Boarlander Boss Bear (Boarlander Bears #1)(5)

“No women at the trailer park. That’s the rule,” the * sang.

“I don’t understand,” Audrey said, and now her pretty brown eyes were brimming with moisture.

He wanted to retch but didn’t know why. He hadn’t drank that much.

His bear was scratching at his skin, and he was in serious danger of an uncontrolled Change. “I have to go.” Harrison ripped his gaze away from her pretty pursed lips and wove through the crowd. With every step away from her, his stomach hurt worse. She was a witch or…something.

“Harrison?” she asked from behind him. Her voice sounded so hurt. So disappointed.

Clenching his hands, he shoved the door open and escaped into the night. Only the farther he got away from the witch, the worse he felt. Gripping the tailgate of his truck, he dragged in a lungful of cool air. After a minute of focusing on the long line of women waiting outside of Sammy’s, he turned over his palms and stared at his shaking hands.

He wasn’t hers. He didn’t belong to anyone.

Whatever that woman was doing to him, it was dangerous—not only for him and his crew, but for her as well. Shifter groupies thought they wanted a piece of him, but they didn’t really understand the danger. He was an alpha, and one who was reeling and struggling to keep a crew under him.

And Audrey, that crazy, little, fragile human had no business teasing a wounded predator.





Chapter Three




She’d been duped.

Audrey didn’t know how or why yet, but she’d been tricked into coming all the way out to Wyoming for a man who didn’t exist.

Unless…

Maybe this was Harrison’s way of keeping their relationship casual. Or maybe he didn’t like the way she looked in person. Or maybe he didn’t like her accent, perfume, nail color, smile… There were a billion things that could’ve made him decide to pretend he’d never talked to her before. But if that was his game, he was extraordinarily good at it because his eyes had been so solemn and shocked, and his tone so honest. I’ve never met you before.

The thought of last night’s meeting made her double over the steering wheel with embarrassment. She’d never said the word mate out loud, and clearly, she’d used it wrong.

It sucked being a shifter, stuck between the human and supernatural worlds, and fitting in with neither.

Audrey turned down the country station on the radio and spread the crinkled map across the steering wheel. Even if her cell phone had gotten good reception in the valleys between the towering mountains that surrounded her, the GPS had basically laughed at her when she’d entered in Boarland Mobile Park.

She understood the need to live out away from people like Harrison and his crew did. It was easier to Change without people knowing, watching, asking questions, judging…hating. As she maneuvered the final switchback and turned onto a gravel road, she was struck by how beautiful this place was. Some of the trees were dead and brown, but a majority of the evergreens here stood tall and strong with rich green needles that painted the landscape in a myriad of earthy colors. Audrey reached out the open window and let the crisp breeze run through her fingertips. She lived out in the country in Texas, but the landscape didn’t touch this. Thorny mesquite trees didn’t hold a candle to the hill country she found herself in now. It was May, and sunny, and the sounds of cicadas and birds were a constant song here.

She rode the brake and slowed down as the entrance to the trailer park came into view. Across the road, there was a massive, arched sign that read Boarland Mobile Park. Only that had been crossed out in bright red paint, and over it was written Missionary Impossible.

What did that mean?

The second she laid eyes on the destroyed park, she regretted showing up uninvited. There were six ancient trailers, lined up three in a row on either side of the road, and settled lengthways. The dingy white paint was chipped on each, and the roof shingles were years over good use. Entire sheets of disintegrating shingles had fallen off one trailer and lay on top of the overgrown landscaping that looked to be the biggest mutant weeds she’d ever seen in her life. Some would be taller than her if she got the mind to stand beside them. There were three sun-bleached, plastic flamingos toppled over in one of the weed-riddled yards, and a plethora of old tractor parts sat in a pile at the end of the trailer park. Two rusty old cars were up on blocks and looked like they hadn’t been worked on in years, and instead of a door, one of the singlewide mobile homes had a stack of old tires in front of it. The road was made of gravel that had washed out, and various potholes tried to swallow her Jeep before she pulled to a stop in front of a giant anthill that had been built in the middle of the road.

This place looked like an abandoned ghost town. Or at least, it would’ve looked like one if Clinton wasn’t sitting in a duct-taped, plastic lawn chair at the end of the road, drinking a beer and glaring at her. He wore a trucker hat, aviator sunglasses, a white T-shirt two sizes too small and the tiniest pair of yellow shorts she’d ever seen on a man. Yellow and white baseball socks clad his hairy legs up to his knees. He wore old sneakers and had shaved the facial scruff he’d worn yesterday into an 80s style mustache. God, this was weird.

She cut the engine and got out, but as she opened her mouth to say a polite greeting, he lifted a finger to shush her, bent over his creaking chair, then pulled an old metal sign out of the dirt beside him. In exceptionally shitty handwriting, it read no girls allowed in the trailer park.