A Grizzly Kind Of Love (The Mating Game Book 3) (2 page)

Gillian, who had been sitting there silently, cleared her throat. “Excuse me,” she said. “Has it occurred to you that after several weeks of spending time in Wynona’s company, this bear might fall for her instead of the woman he’s intended to marry?”

“As if,” Cecily scoffed, looking at Wynona with amusement. “I can assure you, my dear, that is very far down on my list of concerns. Right after a comet striking North America.”

“That does it.” Wynona leaped to her feet and tossed the folder onto the table. “Take your folder and stick it up your furry ass.” Wynona hardly ever used language like that, but for Cecily, she’d make an exception.

“We’re not done here.”

“I am done with
you
. I will not be helping you civilize Zane.”

“Oh, you most certainly will,” Cecily said, with a cold assurance and a look in her eyes that Wynona didn’t like.

Gillian went back to the office after lunch, but Wynona went to buy office supplies and some fresh flowers for the vase on Gillian’s desk.

It was a warm spring day, and normally a visit to the flower mart would have delighted her, but today she could barely concentrate. There had been something very disconcerting about the visit from Cecily and Hubert.

And to make things worse, she got a text message from her ex-husband as she was setting the bouquet down in the back of her minivan.

“If you hear from the Shepherds, you don’t know where I am,” was all it said. No, “Hello, sorry I was such a douche,” or, “How’ve you been?” Not that she really expected anything like that from Hartford. He’d thrown a tantrum when she’d told him she was divorcing him, wailing about how nobody in their crowd divorced, and she’d make him look like a fool, and then threatening to ruin her reputation so she would be exiled from their social set.

When she’d responded with “Pinky swear?”, he’d failed to see the humor in it. Instead he’d thrown a vase against the wall and stormed out of their house.

“I don’t know where he is?” she echoed, exasperated, and erased the text. Of course she didn’t know where that idiot was. He’d gone off on a round-the-world tour to sulk, and as far as she knew, still hadn’t come home several years later.

As she shut the van’s rear door, she saw an older lady with a walker slowly, painstakingly making her way towards her car, which was a few spaces down from hers. The woman was struggling to hold on to a big bag of groceries.

“Can I help you with that?” Wynona called out.

“What’s that, dear?” The woman twisted around to face her and dropped her bag. She cried out in dismay as apples rolled out onto the pavement.

“Oh, are you all right? I’ll get that for you,” Wynona said, kneeling down to scoop the fruit into the bag.

Wynona held out the bag of groceries. Instead of taking it, the woman slapped a sheaf of papers on top of the bag, smiled sweetly, and said, “You’ve been served.”

Wynona stared down at the papers in shock as the woman strolled off, folding her walker as she went. Someone was suing her? What the hell?

“You have got to be kidding me!” she yelled at the woman.

“Works every time,” the woman said smugly, sliding into her car.

“Hey, you left your groceries! That’s littering!” Wynona shouted. The woman shut the door and backed out.

Cursing under her breath, Wynona set the groceries down on a bench and grabbed the papers. Maybe a homeless person would find the bag; she hated to waste food.

Then she looked over the sheaf of papers. She was somehow not surprised to see that she was being sued by the Shepherds. Back at the restaurant, Cecily had been awfully sure that Wynona would be forced to do what she wanted.

But why were they suing her for fraud? This had to be some kind of ridiculous mistake – she’d never had any business dealings with them.

That text from Hartford, though… A sudden clutch of anxiety squeezed her breath away. Why didn’t he want the Shepherds to know where he was? What had he done?

She went straight back to the office and called Roland Brown, an attorney she knew. He was a lion who had ended up marrying a gazelle after she’d fixed them up on a date. Weirdest pairing ever. But now they were expecting.

Roland stopped by a couple of hours later. He went into Wynona’s office, sat down on her couch and read through the paperwork with a scowl on his face. “Hmm,” he muttered as he read.

Wynona sat at her desk and watched him with alarm.

“Don’t hmmm. Don’t look like that,” she said. “Why are you shaking your head? What’s going on?”

“Well, according to this lawsuit, you and your ex-husband got the Shepherds to invest in a building project in Florida. It was supposed to be a beachfront resort, but that lot of land turns out to be swampland, which was why you were able to purchase it so cheaply and pocket the profits. You bought the land using a shell company that was posing as a construction company. The land itself is worthless.”

“I did nothing of the sort!” she said indignantly. “Why would I do something like that?”

“I don’t know, but your signature is here on the contract,” he said.

She got up and walked over to look at the page he was pointing at.

“That could be forged,” Gillian called out from her desk in the other room.

“And your paw print. And your thumb print.” Roland tapped each spot.

“That’s just on the final page of the document,” Wynona protested. “The rest of the document has been changed. There’s only one property deal that my ex and I were involved in. We bought one condo unit that we were going to rent out during the year and then vacation in for two weeks every summer. When we split up, we got our ten-thousand-dollar deposit back and split it.”

Roland’s brows drew together. “Hmm.” She hated it when he said that. “After you signed the document, who took it down to the courthouse to file it?”

She suddenly went cold. “My ex-husband did.”

“So maybe he swapped out all but the last page of the contract.”

“That’s not possible!” she spluttered.

“Well, we can take it to court. Where is your ex-husband?”

The hair on the back of her neck lifted. “He left the country after we divorced several years ago. I have no idea where he is right now. He just sent me a text saying that if the Shepherds ask where he is, I should say I don’t know – which would be the truth.”

“Well. That’s awfully convenient for him, isn’t it? One might almost say suspicious. Basically, your ex-husband apparently defrauded the Shepherds of five hundred thousand dollars, and he may have left you on the hook for half. We’d probably have to go to court to prove that the contract was a forgery.” He shook his head. “Well, hopefully we could prove that.”

“Incorrect use of hopefully!” Gillian yelled from the other room.

Wynona ignored her. “I see. Is there any good news here?”

“Certainly,” Roland said, and she brightened. “Since I’m indebted to you for introducing me to my lovely bride, I’m happy to offer my services at fifty percent of my usual rate.”

Great. His usual rate was a ten-thousand-dollar retainer and seven hundred dollars an hour.

“Thanks, Roland, that makes my day,” she said with a grimace. “Well, I’ll call you.”

Minutes after he left, Cecily called her at the office.

“Yes, your process server found me, and she’s just as slimy and devious as you are. This is all a scam – it’s a set up,” Wynona fumed at her.

“Well, you can certainly take it to court,” Cecily said, sounding so amused that Wynona wanted to reach through the phone and slap her. “I imagine that the publicity won’t be that great for your business. Also, it’s a criminal matter, because you committed fraud. We haven’t gone to the district attorney yet; that’s tomorrow. However, all you have to do is agree to spend three weeks getting Zane civilized enough to start courting Tiffany, and we will let you off the hook and we won’t press charges. I will have a contract delivered to your office, spelling out our terms.”

“You’re saying that this mating is worth a quarter of a million dollars?” Wynona said incredulously.

“It’s worth considerably more than that. Besides, we’ll just pursue your ex-husband, and we’ll say that the whole thing was his idea. His family will have to pay up.”

“If this contract even exists, then it
was
all his idea,” Wynona said indignantly.

“Whatever.”

Wynona pondered the idea. Zane, from what she’d heard, was a rude jerk, and Tiffany was a spoiled twerp. She didn’t think it was a great idea to pair them up, but they were both adults, and it sounded as if they were both willing to enter a mating of convenience.

“Are you sure she really wants him as a mate?” she asked.

“She doesn’t care who she mates, since it will be a mating of convenience. Her clan wants it. There is considerable prestige attached to being a Shepherd. The Shepherd males are known to be the physically strongest among all bear shifters. And our family name goes back generations; we’re among the First Shifters of Virginia.”

Wynona let out a disgusted sigh. “Fine,” she said. “Send the paperwork over and I will have my attorney take a look at it.”

She hung up and saw that Gillian was standing in the doorway.

“You’re going to go ahead with it?” Gillian asked.

Wynona shrugged. “How bad could it be?” she said.

* * * * *

Pretty bad, it turned out.

After the contract was signed, Cecily showed up at her office the next morning with Tiffany in tow, along with two of Tiffany’s personal assistants, whose names Wynona instantly forgot, and Tiffany’s yappy purse dog, a long-haired Chihuahua named Sprinkles.

The assistants were middle-aged women who fawned over their employer as if she were royalty. Tiffany was reed-thin, with frosted blonde hair styled in an artful razor cut that hung around her narrow face. She wore a billowy Dolce & Gabbana ankle-length dress with a red and black geometric print, and tottered on stylish red platform shoes. She glanced at Wynona, who was wearing a flower-print dirndl dress from Target, with a lip-curl of disdain. Gillian, who stood next to Wynona, seemed to escape Tiffany’s notice completely.

“Here’s my list,” Tiffany said, slapping down a lined piece of paper on Wynona’s desk. Then she plopped her skinny butt down in the chair facing the desk and stared at Wynona expectantly.

Wynona looked at it.

“Must buy me flours every day. Must say I’m beatifull minnamum five times a day but must say it in diffarant ways and be convinsing. Must buy ten thoussend dollars of joowelry minnemam every month exseppt my birthday and Chrismiss and other holladays then must buy more. My cloathng alloence fifty thouzend a month. He takes care of the cubs I doant chang diapers we get three nannees for kids.”

She couldn’t read any further; it was making her queasy.

“I thought you graduated from college,” she said, looking at Tiffany. Tiffany was glaring at Sprinkles, who was skulking in her purse and snarling at her.

Tiffany spared her a glance. “I did. Summer cum loudly,” she bragged.

Gillian twitched and massaged her temples with her index fingers.

“Summa cum laude?” she said, which earned her a scornful look from Tiffany.

“
That’s
not how you say it,” Tiffany scoffed. “Laude’s not even a word.” She glanced at her two assistants, and they both dutifully brayed with laughter.

Wynona felt the beginnings of a headache. “Okay. Did you take your own classes?”

“Of course not,” Tiffany said, looking offended. “As if. My parents paid someone to take them for me. I just went so I could be in a sorority.”

“And your parents donated a wing to the college?”

“A new library. How’d you know?” Tiffany looked mildly curious, then scowled at Sprinkles again. He was yapping at her angrily, tiny fangs bared. “Shut up, you rat,” she hissed at him.

“Lucky guess,” Wynona said with a pained smile. She glanced at Cecily.

“This list…” she said.

Cecily frowned reprovingly. “You signed the contract.”

Yes, according to the contract, the Shepherd family would forgive the debt and not prosecute if she could make Zane gentlemanly enough that Tiffany would find him at least tolerable.

She had three weeks.

In the meantime, both Gillian and her lawyer’s private investigator were doing their best to track down her ex-husband, and looking into her ex-husband’s shell company that had defrauded the Shepherds.

“Well, I…”

“Ewww, he peed in my purse! I hate this dog!” Tiffany screamed. She shoved the purse at one of her assistants, who reluctantly took it, holding it out at arm’s length. Sprinkles’ enraged yapping pierced the air.

“Then why do you even have it?” Wynona snapped at her, exasperated.

“Everyone has them! They look good in pictures!” Tiffany jumped up. “Did he pee on my phone? No way! He’s going back to the store!”

Wynona was supposed to be kissing up to Tiffany, but she found she couldn’t stop herself.

“What store?” she gritted out.

“Elegant Accessory Pets, of course. At the mall.”

“What the hell’s wrong with you?” Wynona glared at her client. “You don’t buy from a mall! You buy from a breeder or you adopt from a shelter.”

“A
shelter
?” Tiffany drew herself up in utter horror. “Oh, and should I go buy my clothes at a thrift store?” She glanced at her assistants, and they both brayed out some more laughter, on cue.

Gillian marched up, reached into the purse, and picked up Sprinkles, who instantly settled down. She set him down on the floor, knelt next to him, and stroked his fur. “We are keeping him. He will now be the office canine companion.”

“The office what?” Tiffany’s eyes widened in confusion and her gaze swiveled back and forth between Gillian and Wynona.

“All right, I am meeting Zane tonight, and I will call you tomorrow to report on my progress. Go. Just go,” Wynona said to Cecily, who scowled at her.