by Jessie Lane
Text copyright ©2016 by the Author.
This work was made possible by a special license through the Kindle Worlds publishing program and has not necessarily been reviewed by Three Cats, LLC. All characters, scenes, events, plots and related elements appearing in the original Grayslake: More than Mated remain the exclusive copyrighted and/or trademarked property of Three Cats, LLC, or their affiliates or licensors.
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BEARS DO IT BETTER
JESSIE LANE
Misha and Borys sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G …
Misha falls in lust at first sight with the big, sexy bear shifter, but she doesn't have time for his mating nonsense. Raised in Russia by tiger shifters, she came to America to follow up on her first real lead for finding her biological family.
Borys wants the smokin’ hot bear who recently wandered into town. Now all he has to do is convince Misha that she’s meant to be his. The stubborn woman won’t give him the time of day, though, saying she’s looking for her kin.
His biggest problem? He might be the family she's looking for.
Grayslake: More than Mated: Bears Do It Better
by Jessie Lane
Disclaimer & License Notes
Cover by Mina Carter
Editing by C&D Editing and Shannon Webb
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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Trademarks: This book identifies product names and services known to be trademarks, registered trademarks, or service marks of their respective holders. The authors acknowledge the trademarked status in this work of fiction. The publication and use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.
This book contains mature content not suitable for readers under the age of 18. This book contains content with strong language, violence, and sexual situations. All parties portrayed in sexual situations are over the age of 18.
~~~
Dedication
To Celia Kyle: Thank you for this wonderful opportunity to write in your Grayslake World that I love so much! Dream come true.
Table of Contents
Bears Do It Better
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
About the Author
Other Titles from Jessie Lane
More than Mated Novels
Chapter One
“An offer, I make. One that you cannot refuse, little Misha.”
Clamping her lips together tight, Misha did her best to give a straight face to the utterly crazy yet loveable woman standing in front of her, instead of laughing straight out. “Auntie Arina, have you been watching mobster movies again?”
The Russian tiger shifter who looked, dressed, and often acted like a wild twenty-year-old, but was closer to forty, gave her a hand wave and a pft as an answer. “You know I have to learn this American lingo if, fitting in, I’m going to do.”
This time, Misha didn’t bother holding the laughter in. “Yes, but you sound like Yoda when you do it.”
Auntie Arina gave her a glare of annoyance, and Misha decided to return to unpacking her suitcase that was lying on the hotel room bed. That didn’t stop Auntie Arina from continuing to give her opinion.
“I just do not understand, my little медве́дь, why you left Russia, our beloved homeland, and the pride, to come on some goose of the wild chase?”
A long suffering sigh escaped Misha as she pulled out another shirt and hung it up in the closet. How could she make Auntie Arina understand that she had inadvertently answered her own question with her question?
Hearing Arina call her медве́дь, pronounced “meed-VYEHT”, was something the entire Vasiliev Pride had called her as an affectionate nickname since they welcomed Misha into the pride. The word held the same meaning as the name they had christened her with. She had been too young and traumatized to remember the name her biological parents had given her. Bear.
Misha was the sole bear shifter in a pride of Russian Siberian tiger shifters.
They had not treated her badly. In fact, they had saved her life by rescuing Misha from a cruel human circus that had presumably killed her parents while they were in their bear form, and then captured her in the same vulnerable state.
Her past wasn’t all bad, though. The Vasiliev Pride had loved, cared, and protected her when they could have just shoved her off on the first bear shifters they came across. None of the men or women had tried to take over the role as new parents, and she had grown up with an army of adopted meddling aunts and grumpy uncles. Somewhere over the years, though, they had stopped looking at her as a bear, and more as a family member, which was sometimes a problematic situation.
For example, all young Vasiliev tigresses were encouraged to mate and produce cubs. The pride’s numbers were shrinking, and reproduction was on the top of their priorities. So when they accepted Misha as one of their own, naturally they expected her to do what all the other tigresses did: cat around.
Now that was a problem. Misha had absolutely no desire to sleep around with a bunch of men and get knocked up. She couldn’t explain it to them, but deep down inside, her bear yearned for more—a connection. It was what she lacked with all the men of the pride, which was why she was here, visiting Grayslake, Georgia, searching for a connection.
Perhaps it wasn’t quite the romantic one her extended tiger family wanted her to get, but in her opinion, it was just as important.
Family.
While cleaning out Auntie Arina’s attic a few months ago, Misha stumbled across something she never expected to find: a clue to her identity.
There, in boxes of old clothes Auntie Arina probably hadn’t worn in years, buried at the bottom, was a newspaper from twenty-two years ago and several towns over. At first, she had been confused as to why Arina would have kept it at all. Her aunt had always said the only good news was the kind she didn’t have to read or watch, so why did she have the yellowed, brittle newspaper buried underneath a pile of horrible clothing from the eighties? Why would the woman who didn’t pay attention to the world outside the pride have a human newspaper?
Like any young bear, Misha had a horrible sense of curiosity, or maybe that came from being raised with a bunch of cats. Either way, she found herself flipping through the pages. Then, there it was, in aged, bold black ink. The headline:
LOCAL FAMILY GOES MISSING
The article went on to talk about how a young family—husband, wife, and toddler—living on the edge of town had seemingly disappeared into thin air. Their belongings had been left behind, money on the kitchen table, food in the pantry, and clothes in the closet. Not a single item out of place, just abandoned as if the family had gotten up and walked out one day, never to return.
The piece ended with claims of suspicions and worries about the family, but that’s not what kept Misha’s eyes riveted to the page. It was the small black and white, three-by-five picture of the family with kind eyes and smiles. The man had his arm wrapped around both the woman and
child, and the woman had the side of her face resting lovingly on top of the little girl’s head.
The little girl with her face.
It seemed too impossible to believe, living all these years in this town of feline shifters with no memories as to who she was, and Auntie Arina had known almost the entire time. Misha knew she should be furious with her adopted aunt for keeping the truth from her, yet she couldn’t bring herself to get angry at a woman who had loved and protected her for as long as she could remember. That didn’t mean she wasn’t frustrated with her adopted aunt.
As soon as she had been old enough to handle confronting the frightening flashbacks she had from the circus, she began asking Arina if she knew what had happened to her parents, if perhaps they were alive. All her aunt would ever say was, “I don’t know where they are.”
Technically, it wasn’t a lie. After confronting Arina with the article, she had plainly told Misha that she hadn’t known where her parents were. However, it all boiled down to one simple truth: Arina firmly believed her parents would have never voluntarily left her.
Since the tigers had found Misha in that horrible circus, and once they had seen the newspaper article, they had assumed the worst. Misha’s parents were dead; probably killed by the very circus that had captured her.
Hearing that had totally broken her heart. What child didn’t wonder about their real parents when they knew they were adopted? Misha had dreamed of finding them alive one day. Then she had realized just how hopeless those dreams had been. Aunt Arina then pointed out one very important fact.
In that article was the name of the missing couple: Ludwig and Hanna Wisniewski. Also listed was their daughter, Anna Wisniewski.
That didn’t mean she was ready to run out and change her name. Not to disrespect her biological parents, but she had been Misha for twenty-two years. She would stay Misha until the day she died. Wouldn’t it be nice to maybe know more about her family, though?
In place of her pain bloomed a completely different feeling. Hope. It took a lot of begging and pleading, but eventually, her adopted aunts and uncles gave in and helped her track down the relatives of the missing Wisniewski couple. Unfortunately, the only one they could find was a possible cousin who had been born in America. And that is how Misha ended up here in Grayslake, looking for her cousin Borys Anderson.
He had been born to an American father and a Polish mother in an arranged mating thirty years ago in Alabama. Sometime after his birth, however, his father had been killed in a fight and his mother had taken him and sought sanctuary with the compassionate leader, the Itan, of the bear clan in Grayslake.
Now it was up to Misha to find Borys. Thankfully, she wasn’t doing it alone since Auntie Arina had insisted on coming with her. Misha would have never asked any of her Vasiliev Pride family members to leave their home for her, but she was utterly grateful that the woman had decided she couldn’t let Misha do this by herself. Arina had told her quite fervently that “Stuck together, family should be.” Misha didn’t giggle at her aunt’s garbled attempt at English, but the sentiment did make her smile wholeheartedly.
Now, very soon, she was going to be in a bear’s den, surrounded by other bear shifters for the first time in her life. Misha might not be a scaredy-cat due to her genetics, but she was a scaredy-bear. All she could hope was that the current Itan of Grayslake was just as compassionate as the former one who had taken in Borys’s mother when she had asked for asylum.
Chapter Two
Borys Anderson stared at the annoying human in front of him, wishing he could let loose a good roar to scare the man off his doorstep. If it wasn’t bad enough that the man was standing there after clearly walking right past the “no trespassing” sign in his front yard, then what was worse was how the human was butchering his name.
“Is it Barry or Boris with an ‘is’? I’m sorry to ask, but I guess the people who compiled this list made a typo. They have your name spelled B-O-R-Y-S. I just want to make sure I have the correct spelling put down for your voter registration.”
Right, because Borys was totally interested in human politics. Not.
He somehow managed to stop the annoyed eye roll his bear wanted to give, yet he did feel his left eye twitch in protest, anyway.
“It’s Borys with a ‘Y’. Pronounced exactly the way someone would say Boris with an ‘I’.”
The human in front of him looked truly perplexed, which was just sad. It wasn’t like they were talking about rocket science here. Just a name spelled a little differently than most people were used to.
“Look, you have the correct spelling of my name. Borys Anderson. You can move it along to the next house now.”
Borys started to turn around and head back into his house when the man spoke again.
“Wait! Do you mind if I ask your political party preference? Are you a Republican or a Democrat?”
How about neither? The only rulers he needed to worry about was his Itan, Ty Abrams, and his Itana, Mia. What could Donald Trump do for him? Build a wall around Grayslake? And all Hillary Clinton could do with any sort of consistency was delete emails. So yeah, Borys couldn’t really care less what the human politicians did until they somehow threatened his way of life as a shifter, and so far, no one had been stupid enough to do that.
He needed this human to go away before he lost his patience and flashed a fang at him.
Looking over his shoulder, Borys deadpanned. “Neither. I’m voting for Ted.”
“Ted?” the perplexed man asked. “As in Theodore Roosevelt? He was a great president, sir, but since he’s dead, I’m pretty sure he’s not in the running this year. Does that answer mean you’re a Republican?”
Grabbing hold of the door with one hand, ready to slam it shut, Borys gave the man one last answer. “No. Ted, as in the pot smoking, beer drinking, parties with prostitutes, real life teddy bear from those two movies with Mark Wahlberg. I figure he would fit right in at the White House. Now get the fuck off my property.”
Slamming his front door shut, Borys ignored the human’s gasp of surprise and walked back into his living room where the action movie he had paused was waiting for him.
Collapsing onto his sturdy, oversized couch, he propped his head up on one of the throw pillows his mother insisted he needed and let out a sigh. This was his day off after working overtime with the lawn care business he owned. He wanted to lay around, watch things blow up on the television, and be lazy for the rest of the day, which was why he decided that the next idiot who knocked on his door and interrupted his day of hibernation was going to end up with a bucket of fertilizer over their head.
Chapter Three
Misha couldn’t remember the last time she had been this nervous, or excited for that matter, as she drove their rental car over the rutted road that would lead them to the Itan’s den. At least it seemed peaceful out here. There was a wooden fence with posts down the side of the road with some lovely high grass beyond it. She could see plenty of trees across the bit of field, so there must be plenty of space for the bear shifters here to run wild. Would they let her shift and run with them?
In a world filled with humans, shifters were part of the hidden minority, staying in shifter-run communities to keep their true identities a secret. Auntie Arina used to say that she couldn’t care less what was going on with the world outside their pride’s town. Misha had always suspected that wasn’t the truth of it, though.
Her adopted aunt seemed to have her finger on the pulse of everything that was going on in the world. One might not realize the woman knew so much right away, but if you stayed around her long enough and really paid attention, you started to notice things. Such as how Arina would tell her family not to leave their lands because there were human soldiers two towns over. Or, one spring when she told the pride they needed to stock up better than they usually did for the next winter. It was almost as if she had a sixth sense for anything that could affect the safety of their pride.
When Misha had figur
ed that out when she was fourteen years old, she started to wonder if Arina had ever thought Misha herself might be a danger to the pride since she was a bear. A few days later, with no warning at all, her aunt had sat her down at their kitchen table and told her in very direct terms that she had never considered Misha a threat to their family, and she never would. Misha was her cub, her little bear, and she loved her as much as she would any child of her own.
Misha never figured out how Arina had known what she was thinking back then. However, part of her didn’t really want to know, either. Arina was Arina, and Misha didn’t need to dissect how the woman always seemed to know when or where something was happening.
“You seem nervous, my love.”
Nervous was an understatement. Misha was going to meet other bear shifters for the first time in her life, and she had no idea what to expect. If she were walking into a tiger’s den, she wouldn’t be worried at all. That was easy to anticipate: crazy-ass cats who liked to party too much and were prone to bouts of diabolical mischievousness.
Auntie Arina tsked. “Loosen it up, you should. It’ll be fine, you’ll see. We go meet other bears. You’ll find them loud and stinky, and back to Russia we go!”
Misha rolled her eyes. “America is not that bad, you know.”
Her aunt shrugged. “Maybe yes, maybe no. Until I find good reason for us to stay, then I will not so secretly plan to drug you and take you back to the motherland.”
Rolling her eyes, Misha decided not to comment on her aunt’s plan to kidnap her. Instead, she concentrated on the driveway she was turning in to. The clan den came into sight, and she took in the massive house sitting atop a hill. The road gave way to gravel as she parked the car off to the side. Her stomach was in knots, and she was trembling in excitement.
