Bear No Defeat (3 page)

Alice allowed herself to trail off as she drained the last of her rum, finding it tasting far more sour than it should have. Or maybe that was just her general feelings about the whole thing. Sour.

That sounded about as right as anything else had over the last few days.

“Insane,” Sari said, echoing Alice’s sentiments exactly. “You’re going to go through with it?”

A much harder question to answer.

“I haven’t talked to Jax yet. Or, sorry,
Jasper
as his father insists on calling him, but I do have a ticket to someplace called Shifter Grove, where his team is now. I’m supposed to get lodgings there so we can ‘get to know one another,’” Alice said, air-quoting the hell out of that statement. “I can’t imagine what kind of a guy, even a werebear with their twisted sense of propriety, would say yes to something like that. But what other choice do I have?”

“You could just say no?” Sari offered, sounding far more incredulous than she had any right to be.

“And condemn my dad to a lifetime of prison for stealing? I can’t do that,” Alice said, her voice growing softer and getting a slight tremor to it. “I know he messed up, but if there’s anything I can do to keep him out of there, I have to. I think someone might be after him, that he still owes money to some bookies… It’s not like I’m doing anything supremely interesting with my life to begin with, here. Might as well lounge around in Idaho and live the pampered life of a hockey wife, right?”

“Neither you nor I think that’s what you want to do,” Sari said sternly, exhaling audibly. “But, I mean, if you’ve made up your mind… at least he’s hot, right?”

Little mercies.

Except that the fact that her arranged husband’s level of smoking sexiness really had very little to do with how much Alice was looking forward to spending the next few years of her young life in some sham of a marriage.

CHAPTER THREE

Jax

A month later…

“Suddenly, I’m really glad my parents never had a dime to spend,” Memphis said with his casual drawl, the large polar bear shifter leaning back against the hood of Jax’s truck.

The whole team of former Chicago Bluehawk hockey stars had taken about two days before realizing that the only way to survive in the boondocks of Idaho mountain ranges were to get trucks, so now they all drove one. On that particular day, both Jax and Memphis had driven out to the airport some way from Shifter Grove, Jax with the intention of meeting his “betrothed,” and Memphis with the apparent intent of making sure that Jax didn’t bail before Slate could land the plane.

“Yeah, well, I’ve been pretending like mine don’t for the last few years, but that apparently only takes me so far,” Jax said with a shrug of his shoulders.

The small airplane that made up the only reasonable way of moving between Shifter Grove and the rest of the civilized world was about to touch down and even from this distance, Jax could see Slate happily chatting away with whoever was sitting in the seats behind him. There was a reasonable enough road leading out of Shifter Grove and onto the highways, but the drive was too long so most of the goods and people were still flown in.

It was an entirely odd place to set up a major NSHL team, considering that Shifter Grove didn’t even have a hotel and the inhabitant numbers hadn’t cracked four figures yet, but unsurprisingly, eccentric billionaires did not think much about reason and sensibility.

The team had yet to meet their new benefactor, though finding out who he was should have been easy enough… except for the fact that the region boasted ranches belonging to some of the richest shifters in the world, including one of the Goldplains brothers, known for their rock band and the fact that they were fucking loaded!

Exactly my dad’s kind of crowd… except for the fact that none of them wear their money like a badge of honor.

“So what’s she supposed to be like?” Memphis asked casually as the plane taxied to a stop.

“No idea. My father told me that she’s the daughter of an accountant working for him and her family tends toward sons.”

Jax and Memphis met one another’s gazes for a moment and both of them cracked wide smiles, shaking their heads. While most of the shifters living in Shifter Grove were progressively minded and had come there exactly to get away from the madness of their cultural heritage, they couldn’t exactly forget that there were plenty of crackpots out there clinging to the old ways.

People like Jordan Darmuth, for whom it was very important how many sons someone’s family had produced over the years.

“I thought those times were behind us,” Memphis said with a sigh.

“Me too,” Jax agreed, feeling the cold nip at his nose.

Idaho was not a particularly warm place as of late and he had to admit, he didn’t mind it one bit. As a polar bear, the snow and the mountains had always appealed to him and now, being outside of Chicago and the other metropolis he had lived in due to his career, he felt like twice the man he was before. A sneaking suspicion told him that this was exactly what the guy who bought the team had had in mind.

“So why go through with it?” Memphis queried, his tone neutral enough.

No wonder, considering Memphis had very recently gotten together with his own girlfriend, a woman who showed all the signs of being his mate for life. Though polar bears liked to think about everything too damn long, there wasn’t a single person on the team who wasn’t convinced that Memphis had found the one for him. It was easy enough to tell based on how well he was playing lately.

“Got my reasons,” Jax said noncommittally, though he would have been lying had he claimed that he was perfectly happy about it.

The ceremony was planned in a few weeks, right after their last game against the New Jersey Carnivores for the national title. It was going to be a small affair, just him and her and their prenup, essentially. The whole thing still felt so entirely insane that Jax hadn’t really put any time into really thinking about it. Every time he tried, he’d get a massive headache and his bear trying to remind him how he was a giant idiot for going through with something like that.

He wasn’t going to listen though.

“There she comes,” Memphis noted, apparently letting Jax off the hook this time.

For one maddening, weird moment, everything seemed to stand still as Alice Wilcox descended the few steps leading down to the snow- and ice-covered tarmac. Jax’s mouth quite literally fell open.

She was tall for a woman, five foot nine, and built with curves in mind. Even wearing a long coat, Jax could tell she hid a heavy sweep of her hips underneath it, with a soft stomach and bountiful breasts made to be fit into the palms of a werebear. She had pale, icy blue eyes and her hair was pushed up into a messy bun, a few tendrils licking at her face as she pulled her hat down a bit to protect against the snowfall.

Holy shit.

It wasn’t the most eloquent thought Jax had ever had, but it encompassed his current emotions well enough. He must have been staring for quite a while, because when Memphis clapped him on the shoulder with a hearty laugh, Jax realized that Slate had already clambered down the stairs as well and was carrying Alice’s suitcase as they headed toward the two idling polar bears.

“I think you got it from here on, hockey bear. She’s a keeper, play nice,” Memphis said with a wink, clambering into his truck and speeding off before Jax could say anything for or against his assessment.

So much for solidarity,
Jax thought wryly, peeling himself off the hood and walking to meet Alice and Slate, the local tiger shifter pilot.

He reached out a hand and grabbed the suitcase from Slate as soon as he was close enough, suddenly loath to think that any other man was touching anything of Alice’s without his express permission. It was a streak of possessiveness he hadn’t quite known himself to have, so it was all the more surprising when it lashed out so suddenly.

“You must be Jasper,” Alice said with the slightest smile, bringing the universe collapsing around Jax as she called him
that
name.

“Jax, yeah,” he said, pulling off his glove and taking her hand in a hearty shake. “You must be Alice.”

But that was about as far as his thoughts could make it. When their hands touched, that damn slow motion showed up again and Jax became suddenly, intimately, and inexplicably aware of every tiny little thing about Alice. Like the way she smelled, a bit of mint and jasmine—he wasn’t sure if it was her shampoo or perfume yet, but he wanted to find out. Or the way her perfectly small hand fit in his big grasp and how her body would probably conform against him too if he were to grab her right then and there and kiss her until the ice melted around them and spring bloomed.

“That’s me,” she said after a moment that seemed both too short and too long, broken by Slate’s knowing chuckle.

“I think you two will be all right on your own from here, huh? If you need anything, Miss, don’t hesitate to let me know. I’m the only pilot around here and there aren’t a lot of ways to get out of here without me being involved. Though I’m sure you won’t want to run anywhere,” he said with a wink, leaving Jax wondering whether it was meant for Alice or Jax himself, before Slate wheeled around and headed back to his plane with a jaunty whistle.

“So, this is awkward,” Alice offered, much more in control of her tongue than Jax currently was, apparently.

“You can say that again. But don’t,” Jax said, catching her when she started opening her mouth.

He smiled.

A sense of humor. Now we’re cooking with fire,
he thought with amusement, showing her to the truck and opening up the passenger seat’s door for her.

“What, don’t have time for base humor here in the cold North?” she asked with a bat of her long lashes, teasing rather than taunting.

“Plenty of time, but you don’t want to run out of your material before we even get out of the airport. I get a feeling we’re going to be needing a hell of a lot of humor over the next few weeks.”

He closed the door behind her and paused for a moment, looking at the suitcase in his hand before depositing it in the bed of the truck.

The hell had he done to wind up here? And how had he gotten so lucky as to have his father of all people hook him up with a woman who could have walked off the pages of
Shifters Playboy
?

Not that it really mattered. His polar bear was practically ready to throw her over his shoulder and make his way to the nearest minister already, and the man wasn’t too far behind on that idea.

Idaho must really be destroying my brain if I’m beginning to think that an arranged mail-order bride was any kind of a good idea,
Jax pondered, ambling over to his side of the truck and hopping in.

All he knew was that he and this beautiful little thing from New Hampshire were in for one hell of a weird ride together.

CHAPTER FOUR

Alice

The drive to Shifter Grove had been wrought with awkward silences, intersected at times with witty commentary about something or other about their current predicament. At least Jax had shown himself to not be a humorless, dull lump of a bear as Alice had originally feared, like she had when she flicked through his interviews and the few photo shoots he’d done.

It had seemed to her like the man had either been holding back during them or he really didn’t have anything to say. Neither were a good choice and though their conversation had mostly consisted of pauses and quips in between, she’d left the truck not feeling entirely despairing of her situation.

It helped that he was
so
nice to look at, even though she reminded herself adamantly that it was supposed to have nothing to do with it!

They landed in a red, happy-looking booth in a busy diner called the Sunrise Diner, apparently the only one in town—of course—and waited on their order of coffee and burgers. The coffee arrived quickly enough and Alice drank it thankfully, her eyes going wide as she tasted the deep, smoky roast and felt the notes of chocolate tingling on her palate past the first sip.

“This is
really
good coffee!” she commented, not even trying to hide her honest surprise at it.

“I know, right?” Jax replied with a smirk. “Almost makes it worth moving out of civilization.”

“Almost,” Alice echoed with a warped grin, the word having become far too familiar as of late.

“So, how are we going to play this?” Jax asked as the plates of burgers, a meal clearly made for a grown-ass shifter and not any regular human, was set down before them. “Do we do the whole ‘My name is Jax and I come from a world of wealthy misery’ or do we pretend none of this is happening and try to cringe through the next two weeks?”

“How about neither?” Alice asked, shoving her fork into the meal before her. “How about we just chat and see where
that
takes us.”

As much as she wanted to despise Jax for what his family was doing to hers, she couldn’t really bring herself to do it. He was too… nice. For a mountain of muscles and tendons that could rip her head off at any point if he so chose, anyway. But that maybe just added to his boyish charm, or whatever.