Grayslake: More than Mated: Bear-ly a Choice (Kindle Worlds Novella)

by Kelly Collins

  Ty took a deep breath and let his frame relax. “Nothing, I’ll be right in.”

  “Don’t you lie to me, Ty Abrams. I know a serious growl when I hear one.”

  Finn leaned in and whispered. “Damn, she even has your growls catalogued.”

  Ty held out his hand and Finn groaned. “Wait for it.”

  “Finn Marks, you owe the swear jar.” She turned around and walked back into the house.

  He pulled his wallet from his pocket and shoved a five-dollar bill into Ty’s palm. “I swear your kids are going to be able to go to any college they choose.”

  “We got our kids covered from the last picnic. Now we’re setting up a fund for the rest of the clan.” Ty shoved the bill into his front pocket. “What’s the other thing I need to know?”

  “She’s a shifter.” He held his breath and waited for wind from the next growl to move his hair but it didn’t come.

  “Then she has twelve hours to register with me.”

  “Here’s the thing. I can’t know for certain, but I don’t think she knows. I got pretty aggressive with her, and she didn’t spring one hair or pop one claw, but I can smell it on her.”

  Ty’s eyes widened. “You smelled her?”

  “It’s not like I stuck my snout to her bottom and took a whiff, I merely inhaled deeply as I passed, and she’s definitely bear. Not full-bred. She’s a mix. Not from here. Maybe up north.”

  “Find out.” Ty turned to walk away.

  “I need more than twelve hours.” Finn called after him.

  Ty stopped and looked over his shoulder. “You’ve got forty-eight, and if she tags one of my clan and in particular one of my kids, I’ll kill her.”

  Something inside him reared up and itched to claw its way out. He suppressed the growl of rage at the Itan’s declaration. There was no way he would allow him to kill her. Mackenzie Smith was his to deal with, and he had forty-eight hours to prove he could.

  Chapter 3

  Mackenzie

  The Bed and Breakfast was not located where Mack had hoped. Although, the grounds were beautiful and the view of the lake divine. It didn’t sit in the middle of the national forest. On a bright note, it did come with a bountiful breakfast.

  After leaving the diner yesterday with a bellyache, she was hungry. A full buffet of eggs and bacon and toast and pastries were laid out in front of her like a private feast, and if truth be told, she could eat her way through this table in a few hours.

  Mack wasn’t a tiny girl, she had curves, and it took a lot of eating to maintain her shape. Men called her sexy. Women called her plump. When she looked in the mirror all she heard were her mom’s reminders that she was a half-breed. Half pretty like her mom, and half something else from her dad.

  With a full plate, she walked onto the porch and sat in the wicker chair by the railing. The lake was as still as glass except for a random ripple from a bug that touched down, or a break in the water where a fish had nibbled. Mack bit into the cherry puff pastry and moaned. Just when she started thinking there was nothing better than pastries, she looked down at her plate and saw the French toast. Good French toast could rival a cherry pastry in a minute.

  She pulled a bite to her lips and watched the wooded area across from the lake. In the distance a flash of fur caught her attention.

  A bear, big and brown, walked to the water. It stood at the edge and stared at her. A tingle of excitement ran up her spine. It was her first bear sighting in Grayslake and he was magnificent. His tawny fur reminded her of Finn’s hair. Even the width of his shoulders seemed familiar. He walked back and forth and she watched him in fascination until he turned and disappeared into the woods.

  Mack had eaten everything on her plate while she watched her bear. She didn’t know why she thought of him as hers. Maybe the possessiveness came from being the first to see him. Maybe that’s how Finn felt when he went all grizzly on her yesterday.

  Thoughts of Finn and his abrupt exit left her with a hollow feeling in her chest. There was no place for emptiness inside Mack. Anytime she got that feeling she filled it with food and there was nothing better to fill her empty places than another helping of French toast with extra butter and syrup. Honey syrup made by a local company called BE’s. How clever.

  When she’d stuffed herself enough so that there wasn’t room for doubt or disappointment or any other feeling or emotion, she hopped into her truck and started for the ranger station.

  It was three minutes to eight when she arrived to find Finn exiting the cabin and buttoning up his shirt. His hair was wet and curled at the edge of his collar. He was sex and sin wrapped in a supersize package.

  “Good morning.” She reached inside the cab and picked up the cherry pastry she’d wrapped in a napkin. Initially she’d brought it for herself, but the closer she got to the ranger station the more she felt it would be better served as a kind of olive branch. “I brought you a cherry puff pastry.”

  Finn’s eyes rose along with the corners of his lips. “You did?” He walked with purpose toward her. His hulking figure would intimidate anyone, but not Mack. The closer he got, the more alive she felt. When he stood right beside her, her entire body vibrated with feelings. Some of those feelings she recognized as arousal, and that embarrassed her. Some she recognized as excitement, and others, the smallest part, she recognized as fear. Not the kind of fear she felt when she was in danger, but the kind of fear she felt when she was out of control, like something or someone else was in charge.

  “That was thoughtful of you.”

  “It was nothing.”

  “Not true. With the way I left you yesterday, I wasn’t certain you’d show up this morning.”

  “I wasn't certain either, but I’m here.”

  Mack had second and third thoughts as she drove to the far side of town and entered the forest, but her foot stayed on the pedal, and her hands stayed on the steering wheel. It was that tiny part that controlled her that got her here. The part that made her think something bigger was waiting for her. One look at Finn and those second and third thoughts were turning into fourth and fifth.

  “Come on inside.” Finn unwrapped his pastry and nearly devoured it in one bite. “I’ve got coffee brewing.” He walked up the steps and entered the station. In the front, it looked like any other station with brochures, a poster of Smokey the Bear, and a few desks, but once he led her through the door at the back, it became a house. A beautiful log cabin-like structure that smelled of coffee and pine and something a little spicy. When he brushed past her, she knew that spicy scent was him. It filled her nose and wrapped around her senses like an invasive vine.

  “This is where I wanted to stay. In the middle of it all.” She walked to the back of the living room where the wall was floor to ceiling windows. “You don’t even have to leave your house to do your work.”

  She turned around and watched Finn pour two cups of coffee from a pot in the small kitchen. “Do you take anything in your coffee?”

  She stalled a second wondering if he’d think it was weird if she asked for honey as a sweetener. Mom always said it was a strange thing to use, but she chalked it up to half of her genes being from her father. Apparently, he wasn’t very sweet and needed all the help he could get.

  “Do you have honey?” She asked in a smallish voice.

  “You like honey?” A knowing kind of smile curled his lips and Mack wondered what her choice told him about her. “I do too. It’s the only way to sweeten anything.”

  Mack thought of a half dozen ways to sweeten things, but her thoughts went from honey to Finn’s lips, Finn’s hands, Finn’s arms around her. Finn’s body… naked. Then she remembered his bristly personality and told herself that honey would do.

  “My mother thinks it’s odd.”

  Finn handed her a mug, and she followed him to the oversized leather couch. Everything about the room was oversized including the doors, the ceiling height, and the furniture.

  “Tell me about your mother.” He
leaned in like he was interviewing her. The thought bristled her edges a bit, and that familiar burn and itch tugged at the deepest layers of her skin.

  “You don’t get to interview me. I’ve already got the job.” She sipped the coffee which was doctored perfectly for her taste. She liked a little bit of coffee thrown in with her honey. It was a wonder she didn’t have diabetes, but Mack, despite her curves was all lean muscle. That’s the one thing she could thank her father for—a fast metabolism.

  “Mackenzie,” he said with a voice that made her heart flip and her stomach flop. “If we are going to work together, I thought it might be nice to know a bit about you.”

  Guilt buzzed through her for her moment of snarkiness. Of course he was being nice. She had given him a cherry pastry, and he had given her his attention. At this point she wasn’t sure who got the best end of the bargain.

  “There’s not much to tell. I’m an only child born in North Dakota and raised by a single mother in Montana.” He sat up at the mention of her mother.

  “What happened to your dad?”

  “I don’t really know. I have vague memories of him. He was an outdoorsman. All my mom said is he was consumed by bears.”

  Finn leaned back and kicked his feet up onto a tree trunk turned into a coffee table. “Like he was obsessed by bears or eaten by bears?”

  “I doubt it was either.” Mack’s mom never spoke kindly of her father, but she would have never spoken ill of the dead either. “My mother and father split when I was little. He wasn’t part of our lives.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. Father’s should always be a part of their children’s lives. Their presence makes for well-rounded individuals.”

  “Are you insinuating that I’m not well-rounded?”

  He dropped his feet and leaned forward closing the gap between their bodies. His heat wound around her legs and eased its way to the area where her thighs touched.

  Finn scanned her body from the tips of her boots to the top of her hair. “You are beautifully rounded in all the right places.” He continued to talk as if his last statement wasn’t sexual in nature. “All I was saying is you might have missed out on knowing half of your lineage. That’s a shame.”

  She stood up and walked to the window where she placed her face against the cool glass. “My mother would like me to believe he was a beast of a man by the way she talks about him.”

  “Interesting.” Finn stood next to Mack. “Are you ready to get to work?”

  “Absolutely.” She spun around and walked toward the door that led to the front office. She was never so excited to get to work. It meant getting out of the large room that seemed to shrink with Finn’s larger-than-life presence. Mack knew she couldn’t spend another minute there without making a fool of herself.

  “I’m taking you to the ridge.” He opened the door to his pickup and helped her inside. “We’ll use today to help you get a feel for the land, and for us to get a feel for each other.”

  The way he said feel and each other was like a caress across her skin. Mack chastised herself for fantasizing about a co-worker, and when Finn rounded the corner and jumped in she went straight into talking about what she loved—bears.

  “This morning I was sitting on the porch of the bed and breakfast eating when I saw an amazing bear across the lake.”

  “Really.” He turned the engine, and it growled to life. “What made the bear amazing?”

  She turned in her seat and faced him. The man had a jaw chiseled from stone. A shadow from his less than close shave gave him a ruthless bad boy look. “Oh he was magnificent. His fur was a tawny brown like your hair, and the way the sun lifted the red was beautiful.”

  “He?”

  “A bear that size could have never been female. Broad shoulders and a strong back, he stood there and looked at me. Really looked at me, and for a minute I felt this connection like it was just him and me.” Mack thought about how stupid she must have sounded. She was describing the bear as if he were human.

  Finn sat up taller and that one move filled the cab of the truck to capacity. “Sounds like quite a bear.”

  “Do you think we can walk the lands behind the lake? I’d really like to tag that one.”

  A low growl spurred his words forward. “Would you tag him for life or death?”

  “To kill such a magnificent beast would be criminal.”

  “What about his mate or his cubs? Would they be spared? What about his brother or his parents or his friends? Would they be tagged red or green? Would you give them life or death?” Finn’s hands gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles turned white. “You’ve become the executioner. How does that feel?”

  Finn made the bears come alive with his questions, which only strengthened the doubt that lived in her heart. Mack had joined the Forest Service to serve and protect, but who would she serve and who was she supposed to protect?

  Chapter 4

  Finn

  Sitting in the cab for an hour while they took the rugged inner road to the ridge was pure hell. Mack’s scent drove him wild in one way, and her determination to reduce his clan insane in another.

  “Tell me about you.” Her voice was soft and sweet and as satisfying as the cherry pastry she’d brought. But the problem with sweets was they rarely satisfied for long and Finn’s appetite for her was growing by the minute.

  “I’m one of two sons. My brother is also a ranger and manages the station on the far side of the forest.”

  She sat up taller. “So, does he agree with your claim that the numbers are exaggerated?”

  “No doubt. We do not have an overpopulation of bears in Grayslake.”

  Mack twisted a section of her hair around and around her finger then let it fall in a curl over her shoulder. “I hope you’re right.” She pulled her upper lip between her teeth and nibbled it back and forth. “It’s not like I want to tag bears for termination.”

  The word termination made the hairs on his back rise. It was a natural instinct to shift when someone was talking about exterminating a branch on the family tree. It took all of Finn’s reserve to keep his hair from sprouting and his teeth from breaking free.

  “Then don’t.” Mack let out a long exhale, and Finn caught the scent of honey on her breath. “Take a few days to simply observe the population and then you’ll be able to make a more educated decision.”

  When they got to the ridge, Finn pulled the truck in front of the shack that held supplies. It wasn’t more than a small box with a twin bed and shelves that contained first aid supplies and extra food, but it was a nice location that gave a bird’s-eye view of the surrounding forest and the valley below.

  Mack was out of the truck before it came to a full stop. “This is magnificent.” She lifted her arms in the air and twirled in a circle. Her hair spun around her shoulders like a sexy cyclone. Finn’s dick twitched and his animal instinct was set to mate, but he couldn’t just lay the woman down and tell her she was his for life.

  He had to figure out how much she knew—if anything—about shifters. The way to a woman’s heart wasn’t to scare it straight out of her chest.

  “We keep this place up here in case of emergencies. The weather can change on a dime and the last place you want to be stuck is in the middle of the forest without supplies or a dry place to wait it out.” Finn walked to the small cabin and pulled a key from above the doorframe. “You thirsty?”

  “You keep the key right there for anyone to get?” She placed her hands on her beautiful wide hips.

  His motto was big ass, big sass, and in both cases, the bigger the better. Finn liked his girls with plenty of sass. He glanced at the wooded area around them. “We don’t get many people up here. Besides, all they could take is a case of water and a box of protein bars.”

  “What about the wildlife?”

  “Opposable thumbs would be the first obstacle. Besides, most of the wildlife here prefer the diner.” He unlocked the door and walked into the room. It was a simple struc
ture with a bed on one side, a shelf full of miscellaneous supplies, and a wood stove in the corner.

  “Ha ha.” She walked into the room. A slant of light shone through the window and picked up the dust that floated in the air. It surrounded her in an ethereal fashion. “There’s more than protein bars here.” She picked up a can of chili and a can of soup.

  “I don’t think the wolves in the area will be breaking in and using the can opener for those either.” An image of the alpha wolf Reid Bennett breaking into the cabin for a can of soup made him chuckle. There was no way a can of anything would satisfy that bloodthirsty bastard’s appetite.

  Mack set the cans down and walked toward the door. “A wolf with a can opener is a funny image.”

  “You have no idea.”

  She brushed past him and all he wanted to do was pull her into his arms and kiss her. Those red lips with the scent of honey called to him like a bullhorn. There was nothing subtle about this attraction to her, his bear roared to be let loose, and his human was barely keeping him contained. He grabbed two bottles of water and hoped for the best.

  She stood in front of the door and waited for him to join her. “What should I expect to see up here?”

  The truth was she’d probably see very little. It was too far from town for many of the shifters, which was why he brought her up here. She’d see some wildlife for sure, but it wouldn’t include four-legged beasts with bad attitudes.

  Most likely the highlight of her visit to the ridge would include birds, rabbits and many a mountain goat if she were lucky. Then again, old man Hilliard hadn’t been out much since his wife passed. There were no more treks to watch the sun rise and set with his mate. Those ended when a hunter took her out. Finn remembered the day they found her in the woods. The damn poachers hunted for sport and left her to rot in the forest.

  “Let’s go.” The brusqueness of his voice surprised him, and then again, it didn’t. He was torn between wanting the woman beneath his body and wanting her gone. He shoved a bottle of water toward her. “You’ll need this.” His plan was to hike until his bones were weary and his need was gone.