Her Bear and a Baby: BBW Bear Shifter Baby Paranormal Romance (Who's the Daddy? Book 2) Read Free

Gable. She never specified what she expected Elise to do when she did. Elise needed to reconcile those thoughts pretty quickly. By coming here, she had set things in motion, and Beau would start the investigation soon. In only a few hours she might have the answers she was looking for; she would have stirred up things that might be best left alone.
    In the space of the next day or two, there was a chance she would come face to face with Gable O’Donnell, with eyes as dark as the abyss. What happened then, she didn’t know. Would it depend on what kind of man he was? Had she misjudged him when it came to him abandoning Eleanor? Maybe he had a good reason for disappearing. Or maybe he didn’t.
    She wished she had someone to talk things over with. But she had no close confidantes any more. When her sister finally made contact after being away so long, Elise had rushed to her side. Only to find her sick, with a young baby in her arms. Elise had left her old life behind to go and nurse her and look after Connor. It had consumed all of her time, so she had never made friends with anyone in the faceless city where her sister lived. The only people Elise knew on first-name terms were the nurses who worked on the ward her sister had been on, as she slipped from this life to the next.
    A lump rose in Elise’s throat. She had to forget about that now. Focus on the future, not the past.
    “Let’s go and get our bags, shall we?” she asked Connor.
    She left Beau’s office, which, she guessed, used to be a dining room; the clue was a large, solid oak dining table, pushed back against the far wall to make room for his desk. The same desk that was surprisingly empty for a PI. She had expected it to be overflowing with pieces of paper, scribbled notes of his current cases. Instead it was neat and tidy. Maybe too tidy.
    Not for a man who has retired, her bear reminded her.
    True, she answered. It was becoming clearer, that for whatever reason, Beau had stopped taking on cases. Yet he was powerless to refuse his mate . A prickle of guilt crept up her back. He must have had good reasons for retiring, and she ought to respect those reasons and let him live in peace.
    Her assumption was confirmed when she noted his fingerprints in a thin layer of dust which had settled across his desk. Now, she began to wonder if he was the man he had been built up to be by the other investigator she had spoken to, or if he had lost his touch.
    Was Beau still the best in the business? Was he the man she needed him to be? She had told him she didn’t need a man, but the ache in her chest told him she did. Or one specific man, at least. She ought to come clean and tell him the truth. Yet she was scared.
    Scared of being the woman alone with a baby, knowing she was going to die and never see her beautiful child grow up. Eleanor had wept so many tears over life’s cruel twist.
    Wiping away her own tears, Elise left the room, her resolve firm once again.
    As she walked along the hallway, retracing the steps she had taken to get to Beau’s office, she took her time to take in the rest of the house. It wasn’t exactly stuck in a time warp, but there was a feeling that the house was holding its breath. That time stood still.
    It was clean, and the wallpaper wasn’t faded; there was no sense of Miss Havisham here. And yet there was. On the coat stand hung a coat belonging to a woman. Shoes were neatly tucked under it. Blue, with four-inch heels and a cut-out pattern to reveal the wearer’s toes. Again with a layer of dust on them, unused for some time. She shook off her suspicions that something wasn’t right here. For all she knew he might have a woman living here. A live-in lover, a woman to warm his bed while he waited for his mate to appear.
    While he waited for his mate to appear.
    That hurt. A stab of jealousy in her heart. Wouldn’t that make things so much easier? If he already had a woman, he wouldn’t be so cut up about her denying him as her