Free Bear In The Rough: Book 1: Treasure Hunt (BBW Bear Shifter Romance) by L. Foster

can’t fight this.” Her usual pretense of invulnerability had vanished. She was a desperate woman scared for her life.
     
                  The bear swiped down at me with its ragged black paw, sending chunks of blood and hair and sweat flying across the room.
     
    I fell backwards, stunned and faint. This hadn’t even been a fight. The bear loomed over me, preparing for the final blow.
     
    I shut my eyes tight, wondering what death was like, whether it hurt, whether I would see my parents and grandparents again. When she bore down on me, would I find them waiting for me? Would I ever wake up at all, or would I just wink out? And I suddenly felt immensely sad, realizing this was how my life ended: cowering on the floor of the cave where I lived, waiting to be devoured by a bear, in front of a woman I had been unable to protect, because I had stupidly been trying to prove my own worth by taking on a creature three times my size. Instead I had been humiliated in every possible way.
     
                  Instinctively I clinched my fists into a praying position. They fastened on the green stone, which I happened to be wearing around my neck. It was then I remembered the words that Olivia had translated a few minutes before, the ones that had seemed so significant at the time: “The owner of this stone poses no danger to others, so long as he keeps it in his possession.”
     
                  Growing up I had been forced to keep my emotions at bay because any outburst of intense passion stoked the risk of transformation. Once I had gotten in a schoolyard fight with a bully, a kid three times my size, who turned and ran in the other direction when I suddenly turned into a bear. He fled, and no one ever believed him.
     
                  Then, a few years later, I had hooked up with a girl. Things had gotten heated, and I was unhooking her bra when the metamorphosis took a place. She never returned my calls after that.
     
                  I had resigned myself to a life of having to force down my deepest feelings, a life of perpetual emotional privation, of never getting married, never having sex with a woman, never letting myself get lost in the throes of grief or anger or despair, a life with no sense of catharsis. It was the reason (though the rest of my extended family would never forgive me for doing it) why I had skipped out on my grandmother’s funeral. I had loved her, but I wasn’t going to interrupt the service by turning. Instead, I went home and sobbed and turned in private.
     
                  It was the reason I had tried to send Olivia away. Because of my condition, even if we dated there was no way our relationship could ever be fully consummated.
     
                  But in every fight I had ever had, I had transformed. So naturally, I had easily won every fight I had ever had until now. This time something was different. And I might never have known what it was, might have gone to my grave wondering what had gone wrong, if it hadn’t been for the inscription that Olivia had spent the last half-hour translating.
     
                  “Liv!” I gasped, pulling the stone from around my neck and flinging it, with my last ounce of strength, towards the entrance. It rolled along the ground with a disheartening series of clinks. “Take this.”
     
                  Numb and uncomprehending, Olivia ran forward and grabbed the stone, clutching it in both hands like a trinket she had just been awarded in someone’s will.
     
                  The last thing I was conscious of hearing before the transformation took effect was Liv shouting something from what sounded like a great distance. I was losing the ability to recognize language. She was saying the same words as before, but in my ursine brain they became muffled, incomprehensible, just another series of groans in the savage