Staring at the garden gnome sitting on his desk, Edison Rochon resisted the urge to hurl the offending little man across the room. It wasn’t the gnome’s fault. The little ceramic man wearing sunglasses holding up his hand with a Hang Loose sign was actually pretty cute.

Sure, he’d gotten blindsided by a lawn ornament a few months ago. In his defense, he was distracted by the attractive hottie his cousin Tanner had mated with. He knew she was off limits, but looking wasn’t a crime.

The crime was when some asshole cracked him upside the head with the little bearded fellow to snatch Tanner’s girl. Luckily, he was able to call in the troops when she’d gotten snatched. The blow didn’t knock him out. He wasn’t a complete pansy. Just stunned him for a bit, barely a moment really.

Now the little bastards kept popping up everywhere – his home, his office – he’d even found one sitting on the hood of his car. All planted by members of his family who thought they were funnier than a car full of clowns.

The gnome itself didn’t piss him off – it was the fact that they’d taped the little asshole to his 1967 Land Rover Defender that made him lose his mind. He loved his car. Not more than his family of course, but he knew his cousins and brother were not even close to being done tormenting him with the gnomes.

He’d broken the first few. Then he started feeling bad for being so wasteful, so he’d been collecting them and stashing them in his garage. He didn’t want anyone to know he was keeping them – they’d just continue adding to the collection.

They seemed to pop up whenever he wasn’t expecting them. Turn your back, and boom! Ceramic dude with a beard.

Eddie had a decent sense of humor. In fact, he wasn’t known for being overly serious. Growing up, his mother Sandy bemoaned the fact that he was the kid always getting into trouble at school. His dad, Joe, would just ruffle his hair after he got home from work. His mom would spell out the latest meeting with the school, and his dad would listen and nod.

Eddie knew that his dad didn’t think his schoolboy crimes were that worrisome. Eddie never teased other kids or destroyed school property. He just found things funny. He could find humor in pretty much everything. So he would just comment, crack a joke, or draw a funny picture. Then he would share. He would always share. He couldn’t seem to help himself.

Even in elementary school, his knowledge of sarcasm was well advanced. As he grew, his sense of humor kept him sane. His family, the Rochons, were all about timber. Growing it, cutting it, milling it, and shipping it. It was a good business.

Eddie’s family was unique. Well, unique as a human would see it. They were a clan of bear shifters. Each of them had the soul of a bear living inside them. This bear was part of who they were. The fates decided that the human and bear souls were a match, and from that moment on they were one. There were other types of shifters, but they tended to stay with their own. Recently one of Eddie’s cousins had met a cougar shifter, and they were now happily mated.

The Rochon clan had been living in the Pacific Northwest for a number of generations. At first, because it was remote. Their animals, being large predators, needed space. They needed the trees and mountains to be themselves. Their human sides liked the peace and ease of hiding who they were. Not wanting to leave the land they had grown to love, the Rochons started to make a living out of it.

Over the course of two generations, the Rochons built a timber empire. The families all worked in the business or in supporting businesses in towns nearby.

The last name Rochon meant money and stability. Eddie knew how lucky he was. His family lived in a beautiful house on the outskirts of town. They didn’t draw much attention to themselves and focused on living a quiet life. The community was used to the longevity and close-knit nature of the Rochons. Being shifters – who age more slowly – made them keep their heads down. Keeping their place in the community but not exaggerating it.

Eddie was not one to be left in the background. He couldn’t help it. His nature was to be out there. It didn’t hurt that he was a middle child. Growing up between a bossy older sister and a younger brother who got away with murder made Eddie seek attention. Lisa, his sister, was overly motherly to him. Bossy, controlling, always thinking he wasn’t behaving – which, sometimes he wasn’t - but usually whatever scrap he was in was his brother Angel’s fault. His mother totally failed when they named that little devil. Being the last child, born a number of years after Eddie, his mother’s expectation of her baby was way off the reality of the terrible twos he never grew out of even in his teenage years.

But for all of Eddie’s typical boyhood antics, he had a kind heart. His mother said he was born with empathy; he didn’t need to learn it. Eddie was the boy that would bring in the birds with the broken wings. His parents would find stray dogs in his bedroom closet that he had rescued. They were constantly trying to re-home animals as he grew up.

When he was in his teens, he started working in the trees with the rest of his cousins. He did the work, never shirking, but he didn’t like it. It didn’t make him happy to be out in the woods all day. His mind was always somewhere else. Maybe it was because he was a polar bear, a rarity even in the bear shifter world.

The last polar bear in the Rochon clan had been when the family was settled in Canada. His great grandfather had written about a family member who had been matched by the fates with a polar bear. That man had never found his mate. That didn’t mean anything, really, certainly not that polar bears couldn’t find mates. That particular relative simply hadn’t found his.

He always wondered if this made him different on more levels than just the obvious.

His bear was an odd mix of aggressive when provoked, but compassionate to family and friends. His animal wanted everyone to be happy, healthy, and taken care of. It was a focus of Eddie’s childhood, being the helper. His mother never had to ask him twice to handle any chore.

As he went through high school, he knew that lumber was not going to be his life, but unsure of what else he might be good at, he sought out the advice of their Alpha at the time. He calmly looked at Eddie for a while after hearing his dilemma. Eddie waited as the man sized him up.

“Edison, if you came across a man getting beat up by another man, what would you do? Attack the man who was the aggressor? Make him pay for causing another person pain? Or would you scare him away and help the man who was hurt? What does your bear say you would do?”

Eddie waited for his animal to respond. The vision was clear. The bear was upset there was someone injured. That he was in pain, scared, and injured.

“He’d want me to help the man,” Eddie replied.

“So what career do you think would make your bear the most content? How would you and he be the happiest?”

Thinking about his favorite classes, the ones he excelled at, math, science, and chemistry he replied somewhat hesitantly, “I could be a doctor.”

“You could. Would that make you happy?”

Eddie paused. “Yes, and it would be good for the clan. We need someone who knows about us, who can deal with illnesses that our animals can’t heal.” Ordinary injuries in shifters healed at a rapid speed, but there was always a need for extra help when trauma was severe or life-threatening.

“Then that is your answer,” his Alpha declared.

Eddie visited his counselor the next day at school. They figured out what he needed to take to complete his exams and bulk up his applications. Before he knew it, he was accepted at the University of Washington.

Even though he had found his calling, he and his bear still wanted more. They wanted their mate. Their One who would be their partner for the rest of their lives.

Eddie was trying to be patient. He was only thirty-five. He had all the time in the world to find his One. In his younger days, he’d dated and had gone out with different girls. College had been fun – too fun, truthfully. He was nice to women – engaging, funny, and courteous, but their feelings for him, which were often painfully obvious, were not returned by him. He couldn’t, his bear wasn’t even interested in investing any time in someone that wasn’t his mate.

Once he’d graduated and completed his residency, he was ready to head home and settle down. He had no big aspirations to be the top doctor in a huge hospital, even though the job offers had rolled in. He had been top of his class and had extensive skills as a surgeon.

Instead, he chose to come home and take care of the people who had taken care of him growing up. The loggers and townspeople of Apex, Washington needed quality healthcare just like everyone else – perhaps more so because the nearest large hospital was a helicopter ride away.

There wasn’t much Eddie couldn’t handle at the Apex hospital; the Rochon family had more than enough money to make sure the hospital was state of the art. Having Rochon money also meant that Eddie was one of the lucky few who didn’t have to worry about student loans.

There wasn’t anywhere else Eddie wanted to be. He knew that the odds of finding his mate in their tiny town were slim to none, but he couldn’t justify leaving to go on a wild goose chase. Dr. Platt was the town’s doctor when Eddie was growing up, and still filled in at the hospital when Eddie was off, but he didn’t want to leave the responsibility on the elderly man just so that he could go find some booty. Granted, it would be forever booty, but still.

Tapping the gnome on the head, he declared, “I shall name you Norman.”

Giving a small chuckle, he tossed the statue into his desk drawer.