Geek Bear (Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (Rescue Bears Book 6) (2 page)

He decided to have a few more beers and school some humans at pool. Later, Corey found himself walking down the dark highway headed home. His head was full of beer and his pockets were full of bills. For a split second, Corey wondered if maybe the other guys were onto something by going home early to their mates.

Corey considered what it might be like to have someone to come home to, someone who’d make him want to be a better bear. The grizzly inside him grumbled at their shared loneliness, but Corey brushed it aside.

The moment had passed and all he wanted to do was get home to his cave and be left alone.

2

W
illow Rhine closed her laptop and squeezed her eyes closed. This book was killing her. She’d written herself into a corner and had no idea how to get out.

Looking around her apartment, she decided it was the perfect time to have a coffee break. Willow stood from her chair and pulled her curly black hair up into a topknot. She pulled the coffee pot out and looked at the sludge at the bottom of the glass. Then she looked at the clock.

It was already well past noon. Where had the time gone? She’d only written five hundred words all morning and still had no idea where her plot was going.

She took the glass pot to the sink and rinsed out the burned coffee before fixing another pot. She flipped the coffee maker to on, not even sure she wanted coffee anymore. As the brew percolated, she hurried out the front door and down the stairs to the mailboxes. Sliding her key into the lock, her heart started to beat nervously inside her chest. She drew the envelopes from the box, hoping it was just bills and junk mail. She couldn’t handle another letter.

As she walked up the stairs to her third-floor apartment on the outskirts of Seattle, she shuffled through her mail. When she made it to her door, she saw it. She froze in her tracks, her body jumping into high alert.

“Not again,” she muttered, pushing open her door.

She put the letter on the kitchen table and stared at it. This sicko wouldn’t stop. What did he even want?

Willow looked at her coffee bubbling into the pot and then looked at her laptop again. She couldn’t work under these conditions.

Her editor had already accused her of being a prima donna the last time she’d missed her deadline. Now, her book was two months overdue, and Willow wasn’t any closer to being finished.

As a ghostwriter for one of the best known romance authors in the business, Willow was anything but a prima donna. How could she be one? She worked her tail off just so someone else could get the credit.

Not that Willow wanted the credit. Sandra Collins was constantly on the road doing press junkets and book signings. Willow didn’t want any of that, thank you very much. She preferred to stay home and focus on her work.

Ever since she’d started receiving these serial killer style messages, with all the letters cut out of magazines to spell out quotes from her books, she hadn’t been able to work. Everyone was waiting on her, and if she missed another deadline, her publisher had threatened to cut off her royalty checks.

Willow gritted her teeth and grabbed the letter, shoving it in her purse on the way out the door.

She intended to get to the bottom of these creepy letters once and for all. Hurrying out to the parking lot, she unlocked her car and slid behind the wheel.

A few minutes later, she was sitting in a Seattle police station talking to Detective Johnson for the fifth time in three months.

“I’m sorry, Ms. Rhine. We couldn’t find any prints on the letter this time either. There is no way of knowing who this is in order to stop him.”

“What about the postmark?”

“It’s for Bellevue. I’m sorry, but that doesn’t give us anything to work with.”

“Can’t I take out a restraining order?”

“Not if you don’t know who it is that’s harassing you.”

“Look at the message. It’s obviously a reference to my last Sandra Collins book. He knows I’m the writer. How could he possibly find that out? The only people who know work for my publishing company.”

“Do you have any reason to believe that someone associated with your publishing company is stalking you?”

“Why would they? They deal with hundreds of authors. I’m just one of many ghostwriters who work for them. I’m no one.”

“The person who sent this letter would disagree.”

“What do you think this quote means? ‘They embraced under the glowing boughs touched by milky moonlight.’”

“Look, this guy is obviously obsessed. If I were you, I’d make sure I wasn’t alone at night until we find out who it is.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

“Don’t you have a boyfriend or a significant other or something?”

“No. Thanks for the reminder.”

The detective squeezed the bridge of his nose and pressed his eyes closed.

“Look, Ms. Rhine. We’re doing everything we can with what we’ve got. Now, if you’ll excuse me. I have other cases to attend to.”

“Fine,” she grumbled as she stood. “You can keep the letter. As evidence.”

She walked away from the detective’s desk, feeling like she’d just wasted the entire day.

When she got back to her apartment, it smelled like burned coffee. She wrinkled her nose and poured out the ruined pot. Her laptop sat across the room, waiting for her like an angry lover.

“I’m really going to work today,” she said to no one. The laptop stared back at her silently. “Really!”

She poured herself a glass of water and downed the whole thing before sitting in front of her computer again. She opened the laptop and waited for the screen to wake up.

The last five hundred words she’d written sat on the word processor in front of her, reminding her how off her game she was.

Willow slid her hands across her touchpad and highlighted everything she’d just written.

With a deep sigh, she hit the delete key.

“I guess today was a wash,” she said.

Willow stared at the empty screen, her brain feeling as burned as that pot of coffee. The hero of her story had left the heroine because he wasn’t ready for love. She’d written the heroine’s reaction, but the character’s response was uncharacteristically tepid.

The heroine should be angry, right? She looked at her notes and character sketches. It was all wrong. She’d made the hero hurt her heroine so badly, just the thought of it made Willow want to cry. But for the life of her, she couldn’t make her heroine care.

Why was the heroine so unmoved? Did she even really love the hero? If she didn’t love him, then there was no story. Willow would have to start all over, and there wasn’t time for that now.

She remembered the detective telling her to have her boyfriend stay over to protect her from the stalker. But Willow didn’t have a boyfriend. She hadn’t had a boyfriend in god knows how long.

Willow growled at herself, clicking away from her manuscript to browse the internet. As a writer, surfing the internet during work time was a cardinal sin. One of her writer friends always called writers professional procrastinators. Willow had never had trouble with a deadline before. That’s why the publishing company had put her on Sandra Collins over two years ago. She’d written a dozen novels for Sandra since. Every one had been a bestseller.

When Willow thought about all the money those books made, that she
wasn’t
making, it almost made her a little queasy. She tried not to think about it most of the time.

Willow checked her emails and saw a message from a dating site pop up in her inbox. Just then, her phone pinged with a new message from the very same site.

“Mate.com? When did I sign up for that?” she asked herself, clicking on the text message on her phone.

Then she remembered. Mate.com was a shifter/human dating site. She’d signed up months ago when she was doing some research for a book she’d been writing at the time. The hero had been a shifter and the heroine a human.

Ever since shifters had become so popular in the media, shifter romances had become just as hot. The Sandra Collins marketing division had decided against publishing shifter books, so Willow’s shifter book had gone to another name. Willow hadn’t been assigned another shifter book since. It was really too bad; she’d loved writing about fated mates.

When the message from the dating app came up on her phone, she didn’t quite know what to think.

“Congratulations. You’ve been matched with your fated mate!”

“My fated mate?”

Her heart started to pound and she bit her lip.

Willow knew that shifters had one special someone who they knew instinctively was the one. Once fated mates found each other, nature took its course. A powerful pheromone was emitted by the shifter, and his mate was powerless against it. The shifter was powerless against his mate as well. The instinct to mate was overpowering.

Now she’d been matched with one. From what she’ learned about shifters, she knew this guy would want her no matter what. He’d want to provide for her, protect her, and would probably want to start a family as soon as possible. That’s what shifter guys were like. The idea of having her own fated mate lit a fire inside her she hadn’t expected to ever feel. She was warm and flushed all over, thinking of a man wanting her like that.

Willow clicked on the screen and brought up her match’s photo on Mate.com. She was struck instantly with how handsome he was. Shifters were all handsome. They were bigger, stronger, had keener senses, and were preternaturally good-looking.

But it wasn’t that. There was something else. This guy wore glasses, which was odd for a shifter. But the eyes behind those glasses were what caught her attention.

She could see the depths of his soul in those brown eyes.

She blinked, pushing away her fanciful idea.

“You’ve been in your romance novels too long, Willow. Things don’t happen like that in the real world. Not for you anyway.”

Still, she couldn’t help but linger on his photo for a long time before scrolling down to read his profile.

Like most young male shifters, he’d served during the war. He was a computer programmer by trade and lived in a small town called Fate Mountain Village where he served on the search and rescue team.

Smart, courageous, and he volunteered. What could be hotter than that?

Apparently, he lived in a small cabin at Fate Mountain Lodge where he worked for himself. The profile said he was looking for someone to make his life complete.

Just as she was about to blow the whole thing off and try to get back to work, a message came up on her phone.

“Hello, Willow. It’s me, Corey, your fated mate.”

“Hi,”
she replied, still a bit in shock.

“I really want to meet you.”

“Okay,”
she typed, not knowing what else to say.

“I’ve arranged for you to stay at Fate Mountain Lodge for the next week, free of charge. Everything is included. You just have to get here.”

“Wow.”

“That way, we can get to know each other.”

“This is a little sudden. I’ll have to think about it.”

“I’m awaiting your reply.”

Willow read the conversation over a few times. With everything going on in her life, how was she supposed to deal with this? Shifters were known for their whirlwind relationships with their fated mates. Willow was so not ready for that right now. Was she?

She had a half-finished book to write. A stalker to shake off. And a serious case of writer’s block. Of course she couldn’t get involved.

She clicked back to her word processor and stared at the blinking cursor.

Then again, she really could use some time away from everything. Maybe a trip to the mountains was exactly what she needed right now.

3

C
orey rolled out of bed with a growly groan. He rubbed his eyes and trudged through the house, glancing at the clock on the stove. It was already past noon. He clicked on his coffee pot to make it brew the grounds already in the basket and walked back to his desk.

He swished his mouse around, making his screen wake up. The code he’d been working on the night before came to life in front of him. He squinted, realizing he’d forgotten to put on his glasses. Most shifters had excellent eyesight. And so did Corey, in bear form. Unfortunately, he’d spent so much time staring at the computer, he’d grown an astigmatism that didn’t heal and needed glasses in human form.

He sat in front of his work, forgetting completely about the coffee until almost an hour later. He’d been so lost in his work that he was only brought out of it by the smell of his coffee going bad.

He growled and pushed himself away from the desk. Now the clock said it was after one in the afternoon. He let out a long groan as he poured his first cup of coffee for the day. He should stop staying up so late, he told himself. But he knew that was a losing battle. He did most of his best work late at night.

Not that it mattered. The only time anyone ever needed him was when the Rescue Bears were called out on a mission. That only happened a few times a month. The rest of the time, Corey was alone in his cabin with his computers.

He sat back in front of his multiple screens, focusing on the code in front of him. His fingers itched to type, but he contemplated, drinking his coffee. There was something missing. He knew there was a way to make this algorithm run more smoothly. If he could just pinpoint how.

His cell phone pinged and he set his coffee cup on the desk to pick it up. It was Levi, asking him if he’d woken up yet.

He sent a text back that read,
“Of course.”

His crew had been getting on his back lately about finding a mate. Levi thought Corey was becoming too reclusive. But Corey disagreed. He was more than happy to be alone with his work. In Corey’s opinion, there wasn’t anything better.

The last thing he wanted was a repeat of the way he’d grown up. He knew exactly how much fated mates could hurt each other. When Corey was only a baby, his father had left his mother for the first time. His parents had been fated. They were both shifters. But that didn’t mean that they’d lived happily ever after.