Page 11 of Bear’s True Mate

Her jaw tightened. “Your friend’s, apparently.”

Fair point. I didn’t say so.

We were squared off now in the kind of standoff that could go on all night if neither of us blinked first. It was stupid. It was about a damn driveway and how I parked my truck. Even so, my bear was eating it up. He was locked on her like she was the most interesting thing that had happened to him in years.

“Look,” I said, and I didn’t mean it to come out as loud and harsh sounding as it did. That was just how I talked sometimes. I had a big voice that carried. My volume knob was stuck at eight on a good day. “I’ll try to park more to the left, but I’m not⁠—”

She flinched.

It wasn’t much, just a quick tightening around her eyes while her fingers gripped the mug she held a fraction harder. If I’d blinked, I would have missed it. Instead, I’d noticed it, and so had my bear. Instantly, he went still as we both realized that something had made this woman afraid of a raised voice.

No, not something—someone.

She blinked and recovered fast. “Thank you,” she said. Her voice was even, like nothing had happened.

But it had.

I’d seen it.

She picked up her laptop and mug and went inside. The door clicked shut behind her, and she was gone just like that. I stood in the driveway for a long minute after she was gone, seeing every interaction with her in a new light.

That flinch hadn’t been about me. It was muscle memory created from someone else. I didn’t know who, but I knew one thing for certain—whoever it was, they’d never get the chance to hurt her again.

That was something my bear and I could both agree on.

5

ROSE

Iwoke to Nolan’s massive truck starting up in the driveway. Deciding I’d better take advantage of him not being home, I slipped out of bed and headed to the kitchen to make some tea. Once I had a mug in hand, I settled in at the desk and opened my laptop.

The morning was rough. I’d stared at the blinking cursor for way too long, tapped out too many sentences that went nowhere, and erased more than I added, but somewhere around noon, the words started to loosen up. It had taken me nearly all day, but I’d finally found a rhythm, and by mid-afternoon, I was actually writing. At around six, I had three chapters completed and some semblance of an outline started on where to go next with the story. The plot was moving forward, the dialogue was clicking, and my heroine was finally starting to feel like a real person on the page.

The hero was a different story, though.

No matter what I tried, he still fell flat. Cardboard flat. I didn’t understand why. The rest of the book was working. The only problem was him. I’d made notes about him using the comments feature in my document, highlighted the places where he needed to be fleshed out, and kept plowing ahead with the story, deciding I’d figure him out later.

Right now, everything else was flowing.

The scene was working, and my fingers were moving faster than they had in weeks across my keyboard. My heroine was standing in a kitchen with the hero, and he was about to lean in and say something witty that made her feel all the feels.

A weed eater roared to life outside.

My fingers stopped.

No.

Not now. Not when I was finally in a groove.

I glared out the window, ready to shoot daggers at Nolan for interrupting my flow. The daggers never fired because the man had stepped into my line of view—shirtless.

He carried the weed eater toward the far edge of the property where the grass met the sand, and I couldn’t take my eyes off him. His back was to me, allowing me to see his broad shoulders, tanned skin, and the muscles he had while he adjusted his grip on the machine. He wore low-slung jeans and work boots.

Men were not supposed to look this good doing yard work.

Were they?

The weed eater ground along the property line as he walked. He moved in a slow, steady pass, his arms flexing against the vibration, and the evening light caught a thin sheen of sweat glistening across his skin.