MARS (BBW Bear Shifter MC Romance) (MC Bear Mates Book 1)

by Becca Fanning

  And he was unique in one more way: he had worked alongside his own engineers for decades, the last of a dying breed of inventor CEOs. Cartwright knew that to get good results, you had to put in the time and effort, even if it meant doing things yourself. Competitors had rose up, full of young leadership and boards of fresh faced MBA sharks who didn’t care what they were making, as long as they made a profit. They outsourced for cheaper labor, compromised on quality, and only cared about their margins and bonuses. And as soon as they had rose up, they had fallen.

  And Animus Engineering had remained, just as successful as it ever had been.

  Kat had always looked up to him, and working for him was her dream job. She respected him, which made what they had done that much worse. Still, she could tell he was wary about her unannounced visit.

  “One second, Matthew,” he said into the phone, before putting it up to his chest. “This is unlike you, Kat. What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing’s wrong –”

  “Then can it wait just a few more minutes?”

  Kat’s hands were on the back of a chair, knuckles white. She could feel her smile spreading across her face. She’d been trying to hold it in, but she couldn’t any longer.

  “We did it.”

  It took a few seconds for her declaration to sink in. He took the phone from his chest and said, “Matthew, let me call you back. Yes, I know the deadline is coming up.” He hung up without another word. “You did it? You really did it?” His eyes were wide. He was more excited than Kat had ever seen him.

  “Simon and I just completed the first trial. We did it. And you, of course. Without your years of research you put into this, it would have never happened,” she said, smiling.

  Cartwright got out of his chair, moving faster than any 70 year old had the right to. He came around his desk, embracing her in a hug. She could smell his cologne. It reminded her of the pipe that her grandfather used to smoke when she was younger. He broke the embrace, giddy with excitement. “Don’t hold back. Let me hear all of the details. How low did you get the lag?”

  Kat took a deep breath, smiling just as wide as Cartwright. “Two point five milliseconds.” In other words, nothing. She almost couldn’t believe it.

  Cartwright was silent for a few seconds. He leaned back against his desk. “Unbelievable. Just unbelievable. I never could have imagined it would be possible to get it that low. Even with all of my research, I didn’t know if it was possible. Perfect timing, too,” he said, moving around his desk and flipping open a manila folder. He ran one finger down a page, stopping halfway, and pointed. “Perfect timing.”

  “Perfect timing. For what?” Kat asked.

  He gestured towards the phone. “That was one of the shareholders. They’re getting pushy about the deadline. Now, we can share the good news with them and finally get this target off of my back.”

  “Target?” Kat was genuinely confused. “What target? Everyone knows that the shareholders love you. They know you do amazing work. What’s the problem?”

  “Kat, don’t worry about that. I don’t want to spoil your good mood,” Cartwright said, sitting back down in his chair. “What you and Simon have accomplished… it’s beyond my wildest dreams.”

  “Mr. Cartwright. What’s the problem?”

  He sighed and leaned back in his chair. “You’re right when you say most of the shareholders love me. Unfortunately, there’s one who does not. He controls a lot of money to fund our projects, including this one.”

  “Get rid of him, then. There are others that would love a chance to invest in our technologies.”

  “That’s true, Kat. Unfortunately, he also happens to have a lot of sway in the investing committee. Over time, he’s been bringing in younger and younger guys. He’s threatening to pull funding unless I defer control of Animus to a younger engineer. Someone half my age, handpicked by the investing committee. He’ll sell off my patents, shut the company down, and move on to destroy the next company for profit. But this… this buys us some time.”

  Kat felt a slow, creeping terror crawling up her body. She was afraid for Animus, and Mr. Cartwright, but the ramifications of what her and Simon had done – this could be the straw that finally brought down Animus. The investors were just waiting for one wrong move, and Kat had just played into their hands.

  “This is unlike anything they’ll have ever dreamed of. This news will show them that they can’t dismantle us, not just yet! Two point five milliseconds… amazing… I have to call the board and let them know the good news!” he said, picking up the phone. He looked at Kat, his smile faltering when he saw her expression. He put the phone back on the receiver. “Kat, what’s wrong?”

  She didn’t answer at first. Her whole body felt numb. She had been trying to do the right thing, but she had just shut Animus Engineering down, for good. She knew it with certainty in her heart. She had been certain that somehow, Cartwright would work out a way to make the Aegis legal. But she hadn’t known that the shareholders, who funded so much of the work done here, had funded the Aegis itself.

  “Your life isn’t over, Kat,” Cartwright said, getting back up from his desk. “I know what you’re thinking. I’ve felt it too, more times than I can tell you right now. You’ve been devoting your life to this project for the past few years. Now that it’s complete, there’s a void in your life. You think nothing you do will ever top this. But let me tell you something, Kat. You’re smart. Your next project will be even bigger than this one. And if it’s here at Animus, two years from now, that’s great. If they finally shut me down and you do it somewhere else, just know that I’ll always be proud of you. You’re going to do great, no matter what you set your mind to.”

  “It’s not that, Mr. Cartwright,” Kat whispered. Her grip had tightened around the chair again, but now, it was for all of the wrong reasons.

  “What is it, Kat? There’s nothing to worry about, now. The Aegis is a success. The shareholders will be off of our backs. We’ll be funded for at least another five years, at the minimum. Hell, I’ll probably be dead by then. Everything is looking up!”

  “You can’t tell the shareholders,” Kat whispered, even quieter than before.

  “What?” Cartwright asked, leaning close.

  “You can’t tell the shareholders,” she repeated, louder. She looked into his eyes and saw his confusion.

  “What?” he laughed. “Of course we can. We have to! They’re who funded this project, after all.”

  “You can’t. The Aegis isn’t up to spec.”

  “I know about the polymers, Kat. I know we went over budget – but I promise you, production units will be cheaper, without compromising their integrity. I can even spin that to the shareholders as a positive!”

  “The power source,” she said, body still numb. “It was the only way.”

  Cartwright took a deep breath, his wary look suddenly returning to his eyes. “Kat, you’d better come clean with me right now.”

  “It’s oscillating.”

  “Oscillating?” Cartwright asked, back to his desk. This time, when he sat down, all of the joy from before was gone. He leaned back heavily, exhaling a heavy breath. He grabbed a pin and twirled it, his eyes going blank. Without even looking at her, he said, “Kat, you know that’s not approved by the FDA. What the hell were you thinking? Those prototypes are useless! What am I going to tell the shareholders? They’ve invested all of their money into a prototype that’s not even legal!”

  “I didn’t know they funded it and it was the only way to get the delay down low enough to be useful. It was the only way,” Kat said. There was nothing else she could say.

  “You went behind my back and used an unapproved power source?” he asked, leaning forward. “Kat, how could you? Do you realize what you’ve done? The shareholders are going to eat me alive!”

  “We’ll figure something out,” she mumbled. She couldn’t bring herself to use any conviction in her voice, because she didn’t feel it herself. Tears were we
lling up in her eyes. She wiped them away.

  “How? The FDA will never approve human trials.”

  “I set out to make the best prosthesis I could and this was the only way. I couldn’t compromise the integrity of the Aegis just because of some damn regulations!”

  Cartwright tossed the pen on the desk and looked at his paper. “I have to tell the shareholders within eight days, Kat. You have eight days to sort this out, either we’re all out of a job.”

  “Yes, sir,” Kat said, wiping her eyes again. She stood up straight.

  “I don’t care how you do it, but get that oscillating power source out of there.”

  “It’ll compromise the Aegis –”

  “I don’t care, Kat. It’s the only way to make this thing work and save this company. Get it done.”

  Kat bowed her head and walked out of the office, defeated.

  *

  “So what’re you here for?”

  Briggs leaned back in his chair, hearing it creak alarmingly under his weight. He glanced over at Toby. He knew what Toby was in here for: substance abuse at the very least, probably drugs and alcohol. Then he realized that there wasn’t any recognizable reason for him to be here – he wasn’t strung out or some kind of user. What would this man think if he told him the only reason he was in here was PTSD? Would he laugh at him? He wouldn’t be the first one.

  It was real to him, but to others he had met, it had been some kind of joke. Just something to deal with. Something to push away, and never talk about. It was something to swallow, forget about, and then he was supposed to move on with his life. It was something Briggs knew he would never do.

  There just wasn’t any way he would ever forget the circumstances that led him to this point in his life, and honestly, he didn’t want to. Despite all of the bad, one of the things his father had taught him was that you always had to take responsibility for your actions, no matter what they were. And a lot of bad and unlucky actions had lead him here.

  But I’m not the one to mope about them, he thought. In his mind, he growled affirmation. He’d dealt with this shit his whole life, and going to one meeting didn’t mean he wouldn’t have to deal with it anymore. He was tough.

  “You’re probably going to laugh, and think it’s some kind of joke, but –”

  “Is there something you’d like to share, Briggs?”

  Briggs looked up, seeing that the man running this whole show, Sam, a former drug addict turned man of God, had stopped talking and decided to focus on him. Briggs felt the stares of everyone else in the support group turning towards him. He could feel their eyes boring into him, some intently focused on finding out why he was so fucked up, others not giving a shit, others only focused on what he looked like.

  “Ah, no thanks, I’m good,” he muttered, eyes downcast. He came here to humor a whim, using it as a way where he could tell himself he was trying to get better, without actually doing it. He hadn’t come here actually ready to talk about all of the problems he had. And he had plenty.

  “Come on, Briggs. Everyone else here has shared their stories.”

  Briggs looked around the circle. To tell the truth, he hadn’t remembered half of them and what had went wrong in their lives. Then he looked over at Toby. “He hasn’t.”

  Toby gave him a look of incredulity, as if Briggs had just ratted him out and thrown him under the bus. “We’ll get to Toby next, Briggs. Now, it’s your turn.”

  “Thanks,” Toby whispered.

  Briggs felt the rage inside building. His vision started to blur, started to go red, and all he wanted to do was lash out. He wanted to shift, attack these people, and go on with his life. That realization startled him and brought him back out of his haze. The anger hadn’t always been there. In another life, he had been kind hearted, without a mean bone in his body, something rare for a man of his kind. Somewhere down the line, that had changed.

  “Fine,” he grated through clenched teeth. “I have… PTSD.”

  “From getting kicked off that football team?” a skinny woman asked from across the circle.

  “No, from just being a Shifter, you idiot!” the man next to her whispered.

  “I think we should let Briggs explain it himself,” Sam Something said.

  “Not from getting cut from the football team, though that certainly set me on the path towards it,” Briggs said, looking at the woman. She nodded as if that was what she had meant all along. He looked at the man. “And definitely not from being a Shifter. That’s the one thing in my life I’m okay with.” The look Briggs shot the man made him shrink back into his chair.

  Briggs took a deep breath, bracing himself. He couldn’t think of the last time he’d ever told this story – hell, he wasn’t sure if he ever had. But this was the time to do it, right? He wasn’t one hundred percent sure, but he thought it was.

  “When the news came through that I’d been cut, I was devastated, of course. Shit, who wouldn’t be? It was embarrassing. I was trying to board the plane to a game when I found out. But I had my signing bonus, a nice five year contract that was sure to set me up for the rest of my life, if I was careful with my money. But I kept my head up, you know? When I headed home… that was when the real trouble began. Maybe I shouldn’t, you guys don’t need to hear my life story.”

  “Keep going,” Sam urged.

  Briggs sighed, but continued, “My home had been sold. My money, every last penny, was gone. My fiancé, who I’d trusted absolutely, had stolen it, sold my house, and fled the state. Everything I had was gone…”

  “You should have hunted that bitch down!” one of the men said. Sam shot him a dark look.

  Briggs looked over with sad eyes. “That’s what everyone always tells me, but that’s not who I am. Not who I was. Now, if I could just get ahold of her, I don’t know what I would do...” The circle laughed at that. Even Sam smiled. Briggs didn’t know if they were laughing at him, or with him, even though he wasn’t laughing. Was it possible that they could feel his pain? He wasn’t sure.

  “No money, no job, no future. All I had was a duffel bag full of clothes, so I just started walking. I walked for, I don’t know how long, must have been hours. But when I finally stopped, I was in front of a Marine recruiting office. I figured I could turn my life around, do some good for our country. And unlike the football league, the army loves Shifters. I think they would have a whole army of Shifters, if they could.”

  Briggs found himself flexing his hand, the anger, hurt, and loss threatening to overwhelm him. “We weren’t over there for long. Fallujah, over in Iraq. We moved into the city, ready to end the war. Ready to come home as heroes. Ready to come home with a purpose in life,” Briggs explained with a hurt laugh. No one laughed this time. “I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

  “When the VBIED hit – that’s vehicle born improvised explosive device, for those not familiar with the lingo – crashed into us, I didn’t even know what had happened at first. My friends were laying dead next to me… I remember reaching out for them, but just not being able to grab ahold of them. I couldn’t understand why. I busted out of the Humvee, injured so bad that I couldn’t even Shift, though at the time if you would have asked me, I would have told you I was fine. It was carnage. My whole squad was dead. Somehow, I was the only one left alive.”

  “And the enemy was closing in. I could see them walking down the street, their weapons raised. I couldn’t find mine, and I knew my only chance was to Shift – but I couldn’t do it. The frustration, the helplessness, of not being able to turn into who I really was… that was worse than the pain from the explosion itself.”