Big Bear Mountain - The Complete Series (11 page)

C
assie wasn’t sure how she felt about her
grandmothers passing. They hadn’t been that close, not since grandma had a
falling out with her mom. That had been when she was still too young to understand
why her mom was so upset with grandma and why it meant she couldn’t go and stay
at grandmas anymore.

That’s what she missed the most. Her time
in grandma’s cabin, learning needle work, hearing stories from when her grandma
was her age and grandma’s baking. She was always baking something. She still
remembered the fresh scent of pine when she woke each morning to the crackle of
the open fire and the sound of the crystal clear water that ran from the
natural spring in grandma’s yard.

When she cracked the window of her restored
Oldsmobile Cutlass, the scent of the forest and the chill in the air brought
the memories flooding back and tears welled in her eyes as the pain of regret
weighed heavy in her heart. She regretted the precious years wasted because of
some stupid argument. Her fingers found the silver key shaped pendant her
grandmother had given her the last time they saw each other. Cassie had worn it
around her neck ever since. She fondly remembered grandma smiling as she placed
the pendant in Cassie’s palm and used her spotted, bony fingers to force her
tiny hand closed around it.

“This is the key,” her grandmother had
said, in all seriousness. “One day, you’ll understand what it means, but for
now, how about we keep it between us. Our little secret, okay?” The old lady
gave a conspiratorial wink. Young Cassie nodded as she accepted the old lady’s
gift, although she didn’t fully understand. All she knew was that she shouldn’t
tell her mother.

Cassie took her responsibility seriously
and treasured the keepsake all these years, wearing it whenever she could and
keeping it safe when she couldn’t. Not because it was of any real value, but if
it was important to her grandmother, then it was important to her, too.
Everyone knew that grandma wasn’t rich and had nothing that anyone would
consider a treasure yet, somehow, that made the heirloom seem all the more
precious.

N
othing looked familiar as she continued up
the mountain road. It had been too long since she had ventured to Big Bear
Mountain. Much had changed. Law enforcement, for one thing. When she was
growing up, there wasn’t need for a sheriff on the mountain and the State
Troopers based in the valley were hardly ever called upon to settle disputes or
breaches of the peace.

With a smile, Cassie recalled the scary
bedtime stories her grandmother would tell of men who could turn into bears and
other fierce creatures. They were all the law they needed on the mountain, she
would say.

“We look after our own up here,” she
recalled her saying. And Cassie intended to maintain that tradition.

She glanced down at the envelope from the
lawyer containing a copy of the will, a letter she couldn’t bring herself to
open at the time and an old fashioned iron key to the cabin lay on the
passenger seat. Barely concealed by the large brown legal envelope was what she
called her American Express. She never left home without her CZ 75 Shadow. With
its steel frame and 17 round magazine, it wasn’t your typical ‘girl gun’. The
dealer at a local gun show nearly wet his pants laughing when she asked to try
one. He was convinced it was too much gun for her to handle.

He changed his tune, though, when she set
her sights on the silhouette target and double tapped two rounds grouped nice
and tight in the center mass in rapid succession followed by a fast, smooth
kill shot to the head without any hesitation. She earned some respect that day
and he cut her a deal on the gun and a few tactical accessories that he thought
might prove handy in her line of work.

Her fascination with firearms, handguns in
particular, began during her vacations at her grandmothers. She remembered
seeing her custom made, pearl handled Colt .45 for the first time and watching
the old lady handle it like a pro, shooting tin cans off a fence railing.
Nobody was going to mess with Grandma, living alone in the woods. She even had
a collection of early Colt revolvers that her grandfather had given her. She
loved to show them off and would even fire them from time to time, loading the
chambers with black powder and ramming home the lead ball like a modern day
Annie Oakley.

When they said ‘country girls don’t
retreat, they reload’, I think they were talking about grandma,
Cassie thought fondly. With ache in her chest and tears threatening
to burst from her eyes, she drove on toward the cabin she hadn’t seen in many
years.

C
hecking the GPS, she could see she wasn’t
far away from the cabin. The turn off should be right around … a black Chevy
truck spun its wheels in the dirt track as it shot out of a side road, cut in
front of her, fishtailing as it careened down the mountain. Through the rear
vision mirror, she followed its path as it raced into the distance.

Then she realized that the truck had come
from her turnoff. And the only thing on that stretch of road was her
grandmother’s cabin.

J
ack’s bear wanted to run.
Needed
to
run. Hard and fast to burn off the hormones that surged through its massive
body. The raw sexual energy that the outlandish woman had somehow sparked
within him had to be released or he’d likely burst with frustration. The bear’s
massive paws pounded the soft earth as it galloped across the forest floor.
Gleaming brown fur, limned golden by the setting sun, undulated as the powerful
muscles beneath rippled.

This was what his bear craved during the
years Jack was enlisted in the army. Now, the big Grizzly was in its natural
element. It was at home in the forest. Running around a stinking hot, sandy,
wind-blown desert just wasn’t right, not when you belonged somewhere like this.
Tall, hundred year old trees, pristine water from snow melt high up the
mountain and the dark, earthy, organic smell that can only come from the forest
floor. Jack’s bear was as happy as it had even been.

And if Jack’s bear was happy, so was Jack.
Raven wished he’d figured that out a lot sooner but there was no point dwelling
on the past. Nothing was going to change that.

As he shifted back into his human form,
Jacks thoughts turned to the woman who had taken his breath away earlier in the
day. He’d hardly stopped thinking about her and he had no idea why. She was
abrasive, prickly, sarcastic and plain rude. Yet he couldn’t help but be
attracted to her. Perhaps he’d spent too much time in hostile places and
hostility was all he really knew or understood. Maybe it was something else.
His bear wanted her. That much was clear. He felt a stirring in his pants and
tried to convince himself that it was probably just the testosterone talking.
He was damaged. Broken. The doctors had told him that. He’d seen the damage the
blast concussion had caused on the scans. There was no way he’d drag someone
else down with him. That’s why he’d chosen this wilderness community to make
his peace and live out his days playing sheriff and collecting his army
pension.

Or had the wilderness chosen him and his
bear? One of the chopper pilots who had saved his ass on a mission a few years
back recently told him about an opening for a sheriff on Big Bear Mountain.
He’d nearly choked on his coffee he laughed so hard. Big Bear Mountain? Really?
His chopper pilot buddy, ‘Spider’ aka
Lieutenant Jim Webb was usually a man of few words, but on this
particular occasion, lubricated with a couple beers, he really went to town and
sang the praises of Big Bear Mountain. Spider took up flying rescue choppers up
in the mountains after the Navy downsized him out of a job.

“Trust me,” he’d
said, “the place would really suit a guy like you.”

If Jack hadn’t
known better, he’d have sworn that Spider knew about his bear.

Knew that he was a
shifter.

A freak.

S
hifting back into
his bear, he ran through the forest enjoying the feel of the dank soil beneath
his paws and the smell of the cool mountain air as it filled his heaving lungs.
Maybe he was a freak somewhere else, but not here. He was in his own
environment. Here he was anything but a freak.

Jack’s bear ran
and ran until it was parched and couldn’t run any further.

A
fter slamming the
magazine home and racking the slide to chamber a round, Cassie cocked the ham
mer and flipped the safety off. She approached the unlatched and
slightly open front door of the cabin ‘cocked and locked’. Not the safest of
gun carrying protocols, but sometimes being too safe can get you killed.
Especially when you didn’t know who’s waiting for you on the other side of the
door.

She was in the middle of nowhere. Alone. No
backup. The smooth, well-oiled 9mm was all that stood between her and whoever
might still be in the cabin. Just because she saw the black truck speeding away
didn’t mean they hadn’t left someone behind. Waiting for her.

But why?
That was the question that went through her mind. But it would have to wait.
She needed to sweep the cabin and make sure it was clear. Something strange was
going on and she had a bad sense about it.

The steps creaked as she climbed them. So
did the timbers on the porch as she walked toward the door.
So much for the
stealth approach
. Keeping to the left of the doorway, Cassie approached,
muzzle up and kicked the door open with her foot. She waited a beat then went
in, gun first and swept the room for hostiles.

It was empty. A mess, but empty. Someone
had done a thorough job of searching for something. Furniture was strewn
around, bookshelves upturned and drawers emptied all over the floor. Everything
in the kitchen had been trashed with sacks of flour emptied all over the floor
and the contents of every cupboard thrown haphazardly as the unknown intruders
searched every nook and cranny. The only thing left undisturbed was an
incongruous fire extinguisher hanging askew from a mounting bracket near the
stove.

Approaching the bedroom, she performed the
same routine and checked under the bed and inside the closet for intruders.
There were none. The place had been ransacked but she was all alone. She
couldn’t even begin to imagine what anyone would hope to find in a penniless
old lady’s cabin in the woods. It made no sense.

E
jecting the chambered round and lowering the
hammer, she kept the gun in her hand. She wasn’t ready to holster it. Spooked
by the apparent burglary and trashing of the cabin, she felt vulnerable but was
ready to favor safety over readiness to shoot. For now.

The sound from the nearby tree line had her
immediately regretting her ‘safety first’ approach. With a two handed grip, she
went out the door, gun barrel raised, scanning for the source of the sound.

She heard nothing but running water from
the nearby spring.

She waited.

Then she heard it again. A slurping,
sucking sound, coming from the spring. It sounded like an animal. A very big
animal. It certainly didn’t sound human. She was sure of that, so all the more
reason to approach the sound ‘gun up’.

That’s when she saw it. At first she didn’t
believe her eyes and it took a breath for her brain to process what she was
seeing. A giant of a bear drinking from the water that flowed from her
grandmother’s … no …
her
spring.

The bear had already smelled her scent as
she approached but it was thirsty and continued drinking until the woman stopped
and gasped in shock, her gun aimed squarely at him.

They stared at each other. What once felt
like a massive weapon trembled in her hands as she realized how ineffectual it
was against the behemoth that stood before her. If it attacked, she was so
close that she’d be lucky to even get one round fired before it was upon her.

The bear’s nostrils flared slightly as it
lifted its head and breathed in her scent. Then it did a strange thing.

S
lowly, very … very slowly, the bear averted
its eyes and took a step backward, not wanting to antagonize or threaten the
woman aiming the gun at its head. Without a sound, the bear turned and walked
into the forest, exposing its huge and well protected read end to the line of
fire should she fire at him.

With her mouth agape and her gun lowered
harmlessly toward the ground, she stared at the butt of the gigantic bear as it
waddled away from her. The creature hadn’t made so much as a sound and looked
like it might have been more afraid of her than she was of it.

“What the hell just happened?” she asked
herself as she stared into the dense, green forest that had simply swallowed
the bear until it completely disappeared.

H
er emerald eyes
sparked fire. She might have been in shock, but she wasn’t exactly afraid and
she was certainly ready to put up a fight. The gun was aimed straight at him.
Unwavering. Taking on an 800 pound Grizzly with nothing but a 9mm handgun?
Who
does that?
She must have heard him splashing around in the water. He hadn’t
even realized where he was. He sure knew now.

The small caliber
weapon wasn’t going to kill him, but even with his inherent healing abilities,
a shot to the head was still going to hurt like a son-of-a-bitch. No point
making the crazy woman even crazier, but he couldn’t help himself. He needed to
scent her one more time. There was something about her that stirred him. Drew
him to her in a way that was both unnerving and completely out of the question.
He drew a deep breath of her scent before adopting a submissive posture.

Slinking backward
into the safety of the forest, Jack’s bear was doing something that didn’t come
naturally to the man or the bear. Retreat.

The huge bear
growled deep inside as its entire body churned with rampaging hormones, giving
rise to a primal need to mate. A need the bear hadn’t felt in a very long time.

N
either had Jack for
that matter. He’d had a few girlfriends in the past, but a career working
covert operations and sometimes crossing borders into three or four different
counties on a single day didn’t bode well for romantic relationships. For Jack,
spending an entire weekend on leave with the same girl constituted a long term
relationship. It wasn’t that he wanted it to be that way or that he shunned
commitment, but it was the life he had chosen and that’s how it was. The
mission always came first. Relationships didn’t help him achieve his
objectives. It was as simple as that.

Yet, he was drawn
to the impossibly frustrating woman in a way he couldn’t fathom. His bear just
wanted a mate and sensed she was ‘the one’ for him just from her scent. That,
he understood. But a strange ache beneath his ribs told him something else was
going on and he couldn’t get her out of his mind. The image of her fearless
eyes, her curvy combat stance and the way she held the gun on him in a strong
two handed grip spoke volumes about the contradictory female. Then he thought
back to the way she had treated him earlier that very day.
Great, she’s
perfect and unattainable
.

But something was
off and he was annoyed with himself for not realizing it sooner. He couldn’t
tell what it was, but when his bear had taken a deep breath of her scent, he
sensed something else mixed in with her distinctly feminine pheromones. He
should have been able to identify without effort and there was a time when he
would have, too. He blamed the country living for making him soft and pushed
the niggling thought aside.

I
t was later that
night as the irritating memory clawed at his efforts to sleep that it came to
him. He sat bolt upright in his bed.

It was impossible.

It made no sense.

He knew exactly
what the source of the tar like aroma was. Jack’s face darkened with anger. His
inner bear growled at the thought of what that might mean to his mate.