Bear in the Rough: Bear Shifter Romance (Broken Hill Bears Book 1) by Ariana Hawkes Page A

escape?”
    “Yes!” Marin said, right behind her. She opened the window wide and began to climb out. At the same moment, a powerful roar burst out from someplace nearby. She fell back into the room in alarm. “Fuck,” she hissed. “They’re watching us.” Dejectedly, they wandered back to the couch and slumped down again.
    “I feel like a fucking sitting duck,” Marin spat.
    “I keep thinking about all those thrillers I read where the heroine gets trapped somewhere, and sits waiting to decide what the bad guy’s going to do with her,” Eloise said in a quavering voice, hugging herself and shivering, although the room was warm.
    “Let’s try to stay calm and think about why they might have decided to abduct us,” Freya said. “I’m pretty sure it wasn’t planned.”
    “So they grabbed us because we’re females.”
    “Maybe they want to keep us as sex slaves,” Eloise wailed.
    “I asked one of them if he knew Xander the Great – you know, the shape shifter I saw fighting the other day – and he reacted. I think he knows him. Maybe we can work with that.”
    “Shifters live someplace secret, right?” Marin said.
    “Uh huh.”
    “Maybe we strayed too close to their territory.”
    “So they abducted us? I don’t want to think how that line of argument ends,” Freya said.
    They kept throwing ideas back and forth, nothing really making sense, until the door banged open again and a girl strode in carrying a huge tray laden with steaming plates of food.
    She was tall, statuesque, and lithe, with the body of an athlete. She had long red hair, plaited into braids, and wide green eyes that tilted upwards at the outer corners. Her bare arms and legs were covered in bruises and healing gashes as if she’d recently been involved in a vicious fight, but her manner was careless, as if they didn’t bother her at all.
    “Hi!” she said perkily.
    “What are we doing here?” Freya said immediately. The girl frowned.
    “I don’t know, hun. Deacon just asked me to bring you some food.” She stepped closer to them and cleared the coffee table of all the objects on it with a swipe of her hand, before laying the tray down. There was something feline about her, and her strength was superhuman. She’d been holding the tray balanced in one hand, while Freya knew that she would’ve struggled to carry it in two.
    “You all really are humans,” she said, regarding them with some interest. “Damn, you’ve gotta be the first ones to have set foot in the valley.”
    “We are?” Marin said, but she didn’t say anything else. She sat cross-legged on the floor opposite them and gazed at them like a big cat watching some prey that it was deciding whether to hunt or not.
    They stared at the food. It looked and smelled delicious, but they all feared some trick. Maybe the plan was to sedate them or something , Freya wondered.
    At last, the girl leapt to her feet.
    “It’s okay. It’s not poisoned or anything. Rudy made it. She’s the best chef in the entire hill. You all are lucky,” she said. When they still didn’t move to pick up the plates, she darted forward and with a sigh, picked up a fork, dug it into the food and put a big dollop into her mouth, before chewing and swallowing with some enjoyment. She licked her lips. “See. It’s all good.”
    Slowly, they edged forward. It did smell incredible, and Freya’s tummy rumbled. She grabbed a plate and the others followed, eating slowly at first, then ravenously. The woman watched them for a while, then slipped out of the door, smirking, like a satisfied cat, slinking off for a nap.
    “She didn’t know anything, did she?” Freya said, as soon as she’d gone.
    “I don’t think so.”
    “I kind of liked her,” Eloise said, and the heads of the other two snapped toward her in surprise. “I mean, she’s kind of kick-ass.”
    “We should have gone for the female solidarity angle and got her to help us,” Marin said with a sigh of impatience. “But I