Commander Bear (Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance) (Bear Patrol Book 1) Read Free Page B

closed the door behind them, leaving Rollo alone in peace and quiet where he could finally think. Something about the crime scene at the mansion had thrown him off. He couldn’t quite place what it was.
    Rollo shook his mouse to wake up his computer screen. He still had information about Caitlin Somerset on his internet browser. After quickly closing all his tabs, he came to an open screen displaying Mate.com.
    He exhaled a long breath, looking at the profiles of the women who were almost perfect matches for him. There was a pretty blonde who was a ninety-eight point nine percent match. There was a beautiful Hispanic woman with big brown eyes who was a ninety-five percent match. But not a single one of these beautiful women was a hundred percent match for him. Only a hundred percent match from the Mate.com algorithms meant that he had found his fated mate.
    With a sigh, he closed Mate.com and tried to put it out of his mind. That’s when he remembered the faint scent in the mansion that had made his bear rumble awake inside his mind. His inner grizzly was sure he’d smelled the scent of his mate.

3
    Z oe Bright pulled on her safety goggles over her green eyes and loaded a rectangular piece of oak wood into the lathe. Her long, black hair swung in a ponytail down her back. She turned on the machine and slowly pressed her sharp cutter against the swiftly turning wood, pursing her red lips in concentration. Soon she had the rectangles smoothed into a cylinder that would began her intricately beveled table leg.
    When she had first come to the Bright Institute for Shifters to study woodworking, she had not expected to enjoy it so much. Her brother Corey Bright, the founder of the Institute, thought she was lying about her interest. But the fact was, she really liked working with wood. Building real things with her own two hands gave her a sense of accomplishment she had never known before.
    If only she had come here under different circumstances, maybe she could really use the skills she’d learned over the last six months. Maybe she could have a real life that she could be proud of for once. But Zoe still wasn’t free from her past, and she didn’t know if she ever would be.
    Part of her knew that she should have come clean with her brother six months ago when she had first arrived in Fate Mountain. But every time she tried to talk to him about it, she couldn’t bring herself to tell him the truth. Corey was ten years older than her, and in some ways, he was more like a parent than a brother. He’d been taking care of her since she was a child.
    Unlike Corey, who was a computer genius and a billionaire, Zoe had always been labeled a troublemaker. From her earliest memory she had been the wild child and the one who always had to be lectured and watched. After their mother had died before the war, Zoe had left the country to find a life of her own. All along, Corey had been sending her money and hadn’t asked what she was doing with it.
    He was a good brother. He had never let her go hungry. In fact, he had allowed her to live a life of leisure since she had become an adult. She’d never actually had to have a job or had any kind of responsibility. When she first left the country seven years ago, she had spent the first couple of years traveling to music festivals and dancing.
    But that form of stimulation had only excited her for so long. Soon, she needed greater thrills and that’s when she met her ex-boyfriend, the and notorious Russian mob boss who was the leader of an international crime syndicate. He had taken her and immediately shown her the kind of life that Zoe had always believed she deserved. Corey’s money had afforded her the luxury of never having to work, but it didn’t afford her the real luxuries of life. That, Dima had given her.
    But it didn’t come without a price. Not long after she had become involved with Dimitri Ivanov, he started to ask her to use her shifter skills to do jobs for him. At