Shifters, Inc. The Bear Who Loved Me (A BBW paranormal romance) (3 page)

Tonya tried to sound dignified as she said, “I wouldn’t
quote
you if you were the last man on Earth.”

She turned and stalked out of the room, with Bridgit trailing after her.

* * *

The shifters who’d stayed behind at the gallery were gathered around the bar, and the liquor was flowing generously. The owner was delighted; the series of art thefts over the last year had every gallery owner, museum and private collector in Southern California on edge, and now the thieves had finally been taken down.

Bobbi, Heath’s adopted sister and one of Shifters, Inc.’s best operatives, was leaning on the bar and downing a margarita. It always made Heath laugh to see the tomboy dressed in an evening gown and heels. Bobbi was a coyote shifter who’d grown up in the ghetto with him, and he knew that designer clothes made her itch.

“Thank God she’s gone,” Heath growled. She was gone but not forgotten; her scent was on him, and he could still feel hot desire raging through his body. He was going to shower long and hard tonight to wash her away.

“Yeah, I like her too,” Bobbi said. “She’s a nice person. For a reporter. I approve.”

“What?” Heath spluttered. “You thought – me and her? I can’t stand her! I’m practically allergic to her!” It was true – every time she came near him, he swelled up. Unfortunately, he only swelled in one part of his body.

“Of course you can’t,” Bobbi said.

“I mean, she’s attractive, yeah, but a reporter? Never. She’s so annoying. I run into her all the time. Every damn time I turn around she’s there,” Heath grumbled.

“That must be terrible for you,” Bobbi said, and then she coughed words into her hand. Heath could have sworn she coughed the words “Fated Mate”.

“What did you just say?” he demanded, astonished.

“I beg your pardon? I didn’t say anything.” She flashed a maddening grin and tossed back the rest of her margarita.

“She is not my Fated Mate! She most definitely is not! I don’t even believe in that crap. It’s ridiculous. This is the twenty-first century. It’s an old wives’ tale. There’s no such thing.”

Bobbi was staring at him with an amused grin, and he scowled at her. The harder he glared, the wider she grinned.

Just because she and her wolf husband were ridiculously happy, it didn’t mean that Fated Mates were a thing. Even if they were, he was not the type to settle down, ever. He didn’t believe in happy endings; his childhood and teenage years had crushed that right out of him.

The fact that he kept running into Tonya was just a coincidence, he was sure of it. The fact that when she got near him his senses went crazy and all the blood rushed from his brain to his cock meant nothing. Nothing, damn it! Nothing more than that he liked larger women. Physically, sure, he found Tonya hot and he wouldn’t mind a quick fling, but his Fated Mate? Ha!

He realized he was so distracted that he was actually muttering his thoughts out loud, and Bobbi was looking at him strangely. He scowled and stomped off.

Outside the gallery, he watched Tonya climb behind the wheel of her Mercedes and drive off. He’d done some checking into her, strictly for professional reasons, of course. She’d gone to Harvard, and she drove a Mercedes that was a year old, and she lived in a huge mansion in a snooty subdivision.

He’d been abandoned as a cub, grown up on the streets with a gang of punks, watched his closest friend whom he’d loved like a brother die of an overdose, and barely dodged jail countless times before finally turning his life around.

If he was going to have a Fated Mate, it wouldn’t be some pampered rich girl.

“Fated Mates don’t exist,” he muttered under his breath.

His phone rang and he grabbed it, suddenly eager for a distraction.

Pete, one of the operations coordinators at Shifters Inc., was on the other end.

“Nice job tonight. As a reward, we’ve got a new assignment for you,” he said. “Starts tomorrow morning.”

“Please tell me it’ll take me out of town.” God, he needed to get away from that fox before he took his sister’s words to heart and started believing that he actually liked her.

“Out of town, out of the country. You’re going to love this one. It’ll be right up your alley.”

“Oh. My. God. He was such a dickhead.” They were back at the palatial mansion that Bridgit’s grandmother had left her as part of her trust fund, and Bridgit was pacing the floor of the living room. The room was massive, the oak walls adorned with hand-carved friezes. When Tonya stood at one end of the room and shouted, it echoed.

“Yes, he certainly was.” Tonya leaned back in her overstuffed reclining chair. This room smelled a lot like the gallery’s warehouse, she realized, with all its dust and antiques.

“I seriously hate his guts.” Bridgit stomped her foot on the
nineteenth-century Persian carpet. Tonya winced. That carpet was probably worth more than the Porsche Bridgit drove.

“So you’ve said. Many times,” Tonya pointed out. “In fact, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you had a crush on him.”

“What?” Bridgit looked appalled. “I do
not
! Of course I’m complaining about him. He’s an ass. You’re constantly complaining about Heath too.”

“Well, yeah, but… Oh, God.” Tonya sat bolt upright. “It’s true. I think about him all the time. I have X-rated dreams about him. Oh, God. I
do
have a crush on him. Kill me now!”

“Of course you have a crush on Heath. You’ve known him for a while. I couldn’t possibly have a crush on the Beast. I just met him.” Bridgit looked indignant. “What kind of a nickname is the Beast, anyway?”

Tonya wanted to say
A sexy one
, but that wouldn’t be very supportive.

“A terrible name,” she said. “The name of a horrible, horrible person who you would never want to associate with.”

“Damn straight,” Bridgit said firmly. “He was so not my type. I like them refined and respectful. And I am going to stop talking about him now, because he is not even worth talking about, at all. He’s not worth a single word. In fact—”

Before she could say anything else, her phone rang, and she looked at it and winced. That meant it was her stepmother calling.

She picked up the phone, and Tonya grimaced in sympathy as she listened to the stepmonster verbally light into Bridgit. From what she could overhear, Bridgit was entirely at fault for being at a gallery where a crime had taken place, and it was very embarrassing for the family, and why did she always end up right where trouble was?

With a sigh, Tonya got up from her chair and walked to the mahogany bar at the other end of the room to pour them each a shot of tequila. She was sure they’d need it after this conversation.

Bridgit’s family had barely tolerated the fact that Bridgit wanted to use her PR and marketing degree to get a job instead of finding some excruciatingly boring, proper jerkwad to marry. Tonya secretly suspected that her family was sabotaging her efforts to get a job so she’d be forced to give up and she’d go back to her life as a debutante. She had been expected to go to school to get her MRS degree – as in, hunt for an appropriately boring and respectable husband. Nobody had expected her to actually want to lead an independent life.

Tonya returned with two shotglasses of tequila on a tray, and set it down on a table next to Bridgit.

As Tonya reached for her shotglass, Bridgit hung up the phone, grabbed both of the shotglasses, and slammed them one after the other.

Her hands were shaking and she’d gone pale.

“They’re taking back my trust fund money unless I let them start fixing me up with more guys, and agree to be married to one of the guys from their list within the next six months.”

Tonya knew about the list. Bridgit’s parents had drawn up a list of appropriate wolf shifters from good families, of the right age and the right lineage to marry into their family. Bridgit knew and hated all of them. Rich, stuffy bastards who’d expect her to stay home and keep a perfect house while they were out keeping up appearances and having affairs.

Also, Bridgit passionately believed in the whole “Fated Mate” concept and she was determined to wait for her Fated Mate to come along.

Tonya shrugged. “You can use your degree to get a job.” Bridgit had been planning on doing public relations for the Animal Haven shelter for free, but her family might be forcing a change of plans.

“No, you don’t get it. They’ll take away the money that I was pledging to the animal shelter. There will be no shelter.”

“Can they do that? Your grandmother left that money to you!”

“Yes, but the way the trust is written, it’s doled out to me by a board of trustees, and my family has a lot of influence over them. They can freeze that money indefinitely. They can’t spend it themselves, but they can prevent me from having it. My mother was still alive when the trust was written; my grandmother never anticipated the stepmonster situation.”

“They would do that? I know you and your grandmother had talked about founding a shelter. This would be going against her wishes.”

Bridgit shrugged miserably. “It would, but my stepmonster wouldn’t care about that, and my father bows to whatever she wants. Oh, and since this house is owned by the trust, and my car and your car were purchased with funds from the trust, we’d both be homeless and carless.”

Tonya looked around the room. “Okay, no offense to whichever of your gothically inclined ancestors built this heap, but it is damned creepy. All the gargoyles and weird carvings freak me the heck out. Wouldn’t you rather live in a place you decorated yourself, in a style that doesn’t remind you of a horror movie set?”

Bridgit managed a shaky laugh. “Yes, actually. I guess you and me could get a studio apartment together and take public transportation, or buy an old junker or something. What’s it like being really poor?”

“It’s great!” Tonya said with a big, forced smile. “Every day is an adventure!”

“Really?” Bridgit raked her with a skeptical look.

“Okay, it actually kind of sucks. It sucks big time. But, you know what? Not always. I didn’t enjoy worrying about how I was going to pay my bills, but I used to have fun going to thrift stores and dumpster diving and making my house look great on zero budget. I’ve got my bartending job, and the freelance work from the
Telegraph
, and you can get a PR job somewhere. We’ll be fine, I swear.”

“What is dumpster diving?” Bridgit looked worried. “I’m not sure I like the sound of that. It doesn’t require a bathing suit, does it?”

“Oh, Grasshopper, I have much to teach you. And now I’m going to go get some more tequila, because apparently somebody didn’t learn how to share when they were growing up.”

Tonya and Bridgit headed back to the bar.

Tonya’s phone chirped, and she raised an eyebrow. Tom Hooper was sending her a text.

Call me now – and be ready to pack your bags. I’ve got the story of the century for you.

* * *

“You are absolutely sure that you can pull this off.” Alexander was nervous. He had called the Chameleon for reassurance, even though they’d been over this a dozen times.

If this failed, it would be his head. Literally.

“There’s a reason that you came to me, right?” said the tinny voice on the other end of the line. The Chameleon always used a voice scrambler for all communications. “You know my reputation. I never fail.”

The assassin known as The Chameleon never met with employers in person. Literally nobody in the world knew what the Chameleon looked like. What everybody knew was that the Chameleon never failed, and could take out any target, no matter the level of their security. Kings, heads of state, billionaires, heads of multinational corporations…the Chameleon had taken them all out.

“How do you do it?” Alexander asked, fascinated.

“Trade secret,” the tinny voice said. “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”

Alexander let out a hollow laugh. Very funny.

“You understand how much security will be on that boat,” he said. “They will check everyone’s identity, verify every single person from the captain down to the galley chefs and room stewards and engineers.”

“We have been over this before, in great detail,” the Chameleon said, with an edge of impatience that came through even with the voice scrambler. “I thrive on setbacks. I always turn them to my advantage, and having security on this ship actually works to my advantage in this case.”

“How?” Alexander demanded.

“I never reveal my methods. Now stop harassing me with your insulting queries, and let me do my job.”

“All right,” Alexander said. “I look forward to reading the tragic news in the papers.”

“My condolences on your loss. In advance,” said the voice on the other end, with a tinny laugh.

“Good luck.”

“I won’t need it.” And the connection cut off.

              “This is the dream assignment,” the Beast gloated as they headed towards the briefing room. “Karma is rewarding me. I must have been really good in another life.”

              “Maybe. Certainly not this one.” Heath couldn’t help but grin, however. The Beast’s enthusiasm was contagious. And he was right; this was the dream assignment.