Bear No Defeat Read online

  “Oh my god, Alice… that’s horrible,” Sari said, leaning forward to put her hand on Alice’s.

  Alice looked at Sari’s hand with a tinge of appreciation, her pale blue eyes absently considering the manicure Sari had. On point as usual, while Alice herself hadn’t been to a manicurist in months and just wore a clear coat on them now. Who was she trying to impress, after all?

  Shaking her head, she forced the morose thoughts away. She’d have plenty of time to wallow once she packed her bags and arrived in Idaho, after all.

  “My dad even bought this apartment for me when I was starting out. I mean, I’m working as a junior accountant for the same people! I should have caught it, should have realized what he was doing. Maybe I could have stopped him or made it right in time… but he hid the whole thing very well. Gambling addiction, apparently. Horses, of all things.”

  Despite her best efforts, a pout rolled over her plush lips and Alice busied herself with another sip of her drink. There wasn’t enough rum in the world, but she was dedicated to testing that theory.

  The news had come straight out of nowhere. One day, Alice Wilcox was minding her own business, waiting for the clock to tick to five so she could run home, get dressed, and hit the town with Sari, and the next moment her father, Andrew Wilcox, and the owner of Darmuth Incorporated, Jordan Darmuth, were showing her into a meeting room and destroying her world from the very foundation up.

  Losing her mother had been no easy pill to swallow six years ago, when Alice had been in her second year of college, eventually getting her degree in accounting and finance. Since then, it had just been her, her father, and her four brothers, all self-sufficient now but obviously somewhat at a loss after losing the anchor of their family. They’d all known it was coming, obviously, with Adelaide Wilcox’s leukemia having been a long, arduous battle, but no one’s ever ready for the end.

  Since then, Alice had been picking up the pieces of her life as best as she could and putting them together into something new and hopefully almost as good. She thought she had it down fairly well, other than the whole finding a man who isn’t a complete jerk part, but apparently that too had to be questioned.

  Over the course of an hour, Jordan Darmuth had done most of the talking. He’d exposed Alice’s father for what he had done, as Andrew listened like a dog who had gotten kicked and not saying a word in protest, and then laying forth a plan that would allow Alice and her father to make it up to the Darmuths. The plot, of course, was ludicrous. But at the end of it all, Alice hadn’t even been that surprised. Just numb.

  And that feeling didn’t seem to pass no matter how many cocktails she inhaled, much to her chagrin.

  “Okay, okay, so, tell me all of this again. This time, I promise I’ll listen and pretend to think that you’re not crazy, okay?”

  “Fine,” Alice said with a shadow of a smile, completely devoid of emotion as it was. “Jordan Darmuth is the father of Jax Darmuth,” she began, only to be interrupted.

  “This Jax Darmuth,” Sari asked, holding up her phone showing a shirtless, utterly delicious picture of the Shifter Grove Shovelers enforcer.

  The sight of him almost made Alice stutter. Almost. He was one of those hellishly tall, broadly built guys who resembled a wall of muscle and strength rather than any ordinary man. Greek gods would have been jealous of his pecs, and while the theory of grating cheese off of someone’s abs sounded entirely ludicrous to Alice, his certainly looked like they could fit the bill.

  And he’s going to be my…

  Alice bit her lower lip, taking a deep breath. Focus was really difficult to achieve when she had to stare into the soulful gray eyes of the cuddliest damn goon in the whole NSHL. And she’d had her fair share of bad boy bastards so honestly, when the rational part of her mind told her to completely ignore the way he looked, she was almost, almost on board.

  Almost.

  “That Jax Darmuth, yes,” Alice confirmed. “Apparently, Daddy Darmuth wants his son and heir to get married to a nice, respectable girl and to pop out a couple of boys to carry on the family legacy, or whatever. His daughters are both married off already but Jax has been avoiding the sacred ‘duty’ to the best of his abilities. Can’t say I blame him,” Alice said, grumbling as she sipped at her ever-depleting stores of rum.

  “And you’re supposed to be the nice, respectable girl?” Sari asked, blinking like someone had thrown glitter in her eyes and she was having a hard time telling fiction from fact.

  “Seems so,” Alice said, a small smirk playing on her lips now.

  She pushed a lock of her strawberry-blonde hair out of her face, glancing around her cramped living room. Most of the furniture was second-hand and the space was small, but cozy. She’d expected to stay in Concord, work for Darmuth for a few more years, before branching out somewhere and seeing the world when she felt like she had enough money for it.

  Family had been her first choice, but if the last few years of dating had taught her anything, then it was that men were, by and large, jerks, or at least the ones she seemed to attract. Romance as a whole had sort of lost its luster by that point.

  Guess I’ll be finding my “adventure” sooner than I thought, she mused, however dark it was.

  “It still sounds made up to me,” Sari said, shaking her head and draining half a glass of wine in one gulp.

  Alice could understand. She’d gone through the denial phase already and was well on her way to acceptance, two nights of consuming rum and inhaling ice cream later.

  “Oh, trust me, that doesn’t change,” Alice assured her. “But the deal is that Jax and I get married, quietly, and I keep my mouth shut. The prenup said two years of marriage at a minimum to not be in breach of contract, but they can’t force me to have a baby. I’m simply… encouraged,” Alice said, her tongue barely twisting to say it.

  “Encouraged how?” Sari asked.

  “With a couple of million bucks and my father’s debt in front of the Darmuths swept under the rug. Right now, if I get married to Jax, my dad will retain his job, but not his position. Although he’s going to have to try and pay back what he took over the years. It’s impossible. He’d have to live to be three hundred and even then, he’d have to forego eating and sleeping and all those other troublesome details. But if I have a baby, a boy in particular…”

  Alice allowed herself to trail off as she drained the last of her rum, finding it tasting far more sour than it should have. Or maybe that was just her general feelings about the whole thing. Sour.

  That sounded about as right as anything else had over the last few days.

  “Insane,” Sari said, echoing Alice’s sentiments exactly. “You’re going to go through with it?”

  A much harder question to answer.

  “I haven’t talked to Jax yet. Or, sorry, Jasper as his father insists on calling him, but I do have a ticket to someplace called Shifter Grove, where his team is now. I’m supposed to get lodgings there so we can ‘get to know one another,’” Alice said, air-quoting the hell out of that statement. “I can’t imagine what kind of a guy, even a werebear with their twisted sense of propriety, would say yes to something like that. But what other choice do I have?”

  “You could just say no?” Sari offered, sounding far more incredulous than she had any right to be.

  “And condemn my dad to a lifetime of prison for stealing? I can’t do that,” Alice said, her voice growing softer and getting a slight tremor to it. “I know he messed up, but if there’s anything I can do to keep him out of there, I have to. I think someone might be after him, that he still owes money to some bookies… It’s not like I’m doing anything supremely interesting with my life to begin with, here. Might as well lounge around in Idaho and live the pampered life of a hockey wife, right?”

  “Neither you nor I think that’s what you want to do,” Sari said sternly, exhaling audibly. “But, I mean, if you’ve made up your mind… at least he’s hot, right?”

  Little mercies.

&
nbsp; Except that the fact that her arranged husband’s level of smoking sexiness really had very little to do with how much Alice was looking forward to spending the next few years of her young life in some sham of a marriage.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jax

  A month later…

  “Suddenly, I’m really glad my parents never had a dime to spend,” Memphis said with his casual drawl, the large polar bear shifter leaning back against the hood of Jax’s truck.

  The whole team of former Chicago Bluehawk hockey stars had taken about two days before realizing that the only way to survive in the boondocks of Idaho mountain ranges were to get trucks, so now they all drove one. On that particular day, both Jax and Memphis had driven out to the airport some way from Shifter Grove, Jax with the intention of meeting his “betrothed,” and Memphis with the apparent intent of making sure that Jax didn’t bail before Slate could land the plane.

  “Yeah, well, I’ve been pretending like mine don’t for the last few years, but that apparently only takes me so far,” Jax said with a shrug of his shoulders.

  The small airplane that made up the only reasonable way of moving between Shifter Grove and the rest of the civilized world was about to touch down and even from this distance, Jax could see Slate happily chatting away with whoever was sitting in the seats behind him. There was a reasonable enough road leading out of Shifter Grove and onto the highways, but the drive was too long so most of the goods and people were still flown in.

  It was an entirely odd place to set up a major NSHL team, considering that Shifter Grove didn’t even have a hotel and the inhabitant numbers hadn’t cracked four figures yet, but unsurprisingly, eccentric billionaires did not think much about reason and sensibility.

  The team had yet to meet their new benefactor, though finding out who he was should have been easy enough… except for the fact that the region boasted ranches belonging to some of the richest shifters in the world, including one of the Goldplains brothers, known for their rock band and the fact that they were fucking loaded!

  Exactly my dad’s kind of crowd… except for the fact that none of them wear their money like a badge of honor.

  “So what’s she supposed to be like?” Memphis asked casually as the plane taxied to a stop.

  “No idea. My father told me that she’s the daughter of an accountant working for him and her family tends toward sons.”

  Jax and Memphis met one another’s gazes for a moment and both of them cracked wide smiles, shaking their heads. While most of the shifters living in Shifter Grove were progressively minded and had come there exactly to get away from the madness of their cultural heritage, they couldn’t exactly forget that there were plenty of crackpots out there clinging to the old ways.

  People like Jordan Darmuth, for whom it was very important how many sons someone’s family had produced over the years.

  “I thought those times were behind us,” Memphis said with a sigh.

  “Me too,” Jax agreed, feeling the cold nip at his nose.

  Idaho was not a particularly warm place as of late and he had to admit, he didn’t mind it one bit. As a polar bear, the snow and the mountains had always appealed to him and now, being outside of Chicago and the other metropolis he had lived in due to his career, he felt like twice the man he was before. A sneaking suspicion told him that this was exactly what the guy who bought the team had had in mind.

  “So why go through with it?” Memphis queried, his tone neutral enough.

  No wonder, considering Memphis had very recently gotten together with his own girlfriend, a woman who showed all the signs of being his mate for life. Though polar bears liked to think about everything too damn long, there wasn’t a single person on the team who wasn’t convinced that Memphis had found the one for him. It was easy enough to tell based on how well he was playing lately.

  “Got my reasons,” Jax said noncommittally, though he would have been lying had he claimed that he was perfectly happy about it.

  The ceremony was planned in a few weeks, right after their last game against the New Jersey Carnivores for the national title. It was going to be a small affair, just him and her and their prenup, essentially. The whole thing still felt so entirely insane that Jax hadn’t really put any time into really thinking about it. Every time he tried, he’d get a massive headache and his bear trying to remind him how he was a giant idiot for going through with something like that.

  He wasn’t going to listen though.

  “There she comes,” Memphis noted, apparently letting Jax off the hook this time.

  For one maddening, weird moment, everything seemed to stand still as Alice Wilcox descended the few steps leading down to the snow- and ice-covered tarmac. Jax’s mouth quite literally fell open.

  She was tall for a woman, five foot nine, and built with curves in mind. Even wearing a long coat, Jax could tell she hid a heavy sweep of her hips underneath it, with a soft stomach and bountiful breasts made to be fit into the palms of a werebear. She had pale, icy blue eyes and her hair was pushed up into a messy bun, a few tendrils licking at her face as she pulled her hat down a bit to protect against the snowfall.

  Holy shit.

  It wasn’t the most eloquent thought Jax had ever had, but it encompassed his current emotions well enough. He must have been staring for quite a while, because when Memphis clapped him on the shoulder with a hearty laugh, Jax realized that Slate had already clambered down the stairs as well and was carrying Alice’s suitcase as they headed toward the two idling polar bears.

  “I think you got it from here on, hockey bear. She’s a keeper, play nice,” Memphis said with a wink, clambering into his truck and speeding off before Jax could say anything for or against his assessment.

  So much for solidarity, Jax thought wryly, peeling himself off the hood and walking to meet Alice and Slate, the local tiger shifter pilot.

  He reached out a hand and grabbed the suitcase from Slate as soon as he was close enough, suddenly loath to think that any other man was touching anything of Alice’s without his express permission. It was a streak of possessiveness he hadn’t quite known himself to have, so it was all the more surprising when it lashed out so suddenly.

  “You must be Jasper,” Alice said with the slightest smile, bringing the universe collapsing around Jax as she called him that name.

  “Jax, yeah,” he said, pulling off his glove and taking her hand in a hearty shake. “You must be Alice.”

  But that was about as far as his thoughts could make it. When their hands touched, that damn slow motion showed up again and Jax became suddenly, intimately, and inexplicably aware of every tiny little thing about Alice. Like the way she smelled, a bit of mint and jasmine—he wasn’t sure if it was her shampoo or perfume yet, but he wanted to find out. Or the way her perfectly small hand fit in his big grasp and how her body would probably conform against him too if he were to grab her right then and there and kiss her until the ice melted around them and spring bloomed.

  “That’s me,” she said after a moment that seemed both too short and too long, broken by Slate’s knowing chuckle.

  “I think you two will be all right on your own from here, huh? If you need anything, Miss, don’t hesitate to let me know. I’m the only pilot around here and there aren’t a lot of ways to get out of here without me being involved. Though I’m sure you won’t want to run anywhere,” he said with a wink, leaving Jax wondering whether it was meant for Alice or Jax himself, before Slate wheeled around and headed back to his plane with a jaunty whistle.

  “So, this is awkward,” Alice offered, much more in control of her tongue than Jax currently was, apparently.

  “You can say that again. But don’t,” Jax said, catching her when she started opening her mouth.

  He smiled.

  A sense of humor. Now we’re cooking with fire, he thought with amusement, showing her to the truck and opening up the passenger seat’s door for her.

  “What, don’t have time for base hu
mor here in the cold North?” she asked with a bat of her long lashes, teasing rather than taunting.

  “Plenty of time, but you don’t want to run out of your material before we even get out of the airport. I get a feeling we’re going to be needing a hell of a lot of humor over the next few weeks.”

  He closed the door behind her and paused for a moment, looking at the suitcase in his hand before depositing it in the bed of the truck.

  The hell had he done to wind up here? And how had he gotten so lucky as to have his father of all people hook him up with a woman who could have walked off the pages of Shifters Playboy?

  Not that it really mattered. His polar bear was practically ready to throw her over his shoulder and make his way to the nearest minister already, and the man wasn’t too far behind on that idea.

  Idaho must really be destroying my brain if I’m beginning to think that an arranged mail-order bride was any kind of a good idea, Jax pondered, ambling over to his side of the truck and hopping in.

  All he knew was that he and this beautiful little thing from New Hampshire were in for one hell of a weird ride together.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Alice

  The drive to Shifter Grove had been wrought with awkward silences, intersected at times with witty commentary about something or other about their current predicament. At least Jax had shown himself to not be a humorless, dull lump of a bear as Alice had originally feared, like she had when she flicked through his interviews and the few photo shoots he’d done.

  It had seemed to her like the man had either been holding back during them or he really didn’t have anything to say. Neither were a good choice and though their conversation had mostly consisted of pauses and quips in between, she’d left the truck not feeling entirely despairing of her situation.

  It helped that he was so nice to look at, even though she reminded herself adamantly that it was supposed to have nothing to do with it!

  They landed in a red, happy-looking booth in a busy diner called the Sunrise Diner, apparently the only one in town—of course—and waited on their order of coffee and burgers. The coffee arrived quickly enough and Alice drank it thankfully, her eyes going wide as she tasted the deep, smoky roast and felt the notes of chocolate tingling on her palate past the first sip.