Husband Fur Hire (Bears Fur Hire #1)(6)

The urge to visit Elyse Abram’s homestead was overwhelming. It was more than idle curiosity that had him hesitating before walking back to the airstrip outside of town. He was so close and hadn’t visited Galena in two years. He’d been all over Alaska, both on tracking jobs like this one and as a bush pilot, delivering anything and everything that needed to be delivered. But now that he was thirty miles away from her town, the instinct to linger was almost too hard to ignore.

She was the recent mate of a werewolf, though, and a sensible bear didn’t touch another predator shifter’s claim. But even so, when Ian had talked to Elyse Abram on the phone, it had sounded like whatever Cole had done to her had hurt her badly, and the want to comfort her somehow made it hard to put one foot in front of the other right now. His gaze was drawn time and time again to the main road that led out of town to where she lived up in the wilderness.

No. Ian shook his head to rid himself of the temptation. The best thing he could do for her was put down Cole, and make sure the crazy wolf didn’t lose what was left of his mind and go after her. She’d dodged a bullet by escaping a relationship with a shifter, and Ian would be damned if he was the bigger, more damaging, bullet she stepped in front of. She deserved a nice, normal, human mate, or husband, or whatever they were called.

His boots crunched through the late winter snow as he strode purposefully toward the landing strip where he’d parked his plane.

Meeting her, and allowing his bear see and smell her, was a terrible idea. What did he have to offer anyone? He slept half the year, and the other half was filled with enforcing and running plane deliveries in a mad rush to earn enough money for the food he needed to eat for the next hibernation.

No, she was much better off without knowing he even existed.

Everyone was.





Chapter Three


The little girl had been attacked twenty miles outside of Kaltag, and the trapper attacks were within a thirty mile range of that as well, so Ian would start there. If Cole had moved on, he would have a better chance of finding where to if he canvassed the village. McCalls were notorious freeloaders, and unless Cole was going straight wolf, he would be in town begging for food, money, gas for his snow machine, whatever.

There were a dozen old homesteader cabins that had been abandoned out there, too, so he would check those out while he was in the area and hope to get lucky.

Outside of town, he prepped his plane and took off. It was a short flight to Kaltag, and he began circling out from there. From the plane, he could make out two old dilapidated one-roomers through the trees with a lot of animal tracks around them. Cole would’ve traveled here by snow machine, or maybe he’d gone wolf to get way out here.

Another sure sign that Cole had been squatting here and not just passing through was there were no manicured landing strips. Cole would want to make it difficult for Ian to get to his hidey hole, and from way up here, scanning the snowy tundra below, dotted heavily with evergreen trees, Ian was going to have a hard time landing safely.

If he was Cole, he would’ve picked a similar place to hide out. Think like the prey. That’s what dad had taught him, Tobias, and Jenner when they’d first shifted at age sixteen. And Dad had been the best tracker there ever was. Any advice Ian had gleaned from him during his youth was now worth more than gold.

He took the last bite of yet another apple and tossed the core onto the pile in the passenger’s seat of his little four-seater plane.

Ian narrowed his eyes at a strip of smoothish landing space, covered in what looked like thinner snow. From the long tracks, someone had used it since the last snowfall to land, so that was going to have to be good enough. He had the skis on the landing gear, but still, one wrong move and his lightweight plane could be smashed to pieces with him in it. Now, he had decent shifter healing, but he sure loved his ride, and he hadn’t crashed yet. A couple of close calls, but nothing too damaging.

He circled around, assessing the makeshift landing strip, and sure enough, there were definitely sled marks in the snow, revealing it was thin enough to land if he took the angle just right. He lined up and dipped the nose slightly, lowering himself slowly to the glittering snow. It would be dark soon, and he needed to make some tracks before nightfall. If Cole was still here, his brothers would’ve likely called to warn him. But if he’d been spending time as a wolf all day, Ian still had a shot at catching him by surprise.

His heart drummed against his sternum as he lifted up enough to straighten out, and his landing gear skied across the snowy straightaway. It was rough and jostled the plane, and at the end, he turned a bit wonky, but it was a better landing than he could’ve hoped for way out here.

It was cold as balls, so he blanketed the plane to make less work for him when he returned. It took time prepping the Cessna, but it would be worth it later, especially if he came back out here after dark.

He tossed the apple cores in the woods for the hungry winter birds to pick up, then pulled on his fox fur hat, sunglasses, and mittens. He could stand the cold a lot better than humans, but Alaska was brutal at night, and any windchill made it even more miserable. Despite the frigid temperatures, this was just how he liked to hunt. Snow made it easy to track anything. Animal scat was stark against the white, and tracks were easy to see and identify. He could read entire stories in the snow if he took the time to interpret the signs.

Ian pulled a giant pack of beef jerky from his backpack and tore into it as he made his way from the plane toward the woods in the direction of the most promising cabin he’d seen from the air.