A Mate For The Bear: BBW Paranormal Alpha Shifter Romance (Bear Brides Book 4)

A
MATE FOR THE BEAR

By

Natalie Kristen

Also by NATALIE KRISTEN

Bear
Brides

A Bride For The Bear

A Date For The Bear

A Wife For The Bear

A Mate For The Bear

Billionaire
Bear Shifters Romance

Taken By The Bear

Owned By The Bear

Saved By The Bear

MISTY
VALLEY SHIFTERS

Growl
For Me

Fight
For Me

Purrfect
For Me

MATE
series

Alpha
Mate

Bear
Mate

Vampire
Mate

Wolf
Mate

Wild
Mate

Dark
Mate

Blood
Mate

NORTH
WOLVES

To
Kill A Wolf

ALPHA
GAME

Alpha
Game

Alpha
Game 2

Alpha
Game 3

DARK
erotic romance

Rapture
In The Dark

Release
In The Dark

One
Night With Death

Copyright
© 201
5
Natalie Kristen

ALL
RIGHTS RESERVED

No
part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever
without written permission except in the case of brief quotations
embodied in critical articles and reviews.

This
is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are
used fictitiously or are the products of the author's imagination.
Any resemblance to actual locales, events, establishments or persons,
living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

About
this book

Alone and up to her
eyeballs in debt, Joyce Donovan has to work as a stripper to pay off
her ex-husband's debt. On a whim, she joins an online dating site,
hoping to make a friend and just connect with someone. To her
surprise, one of the members on the dating site contacts her. His
profile name is DJ, and he becomes her online friend, someone she can
chat with anonymously and confide in.

Dalton Jameson didn't think
his Alpha's plan would work. But being a good Beta, he throws his
support behind his Alpha's insane plan and gamely puts up his profile
on an online dating site. Dalton doesn't think he'll find his mate
on the site until he sees JD's profile. They strike up a friendship,
a purely online one. When she finally discloses that she is working
as a stripper in a club in Moonstone Creek, Dalton resolves to find
her, even if he has to visit every strip club in town.

Facing off against
treacherous predators in the strip club, Joyce is shocked when she is
saved by DJ, her online friend who has burst out of cyberspace and
into her real, messy life. Dalton takes her home and offers her a
job. But falling for her boss and best friend brings danger to his
doorstep.

Joyce isn't going down
without a fight this time.

Dalton is her mate, her
true love and she will fight for a future with him.

*****

Joyce applied another coat of
lip gloss and stepped back from the mirror. She squared her
shoulders, puffed out her chest which was amplified by the sparkly
stringy bra, and blew out a long breath. Nope, that wasn't her in
the mirror. That sultry woman with the big hairdo wearing too much
makeup and too little clothes was Jade. The moment she stepped into
the club, she was no longer Joyce Donovan. She was Jade.

She had been given that stage
name because of her stunning green eyes. Her unruly red hair
emphasized the color of her eyes and the freckles on her nose, which
she tried to conceal with lots of powder. Joyce adjusted the sheer,
see-through fabric of her costume and made sure the feathers were
securely fastened to the sleeves. Snapping the sequin mask over her
eyes, she struck a pose and blew a kiss to Karen, who was liberally
dusting glitter powder all over her cleavage.

Karen turned and winked at
her. “Warming up, are we, Jade?”

Joyce laughed and wiggled her
generous bum. “I don't need to warm up. I'm hot!”

“Touche!” Karen
grinned.

Joyce smiled as she squeezed
past the other girls to reach her large, floppy tote bag on a corner
chair. The girls were all dressed up and made up, all ready to step
onto the stage and do their thing. All eyes would be on them while
they owned the stage, but once they stepped out of the club, no one
would even recognize them. Karen was a single mom to two young kids,
and the loud, gum-popping Stephanie who was stretching and gyrating
in a corner to limber up was actually a studious, bespectacled med
school student by day.

Working at Candybar, the
newest and hottest strip club in Moonstone Creek, allowed the girls
to earn enough money to fund their day-to-day lives and their dreams.
For many of the girls, stripping was a means to an end. They were
just here to earn the money they needed and pay off what needed to be
paid.

Like a big, fucking debt
incurred by a loser ex-husband.

Joyce slumped into the chair
and sat in a dim corner of the dressing room. Wearily, she shook all
thoughts of her ex out of her head. Felix had been nothing but
trouble, and even after their divorce, he still managed to cause
trouble for her. She hadn't seen him in more than a year, but she
sure saw a lot of his creditors. The little shit had forged her
signature and made her the guarantor of his debts. She had almost
passed out when she found out that Felix owed a truckload of money to
the Crimson Wolves, one of the largest, most dangerous wolf packs in
town. The wolves had come after her and demanded that she pay off
Felix's debt in full. They obviously didn't care that the document
had been forged. All they cared about was getting their money.

But where in the world would
she find that kind of money? Felix had practically wiped out all her
savings towards the end of their marriage. She still had her job as
a receptionist in a small trading firm, but her salary barely covered
her rent and daily necessities.

The Crimson Wolves weren't
known for their scruples. They could make people they didn't like
disappear, people like errant debtors and irresponsible guarantors.

Joyce had no intention of
disappearing. She had finally ended her disastrous marriage and was
about to begin life anew. She wasn't going to let the wolves kill
her just as she was learning to live again.

She would pay off the debt
and she would live, goddamit.

But first, she had to find a
way to raise that obscene sum of money.

Randell Wyle, the Beta of the
Crimson Wolves, had offered her an opening. It was an offer she
couldn't refuse.

She would work as a stripper
in their club to pay off the debt. The Crimson Wolves owned a few
nightclubs and a string of other businesses that she didn't really
want to know about.

It was easy as pie, Randell
told her. They would take a cut of her earnings, a big cut since she
wanted to settle the debt as soon as possible, and she could take
home the rest.

Joyce didn't see any other
way out. She would do it. She would strip, but she wouldn't strip
all the way. She would wear a thong and a stringy, bikini bra and a
mask, and she wasn't going to take these off. With an amused smirk,
Randell had agreed to her conditions.

Joyce continued working as a
receptionist in her old firm. But every weekend, she would slip into
her sexy, sheer costume, throw on that glittering mask to obscure
half her face and transform into Jade, stripper extraordinaire at
Candybar.

Joyce felt her phone vibrate
in her bag. She fished it out and smiled when she saw the screen
light up with a new message.

It was a message from “DJ”.

She opened the message and
giggled at the joke he'd sent her. DJ always knew how to make her
laugh. Even though she'd never even met him. He was just a
nameless, faceless friend she'd made on a dating site.

Making a friend, on a dating
site? Unbelievable, right? She wouldn't have believed it was
possible if it hadn't happened to her.

On a whim, she had signed up
at an online dating site. She had used her initials, 'JD', as her
profile name. She'd cropped her profile picture to show only her
eyes and she hadn't bothered typing out a long, rambling paragraph
about herself. She'd just answered the site's mandatory
questionnaire and left most of the columns blank. She wasn't
actively looking for a long-term relationship. She had too much on
her plate right now. Holding two jobs, shuttling between two
identities and trying not to keel over from exhaustion didn't allow
for much time to date. But she thought it would be nice to just chat
with someone about, well, everything and nothing. Just chat and
connect with someone, even a stranger. Her friends, if she could
call them that, had distanced themselves from her when they found out
that the Crimson Wolves were after her for a big fat debt. She was
disappointed but she couldn't blame them. They had to look out for
themselves, their families. The wolves wouldn’t hesitate to
hurt anyone connected with her just to get what they wanted.

After her divorce, she had no
family to speak of and no friends to speak with. She felt so
isolated, so alone. She just needed to have someone to talk to.
Even an anonymous online friend would be enough to fill the void and
save her sanity.

Joyce had stated
categorically in her profile that she was only on the dating site to
make new friends. Friends, with no benefits. It was for their
safety as well as hers. With the wolves breathing down her neck, it
wasn't safe to get too close to anyone. She could only hope to have
at least an online friend, someone she could talk to but would never
meet.

She'd been surprised to
receive quite a number of messages from the members of the dating
site. But a quick glance at their profile and their messages told
her exactly what those men were looking for. Those men were at the
dating site for one thing only. They just wanted casual sex, so any
female would do. They weren't really interested in her. They
weren't even on the dating site to find a date. They were just there
to score.

Joyce had deleted all the
messages without replying. All but one. That message had been from
a member with the username “DJ”. It was a simple, no
frills profile name. Unlike most of the other profile names which
made lewd, suggestive innuendos and puns on their, um, size and
prowess. Joyce had learned from experience that empty vessels made
the most noise. It was just hot air and inflated puffery. The more
they talked, the less they did. And the less they did, the more
deluded they were about their abilities and achievements.

But “DJ” was
different. His very first message had just been a simple, sweet
greeting asking how her day was. It just happened that she'd had a
really crappy day, and she just had to vent or she'd explode. She
ended up typing a rather incoherent, expletive-laden message and
hitting the send button before she cooled down enough to realize what
she had done. Mortified, she'd sent him another message, apologizing
for her previous rude message.

She definitely didn't expect
to hear back from him. She thought he'd probably deleted her message
and blocked her from ever contacting him again. But to her surprise,
DJ replied.

She messaged back, and that
was the beginning of their online correspondence. They messaged each
other almost every day, sharing jokes and encouragements. Even
before DJ pointed it out, she'd noticed that his profile name
mirrored hers exactly. And that made her suspect that “DJ”
had used his initials as his profile name as well.