Page 66 of Fearless Bond

Laure chuckled. “Neither is mine. But it seems like you’ll be fine now.”

“Barclay’s amazing. I love him.”

“Yeah. Well. He’s hot. I’ll give you that. All of them are kinda hot. I didn’t think I would dig the whole hairy and beefy thing,but maybe I wouldn’t kick a couple of bear shifters out of my bed if I happened to find them there.”

The image of Laure flanked by a shirtless Monty and Jordy flashed in my head, but I chased it away. It weirded me out. “Don’t let Monty hear you, or you’ll never get rid of him.”

“See, if he shut up for a second, I’d be all over him. But he never closes his mouth, does he?”

Now we could laugh at the earlier standoff with Monty and Jordy in the yard. I’d missed Laure. Warming our feet in front of the fireplace, just chatting, I got reminded of those easy summers a long time ago, before adulthood came and took our innocence.

My father and Damian were still outside, but I wasn’t bothered by their presence anymore. I was done with them both.

After half an hour, Barclay poked his head in to say that he, Monty, and Jordy were going to dig my father’s sedan out of the snowbank.

Laure wanted to watch. I added a couple of logs to the fire so it wouldn’t die and reluctantly followed him back to the kitchen. Hawke and Hunter sat at the table with coffee mugs and a half-eaten plate of cookies. They stood and joined us at the window.

Except Barclay and his friends were nowhere to be seen. The yard was empty. Down the driveway, Laure’s bodyguards shoveled snow around the trapped sedan while my father oversaw them with a phone to his ear. I could see Damian’s silhouette in the back of the car. The lazy coward he was, he wasn’t even bothering to pretend to help. The reminder stung. Why had I ever let that man near me?

Before I could spiral down the familiar rabbit hole of self-deprecation, Laure sucked in a startled breath next to me.

“What the fuck?!”

I gaped as three bears sauntered into the yard from behind Barclay’s shed.

They were massive, humungous,unnaturallyhuge. Giant furry monsters from a different world where the laws of physics didn’t apply.

The one in the front was grayish-brown, and even down on all fours, he was as tall as a horse. I didn’t know how, but Iknewit was Barclay. It was in the way he moved. He turned his head and must have spotted me in the window because he seemed to smile. His muzzle opened into a sinister grin, and his tongue lolled out.

Monty must have been the bigger light-brown bear to Barclay’s left. Jordy, with black fur and leaner than the other two but no less imposing, stayed a few steps behind.

“Holy fucking shit, Cal,” Laure breathed.

“I know,” I piped up.

I was stunned but not afraid. They were fascinating.

Laure’s alphas backed off into deep snow away from the road and stood there, faces pale and mouths open. The leader let go of the shovel.

My father froze. His phone slipped from his hand, landing among lumps of snow at his feet.

Barclay walked up to him. He lifted one paw in a way that made my stomach clench for a second. But he merely nudged my father to the side.

Father scrambled to retrieve his phone and joined Laure’s security team, who were up to their knees in the snow among the trees.

The three bears surrounded the sedan, put their front paws underneath, and lifted it from the snowbank as if it were a cardboard cutout, not a three-thousand-pound car. They set the car neatly in the middle of the road.

Damian flailed inside. I would have enjoyed listening to him shriek with terror, but if he made a noise, we weren’t able to hear him.

My father came to life, scrambling toward the driver’s door. He jumped in and started the engine, seemingly eager to leave as soon as possible.

Except Barclay blocked the road.

He rose on his hind legs, the sheer mass of his body dwarfing the vehicle.

And then he snarled.

His enormous canines showing, spit flying, he let out a booming roar that vibrated through the ground and shook the damned house.

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