Husband Fur Hire (Bears Fur Hire Book 1) (5 page)

“Stop calling me that!” she fumed, rounding on him. He backed up from her, step for step. Wise man.

“It’s your name.”

She shoved her ring finger in the air like she was flipping him off. “We’re engaged. You can drop my last name.”

A low rumble emanated from his chest.

“Did you just growl at me?”

“No.”

“Yes you did!”

“Give me the gun, and let’s go back to the house before you find a pack of wolves.”

“Piss off. I’m going to bring home dinner, honey.”

“I brought food with me. We don’t need to do this tonight and, anyway, it’ll be dark before you find any game. Just…” Ian grabbed the barrel of the gun over her shoulder and yanked. Only she wasn’t ready. He startled her, and she jerked the trigger.

A deafening boom echoed through the woods.

Ian’s bright eyes looked downright terrifying as he yanked the gun from her grasp. “Are you fucking kidding me? You had it loaded with the safety off? You could’ve killed yourself or somebody else.”

“I wasn’t pointing it anywhere near you or me. It was up in the air.”

“Gun safety basics, Elyse
Abram
. Safety on until you’re ready to pull that trigger, and furthermore, your finger shouldn’t even be on that trigger unless you have your intended target in the crosshairs. Now get your ass back to the cabin before I carry you my damned self. I’m mad enough to do it right now.”

Elyse gave him a slit-eyed glare. “You aren’t the boss of me.”

“I offered you the protection of my body when I gave you that ring. You aren’t going out into the wilderness when it’s this late in the day on a fool’s errand. Your kind can’t even see in the dark.”

“My kind?
My kind
? I suppose you mean women.” She poked him in the chest, but jammed her finger painfully, which only pissed her off more. Irrationally, she growled out, “I’ll have you know I was doing just fine before you came along.”

“Bullshit. You’re skin and bones.”

“Stop it!” Her lip trembled, and she bit it hard. “Don’t you know anything about being nice? If you have something mean to say, swallow it down, man. I get it. I’m too skinny for your liking, but this is the only body I have, and insulting it isn’t helping. You think I want to look like this? Do you even know what it’s taken to get this bad? I was pretty once, you arrogant sonofabitch.” Stupid tear as it tracked down her cheek and stupid tremor in her voice. Furious that he’d gotten her so riled up, she made her way around him and stepped over the knee-high grass, headed back home.

She used to be strong before Cole mishandled her. She never cried or worried over the opinions of men, and now she’d been reduced to tears by a stranger.

“Fuck,” Ian muttered from behind her, but if he was following, she couldn’t tell.

At the water pump, she dragged over the biggest bucket and began pumping the handle to get the water flowing. She filled the bucket nearly to the top and hauled the insanely heavy burden toward the horses’ shelter.

“Here, let me,” Ian said in a resolved voice as he slid his hand over hers to take the bucket.

“I can do it on my own. I have been for the past three years. Don’t worry. You don’t have to have a dick to do this kind of work, Ian. Women can do it, too.”

He released her hand and walked beside her. “I was wrong for the things I said.”

“Great. Forgiven. Fight one down, only sixty more years of me pissing you off to go.” Water sloshed all over the leg of her jeans and, great gads, it was cold, but she was used to it. She always fatigued at the end.

Demon and Milo waited at the fence for her as she hoisted the water bucket to her hip and dumped it through the fence into their trough. “And just so you know,” she said, clutching the bucket handle to steady her shaking hands. “I have goats. I was working my way up to…you know…killing one.”

Ian ghosted a glance toward the barn where the goats lived, then nodded his head. “I shouldn’t make snap judgements on things. I just don’t like how thin you’ve become.”

“How thin I’ve become? You’ve only seen me one other time, and I assure you, I’m not much worse off.”

Ian opened his mouth as if to say something, then snapped it closed again. He ran his hands through his hair and admitted, “I don’t know how to talk to girls.”

“You never had one before?”

He shook his head, and if she didn’t know any better, she could’ve sworn his cheeks were turning red.

“Well, you’ve just shocked me to my bones.”

Ian leaned on the fence and watched the horses drinking deeply. “How so?”

“Because I thought a man who looks like you would’ve been with a dozen girls, at least.”

Scrunching his face up, he glanced over at the sunrise and murmured, “I didn’t say I haven’t slept with women. I just mean that I haven’t had one of my own.” He turned those bright eyes on her. “To keep happy. You understand?”

“Are you backwoods?” Being raised in the wilderness without access to girls was the only thing that explained why a big, strapping, sexy-as-hell man like Ian Silver hadn’t held down a relationship with a woman.

He huffed a soft laugh. “You could say that. And just so you know, you aren’t too skinny for my liking. I think you’re pretty enough. I just don’t like thinking you’re hungry. I’ve been hungry before. It sucks.”

“Yeah it does,” she said on a sigh as she rested her chin on the fence and watched the sinking sun beside him. “And thanks for saying that. You didn’t have to.”

“What, that you’re pretty?”

She nodded slowly, her chin rubbing her protruding wrist bone.

Ian shook his head, whatever that meant, then said, “Come on. I’ll put a few more buckets of water in the trough. You go wash up, and I’ll get dinner on.” He picked up the bucket, then turned and walked away. “You smell like chicken shit,” he said over his shoulder.

Elyse snorted, but bit her lip to hide her amusement. She really did smell rough after cleaning out the coop. Ian was one lucky man to have landed such a fine woman as herself. “Sorry I almost shot you!” she called.

She couldn’t tell for sure from here, but his cheeks looked like they swelled with a smile as he walked away. “Forgiven. Only sixty more years to go.”

Ian had hurt her.

A few hours here and, already, he’d made her tear up. Even though she’d let him off the hook, his guts still felt all ripped up that he was the cause of any more hurt. This is why men like him had no business taking on a woman. They were soft, and he was all claws and teeth and grizzly moods.

He dumped a second giant can of beef stew into the pot and stirred.

The woman had taken to nesting worse than he did right before hibernation. While he’d unpacked the pallets of food he’d brought with him from the bed of his pickup, she’d swept the floors and thrown out the dead flowers from the vase that decorated the kitchen table. He was pretty sure she’d even cleaned the outhouse. There was running water here, but just barely since, according to Elyse, it was fed by a natural spring that wasn’t a huge producer. There was enough for a quick, trickling shower, but not enough for toilet flushes, so the outhouse was going to be part of life now.

“Is your heat oil?” he asked. Lame. God, he didn’t know how to talk to women.

Elyse bent down with the dust pan and scooped a mound of dirt into it. “I couldn’t afford the three thousand a year to do oil, so I’m all wood burning. I mean
we’re
. We’re all wood burning.” She stood, cheeks flushed in the soft glow of the lanterns hung around the room.

“I’ll need to start cutting as soon as possible then. You only have enough chopped to last you the first couple of weeks of snow. And I think we’re going to have to butcher at least one of your cows.”

“What? Why?” she asked as she dumped the dustpan’s contents out the back door. “I need those to sell. That’s where my money comes from. I’m not totally off the grid or subsistence. I buy some of the things I need, and I only have fifteen head of cattle left, if no predators have run off with any of them.”

“I thought you said your brother was watching them.”

“Part of the time. More like checks on them, but Josiah’s no range rider. He has a life of his own and a little piece of land he’s managing close to the summer grazing range.”

“Hmm,” Ian said low in his chest. That wasn’t good. Predators were thick around here, thanks to all the wilderness around them. Galena was nothing like Anchorage. It was population five-hundred, and other than sitting on the bank of the Yukon River, it was surrounded by the Alaskan wilds. It was a wonder Elyse had any cattle left.

As if she could hear his thoughts, she said quietly, “When my uncle was alive and running this place, he had eighty cattle. It’s hard thinking about losing any more of his herd.”

“It’s not about the meat, Elyse.” Ian banged the extra stew off the spoon on the side of the pan and moved the boiling meal off the burner. “I looked at your hay, and if we cut it at peak time, when it will give the most nutrition to your animals—”

“Our animals.”

Ian sighed and leaned against the natural wood counter. “It won’t be enough to get a herd that big through the winter. Honestly, we need to butcher one or two and maybe even sell off a couple more. If you want to build the herd next warm season, then we need to figure out how to purchase more later, but we can’t feed what we have now. Not with that little hay.”

“I worked my ass off to plant that. Josiah helped, but most of that was me.”

Ian hated the disappointment on her face. He got it. Right now she was thinking about how hard she’d worked. She’d probably bled and sweated all over that field, and here he came, telling her the work wasn’t enough. “Next year will be different,” he said softly. “If you still want me around after this winter, we’ll get more hay planted, and I’ll buy you more cattle, okay? Between you and me and Josiah, we’ll get you where you want to be.”

Elyse’s hair was down and still damp from her shower, and as she picked at a little piece of masking tape on the counter, she’d let her tresses fall forward, hiding her face. He couldn’t stand not being able to see her eyes right now, so he reached forward and tucked a strand behind her ear, then lifted her chin with a hooked finger. “Okay?”

“You’re a good man,” she said so softly he wouldn’t have heard it without his heightened senses.

God, he wished that were true. If she knew her ex boyfriend’s blood was on his hands, though, Elyse wouldn’t be looking at him so gratefully right now. She was the good one. He was just here hoping some of her decency rubbed off on him.

Ian focused on pouring stew into the two wooden bowls Elyse pulled from the upper cabinets.

“Are you feeding an army?” she asked twitching her chin toward the vat of canned stew he’d heated up.

“Oh. I should tell you now. You’ll have to accept and get used to the fact that I eat a lot.”

“We’re going to eat all this in one sitting?”

“Look, I can’t explain why, but my body needs a lot of food to sustain itself. I’ll get sick as all get-out if I don’t eat constantly.”

Her delicate, sandy-colored eyebrows arched up in surprise. “Constantly?”

Ian handed her a bowl and settled his hip against the counter to tuck into his meal. But Elyse had other ideas about the way meal-time should go and made her way through the small kitchen to the table. She even pulled a chair out for him before she sat in the one right next to it.

“I usually eat standing up.”

“Why?”

Ian took a bite to stall as he mulled over why he was so damned comfortable avoiding tables outside of restaurants. After swallowing, he shuffled to the chair and sat down beside her. “I guess because I’ve always been alone. Tables are for families.”

“Well, now you have me.”

Now you have me.
Her words lifted the hairs on his arms, and he sat there stunned, watching her eat. He had someone. Really had her. Elyse was wearing his ring as proof.

Ian Silver wasn’t a lone grizzly anymore.

Elyse was wrong, though. He wasn’t the one who had her. She’d had him since the day he’d woken up on Afognak Island with her picture tucked into that envelope. He’d wanted her. Feared her for what that attraction could mean for him. Deep inside, there was this warm tendril that unfurled like a fern frond a little more each time she spoke to him, or each time he learned something new about her. It wasn’t love yet, but if she kept declaring things like that, she was going to own him, heart and soul. A dangerous game for both of them.

“Where are you from?” Elyse asked between bites.

The temptation to tell her the truth was overwhelming. He was from a dark den in a dark cabin in a dark cave made for long sleeps. In his mind, he’d always called it the Monster House. That had been home base until Miller had burned it. She didn’t need to see the darkness of his life, though, so instead, he answered, “Everywhere. Here and there.”

She stopped eating and stared at him. With a slow blink, she said, “You know we’ll have to actually get to know each other at some point.”

“Alaska.”

Elyse pursed her lips. “Where in Alaska?”

Stifling a growl at her getting too close to his secrets, he leaned back in his chair and listed off the places he’d stayed this warm season. “Fairbanks, Coldfoot, Nome, Kodiak Island, specifically Port Lions and Larsen Bay, Afognak, Trapper Creek—”

“Okay. I get it. You don’t want to talk about where you’re from.”

“I’m from everywhere, like I said.”

“Or you’re from nowhere.” Elyse cocked her head with a challenging look glinting in those gorgeous green-gold eyes of hers, then went back to eating and completely ignored him.

Nowhere. A good place to hail from for a ghost.

“What about you? Where are you from?”

“Anchorage.”

“City girl,” he said, teasing in desperation to see a smile on her face again.

She scraped the bottom of her bowl, so Ian stood and refilled it for her. When he sat back down and settled the steaming beef stew in front of her, she said, “I used to spend time out here with my Uncle Jim in the summers when I didn’t have school. He and his woman, Marta, didn’t ever have children of their own, and my mom was overwhelmed raising me and Josiah by herself. She got the summers off of being a parent when she sent us here. And it was fine by us, because we got to help my uncle around the homestead.” Elyse ghosted him a glance, then returned to her food. “I fell in love with this place when I was seven.”

“Is that why you’re so hard on yourself for struggling here?”

“Yeah. When I stayed with my uncle, I thought there was nothing he couldn’t do, you know? He could fix anything and come up with a solution to every problem. I watched him dig a water filtration system to get water in this cabin, just because Marta wanted it. I saw him treat her like a queen as much as he was able, and he never got impatient with explaining how and why he did things around the homestead. My dad wasn’t in the picture, so Uncle Jim filled this void in me I couldn’t figure out how to fill up when I lived in Anchorage. Josiah always loved this place, but me? I
loved
this place.” She pursed her lips and shook her head, shrugging her shoulders. “It always felt like home, and my real home in the city felt temporary. I think my mom saw that, too, because even when Josiah started wanting to stay in the city and spend the warm months shooting the shit with his friends, she kept sending me here.”

“Why didn’t your uncle teach you to hunt?”

“He got me through the hunter safety course, but by the time most of the big game seasons came about, I was back in Anchorage going to school. And when I turned eighteen, Mom wanted me out of the house the second I graduated high school, so then I got a job in the city and my visits out here were few and far between. Life, you know? I got caught up trying to cover my bills. I missed the last of Marta’s life, and I missed the last of Uncle Jim’s. And I missed this place. I was unhappy and uncomfortable in my own skin. I didn’t know a damned thing about myself and couldn’t figure out what was missing, and then Uncle Jim left me this place in his will when he passed three years ago. And suddenly, everything made sense. It was like coming home after being away for a really long time. And I was proud of myself for the first time in a long time because the first year I did okay. Josiah helped a lot and settled twenty miles away. The grazing was better over his way, so we figured out how to run the cattle together. Sometimes I think he moved here to make sure I was okay, though. He liked Anchorage more than I did. He has friends there.”

“And you didn’t have friends after all that time there?”

“I did, but it wasn’t like with my brother. I have trouble connecting with people. No, that’s not true,” she said with a deep frown. “I have trouble picking the right people.”

Ian nodded slowly. He could see that. She was trusting and gave too many chances, and sometimes in this world, innocence like that drew in dark people who liked to take advantage. She’d put herself in a submissive position and drawn in the dominants who would feed off what she could provide, be it emotional or material. It was the easiest thing in the world to see why a woman like Elyse would want to make a life way out here where she didn’t have to make those decisions on who to trust.

“Is that why you let Cole come around?”

Elyse gave him a faraway look and an empty smile, then pushed her half-eaten bowl away as if she’d lost her appetite. “Cole came around because he found a good mark to use. And being too big a pussy to break it off with me, he made himself unacceptable so I would pull the trigger on our relationship. I’m going to go to bed.” She stood and walked abruptly into her bedroom, leaving Ian’s head spinning on what had just happened.

What had he said? He’d just asked about Cole because he was honestly curious on why a smart, hard-working, level-headed woman like Elyse would allow a free-loading asshole to drain her like that.

Elyse closed her bedroom door behind her, and from the other side, he heard the trickle of water from her bathroom sink. Troubled, he ate slowly, going over and over their conversation. He didn’t want to be done talking yet. He was only just getting to know her. But maybe that was the problem. Perhaps she wanted to get to know him, too, but he’d shared nothing about himself and had asked her to share her deepest regrets with him. This shit right here was why he was going to make a terrible mate…er…husband. He had no social skills and was baffled by every single thing she did and said. Grizzly bear shifters were solo creatures. Too dominant to hold relationships with each other, as highlighted by his non-existent bond with his brothers, and the instinct to settle down only struck on rare occasions. And that usually turned out awful by the first hibernation because what woman on earth was going to deal with their man sleeping for six months of the year instead of carrying on a relationship with her? None. Even his own damned mother had been done with his dad long before she delivered his triplets. Overwhelmed and uninterested in mothering multiples, she’d given Ian and his brothers to Dad for full custody by their second year.

Maybe he should’ve told Elyse that part. Maybe she wouldn’t feel like she was giving too much for nothing in return then.

Ian washed their dishes and turned off the lanterns, and with one final troubled glance at her closed bedroom door, he made his way across the living room to his own bedroom.

The bed was lumpy and the pillows flat, but that wasn’t what kept him awake tonight. It was a small sniffle, just like the one Elyse had given off when he’d talked to her on the phone all those months ago. It gutted him.