Free For the Love of Two Highland Bears by Tianna Xander Page A

the walls. “Hmm… What’s this?” She stopped the beam over some old cave drawings, then moved closer. “Have you ever seen anything like this?
    The crudely drawn figures started out as men. They changed to some large animal then back to a man again.
    “It looks like the cave drawings my grandfather told me about.” Sunshine ran over to the wall, pulled a paint brush from her backpack and gently brushed the dirt from the picture.
    “Do you think they’re just wearing animal skins?” Roxie knelt down, brushed her hand over the drawings then glanced back at Sunshine. “Can you read this?”
    “No, but my grandfather could have if he were here.” Biting her lip, Sunshine tilted her head with a frown. It was too bad she couldn’t convince him to come here with her. “I think this is the cave he told me about.” Pulling out her cell phone, she took a few photos before cramming it back in her pocket. “If it is, this says something about the Great Bear Warrior. ”
    “What’s that?” Roxie frowned.
    “I’m not sure. The only thing I am sure about is that he wasn’t able to find out anything either. The closest he got was sighting a polar bear on one of the hills.” He said he didn’t stick around long after that. For some reason the locals refused to talk to him and got downright anti-social when he asked questions.”
    “So he went home and told everyone those stories that made him look like a crazy person, huh?”
    “That just about sums it up.” Sunshine turned toward the mouth of the cave. “We need to get out of here. The flashlight is going dead and being stuck down here in the dark is not at the top of my list.”
    “Yeah, it’s not on mine, either,” Roxie agreed falling into step beside her. “Let’s put it in high gear and get the hell out of Dodge, shall we?”
     

Chapter Two
     
     
    “Where did the boy say he saw them?” Malcolm asked as he shaded his eyes and peered up at the ridge.
    “Right up there, at the mouth of the cave. He didnae say whether they went in or not.” Gavin moved up beside him and pointed to where the thick brush covered the entrance.
    “Ye know they did.” Malcolm sighed, hiked the backpack he found up onto his shoulder, and started the climb up the side of the steep hill.
    It was a damned good thing they had decided to pay a couple of the human locals to keep a lookout for anyone trespassing on their property. Ever since scientists found the skeleton of one of their kind in a cave in the area, there had been hundreds of eager scientists looking for more.
    They had been lucky with the first one. The bones had been so old, there hadn't been even the tiniest amount of viable DNA left in it. He glanced at Gavin who moved up next to him. "How do ye suppose they knew about the cave?”
    "I dinnae know," Gavin said with a grunt as he pulled himself up another arm's length with little more than the tips of his fingers.
    The cavern was once a sacred place for his people. They lived inside, using the fresh water that ran down the walls to drink and the small, underground lake for bathing. Now, they merely wished to keep it hidden to stop others from finding the pictographs inside.
    It was never easy to explain why the hunters on the wall appeared to turn into animals before becoming men once again. They would have destroyed the cave and its evidence of the existence of shape shifters long ago, if it weren’t for the historical significance it held for their kind.
    Fifteen minutes later, Malcolm climbed over the edge, stood up and heaved a sigh as be bent to brush the dirt from his jeans. “That was a bit of a challenge.”
    “I’ll bet it was, if you climbed up here from the bottom. That looks like a two-hundred foot drop.”
    Looking up, Malcolm met the gaze of the most beautiful woman he had ever seen. Long red hair framed her heart-shaped face as she stared up at him with her gorgeous green eyes. Her thick jacket hung open over a sweater and blouse. She wore