Bearing The Long Road Home (Ice Bear Shifters 7) Read Free

territory, where she could lay low and live in peace. It didn’t take long for her to realize, though, that there was nowhere in Alaska where she would be safe. Dominic’s reign of terror had touched every corner of the state.
    Now, as Chloe finished off the last few bites of her cereal, she tried to figure out her options. The way she saw it, the only thing left to do was move far away from Alaska, and start a new life somewhere else. Her best bet was probably to move to a completely new state and start over in a place where no one had ever even heard of the Blizzards. She’d heard the state of Maine got a lot of snow, and had plenty of forestland. That sounded like the perfect place for a polar bear shifter to start over.
    Chloe had one issue with moving three thousand miles away, though: moving was expensive. The destruction of her clan and two years of living life in the shadows had left her with little money to spare. She took on odd jobs here and there, but thanks to her constant moving from town to town, her work history was spotty. Chloe had one idea up her sleeve, though. She’d heard some guys in a bar a few nights ago discussing the lucrative possibilities of ice-road trucking. Every January, trucking companies hired seasonal workers to get take loads of supplies across frozen ice to mining outposts in the far north of Canada. The work was dangerous and difficult, but the pay was high. According to the guys in the bar, an ice road trucker could earn up to $80,000 for just three months of work.
    Chloe just so happened to have experience with driving a truck. Her father, who mercifully had passed away long before Dominic had taken over as alpha to the Blizzards, had been a truck driver. He had taught Chloe how to drive an eighteen-wheeler, and Chloe had actually spent one summer working as a truck driver before the clan wars had started. She wasn’t sure how hard it would be to get a job as an ice road trucker as a woman, but she was going to try. She’d heard turnover in the industry was off the charts, so hopefully she could find someone willing to hire a woman. Of course, the bosses weren’t supposed to discriminate based on gender, but Chloe had been around long enough to know that anti-discrimination laws didn’t do much in actual practice.
    Chloe took her empty bowl to the sink to rinse it out. She suddenly felt excited and energized for the first time in several years. If she could really make $80,000 for a few months of work, she could move somewhere far away and start over. She couldn’t help but smile at the prospect of being able to live her life without constantly looking over her shoulder.
    She wanted nothing more than to shed the label of “Blizzard” and just be “Chloe.” She wanted people to judge her for her, not for the awful things her former clan members had done. Getting the hell out of Alaska would allow her to do just that.
    Operation “get an ice-road trucking job” started now.

Chapter Three
     
    Seth Evans swung his axe with a vengeance, splitting yet another log in two. He tossed the split pieces into a growing pile of firewood, and grabbed another log for the chopping block. He had been at this for two hours already, with no signs of slowing down. The clan needed firewood, and he needed an outlet for his pent up energy and frustration. It was a win-win situation.
    Seth worked under the light of a giant spotlight. Even though it was 11 a.m., the sky was pitch black. The depths of winter in Glacier Point brought over two months of complete darkness. The locals liked to joke that the cold was so bad here that even the sun went south for the winter. Today was December 27th. That meant another solid month without daylight.
    A loud crack sounded across the otherwise quiet stillness of the snow covered landscape as Seth brought his axe down. Nearby, seven cabins stood, all built in the same style and located equidistant to each other. The Northern Lights Clan lived in those