“Why don’t you two to sign up for Mate.com?” Willow said to Zoe and Heath.
“I’ve been thinking about signing up,” Heath said. “Now that I’m done with my training and have been accepted as a cadet onto the Bear Patrol, it might be the right time.”
“What about you, Zoe?” Willow asked, raising an eyebrow with the slightest smirk on her lips.
Willow was a romance author who wrote about the lives and loves of shifters. Everyone knew that Willow took her inspiration from the people on Fate Mountain. Suddenly, it dawned on Zoe exactly what Willow’s ulterior motives had been all along. She was trying to get Zoe and Heath hooked up with their own mates so that she could butt into their business and then write stories about them. She loved Willow to pieces, but that was the absolute last thing that Zoe was interested in being a part of.
“It’s not the right time for me,” Zoe said.
“Of course it is,” Willow said, grabbing Zoe’s phone off the table.
Her sister-in-law navigated to the Mate.com website and downloaded the app onto Zoe’s phone right in front of her face. Zoe made a grab for the phone, but Willow just yanked it away again until she had brought up the screen that allowed new users to create a profile and answer the questionnaire.
Mate.com was one of the many inventions her genius brother had created to make himself the piles and piles of money that he enjoyed. Zoe was not interested in being one of her brother’s clients. She couldn’t possibly find a mate when she still owed Dima so much money.
“I can’t. Not right now.”
“Well, just in case you change your mind, you have the app on your phone.”
“Really, mating is the last thing I want to do.”
“You never know, Zoe. Maybe your mate is already waiting for you somewhere on Fate Mountain,” Willow said with a smile.
After they had each had a pint, Willow drove them back to the Institute. Zoe and Heath made their way to the dormitory section of the compound and Willow drove home. Zoe said goodnight to Heath as she made her way to her room, mulling over the night’s events in her mind.
Angus had agreed to take her on as an apprentice. She knew she should be more excited about the prospect of studying with Angus Grant. As she walked into her dorm room and sat down on her twin size bed, she kicked off her shoes and sighed. Zoe just wanted the past to disappear. She wanted to believe that she could be like Willow and Heath and Angus and Poppy and all of the other wonderful people living on Fate Mountain.
Maybe if she just allowed herself to believe that she was free, she’d feel better about herself. Maybe she could just take a little break from the truth and pretend that she was just Zoe Bright, woodworking apprentice and Fate Mountain resident.
Zoe pulled her phone out of her purse and navigated to Mate.com.
Chapter 4
Rollo sat on his leather couch watching CNN on the big screen TV in his living room. He liked to stay up-to-date on what was happening on the national and international stage. From his experience as a law enforcement and military officer, he knew that events happening in the world could trickle down to a local level. Since the Shifter Equality Act had been passed, things had been looking up for shifters on the whole. The end of the war had brought a lasting peace to most of the world and to his country.
Rollo felt gratitude for being able to witness this time in history when shifters could make themselves known to the world and could live their lives in peace. It was a great time to be alive.
The only thing that was missing for him now was a mate. He had been longing for someone to fill the empty void in his heart for a long time. It seemed that the longer he waited, the more hopeless he felt.
So many of the shifters he knew on Fate Mountain had already been matched up with their fated mates on Corey Bright’s dating site Mate.com. Rollo had been signed up since the very first beta site went live. All those women and all those shifters who had been matched up already, and he still hadn’t found the one. She had to be out there somewhere, Rollo kept telling himself. It was the only way for him to not completely lose all hope.
The news show went to commercial and Rollo picked his phone up from the coffee table in front of him, thinking about his case. Rollo wanted to know how someone could break into in an 18th-century secret compartment that had securely held valuables for the last three hundred years. There had to be some kind of trick to it.
He searched the internet, trying to come up with information. But he came up empty-handed. Since Damien already had too much work on his plate, he couldn’t pass off the research to his Tech Bear. If Rollo couldn’t find the information on the internet, the next best thing would be to ask an expert.
There was one furniture expert on Fate Mountain, and that was Angus Grant. Rollo knew Angus well because they had worked together on Search and Rescue missions in the past. Rollo and his crew had even helped Angus find his mate when she had been kidnapped and taken into the forest. If anyone on Fate Mountain could give him any further information on how to break into a secret compartment in a Louis the Fifteenth chest, it would be Angus.
He considered texting Angus, but decided it was too late at night. He would just have to call him in the morning from the station. Rollo turned off his phone and was setting it on the end table when he heard it ping. Thinking he’d just received a text from his crew, he picked up the phone and turn on the screen.
What he saw there startled him so much he almost dropped the phone on the dark wood floor below his feet. Fumbling with the device, he looked at the screen again. He’d received a message from Mate.com.
“Congratulations! We’ve found your fated mate.”
His heart started to pound and his limbs felt numb. Rollo was a man who was used to being in control of himself and leading other men. He was not accustomed to becoming so overwhelmed or disoriented by anything, be it enemy fire or drunk and disorderly citizens. But getting a text that his fated mate had been located completely threw him off. He had been waiting so long that the news hit him hard, and he had trouble breathing for several moments.
When he pulled himself together, he flicked on the screen and followed the app to his mate’s profile. Her name was Zoe Bright.
Zoe Bright? It couldn’t be Corey Bright’s sister. Could it?
Rollo read further. Zoe Bright was a female jaguar shifter. Her mother was a grizzly and her father was a jaguar. She had one brother, a grizzly shifter named Corey Bright. The inventor of Mate.com.
He knew it. Zoe was Corey’s brother. He had known, through the multiple channels of gossip, that Corey Bright’s sister had come to participate in the first class of the Bright Institute for Shifters. He hadn’t thought anything of it. And why would he? She was just the kid sister of one of his colleagues.
Looking at her picture, Rollo realized that Zoe was anything but a kid. She had flashing green eyes and a mane of long black hair that hung down around her shoulders and accentuated her voluptuous curves. Her pouty, full lips were tinted red and she wore a form-fitting jaguar print dress that brought out the golden undertones in her tanned skin.
His bear reared up on its back legs inside his mind. Roaring at the top of its lungs. Rollo couldn’t remember the last time his bear had exhibited so strong a reaction to anything, even Rollo’s own physical danger. He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to block out the intrusive noises his grizzly was making.
When he opened his eyes again, the picture of Zoe in that jaguar print dress was imprinted on his eyeballs. He saw her even when he blinked. Not only was his bear huffing and puffing, Rollo’s own human body was beginning to react to the sight of his mate.
It wasn’t like Rollo hadn’t seen the beautiful women before or had them in his bed. But the sight of Zoe in that skintight dress, with her wide hips and round breasts made him strain against his dark jeans.
He continued to read her profile. She had come to Fate Mountain to study carpentry at the Bright Institute for Shifters. Before that, she had traveled
extensively. She’d been to over sixty-five countries in the last seven years and she was only twenty-five years old. The spark in her eyes told Rollo that Zoe was a force to be reckoned with, and everything in him wanted to reckon with it.
With shaking fingers, he pressed the “message now” button on her profile and the texting app came up on his screen.
“Hello Zoe. It’s me, Rollo. I just found out that we are a hundred percent match. I would very much like to meet you.”
He sat staring at the screen, his heart pounding, the news reports playing in the background completely forgotten. He waited, feeling flushed and ridiculous. Police Commander Rollo Morris did not get thrown off his game by twenty-five-year-old girls. But the longer he waited for her to reply, the more he knew he was lying to himself. This twenty-five-year-old girl could throw anything at him and all he could do was catch it.
He navigated back to her picture and bit his lip as he drank her in with his eyes. He sat like that for several long moments, unable to look away. But then, a new message notification popped up on the screen. He swallowed the lump in his throat and read the text.
“Hi Rollo. I’m really sorry. I signed up for Mate.com by mistake. I’m not really ready for a mate right now. I hope you understand.”
Rollo’s heart sank like a stone in his stomach, and he wanted to crush his phone in his hands. How could she say that? They were both shifters. She knew exactly what it meant to be fated mates. Her own jaguar would be giving her as much trouble is his grizzly. They had to meet. They had to be together. That’s all there was to it.
“You can’t be serious.”
He sent it before he realized that it had a rude tone to it. But in the end, he didn’t care. She was a shifter, and she knew exactly what she was saying by telling him she didn’t want a mate. It meant that they would both forever know that the other existed, and they were meant to be together. Suggesting that they should not be together condemned them both to a life of loneliness. He was unwilling to accept that.
“I understand why you would be upset,” she texted back.
“Don’t you think we should at least meet?”
“I’m not ready for that right now. Maybe in a few months if I decide to stay on Fate Mountain.”
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t stayed in one place for a long time.”
“I read that on your profile. I understand that you might want to get back out on the road, but you owe it to yourself to at least meet your mate before you do.”
“Fair enough. But not now. I’ll hit you up before I leave. For now, I’m deleting my Mate.com profile.”
“Zoe, wait.”
But it was too late, her profile disappeared before his eyes. She was gone, and she didn’t even want to meet him. He sat dumbfounded for long moments, considering what to do. He knew who she was. He knew where she lived. He could easily meet her if he wanted. But how could he force a meeting on her?
It was behavior he would not find acceptable in other men, let alone in himself. But Rollo was at the end of his rope. He had been waiting for her for a long time. If he lost her now, he would never find another mate that could fill his heart the way she could.
A fated mate was not just a partner or a spouse or a lover. They were all those things and more. A fated mate was connected to a shifter’s very soul. They belong together in body and spirit. A shifter could tell his fated mate by sight or scent and the animal inside immediately desired to claim her. Rollo and Zoe had to be together. There was no other way.
Rollo had never considered himself a romantic. He knew that not every fated mate relationship ended up with a fairytale ending. But, fated mate pairs were profoundly happy together when they did work things out. The success rate of fated mate relationships was much, much higher than the success rate of the average human relationship.
Zoe belonged to him, and he belonged to her. She would always have his heart, his body, and his soul. He could not allow her to walk away when she had that much power over him. If she did, he would never be the same again. He would lose his self-esteem, his confidence, his alpha swagger. Without his fated mate, he would be less of a man, knowing that she was out there and didn’t want him.
Rollo Morris would not allow that to happen. Somehow, someway, he would meet Zoe Bright, and he would claim her. That was final.
When Rollo arrived at the station in the morning, with a cup of coffee from the drive-through coffee place on the highway, he found Cadet Heath Reynolds already waiting in the waiting area of the station. He was wearing his street clothes, looking nervous but competent. Where the hell was Knox? He was supposed to babysit the cadet.
“Commander Morris,” Heath said, standing from the chair.
“Good morning Cadet Reynolds,” Rollo said. “Follow me.”
He walked through the waiting area into the back offices where he found several of his Bear Patrol crew getting ready to go out for the day. Gauge was still absent as was Knox. There were several human cops at their desks and a few walking out the front door to go on patrol.
“You’ll find your uniform in the locker room. Go get yourself dressed and we’ll get you set up with Knox for the day.”
“Thank you, sir,” Heath said, hurrying off towards the locker room.
Rollo continued into his office, sipping his coffee. As he sat down behind his desk, Damien walked into the room.
“I hope you have good news for me Damien.”
“I have the forensic results from my lab work, sir,” Damien said. “I’m afraid there isn’t much.”
Damien set the files on Rollo’s desk, and Rollo opened them as Damien took a seat across from him. Rollo flipped through the files, seeing that the human fingerprints they found throughout the room belonged to staff members and to Caitlin herself. He had also researched the attendance at the auction where Caitlin had purchased the Louis the Fifteenth chest.
One familiar name jumped out at him. It was Dimitri Ivanov, a notorious Russian Mafia boss. No one had ever been able to nab him because as soon as the law got close, Ivanov threw up a smokescreen. No one ever found any concrete evidence to put him away. Rollo read over the files on Ivanov, feeling for the first time that he had some kind of lead on this case.
“Have you done any further digging into Ivanov’s recent movements?” Rollo asked Damien.
“I’ve started tracing Ivanov. He has talented people working for him in the tech department so his movements are hard to trace. But I’m still working on it. There’s more information in the forensic files that you might find interesting,” Damien said, pulling out a fingerprint.
“This isn’t human. It’s a paw print,” Rollo said.
“It’s a large cat paw print. This was the one print found at the scene that didn’t belong to the staff or the homeowner. It’s possible that the thief was a shifter.”
“Maybe Ivanov has a shifter working for him.”
“It’s possible,” Damien said.
“Find out exactly what kind of animal this print belongs to.”
“I already ran a scan on the print, but it’s too damaged to narrow down exactly what species of large cat it is.”
“We have to work with what we’ve got. I want as much information as you can find on Ivanov and any shifters he may be associated with.”
“On it,” Damien said standing from his chair just as Heath walked into the office wearing his uniform.
“When do I get my gun?” Heath asked.
“Slow your roll, Cadet,” Rollo said. “You’re still in training. You don’t get a gun or a badge until your training is complete. Now, where the hell is Knox?”
“I just saw Knox at his desk,” Heath said.
“You’ll be with Knox today.”
“Deputy Knox already left with Detective Gauge,” Heath said, his voice cracking.
“Freaking Gauge,” Rollo grumbled to Damien. Damien shrugged, and Rollo focused on the new kid. “You’re with me today, Cade
t. If you’re going to be on the Bear Patrol, you need to patrol with a bear.”
“Awesome. I can’t believe I get to go out on patrol with Commander Rollo Morris,” Heath said too enthusiastically. “What are we doing today, sir?”
“We’re going to visit Angus Grant.”
Chapter 5
Zoe was nervous about her first day as Angus’s apprentice at his woodshop in town. As she got ready to go to work that morning, she felt an impending sense of doom hanging over her. It was like a heavy weight that was ready to fall at any moment.
She knew she never should have signed up for Mate.com. What had possessed her to do something so stupid? Willow’s prodding and prompting had gotten to her, and she had relented. In a moment of loneliness and weakness, Zoe had signed up for the stupid dating site, believing she too, for a brief moment, could have her own happily ever after. How could she have known that she would be immediately be matched with Fate Mountain’s chief of police?
She was in eight hundred thousand dollars of debt to a mob boss and she had stolen jewels under her bed. Rollo would see right through her. She had to avoid him at all costs. If she were smart, she would leave town right now and never come back.
But she had spent the last six months learning about woodworking and didn’t want to give up her newfound love. She had gone into carpentry for the sole intention of studying up on how to get into Caitlin Somerset’s Louis the Fifteenth chest.
Coming to the Bright Institute for Shifters had just been a cover in a long game heist. She had used the woodshop at the Institute to study how the chest was put together. She had successfully broken into Caitlin Somerset’s Louis the Fifteenth chest while inside the mansion and had managed to steal a million dollars’ worth of jewels.
But along the way, Zoe had fallen in love with working with wood. She’d never expected that to happen. Zoe had never really been a hands-on kind of girl. She hadn’t played sports in school; she’d been too busy smoking cigarettes under the bleachers with the bad kids. She had never been an artist or a painter or a gardener or anything like that. She really didn’t like getting her hands dirty at all.