The Bear's House Guest

  THE BEAR'S

  HOUSE GUEST

  BEARS WITH MONEY BOOK 6

  AMY STAR

  Copyright ©2018 by Amy Star

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  When Elizabeth Marston arrived home one night to find a shifter war happening in her back yard, she knew life would never be the same again.

  Unable to live in her own home, Elizabeth had no choice but to accept an invitation to stay with the handsome and hunky Ambrose Baxter.

  However, Elizabeth was about to learn that Ambrose was a shapeshifter with the ability to turn into a huge grizzly bear.

  And Elizabeth was also about to learn that life as the bear's house guest had its own special and pleasurable benefits...

  Start reading this SUPER steamy werebear romance right away and expect a thrill of a life time ;-)

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  Elizabeth Marston loved her house. From the first moment she laid eyes on it when she was twelve years old, she had known it would be her house someday, and she started hiding money away in places she knew her father would never be able to find it, earning it in any and every sort of odd job she could convince people in town to give to her. By the time one of her teachers helped her get emancipated when she was sixteen, she had enough to buy it outright.

  That wasn’t because she was especially talented at saving money but because the house was falling apart, and no one else wanted it. It had been ever since she first saw it, and she had fallen in love with it anyway. She dropped out of school that year, got a slightly more stable job, and started dedicating every spare cent and spare moment to putting the house back together, until it was once again the beautiful Victorian she had always seen it as—pale grey with dark blue accents, plus a wraparound porch and a latticed foundation. It was her perfect little hideaway from the world.

  She was twenty-three by the time she really finished repairing it—construction had never been her forte, and most of her work on the house had involved some level of trial and error—and though it had taken a while, she was content. She had gotten her GED, and even if college wasn’t in the cards at that point, she did have a better job than working at the farmers market, as the farmer up the street had been quite happy to hire a set of extra hands.

  (Well, okay, ‘up the street’ was still a two-mile walk. She didn’t exactly live in a bustling metropolis.)

  And then one day, her perfect little hideaway was stolen from her.

  She was walking back to her house late in the evening, returning from work. A few of her acquaintances always looked at her a bit oddly whenever she mentioned that she made the two-mile walk twice a day, five days a week, but she never thought much of it. Even making the walk at night had never been much of a worry; it wasn’t a particularly dangerous area. The local wildlife was probably more dangerous than any of the scattered people, and the animals didn’t want anything to do with her or the very large stick she got into the habit of carrying with her.

  She was unaware that there were other sorts of dangers she needed to worry about until she stumbled upon them.

  She was just a few hundred yards from her driveway when she heard a ruckus that was very definitely coming from her yard. She immediately burst into a sprint, work boots kicking up stones along the gravel road until she practically skidded to a halt at the top of her driveway.

  When she heard the noise, she had assumed she was going to stumble upon someone trying to break into her house.

  What she saw, instead, was a pack of wolves duking it out with a gathering of bears. They were not normal wolves or bears, though, even ignoring the fact that they weren’t really common in the area. The wolves were the size of her boss’s horses, and the bears each looked like they could have taken down a semi-truck just by standing in its path. The bears were clearly larger, but the wolves outnumbered them at least two to one. And for whatever reason, they were all very avidly attempting to kill each other in her yard, as if her house wasn’t even there.

  Elizabeth stood at the top of her driveway, still as a statue, as if she had frozen in place. She knew she should run before any of them saw her, but she couldn’t get her legs to cooperate, and her eyes remained fixed on the claws and the teeth and the spraying blood.

  Someone else had to be hearing it. Regardless of how far away her neighbors were, it was not a quiet or subtle brawl. Surely someone else had to hear it, and someone would come along to investigate the noise and help her out.

  Or they would hear it, and they would assume it was just animals fighting in the woods. They wouldn’t be wrong either.

  With one shaking hand, she began to reach for her phone, fingers trembling so much as she drew it out of her pocket that she nearly dropped it, and then she just stared down at it blankly. Who was she supposed to call? Animal control? The police? She supposed if she just called 911 and explained that there were animals fighting in her yard and that she couldn’t get to her house, the dispatcher would probably have some idea of what to do. She started dialing, but as she was still shaking like a leaf, she had to redial it half a dozen times.

  Then, one of the wolves squealed in distress and landed in front of her as it was thrown aside, and she whipped her head up to stare at it. For a moment, it didn’t move, simply lying on the ground, dazed and twitching. And then, it rolled its eyes to look at her and laboriously hauled itself back to its feet. Panting slowly, it took a step towards her, and Elizabeth’s phone tumbled from her fingers.

  She could see its teeth as it opened its mouth and licked them, and she was pretty sure it was drooling as it took another step closer to her. She needed to move. She needed to run. She knew she should, and every instinct she had was screaming at her to do just that. But she couldn’t get her legs to move, as if her feet were suddenly stuck in concrete.

  Faster than she could really process what was happening, the wolf approaching her was thrown aside with a yelp as a bear barreled into it like a freight train. The bear hadn’t been part of the fighting, though. The only reason she knew that was because she had seen it come charging out of the woods.

  The bear planted itself in front of her like a barrier and snarled, its teeth bared. The wolf scrambled back to its feet and paused, like it was thinking the situation over, only to go running back towards the fray as the bear’s snarl ratcheted up a few decibels.

  Once it was apparent that the wolf wasn’t going to come back and that the rest of the wolves and the bears were still quite busy attempting t
o kill each other, the bear standing in front of Elizabeth turned to face her, first looking over its shoulder at her and then turning around entirely.

  She flinched when it prodded her with its nose, but it made no efforts to hurt her, and when she didn’t move, it simply gave her another poke with its nose, urging her into motion. She stumbled backwards a few graceless steps before she finally turned and started walking in the direction the bear was urging her towards, and after a moment, it pulled ahead of her leading the way.

  She was following a bear. There was something utterly absurd about that, and if she hadn’t been terrified, she would have laughed out loud instead. She wasn’t sure how well the bear leading the way would take that though, so it was probably for the best that she couldn’t actually muster up any sort of giggles just then.

  Instead, her thoughts jumped back to the fact that she was following a bear, an entirely non-native bear that was also the size of an SUV. By all logic, it should have been trying to kill Elizabeth for daring to be as close as she was to it. Instead, it just looked back at her every so often to make sure she was still following along behind it. Though the urge to turn and run continued to nag at her all the while, she ignored the urge. She knew there was no way she would ever be able to outrun a bear if she made it angry, and considering it didn’t seem particularly inclined to eat her just then, she wasn’t going to needlessly push her luck.

  She wasn’t sure for how long or how far she followed the bear. It wasn’t any sort of distance she couldn’t walk, though, considering her almost daily habits.

  She wasn’t sure whether she was more or less surprised when eventually they came upon another house, enormous and set deep into the woods with a driveway that wove through the trees. It looked vaguely familiar, but it still took a few moments for her to recall that she had seen it a few times during her explorations of the woods. Technically, it was one of her neighbor’s houses, but that didn’t mean much when her neighbors tended to be several miles away and very well hidden.

  She continued to follow the bear up onto the porch, where, at last, it paused. It looked around slowly, almost seeming confused—or maybe even distressed—as it looked at Elizabeth in something akin to consternation. Finally, it heaved a sigh as if in resignation, and where once there was a bear, there was very suddenly a man, naked as a jaybird and looking at Elizabeth with something like sheepish expectation.

  He gestured towards the front door and offered politely, “You can make yourself comfortable in the living room while I find some clothes to put on.” And with that, he turned and entered the house. Feeling like she was in a daze, Elizabeth quietly followed along on his heels.

  *

  She waited in the living room for only a few minutes before her…host…returned, fully dressed and still slightly sheepish. He ushered her to follow him with one hand, and she trailed after him into the kitchen. Within a few moments, she had a mug of tea sitting in front of her as she sat at a kitchen table that had probably cost more than all of her house’s renovations. She curled her hands around it, and the familiar feeling was at least sort of comforting. Once he had prepared his own mug, her host sat down across from her.

  “Are you alright?”

  They were the first words out of his mouth, and Elizabeth hadn’t been expecting them. She wasn’t actually sure what she had been expecting, in all honesty. Maybe some sort of demands about how much of the fight she had seen, or a bribe to stay quiet about everything she had seen. Just going by his house, he could probably afford to bribe just about anyone.

  Slowly, she nodded, though her voice was more of a mumble as she informed her mug, “None of them touched me. But—what was all of that?” Her voice sounded so tiny, and she lifted her mug to drink from it to distract herself from that thought.

  Her host sighed out a slow breath. “My name is Ambrose Baxter,” he stated, before he lifted his mug to drink from it. Once he set his mug down again, he carried on. “I’m sure you noticed that I’m not exactly human.” There was a tiny, wry smile on his face, crooked though it was. “Those animals fighting outside your house were like me.”

  “You didn’t try to eat me or rip anyone else apart,” Elizabeth mumbled to her mug, her grip around it tightening until her knuckles began to ache. “So, what was going on back there?” She peered up at him cautiously as she asked.

  Ambrose set his mug down and ran a hand over his hair, fingers briefly curling around the back of his neck as he sighed once more. “Not everyone like me is quite as…civilized,” he replied, as if he was picking his words very carefully. “Sometimes, even if it’s rare, they give up on being human all together. While not all of them in that scuffle were quite that far gone, I suspect the one who tried to attack you had long since given up on being anything other than a wolf.” He didn’t seem particularly thrilled about the observation as he made it. “As for the rest of them, that was…a territory dispute. Much of this county has belonged to the bears for quite some time, and your property is right on the edge of it. I suspect the bears tried to claim it, and the wolves took issues with the bears encroaching.”

  “It’s my house,” Elizabeth pointed out sharply, her tone surprising even herself, “my property, my territory.”

  Ambrose arched one eyebrow slowly. “Do you think they really care about that?” he wondered mildly. “Like I said, some don’t even think of themselves as human anymore. They don’t care what you think.” Though the words were blunt, his tone was at least sympathetic.

  Elizabeth stared down into her mug, until finally she wondered slowly, “What do I do, then? I can’t go back.” Not, she thought, while they were still feuding over her land.

  Ambrose was quiet for a moment, before he offered slowly, “You could stay here, if you wanted to. Or if you have a friend or family you could stay with, I would be happy to help you make the move.”

  She didn’t know why he was being so nice. They didn’t know each other. She felt tears beginning to prick at the corners of her eyes. “All of my friends have families of their own,” she mumbled. She made no mention of her family, and Ambrose didn’t pry. “I…I guess I’ll stay here until I can go home again.”

  Ambrose nodded once and drained the last of his tea. After a few more careful sips, Elizabeth drained hers as well. At Ambrose’s gesture, she got to her feet and followed him down the hall and up the stairs to a guest room that dwarfed Elizabeth’s main bedroom. There was a bathroom across the hall, and as Elizabeth lingered in the doorway, Ambrose strolled away, only to return a moment later with a t-shirt and an unopened package of boxer shorts. “I don’t keep women’s pajamas stocked,” he explained wryly, “but I figure these will do.”

  Elizabeth managed to offer him a shaking smile as she accepted the clothing, and he moseyed on his way soon enough.

  For a moment afterward, Elizabeth just stood in the middle of the guest room, staring blankly at the window but not really seeing it. It took a few minutes before she was able to shake off her daze and make her way into the bathroom, where she had to pause to stare at her reflection in the mirror.

  She looked completely disheveled with curly black hair a mess from the roots all the way down to her shoulder blades, dark skin streaked in sweat, and brown eyes wild and ringed in smudged make up. She only needed to look at herself for a few seconds before whirling around to face the shower and turn the water on. She quickly shucked off her clothing, leaving it in a pile on the bathroom floor before she hopped into the shower.

  Her shower was brief, but it helped to clear her mind a bit regardless and helped her realize that maybe her situation wasn’t all that dire. Granted, it certainly wasn’t great, but she was safe. If it was a territory issue, then she doubted any of the wolves or bears would actually go into her house, so her stuff was probably safe too. And the dispute had to come to an end, so she would be able to go home eventually. She didn’t have to work tomorrow, so she didn’t need to worry about acting normal in front of her boss (he was an eagle-eye
d man, honest and kind but shrewd, and he would be able to spot that something was off before Elizabeth even started on her tasks for the day).

  She was calmer by the time she got out of the shower, and she relished in that feeling as she poked through the cupboards until she managed to find an unopened toothbrush and a tube of toothpaste.

  By the time she was wearing the t-shirt like a dress with a pair of boxers underneath, it felt like the clash between the wolves and the bears had happened both five weeks and five years ago; it was all fuzzy around the edges, so she couldn’t quite think about it. She left her clothes in a pile in the corner of the guest room with her boots sitting on top and toppled into the bed, only barely remembering to turn off the lamp before she pulled the blanket over herself and passed out for the night.

  All things considered, she slept much better than she would have expected to. Her dreams weren’t exactly pleasant or restful, but they weren’t what she would call nightmares. On the whole, she felt safe. That alone was sort of impressive, and she wasn’t going to argue with it.