Page 1 of Bearly Mated

one

CALLIE

I drummedmy fingers on the diner’s table, forcing myself to breathe through the bundle of nerves in my abdomen.

The checkered flooring and cherry-red booths screamed of decades past, and everything about the building reminded me of my childhood.

Even the pink and red paper hearts, streamers, and other Valentine’s Day décor were familiar.

I combed my long, dark blonde hair over my shoulders and straightened the faded t-shirt I’d paired with black leggings.

It was going to be fine. Everything was going to work out.

The bell over the door jingled, and my head jerked upward.

A relieved breath escaped me.

It wasn’t Hudson.

Yet.

My phone buzzed on the countertop, and I looked down at the screen.

Wren

Is he there yet?

You can still back out. I can fill out the paperwork with the clan, and give you whatever you need to make the payments manageable

I bit my lip and texted back.

Me

I’m not making you do that, or taking your money

I’ll be fine

My best friend worked as a waitress at the diner, but she’d gotten off an hour earlier. Though she’d offered to stay for moral support, I’d turned her down. I didn’t want to make her life any harder than it already was.

And my problems were my own.

Well, they were my dad’s—but they had become mine when I buried him two months earlier.

Hence the meeting with Hudson.

My childhood best friend who I’d been secretly in love with through our teenage years, and the only adult bear shifter I was still in contact with. We only talked two or three times a year, and hadn’t been face-to-face since our high school graduation eight years earlier, but he would always be family to me.

Well, notfamily, family.

I didn’t think I’d ever stop wanting to screw him.

But family, because he was so familiar.

Anyway, supernatural beings had been a part of human society for a long time. We had been at peace for more than a century.

Cub Lake was a small town with the highest percentage of bear shiftersanywhere, which meant everyone in town knew them. The bears were usually born male, and there weren’t a lot of them by any means.

I happened to knowwhythere weren’t a lot of them—because they refused to stay with their mates afterbreedingwith them.

---