Home>>read Gray Back Ghost Bear free online

Gray Back Ghost Bear(3)

By:T. S. Joyce


Be the lion, not the gazelle.

She narrowed her eyes and let off a growl, then slammed the mirror closed. She could do this. She was a park ranger, and she was a badass.

Lead foot on the gas of her old, beat-up Jeep Wrangler, she blasted down the dirt road toward the trailer park. It was November, so the chilly air that blew through her open windows stung her hands as she gripped the steering wheel. She’d have to button up the old Jeep for winter soon.

A wooden sign hung over the white gravel road. Someone with an eye for detail had carved Grayland Mobile Park into the rustic sign in perfectly spaced block letters. And as she passed under it and got her first glimpse of the trailer park, she huffed a surprised laugh. This wasn’t like the one she’d grown up in. Five trailers sat in a semi-circle around a large, communal fire pit. Four of them had new roofs and fine shingles down the side of them, giving them a cabin feel. The one on the left side, though… Now, that one felt more familiar. It was dilapidated and old. The cream paint was chipping, and the green shutters had seen better days. Even the house number, 1010, was lopsided and barely hanging on. If she ignored the sprawling porch off to the side, it looked a lot like the singlewide she’d lived in until she was eighteen. The mountains behind the park blocked the sinking sun, and shadows stretched across the patch of grass she had parked her Jeep in. Georgia cut the engine. It would be dark soon, and she mentally choked herself for stalling so long to come up here.

A man walked out of one of the middle trailers, the screen door banging loudly behind him as he jogged down the stairs with a large plate of raw steaks. Did bear shifters eat raw meat? She should’ve researched them more. She tracked his short journey to the communal fire pit. The man was very handsome. Short, dark hair matched his chocolate-colored eyes. His face was clean-shaven and his cheekbones sharp, so it was easy to see he was talking to himself, or perhaps singing too low for her to hear. He was tall, but not as brawny as she’d imagined bear shifters would be. She’d expected hairy, bulky men, but this one wasn’t like that at all. On closer inspection, the sloping curves of his defined arm muscles pressed hard against the gray, thin, long-sleeved shirt he wore over his medium-wash blue jeans. And the way his waist tapered inward made his shoulders look much broader.

He opened a grill that was bricked in near the fire pit and jammed a spatula into the air, then said something sharp to the space beside him. Who was he talking to? And if he was a shifter, why hadn’t he used his animal senses to notice she was here? Perhaps their hearing and instincts weren’t as good as the Kodiak bears she’d dealt with.

Georgia pushed open her door, ignoring the hairs that were rising on the back of her neck. She had a gun. She was safe.

The man spun so fast he blurred, and those eyes she’d thought had been dark were suddenly as silver as the back of a minnow. “What the fuck?” he snarled out.

Lovely. And terrifying because his voice didn’t sound entirely human.

But when his silver eyes locked dead center on hers, she gasped and froze. He looked…not familiar exactly, but not like a stranger either. His face took on the slack look she probably wore right now. His dark eyebrows relaxed out of their frown, and his clenched jaw eased open. His breath hitched as he straightened his spine and narrowed his blazing eyes. “Who are you?”

She swallowed hard once, then twice, stalling so her voice wouldn’t come out shaky and scared when she spoke. She cleared her throat and approached him slowly. “I’m Georgia Ames.”

The man backed up a step, so she locked her legs against any further forward momentum. She was going to offer her hand for a shake, but maybe bear shifters didn’t like touch. Or maybe they greeted each other differently than humans did, she didn’t know.

The man jerked his attention to the space beside him he’d been talking to earlier and looked around as if he were searching for someone. With a baffled look on his face, he scanned the entire trailer park before his eyes landed back on her. He studied her uniform.

“You some kind of game warden? We don’t poach here. Anything we hunt, we do in season and we buy licenses.”

“No. Yes.” She cleared her throat again and tried to steady her unraveling nerves. “I’m a park ranger hired by Damon Daye to watch over his mountains, but I’ll be serving as a type of game warden, too. He’s been having some poaching problems.”

“I already told you. We don’t poach.”

“No, I’m not accusing you. I’m just here to introduce myself. I’ll be working all over this place and didn’t want you and your…people…to think I was trespassing. I’m going over to meet the other lumberjack clans tomorrow.”