Billionaire Bear Shifters A Paranormal Romance Complete Series Boxset - Brittany White Page 0,163

interrupted. “I don’t wanna hear one word until the others are here, okay?”

Carlo nodded quickly and followed Brooke inside. “You want a drink?” he asked, making a beeline for the kitchen. “We’ve still got some of that extra strength coffee in the back.”

Brooke wasn’t listening, collapsing onto the couch and toeing off her shoes with an irritated sigh. Her wolf was pissed, going over Connor’s words again and again in her mind.

I know how that goes, he’d said. Brooke scoffed. Did he? Did he know what it was like to drag your pack halfway across the country just so they could hunt in peace? Did he know what it was like to go to sleep every night and not know how the hell you managed to get through another day? To feel utter despair and downright terror at the possibility of another unexpected expense, because it wouldn’t take much for your entire life to fall to ruins? She didn’t think so.

“Brooke?”

Brooke jumped, uncurling her hands from where they were angrily balled in her lap. Carlo was standing at the kitchen counter holding up a can of coffee. Brooke sighed, closing her eyes. She didn’t normally drink very often, but she’d already had that cocktail and after the day she’d had. She said, “I’ll take some of the gin Lucas keeps under the sink.” Brooke smiled at the somewhat stunned silence that followed, eyes still closed.

“How did you know about that?”

“Please, he carries a flask around at all times and swigs from it like a drunkard. He doesn’t have a subtle bone in his body.”

When Lucas and Simon slunk into the room, they could immediately tell they were in trouble. If Brooke wasn’t feeling so annoyed she might have laughed at how uncomfortable they looked. All three of them sat on the couch opposite her. They were only barely old enough to hunt without her, and, looking at them now, it was so obvious just how young they still were.

“Okay,” Brooke said, sitting up. “Who wants to go first? And I swear to God, if one of you says, ‘they started it’ I will kick your ass so hard your great, great, grandcubs will feel it.”

Simon and Carlo looked at each other and then to Lucas, who sat between them, scowling. He was the eldest of the three and was developing a serious attitude problem. Their eyes met and Brooke lifted her chin, not backing down in the face of his childish silence.

“We didn’t do anything wrong,” Lucas grouched eventually.

Brooke sighed, leaning forward. God, she had a headache.

Lucas continued, “We were hunting in the forest, came across a couple of bears and things got tense.”

Brooke raised a sceptical eyebrow. “So, you didn’t intentionally piss off two of the Strauss brothers?”

“Okay so maybe we did-”

“Goddamnit, Lucas.”

“But we were chasing a bobcat! How are we supposed to hunt in such a small area, Brooke? It’s not our fault the bears get too touchy when we come half a mile onto their ‘sacred land.’”

Her wolf snarled in agreement. It’s not like he’s wrong. The mountain territory should be more than big enough for them to hunt comfortably without taking the bear’s prey. Brooke and her wolves may be new to the area but they had a right to as much land as the bears had. She looked at the three boys in front of her and couldn’t find it in herself to be mad at them.

“It wasn’t just us, anyway,” Lucas added, crossing his arms. “Vince and Angela got chased out of disputed lands, just the other day. The bears don’t care about their land; they just don’t want us anywhere near their precious lodge.”

Brooke downed her gin angrily. Goddamned bears. The boys were right. Their pack needed more territory if they were going to survive here. Bears and wolves had never gotten along, at the best of times, but Brooke had been willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.

“Look. I’m frustrated too, but you can’t go around openly picking fights with them, okay? If their alpha was there you could have been seriously hurt!”

“We could have taken Connor Strauss,” Simon piped up, voice trembling even as he sneered. Brooke scoffed. Three wolves barely older than cubs didn’t have a hope in hell of taking down an alpha bear as powerful as Connor. Brooke had never seen his bear, but she didn’t need to. As a human he was broad, tall and muscular; his bear would no doubt be even more impressive.