Brock wasn’t ready to mate, especially with a mysterious, disheveled woman who he’d never met before. She might be the cutest little thing he’d seen in ages, but he was too suspicious of everything going on around him to take any of it very seriously. He couldn’t even take his bear seriously.
What he needs was some time out in the woods. Once he came back into town, he knew he’d have a clearer picture of what to do next. The fact that he was going out into the wilderness with a woman his bear claimed was his fated mate was just an added bit of confusion for him at an already confusing time in his life.
Since everyone, including his inner nature, wanted to pair him up, he might as well spend some time getting to know this girl. She seemed sweet and determined. He admired those qualities. If anyone was going to be his mate, he was glad that she appeared to be the kind of woman he could fall for.
Not that he was ready to fall for her. Far from it. He was determined to prove to his inner bear that he was not ready for mating, and he could take his own sweet time finding someone to settle down with, eventually.
As they made their way into the backcountry, he had to stop far too often to wait for Ginger to catch her breath. It was a hard trek for even the most seasoned hikers to make. Ginger didn’t seem out of shape, or unhealthy, she just seemed unprepared for such a hard hike in the wilderness. She leaned against a moss covered boulder, panting. The rain forest of the southern Alaska was green and damp, not the kind of thing that most people thought of when they thought of Alaska.
Even in the fall, the emerald rain forest grew up under a thick canopy of lush greenery. Ferns and vines crawled up the hillsides and wide-trunked Sitka pine dominated the forest. This was Brock’s home. It was the place that made him feel most comfortable in the world. A few miles up from here was a river where salmon ran every year. It was one of his favorite places for fly-fishing, a solitary activity he enjoyed doing for days at a time.
He handed Ginger a canteen of water, which she accepted gratefully, chugging it down into her pumping chest.
“Take it easy there, tiger,” he said, pulling the canteen away from her. “Pace yourself.”
“My lungs are so raw, and my legs are already starting to feel numb,” she panted.
“Are you going to make it?”
“Of course I am. I just need to, pace myself, like you said.”
“Are you ready to start walking again?”
“Yeah, I’m ready.” She wiped the sweat from her brow and pushed away from the boulder.
Brock glanced over his shoulder at Ginger as she followed him up the trail, trying to keep pace with his long strides. He slowed slightly, trying to make it easier for her. As the trail narrowed and became rockier, he scrambled up first and then reached out to her to help her up the rock face.
She slipped her hand into his and a spark of sensation flooded his senses. Even after half a day of grabbing branches and rocks, Ginger’s hands were smooth and soft. His inner bear roared that he wanted those hands all over Brock’s body. He had to quiet the urge roaring within him if he wanted to retain his sanity for the rest of this trek.
Even if he agreed that Ginger was his mate and he wanted her to be his, there was the little issue of Ginger’s feelings about the whole matter. She was a human, and therefore would not understand shifter mating instinct.
When a shifter like Brock encountered his fated mate, the beast within did not hesitate to scream that fact inside a shifter’s mind. Right now Brock’s inner beast was doing the bear version of screaming, which sounded more like a strangled, panicked roar. He could feel the beast pacing around inside his mind, bumping up against the edges of his thoughts, and generally making a nuisance of himself.
Brock was generally on good terms with his inner bear. He let him out regularly, at least once a day, especially when he spent time alone in the woods. As a grizzly bear, he was an apex predator and could roam the wilds at night without much fear of anyone or anything.
He had never known his inner bear to behave in such a manner. Unlike Brock’s brother Keaton, Brock was in control of himself, and generally behaved in a socially acceptable manner. His inner bear was just as well behaved, even though he preferred to spend his time alone. To have his grizzly clawing at the back of his eyes was disconcerting to say the least.
The longer he listened to his grizzly roar, the more he wanted to just take the little woman right then and there. Everywhere he looked as he walked up the trail he saw new places where he could bend her over, pulled down her pants, and thrust himself into her warm center. He put his hand to his forehead and shook his head, trying to drown out the visions his bear was projecting inside his mind.
Pulling that kind of a start with a woman like Ginger was never going to happen. If he was going to do this mating thing, he was going to have to do it right. First, he had to figure out if he wanted to do it at all. If Ginger went away and never came back, this would be his only chance to ever be with his fated mate. He could mate with someone else, but it would never be the same.
If he wanted what his parents had, this was his one and only chance before she went back to wherever she’d come from. The parts of himself fought violently inside his head as he walked up the trail.
The purpose of this journey had been to clear his mind, not to become more confused than ever. Even with Ginger several paces behind him, he could smell her sweet scent. He could hear the sound of her breathing and her footfalls on the trail behind him. Ridiculous little things like that were exciting him so intensely that he had to readjust himself inside his pants as if he was some kind of teenage boy.
Chapter 7
Ginger pushed herself harder with every step. She could tell that Brock had adjusted his pace to accommodate her. She was embarrassed that she was so out of shape, and so ill prepared to tackle the trek into the backcountry she had come to Alaska to do. Unfortunately, there had been no time to train or prepare for anything. She had been kicked out of her father’s condo just the day before. The day before that, she had attended her father’s funeral.
It hadn’t really been much of a funeral, so much as Ginger taking her father’s ashes from the crematorium and carrying them back home. She had packed them all the way up to Alaska to fulfill his dying wish that she would spread his ashes on his old land. If nothing else, she intended to give that one last thing to her dad.
After her mom had left when she was a little girl, her father had been the only one there for her. Unlike a lot of single dads, he had been a good one. He’d always been there for her in every way, and was the one who had first recognized her musical talent. He bought her first violin and arranged her first music lessons. He had encouraged her to go to the Conservatory and had begged her not to leave when he had fallen ill.
But there had been no way that Ginger could’ve let her dad die alone. Not after a lifetime of so much love and care. He had always been there for her, sacrificed for her, given her everything that he could. The love in her heart wouldn’t allow her to do anything less for him in his hour of need. The bond between them had been incredibly strong, and he had been gravely discouraged that he was leaving her with nothing to depend on.
She knew it wasn’t his fault. It was nobody’s fault. When he had gotten sick, his health insurance wouldn’t pay for most of the bills. With each passing month, more bills piled up that nobody could pay. The cancer made him weak, and unable to work as it ravaged his body and mind. In the end, he had become frail shell of the man he had once been, the man who had held her hand before her first music recital, the man who had killed the monsters under her bed, the man who bagged her to stay in university and leave him alone to die.
A silent tear slid down her cheek, and she wiped it away. Her grief was so palpable, it made her forget how desperate everything in her life truly was. The bank took the condo, and the hospital claimed the rest of his resources. The one glimmer of hope was the story he had told her about the raw gold he’d panned during his summers in Ala
ska that she’d spent with her grandmother in California. Her grandmother had passed away, but her dad had still traveled out to Alaska while she was in college before he had taken ill.
She knew that the cabin really existed. She didn’t know if the gold really existed. Near the end, when he’d told her about the gold, he had already become somewhat delusional. His memory and his thoughts had become muddled, and Ginger could rarely tell what was true and what was fiction. But he had been so adamant about the fact that the gold was there, that she was forced to believe him. Since it had been her father’s dying wish that his ashes be spread at his place in Alaska, the trip served two purposes, and she could endure the sacrifices required of her to make it.
She watched Brock walking ahead of her, his tight, sexy ass framed in the rugged jeans he wore. Part of her wanted to reach out and grab it, squeeze it and really feel it with her hands. She bit her lip at the thought.
Ginger hadn’t had a boyfriend in ages. Back in the Conservatory, she’d spent some time with a boy, but not much had come of it. In the two years she had spent taking care of her dad, she hadn’t been on a single date. The sight of Brock’s sexy behind right in her face was giving her heart palpitations that were not associated with her overexertion.
The trail opened up into a broad meadow with tall grasses that shone gold under the bright, late afternoon sun. At the edge of the meadow was a small river that bubbled past and down the mountain towards the sea. Brock walked out into the wide meadow and set down his backpack in a clearing of lower grasses. Ginger noticed that a fire pit had already been built there and that the area was cleared out for camping.
“We’ll camp here for the night. There’s another spot about two miles further up the trail, but I don’t think you can handle anymore hiking today. I’m a little worried that your legs will be too sore to walk tomorrow as it is.”
Ginger was so grateful to stop moving that she dropped her backpack off of her back with a loud thud and sat down unceremoniously on the ground. Brock stood over her, a smile spreading on his full lips. Light sparked in his eyes, and then he began to chuckle.
“What?” she asked.
“Nothing,” he said. “You’re just really cute when you’re exhausted.”
Ginger raised her eyebrow at his remark. He thought she was cute? “If being exhausted makes me cute, I must be the cutest woman in the entire world,” she said unzipping her backpack to find something to eat.
Brock began spreading out the tent and had it pitched up in a matter of moments. He threw in his sleeping bag, sighed, and asked her to hand him hers, which she unstrapped from her backpack and gave to him. He unfurled it in the tent and then began working on the fire.
A violent shiver went down Ginger’s spine, the electric feeling pulsing in her core. She squeezed her legs together and shook her head, staring at the tent. She was supposed to spend the night sleeping next to Brock. How she was supposed to do that without jumping his bones like some kind of wild animal, she had no idea. The fact that she was even having these feelings was so confusing she didn’t know what to do. It seemed totally inappropriate to be so lustful right after losing her dad, but she chalked it up to the emotional upheaval of grief. It was probably just nothing.
Brock had the fire made in a few minutes from branches that he found littered around the edges of the forest. Ginger moved closer and absorbed the heat from the fire. Every muscle in her entire body ached, and she had no idea how she was going to keep going the next day. Brock was right, there was a very good likelihood that she wouldn’t even be able to walk in the morning, let alone hike another ten miles into the backcountry. But she had made it this far and she was damn well going to make it the rest of the way.
Chapter 8
As night fell, Brock watched Ginger over the campfire as she ate her baked beans out of a can.
Even doing something as mundane as that made his body react in the most disturbing ways. It was as if he was possessed by some kind of rabid bear that kept him erect at even the slightest hint of Ginger’s presence. It was already driving him mad, and he’d only spent the better part of the day with her. He knew his bear’s tantrum would go away as soon as he mated with her. It was common knowledge among shifters that this kind of thing happened when someone found their fated mate. No matter how many times he’d heard the horror stories about it, he hadn’t believed it--until now, when it was happening to him.
If a regular human had this kind of thing happening inside their own mind, they would probably commit themselves to an asylum. Brock ate his baked beans but his mind wasn’t on his food. He was so excited he could barely digest. He’d spent most of the day hiding his erection from Ginger out of sheer embarrassment. He was a thirty-year-old man who ran his own business, and was not a stranger to the opposite sex. Even when he was a teenager, his body had never responded like this to anyone or anything. He was going to have to do something about it fast, or the man Brock once had been would be replaced with a sex crazed maniac.
He had to share the tent with Ginger tonight, which was probably going to be the most difficult thing he’d ever done in his life. He couldn’t very well pull down her pants and thrust himself inside her without a word, which was the very thing his bear was advocating inside his mind. Loudly.
Brock was not the kind of man to seduce the women he guided into the backcountry. Only on one other occasion had he ever become romantically involved with one of his clients, but she was a local he’d known for most of his life, and so wasn’t technically a client. He didn’t like having one-night stands any more than he liked having relationships. Considering his hesitance to get involved, his trysts had been becoming fewer and farther between as the years went by. When he was younger, he had been more willing to put himself out there. In the last couple of years, he just didn’t want to deal with the drama anymore.
When the elders of his clan began pressuring him to find a mate, all he could think about was the drama that dating always seemed to bring his way. Little did he know that the bear inside his mind would give him this kind of hell when he found his fated mate.
Brock took the cans and buried them in a hole in the ground so no wild bears would find them. He needed to go to sleep, he needed to be unconscious and get all of the growling and roaring and sexual desire out of his mind. The oblivion of sleep was his only release, and it couldn’t come fast enough.
“Time to turn in for the night,” he told Ginger. “Need to get as much rest as possible for the last leg of the trip.”
He climbed into the tent and pulled off his boots before slipping into a sleeping bag. Ginger came in behind him and zipped up the tent door. The smell of her sweat hit him like a ton of bricks, and his erection went stiff instantaneously.
God dammit.
He turned over on his side and squeezed his eyes closed, trying to block out how Ginger overwhelmed his senses.
She climbed into her sleeping bag beside him and let out a little moaning sigh. That was just too much. He put his hands over his face. There was no way he was going to be able to sleep in the tent with her tonight and retain his humanity. He had to get the hell out of here.
“I think it would be better if I let you have the tent yourself,” he said crawling towards the door.
She rose up on her elbow and looked at him quizzically in the flashlight’s glow. “Where are you going to sleep?” she asked, the concern thick in her voice.
“I’m a bear shifter. I can sleep in the woods. It will give you more space to rest, relax, and recuperate. What’s good for you is good for me because we need out to your father’s land tomorrow.”
“Well if you’re sure...”
Brock burst out of the tent and zipped it back up behind him. Striding into the forest, he peeled off his clothes until he stood naked in the chill, damp underbrush. His human skin beginning to prick with cold, Brock rolled his shoulders and threw his head back in a silent roar. His body grew, his back curved, sharp teeth sprouted from his jaw. Brock
’s grizzly puffed in the night air, scratching the ground.
He scented his mate. His urge to take her drowned out his reason. The bear pivoted toward the tent, sniffing and scratching. The grizzly mind, now in control, wanted nothing more than to propel the human back to the tent to take his mate. Brock’s human mind wrangled with his animal instinct, forcing the beast to turn back around and head into the forest.
As soon as he broke through the underbrush into the woods, he shot into a run. He galloped past low hanging branches, and they broke against his chest and over his back. The slap and sting of drying leaves on his flesh braced his consciousness. The faster he ran, the farther away he got from the woman lying in the tent, the freer his bear was from the drive to claim her.
He came out of the forest onto the rocky river bank. He could smell the fish under the water, salmon thrashing upstream towards their spawning grounds. He dove into the water, his teeth gnashing at the wriggling, slick scaled creatures under the surface. He bit down hard on the large Chinook salmon, the taste of its blood and flesh bursting over his tongue. He brought it back to the shore and tore into it, gorging on the tasty treat.
Not full yet, he continued fishing. His bear would gorge until his belly was full. When finally the grizzly had satisfied himself, he wandered into the forest and curled up to sleep.
When the morning came, Brock shifted back to human form. He couldn’t let the grizzly walk back into camp and confront Ginger. Better to go back as a naked man, cold and shivering, then to frighten his would-be mate.
He hurried through the forest and came out into the meadow where they’d camped. She still wasn’t awake, and he could see the heat rising from the dying coals still in the fire pit. He pulled his clothes back on and stoked the fire, preparing coffee and breakfast for the woman still sleeping inside the tent.