Free Marrying The Bear (Gray Bears 1) by Natalie Kristen

CHAPTER
ONE

    Alisa Perez pushed away from
her small, wobbly dining table and rubbed her eyes. She threw her
head back and stared at the stain on the ceiling. Slowly her tired
eyes traveled from the stained ceiling to the cracks in the walls and
around her tiny rented space. She looked at the peeling paint and
heard the drip, drip, drip from the leaky tap in her bathroom.
    She sighed. This place
wasn't much but the rent was cheap. Still, without a job, she might
not be able to keep this flimsy roof over her head for much longer.
    Wrapping her arms tightly
around herself, she winced and was about to spew out another vicious
curse when she stopped herself in time.
    She wasn't going to waste her
breath cursing and swearing at her ex-boyfriend. She had wasted
years, and even more tears on that creep. Alisa clenched her teeth
to stop herself from spitting out their names.
    Alisa pressed her palms to
her forehead and sat down heavily on the plastic chair. Tears
threatened to fall but she fought them back. She wouldn't cry. Not
for them. She wouldn't cry for them, but she wanted to cry for
herself. Was she really such a loser?
    Her ex-boyfriend had run off
with her ex-best friend. God, she had been so blind! How could she
not have known?
    And not only had the creep
dumped her, he had emptied their joint account.
    Alisa stared numbly at the
flickering light bulb overhead. She had no love, no friends, no
money and no job. The eatery where she had worked as a fry cook had
closed down unexpectedly three weeks ago. With the exploding
population in the city, there were more people than jobs. She had
tried to find another job, God knows she tried. But there just
weren't any openings.
    With a sniff, Alisa sat up
straight and stared at her battered, second-hand laptop. She had
been looking through all the job sites, filling in countless
e-applications. She tried not to lose hope but she knew that she
would not hear back from any of those companies. She had been
checking her inbox every ten minutes, but nothing arrived.
    Swallowing hard, Alisa stared
at the torn calendar on the wall. The dates seemed to stretch out
meaninglessly before her. Nothing was circled on the calendar. No
interview dates, no important events and milestones worth
celebrating, no happy holidays, nothing.
    Her adoptive parents had been
kind and loving, but they had passed away. She had spent the first
ten years of her life in an orphanage, and the next ten years in a
loving home. Her adoptive parents weren't well off, but they loved
her with all their hearts. But now she was all alone once again.
She'd always been introverted and quiet, and didn't have many
friends. She was so happy when she got to know Lucy, who was fun and
loud and bold. And when she met Ben, she felt like the luckiest girl
in the world. She imagined they would have a house with a white
picket fence, two kids and a dog.
    She was still thinking of
that lovely white house when Ben and Lucy's faces popped up in a
curtained window of her fantasy house. Alisa shook her head so hard
she almost fell out of her chair. What the hell! That was her dream
house, her fantasy, her happily-ever-after! How the hell did they
get in it! Shit, shit and shit!
    Alisa stumbled away from the
table and went to splash some cold water on her face. She had to
stop thinking about her loser ex-boyfriend. Ben had hurt her, but
Lucy...Lucy was her best friend, and she had betrayed her.
    Alisa yanked the almost empty
carton of milk out of her small fridge and gulped down the contents.
She had to stop dwelling on the past and move on.
    When she'd finally stopped
shaking, Alisa forced herself to sit down in front of her blinking
laptop and curled her fingers over the keyboard. She had to find a
job pronto. Any job.
    For just a moment, she
wondered if she would be able to finally get a job she loved. She
loved cooking, and she loved working in the kitchen. Being a fry
cook in a modest fast food eatery was as close as she ever got to