“I’m sorry to hear that, sir.”
“Have you signed up?” Rollo asked.
“No. I don’t think I’m so ready for a mate. I’ve got a lot of things going on in my life right now, and I just don’t think that a mate would mesh with my private work.”
“Private work?” Rollo asked.
Rollo knew that Damien was a tech whiz and a bit of a hacker. Those skills proved valuable for the police department. But Damien was secretive about what he did in his free time. Rollo suspected that it wasn’t one hundred percent above board. But he and Damien and the rest of the Bear Patrol had been a crew for a long time.
They had all served in special forces during the war. Rollo had led them back then and led them again now after they’d settled on Fate Mountain. He would not question Damien’s ‘hobbies’. He owed his friend that much respect.
“I can’t really talk about it. But I have important work that requires privacy and focus. A mate would just get in the way of that.”
“We all have important work to do. We’re the police department,” Rollo said.
When shifter draft required all male shifters between the ages of eighteen and forty to join the military, Rollo had gone off to war to fight for his country and left behind his career as a police detective in San Francisco. After the war, he and his crew settled at on Fate Mountain and got jobs at the police department. Rollo had not expected to be appointed police commander only a few months after joining the force. But that’s the way things had worked out.
Now, instead of being a detective, he was in charge of the whole department. But Rollo was used to leadership. He’d been the commander in his crew’s special forces unit in the Marines. When they had all been discharged after the war, they’d decided to settle in the burgeoning new shifter community in Fate Mountain Village.
Rollo pulled up to the police department, and he and Damien got out of the SUV. Damien grabbed his forensics case from the back of the car and carried it into the police department behind Rollo. The dispatcher greeted him from the front desk as he and Damien made their way into the back offices of the police station. There was a wide open room where his crew each had their own desks.
“I’m going to get this evidence to the lab,” Damien said lifting his forensics case as he continued through the offices towards the small forensics laboratory.
“Let me know as soon as you find anything,” Rollo said.
Rollo saw movement out of the corner of his eye from behind the glass door of his office. He turned toward his office door, tilting his head curiously when he found his deputy inside with a young man Rollo had never seen before.
“Commander,” Deputy Knox Carter said as Rollo entered the office.
Knox was giving Rollo one of his shit eating grins that told Rollo his second in command was up to something. Rollo circled around to sit behind his desk and regarded the two men in front of him.
“What is it, Knox?” Rollo asked. “Who is your friend?”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Commander Morris,” the young man said, standing to shake Rollo’s hand.
“Sir, this is Heath Reynolds. He’s just finished up his high school diploma and initial law enforcement training at the Bright Institute for Shifters,” Knox explained.
“And let me guess, you want to join the police department,” Rollo said, bringing his hands up together in front of him to form a triangle.
“It’s all I’ve wanted to do as long as I can remember, sir,” Heath said, his youthful face full of youthful enthusiasm.
Heath was a young man, but far too mature looking to be a high school student. The man had the hardened muscle and the square jaw of a man who’d seen more of life than a teenager possibly could.
“You don’t look like a high school student,” Rollo said, inspecting the young man’s face. He looked as if he was at least twenty-five. “What were you doing getting a high school diploma at the Bright Institute?”
“I had to drop out of school before the war to take care of my mother. After she died, I’d planned to go back and get my GED. But then the war broke out and the shifter draft was instated. The military didn’t care that I didn’t have a diploma since I am a shifter. I served my country for four years. When I came back home, I couldn’t get a job in law enforcement because I didn’t have a high school diploma. I spent a few years doing odd jobs and trying to recover from my experiences overseas. That’s when I heard about the Bright Institute for Shifters. I signed up and was accepted to the first class six months ago. I’ve since completed my high school education and the initial law enforcement training. I have official certifications of each. I came in here today to speak with you about joining the force.”
“Well, it looks like you have all of the primary requirements to become a member of the Fate Mountain Police Department,” Rollo said.
“Otherwise affectionately known as Bear patrol,” Deputy Knox said.
“It’s true, most of the officers on the force our bears. We served together as a special forces unit in the Marines during the war. It sounds like you will fit right in here.”
“Thank you, sir,” he said.
Rollo sniffed the air, trying to make out what kind of bear Heath was behind his human façade. “Grizzly or polar?” Rollo asked.
“Grizzly,” Heath said.
“So Gauge is still going to be the only polar bear on the crew,” Knox said.
“Where is Gauge anyway?” Rollo asked Knox. “He hasn’t reported in today.”
“You know Gauge,” Knox said.
Rollo did know Gauge. Detective Gauge Stockwell had been the loose cannon of the bunch ever since their early days in the Marines. Now, as a gifted detective for the Fate Mountain Police Department, Gauge still played by his own rules. But that wasn’t something that Rollo wanted to talk about in front of a new recruit. He had to project an air of absolute authority to the new guy. Rollo couldn’t have a cadet questioning his status as alpha of the Bear Patrol.
“He’s still deep in a case right now, isn’t he?” Rollo said, trying to play it cool in front of the cadet.
“As far as I know,” Knox said.
“Knox, get our new recruit up to speed with the workings of the department. Get him a uniform and a locker. He’s going to be your partner for the rest of his training,” Rollo said.
“Thank you, sir,” Heath said.
“Welcome to the crew, Cadet Bear. I hope you’re up for the challenge.”
“I am, sir. I definitely am,” Heath said enthusiastically.
Knox and Heath left Rollo’s office and closed the door behind them, leaving Rollo alone in peace and quiet where he could finally think. Something about the crime scene at the mansion had thrown him off. He couldn’t quite place what it was.
Rollo shook his mouse to wake up his computer screen. He still had information about Caitlin Somerset on his internet browser. After quickly closing all his tabs, he came to an open screen displaying Mate.com.
He exhaled a long breath, looking at the profiles of the women who were almost perfect matches for him. There was a pretty blonde who was a ninety-eight point nine percent match. There was a beautiful Hispanic woman with big brown eyes who was a ninety-five percent match. But not a single one of these beautiful women was a hundred percent match for him. Only a hundred percent match from the Mate.com algorithms meant that he had found his fated mate.
With a sigh, he closed Mate.com and tried to put it out of his mind. That’s when he remembered the faint scent in the mansion that had made his bear rumble awake inside his mind. His inner grizzly was sure he’d smelled the scent of his mate.
3
Zoe Bright pulled on her safety goggles over her green eyes and loaded a rectangular piece of oak wood into the lathe. Her long, black hair swung in a ponytail down her back. She turned on the machine and slowly pressed her sharp cutter against the swiftly turning wood, pursing her red lips in concentration. Soon she had the rectangles smoothed into a cylinder
that would began her intricately beveled table leg.
When she had first come to the Bright Institute for Shifters to study woodworking, she had not expected to enjoy it so much. Her brother Corey Bright, the founder of the Institute, thought she was lying about her interest. But the fact was, she really liked working with wood. Building real things with her own two hands gave her a sense of accomplishment she had never known before.
If only she had come here under different circumstances, maybe she could really use the skills she’d learned over the last six months. Maybe she could have a real life that she could be proud of for once. But Zoe still wasn’t free from her past, and she didn’t know if she ever would be.
Part of her knew that she should have come clean with her brother six months ago when she had first arrived in Fate Mountain. But every time she tried to talk to him about it, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth. Corey was ten years older than her, and in some ways, he was more like a parent than a brother. He’d been taking care of her since she was a child.
Unlike Corey, who was a computer genius and a billionaire, Zoe had always been labeled a troublemaker. From her earliest memory she had been the wild child and the one who always had to be lectured and watched. After their mother had died before the war, Zoe had left the country to find a life of her own. All along, Corey had been sending her money and hadn’t asked what she was doing with it.
He was a good brother. He had never let her go hungry. In fact, he had allowed her to live a life of leisure since she had become an adult. She’d never actually had to have a job or had any kind of responsibility. When she first left the country seven years ago, she had spent the first couple of years traveling to music festivals and dancing.
But that form of stimulation had only excited her for so long. Soon, she needed greater thrills and that’s when she met her ex-boyfriend, the and notorious Russian mob boss who was the leader of an international crime syndicate. He had taken her and immediately shown her the kind of life that Zoe had always believed she deserved. Corey’s money had afforded her the luxury of never having to work, but it didn’t afford her the real luxuries of life. That, Dima had given her.
But it didn’t come without a price. Not long after she had become involved with Dimitri Ivanov, he started to ask her to use her shifter skills to do jobs for him. At first, they were small, innocuous jobs that she could tell herself had no victims. But soon the jobs escalated in risk and she was complicit in Dimitri’s criminal underworld. She was deeply involved by the time he asked her to begin stealing and smuggling jewels across international borders.
The thrill of danger and the luxury Dimitri provided could not make up for the fact that Zoe was doing something incredibly wrong. She couldn’t justify her actions and asked Dima to allow her to leave. He did kick her out of his bed, but he would not allow her out of the crime family until she did one last job. It was the most dangerous job yet, smuggling a million dollars’ worth of diamonds from Saudi Arabia into France.
She’d made a judgement call in the airport when it became evident that security was onto her. She’d been forced to drop the diamonds into a garbage can on the concourse. She had been able to get past airport security, but she wasn’t able to get free of Dima. He insisted she pay him back every penny of the value of the diamonds she’d lost.
For the last eight months, Zoe had been giving Dimitri every cent that her brother Corey sent her. Every job she did for Dima she had to do for free. And she still owed the man eight hundred thousand dollars. Soon, she would not owe him anything anymore, and she’d be free. At least, that was the plan. Part of her knew that Dimitri would never let her go after what she had seen.
But Zoe couldn’t give up hope, not now when she had come to Fate Mountain to be with her brother and his new wife Willow. They had welcomed her into the Institute and into their home in the way only a loving family could. It reminded Zoe so much of what she had been missing all these years since her mother died.
She hadn’t seen Corey in so long that she almost hadn’t remembered how close they had always been growing up. Even though Corey was ten years older than her, and he was the good kid that everybody looked up to, he was still her big brother.
She loved him, and she wished that she could tell him the truth. Every day that she came to learn at the Bright Institute, every time she saw Corey walking down one of the hallways or talking to an administrator, every time Willow invited her over for dinner at the couple’s big house that looked out over the lake, Zoe felt a sinking sense of dread and guilt eating away at the pit of her stomach.
Corey was a genius and the people who knew him well knew he was also an exceptionally skilled computer hacker. If anyone could help Zoe with her predicament, it was her brother Corey. But she couldn’t tell him. The shame of what she had done burned bright and her heart. She couldn’t tell her perfect brother, the guy who had won a full ride scholarship to college from the Great Shifter Counsel, that she had fallen in with the Russian mafia and had become a jewel thief.
Every time she thought about telling him, all she could see was the disappointed look on his face that he always gave her when she screwed up or didn’t live up to his expectations. He’d given her that look when she had created a less than perfect end table on her first attempt at woodworking. She couldn’t even imagine how he would look at her if she told him the truth.
No, telling Corey just wasn’t an option no matter how much she wanted to get it off her chest. All she could do was hope that her last heist would be worth enough to pay off Dima once and for all, and she would finally be free of him. She hadn’t expected to love Fate Mountain or woodworking as much as she did. But now that she was here and she had learned a new skill, all she wanted was to stay and explore her newfound passion.
Zoe continued to press her cutter into the table leg, creating an intricately tapered spindle that she could be proud of. Zoe’s skill had advanced exponentially since she’d first started taking classes in the Bright Institute woodshop. Even Corey’s crewmate Angus, who was an expert woodworker himself, had commented on her ability. Zoe hoped that after her graduation, that Angus would take her on as an apprentice. But she still hadn’t worked up the courage to ask.
Life on Fate Mountain was the exact opposite of the life Zoe had been living up until now. Everyone knew everyone else and they were all like family, for the most part. There were still some human/shifter tensions among the Fate Mountain community. But all of the shifters that she knew were some of the warmest people she’d ever met on earth.
Zoe had been welcomed into Corey’s clan. Her brother served as a volunteer Search and Rescue technician with his crew from his days as a Navy SEAL. The guys called themselves the Rescue Bears. All of them, including her brother Corey, who had sworn he’d never find a mate, had settled down with human women they’d met on Mate.com. Most of them now had cubs and homes of their own. It was a stark contrast to the way things had been when she and Corey grew up.
Back when they were kids, in the years right after the Great Shifter Council had first revealed the existence of shifters to the world, there had been an intense backlash from humans. Violence and persecution rose up all around the country and the world. Shifters were heavily segregated and entire neighborhoods turned on those who had once been friends, simply because they were shifters.
Since shifters had played such a critical role in ending the war, the government had passed the Shifter Equality Act and compensated all of the drafted shifters with generous VA packages.
Now, the world was totally different. Humans and shifters were openly mating and people like the men on her brother Corey’s crew owned businesses and held important positions in the community. Before the war, police brutality against shifters was common. Now, seven years later, the majority of the cops on the Fate Mountain Police Department where shifters. It was definitely a new world.
That was part of what gave Zoe hope that she could have a real future if she was ever re
leased from Dima’s grasp. The thought of gaining her freedom and living a peaceful life on Fate Mountain made a tear well up in the corner of her eye. Zoe sniffled from her growing emotion and the sawdust that rose from the lathe.
She turned off the machine and released her table leg. It was a perfectly beautiful, beveled spindle, and she couldn’t be more proud of her handiwork. For a girl who had spent four years traveling the world to go to dance parties and another three years as the girlfriend of a dangerous mafia boss, something as simple as making a table leg gave her a tremendous thrill that she couldn’t quite explain.
As she sanded down the wood, wiped it off and applied a dark stain, she thought about what she would do if she could be an ordinary girl like the women who had been matched with her brother’s crewmates. Maybe she could find a mate and settle down. Zoe was twenty-five now and she felt ready for something more solid and real than she had ever wanted before.
Something like the table leg. Solid, beautiful, and sturdy. It would hold up the tabletop and provide support for everything that was placed on top of it. Family dinners. Holiday feasts. She knew she could be that solid, sturdy support for a real family if she could just get free of her past.
She placed the stained leg next to the other three and pulled off her safety goggles. The tear that had formed in the corner of her eye slid down her face and mingled with the sawdust on her cheek. She wiped it away with the sleeve of her girly coveralls and sniffled. She pulled off her coveralls, and hung them on the hook on the wall near the door.
She walked out of the woodshop, wearing a pair of multicolored, ethnic patterned short shorts. She’d paired it with a lacey, white tank top that accented her tanned skin and the detailed, pretty tattoos on her arms. Her brown leather ankle boots worked with her cute summer outfit and her coveralls. The boys in the hall glanced at her generous curves and her shapely legs as they passed. Zoe chuckled inwardly, knowing that even men who weren’t her fated mate thought her hourglass body was hot as hell.