Snowbound With The Bear (Bear Creek Clan 4) by Harmony Raines Read Free Book Online

Trouble was, Franklin wasn’t one of them. So he didn’t see the danger, until one of Hal’s sisters was shot.
    Prim was only a cub; she had been playing hide and seek in the forest with a bunch of kids from town. Luckily, she was only winged, but Hal had gone crazy. Not in the way a man usually went crazy—this was more of a blood rage. In the middle of pounding this guy into the ground, his bear was unleashed and he nearly killed the man.
    Now, no one felt bad for the guy, but it put every other shifter in danger. Brad and the Cartwright brothers, along with Will, helped cover it up. But the only safe way for Hal not to be recognised was for him to go and hide high up in the mountains where no one would find him.
    “At first I lived in a cave, about half a mile away from here. Then my friends and family helped me build this cabin.”
    “How long ago was that?”
    “A couple of hundred years.”
    Her mouth fell open. “The man who you attacked is long gone. Why stay up here?”
    His appetite had gone, but he sat down at the table, looking at her imploringly. “I couldn’t risk it ever happening again. I don’t know why I couldn’t control my bear. So I couldn’t risk it ever happening again.”
    “But you were young. Wolves have trouble in adolescence. The wolf wants to be the master.”
    “But what if it wasn’t? What if I can’t control it and I kill someone? I’m stronger than I was then. Much stronger.”
    She shook her head. “You wouldn’t hurt anyone. You have the kindest heart, I can tell.”
    “Around you, yes, you’re my mate. I couldn’t hurt you, but other people, I don’t know.” It was a question he had asked himself so many times. It was also the reason he had never gone looking for his mate. Because if he couldn’t leave the mountain, he was sentencing her to a life of solitude, too.
    “Hal. It doesn’t matter to me.”
    “It should.”
    “You saved me, you’re my mate. I know everything that entails.” She came to him and wrapped her arms around his shoulders, pulling his hand close to her breasts and holding him there in an embrace. In return, he put his arm around her waist and pulled her close. “Anyway,” she added, stroking his hair. “You forget I have nowhere to go. And if you hadn’t been here, I would have died out there in the snow.”
    “I hadn’t thought about it that way.”
    “I think it’s time you let go of the past and we embraced the future, together.”
    “Well, right now, our future is made up of cold beans and rice.”
    “Yummy,” she said, but she sat down and ate it anyway.
    Tomorrow he was definitely going to get the pack, before the food in it spoiled. He didn’t want them eating this for the next two weeks while the snow thawed.
     

Chapter Twelve – Fiona
    “What do you do for entertainment around here?” she asked.
    They had eaten their dinner; even cold, it had not been as bad as she expected. Then they had washed the dishes, dried them and put everything away. When he went to each fire and banked them up for the night, she had followed him, content to be in his company. Now they were in the sitting room, their thighs touching as they sat watching the fire dance. Outside, darkness had settled. The wind could be heard trying to get down the chimney and vanquish the warm fire, to leave them cold and miserable. So far, the fire was winning, but the wind didn’t sound as though it was going to give in anytime soon.
    He turned to her in earnest. “Honestly?”
    She nodded, unsure of what he was going to say, but wanting to hear it anyway. He was such a mystery to her; she longed to find out every detail about him, but she wanted to take it slow. His words from earlier still haunted her. It seemed impossible that a strong, gentle man such as Hal could possibly inflict that much harm on another person. She tried to tell herself he was only protecting his family, his sister, who could have been killed by a thoughtless hunter. But it still