~

 

Time was money, and Rayner valued both. While she was stuck in the middle of shits-ville, she wasn’t earning a damn thing.

She needed two things; firstly, she needed the damn bear outside to shift back into his human form. Secondly, she needed to get her money and be gone.

She didn’t know a lot about mates, especially, mates and bears, but what she did know was that Dane was going to follow her around like a stray dog if the Internet was anything to go by. That was going to be a headache that she just didn’t need either.

“You know, your brother owes money,” Rayner said, and watched as Dane drew up to his full height, pulled his shoulders back, and tossed a look at her over his broad shoulder.

“And your boss isn’t going to stop sending people until he gets paid?” Dane growled.

He really needed to kick Bowie’s backside up and down the mountain just for bringing trouble to their door. As if being a shifter just wasn’t trouble enough.

The man just had to have a new truck, didn’t matter how much they told him he couldn’t get it; he’d gone out and got it anyway.

Now Dane knew how he’d afforded it. Idiot.

“I can buy you some time,” Rayner offered.

“Let me guess — you need to act fast?” Dane almost chuckled to himself on that one.

“I do.”

“So you need to get off this mountain?” Dane said as thoughtfully as he could manage.

“That would be a good idea. It’s kind of hard to get a signal up here,” Rayner offered back.

“Then I should come with you.” Dane tossed another look back over his shoulder at her, and he found that she was mulling that one over.

“That might not be the best idea. My boss is an asshole, and we wouldn’t want to make the situation any worse.”

Rayner shrugged for her own benefit in backing up her story more than for his benefit because he wasn’t even looking at her at the time. She needed to be plausible as the man seemed to have something of a nose when it came to detecting bullshit.

“Yeah, I’d hate for this to go wrong.” Dane almost chuckled.

She was trying, he’d give her that, and yet, she was failing miserably because he was onto her game.

“We wouldn’t want Bowie to get in any deeper,” she offered.

“I wasn’t talking about Bowie. I was talking about us. We wouldn’t want us to go wrong.”

Dane was having the hardest time not chuckling at her antics. She told a good story, but she’d forgotten one thing, he could scent the deceit coming from her.

Rayner bit down on a curse. The man couldn’t see the wood for the trees, and no wonder if he thought he’d get laid at the end of it.

Mates — she really needed to check that out. How the hell was she supposed to know if he was on the level?

For all, she knew he could just have been another jerk spinning a story to get his brother out of the crap he’d got himself into. It wouldn’t have been the first time she’d heard a story, a fairytale, pure bullshit.

Rayner guessed at that point what she didn’t know wouldn’t come back to bite her in the ass. That was probably a good thing as the man had some damn fangs on him.

She guessed time would tell, or, it would all come out in the wash, or some cliché like that. But the truth was that she wasn’t waiting around to find out.

That man was smoking hot, and being locked up in a cabin with him wasn’t the best idea on the planet. Sure, she could keep her hands to herself, and he didn’t look the type to push things where she didn’t want them to go — and she knew that type — she’d dealt with everyone in her line of work, but he seemed different.

Still, you couldn’t put your hand in the cookie jar if that damn jar wasn’t in front of you in the first place.

 

~

~

~

 

“You need to shake off your bear, Bowie,” Roland said.

He was still kicking up his heels as he sat on the roof of his brother’s cabin and waited for the man to calm the hell down. His brother was highly strung, and today wasn’t a good day, not when a human female had trespassed on their land.

Lucky them — Dane had found his mate. What that meant to Roland was that Bowie needed to get over himself and realize that the human female was staying.

That was if Dane could woo his mate. The jury was still out on that one, but Roland had hope.

One of them needed to find a mate and a chance at a normal life — he didn’t think it was going to be the psycho bear brother. He’d kind of had a little bit of hope that it might have been him, well, not really, because out of the three of them; Dane was the more likely to be able to woo a mate.

Bowie was unstable, Roland was all about playing the game for the hell of it, and Dane was the glue that held them together. It was only right that the man found some happiness.

That female seemed nuts enough to be able to handle a bear shifter. He could be wrong — he sometimes was — but she seemed to have a strength about her that a human female would need to be around any of them and their monsters.

Roland had to guess that Dane would be moving away. He didn’t expect the man to bring up a family around Bowie and his damn bear. That would be playing with fire, and you didn’t play with fire around family.

“Shake it off — put the bear back in its cage,” he called down to his brother and got a hard warning growl in return. “Didn’t think so.” Roland sighed.

Now he was going to have to go down there and beat the bear back into its cage. Yeah, that human female definitely needed to be strong if she wanted to be around them.

 

~

~

~

 

Dane heard the sound of his brothers bears going at it, and he had the damn urge to leave them to it and kill whichever one came out alive. The truth was; that would have solved all of his problems right there.

The fact of the matter was that he’d sworn to protect those knuckleheads, try to keep them alive as long as possible, and not to let them kill anyone unnecessarily.

It was a damn job that took everything he had, including an ounce of flesh every once in a while. He had the scars to prove it running over his skin like patchwork.

But they were his clan, his kin, family, and without family, he would have lost his mind years ago.

“Stay here, don’t run,” Dane tossed the words back over his shoulder by way of a warning to his mate, but even as he did, something told him that she wasn’t planning on sticking around.

“Fight club?” Rayner had heard the fighting as well. It wasn’t exactly something that you could miss, a couple of bears roaring at each other and the sound of things breaking.

Little wonder that the place was a dump if they fought each other.

She watched Dane stalk towards the front door, stripping his shirt off over his head as he went, and she was more than prepared to be impressed by his naked torso.

Instead, the sight of the deep scars across his skin, over his back, across his ribs, and up over those broad shoulders made her heart hit her ribs and a weight drop in her stomach.

Rayner pushed forward on the couch and up to her feet to follow on his heels as he stalked out if the cabin. It didn’t matter to her that he’d slammed the door closed behind him, because she wasn’t the kind of women that let a little thing like symbolism get in the way of doing what she needed to do, and she had the damndest need to protect him from himself.