Billionaire Bear Shifters A Paranormal Romance Complete Series Boxset - Brittany White Page 0,106

If she wasn’t so tired and stressed out all the time, she would not have minded the job at all. The pay was good and the Strauss brothers treated their staff well.

Her phone buzzed in her pocket as she pushed her cleaning cart down a carpeted hallway and she bit her lip. Texts always meant something had happened or somebody wanted something back home. Most of the time, it was something small. But after everything, her heart always gave a nervous little leap when her phone buzzed.

The text was from Molly as most texts usually were, unless Chris or Jason had grabbed the phone.

Pls pick up applesauce & milk.

It was followed by several nonsensical but cheerful emojis.

Jessie chuckled at the emojis, wondering what an octopus and a unicorn had to do with anything and replied.

Ok. We had a gallon of milk?

Molly replied: Twins spilled it all over floor.

“Noooo.” Jessie groaned into her hand and took a couple of seconds, first to imagine what an awful mess that must have been and then hoped that Molly had cleaned it up.

Poor Molly.

She texted back an okay and an octopus emoji for good measure and pocketed her phone.

Molly was twelve years old and the twins, Kevin and Mary, were three. Then there was the ten-year-old, Chris, and eight-year-old Jason and the toddler, Sophie. They were all bear shifter cubs.

None of them were hers and neither were they her siblings.

“Okay, one more hour,” Jessie said, sighing.

The Clan, as Jessie had taken to calling it, of six bear shifter children who Jessie cared for all by herself had sort of fallen into her lap one day. Since that day, life had become a lot more exhausting, though sometimes when she could forget the danger and her entire body wasn’t aching from all the work and the kids were behaving, it was also a lot of fun.

Jessie had come upon the six children one day a few months before getting her job at The Black Bear Lake Lodge. She’d been working as a barista at the time, and living with a couple other women her own age as roommates in an apartment just outside Black Bear Lake. She’d gotten along with Lucinda and Rebecca well enough. They’d never ended up becoming super close friends.

Lucinda and Rebecca were devoted to their schooling, still in law school and working full time, while Jessie was happy to take whatever job she could get that she didn’t hate and have enough free time to pursue her hobbies; watercolor painting, reading like a fiend, and a number of video games that she played into the wee hours of the night. But the other girls had been bear shifters too, and the three of them got along well enough. On occasion, they even went on runs together in the woods on the edge of town, or at least they did whenever Jessie could get them to take a break from their studies.

It was on one such run when Jessie had found the children.

She had split off from Lucinda and Rebecca and gone off on her own pursuing some interesting and unfamiliar muddy smells, her bear nature curious to explore on a chilly spring day. She’d found the source, a creek still thawing from winter. Then she smelled young bear shifters. Cubs always had a different scent than adults and it wasn’t something Jessie was too used to, having been an only child and not spending a whole lot of time around other cubs.

Jessie had followed the scent through the woods, all the way to a damp and very cold cave beyond a cluster of trees. The entrance was blocked by a small boulder and a makeshift door of branches and vines attached to a chain around a hook so that it secured whatever was inside.

It was not an everyday occurrence to find a cave that was obviously and deliberately “locked” to keep something in it. That was one thing. But the scents were unmistakable. There were cubs in the cave. And worse, once Jessie approached it, she could hear them crying.

Jessie had not thought twice about it at all. She didn’t think about potential consequences or the idea that if someone was locking baby bears in a cave, they might also be nearby. And what then?

Instead, she’d used all her strength to move the boulder and unhook the chain from its latch.

Once she’d made it inside the cave, she felt her heart breaking. The six cubs were all in their human forms