Free Grizzly Flying High (Air Bear Shifters 1) by Sloane Meyers Page A

get her to talk to him for a few minutes. Any plans he had made to stay away from her and not focus on women had gone out the window as soon as her beautiful face was right there in front of him again.
    She quite literally took his breath away. The soft lights from the streetlamps made her skin look like it was glowing, and her hair fell in soft, shiny waves around her perfect oval face.
    “Amanda, I’m so sorry. I didn’t see you there at all. Did I hurt you?”
    Amanda looked at her hands once more, then looked up at him suspiciously. “I’m fine,” she said. “Are you stalking me or something?”
    Sawyer shook his head in an emphatic no. “I swear I was just going for a run. I’m glad I didn’t hurt you badly. Can I get anything for you? Bandages or anything? There’s a pharmacy one block over.”
    Amanda shook her head. “No. It’s just a very small scrape. Besides, I can take care of myself. I don’t need some jealous, possessive psycho to handle things.”
    Sawyer winced at her harsh tone and words. “Okay, I probably deserved that,” he said. “I’m sorry about the diner earlier. Well, I’m sorry I embarrassed you, I guess. I’m not sorry I kissed you.”
    He looked at Amanda, meeting her gaze unflinchingly with his own. He knew his eyes were burning with desire, and he tried his best to let her see that. She didn’t look away, and the harshness in her expression softened somewhat.
    “You don’t own me, Sawyer. You can’t just drag me out of a diner and kiss me whenever you want. Although, I do have to admit that kiss was one of the sexiest experiences of my life.”
    She laughed as she admitted this to him, then looked out over the water, staring unseeingly across the dark expanse beyond the boats that were bobbing gently near the piers.
    Sawyer furrowed his brow. “If it was so amazing, then why did you still turn and leave?”
    Amanda gave him a longsuffering sideways glance, as though she couldn’t believe he was actually asking the question. “It takes more than just a good kiss to make a relationship,” she said.”
    “True. But we have more than just physical chemistry. We get along well. We have great conversations and we laugh well together. I think we could have something special, if you gave us a chance.”
    Amanda frowned at him. “I tried to give you a chance, remember? And you didn’t take it. So you couldn’t have wanted to try things out with me all that badly, no matter how much of a connection we might have had. And, besides, I’ve decided that I’m not looking for a guy while I’m on this yearlong journey of finding myself. I’m going to focus on enjoying nature and the wilderness, and trying to get back to who I really am, whoever that might be.”
    “So hanging around with the tourists in Kodiak is your way of finding yourself?” Sawyer asked, unable to keep the sneering tone out of his voice.
    “If you hate Kodiak so much, then why are you here?” Amanda asked, crossing her arms.
    “I don’t hate Kodiak. And I’m here for…work. But I thought you were all into solo hiking and backwoods camping. Why are you hanging out here with all the people who sign up for the stereotypical tourist experiences and then act like they’ve been such adventurous explorers?”
    Amanda glared at him. “Not like it’s any of your business, but I had an encounter with a grizzly that shook me up and made me realize that maybe solo camping in grizzly country wasn’t exactly my thing. I decided to come here and do some group tours for the rest of my stay in Alaska. Don’t judge too harshly, unless you’ve ever been face to face with a grizzly. You may think you’re a large man, but you’d look like a dwarf next to the bear I saw.”
    Sawyer took a step backward in surprise. “You saw a grizzly?” he asked. “What did you do?” Grizzly encounters with humans were still relatively rare around here, but he knew, better than Amanda could have ever imagined, that the size