly began to focus on a rock. No, it was a wall of rock, lit by a flickering light. The wall was painted in vivid colors and showed scenes of men hunting bears and bears hunting men. She moved her eyes and saw the bear and men merge together and how she couldn’t tell if it was a man or bear hunting. The final painting was of a blended man and bear standing on the ice, holding a spear and looking out over the ocean.
Susan knew she had been sick. The injuries sustained from the balloon crash had hurt her worse than she could have known. Later, she would learn of the internal bleeding she had suffered and only the low temperature of the ice had saved her from hemorrhaging to death.. She had been transported two miles through ice and snow to the only place where there was warmth.
Susan felt a hand give her warm nourishment and another hand offer her water. She took both, still too sick to focus on what was happening about her. Was she on the ship? Had the crew managed to get her back to safety at a hospital? And what was going to happen to her now?
She gradually felt better and started to become aware of her surroundings. She was covered in soft fur and kept warm by heated stones placed next to her body. The stones felt good next to her bare flesh. Susan realized she was naked in the bed, but she didn’t care. She thought about the last time she’d felt good naked and warm in bed. That time the heat had come from her boyfriend’s body, which had felt warm and sweaty after a passionate night of steamy sex. She’d shown him some new things and he was grateful, even if he tired too soon, before she was satisfied.
