Bear Your Heart (Alpha Werebear Romance) (Forever Mated Book 1) Read online

  Table of Contents

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  Also By Lynn Red

  Bear your heart final (forever mated, #1)

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  Ami, Ale, Nana Singer and Jasper will return in BEAR YOUR SOUL – coming soon!

  If you’d like some steamy sci-fi action adventure, look no further than TRAPPED IN THE STARS! | Avai

  Further Reading: Hare Today Bear Tomorrow

  BEAR YOUR HEART

  A Forever Mated Story (alpha werebear romance)

  ©2017

  Lynn Red

  Also by Lynn Red

  forever mated

  Bear your heart final

  Jamesburg Shifter Romance

  Bear Me Away

  Kendal Creek Bears

  Can't Bear To Run

  Can't Bear to Hide

  Mating Call Dating Agency

  Hare Today Bear Tomorrow

  The Fox and her Bear

  Bear the Heat

  Bear Arms

  Mating Call Dating Agency Box Set

  The Broken Pine Bears

  Two Bears are Better Than One

  Between a Bear and a Hard Place

  The Jamesburg Shifters

  Bearing It All

  Bear With Me

  Bearly Breathing

  Bearly Hanging On

  Bear Your Teeth

  The Jamesburg Shifters Volume 2

  Wolf on the Road

  The Jamesburg Shifters Volume 1

  To Catch a Wolf

  Standalone

  Lion In Wait

  Horns for the Harem Girl

  Watch for more at Lynn Red’s site.

  Table of Contents

  Copyright Page

  Also By Lynn Red

  Bear your heart final (forever mated, #1)

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  Ami, Ale, Nana Singer and Jasper will return in BEAR YOUR SOUL – coming soon!

  If you’d like some steamy sci-fi action adventure, look no further than TRAPPED IN THE STARS! | Available for FREE on Kindle Unlimited!

  Further Reading: Hare Today Bear Tomorrow

  Also By Lynn Red

  Thank you so much for taking the time to check out my new book! Click here to subscribe to my mailing list to keep up to date on all my new releases, giveaways, and free books!

  1

  “Nurse Ami, report to the central nurse’s station. Nurse Ami to the central station.”

  The fuzzy PA that had lived inside the Munroe Village General Hospital since Munroe had actually been a village instead of a moderately sized town crackled, popped, and woke me up from my dream. I was on my third shift in thirty-six hours, and was supposed to get a four-hour break, but it really only lasted about an hour and a half before that damn thing woke me up.

  I rubbed my eyes and tried to throw my legs over the side of the breakroom cot, but they were so heavy it was all I could do to keep from either passing right back out, or landing on my face once I managed to stand up. Wandering over to the coffee maker, I poured about forty-six ounces of it into my fishbowl sized mug before I realized the liquid I was getting was lukewarm at best, and there was a slick coating of grounds in a layer on top.

  “Pounding headache, no coffee,” I paused as a sour feeling twisted my stomach in a knot, “nausea, check. That’s great.” My stomach gurgled dangerously, and a chill radiated from my insides out.

  “You look horrible,” my friend, Elle Hicks said as she walked through the break room door with steps only slightly less heavy than mine. If it were any other time, and I was in any other state, I would’ve heard her coming for a mile. As it was, I hardly recognized the reality of her being in the same room with me. “You sick or something?”

  I shook my head. “I was supposed to have a break,” I managed to mumble, not at all happy about my situation. “Been here since Tuesday, it’s Thursday, right? Don’t tell me some of the kids quit or I’ll strangle you with the cord on this coffee maker.”

  Elle lifted an eyebrow. “All right then, no, kids didn’t quit.”

  Heaving an oversized sigh, I made it to the couch that ran along the western wall of the break room and sat down in a heap. The couch squeaked uncomfortably, the ancient springs in the wheat-colored furniture groaning under my weight. “I think it just called me fat.”

  Elle burst out with a huge boom of laughter. For a girl who probably doesn’t make five foot three, she has the loudest laugh I’ve ever heard. She doesn’t draw it out, either, she just gives one, big, ‘HA!’ and then turns bright red for a minute. Maybe she just distills her laughs like liquor, until all the filler is gone, and you’re left with Everclear.

  Not thinking very quickly, or very effectively, I announced that I’d really like a shot of the above-mentioned liquor. “Who quit?” I asked, trying my damndest to wake up enough to deal with patients.

  “Nurse Ami, report to the central nurse’s station as soon as you are ready.”

  I rolled my eyes so hard they clattered against the back of my skull. “Can she possibly be more annoying?”

  “Who? The boss?”

  Our boss, the ancient and horrible Paula Kiddleton, RN, had this amazing ability to drive me completely nuts. For a second, I thought I might join all those new interns who quit. It’s amazing—they go to school for four years, get a nursing degree and start a work rotation. If they were placed anywhere but here, under anyone but Kiddleton, I promise you they’d, every single one of them, been perfectly content. She has this power to make people question their own sanity, convince themselves that they’re the inept morons, and then sort of implode.

  Needless to say, Skinny Kiddy, as we called her behind her back, was not the most popular person in the hospital. Still, she knew her shit and would go to bat for you if you were one of the six or seven people on earth she liked, so I generally didn’t have any real problem with her.

  Except when she wouldn’t shut the hell up on the PA. The voice came again, and without thinking—or maybe because I could blame it on not thinking—I shouted that I was coming as soon as I could stand up. I also made a nasty comment about the sad state of the coffee maker.

  “Wait, are you kidding me?” it was Elle this time, instead of my archrival, the announcement system. “Whose day is it to keep this thing hot?” She made her way to the table right beside me and flipped through the sign-up sheet. “Oh right, well, Olivia doesn’t work here anymore, so I guess it makes sense the coffee’s a day old and awful. Well, what the hell are you going to do.” She went to get some, but found it empty. “You gonna drink that?” she asked, indicating my abandoned coffee mug. When I shook my head, and shuddered in disgust, Elle used her hand to scoop the junk off the surface of the coffee and flicked it into the trash.

  Nurses, I guess, have a vastly higher level of gross-out than normal, mortal human beings.

  The PA fired up again, and before Skinny Kiddy could get rude about my not having yet appeared, Elle had grabbed a broom, and flicked the power switch on the speaker over the door. “What?” she asked when I r
aised an eyebrow at her strictly illegal activity. “I’ll turn it on when I’m done with this coffee.” She took a couple of chugs, which immediately made my stomach turn a small flip. “I just can’t bear listening to her during my break. I think I’m allowed.”

  I nodded, laughed under my breath, and rubbed my eyes with the back of my hands enough to make sure they were just a little puffy—as though they needed any help to be puffy—before I strode out the door and into the florescent jungle of the MVGH. To my surprise, when I emerged, the lights were nowhere near as caustic and awful as they usually were. I caught Kiddy’s glance, mostly on accident.

  “Glad you could join us,” she said, “we’ve got an entire troupe of wounded muscleheads in the lobby and I swear to god if I have to listen to one more whining complaint from one of them, I’m gonna go to my car, get my gun and start shooting. I’m joking, I don’t have a gun. At least not in my car.”

  As she talked, her grandma-style glasses slipped to the tip of her nose, and I couldn’t help smile. For all her bluster and her bracing style of talking to other people, she could be pretty funny sometimes. Still, the mention of a lobby full of injured muscleheads both confused and fascinated me. “Was there an explosion at the gym?” I asked as I snatched a clipboard and went to drag one of them back to an examination room.

  Kiddy stared at me blankly, her glasses once again sliding down her nose, but this time I have no idea why they were doing that, as she was standing stock-still except for the unimpressed chewing of gum she never stopped doing. “Was that a joke?” she asked. “This is serious, we have injured people out there, and you’re making jokes?”

  “Yes,” I said flatly.

  She snorted, and then laughed for a second before waving me on. “Oh, Alyssa?”

  “Huh?”

  “There’s one out there with long, blond hair and a half-buttoned dress shirt. Leave him alone.”

  “He making trouble?” I asked.

  “No,” she said, “he’s mine.”

  *

  In my twelve years of being a full-time, practicing nurse, I’d never seen so many muscles in one place. There was one in the corner of the lobby with a pair of shoulders so big that they seemed to swallow his neck, which was in no way diminutive. Another guy, next to him, was a little smaller, although seriously, no one in that room was small or even sort of normal sized. I couldn’t figure out what the hell I’d wandered into.

  “Hey,” I asked the secretary, whose name I forget chronically and always feel guilty about it, “did a calendar shoot explode?”

  She popped her gum and stared at me. “Huh?”

  “The muscle guys sitting in front of you. Have you noticed?” Suddenly I remembered why I can’t ever recall her name. “Little weird, dontcha think?”

  She shrugged and called someone up to fill in his insurance information. The specimen that approached had close-cropped brown hair, high-cut cheekbones, and bright blue eyes. He smiled at me, which made his cheeks frame his chin. “Hey there, cutie,” he said. I immediately pursed my lips and frowned at him. Look, I don’t care how hot you are, saying ‘hey there, cutie’ is enough to get you jettisoned from me ever caring about you, ever. Apparently, pursing my lips and frowning with my hands on my hips is pretty expressive, because the guy just turned back to the magazine he was reading.

  “I dunno,” the secretary said in between popping her gum. That snap-snap-snap got me just about mad enough to scream, but she just kept on.

  I sighed heavily. “Who’s next?” I asked. “I guess we can’t keep them sitting around forever.”

  “We’ve been here forever!” a particularly large creature from the other side of the lobby shouted, as though he’d heard me, and was trying to agree as obnoxiously as possible. “Can’t we get some help?”

  And then, like an angel of death swooping through a bunch of Nazis in an Indiana Jones movie, Skinny Kiddy descended. Nothing in the world made her angrier than a bunch of idiots, who weren’t even critically injured, whining about how long it took to get through the line. She never got irritated at people who were actually sick, or actually injured, but these guys had just about gotten under her skin. “We’re going as fast as we can!” she shouted as she emerged from the hall, sweeping the giant swinging doors aside like a cowboy sauntering into a saloon. “If you want to get seen faster, then shut the hell up!”

  Everyone froze where they were. Mouths were open, hands were left hanging in the air pointing in various directions, and one guy had stopped moving halfway between standing and sitting. When he sat down, I checked my clipboard. Kiddy, satisfied that she’d beaten back the devil for a moment at least, disappeared behind the swinging doors. The noise was significantly reduced, but some of the guys were still grunting and grumbling. As it happened the clipboard in my hand had one of the chief grumbler’s file on top.

  “Mountain Daniels?” I asked the crowd before realizing what I’d just said, and laughed. “Uh, Mountain? Is there a Mountain here?”

  The largest human being I’d seen outside of a World’s Strongest Man contest stood up, raising his hand like a kindergartner that needed a potty break. “Mountain?” I asked him. I still had a hard time not laughing, but it was, I had to remind myself, not professional to laugh at someone’s name, even if it was extraordinarily prescient and literal.

  “Yes ma’am,” he said in a very soft voice. “That’s my name. It doesn’t, uh, say on that clipboard why I’m here, does it?”

  I looked over it quickly and to my surprise, there wasn’t even the briefest mention of any injury or reason for the visit. Either the secretary was slacking off, which wouldn’t be in any way surprising, or he’d neglected to say anything.

  “Why are you all here?” I asked. “Assuming you all came from the same place, which let’s be real, you must’ve.”

  “Can we go to the back?” he asked. “I don’t really want to say anything here. There’s too much chance of prying ears. And that’s something I can’t risk.”

  I raised my eyebrows in surprise. “I guess so?” I responded. “Just a little weird that there’s no hint of what’s wrong with you, because if there was I could order—”

  He was already headed toward the doors leading to the rooms. I had to rush to keep up with him. “You can’t go back there!” I shouted. “HIPA violations, and...wait!”

  The enormous creature turned to face me. “Well come on, then,” he said with a slight smirk. That was the first time I really noticed him, as I walked toward where he stood. He had this sort of brownish-blond hair, high cheekbones, a nose that had been broken more than once, and a pair of eyes that seemed to change colors from purple to gold as I watched. Or maybe, I thought, his eyes had flecks of gold in them.

  Then I noticed the scars. They were white and old, but they were plain to see. Five long, jagged scars, one of them shorter than the rest, ran over the right side of his face, straight across his right eye. When he closed it, even the lid was scarred. Whatever did that, he was lucky as hell to still have an eye, much less be able to see through it. When he turned his head toward me and invited me through the door of my own hospital, it struck me as slightly funny and more than a little confusing.

  But, he was just sitting there waiting for me. “Well, come on,” he said with a flashing smile. “We’ve got a lot to talk about, even though you won’t remember it afterward.”

  That immediately sounded like I was about to get drugged. “Roofies?” I asked. “Where’d you get ‘em? They aren’t supposed to hand those out anymore.”

  From the confused look I received in return, it was clear the muscled creature in front of me had no idea what the hell I was talking about. That, in itself, was odd enough, I mean who doesn’t appreciate a good roofie joke, but it was much stranger for someone to have no idea what a roofie was.

  “Anyway,” I said, trying to clear the air, “head back here, we’ll be in room six.”

  So far, so good, right? Everything’s a normal trip to the emerge
ncy room, everything’s on the up and up, and everything is happening just like it should. Nothing out of place, no one screaming, no one yelling and carrying on. Sure, the lobby full of giant guys was a little weird, but there still wasn’t anything too out of the ordinary. Yeah, they were whining some, but if I’ve got the choice between whining calendar hunks and an ER full of people who are really, seriously hurt, I’ll go with the former every time out of the gate.

  “Which way?” the big guy asked, distracting me from my short respite of losing myself in my thoughts.

  “Huh?” I grunted, forgetting where I was for a moment. “Oh right, room six right past here.” As I led him along the corridor, and past a room that wasn’t supposed to be occupied, but was, the big guy recoiled so fast he almost knocked me over.

  “Who’s that?” he hissed, flattening himself against the wall. “Who is it? And why is he here?”

  I shrugged. “I’ve been on break for a while, and anyway there’s all sorts of reasons I can’t tell you who someone is or why they’re here. Not least of which is that there’s no clipboard in the door and I’ve never seen him in my life. It is sorta strange though. Let me get you to your—”

  I turned back, about to finish telling him we’d go to his room and then I was going to check out who that guy with the weird, inky black hair and the glassy blue eyes sitting in an exam room with the door open, was. Only, the guy I’d been leading to room six wasn’t, you know, there.

  A sudden outburst of noise in the lobby broke my concentration and I ran back to see what the big to-do was. Now things were getting weird.

  Look, hospital ERs aren’t normally staging grounds for much excitement. Sure there’s always something new happening, and sometimes things get pretty hectic and confused, but it’s just ER business, right? People get sick, people get hurt, people get shot, and they end up here to get patched up, fixed up, and sent on their way. During my decade-plus in this very ER, I’d never—and I mean it when I say never—seen what I was looking out at just then. The giant was rounding up his herd, and shoving them out the door in a scene that reminded me of a bunch of panicked buffaloes. Admittedly, a herd of really attractive, incredibly fit buffaloes, but still. It was a sight I still haven’t gotten out of my head.