Husband Fur Hire (Bears Fur Hire Book 1) (2 page)

He read faster. The girl had been care-flighted to Anchorage. The doctors were hopeful for her to survive, but as of last week, she was still in the ICU, listed in critical condition. When the hell had Clayton dropped this packet off? Ian searched for a date, but all of the printed numbers in the top left corner of each page were a week old. Cole was probably in the wind by now and would be harder to track.

Ian huffed an angry sigh and relaxed into the seat cushion as he stared out the window, his thoughts racing. A little girl. The food in his stomach turned to a block of cement. A little innocent girl, and Cole went after her. Why? Because that was what McCalls did. They should’ve done the world a favor and let their line die off generations ago, but no, they just kept procreating with unknowing humans. All the pups were males because female offspring didn’t live past childbirth, and all male McCalls grew up just as crazy as their ancestors. There was poison in their bloodline, and now the present-day pack was apparently old enough to start letting the madness in.

A week. What if Cole had gone after Elyse while Clayton was waiting for Ian to wake up? He swallowed hard. Elyse Abram. Best to keep her name formal in his mind since his heart started pounding every time he thought of her. It was dangerous to imagine himself attached to anyone. He had a better moral compass than to pass his bear shifter shit onto an innocent.

He needed to get it together. Eat, find a hotel, and scrub himself clean until he felt like a human again, charge his long-dead cell phone, check and prep his plane, and head to Galena to track down that psycho sonofabitch that would split a woman’s lip and harm a little girl just as easily as armed trappers.

Cole McCall had hell coming for him, and the damning fire that was about to engulf him had a name.

Ian Silver’s hunt started now.

Elyse wiped sweat from her brow and pulled another bunch of rotten potatoes from the wooden box in the root cellar. She was so desperately low on food that each one felt like a slash to her stomach. Each represented another meal she wouldn’t eat because stupid Cole had stolen half her danged vegetables and most of their meat as well, just to pilfer off to his no-account brothers. She wasn’t totally off the grid, but there was no money for red meat. Red meat was hunted during the warm season and rationed, and if someone in the community needed help, people helped, knowing they would do the same for them if they could. But the way the McCalls did things was stealing. They never repaid anyone, and when she and Cole had started dating, the mooching had begun early. And the last couple months, when Cole was out drinking and kicking up some awful rumors with a couple of townie girls, his two brothers, Miller and Lincoln, had become aggressive with their freeloading.

She’d fought it, but Cole never defended her from their treatment and yelled at her for resisting his brothers. “They’re family,” he said, as if that gave them an excuse to abuse her hard work. Well, they were no relation to her. She’d worked her ass off to gather enough food to last the winter for her and Cole, and he’d just thrown it away, as if his no-good brothers were more important than her. So many red flags she’d ignored because she’d loved him. Or thought she did, but thinking back, perhaps she was just so desperate not to be alone through the long winters that she mistook companionship for love. Being with someone and still feeling completely alone was the worst feeling in the world.

She would never, ever make that mistake again. Love, or whatever amounted to love, was off the table from here on. Love had starved her and hurt her heart, and he’d been able to walk away so easily. From day one, she’d told him what she was and wasn’t willing to put up with, but he’d broken every rule, one by one, as if he was testing her to see how long until she cracked. Fucker. Elyse sniffled and wiped her eyes. She’d let a man ruin her. Uncle Jim would be rolling over in his grave if he saw how weak she’d been with Cole. He would’ve never given her this place in his will if he’d known how pathetic she would turn out. Well, no more!

She knew what she could and couldn’t do. She couldn’t run this homestead by herself. Not with the cattle and the other livestock to take care of, and not when she couldn’t leave the animals long enough to hunt game meat for the winter. She needed a helpmate, and this time she was going to do it better. She was going to be stronger. Uncle Jim had put an ad in the newspaper for a helpmate when he’d needed one, and he’d been rewarded with Marta, who’d worked this place beside him for twenty years before she passed. He’d found the exact partner he needed to run this place, and that’s just what Elyse aimed to do, too. No more romantic bullshittery or fairy-tale notions. She would find a good, capable husband who would just happen to be fantastic at leading the subsistence lifestyle this place required. She was going for the man with the strong back and leaving love off the table completely. A wise woman learned from her mistakes, and Cole McCall had been the biggest, most disappointing mistake of all.

Her cell phone rang, and she tossed it a glare before she moved to a box with precious few carrots left in it. Half of those were rotted, too, and it became abundantly clear that her rationing hadn’t been doing her any favors. The vegetables were old and going bad. No amount of cool, moisture-free air and sawdust packing could keep them edible forever.

Another ring, and she wiped the sawdust from her palms to her jeans and picked up the phone that was about to jump off the wooden stool she’d set it on. She didn’t recognize the number.

“Hello?”

“Uh…” There was a pause that was too long to be polite.

Elyse narrowed her eyes. “Cole, if this is you, fuck off.”

She went to end the call, but the man said, “No, no, wait,” in a deep, gravelly voice that was definitely not Cole’s. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think you would pick up.”

“Well, you called me. What do you want?”

“Cole McCall. Have you seen him?”

Elyse sank down to the stool and bit her thumbnail. “Who wants to know?”

The man gave off a nervous laugh. Deep and rich, like his voice. “Look, I’m sorry for interrupting—”

“Does he owe you money?”

“No.”

“Did he bang your sister?”

The man cleared his throat and sighed. “No.”

“Mister, I haven’t seen Cole in months. I booted his ass out of here mid-winter. I haven’t seen him at my homestead or in town. His brothers still hang around the bar in Nulato, though, if you want to ask them.”

“Okay. Thanks for taking the time to talk to me. Miss, are you crying?”

“Of course not.” She wiped her tears with the back of her hand and swallowed hard. “I never cry.” Stupid sniffles were giving her away.

“Over Cole?”

“Ha,” she huffed.

“I’m a complete stranger who you’ll never meet.”

Elyse forced herself to stop biting her nail—a bad habit she couldn’t seem to break—and leaned back against the stone wall of the root cellar. “Not over Cole. Over the situation he left me in.”

“What situation?”

“It’s nothing. I’m fine, just angry with myself. Everything will work out. It always does.” She’d been repeating those lies for the last three snowy months.

“Hmm,” the man said noncommittally, as if he didn’t believe her lies either. He had a nice sort of voice. Calm and deep, but with a gravelly rasp, as though he didn’t use it often. She couldn’t get a grasp on his age, though. He could be twenty or sixty. She smiled and imagined he was twenty-six like she was. Food for thought since there weren’t many people her age in Galena.

“Elyse Abram?”

She froze. He knew her whole name, and the way he said it, so formally, sounded so strange against her ear. “Yes?”

“If you need anything, you call this number, and I’ll get it to you. Food or anything. No strings attached.”

“What?” She sat up straighter against the cold stool. “But…you don’t even know me.”

“That’s okay.”

She waited the span of three breaths, her mind racing round and round. No man had offered her help out of the blue…well…since before she met Cole, and even then, it was kind neighbors who had a stake in helping her out. She had repaid their kindness and more as soon as she had been able. But complete strangers didn’t offer help. They just didn’t.

The line was quiet, the man still waiting, and for lack of a better answer, she murmured, “Okay,” knowing she would never call this number again. Her pride was as big and wide as a canyon, and asking for help from someone she couldn’t repay reeked too much of charity. And she was no charity case. “It was nice talking to you.”

The man’s voice softened as he said, “You, too, Elyse Abram.”

The line went dead, and Elyse stared at the screen until long after it had gone dark. She couldn’t believe that five minutes ago she was thinking there wasn’t a decent man left on earth, and then one had called her unexpectedly.

Perhaps that was a sign.

Not everyone was as broken as Cole McCall, so maybe she could stop being so mad at the world and get on with living already.

And the first step to doing that was putting the ad in the newspaper, just like Uncle Jim had done all those years ago.

She would be damned if she was going to come out of another Alaskan winter this hungry.

****

Whatever situation Cole had put Elyse Abram in made Ian want to kill him twice. Some put-down orders haunted him. The ghosts of his marks seemed to cling to him. His animal wasn’t a killer for sport. He was defensive when cornered and could hold his own with any shifter who went on the attack, but being an enforcer wasn’t a choice. It was a career chosen for him by his lineage. Grizzly shifters were rare, and they were the biggest of all the were-animals. He and his brothers existing at all kept most of the shifters in Alaska in line. But sometimes when his hand was forced and someone went mad, hurt humans, or threatened to expose their kind, he had to hunt them when his animal didn’t see the point.

With Cole, it was different.

Inside, his bear was snarling to get the damned deed done already. And for the first time in as long as he could remember, Ian was concerned his bear was actually going to enjoy putting someone down. It was that little sniffle Elyse had made. That tiny noise had his bear churning in his gut, roaring to get out and bleed something.

What Elyse hadn’t known when she gave him the whereabouts of Cole’s brothers was that Ian was calling her from the bar in Nulato. Currently, he was sitting a mere thirty miles down the Yukon River from her homestead. So close.

Ian fingered the napkin under his beer and lifted his narrowed eyes to a pair of scraggly werewolves talking low between themselves in the darkest corner. Even from here, his nose burned with the stink of alcohol wafting off them. They must be in some kind of important conversation if they’d missed him sauntering in. He’d showered and trimmed his beard, and sure, he looked human enough right now, but there was no mistaking the scent of bear that clung to him, and werewolves had impeccable senses of smell.

Miller’s nostrils flared, and he jerked his pissed-off glare to Ian. There he was—alpha of the McCall pack and general asshole. Lean as a whip, disheveled, greasy hair, and a shade of blue eyes that screamed “somethin’ ain’t right.” Wild Miller, dipping his toe into the insanity pool, too.

He stomped over, his untied boots clomping with every step. “I know what you’re doin’ here.”

“Sit down.”

Miller slammed his fist against the table and leaned into Ian, eyes lightening by the second. “You tell that cunt-licker, Clayton, to take the order back.”

Ian kicked the chair across from him out from under the table and looked pointedly. “Sit down, or I’ll be hunting you next.”

Miller glanced back at his brother, Lincoln, who was still glued to his chair in the corner, ear turned, listening easily. Gritting his teeth, Miller sat down across from Ian and clasped his hands on the table. “He didn’t do nothin’ wrong.”

Ian laughed once and shook his head. “That’s the way you want to play this? You know what he’s done. Three strikes, McCall. If you didn’t want this, you should’ve kept your dog on a tighter leash.”

“He bit one trapper, but it ain’t like we can Turn anyone. Just a harmless little nip.”

“Bit one multiple times and dragged him through the woods, killed the next, and I know about the little girl, Miller, so stop the bullshit and tell me where he is.”

“I ain’t tellin’ you shit.” Miller leaned back in his chair with a smile and spat onto the wooden floor. “And you ain’t never gonna find him, Silver, you big. Dumb. Fuck. He’s off grid and out of your swatting range. You can give Clayton a personal message from me and my pack.” Miller lifted his middle finger and canted his head, his mad grin stretching even wider.

Off-grid and out of swatting range, and Miller was narrowing down his search area quite nicely. Cole would be in an old rundown cabin he thought everyone forgot about then. One without an airstrip around for Ian to land his plane.

Ian gave him a dead smile and downed his beer, then stood. “You have a nice day now, Miller. I’ll see you around.” Probably sooner than later and at the order of Clayton.

Miller stood so fast he blurred, breaking the rules and showing some of his strength to the unassuming humans staring at them from the bar top.

“Careful, doggy,” Ian said low.

“If you go after my brother, know this, Silver. I will summon every McCall in Alaska to my side. Me and my pack will hunt you down. You won’t be able to find a safe enough place to hide from us. And we’ll take our time about it, too. Maybe we’ll kill your brothers first. Eye for an eye and all that.”

“Tell them hi,” Ian said blandly. “I haven’t talked to the pricks in three years. Stay safe, McCall.”

The threat in that was intentional, and Miller had the good sense to keep his trap shut as Ian walked out of the bar.

The urge to visit Elyse Abram’s homestead was overwhelming. It was more than idle curiosity that had him hesitating before walking back to the airstrip outside of town. He was so close and hadn’t visited Galena in two years. He’d been all over Alaska, both on tracking jobs like this one and as a bush pilot, delivering anything and everything that needed to be delivered. But now that he was thirty miles away from her town, the instinct to linger was almost too hard to ignore.

She was the recent mate of a werewolf, though, and a sensible bear didn’t touch another predator shifter’s claim. But even so, when Ian had talked to Elyse Abram on the phone, it had sounded like whatever Cole had done to her had hurt her badly, and the want to comfort her somehow made it hard to put one foot in front of the other right now. His gaze was drawn time and time again to the main road that led out of town to where she lived up in the wilderness.

No. Ian shook his head to rid himself of the temptation. The best thing he could do for her was put down Cole, and make sure the crazy wolf didn’t lose what was left of his mind and go after her. She’d dodged a bullet by escaping a relationship with a shifter, and Ian would be damned if he was the bigger, more damaging, bullet she stepped in front of. She deserved a nice, normal, human mate, or husband, or whatever they were called.