Read Online Bear Fur Hire (Bears Fur Hire Book 2) by T. S. Joyce - Free Book Online Page B

able to break the bond with Brea was that his bear was a true animal and couldn’t stand the thought of raising another man’s child. If he was just a man, perhaps he could’ve looked past the fact that she’d started their relationship newly pregnant. Perhaps he could’ve even gotten over the lies and trusted her eventually. But he was only half man, and his animal side had revolted the moment that doctor told them she was having a girl—another male’s offspring. Bear shifters, as well as wolf shifters, didn’t produce female children.
    And after Brea, he’d been jaded, convinced that love was reserved for good, normal people—not an animal like him.
    But Lena…
    Lena felt like everything. She felt like hope.
    Jenner had been sleepwalking for so long, stuck in the dark, going through the motions. Sleep in the winter, eat and work during the summer, rinse and repeat forever. But she’d just come in and taken an ice pick to the permafrost he’d built up to protect his heart, and she was slamming that blade against him with shattering blows. When she looked at him like he was important, crack . When she’d bandaged him so fearlessly, crack . Every time she touched him, crack . When she’d wanted him out there by that pond, trusting him completely with her virginity, trusting him with something so important and fragile… crack, crack, boom .
    But what the fuck could he offer her? She was successful, headstrong, independent, and leather-tough. He was outmatched. He was a hunting guide with a tendency to drop off the face of the planet from October to April every year, and she was a woman with her life figured out and an incredible future in front of her.
    She was oil, and he was water, and they could never really work.
    The kindest thing he could do for Lena was find her the brown bears, get her the pictures that would skyrocket her career, take her back to the lodge, and wave her off when Tobias flew her out of here and back to her life. The thought of her leaving socked him in the middle and made it hard to breathe, but she deserved better. Better than him and better than the life and heartache he would strap her with. Bear shifters were meant to be alone. Dad was proof, and Ian was the exception.
    What happened at the pond with Lena couldn’t ever happen again.
    After losing her first mate the way she did, even if she and Adam had just been friends, she deserved for the next man she chose to stick.
    Bear shifters were genetically prone to disappoint, and Lena was special.
    No matter how much he’d come to care for her, Jenner wouldn’t hold her back for his own selfish gains.

Chapter Seven
     
    Jenner had barely strung a sentence together since their little make-out then freak-out session earlier. Lena was usually perfectly content to be quiet on trips like this. She’d had several guides, usually of the old, tough, burly mountain man variety that were respectful and professional with little to say. But she didn’t want that with Jenner. She wanted more. Problem was, he definitely did not, and now she had been stuck behind him all day, unable to stop looking at him, unable to stop thinking about him, unable to stop wanting him to turn in his saddle and tell her everything would be okay and they would go back to the way they were before they laid everything bare in the woods earlier.
    His distance made her physically ache.
    The sun sat low in the sky, streaking the horizon with pinks and oranges, and suddenly, Jenner pulled his horse off toward a line of trees. There was an old, ash-filled fire pit dug into the ground and logs laid around it to sit on. Off to the side of the small clearing was an old corral made of gray, splintered wood and barbed wire.
    Jenner walked his lead horse right through the open gate and dismounted. “We call this Wolf Camp.”
    “Wolf Camp? Why?”
    “Dalton and Chance built it up when we first started scouting this way.”
    “Okay, what does that have to do with