Bearly Hanging On (Alpha Werebear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (The Jamesburg Shifters Book 6) by Lynn Red

inside of a cell.
    Jamie sighed. Why can't anything just be simple? Simple boyfriend, simple life, simple problems?
    But, there was no point to the moping. There never was, not even in the darkest times. Not even when she'd lost pretty much everything over the course of a single month. If nothing else, she was tenacious, and she clung to hope like Whit Whitman to his gallon-sized pump can of Aqua-net.
    The gray of an overcast, fall morning was impenetrably deep. There was just the slightest mist in the air that was cool and refreshing on her face. The higher up she went, it might be heavier, or it might be ice, it was hard to tell at this time of year.
    But the sky, she thought with a laugh, the sky's not the only thing holding some moisture around Jamesburg today. Just thinking that made her sigh again, partially at her own ridiculousness, and partially at how she was walking... flying, headlong into trouble. Then again, it might be nothing.
    He may turn out to be nothing more than some kind of fantasy that's better left that way. She'd certainly had enough experience with that to know it was a definite possibility.
    Something about him is just different though, she thought, swinging her legs out over her third story windowsill.
    It wasn't that her house was particularly huge - it was a small, circa 1930s place with enough work that needed doing to keep her weekends full - but she had converted the attic into a bedroom. Seemed right, somehow.
    Either he's different, or I'm just a horny idiot, Jamie thought, snickering slightly. But it doesn't matter. I've gotta figure it out, whatever it is. And if there are people needing help, I've got to at least try to help them.
    Taking a big, deep breath, the scent of fir trees and the clean, crisp smell of winter just around the corner filled Jamie's nose. She loved this time of year for the same reason she loved twilight and dusk.
    For whatever reason, the times between the other times - where daylight and nighttime mingled, or where summer gave way to winter - those were her favorite times. As her wings flexed and took the air, she thought that maybe, just maybe, there was something to that too.
    *
    J amie's swooping took her up, then down, up and then down again, along the drifts of wind, and almost to the ground. She skimmed along lakes, rivers, and the tops of Jamesburg's famous Douglas firs, and then finally saw what she thought Ryan had talked about during his fevered, vampire-bitten rambling before she left him in West and Elena's care.
    In an attempt to figure out what was going on, Jamie asked him where he lived, thinking that would give her a clue, but the directions were so jumbled and odd that it took a few days of mulling it over before she was able to make enough sense of them to follow. But, when she finally did, what she saw was a mixture of completely unsurprising, and still unsettling.
    How could something like this go completely unnoticed for so long?
    A bunch of houses, most of them hand-built, and all of them made with a mixture of love and desperation.
    "Jamesburg's forgotten," she said sadly. "So forgotten, that only a handful of people in town know they exist. Ryan's their saint, I guess, because without him, who knows how long ago they would have died."
    Still, she couldn't fathom that the guy she was almost nightly fantasizing about was also a cow thief, and also knocked over a couple of grocery stores in the middle of the night. No one was hurt - as rough and tumble as he might act, he wasn't going to hurt anyone, but damn had he stolen a lot of cans of creamed corn.
    Okay - alleged to have done all those things. Someone knocked over the town’s biggest grocery stores, stealing canned goods and apparently sacks of dog food and birdseed by the ton, and there was nothing to go on. Not a shred of evidence, not a hint of hide nor fur.
    But Jamie thought it might be worth it to finally go and visit this bear who kept haunting her dreams.
    She knew she had to do