Snowbound (Arctic Station Bears Book 1) by Amelie Hunt, Maeve Morrick Read Free Book Online Page A

asked.
    “I don’t know,” I said. “Something…happened just now. I…” What? What was it? My instincts told me I was in love, but I don’t fall in love. And definitely not with some dude I’ve known less than a week. It felt like fate.
    Oh shit. I pushed myself up on my hands and looked into his smiling face. Some deep part of me threw a tantrum as my skin pulled away from his.
    “It feels like fate,” I said. I didn’t think it was possible, but Liam’s smile grew wider.
    “Thank God,” he said. “I thought I was the only one.”
    My mind was racing. My heart was racing. “And it’s okay? I feel like I’m going crazy.”
    “You’re not going crazy. You know shifters have mates—”
    “I know of it.”
    “I think you might be mine.” He brushed the hair out of my eyes.
    God, my hair must be a mess, I thought .
    “Relax. You look beautiful,” he said. “I just…wasn’t expecting to ever meet my fated mate. I just thought it was a thing shifters told themselves to keep from feeling alone.”
    I smiled. “I’ve only read about it in books, so you know more about it than I do. I don’t think either of us is alone anymore.” Just saying the words out loud terrified me and calmed me at the same time. I guess I couldn’t discount insanity just yet.
    I stood up, trying to hold in his seed. I wasn’t ready to let him go completely just yet. Our clothes were all over the place, and I found mine in a nearly useless order. Socks. Sweater. Pants. Bra. Where the hell were my panties? Liam was slow to dress, not that I minded, and we didn’t talk much. We just stared at each other a few times until we both started to giggle from the awkwardness.
    “Aren’t you going to get dressed?” I asked.
    Liam walked to the door and pressed on it with all of his strength. The way the muscles in his back and ass flexed made me wish I was slower to dress as well.
    “Nothing,” Liam said. “We’re trapped in here.”
    “Is there any other way out?”
    “Just the drains in the floor. We’re not getting out that way.”
    “So what do we do? Can you force the door? What if we pushed it together?”
    The cold steel of the door was like a wet blanket after touching his warm chest. Even the two of us combined couldn’t budge the door.
    “We’ve got to warn the others,” he said. For a second, I thought he was talking to the door, like he was trying to reason with it.
    “What are you thinking?”
    “I think you need to stand back. I’m going to shift and I don’t really know what is going to happen.”
    “I think that if you shift and lose control I’m pretty fucked anyway. I’ll just stay here.”
    “At least pick up the scalpel.”
    I conceded the argument. We didn’t have time for debate. I clutched the scalpel and came back to stand by him.
    “Here we go,” he said. He did not step out of his skin like I was expecting, but rather started to shift like Calder. His bones cracked and reformed. Fur sprang from his flesh. Claws erupted from the tips of his fingers and toes.
    “Hurts,” he said. His voice was strange. More guttural. He fell to his hands and knees and completed the shift. A gigantic polar bear now stood in front of me. I could not help myself. I reached my hand out and touched his fur. So warm. Did you really expect a polar bear to be cold? Shut up, brain.
    He turned and looked at me with deep brown eyes. When he took a step toward me, I almost held out the scalpel like a deterrent. Compared to the size of the bear, I might as well have been holding a toothpick, anyway. He nuzzled me with his giant head. I stroked his fur. Then he sort of…I don’t know. Herded me? He pushed me with his nose, again and again, moving me away from the door. Then a lightbulb came on. You want me to move away from the door. Right. I got underneath a table on the other side of the room and away from any of the aquariums should anything go wrong.
    Liam roared and charged at the door, slamming his massive