Bear in Mind (Heart of the Grizzly Book 1) Read online

  BEAR IN MIND

  HEART OF THE GRIZZLY SERIES

  BOOK 1

  TERRY SPEAR

  CONTENTS

  Synopsis

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Author Bio

  Also by Terry Spear

  PUBLISHED BY:

  Wilde Ink Publishing

  Bear in Mind

  Copyright © 2023 by Terry Spear

  Cover Copyright by Terry Spear

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the author, except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review.

  Discover more about Terry Spear at:

  http://www.terryspear.com/

  Print ISBN: 978-1-63311-091-5

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-63311-090-8

  SYNOPSIS

  Grizzly bear shifter Amy Rutherford has special abilities where she can hear voices in her head—the thoughts and feelings of others—and she needs to get control of it. It started way before she nearly died in a car accident during a rainstorm where her parents perished, and she’s sure the crash wasn't an accident. But nobody believes her. She can't let go of what had happened, and storms bring on a case of Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. She is on a blind date while celebrating her sister and her husband's anniversary while a storm rages overhead at the dance club. She's assaulted by all the voices in her head, until one stands out. A man is observing her, hiding his dark secrets from her, or trying to—and she's not sure if he's one of the good guys, or not.

  Cedric Shader is a grizzly bear shifter and knows not to contact Amy the way he did at the dance club, instead of trying to meet her face to face first. But he senses her vulnerability and that she is experiencing psychic overload, just like he would when he was a kid. Now, he uses his ability to investigate murders, but the crime scene memories stay with him, though he tries hard to compartmentalize them, and he doesn’t want her to witness them. He told himself he is here on a job, not to become involved with a woman who has psychic issues. But she’s in trouble—and he’s certain she needs him to teach her how to cope. Worse, she believes someone had murdered her parents, and he's beginning to wonder if she’s right. With a break-in at her apartment, and a possible connection to the murder of her parents, they're running out of time before the person or persons kills again.

  This book is dedicated to Gloria Meuse for following along on my various shifter journeys. Thanks for joining the pack, or in this case, the bear sleuth, for another wild adventure!

  1

  Before Amy Rutherford celebrated her sister and brother-in-law’s fifth wedding anniversary tonight at Brannigans, a steak restaurant and club, she wanted to take a run on the wild side as a grizzly bear at Glacier National Park where other grizzly bears, and even black bears, made it their home, thirty-five miles away from her apartment in Kalispell, Montana. She hadn’t had any visions of danger—for herself—not that they were always forthcoming as a forewarning to her. A storm was coming, and she wanted to do this before it arrived.

  She should be safe in the park as long as no one was illegally hunting grizzlies. Or she didn’t run into a grizzly with spring cubs that were five to six months old. Or cross the path of a mother protecting her yearlings born last spring. Amy also had to watch for males who might be looking for a mate.

  After a grueling week of chasing down husbands who weren’t paying alimony or child support, though she’d had to do the same with a wife in one case, and other investigative issues as a private investigator, she just needed to get out and run for a while in her fur coat. She hadn’t done so in several weeks and she thought she might be able to deal better with the storm and having a blind date tonight if she enjoyed nature for a while. Besides, spring was one of the most spectacular times in the park. With a million miles of acreage and 734 trails, it was perfect for a grizzly bear adventure. Though she planned to stay off the human trails.

  It was dark by the time she reached the park, cut the engine on her car, and got out to walk into the woods—off the beaten path. With her bear sight, she had excellent night vision and was particularly adept at detecting movement so she could see what she needed to in the dark. She pulled off her clothes, tucked them under leaf litter and called on the urge to shift. Her body warmed at once as she turned into her grizzly, her fur tipped with silver, her undercoat a darker brown fur. She began to walk through the wooded park, smelling scents and listening for sounds that might warn of humans or other dangers nearby. The bugs were singing their incessant songs, an occasional moth flying across her path, a few fireflies lighting the way, the full moon shining through the trees. It was a spectacular night, and she was glad she had taken the time to come here and stroll through the woods before the weather turned foul.

  Full-time grizzlies often used the trails that people did. The trails were easier to hike on and the bears walked about the same speed as humans. But she didn’t want to scare any humans and really, if wild grizzlies were walking on the trails, she wanted to steer clear of them also.

  For about an hour, she meandered along one of the streams fed by alpine glaciers and snowpack that had melted and eventually ended up dumping into one of the rivers. She breathed in the scents of rabbits, foxes, deer, grizzlies, and black bears. She drank her fill from the stream and decided it was time to head back to her car. She needed to return home and change clothes to go to dinner. That’s when she saw a grizzly and her three spring bear cubs walk out of the woods to drink water from the stream upwind of her. Amy made a calculated retreat. Not only did she not want to fight a mother grizzly that was protecting her young, she definitely didn’t want to be injured and have to hide the fact from humans. Grizzly shifters would understand. Humans wouldn’t.

  That’s when she saw a male grizzly trailing her, a light tan, close to white. The males would often trail a female for days before one approached if he was interested in a female. She didn’t recognize him from her bear sleuth, though she hadn’t seen all the bears in their fur coats. If she was downwind of him, she would be able to smell his scent and recognize if it was someone she knew.

  She headed back to where she’d left her clothes, hoping she’d lose the bear. It really was time to go home to get ready for her dinner engagement.

  She saw another couple of male grizzly bears. The light colored one took off with great haste. Sometimes a couple of bears would be after the same female. She could see stirring up a fight between two hefty male grizzlies and she wasn’t even on the market for a grizzly bear. Well, not a grizzly that was all bear anyway. Though meeting someone who believed in her psychic abilities was probably not going to happen and so she really wasn’t even looking for a bear shifter to date, to her older sister’s consternation. Rebecca believed Amy needed a man in her life to protect her and take care of her, but no one could protect Amy from the visions running rampant in her head.

  She glanced back at the two male bears. Wait. Was the darker furred bear, David Shader, one of the vice presidents of the First National Bank of Kalispell?

  Cedric Shader and his twin brother, David, were running through the forest as grizzlies in Glacier National Park after he had returned home to investigate a triple homicide for the sheriff’s department. Since he had returned here, he’d been dying to get into his bear suit and run with his brother. They were having a great adventure, just like old times when they were kids but then Cedric veered off in the direction of where the first of the crime scenes was located in the whitebark pines where a forty-three-year-old psychologist, Patrick Pascal, had been shot and died. David glanced at him. Yeah, Cedric was here to conduct an investigation of his own into the three whitebark pine murders and he hadn’t meant to drag his brother into it. But Cedric couldn’t help himself. They’d parked their car at the trailhead so they were close by the murder site, and he wanted to check it out just in case he could learn anything.

  Until he spied a female grizzly with her spring cubs, and they made a wide circle around her. It wasn’t long after that when they caught sight of a male blond grizzly bear following a silver-tipped grizzly female, no young-uns, thankfully, but she wasn’t having any part of the male. Cedric and David came onto the scene, chasing off the other male. The female took one look at Cedric and David and headed off in a hurry.

  He wanted to laugh; his brother grunted. Both of them were bachelors, and though his brother might be on the lookout for a she-bear shifter, Cedric certainly wasn’t. Not only that but the lone female was probably a wild bear. But then he read her thoughts—she’d recognized David. Did David know her then?

  After that, Cedric and his brother spent an hour and a half just enjoying
their jaunt, then headed back to where they’d hidden their clothes and smelled the scent of a she-bear that had passed this way. Not only was she a grizzly, she was human and he wondered if she was the one who knew David. Unless another female grizzly shifter was out here.

  The brothers shifted and hurried to dress, David smiling at him.

  “You better catch up to her.” Cedric wouldn’t be surprised if David took him up on his comment.

  David laughed. “She has accounts at my bank, but I’m not interested in her.”

  “Most of the bears in the sleuth bank with you. Does that mean you’re not going to ever date any of the single ones? Or is she mated already?” Though Cedric figured her mate would have been with her if she had one.

  “Nah, she’s just not interested in me. But you could always check her out.”

  “You know me and mating a woman isn’t in my future.”

  “Yeah, you always say that but if you met the right woman, who knows how it might turn out.”

  Not with the kind of work Cedric did chasing down murderers. His psychic awareness could really put a damper on things also.

  Still, when Cedric and his brother were dressed and headed back to David’s truck, Cedric couldn’t help but take deeper whiffs of her scent, wondering if she was the lone female they had seen. “Was that the one we saw then? The lone she-bear that the blond bear was following?”

  David raised his brows and smiled at him.

  “I’m just curious in case I see her again in the woods in her fur coat.”

  “Yeah, it was.”

  She was a beautiful bear, a striking coloring with her silver tipped fur and dark brown guard hairs. Now if Cedric ran into her again in the park, he’d be able to let her know he was safe to be around—as in he wasn’t a wild bear looking to mate her—and that he was a shifter too.

  “So why isn’t she your type?” Cedric asked his brother.

  “She is all sorts of trouble, believe me.” David wouldn’t say any more than that, and Cedric was more curious than ever. “I can’t believe you had to visit that one murder location.”

  “Yeah, you can.”

  “Well, that’s true. Did you get any clues from it before the she-bear distracted you?”

  Cedric smiled at David. It wasn’t like him to be easily distracted by a female bear shifter when he was on a mission.

  2

  On spring nights like this when the Montana May winds began to gust and howl, shaking the red osier dogwood’s white flowers and pink cherry blossom flowers in an unwilling dance, and the heavens threatened to weep, Amy felt the killer on the prowl. Every streak of lightning brought back the ten-year-old memory of a gun’s muzzle flash piercing the black rain, the squealing of tires on wet pavement, and her mother’s shrieks before the car crashed and her mother and father died. Amy reminded herself she was a grizzly bear shifter and growly, if she needed to be and she could take care of herself, but it didn’t lessen the anxiousness she felt whenever a violent thunderstorm threatened the area.

  Shaking loose of the grim thoughts, Amy remembered her jaunt earlier in the Glacier National Park running through the forest as a grizzly and that it had made her feel so good. Her sister and Brent had picked her up at her apartment and drove her to the restaurant, slash bar, slash dance club. Rebecca was a pretty redhead and had green eyes like Amy. Brent was equally redheaded, though he was blue-eyed, and Amy was determined to help them celebrate their fifth wedding anniversary in style. They had been running a little late to pick her up at her place because Rebecca and Brent had been giving each other presents before they left their house.

  “You smell of the fragrance of the forest,” Rebecca said to Amy, sounding surprised. “You went running as a bear in the park?”

  “Yeah, I needed to do it before the storm hits, and before celebrating your anniversary dinner, of course.”

  “You shouldn’t go by yourself, you know. Not after the whitebark pine murders were committed out there recently. Brent and I are going to run in our fur coats tomorrow night,” Rebecca said. “You’re welcome to come with us if you’d like.”

  “Thanks, but I’ll be working.” Maybe. But Amy didn’t want to impose on Rebecca and Brent’s time together.

  Brent was wearing a new whitebark pinecone tie tack and Rebecca had a new whitebark pinecone necklace. Amy smiled at them. They had actually met each other during the spring while climbing a whitebark pine to grab some pine nuts in their grizzly coats in Glacier National Park. They had been in the same grade in high school but seeing each other in the national park had been the first time that they’d truly met. After that, Rebecca and Brent began dating and that was it. They knew they were meant to be together.

  Amy sighed. Brent had arranged for her to meet with a blind date, a coworker of his, for dinner tonight—despite telling her brother-in-law in the sternest terms that it wasn’t necessary! But they were worried about her and wanted her to be with someone and not there as a third wheel, as if being on a blind date would make her feel more comfortable.

  They finally arrived at the restaurant and went inside. Darkened with low lights for ambience and soft classical music playing in the background, the restaurant didn’t intrude on Amy’s fine-tuned senses. She figured she could make it through dinner and drinks at least. As long as patrons from the nearby lounge didn’t get too vocal, though she could hear the dance music playing in the background. And as long as the thunderstorm wasn’t too violent.

  As soon as she sat on her chair, she envisioned a dark-haired man who was the perfect picture of tall, dark, and handsome, frowning, concentrating on something, alone. The visual sensation faded and for a second, she wished he was her blind date. The same music had been playing overhead in the image she had of him, and she was certain he was here. She wondered why in the world she would have a vision of him. She hoped it wasn’t something serious, like when she’d had to save a choking victim in a restaurant when he had taken too big of a bite of meat and nearly died. Luckily, she’d envisioned his distress, located him, and performed the Heimlich maneuver on him.

  She took in a deep breath of the mouth-watering aroma of hickory-smoked steaks filling the air. The air conditioner hummed on high and antiqued ceiling fans spun around in a speedy dance to further spread the cold air, chilling her. She shivered.

  Then she saw a man who appeared to be her blind-date, Howard Stenson, standing stiffer than a mature oak tree near the hostess stand, dressed in a dark gray business suit. He looked as uncomfortable as she felt as he tugged at his gray tie to loosen it. His gray eyes connected with Brent, and he smiled, then his attention shifted to her. The man had a pleasant face, but a wrinkle etched his forehead. His hair was the same color as hers, a light brown, only it was manicured with the utmost care, not a hair out of place. In fact, she imagined he’d used hairspray to keep it perfectly intact. Whereas the wind had tossed hers around, and she envisioned it could use some major repair work. He was not the intriguing man she had seen in her vision.

  Howard joined them and with his hand outstretched to shake hers, he smiled at her. He was a grizzly too, but she didn’t think he could do well in a bear-to-bear confrontation. He seemed too meek, too mild, too boring. She detected he had no physical interest in her, just like she wasn’t interested in him that way. The silvertip grizzly’s sense of smell was more acute than a human’s, seven times more so than even a bloodhound’s. The grizzly had more smell receptors than any other animal that existed on land.

  “You must be Amy Rutherford,” he said.

  “Yes, and you’re Howard Stenson.” She stood and quickly slipped her hand into his with an extremely light touch and moved it with lightning speed so as not to experience his uneasy emotions. He wore them like a slip of sheer fabric, while her own were already in enough turmoil. Even though bear shifters’ senses were heightened compared to humans, hers were through-the-roof sensitive. She suddenly envisioned a dark movie theater, smelled popcorn, and knew she wasn’t alone. She thought she’d be there tonight, even though she had no plans to go to the movies.