A Bride For The Bear (Bear Brides #1) (2 page)

Terri had insisted on buying
her a cup of coffee. The two of them had hit it off and bonded over
coffee and cakes, and Terri had been her best friend ever since.

Abby licked her ice-cream
spoon and automatically reached for her phone. With a sigh, she put
down both the spoon and the phone.

Terri was out of town,
attending a meeting with her boss. She worked as a secretary to one
of the Directors in an advertising firm, and she constantly had to
accompany her boss on work trips. Abby knew that Terri's job was
stressful and her boss was hard and demanding, but at this moment,
she rather envied Terri. At least she still had a job.

After downing another slice
of pizza and a cup of coffee, Abby felt revived. With food and fire
in her belly, Abby powered up her laptop and curled her fingers over
the keyboard.

She wouldn't be crying over
the loss of her crummy job and equally crummy boyfriend.

Lost her job? Just find a
new one.

She would get started on her
job search right away.

Three hours later, Abby
leaned back and rubbed her eyes. Her job search hadn't yielded any
results.

The only restaurants and
eateries that were hiring at the moment were way out of the city.
She would have to spend two hours or more traveling out of the city
to her workplace. That just wasn't feasible.

Blowing out a breath, Abby
was about to get up and go grab a new tub of ice-cream from the
freezer when a banner flashed across her screen. Frowning, Abby read
the banner and realized that it was an advertisement for a dating
website. An advertisement for a dating site on a job portal? Abby
shrugged. Made sense. Kind of.

Absently, she clicked on the
banner and was directed to an attractive, well-designed website.
Just for fun, she began to click through the site to see what it
offered. The site had many members and there were many profiles for
her to browse through.

For forty minutes, she
scrolled through the profiles, her frown deepening as she read what
the guys were looking for. Almost all the men were looking for slim,
toned, nubile young women, preferably in their early twenties. Abby
glanced down at her curves and laughed humorlessly. They weren't
describing her, that was for sure. She was plump, fleshy and
hurtling towards the big three-zero.

She was about to exit the
page when a new profile caught her eye. The profile had just been
uploaded a few minutes ago, and there was no profile picture.

There was something different
about this profile. For one, his profile name was simply listed as
“Cole”. It probably wasn't his real name. But at least
it wasn't corny, suggestive or lewd, like most of the other profile
names.

“Cole” didn't
state that he wanted to meet thin, young females. Instead, he
specifically stated that he was looking for a curvy, robust woman who
was at least in her late twenties to be his mate.

The writer's choice of words
intrigued her. He had written “mate”. The other
profiles all seemed to be looking for casual sex, friends with
benefits, or a beautiful, trophy girlfriend.

Abby clicked on his profile
information.

Her eyes bugged when she saw
his species.

Werebear.

Abby rested her chin on her
palm to force her mouth close. “Cole” was a bear
shifter, and he lived in Moonstone Creek, the nearest shifter town
from her city.

All the other males on the
dating site were human. “Cole” was the only shifter she
had come across on this site. If Cole was looking for casual sex
like most of the other men on the site, she was sure that he didn't
need to come to a dating site to look for women. There were shifter
groupies all over the towns and cities.

Male shifters had no problem
attracting women. They were generally well-built, good looking and
possessed a certain animal magnetism. There was a hint of danger
about them that made them irresistible to females. She had dated a
shifter once. The sex had been great, but that was all. He had been
a young shifter, out to sow his wild oats and experience sex with all
kinds of females, human, shifters, tall ones, skinny ones, fat ones
too. She had just been on his to-do list. After a month of wild,
animal sex, he had simply chucked her under the chin and swaggered
out her front door. And that was the last she saw of him.

Abby shook her head. A
werebear didn't need to resort to a dating site to find a woman to
fuck.

Cole had to be a fraud. He
was most probably an octogenarian masquerading as a thirty-eight year
old werebear. His occupation was listed as “landscaper”,
but Abby doubted he did much of the actual landscaping work himself.
He probably owned a landscaping company and hired young, strapping
lads to do the landscaping work for him while he sat in his plush,
air-conditioned office.

On a whim, she decided to
refresh the web page before shutting down her laptop.

She glanced at her laptop
screen and gasped when the refreshed web page displayed Cole's newly
uploaded profile picture.

Cole wasn't a wrinkled, old
werebear.

The man was gorgeous.

He wasn't smiling in the
photo but there was laugh lines radiating from his deep, brown eyes.
He had handsome, rugged features, and his complexion was tanned and a
little sunburnt. His brown hair was short and tousled as if he
hadn't bothered to comb it. His expression was stern and too
serious, and Abby thought he looked kind of stressed in his photo.
She could glimpse his plaid shirt stretching over broad, powerful
shoulders in his head shot. That in itself was refreshing and
reassuring. Too many profile photos featured narcissistic, shirtless
men flaunting their newly acquired ripped torsos. Those gleaming
muscles had probably cost them hundreds, maybe thousands, of dollars
in gym membership fees. Cole's physique, on the other hand, looked
like it had been honed by solid, hard labor. There was just
something very natural and honest about this man, something which
tugged at Abby and pulled her hands up to the keyboard.

The picture could be doctored
or edited, or simply a fake. But somehow, Abby didn't think so. She
could see the lines on his face, the creases on his shirt and a trace
of worry in his piercing eyes. He looked real and she just felt, in
her gut, in her heart, that there would be a connection between them.
She couldn't explain it. She just knew that she had to do this, or
she would regret it. She had to contact him.

As with most dating websites,
there were way more male profiles than female profiles. As a result,
the men had to pay a fee to list their profiles, whereas women could
join the site for free. To contact any member on the dating site,
you had to register as a member and fill in a mandatory
questionnaire. The site would then calculate how compatible you were
with the members on the site.

It didn't take long for Abby
to fill in her particulars and click through the questionnaire for
new members. Her answers were all honest and to the point.

She put her real name Abby as
her profile name, and typed in a short paragraph about herself. She
didn't filter anything. Perhaps she should have gone back and edited
what she'd written, but she didn't. Snapping a picture rather
hurriedly and haphazardly with her mobile phone, she uploaded the
picture and cringed. She was frowning, her skin looked blotchy and
her hair was messy and uncombed. She looked...exactly as she looked
right now.

Abby sucked in a sharp breath
and closed her eyes.

She could pretty herself up,
make herself picture perfect, but what would be the point? She
wasn't picture perfect on most days. She had made the effort to doll
up when she went out with Kenneth, but in the end, looking pretty and
being demure and mild hadn't helped the relationship one bit. In
fact, it probably doomed it. She wasn't herself. She wasn't happy
and obviously, neither was he.

Pushing back from the small
dining table, she went to grab the tub of butter caramel ice-cream
from the freezer. Courage. She needed sweet, milky, frozen courage.

With her mouth so full of
ice-cream she was giving herself a brain freeze, Abby proceeded to
hammer out a paragraph about herself. She didn't censor anything.
She decided to be honest about her present financial situation.
There was no point in hiding the fact that she was jobless. In the
box labeled “occupation”, she filled in the word
“unemployed” and left it at that.

With her profile set up, Abby
clicked on the message box to contact Cole.

But at that instant when the
message box popped up, her courage faltered.

What should she say? She
wasn't a werebear. She wasn't even a shifter. She was just a human
woman. Would he even be interested in her?

Abby gulped. She got up and
paced around. She went to the kitchen and ate a cookie without
tasting it. Then she went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on
her face.

She walked everywhere. To
her bed, to the fridge, the toilet, the sink, the window.

Everywhere but her small
wobbly dining table where her laptop sat humming and blinking.

In the end, she pounded out
just one word and logged off quickly before she lost her nerve.

All she managed to type was
“Hi”.

Cole Jameson stepped back
from the laptop and rounded on the three scowling men standing behind
him and squinting over his shoulder.

“There. All done.
See, that wasn't so hard, right? In fact, it was painless,” he
lied.

His younger brother Brad, and
his cousins Dalton and Tony, all shot him identical skeptical looks.

“Whatever you say,
Alpha. Whatever you say,” Tony muttered.

Dalton slapped his younger
brother's chest with the back of his hand. “Don't be mouthy,
Tony.” Stepping up to the computer, Dalton sucked in a sharp
breath and sat down. Anyone looking at his tensed expression would
have thought he was facing the firing squad instead of a computer
screen. Dalton stared at the blank questionnaire on the page with an
equally blank mind. “Why are we doing this again?”
Dalton blinked, his fingers freezing over the keyboard.

Cole gritted his teeth and
answered, “Because the Nightfire clan should be expanding and
growing, not ageing and weakening.”

“Right.” With
that, Dalton got right to work, dutifully filling out his profile and
even freezing his face into a smile long enough for the computer
camera to take his picture and upload it onto the dating agency's
website. Cole knew he could count on his Beta to support him.
Dalton was his right hand man, had been ever since they founded the
Nightfire clan and set up their landscaping business.

At just eighteen years old,
Cole had become head of what was left of their clan and family.
There had been an ambush, an attack from a rival bear clan seeking
vengeance and demanding the payment of a blood debt. The debt had
been settled in blood, the blood of Cole and Dalton's fathers and the
rest of their clan. Cole had managed to escape with his cousins and
younger brother. Brad had only been ten at the time. Ten years of
childhood. And then his family and his world had been brutally
ripped apart.

Tony had been twelve then.
Even before Tony and Brad had hit their teens, both boys had seen far
more bloodshed and violence than most bear cubs would see in their
lifetimes.

Cole and Dalton had both been
eighteen when their clan was wiped out. They assumed guardianship of
their younger brothers, protected them and brought them up as best
they could. The four boys had escaped to Moonstone Creek, a quiet,
deserted town at that time. In twenty years, Moonstone Creek had
grown into a thriving shifter town, and Cole's landscaping business
had taken off. He now owned Nightfire Landscaping, a successful,
reputable landscaping company in Moonstone Creek. He had recruited
young, loyal werebears into his company and gradually formed the
Nightfire clan. Nightfire Landscaping now had around thirty
employees, all members of the Nightfire clan.

But to survive, the clan
needed to grow and renew itself. Although more than half of his clan
members were happily mated, less than half of that number were
producing cubs. If a clan wasn't seen as strong and robust, with the
next generation of members and leaders clearly in sight, that clan
was easy fodder for other shifter packs and clans. Predators preyed
on the weak. Cole couldn't let his clan be preyed upon. He had seen
what happened to his dad and uncle, his aunts and the rest of his
young cousins.

Cole had always been
resourceful and far-sighted. It was due to his quick-thinking and
foresight that his brother and cousins managed to escape the
bloodbath. They had survived. They had made a life for themselves.
They had come so far.

Cole would do everything in
his power to ensure his clan's survival. When the other werebears
joined his clan, their parents, grandparents and any other relatives
they had who wished to join the Nightfire clan would be given
membership and protection. He was responsible for a lot of lives.
He had to constantly plan ahead. He couldn't wait for a problem to
creep up on him and explode in his face. He had to get to the root
of the problem and come up with a plan.