Her Alpha Bear (Thorne Bears Book 2) Read online

  Contents

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  E-mail Sign up

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  Elise

  Lucas

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Elise

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jason

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Elise

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jason

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Elise

  Jason

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Elise

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Elise

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The End

  Note from the Author

  E-mail Sign up

  For Lily

  Her Alpha Bear

  Clara Cody

  Copyright

  Her Alpha Bear

  Clara Cody

  Copyright 2016- Clara Cody

  All Rights Reserved

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This book may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  CHAPTER ONE

  Jason

  It was a hell of a night. The bar was packed with local drunks, the country music blaring from every corner of the place and my barback had just called in sick. Perfect. Now, we were out of Coronas. “Can you bring up a case,” I asked the other bartender working, waggling an empty at her.

  “Sure, why not?” she said, rolling her eyes. She was just as swamped as I was, but that was one of the perks of being the boss. “I’m gonna kill that little shit, flu or no flu.” She disappeared into the kitchen, muttering.

  “I don’t like her,” said a pouty voice. Jenny sat on a stool, looking like a model straight out of Maxim, her bottom lip sticking out.

  “Who? Her?”

  She nodded. “She’s kind of a bitch.”

  “She’s fine, Jenny. You don’t like anyone.”

  “I like you,” she purred, leaning over the bar. Her breasts looked like they were about to spill out onto the hardwood counter. I blamed either magic or double-sided tape, but the girls remained in her shirt. “And I miss you, Jason Thorne.” She bit her lip, as though I had any trouble catching her meaning.

  “Oh, yeah?” I leaned against the bar too. “What exactly do you miss?” I already knew the answer. She missed the game. I wasn’t playing, though. Men never were with Jenny. They were the ball. We’d hooked up a few times, always ending with her disappearing and suddenly playing hard to get. That got old real fast, so I blew her off. This must be her new tactic.

  She gave a coy little glance to either side before leaning close and whispering, “I miss having you inside me.”

  Hard to argue with that.

  Just then, the front door swung open. For a Thursday night, the bar was relatively full. I shouldn’t have even noticed the new arrival. But he wasn’t alone; he came in with a thick, heavy cloud surrounding him. I could smell it from behind the bar. I felt the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, the animal inside me stirring.

  Another bear. He reeked of it. Jenny’s brow furrowed as she looked in his direction. It was the power. Humans were attracted to it on an instinctual level. He wasn’t even much to look at—short, rotund, with greasy blond hair—but he drew Jenny’s attention immediately. He sidled up to the other end, giving Jenny a lustful stare and sat down. “A beer,” he ordered.

  My lip curled. Oh, hell no. I walked over there, staring him down. “You have one minute to get out of my bar and two minutes to get out of my town,” I said, my voice a low, steady growl.

  “Your town?” He stood, trying to match me. “That’s not what I heard. People say there used to be a clan here, but they’re long gone now. Seems this territory’s up for grabs.”

  “It’s not. It’s mine.” If this douche had come in here and shown an ounce of respect, I wouldn’t have cared. I’m not a complete asshole. But he wasn’t the first bear who’d come in acting like a hot-shot, thinking that this area was theirs for the taking. I felt my eyes flash yellow, a clear threat to any shifter. “You have thirty seconds.”

  He swallowed hard before giving a nervous laugh. “Or what? You’ll change right here in your bar? In front of all these people?” He was calling me on my bluff. Some people knew about shifters, including some people in this town that had known my family long enough. But most people had no idea, and I wasn’t about to out myself and my whole race over this shit-head.

  “I don’t have to shift to kick your ass and loosen a few teeth.”

  He sniffed. “All right,” he said, holding up his hands and backing up. “I’ll go. There’s gotta be a dozen other towns ‘round here, with a dozen other bars.” He looked at Jenny. “Along with a dozen other town bicycles.”

  “That’s it,” I said, throwing back the divider. It landed with a crash as I stormed through, grabbing him by the back of his shirt.

  “Wait!” he shouted as I half pushed him towards the door.

  “Here’s the thing you lone bears don’t seem to understand,” I said. I shouldered the door open with a bang. “Wilder Lake isn’t just my territory.” With a rough shove, he flew out the door. “These are my people. If I catch you around here again, I will knock your fucking teeth out.”

  “Who was that?” Jenny asked when I returned to the bar. Everyone was looking, eyebrows raised.

  “Some lost asshole.” I flashed a smile. “Don’t worry, I gave him directions. He won’t get lost around here again.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  Elise

  Why did I ever agree to this? I asked myself as I rang the doorbell. I looked up at the number beside the door, praying that I’d gotten the right one. Thirteen. I was sure that’s what Dad had said. He and Carolyn had moved to Wilder Lake a few years ago. I hadn’t realized that it’d been so long since I visited them. Then again, my father didn’t exactly make it easy.

  I heard footsteps approaching and my stomach turned. Please, don’t be—shit! My shoulders slumped as my half sister opened the door. “Hi, Margo,” I said, trying my best to not sound disappointed.

  Margo stood in the doorway, looking as irritated as usual to see me. The corner of her lip curled in a half smile…the most she was ever capable of. “Elise!” she chirped in a voice that didn’t fit with the sneer on her face. “So glad you could come.” Margo was a bitch. It was just innate in her. She even looked like one. Her face had a certain weasel-like quality which she tried to mask with too much make-up and expensive clothes. She’d been one of the reasons I wanted to go to boarding school as a teen. Even though she was younger, she stopped at nothing to make my life difficult. One time, she had a sleep over with all her snotty little ten year old friends and she talked one into going into my room on a dare and eventually all of them snuck in and snooped around. The next day at school, everyone heard the thrilling tale of how they’d all found a vibrator and stacks of Playgirl magazine.

  “Cute shirt,” she sneered, looking me up and down with mild distain. “I suppose everything that was old, becomes new again…eventually.”

 
Except for bitter, aging soccer-moms, I thought to myself, stepping into the house.

  “And that necklace,” she said, picking it off my breast bone. She gave a chuckle. “A pigeon?”

  I pulled it away, protectively. “A swallow.” One of the many passerine birds I studied.

  She sniffed. “I always thought that anyone who spent so much time watching birds had to have some weird kind of voyeuristic fetish.” She looked down at the present I held, a rectangular box in Frozen-themed wrapping paper. “I suppose that’s for Abigail.” She held out her hand and took it, giving it a shake. “A Barbie? How original.”

  “Margo,” I heard the warning tone in Carolyn’s voice as she came down the hall, wearing a white, frilly apron. “I hope you’re not giving Elise a hard time already! She’s barely come in the door.” Her blonde-grey hair was styled into an effortless looking bob, though I’m sure it took her an hour. “Hello, dear!” she said with a smile. She held out an arm for a moment, like she was coming in for a hug, but dropped it and settled for stroking my arm. The tightness in her face wasn’t because she hated me like Margo. Carolyn was just anxious, especially around me. It was kind of sweet, really. Carolyn always tried harder than anyone else in the family to make room for me—she was the one that forced my father to invite me this weekend for Abigail’s fourth birthday party. But she never really knew how to be with me, how to act. Not that I was any better when it came to her.

  “Hi, Carolyn. How are you?”

  “Good, thanks. And you?”

  Margo rolled her eyes and disappeared down the hall. We followed behind, making small talk about the house.

  “You should have seen it when we moved in. It was a disaster.”

  We found my other half-sister Chrissy sitting at the kitchen island, drinking a cooler. She wore a pair of thick-rimmed hipster glasses and a baggy white t-shirt. Her hair was an amazing combination of blond, blue, and green. She looked like a mermaid. “Hey, Elise,” she said, sounding merely bored. Better than openly disdainful.

  A little girl with brown hair tied up in two ribbons skipped into the kitchen. “There’s my little miracle,” Margo said, scooping her up in her arms.

  “Who are you?” the kid said with a curled lip. She was a mini-Margo, right down to the look of contempt on her little face.

  “That’s your Aunt Elise, don’t you remember?” said Margo. “Oh, that’s right, you haven’t seen her since your second birthday. How silly of me.”

  I made a face. “I’ve seen her since then…there was a—a thing. A recital or something.”

  “Yes, there was.” Margo set the little girl down and crossed her arms. “But you had some work thing, so you couldn’t go. What a surprise.”

  “I sent you the video,” Carolyn chirped and took a sip from her own cooler. “Abigail was just darling in her little swan dress.”

  “Oh, right.” I stood and went to the fridge to get myself something, anything, to drink. I needed to be sporting a good buzz if I was going to survive today. I grabbed a beer and took a long swig.

  “Count your blessings,” Chrissy interjected, not even looking up from her phone. “The kid next to Abigail got stage-fright and froze, so darling little Abby kicked her and she puked all over her.”

  Margo sniffed, turning her nose up in the air. “I don’t know why you always have to bring that up.”

  “See,” Chrissy turned her phone to show me a video of my niece, indeed covered in puke, and crying, as Margo screamed at another woman, completely ignoring her daughter.

  “Yup, sorry I missed that. Um, is Dad around?”

  “He’s at the office,” Carolyn said, her voice tight. “He should be back any minute.”

  Margo, Chrissy, and I scoffed, simultaneously. Some things never change.

  “Well,” Carolyn started, trying to change the subject. “Chrissy is going off to university in the fall.”

  “Really?” There was genuine surprise in my voice. Chrissy had never been exactly studious. She was always more concerned with boys, Twitter, and make-up than school. “Where are you going?”

  She finally looked up from her phone. “I don’t know. I’m weighing my options.”

  “You’d better do it soon,” Margo said, her voice short. “Or you won’t get accepted anywhere.”

  Chrissy rolled her eyes. “Maybe at Last-Chance-U, but I’m sure the other schools will work it out.”

  That was meant as an insult. I worked at a university up North that was commonly referred to as Last-Chance-U, because it was nobody’s first choice. It was an unfair moniker though. For people like me, for instance, researchers, it was ideal. Up North, away from most cities, we had the opportunity to get out into nature and really learn.

  I studied birds. They were my passion. They’d been an escape when I was younger. Whenever Margo was driving me crazy or my father was just completely absent, I’d sneak off into the woods with a pair of binoculars, a sandwich and a bird guide. The bird guides got bigger and heavier, until finally, I decided to just turn it into my work. Although working as a professor in a university meant that I had to also teach classes, apply for grants, manage funds, write papers, and only occasionally do a bit of field work. Which meant almost never, but it was worth it. I was damned good at my job. And it showed. I was the youngest professor in my department, and within my first few years, I had more papers published than most had in their first five. My work ethic was probably the only thing I inherited from my father, but while I worked hard because of drive and sheer will, he stayed at the office to avoid his family. Not his whole family, I corrected myself, just you.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jason

  I sat on my front porch, drinking a beer and thinking about getting a dog. The place needed a dog. I wouldn’t be so bored all the fucking time, that was for sure. Silvie could come over in the evenings and let him out. Silvie was one of the few people in town that knew about us Thornes and what we were. She was an old friend of my parents, she’d been around forever, practically a second mother to all us kids. She’d bitch and moan about being too old to take care of a puppy, but I knew her better than that. She lived to take care of people and animals. Hell, I was thirty-one, and she still came over every other day to make sure I was eating properly and cleaning up after myself.

  I took a swig of my ice-cold beer, condensation running down the side in the June heat. The sun was just starting to go down. A few more days and they’d be here. A family reunion of sorts. I thought now that Sean was back in touch after so many years on the lamb, that it was time the family get back together. Sean and his girlfriend Lacey were coming in a few days, along with my sister Annie and her husband, another bear shifter and their two cubs. I hadn’t heard from the rest of my siblings though. I doubted I would at this point

  Some clouds rolled in over the pink sky. Looked like a storm. I normally loved shifting into my bear and standing in the rain, but I didn’t like the look of this one. Just then, a black SUV drive past. I took another swig of my beer, glaring in its direction. It was the third time the same vehicle drove by in the last hour. I grabbed my phone from inside and dialed Sean.

  “When are you coming?” I asked, pacing the floor. The sooner Sean and Lacey got here, the better. Two bear shifters defending a house wasn’t great, but it was still better than just me.

  “This weekend,” Sean answered. “Why? What’s up, Jason?”

  I sighed. “A black SUV drove past today.”

  “And?”

  “That’s how it starts. I think someone else is interested in the amulet. Is it safe?”

  “Of course, it’s safe.”

  “Don’t bring it with you. I don’t want that thing within a hundred miles of those fucker’s hands.”

  “Okay, no problem. I’ll leave it with Ryan, I trust him. But who do you think’s after it?”

  “Beats me. And maybe it’s just me being paranoid, but I’d rather have you here, just in case.”

  “The soonest I can ge
t there would be Thursday. Lacey can drive up by herself later. I gotta stick around till Ryan learns the ropes down at the bar.”

  It wasn’t even Sean’s bar, but that didn’t stop him from being protective of it. That’s how us bears are. We take care things, even if they aren’t ours. “Fair enough.”

  “What about the others? Anyone else coming?”

  “They will.” I stopped in my tracks, staring out the back window. It looked out onto a grassy meadow, with a dense forested area behind. Movement caught my eye. I muttered a curse word under my breath.

  “What?” Sean asked.

  Just then, a head popped up from behind some brush, before ducking down again. “I gotta go. Someone’s out behind the house.”

  “Jason, don’t you think you should call the cops?”

  I scoffed. “Would you?” No self-respecting alpha-bear would get the cops involved for a matter of territory. If it was what I thought then the cops couldn’t help anyway. The people that were after the amulet weren’t something a normal, small-town police force were prepared to deal with. In fact, it would just put them in danger.

  “Just be careful, bro. Don’t be stupid.”

  “I never am.” I hung up and charged out the back door. Energy pumped through my veins, my animal itching to get out. I huffed, air streaming through my nostrils.

  Whoever was sneaking around back there popped up again. A woman. She hadn’t noticed me approaching yet. Good. Her hair was tied in a high bun on the top of her head. She wore a khaki utility vest and a pair of tight shorts. She hardly looked like she was out on a reconnaissance mission, but if not, why the hell was she rooting around back here? On private property. My private property.

  I moved quickly but quietly, wanting to maintain the element of surprise as long as possible, but still, I wasn’t exactly hiding. I was walking across an open field, and somehow she hadn’t noticed. I couldn’t believe it. Either she was a terrible spy, or something else was going on.