by Roxie Noir
“I’m starving!” she said brightly, sitting down one seat away from him. There was another woman between her and Nathan, and when he looked at them together, he realized they must be sisters.
“Hope they saved some for us,” said Ian. Nathan could tell that he was trying to sound lighthearted, but it wasn’t working for him. Everything he said came out sounding deadly serious.
Nathan just concentrated on his cheesecake, briefly wondering what had happened to the table full of other goodies.
“You take that back,” the teeth-picking redneck suddenly shouted.
Nathan jerked his head up quickly. He hadn’t been paying much attention, but both of the redneck relations were totally trashed.
“I say what I want!” roared the other guy.
“Take it back or I’ll knock your shitty teeth right out your pansy-ass mouth,” the first guy shouted. He stood so fast that his chair went over backwards.
Then the other guy was also standing, leaning over the table, face bright red. Nathan could tell he was moments away from a shift, right there in the middle of this classy hall.
“You just try!” he shouted.
Nathan shifted. Years of practice meant that he shifted faster than most everyone else — after all, as the clan’s main enforcer, being a grizzly almost instantly was valuable.
That meant that he had claws and teeth and fur before either other man even had a snout, and in full bear-form, he picked up the redneck with the bad teeth and tossed him fifteen feet, not even looking where he landed before turning on the other man, roaring in his face. He stepped on the table with a front paw, teeth still bared, and the table snapped completely in half as the man shouted at him, struggling to shift faster, fur popping out of his rigid muscles as Nathan watched.
I can’t let them hurt her, was his only thought, the sole thing filling his brain, to the exclusion of everything else.
With one enormous paw, he pushed the other guy backwards, knocking him head over heels and into another table full of people.
Behind him, the rest of the celebrants had retreated backward.
Nathan looked at them quickly, making sure that Leah was okay. Logically, he knew that a couple drunk shifters weren’t a big deal, and it was almost certainly nothing she hadn’t seen before, but his animal was furious, set to protect her at all costs.
She was fine, using one arm to block her sister. Next to her, Ian clutched at her upper arm, his fingers squeezing her beneath her dress so hard it looked almost painful.
Nathan turned and growled, his bear taking over for a moment.
Don’t you dare hurt her, he thought. If you hurt her I’ll fuck you up so good they’ll never even find—
A gun went off, and everyone screamed.
Nathan whirled as everyone began running for the door, only to see one of the two fighting men waving a gun in the air, a small hole in the ceiling above him. He looked as surprised as everyone else, staring up at the hole like it had appeared there by magic.
In two steps, Nathan was on him. Still half-bear but human enough to have fingers, the other guy pointed the gun at him but he was too slow. Nathan reached out and knocked it from his hands, claws raking across his arm as he did.
The man’s mouth dropped open, like he was surprised that this grizzly bear was disarming him.
“STOP!” boomed a voice at the front of the room, and everyone turned to look.
It was Jonah Whitehorse, looking ferocious and commanding, and most of all, angry. Even Nathan could almost feel the man’s glare on his skin, icy and metallic.
Everyone stopped. The people running for the door stopped, the people who’d hit the floor stopped screaming, the rednecks stopped trying to shift and quietly, meekly, went back to human.
Nathan snorted, fighting to bring his grizzly temper back under control.
“Jedidiah and Carson, outside, now,” commanded Jonah, and just like that, both the men who’d been fighting headed for the front door, heads down, Carson bleeding heavily from his forearm. Nathan watched them go and then looked around, still in grizzly form.
Leah was fine, even though he could practically smell the adrenaline pumping through her veins. She looked more angry than frightened, even though Ian was still frowning and clutching her arm, his fingers digging into her sweet, supple flesh, hard enough to hurt...
Nathan’s vision turned red at the edges, and he could feel himself about to lose control.
Ian had a mate once. Her name had been Candace, and Nathan had heard her speak maybe twice. She seemed meek and constantly cowed by Ian, and had even shown up to things with bruises sometimes. Everyone knew that Ian was a worthless asshole, the kind of man who would hurt a woman if she so much as questioned him, but no one had ever done anything.
Then, finally, Candace had run off with a deep-sea fisherman. No one except Ian had been particularly sorry, and Nathan suspected that Ian just missed having someone to push around.
Nathan growled, a low rumble in his chest, and bared his teeth. He’d rip Ian apart if he so much as bruised Leah, and he’d be more than happy to do it.
“Nathan,” said Brock’s voice, behind him, bringing him back down to earth. Nathan turned and looked at his alpha, fury still pumping through his veins.
“Clothes are in the back,” Brock said, nodding toward the door. Nathan’s own clothes were in tatters. It happened when he shifted suddenly; even though he was big as a human, he was nowhere near grizzly-size.
Nathan stepped off the now-broken table and back to the floor, but he didn’t leave the room. Leah was still there, and he didn’t want to leave her, not without him there in a room full of humans who’d brought guns to a betrothal. Ian wasn’t going to protect her properly, even though his hand on her arm had slackened.
“Nathan?” she said, and he looked her straight into her eyes. He could feel something moving through him, a feeling so strong, like someone had grabbed his ribcage and yanked on it. A deep, ancient instinct whispered to him: protect her, take her.
He took a step forward, even his bear appreciating her perfect curves, thinking of how her soft flesh would yield under his, what she would sound like moaning his name.
“I’m fine,” she said. Next to her, Ian nodded, his jaw tightening, and Nathan realized that two hundred people were watching them.
He dipped his head at Brock, cast one last glance at Leah and Ian, then made for the door Brock had indicated. Better not to be stark naked in front of two hundred people, half of whom he’d never met before.
4
Leah
Nathan, Leah thought, watching the bear lumber into a back room.
I wouldn’t mind seeing him shift back naked, though.
She felt herself turn bright red, from her toes to the roots of her hair, and cast her eyes down, looking at the destroyed table. The desserts she’d worked for days to bake were scattered around, but there were extras. Leah always made extra desserts, and it made her pretty popular wherever she went.
A hand patted her back lightly, between her shoulder blades, and she turned to her husband-to-be and made herself smile up at him.
“Are you all right?” he said, his face deadly serious.
“I’m fine,” she said, folding her hands in front of herself primly.
She felt anything but fine, though. It wasn’t about her stupid cousins who’d brought their homemade liquor to her nice party and then shot a hole in the ceiling. She’d been hoping that wouldn’t happen this time, but she certainly wasn’t surprised by it.
No, it was about Nathan, the man she’d said about three words to, and who’d shifted on a dime to put an end to the violence.
To protect her. Sure, he’d protected everyone when he got the gun out of Jedediah’s hand, but deep down, Leah knew that he did it for her, and she had no idea what to think.
Ian rubbed her arm, his touch only a little soothing. Somehow, he seemed far away.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “You’re safe here.”
Not because of you, she thought involuntarily.
Leah looked up at him, at his salt-and-pepper hair and serious face.
This is my husband, she thought. He’s my mate. I can’t think thoughts like that.
I love him, she told herself, but even the thought rang a little hollow.
“I apologize for them,” said her father’s deep, booming voice behind her. “They’ll be dealt with.”
Leah turned to face him, and for a moment, she was taken aback at the rage simmering just below the surface of his face.
Jonah Whitehorse was angry as hell, and that was never good. Out of habit, she took a step back and looked down, tricks she’d learned long ago as a way to keep his anger from transferring to her. He’d never been physically abusive, but when he shouted, it felt like the whole house shook.
“It’s quite all right,” said Ian, standing a little stiffly in her father’s presence. She could almost feel his desire to run.
“Leah, it’s time to leave,” her father said. “Brock said that they would take care of everything else.”
Leah raised her eyebrows by a millimeter. Her cousins had shot a hole in the ceiling, and the other clan was doing the cleanup? Her father did have some kind of influence over other people.
“I’ll see you tomorrow,” she told Ian, turning to face.
“Yes, tomorrow, dear,” Ian said, and then bent to kiss her lightly on the cheek, his lips cool and dry. Leah hoped desperately for that electric sizzle, that rush of heat, but nothing happened, just the feel of lips on her cheek and then nothing.
She followed her father out of the hall and into the van with her parents and younger siblings, wondering the whole way what was going on.
Something had happened with Nathan, and whatever it was, it wasn’t happening with Ian at all.
The whole way back to the farmhouse they were staying in for the week, Leah fretted and chewed on her lip.
A few hours later, finally alone in the tiny attic room she was sleeping in, Leah finally got some time to think things over. Her party dress off, she slumped onto the bed in a long flannel nightgown. Her mother had sewn that, as well. In fact, her mother had sewn nearly all of Leah’s clothing, ever since she was born — though Jonah Whitehorse might rule his clan with an iron fist, it had never been in his power to make any of them rich. Most Yukon shifters were just getting by, alphas included.
At least, as the oldest, she got most of her clothes new. Her sisters hadn’t been so lucky, having to wear Leah’s old clothes. To make matters worse, they invariably had to take them in, since neither of them had Leah’s voluptuous shape.
Again and again, she ran through the fifteen seconds she’d had with Nathan when she caught him eating the tart. The way that, just seeing him, she’d felt like she’d always known him.
Leah didn’t know if the North Star clan had stories and legends, but the Yukon clan did. When they mated, it was absolute. There was no way to undo a mating — no divorce, no separation.
The story went that, thousands and thousands of years ago, when shifters were mostly bear and hardly human, the alpha of one pack stole the daughter of another alpha. He traveled with her for three days and nights, over rivers and mountains, and he didn’t notice or didn’t care that she was gravely ill and getting worse.
When they finally arrived in his territory, the moment she stepped over the boundary, she died. It was only then that her captors realized she’d been carrying a cub all along, and it was dead too.
The Great Bear looked down and saw this, and erupted into a righteous fury.
He came down to earth to dispense justice. First he took the souls of the mother and baby bear, and put them into the sky, where they stayed, as the Mother Bear and Baby Bear.
Then he took the soul of the shifter who’d done the kidnapping, and he split it in two, along with the souls of all his clan, and cast the other halves of their soul out into the world.
Now, the story went, no shifter was born complete. They were all born with half a soul, and could only become whole by mating with the shifter who held their soul’s other half.
Every couple who mated had found the other half of their soul, their perfect, fated mate. Leah had talked to enough mated shifters to know how they each felt when they first met their mates: an electric buzz, a sudden, soul-deep knowledge and understanding, the feeling that there was no one else on the planet besides them.
Some of them said that, when they first met their other half, they felt like they’d known each other their whole lives, and Leah had always thought that made sense. After all, if someone had the other half of your soul, wouldn’t you know it?
Today, her betrothal day, the day she’d finally met her future mate, she’d felt every one of those things. The shock, the almost-deja-vu, the world tilting on its axis, the bone-deep desire.
The problem was that Ian wasn’t the person who’d made her feel any of those things. He was nice enough, sure, but he was none of that. There was no earth-shaking, no gut-wrenching.
Those feelings had all been reserved for Nathan, who was decidedly not the person she was supposed to marry. She was already promised to Ian, the man her father had found and approved of.
Leah wanted to feel that way about Ian. She wanted to love him, not some stranger with a hair-trigger temper who ate dessert first without even asking.
She had to love Ian. That was all there was to it.
Leah laid awake in her tiny bed for a long time, listening to the wind whistle through the eaves of the house where Brock had put up her whole family. She didn’t fall asleep until it was nearly time for her to wake up again.
5
Nathan
The extra pants that Brock had in the back room of the hall were just sweatpants, so Nathan put them on and left. There was no point staying around any longer, especially if he was going to look sloppy while everyone else had a suit and tie on. Violet had already gotten up his ass about it once, after all.
All he could think about for the entire ride home was her. The way she’d looked, her red hair and the bright blue dress, the way she looked it in. He ached with the desire just to touch her, once.
He’d never felt anything at all like it before, and it terrified him.
For a long time, Nathan had assumed that the mated happiness that other people got just wasn’t going to happen for him. He was pretty sure that the whole one-soul-two-bodies legend was utter bullshit, but that didn’t stop other people from being happy with their mates. Look at Brock and Violet, for instance. They seemed perfect together.
Deep down, Nathan didn’t think that he deserved a mate. He didn’t deserve that kind of happiness. He wasn’t much more than Brock’s hitman, after all.
Sitting on his couch, having changed into jeans and a t-shirt, Nathan tried desperately to stop thinking of everything Brock had him do over the years. Just last week he’d paid a late-night call to a family in Fjords, his pistol prominent on his belt, and told the sleepy parents that their son couldn’t attend college in Seattle, like he’d always dreamed of doing. Instead, he had to stay in tiny, backward Fjords because Brock didn’t like it when people left.
The father had started shouting at him, the mother clutching his arm, and Nathan had simply taken a step back from their front door and asked the man if he wanted to fight.
He had a reputation. No one wanted to fight him anymore.
Crushing kids’ dreams and offering to fight their fathers wasn’t the worst thing he’d done, not by a long shot. It was just the most recent.
The worst was Kaitlyn. She’d been fifteen and hadn’t made it to sixteen, because of him. Brock had ordered that one, too, and it still kept Nathan up at night until he finally hit the bottle so he could sleep.
There was no way that he could be mated to someone like Leah. She was perfect and sweet, innocence practically shining on her face. Moreover, she was betrothed to Ian, and he was better for her. Ian had never done the horrible things that N
athan had, he’d be a good provider, and they’d have a lot of cubs together.
Yeah, he had Leah had shared a moment, but what was that, really? In the grand scheme of things, a full-body jolt and pure desire that just wouldn’t quit weren’t important.
You have to stop thinking about her, he told himself. Whatever it takes, just get her out of your head.
He jumped to his feet, grabbed his black leather jacket, and headed for his bike.
Seward was even smaller than Fjords; a town with a permanent population of only a few hundred. But it was on the ocean side of the peninsula, not the bay side where Fjords was. More to the point, it was completely surrounded by the Kenai National Park — meaning it was a popular stop for tourists who wanted to see the park, as well as for cruise ships along the Alaskan coast.
As soon as he came over the mountains, the cool summer night air whipping around him, Nathan could see the lights of a big cruise ship down below, anchored in Seward’s tiny harbor.
This ought to solve my problems, he thought, tilting his motorcycle toward the town, knowing exactly what he was going to do that night.
First was the Seward Seaside Inn. Despite its nice name, it was a motel at best. Clean, but a little threadbare, if you knew where to look, and Nathan did.
As he walked in, the front desk clerk looked up.
“Hey, man,” said the kid. Paul, his name tag said, and Nathan felt a glimmer of recognition at the name. “Haven’t seen you around here for a while.”
He winked, still grinning.
Nathan shrugged.
“Been busy,” he said, pulling out his wallet.
He wasn’t an idiot, and he knew he had a reputation in all the towns on the peninsula. Most of the late-night motel clerks knew him as the guy who stayed at their place of business once or twice a month, usually coming in late with a different hot, drunk woman on his arm.
