Page 2 of Chased Bear

Take kindly? What backwater place had I stepped into? Maybe I was in the Twilight Zone and had stepped into the wild west but didn’t realize it.

“Listen, I wasn’t trying to hustle you. It’s not like I played terribly for a few rounds and then kicked your ass. I kicked your ass on the first round.” Which made it 1000% not pool sharking in my opinion. “You assumed it was beginner’s luck. That’s not my fault. If you want, you can have the money back.” Because I sure as shit didn’t want to get my ass beat and then have to drive an hour, and that was the vibe I was getting from him, for sure.

“Don’t need your pity.” He pushed me, nearly to the ground. Great. This was going from bad to worse.

“I’m not—” I clamped my mouth shut. I was not about to get into a fight with an alpha in a bar. “I’m leaving. All right?” I picked up my jacket and walked out the door.

That was apparently not good enough for the skunk, though. He followed after me, shouting about how I cheated. I ignored him.I needed to get to my car and get out of here before I caused any trouble that would really get Aydan riled.

I didn’t want to make things more difficult for Corey, and I didn’t want to get kicked out of the den. I might try to put on an I-don’t-care facade but that’s all it was: a facade. I just didn’t understand why we had to have so many flipping rules and that had me puffing out my chest like an emu.

“Hey, I’m talking to you, muthafucker.” The skunk pushed me again, this time the only thing between me and the ground was that I somehow caught myself on the side of my car.

I righted myself and whirled around. “Listen, man—” Only he wasn’t there. He had shifted. I looked down at my feet to see a tiny little skunk. “Oh, you’re cute,” I said and bent down.

Big mistake.

He turned, lifted up his tail, and let out the most foul stench I had ever encountered in my life. I got a face full of spray. I turned to get away from it, but it just kept coming, and now my whole body was coated in that stench. I’d been worried about a physical fight, when I should’ve been worried about chemical warfare. I knew these fuckers stank, but a direct spray was a million times worse than anything I’d ever encountered before.

He shifted back, standing there, naked as the day he was born.

“Are you kidding me?” I said. Thank goodness this was a shifter bar, or else we’d all be in trouble. “You have to resort to foul play?”

He hissed. Was that his skunk side? Did they do that?

“Don’t come back.”

How the— I leaned against my car. Fuck. Now I was going to show up at my brand-new den reeking of skunk, and if the rumors I’d heard were true, it was nearly impossible to get a shifter skunk’s scent off you.

Fuck.

Why did I have to play pool? Why did I think it was a grand idea to stop for dinner? Why didn’t I have a motorcycle so I didn’t stink up my car?

For a half a second, I contemplated going inside and trying to clean up, but even if they let me in and even if those guys didn’t have a problem with me coming back, the watered-down hand soap in there wasn’t going to do a lick of good. I was screwed.

I opened the car door and rolled down every window before climbing inside and driving the hour to my new home, as temporary as it might be. At least it wasn’t raining.

Chapter 2

Aydan

Being Alpha of a den or pack was no walk in the park. I never expected it to be. The amount of responsibility was enough to overwhelm someone even if every single thing was going perfectly, and that wasn’t how life worked. There were days I felt confident that I could do this job—that I was the bear for the position. And other days? Other days I felt like a fraud, like the least likely to keep this den together.

Currently I was functioning in fake-it-until-I-make-it mode. It wasn’t ideal, but it was the best I could do. I owed it to my den tobe the bear they needed, and each day, I was one step closer to being that Alpha. At least that was what I kept telling myself.

I looked around at my desk. When I walked in after dinner, I’d planned to grab my ledger. But when it was what a scattered catastrophe it was, I couldn’t leave it at that. When had it gotten that bad? I’d been running around like a chicken with my head cut off for too long. Something had to give.

It took me five minutes to find the ledger to look up one thing, and as I dug, I found papers I thought I’d lost or thrown away. The more I searched, the more I realized I wasn’t even sure what all was there. That was when I decided to fix things, and after all of that? Truth was, I still wasn’t sure, but after an hour of sorting and organizing, it at least looked like I had my shit together.

Papers were now neatly stacked by purpose and notes were piled on top of one another in a tidy heap. It looked very much like I was nailing my position and that everything was in its place. They weren’t. I still couldn’t even find the electric bill. Who still mails paper bills, anyway?

Everything was a total fucking mess. Maybe this office could fool a den member, but I knew the truth.

The to-do list I’d written down on various notes, now piled in that neat stack, was nowhere near prioritized. Prioritized and overwhelming. I didn’t know what to work on first—Martha’s gutters or Miss Thompson’s application to have her son join the den or bills or working with the youth who just had their first shift. Should I meet with Heather to talk over their after-schoolplans, or with Rissa to discuss expanding the healer clinic and bringing in an apprentice?

Everything was important. It would be so much easier if it was things like buying groceries or taking out the trash. At least those kinds of lists I could tick off a few a day. This list was going to take a month.

I grabbed the list again. There had to be something easy on it, something I could get done so the entire thing didn’t feel hopeless. But the more I looked, the more I saw that wasn’t the case.

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