Free Billionbear and Pair of Bears Boxed Set: BBW and Menage Bear Shifter Romance by Zoe Chant Page A

unimpressed look and said, “Some kind of Special Forces. But I’ll tell you what I don’t know about: werebears. And werecats. So I must have been bitten by a werecat when I was a baby? And you guys were bitten by bears?”
    Jackson emerged from the bathroom as she spoke. Paisley had pegged him correctly, too: he wore a black suit with a blue silk tie, silver cufflinks, and polished shoes. She couldn’t help noticing how good he looked, with the tailored lines of the suit showing off his broad shoulders and slim hips. She also couldn’t help noticing that he, like Eli, still had a visible bulge in his pants.
    “Neither of us were bitten,” Jackson said. “We were born bears. And we call ourselves bear shifters, not werebears. You’re a cat shifter. I’ve never heard of a baby getting bitten and turned— I wouldn’t think they’d be strong enough to survive that. So your mother wasn’t a shifter?”
    Paisley shook her head. “She would have told me.  She always said I’d been born with a special, magical gift that I had to keep secret.  She had no idea why I was like that.”
    “What about your father?” Eli asked.
    “I never knew him,” Paisley replied. “He was a one-night stand Mom had in college, when she went to Burning Man. She never knew his last name and she didn’t get his number, so she had no way to tell him she’d gotten pregnant. But it was him, right? He was the werecat?”
    “Cat shifter,” Jackson corrected, giving her that pained look she was so familiar with— the “Paisley, could you possibly be more tactless” look. “He must have been. So you grew up thinking you were the only one of your kind?”
    “That must have been lonely,” Eli said unexpectedly.
    Paisley bristled. She didn’t want to discuss her past or her private feelings with a pair of strange werebears who’d wrapped her up in a bath towel, no matter how hot they were.
    “What do you want with me?” Paisley demanded. Once she began, everything she’d wondered about poured out. “You said you wanted to hire me— is that true? What for? How did you know I’d be here? Where’s the guy who’s supposed to be here? Do all you werebears know each other, or did you answer some ‘werebear seeks same’ ad? Do you know any other werecats? If you really do want to hire me, how much are you offering?”
    She could have gone on, but Eli put up a hand. “Whoa. I think I’ve already lost track of the first couple questions.”
    “I can start over,” Paisley offered.
    “That’s okay,” Jackson said hastily. “I think this’ll make the most sense if we start from the beginning. I don’t know if all werebears— dammit, you’ve infected me— all bear shifters know each other, but a lot of us do. There are definitely other cat shifters, but I don’t know any personally. Eli and I grew up together in a little town in Maine. It’s got a couple families of bear shifters, and lots of forest for us to roam around in.”
    “I don’t remember a time before I was best friends with Jackson,” Eli put in. “We’ve been buddies since we were five.”
    “Three,” Jackson corrected him. “Then we graduated from high school, and we went our separate ways. Eli became a Navy SEAL, and I became—”
    “A hacker,” said Eli.
    Jackson elbowed him in the ribs. “An inventor. Hacking’s just a hobby. Anyway... Eli, do you want me to tell the next part?”
    “No, it’s fine.” But from the grief and anger that tightened Eli’s jaw, Paisley realized that Jackson had been thinking it might be too painful a story to tell. She knew all about painful stories. “I can’t get into details. Most of our missions are classified. All I can tell you is that my team was issued new, lightweight body armor made by a company called SmartDefense. They told us it was state of the art, and would protect us much better than the older, heavier vests. There was an ambush, and one of my buddies, Ryan, was hit. The bullet went