“Congratulations! We’ve found your fated mate.”
His heart started to pound and his limbs felt numb. Rollo was a man who was used to being in control of himself and leading other men. He was not accustomed to becoming so overwhelmed or disoriented by anything, be it enemy fire or drunk and disorderly citizens. But getting a text that his fated mate had been located completely threw him off. He had been waiting so long that the news hit him hard, and he had trouble breathing for several moments.
When he pulled himself together, he flicked on the screen and followed the app to his mate’s profile. Her name was Zoe Bright.
Zoe Bright? It couldn’t be Corey Bright’s sister. Could it?
Rollo read further. Zoe Bright was a female jaguar shifter. Her mother was a grizzly and her father was a jaguar. She had one brother, a grizzly shifter named Corey Bright. The inventor of Mate.com.
He knew it. Zoe was Corey’s brother. He had known, through the multiple channels of gossip, that Corey Bright’s sister had come to participate in the first class of the Bright Institute for Shifters. He hadn’t thought anything of it. And why would he? She was just the kid sister of one of his colleagues.
Looking at her picture, Rollo realized that Zoe was anything but a kid. She had flashing green eyes and a mane of long black hair that hung down around her shoulders and accentuated her voluptuous curves. Her pouty, full lips were tinted red and she wore a form-fitting jaguar print dress that brought out the golden undertones in her tanned skin.
His bear reared up on its back legs inside his mind. Roaring at the top of its lungs. Rollo couldn’t remember the last time his bear had exhibited so strong a reaction to anything, even Rollo’s own physical danger. He squeezed his eyes closed, trying to block out the intrusive noises his grizzly was making.
When he opened his eyes again, the picture of Zoe in that jaguar print dress was imprinted on his eyeballs. He saw her even when he blinked. Not only was his bear huffing and puffing, Rollo’s own human body was beginning to react to the sight of his mate.
It wasn’t like Rollo hadn’t seen the beautiful women before or had them in his bed. But the sight of Zoe in that skintight dress, with her wide hips and round breasts made him strain against his dark jeans.
He continued to read her profile. She had come to Fate Mountain to study carpentry at the Bright Institute for Shifters. Before that, she had traveled extensively. She’d been to over sixty-five countries in the last seven years and she was only twenty-five years old. The spark in her eyes told Rollo that Zoe was a force to be reckoned with, and everything in him wanted to reckon with it.
With shaking fingers, he pressed the “message now” button on her profile and the texting app came up on his screen.
“Hello Zoe. It’s me, Rollo. I just found out that we are a hundred percent match. I would very much like to meet you.”
He sat staring at the screen, his heart pounding, the news reports playing in the background completely forgotten. He waited, feeling flushed and ridiculous. Police Commander Rollo Morris did not get thrown off his game by twenty-five-year-old girls. But the longer he waited for her to reply, the more he knew he was lying to himself. This twenty-five-year-old girl could throw anything at him and all he could do was catch it.
He navigated back to her picture and bit his lip as he drank her in with his eyes. He sat like that for several long moments, unable to look away. But then, a new message notification popped up on the screen. He swallowed the lump in his throat and read the text.
“Hi Rollo. I’m really sorry. I signed up for Mate.com by mistake. I’m not really ready for a mate right now. I hope you understand.”
Rollo’s heart sank like a stone in his stomach, and he wanted to crush his phone in his hands. How could she say that? They were both shifters. She knew exactly what it meant to be fated mates. Her own jaguar would be giving her as much trouble is his grizzly. They had to meet. They had to be together. That’s all there was to it.
“You can’t be serious.”
He sent it before he realized that it had a rude tone to it. But in the end, he didn’t care. She was a shifter, and she knew exactly what she was saying by telling him she didn’t want a mate. It meant that they would both forever know that the other existed, and they were meant to be together. Suggesting that they should not be together condemned them both to a life of loneliness. He was unwilling to accept that.
“I understand why you would be upset,” she texted back.
“Don’t you think we should at least meet?”
“I’m not ready for that right now. Maybe in a few months if I decide to stay on Fate Mountain.”
“Where would you go?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t stayed in one place for a long time.”
“I read that on your profile. I understand that you might want to get back out on the road, but you owe it to yourself to at least meet your mate before you do.”
“Fair enough. But not now. I’ll hit you up before I leave. For now, I’m deleting my Mate.com profile.”
“Zoe, wait.”
But it was too late, her profile disappeared before his eyes. She was gone, and she didn’t even want to meet him. He sat dumbfounded for long moments, considering what to do. He knew who she was. He knew where she lived. He could easily meet her if he wanted. But how could he force a meeting on her?
It was behavior he would not find acceptable in other men, let alone in himself. But Rollo was at the end of his rope. He had been waiting for her for a long time. If he lost her now, he would never find another mate that could fill his heart the way she could.
A fated mate was not just a partner or a spouse or a lover. They were all those things and more. A fated mate was connected to a shifter’s very soul. They belong together in body and spirit. A shifter could tell his fated mate by sight or scent and the animal inside immediately desired to claim her. Rollo and Zoe had to be together. There was no other way.
Rollo had never considered himself a romantic. He knew that not every fated mate relationship ended up with a fairytale ending. But, fated mate pairs were profoundly happy together when they did work things out. The success rate of fated mate relationships was much, much higher than the success rate of the average human relationship.
Zoe belonged to him, and he belonged to her. She would always have his heart, his body, and his soul. He could not allow her to walk away when she had that much power over him. If she did, he would never be the same again. He would lose his self-esteem, his confidence, his alpha swagger. Without his fated mate, he would be less of a man, knowing that she was out there and didn’t want him.
Rollo Morris would not allow that to happen. Somehow, someway, he would meet Zoe Bright, and he would claim her. That was final.
When Rollo arrived at the station in the morning, with a cup of coffee from the drive-through coffee place on the highway, he found Cadet Heath Reynolds already waiting in the waiting area of the station. He was wearing his street clothes, looking nervous but competent. Where the hell was Knox? He was supposed to babysit the cadet.
“Commander Morris,” Heath said, standing from the chair.
“Good morning Cadet Reynolds,” Rollo said. “Follow me.”
He walked through the waiting area into the back offices where he found several of his Bear Patrol crew getting ready to go out for the day. Gauge was still absent as was Knox. There were several human cops at their desks and a few walking out the front door to go on patrol.
“You’ll find your uniform in the locker room. Go get yourself dressed and we’ll get you set up with Knox for the day.”
“Thank you, sir,” Heath said, hurrying off towards the locker room.
Rollo continued into his office, sipping his coffee. As he sat down behind his desk, Damien walked into the room.
“I hope you have good news for me Damien.”
“I have the forensic results from my lab work, sir,” Damien said. “I’m afraid there isn’t much.”
Damien set the files on Rollo’s desk, and Rollo opened them as Damien took a seat across from him. Rollo flipped through the files, seeing that the human fingerprints they found throughout the room belonged to staff members and to Caitlin herself. He had also researched the attendance at the auction where Caitlin had purchased the Louis the Fifteenth chest.
One familiar name jumped out at him. It was Dimitri Ivanov, a notorious Russian Mafia boss. No one had ever been able to nab him because as soon as the law got close, Ivanov threw up a smokescreen. No one ever found any concrete evidence to put him away. Rollo read over the files on Ivanov, feeling for the first time that he had some kind of lead on this case.
“Have you done any further digging into Ivanov’s recent movements?” Rollo asked Damien.
“I’ve started tracing Ivanov. He has talented people working for him in the tech department so his movements are hard to trace. But I’m still working on it. There’s more information in the forensic files that you might find interesting,” Damien said, pulling out a fingerprint.
“This isn’t human. It’s a paw print,” Rollo said.
“It’s a large cat paw print. This was the one print found at the scene that didn’t belong to the staff or the homeowner. It’s possible that the thief was a shifter.”
“Maybe Ivanov has a shifter working for him.”
“It’s possible,” Damien said.
“Find out exactly what kind of animal this print belongs to.”
“I already ran a scan on the print, but it’s too damaged to narrow down exactly what species of large cat it is.”
“We have to work with what we’ve got. I want as much information as you can find on Ivanov and any shifters he may be associated with.”
“On it,” Damien said standing from his chair just as Heath walked into the office wearing his uniform.
“When do I get my gun?” Heath asked.
“Slow your roll, Cadet,” Rollo said. “You’re still in training. You don’t get a gun or a badge until your training is complete. Now, where the hell is Knox?”
“I just saw Knox at his desk,” Heath said.
“You’ll be with Knox today.”
“Deputy Knox already left with Detective Gauge,” Heath said, his voice cracking.
“Freaking Gauge,” Rollo grumbled to Damien. Damien shrugged, and Rollo focused on the new kid. “You’re with me today, Cadet. If you’re going to be on the Bear Patrol, you need to patrol with a bear.”
“Awesome. I can’t believe I get to go out on patrol with Commander Rollo Morris,” Heath said too enthusiastically. “What are we doing today, sir?”
“We’re going to visit Angus Grant.”
Chapter 5
Zoe was nervous about her first day as Angus’s apprentice at his woodshop in town. As she got ready to go to work that morning, she felt an impending sense of doom hanging over her. It was like a heavy weight that was ready to fall at any moment.
She knew she never should have signed up for Mate.com. What had possessed her to do something so stupid? Willow’s prodding and prompting had gotten to her, and she had relented. In a moment of loneliness and weakness, Zoe had signed up for the stupid dating site, believing she too, for a brief moment, could have her own happily ever after. How could she have known that she would be immediately be matched with Fate Mountain’s chief of police?
She was in eight hundred thousand dollars of debt to a mob boss and she had stolen jewels under her bed. Rollo would see right through her. She had to avoid him at all costs. If she were smart, she would leave town right now and never come back.
But she had spent the last six months learning about woodworking and didn’t want to give up her newfound love. She had gone into carpentry for the sole intention of studying up on how to get into Caitlin Somerset’s Louis the Fifteenth chest.
Coming to the Bright Institute for Shifters had just been a cover in a long game heist. She had used the woodshop at the Institute to study how the chest was put together. She had successfully broken into Caitlin Somerset’s Louis the Fifteenth chest while inside the mansion and had managed to steal a million dollars’ worth of jewels.
But along the way, Zoe had fallen in love with working with wood. She’d never expected that to happen. Zoe had never really been a hands-on kind of girl. She hadn’t played sports in school; she’d been too busy smoking cigarettes under the bleachers with the bad kids. She had never been an artist or a painter or a gardener or anything like that. She really didn’t like getting her hands dirty at all.
But when she started making things, the pride she felt when she held the finished piece in her hands was like nothing she’d ever experienced before. Since Zoe had graduated high school and started traveling the world, she’d had this sense that nothing in her life was permanent or real. For several years she had enjoyed feeling unbounded by anything, but over time, her rootlessness began to wear at her soul.
When she arrived at the Bright Institute for Shifters and had taken up woodworking, Zoe suddenly felt at home. She was surrounded by people who cared about her. Truly cared about her. While she would always have a little bit of sibling rivalry with her brother, his wife Willow was fantastic. She’d made wonderful friends at the Institute like Heath, and she wouldn’t trade that experience for the world.
She hadn’t been part of a community, a real community, since she’d left the Midwest seven years ago. Now she was getting a taste of what community felt like, and she didn’t want to give it up.
The part of Zoe that been working with Dimitri Ivanov for the last three years knew that she should skip town as soon as possible. Like yesterday. The other part of her, the Midwestern girl whose family had been sustained by the generosity of the shifter community the whole time she was growing up, wanted to stay on Fate Mountain.
The child inside of her longed to be home. And this was the first place that felt like home in such a very, very long time. Instead of running away, Zoe put on her favorite girly coveralls over her short shorts and tank top. She donned a pair of practical shoes and put her hair in a ponytail. She was ready for her first day as an apprentice woodworker.
She took the bus from the Bright Institute into Fate Mountain Village, stopped at the cafe, and walked the rest of the way to Angus’s woodshop. When she arrived in the parking lot, she could see Angus working through the open garage style door. She walked up to him, holding a cardboard tray with two coffees in one hand and her protective glasses in the other.
Angus was sweeping sawdust out the front door into a big pile, and he looked up at her as she approached.
“Good morning, Zoe,” Angus said. “Is one of those for me?”
“I hope you like mocha lattes,” Zoe said.
“Chocolate and coffee? My favorite,” Angus said, lifting his coffee out of the tray. “Yum, thanks. Come on in the shop, and I’ll give you a tour.”
Angus showed her his workshop and pointed out all of the machines he had there. Zoe had trained on each of the machines and knew how to use them. Now that she was an apprentice for Angus, he would help take her education to the next level.
The young woman who had been to sixty-five countries over the last seven years thought it was funny that she was so excited about pushing two-by-fours through a bandsaw. But the hometown girl part of her told the traveler part of her to shut up.
The woodshop was Zoe’s new element, and she was not going to apologize for it.
“You’ve got really great equipment here,” she said, looking around.
“Almost as good as what they have up at the Institute,” Angus said.
“Your shop is more complete than the woodshop at the Institute. I can’t wait to get to it. What are you working on today?”
“Nothing all that exciting. I’m constructing the bones of some custom cabinets for a new build up on the mountain. I really could use your help. It’ll make the project go much faster.”
“I love cabinets.”
“What are your favorite c
abinets?” Angus asked absently as he began to pull sheets of Spruce from the stack near the far wall.
“I’ve been studying Louis the Fifteenth cabinetry and chest-of-drawers.”
“I love Louis the Fifteenth style,” Angus said, moving the sheet of Spruce to the bandsaw table. “What are your favorite pieces?”
Zoe helped Angus arrange the sheet on the table. “I’m fascinated by chests with secret compartments from that time period,” Zoe said, regretting her words as soon as they passed from her lips. She was trying to impress her new mentor and just put her foot in it.
“You know; I’ve been meaning to start a project with secret compartments. We should make one together as our first custom project.”
“That sounds like a lot of fun,” Zoe said, pushing her goggles over her eyes.
Angus turned to shut the shop door when a black SUV with Fate Mountain Police Department in yellow across the side pulled up in the parking lot. Zoe’s heart sank and she began looking for any means of escape. But it was too late, she was trapped.
She clenched her fist and waited for the worst, expecting to be handcuffed at any moment. When the doors to the SUV swung open, she saw Heath step out of the passenger side in a blue uniform. The man who emerged from the driver’s side was dressed in dark blue jeans and a tailored but sporty tan suit jacket and a white shirt with a blue tie. His badge was hooked over his black leather belt and his holster gun was slung around his hip.
Zoe took and a sharp breath when her eyes wandered over the man’s incredible physique and up to his handsome face. It was Rollo, her mate. His sandy blond hair framed his angular, masculine face and his blue eyes shone in the morning sunlight. His eyes flashed when they saw her, and she gulped at his reaction. She took a step back into the woodshop, pretending like she was in desperate need of a sip of mocha latte.
“Hi, Rollo,” Angus said, in a friendly tone. “What brings you out to the woodshop?”
“Zoe,” Heath said enthusiastically, walking up to her where she stood beside a steel side table against the wall.