by Star, Amy
BLAKE
HER BAD BEAR
A PARANORMAL SHIFTER ROMANCE
AMY STAR
Copyright ©2015 by Amy Star
All rights reserved.
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About This Book
He was sexy. He was charming. He was also so bad for her that he should have come with a health warning.
When young journalist Lilly went to Beaver Creek to profile a story, she had no idea about what was going to happen next. A chance meeting in a bar with a mysterious bad boy led to a one night stand she would never forget.
However, she was totally unaware that this bad boy was also a BAD BEAR by the name of Blake. A tattooed biker with a dark past and an even darker future.
And they would soon both realize that the night they shared together was going to be memorable in more ways than one....
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER ONE
Storm clouds seemed to dog-pile against the horizon, bunched up like too many folds of fabric. Rain was a threat, waiting to happen, but no one gathered seemed to notice it at all. The tone was solemn, even amongst the youngest of the gang who were notorious for their recklessness—but now was not the time to be reckless, and even they could understand the gravity of the situation. The graveyard, in its Victorian embrace of stoic resolve and right angles, had an ominous presence to it, made all the more so by the two dozen men and women who had gathered.
Standing in the middle among them, Blake kept his gaze centered and stern, not just as an example for the others who were rallied behind them—each in a black and white suit, like the penguin attire you thought of FBI agents wearing—but also because a show of emotion now would be to the detriment of all. The priest who was standing behind a small mobile pulpit finished muttering something that Blake wasn’t paying attention to. A lot of biblical nonsense. Blake didn’t have any time for religion, but he knew the old Alpha, the one sealed in the polished pine box above his soon-to-be grave, had been a God-fearing man all his life.
“And so, as we commit Damian to the earth, let us remember,” the priest prattled on, “that death should not be something we fear, but something we embrace, in order that those who remain are stronger for it. Now, I believe Mr. Gunner has something he wanted to say, as well.”
The priest raised his hand toward Blake and the lean-muscled man startled for a moment, remembering his duty. For almost five years, he’d been the Beta in the gang, the second in command. The death of Damian, their leader, had been a shock, and it had sent ripples through the entire power structure. Everyone knew the way, instinctually, that hierarchy supported Blake as the next boss, but now that he was confronted with it, he wasn’t sure if it was something he was up to.
He cleared his throat and separated himself from the group as he took up a position behind the pulpit and the priest gave him a low and knowing nod. Blake’s own suit felt constrictive, too tight in all the wrong places, like if he moved wrong, every stitch would rip apart and leave him naked in front of the congregation. That would make for a memorable funeral¸ he thought sardonically. Eyes like river stones, round and grey as shale, brooded under his eyebrows. His arms were thick and knotted as ropes, but the suit at least gave him an affectation of being just another normal griever—underneath though, decades of bar fights, gang brawls, and the work of a Thai tattoo artist had turned him into a monster, something to be feared and respected in equal measure. As he took a sheaf of paper from his pocket and set it on the stand, he let himself appreciate the black ink on his knuckles.
It had been Damian’s idea. The tenets of the tribe tattooed on the back of the hand in the tribe’s ancient script. He let himself read them out loud in his mind as he prepared to address the others: tenacity, respect, duty, and loyalty. Have I lived up to these, old friend? he wondered, casting his eyes on the coffin again. It was so well polished he could almost catch his own reflection in it, and he frowned at the face that looked back. His own head was shaved, like the other lieutenants in the gang, but already there was a thin, soft surface of bristles re-emerging on his scalp. He wiped at his head with an obtuse gesture, feeling perspiration already beading.
The heat sink of an approaching storm. Sure, that would be nice to believe. The truth was he was nervous, and it wasn’t like him to be nervous, which only exacerbated his nervousness all the more. Two dozen eyes, dark and gloomy with mourning, followed him to the pulpit and locked there in an almost predatory stare. He gulped and sniffed, trying to find the words.
“Damian was our brother,” he began, and saw nods of approval, “he was my brother, in all but blood. Our loss of him, I know we’re all still dealing with it, trying to find some guidance. Truth is, I don’t know if there is any. We live on the edge—all of us. But there are no scripts for death, no prescribed ways to know what to feel or what to do. We all just hang on the best we can.”
He saw one of the women, Damian’s own mate, a fiery red-haired woman named Melissa, cover her mouth to hide a sob. He caught, for less than a second, a cold blue gaze center on him, almost accusatory. Beside her, a tall man with an indented scar on his upper lip wrapped an arm around her. Damian’s son, Connor, he reminded himself. The youth was steadfast, almost as cruel as his father and just as ambitious. Blake’s status as Beta had always been a source of contention between him and the rest of Damian’s brood. Gently, he continued.
“But if Damian taught me anything, it was that the tribe outweighs the interests and welfare of the individual—that’s what it means to be a man. He was noble as a leader, loyal as a brother. I won’t forget that. Nor will I let his death be in vain, or his sacrifice. On that, you have my word. I’d like to ask you all now for a moment of silence.”
Blake winced. He could hear his own voice, how false it sounded trying to sound poignant, and he hoped no one else had noticed. The congregation bowed their heads in unison and a calm pervaded the entire graveyard, interrupted only by the sound of wind as the sky darkened.
“That was a good service,” a young voice said admiringly after the congregation had started to disperse. Melissa was already halfway up the hill, flanked by a deluge of black suits, only her red hair visible among the mass.
Blake turned and saw a skinny version of himself in a similar suit. Gavin was one of the novitiates—barely seventeen, but he’d already proved himself handy and reliable, and against Blake’s own cold attempts, had more or less endeared himself to the former-Beta. Unlike Blake’s angular, sledge-like face, Gavin’s was sharp and slanted, hawkish and Slavic, and the occasional guttural intonation in his voice belied that descent. He was second-generation Ukrainian, and his spiky, dark blond hair had all the evidence of a lawn that hadn’t been
mowed in many years. But there was a jovial sense of dedication to him, even if it was sometimes comical and ill-conceived.
“I’ve been to enough of these,” Blake said wearily. “You’d think by now I’d be able to say something and have it actually come out right.”
“It’s the first time you’ve had to lead the ceremonies,” Gavin pointed out, correctly.
Blake sighed and stuffed his hands in his pockets as he meandered back up the road. The rest of the gang had already made it to their vehicles, and the graveyard now felt emptier as he turned and gave it a final look. The graveyard keeper had already lowered Damian’s coffin into the ground and was leaning on a shovel. He’d wait until there was no one left before he finally buried the old Alpha.
“The boys said they’re having a wake at old Jack’s. I think by the look of some of ’em they’d already started in on it. You heading that way? I know they’re all expecting you.”
“Aye,” Blake said, his lips wrenching into a scowl.
He still couldn’t shake that cobalt gaze that Melissa had leveled at him earlier, almost as if she was trying to communicate something to him indirectly, but somewhere along the line, it had been lost in translation. A threat? Or am I reading too much into it? For the time being, he was happy to discount it, even though a prominent portion of his mind was still reeling.
“Something up?” Gavin said, his voice rising almost too high.
Blake shrugged as he reached his motorcycle, an older style Harley with an amped up engine. He grabbed his leather jacket off the steering column and threw both arms through it, tasting the smell of it like a familiar lover—sweat, oil, blood, all the good things in life. Sewn by hand into the back of the jacket was the insignia of the Ursa Majors. Bright flared asterisks that were meant to represent stars in the infamous constellation their gang had based their name on in the first place, all connected by faint yellow lines.
It represented not only their gang, but on a deeper level, what they all were: bear-shifters. An ancient breed of creature that was half-human and half-bear, something legendary. Apocryphal. Over the years, the nature of the tribe had changed, from living as bandits on the frontier lands to their latest incarnation. But what always remained the same were the tenets, and the solidarity of the brotherhood.
He growled to himself, wishing he could skip the wake entirely. It wasn’t out of misanthropy or disregard, he had spoken every truth during Damian’s eulogy. The slain Alpha had been a brother, and more.
What bothered Blake was what that meant for him, personally. Leadership, by all rights, extended to the next in line, which meant that he was more or less the informal leader of the gang. But the suddenness of Damian’s passing, along with the circumstances of his death and the internal politics that had been a long time brewing in their midst, left him rattled.
“I’ll be there,” he said curtly, slamming the dull black helmet over his head. It was enough to shut Gavin up, who seemed to flinch back as if he’d suddenly encountered a viper. Blake revved the Harley and tore into the pavement; in his side mirror he caught the novitiate watching him go. He felt a momentary stab of regret.
The kid’s just worried about me, he thought, shouldn’t have been such a hard ass. He brought his attention back to the road and the impending wake—there were more serious things to consider than some gang member’s hurt feelings. Control of the Ursa Majors would ultimately come down to either him or Connor—even during the eulogy, he could sense there was a split, a divide, between those who favored him and those who favored the son of the old Alpha.
It was the oldest trope among bear-shifters. Only the strong survive, and among the strongest, the leader always arose. But the politics, like the era they had all found themselves in, was something subject to mutation. No one, including him, knew where that left the rest of them.
The sky finally opened up, pouring down onto the street, and he slipped his goggles down, feeling the cold sting of droplets blaze against his bare knuckles as he headed back into the sleepy dog-day town of Beaver Creek. He saw a few of the guys at the run-down liquor store, and could identify them by their custom bikes parked out front—probably picking up an extra load of beer, as if Jack’s pub didn’t have enough to satisfy their needs to numb themselves into oblivion.
Blake pictured Connor again, that mean scar on his lip. Sure, the kid was strong, and intelligent enough, but he didn’t have the same sense of leadership that his father had. Even before Damian’s mysterious death, the Ursa Majors had been faltering, splitting at the collective social seams. It wasn’t immediately obvious, but both he and Damian had seen the telltale signs—too many novitiates, orders being disobeyed, insubordination among the rank and file, and even the oldest and most loyal members showed up less and less to the meetings. They smell the scent of death on us, Blake gritted his teeth, and who’s to say they aren’t wrong?
If the gang meant to survive the winter, it would rest on whoever became Alpha.
*
Lily Walker braced herself for a tongue lashing as she sat at the manager’s desk and waited for him to make his way through the bull-pen, what the other reporters at the Daily Mail tended to call the uniform chaos of cubicles that housed the entirety of the staff. Samson, over fifty and showing it in all the wrong ways, opened the door behind her and stepped in, muttering to himself. She could hear the buzz and static drone of people yelling into phones, the tapping fingers of other writers trying to finish up articles before the print call, all of it merging into a formless noise. Samson kept muttering to himself as he made his way to his desk and sat down with a huff, the bald spot on his head winking with light. Lily uncrossed her legs and waited for his rebuke, but he didn’t seem to notice her as he reached for a bottle of pills in his drawer and swallowed two.
“Sir, you wanted to speak with me?” she asked.
For a junior reporter, Lily had all the verve and gusto of a trained and hardened war-time correspondent, even though part of her knew that it was just a surface façade. Still, with her precise black bowl cut that framed her delicate Asian features and seemed to square her round eyes in the center of her face, she looked the part. A pair of rimless glasses hovered above her small nose and she reflexively pushed them further up the bridge. The way it cut her gaze made her look like she was perpetually cross.
“Sorry, yes, Lily,” Samson said, swallowing back a gulp of water and noticing her for the first time. “I suppose you know why you’re in here? That last article you sent in—all right, let me be clear about this. It was great. Genius. Hell, top class reporting.” He raised his arms in high gesticulations. Lily flushed and then frowned—buttering me up so he can bring me down, she mused. “The problem isn’t with your work ethic,” the manager continued, “it’s with your methodology.”
“If you’re referring to how I managed to secure access to the work site—” she began, but his eyes cut her off. The last article she had done had been on work place safety protocols in construction sites. She had “borrowed” the identification card of one of the foremen who she had “accidentally” met in one of the local blue-collar pubs, after getting him wasted on shots of Jack Daniels and promises of a more sexual nature.
She was that kind of reporter. Do or die, and regardless of her modus operandi everyone—including Samson—knew she was slated for the big times. If she didn’t kill herself before then. He shook his head and squinched his brow together with two fingers.
“Listen, I like you, Lily. You’re one of my favorites here—you get shit done, I’ve got no quarrels with that at all. But we’re not the New York Times. We’re not national. People don’t expect Nobel Prize winning featurettes from the Daily Mail,” he said. “Not that this is a reflection on you. Hell, one of these days, you’ll get picked up by a bigger company, and I’ll rue the day I ever lost you. But until then, I need you to hold back. We’re a family newspaper. I don’t need the politics right now, can’t afford it.”
She tried to hold her temper.
Sure, the Daily Mail had been good to her, and Samson let her get away with most things another editor wouldn’t, but that didn’t excuse the fact that she was working way below her pay grade.
“I understand,” she said, begrudgingly.
“I’m running the article, don’t worry,” he said, and then teasingly, “hell, if a bigger paper reads it, they’ll probably come hounding for you. Just wait until then. In the meantime, I need you to be a little more low profile. Don’t worry, I still got you on assignment.”
“A new story?” she asked, her curiosity suddenly piqued as he slid across another assignment in a manila folder. She opened it and saw that it was referencing one of the smaller towns, about an hour and a half south—Beaver Creek.
“Yeah, just a fluff piece. Supposedly, the owner of the pub there tends to sell alcohol to minors. I don’t suspect it’s much of a story, but it’s worth a look anyway,” he said.
“Right, when do I leave?”
“If possible, right away,” Samson said. “We’ve got a reservation for you at the hotel there. They’ll expect you sometime this evening, so if you want to go home and pack or get a change of clothes, you can take off early.”
“I might do that,” she nodded.
“Remember, this is just an interim story. Don’t get carried away,” he chided, and Lily tried to keep from recoiling. It was like he was treating her like a child, and she resented the fact, even if she sympathized with him. In his place, she’d probably have done the same thing. Part of her knew she was reckless, but only in the sense that she took calculated risks that other people didn’t, and more often than not, they paid off.
“I get it,” she said, waving him aside, “keep a lid on it, right?”
