Mating Dance by Bianca D'Arc

Chapter One

    Tom Masdan was the one and only lawyer in
Grizzly Cove, Washington, and he liked it that way. Tom figured if
there was more than one lawyer in a town, they’d be obligated to
fight things out in court, which was one aspect of his profession
that he loathed. The conflict of the adversarial process annoyed
his inner bear and made him want to scratch, claw and just beat his
opponent into submission rather than wait to hear what some old guy
wearing a dress and sitting on a podium had to say.
    Tom thought, not for the first time, that
maybe studying law hadn’t been the brightest idea he’d ever had.
Then again, shifters needed legal representation every once in
awhile, just like everybody else. That’s where he came in.
    He enjoyed helping people like
himself—people who lived under the radar of the human population.
Shapeshifters had to learn to adapt to the modern, human world.
That included following the laws of the countries in which they
lived.
    Tom had been born and raised in the United
States. He’d gone to an Ivy League law school back east. Since
then, he had offered his services solely to the were of
North America, or any were that needed legal representation
in the States. He filed claims, did a lot of paperwork, and helped
shapeshifters of all kinds create the paper trail that humans found
so necessary to their existence.
    He had traveled all over, but he had never
found the one woman who could complete him. He’d never found his
mate.
    So when his long-time friend, John
Marshall—known simply as Big John to most folks—proposed the idea
of forming their own little enclave on the Washington coast and
putting out an open call for any bear shifters who wanted to move
there, Tom was cautiously optimistic. The idea of gathering a
relatively large group of usually solitary bears in one town was
both novel and intriguing. It could also be dangerous as hell, but
Tom trusted Big John’s ultra-Alpha tendencies to keep everybody in
line.
    John had asked Tom to begin the process of
turning the large, adjoining parcels of real estate John had bought
over the past several years into a new town. There were lots of
forms to file with the state of Washington, and quite a few
building contracts to oversee. He’d also overseen the real estate
deals of neighboring properties for each of the core group of bear
shifters that had joined John on this quest. It had taken a good
portion of the last several years of Tom’s life, but the town of
Grizzly Cove had finally become a reality.
    It was a really good reality too. The town
was small by human standards, but already a few dozen bear shifters
had answered John’s call for settlers. There were still more males
than females, but with the recent decision to allow a few select
human-owned businesses to open up on Main Street, things were
beginning to change.
    Just last week, the sheriff had found his
mate in the human woman who, along with her two sisters, owned the
new bake shop. It was a true mating, and Tom was happy for
them.
    But, it had become clear that the so-called
secret of Grizzly Cove hadn’t really been that much of the secret
to the other two sisters. They’d taken the news about shapeshifters
in stride. It seemed they’d already figured it out.
    Which meant that the shifter residents
weren’t being careful enough. And that the two remaining sisters
needed to agree not to spill the beans.
    A job for Tom, the Alpha had said. Tom
wasn’t so sure. He might be a lawyer, but he wasn’t necessarily a
smooth talker. He did his best work on a computer, in an office. He
wasn’t the kind of attorney who schmoozed clients over
three-martini lunches.
    But Big John had asked him to try, so there
Tom was, approaching the bakery he had never stepped foot in
before. It wasn’t that he was shy. It was more that he hadn’t
really wanted to interact with the new humans in town until the
experiment had been proven a success. The bakery was the first of
many