Shifters of Grrr 1 (91 page)

When she came around soon after, she found herself sitting on the track, her forehead resting on her bent knees. A large hand at the back of her skull kept her head steady. Perhaps if she stayed still, and feigned unconsciousness, she would be okay.
 

“Take it easy there, don’t try to do anything in a hurry.”

Ada squeaked. Not only did the bear know she was awake, but the creature could talk. She wished the monster had killed her while she had been out of it. Now she’d have to endure the gruesome ordeal as it dismembered her, while completely aware of what was happening. Still, that didn't mean she had to open her eyes and watch.

“Come on, sweetheart, you need to wake up. I want to check to see if you’re okay.”

If nothing else the talking bear certainly had a gorgeous, sexy rumble to his deep voice. With her breathing steady she counted out another minute before cracking open one eye to peer at the creature.

What she saw set her heart thundering again. It must have been some thump she’d taken to her head, because the bear was gone and in its place was a man.

A fucking gorgeous man.

Completely naked.

“You’re naked,” she mumbled
.

“A little bit, but don’t worry about me. Are you hurt?”

“Winded.” Ada reached up to wipe her forehead, her finger coming away with a smear of blood.

“That looks superficial, but I can see to it properly when we get home.”

She couldn’t go home with a naked stranger. Ada pushed to her feet, but the sudden movement brought with it a new bout of dizziness. That big hand captured her again as she lost her balance sideways and she finished up on her knees.
 

At the same level as an impressive cock, and right above it, abs, abs, more hard abs, and …
oh, shit,
the cock was kind of hard, too.
 

Ada’s mouth was dry, and when she licked her lips to speak, the man made an explicitly sexy noise, then he cleared his throat and turned sideways to her.

“Promise me not to move for a moment, and I’ll find a fig leaf, or a fern frond, to cover up.”

“Wait. You’re going to think I’m insane, but there’s a bear around here, somewhere. A real one. It’s absolutely massive, and dangerous, probably.” Ada kept her eyes averted, because, hell,
sexy
naked man
.

“Don’t worry about the bear, he’s gone.”

That was a brush-off. He didn’t sound as though he believed her about the bear. “There really was a bear.”

“Of course there was, and now the bear has gone.”

“Oh, good.” Her voice had gone all breathy like a cocktail lounge singer. She swallowed a few times and tried again. “Well, if the bear’s gone, you can probably leave now, or I could go. I’ll be fine.”

The man snorted. “I’m not leaving you here after that fall. You were unconscious, so you need to see a doctor.”

“I fear fainted, it’s different. No concussion.” She tapped her head as if that would prove it was solid and free of cracks. This was ridiculous. She was on her knees, staring at the ground, having a conversation with a naked man’s feet.
 

“Where are your clothes?”

“Back…away over there, at my house.”

Ada remembered she had a sarong in her daypack. She pushed to her feet and swayed a little.

“Steady, sweetheart, no sudden movements, just take it slowly.”
 

A large hand grasped her upper arm, and she leaned into the body, waiting for the dizziness to clear. It would have been nice, and completely inappropriate, to rest against him for a while, so she slipped free of his grip.

Ada scanned the ground around her. “Around here somewhere is my daypack.”

His-Naked-Hotness reached behind him, and picked up her pack, brushing it free of forest debris before passing it to her.

She shoved her hand inside, pushing past the fruit and chocolate bars, and found the sarong rolled up at the bottom.

“Do you wander about naked a lot?” she asked.

“I came out for a run to the waterfall, and a swim.”

“Running naked. That must be, ah, awkward.”

When he laughed, the sound rattled right through him. “It depends on the state I’m in.”

Okay, not even going down that track!

“Running about naked in public will get you arrested.” Ada pulled out the sarong and thrust it towards the man, even though it seemed a pity to cover a body like his.

He ignored it. “This is private property, so, technically I’m not in public. You do realise you’re trespassing, don’t you?”

“Sorry about that; I followed the bear.” Not entirely true, but a plausible excuse for trespassing.

Ada had a fair idea she’d probably ended up on private property. The previous evening, she’d been encouraged to join a group of locals in one of Waitapu Bay’s bars. Most people came to the area for the beach, but Ada also had a love of the bush, and this part of New Zealand’s Coromandel Peninsula had some stunning native bush she’d always wanted to explore.

The night wore on, and the locals got louder and more creative with their ideas about the places Ada should visit.

She was in town from Auckland for two weeks’ holiday. A holiday that would not include men, or work. As a journalist on a monthly magazine, her time was marked by constant deadlines, and she put in a lot of effort in an attempt to fast track her climb up the ladder to a permanent feature-writing position.
 

By the time the bar closed, she was armed with a number of maps and ideas drawn on drink coasters and napkins—a collection large enough to give her a unique excursion each day. This morning, while she made coffee, she shoved her hand into her bag for a random draw of the day’s activities.

The diagram on the beer mat had sent her here.

Now she couldn’t help wondering if she’d been set up somehow by the locals. Perhaps someone had dressed as a bear, for a laugh. Yeah, that was the most likely explanation. And the locals had sent her to this area knowing full well
running man
would very likely turn up naked. Which must be terrifically funny if you’re a local.

When he reached for the sarong, Ada skidded her gaze up his body for one last look, that finished at his eyes. That was the moment her day deviated even further into weird territory. She could swear his eyes flashed amber to rust, then a burst of autumnal colours before settling on a deep gold flecked with brown. He seemed to consider her with curious and intense interest.

Perhaps she had taken a knock to the head.

Then he winked at her and shook out the sarong, holding it up and examining the pattern.
 

Ada figured it should cover him. She had a figure that curved and bulged, and she was taller than average, something she could thank her Samoan-German father for. Add to her near six-feet in height, a wild mass of dark hair, and milk chocolate-coloured skin—her father’s diluted Polynesian colouring cut further by her pale Dutch mother’s—and she struck quite a large and imposing image for a woman.
 

“No camouflage in this little number. Red and pink hibiscus on a bright orange background. Let’s hope that bear’s not still around.” The man had clearly spent some time in the islands, because he tied the sarong as if it were second nature.
 

“Ta-da.” He opened his arms wide, as if to show off his new threads. Then he thrust a hand towards her. “Now that we’ve got the wardrobe malfunction sorted, Ranger Sachs-Severin, land owner. Pleased to meet you.”

“Ada Hastings, trespasser,” she replied, with a grin. She must have had bear on the brain, because the size of his hand engulfing hers immediately brought the image of a powerful bear paw to mind.

He picked up her daypack and slung it over one shoulder. “Are you okay to walk now?”

She nodded, still slightly stunned. Even though she didn’t have much to do with the business pages of
In Depth
magazine, where she worked, she knew the Sachs-Severin name, and the immense wealth generated by the hedge fund the three brothers ran. For a moment there, she’d been okay to walk, but now she was struck with yet another sense of wow! It was going to kill Simon, the business editor, once he learned Ada had been caught trespassing by a naked Sachs-Severin.
 

Ranger stopped along the track when he realised she wasn’t following. “Ada?”

“I’m good,” she said, heading after him. “Where are you taking me?”

 
“Into custody. You are trespassing, after all. There are signs everywhere.”

“What? I didn’t see any signs.”

He grinned. Perfect teeth, square jaw, eyes that went spooky at times. Yup, custody sounded just fine right now.

“I’m kidding. We’ll go back to the lodge. My mother’s pretty good at patching people up, and if she thinks it’s necessary, she’ll insist you see the doctor in town.”

A mother. That sounded safe enough even though it could be bullshit. At the moment she didn’t have much choice, because if the bear returned, she’d prefer to have the protection of a sarong-wearing hot guy.

Walking in the bush had never been more pleasant. Every time she looked up, she caught the gorgeous view of the way Ranger’s hard muscled ass stressed the cloth of the tightly wrapped sarong. Until today, she hadn’t realised how see-through her favourite sarong had become from so much wear and washing.
 

At one stage Ranger swung around and caught Ada, who had paused to catch her breath at the top of a particularly steep part of the track, gawking at him.

“How does it look?” he asked.

“Distracting.” Especially front on, she thought. Despite the extra folds of the cloth in front, she could still make out the gorgeous cock she’d seen earlier. Or, perhaps, that was merely wishful thinking.

CHAPTER TWO

~RANGER~

Ranger caught her scent when he emerged from beneath the waterfall. At first he thought his senses were playing tricks on him, exhausted as he was from the mission he’d just completed. He had just returned from Bear Force ops, where they’d taken out a large poaching operation running between Korea and the US, trafficking bear parts for the Traditional Asian Medicine market. His brother, Romer, had gone undercover and infiltrated the organisation. When the time was right, they’d been able to get in, cause a shit load of trouble, expose the poachers to allow the correct authorities to take over, and get back out before anyone who mattered had had any idea who they were.

A classic Bear Force operation.

However, that sort of work left him feeling tainted, and this time, he’d taken a bullet to his side, but thankfully, as a bear shifter he’d healed quickly.
 
They all hated the way the very nature of bears set them up for abuse in almost every country in the world where they existed in their natural habitat.
 

His way of ‘decontaminating’ after an op was to take to the bush at the back of his family-owned retreat in the native forest of the Coromandel Peninsula. Today he’d taken a run out to the waterfall to wash off the effects of the mission, not for a minute expecting to come across anyone.

Ranger knew he had a problem on his hands when he saw Ada. The first being that he had a lot of explaining to do, and the second issue was that his bear reacted in a most alarming way.

He had zeroed in on Ada as a mate.

Ranger hadn’t entirely believed in the fated mate scenario that shifters spoke of, mainly because he was certain that by the age of thirty, he should surely have experienced it. Of course there’d been girlfriends, but he’d never felt the pull of a woman to the extent that his bear became almost uncontrollable.

Until Ada.

The surge of lust that roared through his bear when he watched her on the path was astounding. The alarm that speared him when he saw her fall was beyond anything he’d experienced on his most dangerous missions.

He’d made a snap decision to change back to human form when he went to tend her because, hell, nobody was prepared to discover a bear in the New Zealand bush. That, of course, meant dealing with the awkward naked moment, but he’d almost forgotten about that with his concern about her injuries.

Much of the track back to the lodge was narrow, with steep drop-offs. It wound through stunning bush, with giant, gnarled
puriri
trees, several ancient
kauri
—rare now after the rampant logging by the colonials—huge tree ferns, and a magnificent grove of
nikau
palms. He’d have liked to stop at the grove and spend some time there with Ada, but he was concerned about the knock she’d taken to her head.

Mainly, Ada stayed behind him on the track and he teased her about perving at the guy in the see-through skirt leading the way. She didn’t seem to have a problem with that, and she laughed and joked with him as they trekked. He pointed at various landmarks, explaining about the geological aspects of the area, and places of historical importance to the local Māori.

At steep places he had the opportunity to take her hand and help her climb, even though she complained she was too heavy to pull up. Silly woman, she was absolutely perfect in his eyes.