A Promise To Bear (Second Chance Shifters 4) by Meredith Clarke Page A

reminder that she wasn’t here anymore. He couldn’t walk into the hotel kitchen and grab freshly baked chocolate chip cookies and he couldn’t go upstairs and smell the overly fragrant perfume after she had made beds. She wasn’t here anymore. And the memories just made it worse.
    He collected three of the floral arrangements at once and walked them to the back of the lodge through the kitchen and outside. He wanted to throw them over the mountainside, but he knew he couldn’t. He pulled each of the cards off the plastic stakes in order to write thank you notes later. Would he have to do that? Or would someone else? Grace had a granddaughter who she talked about all the time. But he had only met her once, and their meeting was less than ideal.
    Twila had come to the lodge for a weekend in college. The only thing that her friends wanted to do was drink and lay out in the sun. Except Twila was different. The moment they met, there was a spark between them. He stayed up with her the second night she was there, and they passed a bottle of whiskey between them while they told each other about their lives. He couldn’t help but reveal himself to her.
    But then everything suddenly changed. One of her friends got lost in the woods, and their parents all came up to help with the search effort to find her. Jasper knew he could have done it all by himself, but he couldn’t risk shifting at that time. The only person who had known was Grace. She never asked him to, and he never offered. The girl was found a day later; she had gotten heinously drunk and walked away and must have passed out somewhere in the woods. But while the search was on for her, Grace’s daughter and her husband, Twila’s parents, were mauled by a bear.
    Jasper had spent months afterwards looking for the beast, trying to figure out if it was a rogue shifter or a natural animal. But he never even found a clue about what had happened to them. For a moment, he had wanted to see the bodies, to make sure the claw marks weren’t his own, or someone he knew. But he knew he couldn’t ask for that. It would cause too many suspicions. He had to stay hidden for fear of persecution. He had seen it happen to other shifters. Sure, they were registered and allowed to be out in public, but the court of public opinion was far worse than any real judge. People still saw them as dangerous, especially around these parts. Jasper thought it was because they mostly knew about real bears. People around here knew what kind of beasts they could become, and Twila’s parents getting murdered only solidified that. He made sure that when he Changed he would travel far away from the lodge, away from people.
    That was typically how he liked to live his life. He did handiwork for Grace, fixing sinks and toilets in the lodge and doing all the landscaping in the spring. It had been steady work, and he was grateful for it. He lived in a little cabin out back and got to eat and stay for free. He didn’t really have any needs besides surviving, so he didn’t need any money. But what would happen when a new owner would buy this place? For now, the lawyer had told him that he was in charge, but he didn’t know how to deal with guests or manage the staff. He simply wanted to go back to his cabin and hide, but he knew he couldn’t. It wasn’t fair to Grace’s memory to let this place fall apart before the new owner showed up. He allowed himself just a moment to linger on who that might be. Grace had never given him any indication of who she would’ve chosen to leave the place to. Jasper knew she had had offers in the past, so maybe upon her death it was supposed to go to one of those businesses. He sucked in a deep breath of cold mountain air and tried to calm himself, shaking those ideas from his head. There were at least a hundred and fifty guests in the lodge right now, and he had to attend to them first.
    “Jasper! Are you out here?”
    He turned around to see Lauren, the lawyer who