Alpha Rancher Bear: BWWM Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance (Bears of Pinerock County Book 3) (16 page)

Keep reading for a preview of Lauren’s full-length paranormal romance,
Handcuffed to the Bear
, first in the Shifter Agents series.

A bear-shifter ex-mercenary and a curvy lynx shifter searching for her best friend's killer are handcuffed together and hunted in the wilderness. Can they learn to rely on each other before their pasts, and their pursuers, catch up with them?

Casey's first thought was,
How did rocks get in my bed?

Her second thought was that maybe the rocks were actually in her
head
.

Okay, I'm never drinking anything Billy mixes for me again.
Her boss's favorite bartender had a heavy hand with the alcohol.

Although ... she'd only had one drink. That she remembered.

The annual company mixer for Lion's Share Software, the tech firm she worked for, was held each year on a cruise ship off the coast of Washington. This was the first time Casey had been invited, after working her way up from a lowly mailroom employee to nothing less than the administrative assistant for Roger Fallon, the head of the company himself, in just two years.

All the high-level employees were shifters of one kind or another. It should have been an opportunity for Casey to spend two days among her own kind, making professional connections and sipping expensive drinks. They would be sailing up Puget Sound, around the scenic San Juan Islands, and then back to Seattle by lunchtime the following day.

At this point, though, all she remembered clearly was sailing out of Seattle. Billy had opened up the bar, and everyone was mingling out on the deck. She'd had a drink ... or possibly two ...

Shit, did I get roofied? What the hell happened to me?

She was slowly becoming aware that not all of her physical misery was because of a hangover. She was nauseated and trembling, but some of the shivering was because it was actually quite cold and damp. Those really
were
rocks pressing into her backside.

Her .... very
naked
backside.

Startled, and even more worried, Casey peeled her eyes open. It was dim, but not the flat darkness of a room with the doors and windows closed. She was outside somewhere. As her senses came slowly back online, she began to register the myriad little smells and sounds of a forest at night. Leaves rustled overhead; tiny things skittered in the darkness. She could smell wet leaf mold and the acrid tang where a fox had marked its territory. Since she was in her human form, her senses weren't much sharper than a non-shifter's, but she could feel the lynx instincts inside her stirring lazily at the proximity of small prey. Her awareness of her lynx side was fuzzy, though, muffled by the lingering vestiges of whatever the hell had happened to her.

And she really
was
naked. Rocks and wet leaves pressed into uncomfortable parts of her anatomy. Had she been—? Her mind shied away from even asking the question. She didn't feel terribly uncomfortable in the way that a person might if they were—if they'd been—

Raped
, she thought.
Don't dance around it. You're naked in the woods and the last thing you remember is having a drink at a party. The implications are obvious.

But she really didn't feel like she'd had sex anytime recently, forcible or otherwise. Mostly she just felt achy and miserable and like she might throw up if she sat up too suddenly.

And also naked. Very naked.

Casey started to raise a hand to investigate her physical condition, and was brought up short by a sharp jingling, like a heavy bracelet, and a tug on her wrist.

Wow, okay,
that
was twelve shades of not good. She was chained to something. It was too dark to see what it was. A log?

Casey gritted her teeth and sat up. Her stomach heaved, but once the initial wave of dizziness passed, she felt better now that she was vertical. At least, it made her feel a little more in control of the situation.

The in-control feeling went away fast when she discovered that she wasn't chained to a log, she was handcuffed to a dead guy.

"Oh Jesus," she whispered.

She gave the cuffs an experimental little tug. They were locked around her left wrist and Dead Guy's right one. He was a very large man, lying facedown in the damp dead leaves of the forest floor with his head twisted to the side, away from her. And he was naked too.

What. How.
Why?

Then an even worse thought occurred to her: maybe she was supposed to be dead, too. Shifters were generally more resilient than non-shifters, and it was possible that she'd been drugged—or, rather, poisoned—with something that was supposed to kill her, and then left in the woods with the other victim.

If only her memories weren't such a blur. If only she could
think
.

How did they catch me? What did I
do
?

There was a small, soft sigh from the body next to her. Casey nearly jumped out of her skin, and then laughed softly at herself. He wasn't dead either. Oh, thank God.

Which still left her handcuffed to a naked stranger in the woods.

Not the best day she'd ever had.

The naked guy stirred a little, and then subsided back into sleep or unconsciousness. Casey decided not to bother him quite yet—if he felt anything like she did, it was probably merciful to let him sleep a bit longer—and instead took stock of herself.

She didn't seem to be hurt, other than the headache. Her body was just like it had always been: wide hips, round thighs, a little more padding than she really wanted, and ample breasts that she was currently more aware of than usual, since normally they were contained in an industrial-strength bra to keep them from jiggling all over the place when she moved.

Her headache was mercifully going away, but she was starting to shiver in the night's damp chill. It might be summer, but she was still in the Pacific Northwest—at least, she
hoped
she was still in the Pacific Northwest—and the nights were cool.

Better get up and get moving. Which means waking up Sleeping Beauty here.

Casey rose to her knees and bent over her unexpected companion.

By now her eyes had fully adjusted to the darkness, as much as they were going to. Her new handcuff buddy was a white guy with dark hair and broad, powerfully muscled shoulders. Even lying down, he was big. She didn't really want to think about how tall he'd be standing up.

She started to reach for his shoulder, then pulled her hand back when she noticed a long scar across the shoulder blade, going down his back. What was that from, a knife? Now that she was looking more closely, scars marked his skin like a constellation of past violence. There was a long set of parallel stripes over his ribs that looked like claw marks, and a little puckered scar above his left hip where she was pretty sure a bullet had gone through.

Great
, she thought.
So not only am I stuck in the woods with an enormous naked stranger, but he's the kind who gets into fights a lot. Really violent fights. Better and better.

Casey sat back on her naked haunches and studied him. She wished her head would stop hurting, and that she had even the faintest clue who he was, or whether he was in league with the people who'd put her here.

There were tattoos on his right arm, the one she was handcuffed to. Casey had a little ink on her ankle, a small rose, but this guy had quite a bit more. She gave the cuffs a tug, shifting his limp arm so she could see it better.

The one on his forearm was a dark blur, and she had to tilt her head to make it out: an assault rifle and the word
Defend
.

Army, maybe?

Much more dramatic was the big, elaborate tattoo that covered his upper arm, wrapping around his shoulder. It was a snarling bear, standing rampant on its back legs. Grizzly, she thought.

Between the grizzly tat and the claw scars, odds were pretty good he was a shifter like her. Wendy used to be able to say she could tell by the way people smelled, but Casey couldn't. Maybe she just hadn't spent enough time around her own kind to be able to.

Thinking of Wendy made a little ripple travel across her skin, a shiver like the fur rising along the spine of her lynx form.

What do I tell him about me?

Play dumb, she decided. Play innocent victim until she figured out more about who he was and what he was doing here. Maybe someone who got into fights with people who had knives and guns would be a good ally ... if he didn't turn out to be an even more effective enemy.

She laid her hand on his shoulder. The skin was cool to the touch. Casey gave him a hesitant shake and called, "Hey? Mister?"

***

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Handcuffed to the Bear
!