Mechanic Bear
Timber Bear Ranch Book Four
Scarlett Grove
Copyright © 2017 by Scarlett Grove
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Contents
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
Also by Scarlett Grove
Chapter 1
"Did you bring the potato salad?" asked Sylvia Kincaid, Jessie Kincaid’s sister-in-law.
Sylvia was pregnant with her and Leland's second child. The couple glowed as Leland slid his hand down the small of Sylvia’s back.
"I did," Jessie said. "I made it myself.”
“Good job, Jessie," giggled Daisy, Cyrus’s mate, her blonde curls shimmering in the early evening sunlight.
Daisy held her baby son in a sling as she sat at the picnic table next to Maria, Buck’s mate. Daisy and Maria had become great friends over the last year, finding that they had a great deal in common, even though their backgrounds were very different. Maria and Buck's baby, Joy, was already a year and a half, and Leland and Sylvia's baby Henry was going on three. The whole family was growing and changing right before Jessie’s eyes.
Leland stood at the grill, flipping Timber Bear Ranch burgers. The herd was doing great since Leland had come home. They’d even won some blue ribbons at the county fair. Jessie walked along the food table, paper plate in hand, and dished up a hamburger and some of the potato salad he'd brought.
“When are you going to sign up for Mate.com, Jessie?” Daisy asked when he sat back down at the picnic table. Cyrus gave her a smirk and everyone else at the table began to chuckle.
"I wish you would all stop pestering me about that. I've told you a hundred times that I do not want a mate. Why can't a bear just be left alone to mind his own business?”
“We just want you to be happy," Sylvia said, holding Henry on her lap.
“I would be much happier if you all just left me alone."
"What would be the fun in that?” asked Daisy.
“It would be more fun than being pestered about finding a mate all the time,” he said roughly.
He immediately regretted talking to Daisy that way. She could be kind of a pest, but at the same time she was his brother’s mate. He didn't want to hurt her feelings.
"If Jessie wants to be alone and miserable for the rest of his life, we should let him,” Maria said sarcastically.
"Come on ladies, I can't handle this from both of you," Jessie said.
"I think that was kind of the point," Daisy giggled.
"Why don't you just sign up for Mate.com and see if your mate is on there? You don't have to make any commitments. You could just check it out and see,” said Sylvia.
"We all know it doesn't work like that," Jessie said. “If I find my fated mate, then, of course, she’ll want to meet, and, of course, she's going to fall in love with me. There is no other option. I just don't know if I can break someone's heart right now.”
“So don't," said Daisy. "Just kiss her and claim her and live happily ever after.”
“You people are impossible," Jessie said, shaking his head. He looked at his brothers for support, but all three were smirking. He glared at Buck and Cyrus across the table. Leland was snickering at the barbecue.
"Did you guys put them up to this?" he asked his brothers. “Because it’s tacky to get your wives to do your dirty work.”
"Don't look at us," said Leland, turning from the barbecue. “It's all them. Our mates just know what you need better than you do.”
He was so tired of them pestering him, but he had to admit to himself that maybe they had a point.
"Fine. I'll sign up for Mate.com if that will shut you all up," Jessie said, pulling out his cellphone. The last thing he wanted was to find a mate because his family was being obnoxious, but this was the last straw. He flicked on his cellphone and did a search for Mate.com.
"I can't believe you still haven't signed up after all these years," Buck said.
"Not everybody is as awesome as you, Buck,” Jessie said dryly.
"You don’t have to be a dick about it," Buck laughed.
Jessie growled as he filled out the questionnaire on the dating app. He tried to be honest in his answers. He knew it would come back to haunt him, in the form of more teasing from his family, if he lied.
When he was finished with the questionnaire, he uploaded his profile picture and added some information about himself. When it was complete, he pressed the enter button and waited for his matches to load. His heart beat wildly in anticipation, which confused him even more.
When the matches finally came up on the screen, he scrolled down to the bottom of the page, just out of curiosity, to see if there was a 100% match.
There was.
And he was blown away by what he saw on his screen.
The girl in front of him seemed oddly familiar. Had he met her before? She was absolutely beautiful, with dark auburn hair, pale, freckled skin, and curves so luscious he had to bite his knuckles just to keep from groaning out loud. He was sure he'd seen this woman before. He would not forget a face like that. Where had he met her? He couldn't remember.
"Did you find your mate?" Daisy asked, leaning over the table to look at his screen.
"Yes, if you must know, not that it's any of you people's business,” he snapped.
"We just want you to be happy," Sylvia reiterated. "Each of us knows from experience that finding a mate is one of the best things that can happen to someone. We would hate for you to miss out on having love in your life just because you’re stubborn.”
“If you must know, Mate.com has located my fated mate. She’s beautiful, and she seems so familiar. I don't remember where I've seen her before. Why didn't I know she was my mate?" Jessie asked in a low voice. It just didn't make any sense.
"Let me see," Buck said, taking Jessie's phone. He gazed at the picture for long moments, wrinkling his brow above his big brown eyes.
"You know, she does look familiar. I just can't remember from where."
"Are you going to message her?" Maria asked.
"I told you, I do not want a mate. I don't know how many times I have to say that."
Even as the words left his mouth, Jessie knew it was a lie. The look in the girl's eyes called out to him. He would not be able to resist contacting her for very long.
Chapter 2
Dana Myers slipped behind the wheel of the car and slowly turned the key in the ignition. Her heart thumped distractingly in her ears. This was her chance to make a break for it. The hyena pack was passed out from a particularly strong batch of bathtub gin.
For two years, Dana had squirreled away money, biding her time as a servant to the Updike brothers and their hyena clan.
The car motor rumbled to life. Dana didn't feel bad about taking a car. The hyenas who came to the mansion lived in service of the Updike brothers. Everyone shared the resources they brought to the estate.
Everyone except women like Dana.
She had been a trade from her own fox pack, two years ago, when they’d gotten involved with crime.
&
nbsp; Dana was an orphan and had been left with relatives to be cared for. Her mother and father would turn over in their graves if they knew what happened to their daughter. But Dana was a strong woman and she wasn’t going to let anything stand in her way any longer.
When she finally saw a chance to sneak away, she took it. Slowly driving down the road with her headlights off, to ensure no one saw her, she made it to the main road. She felt like she was home free for the first time in two years.
As far as she was concerned, she had paid whatever debts her old pack had with the Updikes by working for them without pay for the last couple of years, and she didn’t feel obligated to stay any longer, even if it was to protect anyone. Stealing a car might not be hundred percent morally correct, but after what she had been through, she no longer cared.
She turned out onto the highway and headed west toward the city. There, she knew she would be able to find a new place to stay and hopefully a job. Nothing could be worse than working for the Updikes, and she was willing to take any position she could find. She imagined all the opportunities in front of her as she drove down the highway.
It was clear, starry, midsummer night and the world was her oyster. Never again would she take orders from men like Brandon and Chuck Updike. Her life was her own now, and she was never going back to them.
They had kept her in constant fear for two years, promising to kill her relatives if she left. But since her great uncle died last week, there was no one else in the fox pack that she even remotely cared about. Dana had decided it was no longer her priority. She didn't owe anyone anything. After all, they’d sold her to them in the first place.
Losing her parents had not been easy. She’d lived with her great uncle and his second wife since she was ten. They had not been the most attentive caretakers. Unlike most fox packs, Dana's was neither affectionate nor close. They had begun working with the hyenas soon after the Great War, and she believed that it had truly affected everything about the clan.
They no longer behaved like foxes, and seemed to her to have taken on many of the traits of hyenas. Dana had seen this pattern repeatedly with any shifter pack or clan that got involved with hyenas. Their promise of easy money and total disregard for life enabled them to tear the world apart.
That was not the way that Dana wanted to live. She still dreamed of having a family of her own: a mate and pups who would make her life complete. She wanted to give her children the things that she’d missed out on growing up without her parents.
As she drove down the highway, dreaming about her new life, her engine let out a sputtering snap. Her eyes went wide with surprise when the car suddenly died and ran off the road into a ditch. She was only fifteen miles out of Fate Mountain Village. Not far enough to be safe from the Updikes.
The sun rose in the east, breaking over the mountains and stretching in yellow claws over the land. She swore under her breath and dug through her purse, looking for the phone her uncle had still been paying for.
She had a little bit of money that she'd stashed away from coins and bills she'd found around the Updike mansion. It hadn't really been stealing, she was just picking up lost clutter that nobody cared about. During that time, she'd managed to save over a thousand dollars. She could buy a bus ticket into the city if she could make it back to Fate Mountain Village.
If she shifted into fox form, she'd get there faster. But then she would have to leave her things. That wasn't an option. She was starting over from nothing. She couldn't leave her purse, her phone, her wallet and all her clothes.
Dana growled and slammed her fist into the steering wheel. She had the worst luck in the world and it was starting to tick her off. She flicked on her phone with the intention of finding a tow truck. She hadn't looked at her updates all night in her nervous preparation for her escape. When she flicked her finger over the start button, she noticed something on the screen that took her breath away.
The text said, "Congratulations, we found your fated mate."
Dana had signed up for Mate.com three years ago, before she had come to live with the Updikes. In all that time, her mate had never been found. It was odd for a female shifter to go mateless for so long. Since there were five times as many male shifters as females, females often had the easiest time finding someone to settle down with. No such luck for Dana.
But now, her luck seemed to be changing. She clicked on the screen as quickly as her fingers could smash against the glass and brought up the link to Mate.com. The profile of her mate opened on the screen, and she almost dropped her phone. The man's profile name was Mechanic Bear, and he was the cutest guy she'd ever seen in her life. Something about him seemed so familiar. She couldn't quite place it.
Even if she had met her mate before, the mating bite that Brandon Updike had given her would have masked the pheromones and the intuitive attraction that fated mates felt for each other. She was so angry she wanted to scream.
Her mate was handsome, tall and athletic. Blue eyes and blond hair, with broad shoulders that tapered into a narrow waist. A tattoo of a firebird stretched across his bare chest and the cutest little smirk she'd ever seen lit up his face. The man looked like something out of a Hollywood movie, and she knew she had to meet him.
She clicked the “chat now” button on the Mate.com app and brought up the text screen. She bit her lip and thought about what to say. His profile said he lived on Fate Mountain and worked as a mechanic. His favorite hobby was motocross. If her mate lived on Fate Mountain, she would never be able to get away from the Updikes. They would find her, hunt her down, and force her back into their mansion as their servant. She would never let that happen.
Mechanic Bear was a grizzly shifter and she knew a grizzly could take out ten or more hyenas in shifted form. Maybe he could protect her. It did seem a lot to ask. Her problem with the hyenas was her own, and she didn't want to bring her mate into it. It was a lot of baggage to expect a new mate to deal with. But her curiosity and her need for love won out. She began to type in the text bar.
"Hi, Mechanic Bear," she typed. "I think I'm in need of your skill set. My car is broken down on Highway 99, headed west into Portland. Could you come help me?"
She pressed send and sat back. It was very early morning and she didn't expect him to be up and about yet. She groaned at herself for even trying. It was so inappropriate, she didn't even know what to think. Maybe she should just get out of the car and hitchhike into town.
As a fox shifter, she wasn't strong like a grizzly, but she still had sharp pointy teeth. She wasn't afraid of hitchhiking with a human, or anything else for that matter. After living with the Updikes for two years, her standards had changed quite a bit from when she was a teenager. Nothing could bother her, and practically nothing could scare her.
She climbed out of the car, feeling like an idiot. She slung her purse over her shoulder, grabbed her suitcase, and stood in front of her car with her thumb out. There were few cars on the road this early in the morning and nobody had even passed since she had broken down.
She stood on the side of the road looking from east to west and back again, wondering if anyone would even drive by. Maybe this hitchhiking idea wasn’t a very good one. She was about to give up and roll her suitcase back to Fate Mountain Village when a tow truck came driving down the highway toward her. Her luck was definitely changing. If she could flag this tow truck down, then maybe she could get the car towed and take a bus into the city.
When the tow truck pulled up beside her car and stopped, she realized that she was even luckier than she had thought. The door swung open and out stepped Mechanic Bear, his sky-blue eyes shining and his face unreadable. He crossed the distance between them and stood before her. Neither of them spoke as a car zoomed by, heading east. The wind ruffled through her hair and blew around her shoulders.
Mechanic Bear cleared his throat and reached out to offer his hand. As soon as she touched him, a spark of desire and recognition ignited between them. The mask over her instincts,
that Brandon's bite had caused, evaporated, and she knew that she was staring at her mate.
"I'm Jessie Kincaid," he said in a low, growling voice.
She bit her lip, unsure of how to respond. Then she gulped and remembered herself. "I'm Dana Myers," she said. "It's so nice to meet you. I think we've met before."
"How could we have met before?" Jessie asked. “And not know we were fated?”
"Brandon Updike gave me a mating bite. It messed up my instincts and kept me attached to the Updike family, until today."
Jessie squeezed her hand as his eyes glowed yellow and his grizzly canines extended in his mouth. He growled and let go of her hand.
"I can't imagine a shifter doing that to another shifter. I will end him.”
"I need to get off the road and out of sight,” Dana said, changing the subject.
"Why were you with the Updikes?"
"I've been serving as their domestic servant for the last two years. My fox pack traded me for a debt that they owed the hyena clan.”
"The Updikes are a scourge on the shifter world. I want nothing more than to see them brought down," Jessie said.
“I’d have to agree with you on that,” Dana said.
“I remember you now. You wore that French maid uniform," he said, recognition sparking in his eyes.
"That's me." He was a Kincaid. She felt a flash of recognition. "Now I remember when I saw you. You came out to the mansion two years ago when I first started working there."
"That must've been it.”
“Do you think you can fix my car?" she asked.
"Of course. Forgive my distraction. It's not every day that I meet my fated mate… for the second time."
"Perfectly understandable,” she said, looking around nervously.