The Bear Who Loved Me by Kathy Lyons Read Free Book Online

Jesus, she was keeping him on his toes. Throwing things at him left and right, trying to catch him off guard.
    “I’m not stupid, though I should have seen it earlier.” She climbed slowly off the bed. His grizzly tracked every nuance of her movement, ready to take her down at the first show of disobedience. “Your frame and his are similar. The eyes are different, but not the jaw. You’ve got the same belief that you’re right and the rest of the world is wrong.”
    “I don’t think—”
    “And that would explain your obsession with him. To the point that you planted Amy next door to us.”
    A logical train of thought, though completely incorrect. “Amy was a lucky coincidence. And I’m not his father.” He frowned. “Though I think we’re third cousins or something. Once removed.”
    “No wonder Nancy didn’t want you involved in Theo’s life. She said you were insane.”
    He growled, deep and low in his throat. It wasn’t a sound he liked making, but he couldn’t stop it, either. It just happened and it drew her up short. “I’m not Theo’s father. Frank died ten years ago.” Probably not the best time to mention that Carl was directly responsible for that death. The man had gone feral and there’d been no choice.
    Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t know what kind of sick game you’re playing, but it’s not going to work on me.”
    “I don’t see this as any kind of game.” Don’t challenge me. Don’t challenge me. The man in him was all but begging her to stay back. The grizzly was busily envisioning all the ways he’d force her to submit.
    “Then believe this.” She dropped her voice to a low growl and advanced menacingly on him. “If you hurt Theo in any way, I will see you dead.” And with that, she spun on her heel and stomped into the bathroom, shutting the door with a solid thud.
    Carl gripped the desk rather than pursue her. In his mind, his grizzly roared the demand to possess her while the man held him back with every ounce of sanity he possessed. And all the while, he kept replaying her words in his mind, seeing the fire that had burned through her pale blue eyes. No shifter could be fiercer. No she-bear could be more protective of her young. And no woman—shifter or not—could have hit him so clearly between the eyes.
    She was magnificent. And she was his Maxima. It didn’t seem to matter that she wasn’t a shifter and didn’t even believe in them. Logic didn’t hold sway here. He was the Gladwin Max, and she was his mate. And she’d just threatened to kill him, which—now that he thought about it—was a grizzly bear mating ritual.

Chapter 4
    B ecca stared at her reflection in the mirror, desperately trying to think things through. Sadly, it wasn’t her strong suit. She was great in a crisis. If you needed someone to remain calm and react with precision during a disaster, then she was your girl. The more panic there was around her, the better she did.
    Except this time, she was the only one panicking. She was trapped in a town full of lunatics and hadn’t a clue how to maneuver her way out.
    But were they really lunatics? Part of her laughed at the question. Werewolves and were-bears were the stuff of bad horror movies. The most obvious answer was that the town was a victim of some chemical spill and the people were suffering from a mass hallucination. That made it all the more important for her to escape as soon as possible before she too succumbed to the vapors or got infected from the water or whatever.
    Two things kept her from hightailing it out of Camp Max. First, she couldn’t figure out how to escape. Not with the whole town invested in keeping her here. And second, there was something her sister had said about Theo’s father.
    The kindest thing she could say about her sister was that Nancy was troubled. Their father’s abandonment hit her sister the hardest, and Nancy had found escape in the nearest bar. She hadn’t even been thirteen, but she and her