Read Bear With Me: Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance for Free Online

to what was going to be the most important event in his life.
    Had it only been a week? He could hardly believe it. One week since Tom’s wedding. Hell, he and Kes were still on their honeymoon—their last vacation before the baby was due.
    One week, and it had been simultaneously the most exciting and terrifying time of his life. He’d found his mate—well, he thought he’d found his mate—he might have found his mate…
    …And, if he’d gotten all this right, he was about to find her again. And this time, he wouldn’t be a complete fool and mess it all up. He’d searched for her desperately at the post-wedding brunch, but it soon became obvious she wasn’t there. At least it had been easy enough to find out who she was: Jamie Sullivan, an old friend of Kes’s from school. The only redheaded bridesmaid.
    Mark had kicked himself when he’d realized that. All the messing around with shoes, and he could have just asked who the woman with the beautiful red-gold hair was.
    And once he knew her name, tracking her down had been—well, not easy, but manageable. The maid of honor—Lynda, was her name?—had seemed almost gleeful when she told him the name of the conservation center where Jamie worked. And, maybe she hadn’t been there when Mark made the trip, but then Tom’s new mother-in-law had remembered that “that very nice Sullivan girl” did field work in the summers. It had taken her a few more days to remember where Jamie did field work, but she’d sent Mark’s aunt a link to the conservation center’s wildlife projects page and Aunt Lou had sent it on to him, and Mark had packed his bags the moment he found the site on a map.
    So, here he was.
    He wasn’t completely naïve. He knew that, even if Jamie was his mate, they might not have anything in common other than the mate bond. She might not want anything to do with him. Maybe—and the thought had occurred to him more than once—maybe that had something to do with how hard she was to find. But if that was the case, he wanted to hear it from her.
    In the meantime…
    In the meantime, it looked like he was going to spend his vacation stumbling around in circles. At least until he was far enough into the wilderness that he could shift without risking any hikers catching sight of him. Mark’s bear senses were a lot stronger than his human ones, and he was going to need his bear’s sense of smell in particular to—har, har—get his bearings, let alone find Jamie.
    Plus, in human form, he was about to trip over his own feet.
    Suddenly, something squawked in the darkness above his head, and then he did trip over.
    Mark swore softly and dusted off his hands as he stood up. Night had well and truly fallen now. And of course his flashlight was stuffed right at the bottom of his pack. He hadn’t thought he would need it until he unpacked to set up camp.
    Well, that clearly wasn’t going to happen. He would have to find a quiet patch of ground somewhere and shift. His thick bear pelt was better insulation against the cool night air than any number of sleeping bags.
    Of course, that meant being able to find a quiet patch of ground. He wasn’t sure how far away he was from the trail, and he didn’t want to wake up to a troop of Scouts poking him with a stick and screaming.
    Mark blinked, willing his eyes to adjust better to the darkness. The sky was full of stars, glimmering brilliantly this far from the city. Beside him, the river was a coiling black ribbon. If not for the subtle glimmer of starlight on its surface, it would have been invisible in the shadows.
    He’d found the river after he realized he had no idea how to read the map he’d brought, on the basis that if the end of the river was in the foothills of the mountains, the start of it would be somewhere deep in the wilderness.
    Maybe when he told Tom about this trip, he could swing that as “navigating by the land”.
    Craaaaaaawk!
    Mark ducked as something swooped past his head. Time to