Bearly Accidental (Accidentally Paranormal Book 12) Read online

  A noise behind him, subtle, maybe even only in his mind, made him forget about the ache in his finger and stand up straight.

  Cormac tilted his head again and sniffed the air. If there was anything valuable in this crazy-ass transformation he’d gone through, it was his heightened sense of smell.

  It was badass. He could scent a fish from a mile down the creek, a bush full of ripe berries football fields away. In fact, in the beginning of whatever had happened to him, he could scent everything. For a time, it had been unnerving, but over the course of the last three years, he’d grown accustomed to it, nurtured it, and read fiction to try to understand it.

  And what he smelled was perfume. Light, fruity. Maybe peaches and tangerines? None of the three women were wearing anything fruity. In fact, Nina wasn’t wearing anything at all but the scent of Buffalo wings and Coors Light with a hint of Kit Kat bar.

  Cormac whipped around as the women continued upward, closer and closer to the only place he felt even remotely safe.

  His eyes scanned the dollops of snow like whipped cream on the trees, the landscape hilly and covered in rocks, looking for this new scent, but seeing nothing.

  Must be his damned imagination.

  “Wait the fuck up, for Christ’s sake!” Nina yelled to her counterparts, struggling to push her way through the deep snow. “Jesus, this isn’t the flippin’ Olympics, Color Wheel Queen!”

  “I told you that backpack would weigh you down, didn’t I? You only have a side of beef in it. Now pick up the pace, Ex-Vampire!” Marty shouted back, her devilish giggle swirling around the forest like tinkling fairies.

  “I was packing just in case, all right? You don’t know how the fuck long we’re gonna be out here in the Hundred Acre Wood. I wanted to be prepared,” she gasped.

  “Hah! You could feed a small country with what’s in that backpack and it has nothing to do with anyone but you and your bottomless pit of a stomach!” Marty chirped.”

  “One more crack about my fat keister and I’ll haul your ass up that mountain and drop you from the tippy-top!”

  As Cormac listened to them argue, following behind them, hopping from tree to tree, snowdrift to snowdrift, he caught the scent again, distracting him from formulating a plan about what to do with these women.

  Sweet and soft, it grazed his nostrils before it slipped away.

  He’d purposely covered his scent the moment he’d spotted the three of them from across the river. It seemed ridiculously cautionary at the time, but he’d learned the hard way never to expose himself. Now that he knew at least one of them was a werewolf, he was glad he’d taken the time to roll in some mud and leftover fish guts.

  Just as the women peaked the top of the hill and Wanda yelled out, “Oh my God, I think I found it!” he smelled that perfume again.

  That was probably five seconds before something sharp and pointy jabbed him in the side of his neck and he howled his outrage, before falling to the frozen ground and passing out cold.

  Chapter 2

  As the great Sheldon would say, bazinga!

  Theodora “Teddy” Gribanov smiled in satisfaction as she eyed her prey from more than a hundred yards away.

  Hah. Her older twin brothers, Vadim and Viktor, could essentially suck it. She still had it and she had it hard. Grabbing her phone from her backpack, she zoomed in and snapped a picture of Cormac Vitali’s still body, lying in the snow as though he were merely napping, and sent it off to her brother with the subject, “Neener-Neener-Neener!”

  Jamming the phone back into her pack, she hauled it over her shoulder and pushed her way up the small incline to stand over this enormous man she’d just taken down with a dart gun.

  He was worth a lot of money.

  A lot. Money she’d gladly collect and stuff away in her bank account until the time came to figure out how to save the part of her life that was her heart and soul.

  For right now, all she wanted to do was teach her mouthy brothers a lesson about patience and perseverance, and the fact that, despite their ribbing her about being a candy-ass, she wasn’t such a rainbow Skittle after all.

  For a moment, she wondered who those women Cormac had been following were and if they were here for the same reason she was.

  That would piss her off. A deal was a deal, comrade. Vitali was hers—which meant she needed to move quickly in case they’d heard his yelp through all that squealing they were doing up over the rise of the hill.

  Kneeling, she was relieved to hear the voices of the three bickering women were still distant, but she couldn’t quite catch what they were saying.

  Not that it mattered. She was going to haul Cormac Vitali out of this forest, lob him into her battered truck and bring him in—then do a drive-by at the bank, where she’d withdraw her hefty paycheck.

  Jamming her hands under his torso, she ignored how muscly he was, how thick his thighs were, and the fact that he had silky chestnut-brown hair sprouting from beneath his knit cap.

  She also managed to ignore his stench. Why he’d covered himself in mud, fish guts, and whatever that salty hint of schmeg was, she had no clue.

  Don’t worry about who he is or what his predicament is, Teddy. It’s what makes you too soft for this shit. Toughen up and imagine dollar signs on his forehead instead of trying to peer into his soul to see if his heart beats true. Bad guys are bad guys.

  Viktor’s taunting but stern words just before she’d left Denver came back to haunt her.

  Okay, so she liked to look further than the paycheck. But looking at Cormac, his eyelashes fluttering against his ruddy cheeks, lean and chiseled, wasn’t hard to do.

  If one of her brothers had just tranq’d a hot babe, she’d entirely expect them to wonder what had brought their prey the misfortune of meeting the stealthy tip of a dart gun.

  But they were slobbering Neanderthals, and they cared about one thing and one thing alone. Cash.

  Well, to be fair, they cared about her, too. Which was why they’d taken her out of the game for so long.

  But she was better now.

  You’re nothing, Teddy. Nothing.

  Fuck you, she silently spat.

  Teddy bit the inside of her cheek to fight the nausea. She damn well was better, and it was time to stop being the biggest sissy this side of the Mountain time zone and get ’er done. She needed this money.

  Her hands only shook a little as she pulled Cormac’s limp form to her chest, and she was proud to say she flung his body over her shoulder fireman style, her knees only buckling a little before she wobbled and righted herself, her teeth tightly clamped.

  Rolling her head from side to side to ease the tension in her neck, she grunted as she began to make her way down the hill.

  Jesus, he was heavy, and the fact that he was out cold made him heavier. Condensation puffed from her lips as she dragged her still-out-of-shape body down the hill and toward the river. She’d better pump up her jam if she hoped to get him to the truck and tie him down before the effects of the dart gun wore off.

  But then two things happened at once.

  Those three loud, constantly arguing women must have caught sight of her because there was a whole lot of caterwauling coming at her from behind.

  Simultaneously, Cormac stirred, struggling against the hold she had on him at the back of his knees.

  “What the fu…?” he yelped. His upper body, thick against her smaller shoulder, began to rear up.

  She’d had a bad feeling the tranq gun didn’t have enough sedative in it to contain someone his size, but she’d doubted her assessment at the last minute and decided to only nail him with one dart.

  Just another poor judgment call on her part, she thought with a grunt as Cormac wrapped his arms around her thighs and, with his abs of steel, managed to take her down by tipping her backward, using the weight of his body and the press of his bent knees. They fell against the packed snow, making her cry out on impact and sending her backpack flying.

  He rolled from her
and, before Teddy even realized where he was, Cormac pounced, pushing her back into the snow, knocking the wind right out of her.

  “For the love of fuck, what’s going on, Marty?” one of the women bellowed as she ran down the hill, just as the other two appeared above Teddy.

  Two lovely, put-together women with eyes of ragey-ish suspicion and their hands on their slender hips.

  “Oh! Aren’t you pretty? Doesn’t she have lovely eyes poking out from that ugly-ugly mud-brown hat, Wanda?” the blonde with sparkling sapphire-blue eyes asked.

  “Not the time for a color wheel assessment, Marty!” said the woman with an air of sophistication and the smoothest hair she’d ever seen in all of Colorado.

  Teddy attempted to shake the snow from her face and wrestle her way out from beneath this enormous beast of a man. She was no weakling, but damn he was strong.

  Gripping her wrists with a single calloused hand, Cormac yanked them over her head, pulled the dart from his neck and hurled it to the ground, then growled down at her, full of fire and brimstone, “Who the hell are you?”

  The woman who’s going to slap your ass in the pokey and collect a lot of cash? Probably not the way introductions should go if she was to keep her identity a secret.

  Teddy attempted to struggle in his GI Joe grip of kung-fu steel one more time—and that was when she caught sight of his eyes.

  They were green. Okay, so yeah, they were angry, too, but she saw beyond that.

  Oh, sweet-sweet mother of pearl, his eyes were so green. Beautiful orbs in his head that shone like colored glass. Sharply defined jaw and cheekbones, ruddy skin and a beard of thick, coarse-looking hair on his face, all giving him that hot, casually laid-back look.

  Teddy’s heart sped up again as he settled on her torso completely—and a tingle of heat in her belly swished upward to her cheeks as she got an even closer look.

  Thick lashes gave the appearance of guy-liner, but in her gut, she knew a man like Cormac would never wear makeup. He was too gruff—too involved in other things to care about his appearance enough to be concerned about how to enhance that thick fringe of lashes and make his eyes stand out.

  Teddy’s breath left her chest in a whoosh of air as he straddled her with thick thighs and his eyes bore a hole in her face.

  But his anger didn’t matter. None of that mattered. What mattered was what she had just discovered.

  Jesus Christ, how could this be?

  “Who are you?” He ground out the demand.

  “I—”

  “Cormac!” the pretty blonde—Marty—shouted, yanking at his shoulder. “You’re hurting her! Get off!”

  Who was this woman and why did she care if he was hurting her? Did they know each other? As she’d tracked Cormac tracking them, that wasn’t the impression she’d had at all.

  His head swiveled upward, his eyes blazing hot. “For that matter, who the hell are you two?”

  “Three!” the gorgeous brunette, Nina—wrapped up like she was planning a move to Antarctica—wheezed out as she stumbled down the hill, stopping short next to Marty and placing her hands on her knees in order to catch her breath. “Holy shitballs, it’s Lumberjack Bob.”

  “Who are you people and what the hell do you want with me?” Cormac looked back down at Teddy, his eyes glowing with suspicion and rage. “Are you with them, too?”

  Teddy only managed to shake her head, still in utter disbelief. This was wrong. Everything was all wrong!

  Wanda, the one who’d managed to keep the other two from ripping each other’s throats out, gripped Cormac’s shoulder, huffed out a breath, and gave him a good hard shove, sending him tumbling off Teddy and into the snow with his grunt lingering in the air.

  “Marty said get off! Now, do not move a muscle until we’re able to explain ourselves,” she ordered from tight lips with a wave of her finger, her chest puffing up and down. “Or so help me, I’ll take you out myself! I’ve had enough of everyone ignoring my wishes. Now hear this! I’ve had it up to my cerebellum with playing peacemaker for four days since we began this journey. You, Cormac Vitali, have the unfortunate circumstance of being my last damn straw. And don’t doubt for a single second I can’t take out a big, burly boy like you either. I’ll knock you clear to Kentucky. So you march your muscled ass on up that hill to your cabin, you do it without complaint, and you do it now, or so help me, as Charles Manson is my witness, I’ll kill you all! Goooo!”

  Teddy’s eyes followed the direction of Wanda’s finger. This woman, whoever she was, had clearly had enough.

  That was when she jabbed her finger down at Teddy, her eyes narrowed, her nostrils flaring. “That means you, too! I don’t know who you are or what you want, but we’re going to find out. And I’ll take the dart gun, Annie Oakley, thank you very much!” She reached for the backpack and threw it over her shoulder.

  Teddy began to protest, but Wanda clamped her fingers together right under her nose. “I said not a word. Not a single word, or you’ll be the first on my list of things to kill while in Colorado. Got it? Get up and wallllk, goddamn it!”

  Teddy only briefly looked into Wanda’s pretty blue eyes, acknowledging she had an air of authority that couldn’t be denied, before she crab-walked on her hands to back away from her. Rather than thicken the pot with confrontation, she hopped to her feet and began walking.

  Marty followed Teddy closely while Nina, who looked absolutely frozen, fell in behind them.

  There was nothing but silence as they made their way to the top of the hill and Cormac’s cabin came into view.

  The entire time, Teddy attempted to construct a story in her head to explain why she was in the middle of nowhere, hauling Cormac away like she was some sort of female variation on a Neanderthal—because Wanda would want a story. Oh yes, she would. She didn’t look like the kind of woman who would put up with any shit.

  When Teddy finally caught sight of Cormac’s cabin, she wondered how he’d found this place. She’d never, in all her tracking, encountered this section of the forest, and she knew the forest like the back of her hand.

  It was a crude structure under the purple and orange twilight of the coming evening. The logs sturdy, but with no particular architecturally appealing design to them. There was a lone folding chair by the front door, sandwiched between two bushes and an enormous pine tree. Maybe a fishing cabin?

  Smoke wisped upward out of the brick chimney, and a sagging clothesline off to the right side of the cabin, with a metal bucket beneath, waved in the light wind.

  More snow began to fall, the distant roar of a rushing creek filling her ears. God, it was beautiful here. Even under these daunting circumstances, Teddy had to admit, she loved the forest far more than she loved the lights of the city.

  What she probably wasn’t going to love? Explaining herself.

  Cormac stopped at his front door, painted—of all things—an odd shade of eggplant purple, and turned to face them as they gathered, waiting for him to admit them entry.

  “Well, open the door, dude. Jesus, it’s like frickin’ Iceland out here,” Nina demanded with a shiver, her lips dry and cracked.

  But Teddy didn’t pay as much attention to Nina’s grousing as she did the smells these women gave off, assaulting her nose, one right after the other. Foreign, tangy, one even brought to mind the word “displaced,” if you could in fact smell such a thing. But it was strong.

  She hadn’t heard all of their conversations in detail. Most of it had been just bits and pieces. She’d heard their names, seen their arms waving and middle fingers flying, sensed some general discontent, but she’d been so focused on capturing Cormac, she’d clearly missed something important.

  As Cormac looked down at them, his gaze piercing, Teddy refocused her thoughts and waited. “I don’t know what’s going on, but this is as far as it goes until you explain who you are and what the hell you want from me.”

  Then he crossed his arms over his burly chest to further the notion he wasn’t budging.
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  But it didn’t look like these women were up for any arguments. Especially the elegant one who’d demanded Teddy come with them to the cabin.

  Wanda, the lady who’d shouted the orders, pushed her way past everyone and poked a finger into Cormac’s wide chest. “Open the door or I’ll use you as my battering ram. Got me, Bruiser? It’s been a long damn afternoon. We’ve been out on this hike from Hades for four bloody days. I’m cold. I’m tired. I’m done with every single person around me complaining about everything—and I do mean everything. Now, I get your suspicion, but you’re just going to have to trust that we’re the good guys, or I’m going to steamroll right over you if you so much as squeak a peep from your gorgeous lips.”

  “But—”

  Wanda clearly, visibly, undeniably snapped then. Her eyes went wild and furious, her mouth formed a sneer, and without so much as a grunt of exertion, she did exactly as promised. She steamrolled him, knocking Cormac, who was easily six-three and a good two-twenty, flat on his back.

  Then, as dainty and graceful as any prima ballerina and just shy of pirouetting over his body, she hopped over him and entered the cabin, brushing the snow from her ski pants.

  Cormac groaned from the ground, running a hand over his head, but the brunette held out her hand to him with a cackle. “Need some help, big boy? C’mon. Get up before Wanda whips out her clangers and things get really serious.” Then she cackled again as Marty grabbed Teddy by the hand and dragged her into the cabin behind her.

  Once inside, when she got a good look at the interior of the cabin, Teddy’s mouth fell open on a gasp that took even her by surprise.

  It was like FBI command central—or some special-ops mission.

  Shit. What had her brothers gotten her into? Was this some kind of military facility—an outpost, maybe? Computer after computer lined the back wall, leaving only space for the hearth of the fireplace to the right, where a roaring fire burned, a small couch with mismatched cushions sitting in front of it.