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

Logically, she’d known that. She was here on vacation, nothing more. But suddenly this trip-gone-wrong and the fallout with the bombshells felt big. It felt like fate. This place with Matt was comfortable in ways she’d never expected.
    One week, and she’d go back to her life in Minden.
    One week, and she’d have to say goodbye to Matt and the people here.
    One week was all she had to make memories that would last her whole life.

Chapter Ten
     
    “Clinton, quit!” Willa yelled, trying not to laugh as she pulled a third crawfish out from under her shirt.
    Clinton was chortling like a lunatic as he danced out of swatting range.
    “See,” Matt called from the road where he and Jason were tossing a football to each other from a ridiculously long distance apart. “This is why I don’t trust them to cook. Food wasters, all of them. Leave her alone, or I’ll eat you.”
    “From what we heard all night, you should be full of eating people,” Clinton said.
    Willa’s eyes nearly popped out of her head as she scooped rice into paper bowls. “Clinton!”
    “The walls are thin. Oh, Matt. Oh!” he crowed in a high-pitched voice.
    Mortified, Willa hid her searing face and scooped gumbo into each bowl.
    “Where’s Easton?” she asked, desperate to change the subject.
    Creed leaned back on the prep table and jerked his chin to the woods. “At his place.”
    One, two, three, four. How had she not realized there were only four trailers in the semi-circle and five bears in the Gray Back Crew?
    “Why does he live up there?”
    “Uh, because when he moved here two years ago, Matt pissed him off day one, and Easton picked his trailer up and dragged it through the woods,” Clinton explained helpfully.
    “Picked it up and dragged it through—you mean with his bare hands?”
    “Easton needs to live in confinement. His bear does best away from the rest of us,” Creed said as he lifted the draining pot of crawfish out of the water and settled it on the top ledge.
    “That’s sad,” she said, heart aching at what could make a man need such solitude.
    “Spare your pity for someone who deserves it,” Matt muttered as he approached the fire pit, tossing the football up and catching it. “Beaston lives the way he lives because he chooses to.”
    Clinton snorted and repeated, “Beaston.”
    Beaston? Willa tossed a look at the trail he’d walked up earlier. She should be afraid of all these men, but for some reason, she wasn’t. Perhaps her instincts were broken.
    “Food’s on,” Matt said, pouring the crawfish, corn, potato and onion boil onto thick brown paper Creed has spread over the prep table.
    “Shouldn’t we tell Easton?” she asked as everyone gathered around and began twisting tails off the steaming crawfish.
    “You can try, but it’ll be a waste of breath,” Jason said around a bite. “He doesn’t like social calls.”
    Well, she knew exactly how it felt to be left out by the bombshells, and she’d be damned if she was going to do that to someone else.
    After Creed dug into his bowl of gumbo, he rolled his eyes heavenward. “Damn, woman, you can cook.”
    She grinned and thanked him, then snatched a bowl of the piping food and headed for the trail that led to Easton’s wilderness trailer.
    “Willa,” Matt warned.
    “I’m not leaving him out.”
    She could feel Matt’s eyes boring into the back of her head, but she was doing this. The evening had been perfect, and she was enjoying getting to know Matt’s crew, but there was something seriously disjointed when one of them was so ostracized like this.
    She stomped up the uneven trail, clutching her warm bowl of gumbo, but with every step farther into the woods, her confidence wavered.
    The boys called him Beaston for a reason, and here she was, like a horror-movie dumbass, headed out to his hidey hole alone, all human and weaponless.
    But if she was really in danger, Matt wouldn’t have let her come out here by herself.
    Easton’s trailer sat