Mate Fur Hire (Bears Fur Hire #3)(21)

Tobias flipped on the light switch and laid eyes on his mate’s animal for the first time.

Damn, she was beautiful. Rich red fur with black tips and a cream-colored belly. Long legs and eyes that were an impossibly bright gold. Her lips were pulled back over a row of sharp teeth. His pretty fox. Too bad she didn’t recognize him. She charged so fast he could barely get his arm over his throat before she lunged. Her teeth latched around his forearm, and she held, snarling and shaking her head until her sharp teeth hit bone.

Tobias pulled the thick scruff of her neck and yanked her off. She was bigger than the wild foxes by twice the size and heavier than he’d imagined her. And she housed about thirty times the fury he’d expected. He held her at an arm’s length away. Her teeth were exposed as she snarled her death chant, eyes full of hate. This was what Clayton had seen. This is what his father had deemed a failure.

Tobias hated him all over again.

Of course her animal turned out like this. She was born from violence.

“Vera,” he murmured.

Her snarling grew louder, so he let off a growl of his own, filling the room with it. The noise died in her throat, but she still bore her teeth, her eyes still full of anger.

“It’s me. I’m yours, and you’re mine, and biting won’t help anything. It’ll only hurt me. You’ll hurt me, Vera.”

Her lips slid over her teeth in an uncertain look before she snarled again.

Tobias set her down, but she latched her jaws around his ankle immediately. With a sigh, he pulled her off, only to have her attack again. And again. This went on for an hour before she tired herself out and lay panting in the corner, eyes narrowed to suspicious slits.

Clayton had been right. She wasn’t safe in public. Yet. Vera was a fox shifter, one of the few animals that could actually Turn a human with her bite, and his mate was a ferocious little brawler who didn’t give a shit about dominance. Oh, she sensed what he was, but attacked anyway. Her instinct for self-preservation had been broken from the start by the way Jonathan had Turned and treated her.

No, she couldn’t be around humans until she learned to control it. And he hoped to God she would be able to come to some sort of compromise with her animal, but it wouldn’t happen here. Not in this hotel room where she felt caged.

She’d destroyed the room. New clothes lay in tatters across the floor, and she’d shredded the bedding and mattress until stuffing covered everything like snow. She’d left one pillow intact, but nothing else had survived. She’d even gnawed off the legs of the table and its chairs.

With a sigh, Tobias sat on the edge of the destroyed bed and put his face in his hands. How could he fix all the damage that had been done to her? Vera the woman was intelligent and intuitive. She compromised and reasoned. Her fox was wild and, from the way she was acting, about as mad as Link.

Link.

Tobias lifted his gaze to the panting fox as an idea began to take shape. He couldn’t do this alone. Not here. He needed a safe place to go with her. A place where she could roam and get ahold of herself and settle down. The only problem was, she couldn’t travel to Galena the way she was. Not feral and in such a destructive mood. She couldn’t destroy his plane. That was their income and the way he would be able to provide for her.

Gritting his teeth, Tobias packed up everything that was salvageable and snatched the pillow case off the remaining pillow. As soon as he approached her with it, her eyes went wide, and she backed as far into the corner as she could.

Bewildered, he looked down at the case in his hands, and it dawned on him. Jonathan had shoved her in a sack.

“Fuck,” he gritted out, throwing the case onto the bed.

He sat as near to her as she allowed and relaxed against the wall. This couldn’t be rushed, not if he wanted this to be easy on Vera.

She attacked again but had lost her fury. It was done out of fear this time, and she ducked back to the corner before she pierced his skin with her teeth. She did the same three more times, each one shorter than the last before she slunk back to the wall.

Tobias scooted closer. “I don’t know if you can understand me, but the man who did this to you won’t ever hurt you again. I found him.”

Vera’s head snapped up, ears erect, then down, then erect again. Recognition flashed across her pretty gold eyes. Ah, there she was.

“I wrote in the letter that I had an errand to run, and Jonathan Greene was that errand.”

Vera slunk closer, then lowered to her belly five feet away from him.

Tobias swallowed hard. “I counted the scars on your arms last night. Seventeen. Seventeen bites, and my bear demanded a fair trade from Jonathan Greene as retribution for the pain he caused you. He wasn’t as strong as you are.”

Vera slunk forward another few feet, just within reach. She shook now, as if she was afraid to be so close.

Tobias dipped his voice to a whisper. “He’ll never hurt you again, mate. He won’t hurt anyone. You’re safe.”

Vera pulled her lips over her teeth for just a moment before she belly-crawled closer and rested her chin on his open palm.

Tobias smiled at his brave Vera. “That’s right. I’m yours.”

When he patted his leg lightly, she flinched, but then crawled carefully into his lap where he ran his hand down the length of her spine, smoothing her raised hackles.

They sat like that for hours, cuddled against the wall, learning to trust each other, but still, she wasn’t able to Change back. Likely, she didn’t know how. She’d been out of control with every shift, and then before she’d gotten to know her animal, she’d started suppressing her. Vera was going to have to learn to be a shifter, and it would be a long, hard road, but he knew she could do it.