Gray Back Bad Bear (Gray Back Bears Book 1) by T. S. Joyce Page A

Jason asked. “They’re ready to go in.”
    “You do it.”
    Jason gave Willa a look that said he was shocked to his bones, and then a slow grin stretched his face. “Well, that’s a first. Maybe having you around to settle his bear won’t be so bad after all.”
    Giddy and humming, Jason pulled the bag of live crawfish from the shady patch under the prep table and pulled a knife from his back pocket. Willa added some turkey sausage and chicken stock and kept a constant stir as she watched Jason dump the mud bugs into a holey bucket and run a hose over them.
    Creed pulled a plastic chair up next to the stove and handed her an already opened bottle of beer. “You cooking to win my favor?”
    “Shit yeah,” she muttered. The swig of cold beer tasted like heaven as it slid down her throat. “You make me nervous.”
    “You didn’t look scared of blood when Matt showed you his ribs, so that’s one point in your favor. What all do you know about us?”
    “Just what Matt’s told me and what I read on Cora Wright’s Web site. She was the one in charge of helping the Breck Crew come out to the public. She does question and answer forums and has a bunch of frequently asked questions on her site.”
    “I know who Cora is. She advised us when we registered to the public, too.”
    “Oh, right. Of course. Sorry.”
    Creed took a long drink of his beer and stared thoughtfully at Jason, who was dumping a heap of pre-mixed, seasoning into the boiling pot. It was spicy enough to burn her nose from ten feet away.
    “You know about claiming?” Creed asked.
    The nerves were back, and if she answered him now, her voice would shake. She busied herself with tossing grandma’s secret seasoning ingredients into the gumbo. Finally, after she’d added chicken breast and okra, she answered him. “I do. At least, I think I do. Cora Wright’s—”
    “Web site told you.”
    “Yeah.” Heat blasted up her neck and into her cheeks as she thought about how she’d asked Matt to bite her. She’d lost her damned mind in the throes of passion with him because she didn’t really want to be Turned into a bear shifter. She was perfectly happy with her human status.
    “What are your intentions with Matt?” Creed asked low. “I need to know. Whatever is happening between you puts my crew at risk, and I need to know you feel the same about him as he feels about you.”
    “I miss him when he’s away from me. I feel like he gets me like no one ever has, which I realize makes no sense because we haven’t known each other that long. But that doesn’t seem to matter to my silly heart because I feel like I’ve known him all my life. I breathe for his smile, and when he’s hurting, I hurt. And when I touch his scars…” This was too much. She was sharing things with Creed she hadn’t meant to, but he’d asked her a direct question, and it was as if she’d taken some sort of truth serum. Maybe Creed was magic. She believed in it.
    “Look,” she said, pulling the spoon from the pot and looking the alpha right in the eyes. “I’m falling in love with him. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring, or next week. And as much as I’ve tried to convince myself this is some vacation fling, I know it’s not. Matt feels…important.”
    “And you don’t care about all those other women?”
    “I wish he hadn’t been with them. I wish I had all of his firsts to myself, but that was in his past, and I trust him. I don’t care about where he’s been. I care about where he’s going.”
    Creed huffed a heavy sigh and lifted his beer. He tapped the neck against hers with a soft clink , then said, “All right, we’ll try this. You can stay here until my crew proves to me they can’t handle having a woman up here.”
    “And if they can handle it?”
    “You can stay the whole week.”
    A week. She turned back to the pot and began stirring it again. Creed had just reminded her that she was a temporary fixture here at the trailer park.