Corey, Angus, and Shane were already there, enjoying another pitcher of beer. Drew poured himself a pint and took a long swig. The rest of the crew looked at him like he didn’t have a right to drink his own product.
“What?” he said, wiping foam from his beard.
They all shrugged and took swigs of their own pints. What did they know? Since Corey had invented his shifter/human dating site, Mate.com, almost all the bears had been matched with their fated mates. Shane had Lily after all these years. He’d even found out he had a son he’d never known about. Levi had found Juliet, and together, they’d become even more established as the leaders of the clan.
Just six months ago, at Levi and Juliet’s wedding, Angus had found his own mate, Poppy. Angus had just come back from his tropical honeymoon. Their wedding vows had been so saccharine it made Drew want to puke.
Corey adamantly did not want a mate, and Zach…who knew with Zach. At least Zach still had hope of one day finding her. For Drew, all hope was lost. He’d lost it the moment Quinn had run away from him nine months ago.
5
Q uinn Jacobs looked out the window at the crashing waves below her little house. She’d been hiding here for so long, she barely remembered her old life anymore. Before she’d spent that fateful night with the bear shifter, Quinn had been a fun, flirty city woman, working as a successful PR rep in Portland.
She turned away from the window and rubbed her round stomach. The little bundle inside stirred, kicking its strong legs right into her belly button.
“Ouch,” Quinn said, rubbing her hand over the kicking little feet. “What am I going to do with you?”
The baby didn’t answer. It as a question Quinn had been trying to figure out since she’d first learned of her pregnancy. Now, she was running out of time. The baby was due in three weeks, and she still hadn’t come to a satisfying conclusion.
She sat at her dining room table in the rental house she’d been staying in since she’d fled Portland. Bills littered the tabletop, covering the scratches in the wood. How had she let herself fall so far?
At one point, Quinn had been the most successful of all her friends. She had a high paying job, a great apartment. She dated attractive men and went on luxurious vacations. Always the life of the party, Quinn had never been lonely. Now, she hadn’t seen or spoken to any of her friends in almost a year.
She’d dropped out of all social media, quit her job, and changed her phone number. Maybe it had been a little severe, but at the time, total seclusion was all that had made sense. Quinn thought about the night she’d spent with Drew, the bear who’d put his seed inside her.
That was the most confusing thing of all. How had she let herself be marked and mated by a shifter?
The fact was, the feelings she’d had for Drew scared the living daylights out of Quinn. Never before had she been so out of control for a man. He made her want to give up control. He made her want to surrender to him and let him claim her to the core of her being. After he’d done it, she’d come to her senses. All she could do after that was run.
Maybe some girls found eternal happiness with shifters, but the way Drew’s pheromones made her feel was unnatural. It was like he had some kind of power over her that made her lose all reason and rationality. Quinn couldn’t have that. She was in control of her life. No one else could ever take that from her. Least of all a shifter with sexy pheromones that made her want to let him bite her neck and claim her as his own.
Quinn didn’t belong to anyone but herself.
The baby stirred again and she sighed. The piles of bills were getting too difficult to keep on top of. She’d maxed out all her credit cards and no one would give her any more credit. After nine months of living on savings and credit, she’d run out of options. Quinn wasn’t any closer to making sense of her life than she had been on day one.
She often asked herself what possessed her to keep the child. But she knew the answer. It might be a shifter. Drew might have put her under some kind of sex spell, but the baby was still hers. It was her flesh and blood. Her son. And she wouldn’t give that up, no matter who the father was.
Picking up a disconnect notice from the utility company, she felt a hard knot form in her chest. She had forty-eight hours to pay a five-hundred-dollar bill. In the old days, it wouldn’t have been a problem. But now, Quinn didn’t have five hundred dollars. Her last credit card only had a hundred dollars of credit left.
With the baby coming any minute, she had no idea what to do. Quinn had never been so muddled or confused. She’d been a good student, a successful professional. She’d stayed on top of her bills and had an enviable life. Now, she was moments from complete financial ruin and had a baby coming any minute.
She didn’t even have a crib! All Quinn had bought were a few onesies and a stuffed bear from the general store in the small coastal town where she’d been hiding. All this time, Quinn had believed that if she just had time and space to think, she’d figure out what to do. Unfortunately, her plan hadn’t worked at all.
Quinn was just as confused as ever and no closer to a solution to her problems. In fact, she felt less confident every day. Part of her blamed Drew for her inability to get it together. She’d been muddled and fuzzy since she’d left him, and every day she felt more and more empty. It was as if something was missing, something she’d never even known existed. There was a gaping hole inside her and every time she looked at it, she could feel Drew deep inside the bottomless pit of loneliness.
She hated that more than anything. He’d cast a spell on her and now she couldn’t get away from him, no matter how far she ran.
Quinn picked up the utility notice, crumpled it, and threw it in the trash can under the sink. She had to get out of here. But where was she going to go? She couldn’t go to her parents’ house. They hated shifters more than anyone she knew.
Shifters had come out to the public twenty years ago, letting the world know that they’d existed alongside humans since the beginning. After the revelation, humans had reacted as they do. The entire society had focused on secluding and limiting shifters’ rights and freedoms. Fear ran deep among humans. Not only could shifters transform into animals, they were also bigger, stronger, and had sharper senses. In many ways, shifters made humans obsolete.
Hate groups formed almost right away. Quinn’s parents were the founders of one of the oldest and most hateful groups in the country. She’d been raised to fear and loath shifters like they were dangerous aliens who’d invaded her planet.
Quinn’s parents used to celebrate when they found out a shifter in the community had been beaten by a cop or jailed for no reason. They wanted more violence, more segregation, more limits to shifter freedom.
When the war started six years ago and the government opened up the shifter draft, most male shifters had served their country. The shifters had not only served, they’d helped bring an end to the brutal war.
When they’d returned, society had changed. The media heralded them as heroes. They were handsomely compensated for their service. The talk shows and women’s magazines couldn’t stop talking about how male shifters were the hot new ticket on the dating scene.
Since the Shifter Equality Act had been passed a few years ago, things had changed for shifters in general. Specifically, human females were now free to date and mate with male shifters. Since male shifters outnumbered female shifters five to one, the men needed human women to mate with. And male shifters didn’t take mating casually. They believed there was one special person for each shifter. They called it being fated mates.
Quinn was Drew’s fated mate. They both knew it. She’d felt it inside. But with her past, she couldn’t see it as anything but treacherous. The truth was, she hated that part of herself. She didn’t want to feel anything but good intentions to shifters. They were human too. Just because they had an animal inside them didn’t mean they were less than human. Maybe they were just a little more.
The fear she’d been raised on wouldn
’t leave her alone. So much of what was known about shifters had been the stuff of myth and legend. Most of the old stories were tales of horror and despair. The ones she’d been raised on, anyway. When she went to college, she learned more legendary stories of shifters. There were stories of love as well.
The child within her twisted as she went to her room. The furnished rental was simple, but comfortable enough to live in. There weren’t many of her own things in the house. She left most of her stuff in her condo back in Portland.
She’d been paying the mortgage the entire time she’d been living on the coast. She knew she needed to sell it, but with everything that was going on in her life, she was too distracted to even start.
If she could sell her condo, she might have enough money to get by for a little while longer before she figured out what she was going to do with the rest of her life. No matter what she did, she knew she was going to have a baby coming soon and would have to make concessions for the child. She had so little money left now, she had to make a decision soon.
Quinn pulled her suitcase out from under the bed and began throwing things into it indiscriminately. There was only one place for her to go. Quinn had been putting off the inevitable for some time now. She knew that her one option was going to Fate Mountain and finding her child’s father.
Facing Drew after all this time was not something she was looking forward to. Quinn had no other options left. She couldn’t go to her family. She had abandoned all of her friends. Besides, the child’s father had a right to know she was bringing his baby into the world.
Quinn packed up the rest of her belongings and threw them all into her car. Waddling around to the driver’s seat, she opened the door and slid behind the wheel.
Quinn pulled out onto the highway and drove down to the turnoff, headed east. It was a long drive from the coast to Portland and then to Fate Mountain, but she would be there by the end of the day.
Driving that far this late in her pregnancy wasn’t something she wanted to do, but she didn’t have any other choice.
6
Drew poured the hops into the massive pot of boiling malted barley. He took a deep inhale of the scent. He loved the smell of hops and barley. It was probably one of his favorite scents aside from the scent of his mate. Just thinking about how compelling her scent was to him made him angry as hell.
He pushed thoughts of Quinn from his mind and focused on his work. His beer had won several regional awards for excellence since he’d opened the brewery. Even before the war, Drew had been brewing small batches of beer in his kitchen. When the government started giving shifters generous veterans packages, he’d used his to open his own place. It had been one of the happiest days of his life. He still looked back on it and smiled each time it came to mind.
Using a large wooden paddle, he stirred his boiling beer. After a few minutes, he stepped away from the tank and hung up his paddle. Just as he was leaving the brewery, he felt his phone ping. Drew pulled the phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen. What he saw almost made him fall down on his ass.
There was a text from Mate.com. He’d gotten a few over the past nine months from different women. But this was a text he’d never expected to get. It was from Quinn.
“Hey, how are things?” it said.
Drew stared at the text for long moments, his heart racing like a thoroughbred at the Kentucky Derby. He grabbed his chest and took a long breath. Why the hell was she contacting him now? He shoved the phone back in his pocket without responding.
The brewery wasn’t opened this time of day so there weren’t any customers in the tasting room. He went out the front door of the building and got in his SUV. He had to talk to someone about this.
Angus would be in his woodworking shop down the street. Hopefully, he could take a break from making tables and flirting with his wife long enough to have a heart to heart with Drew in his hour of need.
Drew parked in front of Angus’s shop and got out of his car. The sliding doors were open and Drew could see Angus running a plank of wood through a miter saw. He had ear protection and eye protection on, obscuring Drew’s arrival from his senses. When Angus had finished cutting the plank of wood, he turned off the saw and pulled the ear protection away from his ears.
“Hi Drew. What brings you to the shop today?” Angus asked, looking up at him.
“I got a text from Quinn.”
Angus’s eyes widened, and he blinked a few times behind his goggles. He pulled them away from his face and rubbed the sawdust off his chin. Angus tilted his head to the side and gave Drew a concerned looked.
“What did it say?” Angus asked.
“She asked how I was.”
“That’s it?”
“Yes.”
“Have you responded?”
“Not yet. I don’t know what to say.”
“Haven’t you been waiting for this for months?” Angus asked.
“No. Not really.”
“Are you really going to try to tell me you haven’t been waiting for your fated mate to contact you?”
“I’ve resigned myself to live my life alone.”
Angus slapped his hand on Drew’s shoulder and squeezed, pulling Drew closer to him.
“She’s come out of hiding. What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t you want to see her?”
“No.”
“Come on, man. You can’t be that angry. She’s your fated mate.”
“She betrayed our bond. Fuck her.”
“Dude. You have to be realistic about this. She is your mate. If she’s asking you how things are, she’s giving you an opening. I know you want your mate.”
“Not anymore. I’ve spent the last nine months trying to convince myself that it will be okay if I never have a mate. Do you know how hard it was for me to be okay with that?”
“Did you ever succeed at being okay with it?”
“Not really.”
“So you haven’t lost anything except maybe some pride.”
“My pride is important to me.”
“Of course it is. If it weren’t, you wouldn’t be Drew.”
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
“You have a reputation on the crew as being a bit of a drama queen, bro.”
“Me? A drama queen? I would think that distinction would go to Shane.”
“Wild Bear used to be unhinged. He’s never been high maintenance.”
“I can’t believe I’m hearing this. Especially from you, Angus.”
Angus squeezed Drew’s shoulder again and pulled Drew into a rough hug. Drew relented to Angus’s hug. He could be infuriatingly simplistic about things, but Angus was a good man with a good heart.
“Why don’t you just text her back? Tell her you missed her.”
“I haven’t missed her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“She betrayed me, Angus. She left me to be alone for the rest of my life. It hurts every single day not to have her here. It’s like a knife cutting into my heart. And you know the worst part? I don’t even know if I like her. We only spent a few hours together.”
“From what you’ve told me, those hours were some of the best of your life,” Angus said, picking up a two-by-four.
“They were. We could have been great together.”
“There’s no reason to believe it couldn’t be great now.”
“I’m not going to get caught in her trap again. I’m past that now.”
“You’ll never be past your mate.”
Angus wasn’t making things any easier. Drew decided to change the subject.
“How was the honeymoon, by the way?”
“It was fantastic. Poppy and I swam every day. The water in the tropics is crystal clear and warm. It was a very nice way to spend time with my mate.”
“I can imagine,” Drew said, crossing his arms.
“Stop standing around being bitter. Go text that girl and
get her back.”
“Meh, see ya, bro,” Drew said, turning out the door of Angus’s workshop.
“Good luck,” Angus shouted at his back.
Drew climbed into his SUV and started back home. His inner grizzly was going crazy. The bear growled and roared inside Drew’s head so loudly he could barely drive. Ethereal claws dug behind his eyes and bit into his brain. There was no way he could live with his inner bear acting like this.
When he pulled in front of his house, he grabbed the phone out of his pocket and flicked across the screen with his thumb. Drew pushed open the front door and sat at the dining room table. He let out a deep sigh and clicked on the Mate.com icon on his phone.
Quinn’s text came up, and he read it again. His grizzly gnashed at his ears and bit at his heart. Drew pressed his eyes closed and took three deep breaths. What the hell was he supposed to say now?
Things hadn’t been good since she’d gone, but that was the last thing he was going to tell her. He didn’t even know if he wanted to see her again, despite his bear’s protests to go find her immediately. There was no use in resisting any longer. He had to at least text the woman.
Drew clicked on the screen and brought up the text keypad. He growled and started to type.
“Things are great.”
There. The biggest lie of his life. She deserved it. He felt self-satisfied staring at the screen, waiting for a reply. He hated that he’d fallen back into her web. What if she rejected him again? He didn’t know if he could live with that.
Drew walked into the kitchen and put his phone on the counter beside the stove. Angus had installed cabinets a year ago, and they’d put in nice appliances. The kitchen was still the place he did most of his brew experiments. Small batches of beer in oak barrels were fermenting along the back wall.
He grabbed a steak out of the fridge and threw it in a frying pan with some salt and seasonings. Drew scratched his beard and grimaced at the delicious smell. He used to be a fun bear. What the heck had happened to him? He flipped his steak, and his phone pinged from the counter.