A Promise To Bear (Second Chance Shifters 4) (2 page)

T
he next night
, Twila arrived at the lodge kitchen feeling exhausted. As soon as she entered the lodge’s huge wooden double doors, a delicious smell wafted through the lobby and straight into her nose. She couldn’t turn away from a good meal; there had to be some sort of advantage of owning this place. She set her bag down the counter and looked around for the source of the delicious scent wafting through the air. Around the corner from the pantry, Jasper emerged, wearing an apron, a tight T-shirt, and some jeans. He looked sexier than ever. She hoped for a moment he was on the menu.

“Hungry?” he asked, a wooden spoon in his hands.

“You won’t believe the day I had. And yes, I would love some real food. All that they had downtown was some organic Granola crap. I don’t understand health food freaks. Give me some pizza or a sandwich any day.”

He smiled at her, and for a moment, she saw it reach his dark green eyes. “Well I hope you like ziti, because that’s what’s on the menu for this evening.”

“Are you cooking all of this for yourself?” She saw several loaves of garlic bread sitting on the counter too.

“Nah. I feed the staff every night. It’s what your grandmother used to do. I’m not as good of a cook as she was.”

“I’m sure you do just fine.” Why was she suddenly being so nice to him? Was she really that hungry? “I’m lucky I inherited her talents in the kitchen. That is, if I ever have my own kitchen again.”

Jasper’s brows came together.

“I went and saw five apartments today—literally everything that is available—and nothing. Two of them weren’t even inhabitable, and the other three are so far out of my price range that I wouldn’t be able to afford them even if I had a roommate. And clearly I can’t find a roommate, because I just moved here yesterday. Moving sucks.” She pulled out a stool from the long counter and sat down in a huff. She was still trying to figure out how to get Ice to her new location, plus some of the furniture. Between the cremation and taking over the business, she hadn’t even considered going back. She would just have to hire someone or maybe get someone from the salon to go pack up a box for her.

Suddenly she felt like she was living a very sad existence. No friends, no family, and now, no place to live. She had stayed at the lodge last night, but there weren’t any rooms available this evening. So she was either going to crash on the couch of the lawyer, Lauren, or she was going to hide in her grandmother’s office. Either way, things weren’t looking good.

“Here, have some dinner. Maybe you’ll be able to think a little more clearly on a full stomach.” He set a bowl down in front of her and she watched the steam rise from the red sauce. He passed her a fork and she immediately dug in.

“Mmmm, this is good,” she said through a mouthful of noodles. He smiled at her again. She wasn’t embarrassed to indulge in the fact that she liked food. A lot of men around her couldn’t really handle it. They wanted her to be some skinny little thing that only ate salad. But she wasn’t a rabbit, she was a strong, independent woman, even though today she just felt like a poor hairstylist. But when Jasper looked at her with admiration, she didn’t feel the need to stop eating, or even to feel bad asking for seconds. She felt like she could be herself with him, and that scared her.

“So it’s been a long time. A lot has changed around here.”

She shrugged. “A lot and not so much. You look about the same.”

He took off his apron and hung it on a hook next to the stove. Pulling a stool next to her, he sat down and began to eat as well. “You’re more beautiful now then you’ve ever been. I didn’t even think that was possible.”

She was taken aback and chewed her ziti slowly, unsure of what to say. “Why do you say things like that?”

He shrugged. “Because they’re true,” he mumbled softly.

“It’s been three years.”

“Yeah, three really fucking long years. Three years in which you never called. You know how worried your grandmother was all the time about you? I made a promise to her.”

Twila set down her fork. “Promise about what?”

“You.”

“About me? What would she make you promise about me? To stay away? Because when my parents were attacked, you didn’t even come to say goodbye! I left here completely alone. My grandmother couldn’t leave this place, with all her little friends and family here. I flew back on a plane with two dead bodies by myself, and you made no effort to make that any better for me. It was like the minute that Britney went missing, you just forgot I existed.”

“That’s not true!” He growled underneath his breath. His bear paced back and forth in his body, clawing at his skin. He wanted to tell her the truth. He was desperate to. But she wasn’t ready. Twila would never be ready to hear what had really happened. Grace had told him that. He was never to tell her the truth about that day.

“Really?”

“I went and looked for that girl. I was part of the search party! But I didn’t find her. She came back on her own. You know exactly what happened that day. And by the time I heard about your parents, I was still out looking for that girl. I had no idea what you had gone through until after it happened.”

“Fine. What did you promise my grandmother?”

He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now.” He took his bowl and walked over to the sink, clutching it between his strong hands. His bear snarled. Twila made him feel so out of control. It was almost too much for him.

“Like hell it doesn’t! I cared about you. Don’t you see that?” He could hear the sadness in her voice, tears starting to spill out of her eyes. The bowl shattered in his hands and the pieces fell in the metal sink. He could feel her sadness, but he could smell her fear.

“You think I didn’t care about you? I never wanted you to leave. But what happened to your parents—that’s why you can’t stay here. It’s why you couldn’t be around me back then. You weren’t strong enough.”

“I’m stronger now. I’ve lost my parents and my grandmother, I have no family, and I’m making it. What the hell are you doing?”

He picked up the pieces of the shattered porcelain and threw them in the trash. “Nothing. I’m not doing anything.” He heard the porcelain drop to the bottom of the trash can and walked out of the kitchen. The staff would have to fend for themselves; he couldn’t be in there with her anymore.

He walked out the back to where the path made a sharp left at his cabin, moving up into the brush of the woods. The smell of pine trees filled his nose, and the crisp, cool air of the evening settled on his skin. He took his clothes off and set them on top of the rock that he frequented when he needed a break from the rest of the world. He took another deep breath, and he felt his back crack in all the right places. His hands became padded, with dangerous claws emerging from his fingers. His fur sprouted up all over his body, and within moments, he was racing through the trees as the large grizzly bear the animals had come to accept.

He and his bear were one now, but it hadn’t always been that way. For years he had fought the Change. It wasn’t until Grace had finally taken him in and given him a job, honest, hard work, that he finally accepted who he really was. She didn’t want him to be afraid of the bear, and she helped him embrace it.

He was Turned at sixteen. A product of the foster system, he had always been on his own. He was in an all-boys group home when he started to get into some trouble. He started hanging out with the wrong kids and eventually got into a fight with another gang. He remembered the Change like it was yesterday. He was fighting another guy, maybe even a man, in hand-to-hand combat. Jasper had just received a blow to the mouth that had knocked them on his ass. He was flat on the concrete, waiting for the fight to be over, the pain to stop. But as the other boys continue to fight, he looked around him and saw a bear at his feet.

It put its giant mouth around his leg and bit into him, breaking his ankle and a couple other bones. The pain was excruciating. He thought he was going to die. The world grew dark around him, and the next thing he knew, he woke up in a hospital three days later. Social services didn’t know what to do with him. His behavior had become erratic, and now, he had been involved in such a serious fight that they didn’t trust him to go back to the group home.

He ran away from the hospital and took a bus with what little money he could find. This was the end of the road, Bear Lake. He didn’t even have to live on the streets for more than a week when Grace found him and offered him a job in exchange for room and board. He’d been so damn lucky. But every time he got angry, the Change would happen. He couldn’t control it. And he didn’t hide it very well, either. It was less than a year until Grace found out, but she accepted him. She took him to register with the Shifter Affairs Department and just let him be. That was ten years ago.

A bird fluttered away from him and began to fly off into the distance. He considered going to the lake and catching a few fish, anything to get his mind off the pain and confusion. He knew that Twila was feeling lost, but he also knew that she didn’t realize that he was just lost as she was. Without Grace, he was once again just a bear without a home.

T
wila walked
into her grandmother’s office, smiling and greeting some of the staff as she went. Her grandmother had always had such ease dealing with people around this place, so she would try her best to embody that. She traced a finger along the mahogany desk that was one of only a few pieces of furniture in the office. But as she walked around to sit in the chair—whose seat her grandmother had worn to practically nothing—she saw a beautiful, majestic bear climbing up the mountainside. She walked over to press her face up against the glass, admiring its strong body and fierce determination to get farther away. Part of her wished that she could follow it. But the other part of her, a much larger chunk of her being, was terrified.

A bear had killed her parents, mauled them as they searched for one of her best friends. Some people said that they had walked into a mother’s den and she was protecting her young, but Twila didn’t believe it. She knew that there were shifters in this area; her grandmother had warned her about it. She knew that they were dangerous, recluse men living up on the mountainside who didn’t like humans very much. They questioned a few of them after her parents’ incident. Her parents had bled out along the mountainside. It had taken too long to find them. Everyone’s search efforts had been focused on Britney, so it wasn’t until almost a day later that they realized that her parents hadn’t returned. They had died clutching each other, holding on to their love till the very end. The newspapers had said something about that, but she couldn’t remember exactly what it was anymore. She had burned every article about their deaths. The only thing she kept was their obituary, and only so she could send it to her grandmother, who scrapbooked. Twila felt that it was only right that she had her mother’s beginning and end hidden within her pages. Maybe she would make a scrapbook of her own about this place, about her year running a business she knew nothing about.

She walked away from the window, the bear now out of view, and began pulling books off the shelves in her grandmother’s office. Some of them were novels, ridiculous, steamy romances that seemed out of place to her. Gram wasn’t a prude, but she didn’t really like to read. But then the entire bottom shelf was all business books, previous tax records, and folders containing accounts for catering and staff and linens. She would have to learn all of this. Everything about the business of running a hotel, everything she didn’t know anything about. People she could handle; she could be the wonderful Granddaughter of the woman who ran this place. She learned to be what people needed, as doing hair was kind of like being a bartender. You listen to people, give them what they need. So that part of hospitality didn’t concern her. But the books? And dealing with Jasper at every turn? That was something to be concerned about.

Every time she thought about him, the only thing that she could see in her brain was a naked man standing in front of a fireplace. That certainly wasn’t going to bode well for business meetings with accountants and lawyers. She couldn’t sit across the table salivating over how good he looked naked when she needed to talk about figures and quarterly reports. She was going to have to get over her crush. What had he said? Something about making a promise to her grandmother? What the hell had all that been about?

She was startled back into the present when she heard a knock at the door. Jasper stood in the entryway looking a little sweaty and disheveled. He smelled like the woods. It was something that she had forgotten about him, one of the things that she really loved about being close to him.

“Find anything interesting?”

She shrugged. “Not really. Where did you go?”

He ran his fingers through his hair, pulling it away from his face. “Nowhere important. Did you figure out where you’re going to sleep tonight?”

She sighed heavily. “No. My overnight bag is still in the kitchen. My plan right now is to pack some boxes of Gram’s stuff until I’m too tired to move, and then crash here. I’m also waiting for the rest of my stuff. A girl from the salon is grabbing a couple boxes for me. Once it arrives, I guess I’ll move into a room here. Isn’t that what Gram did?”

“She had a place up in the woods for a while, but it’s rented now. I guess I didn’t realize she was living here.”

“Well you’re terribly observant. There’s also shipping my cat. Did you know that you can pay to have your pet put on an airplane for you? Because I had no idea. But apparently that’s a thing.”

He laughed heartily. “You’re so weird.”

She made a face at him. “I’m weird? You’re the one who just broke a dish in the sink. Super strength or something?”

He nodded. “Something like that. So again, where are you sleeping?”

She shrugged. “I was kind of hoping for a cancellation, but I don’t think that’s going to happen. If there’s anything that my grandmother was good at, it was filling this place. Business is booming. Have you seen these quarterly reports from the past year? She was loaded!”

He walked over to the desk, his heavy footfalls muffled by the carpet beneath them. “Damn,” he said, looking over an open folder she had on the desk. “I’d no idea she was doing this well. I mean, business had been good, sure, but this is unbelievable.”

“Plus, she had another few hundred thousand dollars in offshore accounts. By the way, did you know that my grandmother had offshore accounts? I mean, do you know anybody with offshore accounts? Because I don’t.”

Jasper shook his head. “This doesn’t make any sense. Like you said, business is good, but not this good.”

“What are you saying? My grandmother was involved in some sort of illegal activity?”

His head shot up. She realized that he was mere inches away from her mouth, she was drawing him into her. “No, of course not. But something definitely isn’t right here. Something has to be off in one of the figures, and it must’ve just set everything else off. Somebody must’ve added a zero on accident.”

Twila pulled her finger down the list of accounts and then tapped on the final one. “But what about this? An account in the Cayman Islands? Who was running her books?”

Jasper shrugged, “I thought it was her. But I guess she must’ve had help. A lot of these checks aren’t even her signature. I mean, it’s her name, sure, but not her signature.”

Twila chewed on her lower lip. “So someone was stealing from her? Or had her money tied up in investments it shouldn’t have been?”

“Where did you find these books?”

Twila pointed behind her. “Bottom shelf. There’s tons of them. And they’re all current.”

“Something’s not right, Twila. I think we need to go back to Lauren, to see if she knows anything about this.”

“I really had my reservations about taking over this business—I mean, I’m shipping my cat across the damn country—but if she was into anything she wasn’t supposed to be, or someone was taking advantage of her, I want nothing to do with it. Jasper, we could go to jail!”

He took a deep breath, “No. We had nothing to do with this.” Her hand was still on the desk, and he covered it with his own. She felt a warm shock of electricity spring through her veins. Why was it that every time she was this close to him, he was so intoxicating? Every time she got close, she didn’t want him to push her away. But their past told her otherwise. He’d abandoned her in her time of need. Would he do that again? She pulled away from him and slowly began to collect the files, closing them up and putting them back on the shelf.

“I’ll call Lauren in the morning, and we’ll figure it out from there. But right now, I’m just so damn tired. Maybe we’re just not thinking straight.”

“You still haven’t found a place to sleep.”

“No, I haven’t,” she said in a sultry way. She knew she was being flirtatious, but she didn’t care. Right now, her world seemed completely upside down, and all she wanted was for Jasper to take her in his arms and keep her close to protect her. But she knew she couldn’t ask him to do that. It wasn’t fair to either of them.

“Why don’t you come and stay in my cabin? I’ll sleep on the couch, and you can have my bed.”

She didn’t even try to say no; she just wanted to sleep. And if the only bed available was in Jasper’s cabin, then maybe she would forget her pajama pants in an attempt to seduce him once more. Maybe their past wasn’t so much of an obstacle as it was a memory of a wonderful weekend spent in the woods. Sure, everything came crashing down after her time with Jasper, but the sex? Nothing had ever been as good as that. If she was lucky, maybe she would get to relive it again. It would be the perfect cure for all the stress she was feeling. Just a moment with his body on hers, and the problems would melt away.