The Grisly Grizzlies: Kneecap (The Grizzly Bear Shifters of Redemption Creek Book 3)
The Grisly Grizzlies - Kneecap
Kim Fox
Contents
About
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
Epilogue
More from Kim Fox
Books by Kimberly Fox
Books by Kimberly Fox
Books by Kimberly Fox
The Grisly Grizzlies
Kneecap
The Grizzly Bear Shifters of Redemption Creek
Book Three
By KIM FOX
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This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Contains explicit love scenes and adult language.
18+
www.AuthorKimFox.com
Copyright © 2018 by Kim Fox
Wild. Ferocious. Untamed. Vicious. And that’s just Kneecap in his human form. His savage grizzly bear on the other hand… watch out! Nothing and no one has been able to tame this half barbarian/half shifter in thirty years, but there’s a glimmer of hope when a curvy girl named Nora walks onto the ranch.
Nora Marchesi has come to Montana to find her sister. What she didn’t come to find was a naked caveman stalking her through the forest, but that’s exactly what she gets. He has long hair to his shoulders, a long beard to his chest, and a long (you-know-what) to his knees. And for some reason, he seems to have a big crush on her.
Redemption Creek’s most savage grizzly bear is in a constant battle with his human companion Kneecap. Will they be able to work together to charm the pretty girl who is running away from them screaming? And when old enemies come to visit, will Kneecap’s new civilized manner be enough to stop them?
Find out in Book Three of The Grizzly Bear Shifters of Redemption Creek by Kim Fox!
1
Nora
For an adorable little town, the people sure aren’t very friendly. I haven’t been able to get one person to talk to me.
I spot a young kid, maybe about fourteen, standing on the sidewalk by himself. He’s cute with dark black hair, bright green eyes, and an abundance of hard muscle. Maybe he’ll know who I’m looking for.
I fluff up my curly blonde hair and pop open a button on my shirt to show a little cleavage as I walk over. Nothing gets teenage boys cooperating like showing a little boob.
“Hi!” I say, giving him a big flirtatious smile.
His eyes drop to my chest and then dart right back up to my eyes. “Hello.”
“What’s your name?”
He clears his throat as his cheeks redden. “Bryce.”
“I’m Nora,” I say with a flick of my hair. Oh geez. I have a PhD in psychology and I’m acting like a brainless teenager.
But I’m getting kind of desperate. I’ve been roaming the streets for two hours and I’ve gotten absolutely nowhere. I thought everyone in small towns knew everyone else. This is so frustrating!
“I just arrived,” I say with a wide smile, “and I’m looking for a friend. Can you help me out? I’d really appreciate it.”
Bryce grins. Ew. I don’t even want to think about where his hormone-filled brain is going right now.
“Sure,” he says, looking eager to help. “What’s your friend’s name?”
“Lachlan.”
His eyes light up. Bingo.
“I know Lachlan,” he says, looking thrilled to be able to help.
“You do?” I ask, feeling my heart start to thump a little faster. “Where can I find him?”
He’s about to tell me when the most massive man I’ve ever seen comes stomping toward us. I can feel the vibrations in the sidewalk. That’s how freaking big this guy is.
“Who you talking to, twerp?” he asks in a deep voice that makes my pulse race. His hard, untrusting eyes quickly look me over.
“She was just looking for a friend,” Bryce says, looking up at him with innocent eyes. “She knows Lachlan.”
The man smacks the back of poor Bryce’s head and scowls. “When strangers come knocking, we don’t know nothing.” He turns back to me with a glare. “We don’t know no Lachlan.”
I stare back at him. “But you do, though.”
“We don’t.”
“But you do.”
He shakes his head with a grunt, grabs Bryce and pulls him away. Bryce glances over his shoulder at me with a look that says ‘sorry.’
I feel my blood pressure go through the roof as they walk away. This place is beyond frustrating.
If I find Lachlan, I can get closer to finding my sister Jessie. The last time I saw her was a few weeks ago at her wedding. As soon as the bridal march started, she marched her ass right out of the church and never looked back.
Before she left, she told me that she was coming to this town to find an old flame, a man named Lachlan who she’d fallen in love with years ago.
I haven’t heard a word from her since and have been sick with worry. I just need to see that she’s okay.
I’m not the only one looking for her. My father, Emanuele Marchesi, Chicago’s most powerful mob boss, is desperate to find her as well.
His main rival, Luca Capuano, has disappeared off the face of the earth and my father has taken over his territory, his crew, his businesses, everything. His power, influence, and notoriety have doubled in the past few weeks, but he still has a chip on his shoulder.
He wants Jessie to pay for embarrassing him. He’s a man who doesn’t tolerate disobedience well, and Jessie all but spat in his face in the most public way possible. He was forcing her to marry Luca, and she took off at the aisle and ran.
I just want to make sure that she’s safe. If he finds her, he’s going to hurt her, or worse. And if he knew that I knew where she was, I would be in as much trouble as her.
I spend the next twenty minutes wandering the town, trying to talk to people who don’t want to talk to me. It’s strange how people are so wary of outsiders here, especially considering the town looks so warm and welcoming. Cute little shops line the cobblestone roads and the restaurants and bars have fun names like The Slurry Rabbit and Hungry Mountain Man Diner.
It’s not at all what Jessie had described. First of all, the name of the town had been changed from Red Dead Creek to Redemption Creek. It took me forever to find that out. She had also told me that it was full of biker gangs and unsavory characters, but this place looks like the most serious crime would be someone sticking a wad of gum under a bench.
/> The view of the mountains from every angle is utterly spectacular. I keep breathing in the clean air and moaning at the freshness of it. I’m not made for city life. I would love to live out here someday. Open up a small office in town and offer some therapy sessions—that would be a dream life.
I approach another friendly face only to find that face harden up when I mention that I’m looking for someone. This is hopeless.
A thought dawns on me when I see the bar across the street: maybe people will be more talkative in there. Especially after I buy a few rounds.
I head into The Slurry Rabbit and smile to myself when I walk inside. It’s cute. The jukebox is playing an upbeat country song about riding horses on the beach and the bartender is pouring beers into mugs so big they should be in some Oktoberfest tent in Germany rather than in a bar. There are a few people sitting among the mostly empty tables, talking and drinking their dark beers.
I look over the people, trying to find which one will be most likely to talk—aka who’s the drunkest—as I walk toward the booth by the far wall. I slip inside and look at an enormous man who’s sitting with a curvy woman on his lap, wondering if they’re the talkative type.
I’m fidgeting with the wet coaster as I wait to be served, ripping the soggy corners off and tossing them into the ashtray. A sad thought makes my shoulders droop. Will I ever see Jessie again? What if she didn’t find Lachlan here and was forced to keep moving? She could be anywhere on the planet. And if my father with all of his connections can’t find her, then I definitely won’t be able to find her.
The thought brings to tears to my eyes and I have to wipe them away as the waitress comes over to take my drink order.
She looks like a cowgirl with tight blue jeans, tanned arms sticking out of her white tank top, and a matching white cowboy hat, which is blocking her face as she looks down while she reaches for her notepad.
“What can I get you, hun?”
My face drops when she looks up. It’s Jessie.
She looks as stunned as me. “Nora?”
“Jessie?”
My heart is pounding as we stare at each other, both too dumbfounded to react.
Something snaps and we’re both squealing and screaming and jumping into each other’s arms like we haven’t seen each other in years, which it feels like.
By the time we’re done, everyone in the bar is staring at us.
Jessie is gripping my arms like she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she lets go. “What are you doing here?” she asks, looking me up and down with her wide blue eyes.
“I was going to ask you the same thing,” I say, looking her over. This is not the same girl who hugged me in her wedding dress a few weeks ago. She looks so… free. So at ease and happy.
Her skin is tanned, her muscles toned, her eyes bright with life. She looks beautiful.
“I’m working here,” she says proudly. “Four shifts a week.”
I’m still staring at her in shock. “Tell me everything.”
“Hold on.” She finally lets go and races off to the bar. She grabs two of the beer mugs from the bartender and tells him that she’s taking a break.
She turns to everyone in the bar and gets their attention. “I haven’t seen my sister in a long time and we have some catching up to do, so if anyone needs a drink…” She points to the bar and grins. “Get off your lazy ass and get it yourself.”
My mouth drops as I turn to the customers, expecting them to be outraged, but they just laugh and smile at me and raise their half-empty mugs to her before taking another sip. Wow, this is not like the city at all.
Jessie sits across from me and slaps one of the beers onto my soggy coaster. We just stare at each other in shock for a minute before either one of us talks. Then the words come pouring out of both of us. She tells me all about Lachlan and how she’s fallen deeply in love with him. She tells me about the ranch she’s living on with six men and one other woman. She tells me about her job and how much she loves working. How she loves finally being independent and away from Dad’s suffocating shadow. She tells me about her horse named Posh and how she goes riding every day through the mountains and valleys on the ranch.
I’m so happy for her. And even a little bit jealous—okay, a lot jealous—but in a good way.
Jessie has always had it harder than me. We share the same father but have different mothers. My mother came to her senses soon after I was born and moved me away from my father in Chicago, the wicked Emanuele Marchesi, and brought me to Kansas City to raise me. My mother is a strong independent woman who protected me from the man and made sure she was always present when I saw him.
Jessie wasn’t so lucky. My younger half-sister didn’t have a strong mother to keep her sheltered from the corruption. She only had Dad.
Her mother had died when she was very young and she fell under my father’s control. She couldn’t take a breath without his approval. He controlled every aspect of her life—not even letting her get a job when she graduated from school and picking the man she was required to marry.
I always wanted to help Jessie, but there was nothing I could do. My father has always been a very powerful man and what he wants, he gets.
It broke my heart to see my little sister living such a hellish life when I was free. The guilt weighed on me and I didn’t realize how much until now. I’ve always wanted to see Jessie happy and living a life she loved, and now that I’m seeing it, it’s getting me all choked up.
It makes what I have to tell her, all that much worse.
“Was Dad pissed?” she asks, grinning as she takes a sip of her beer.
My stomach hardens and my chest tightens as I watch her. “He’s looking for you.”
She shrugs. “I’m not afraid of him. Not anymore.”
It seems that her cowboy hat is on a little too tight. She can’t be that foolish.
“Jessie,” I say in a serious tone. “He’s more powerful now than ever. Luca is… gone.”
She grins, looking like she doesn’t have a care in the world. “Good riddance.”
“Dad has taken over his territory,” I say. “He’s got senators in his pocket now. He’s looking for you everywhere and when he finds you…”
I let the horrifying thought linger in the air, but Jessie just takes another sip of her beer, looking like she doesn’t give a fuck.
“Tell me you didn’t use your real name on your employment papers,” I say, pleading with her. If she’s in the system, Dad will find her. “Jessie?”
She shrugs. “It’s going to be fine. I’m not worried.”
“You should be.”
To my surprise, she smiles. “He’s not the only one with some muscle behind him. I’ve got a…”
Her words fall away as she stares at me, seeming to think twice about what she’s saying. I’m reminded of all the people I encountered outside. None of them wanted to talk to me and here my sister is looking at me the same way. What the hell is the matter with this place?
I lean forward. “A what?”
She sits back and takes a deep breath. “A few words to say to him if he comes around here.”
“You’re going to need more than a few words to stop Dad.”
She shrugs. “We’ll see. Tell me about you. I’ve been blabbing the entire time. How’s Nick? How’s the job?”
“Gone and over,” I say as my shoulders slouch down. I still can’t believe it.
“What?” she asks, staring at me with a concerned look. “What happened?” My sister has the biggest heart. She has a powerful mob boss chasing her down and she’s worried about my insignificant problems.
“It wasn’t going well,” I say. “Apparently, dating your boss isn’t the best idea in the world.”
I was working as a psychologist in a company that specialized in corporate psychology and was dating my boss Nick. After only two months, it started to fall apart. I’ve never been good at relationships. This one, at only two months, was my longest. Actually, it was only seve
n weeks if you want to get technical.
I can’t get intimate with anyone.
My father might not have been a constant in my life, but he was there enough to fuck me up.
“Did you two break up?” she asks.
I nod. “Nick had latent abandonment issues from his parent’s divorce and that was causing him to subconsciously act out in passive-aggressive ways toward me. I concluded that this self-sabotage was due to a fear of commitment, probably deep rooted in his psychological pain of having his primary caregiver leave at such a crucial stage in his development. So, really it wasn’t my fault this time.”
“Did you diagnose him like that?” she asks with a laugh.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re a psychologist,” Jessie explains. “You have a tendency to see your boyfriends as test cases and not men. Guys want a girlfriend, not a shrink.”
I sigh as I take a sip of beer and contemplate her words. Maybe she has a point. I do tend to look at my relationships through a psychologist’s filter. But then…
“How can I fix them if I don’t diagnose them?”
She laughs. “You fix them through love. Through acceptance and a mutual respect.”
I take a deep breath and exhale long and hard. “I think your cowboy hat is cutting off the blood circulation to your brain.”
She laughs and then downs her beer. “So, you’re unemployed now?”
I nod.
“Great,” she says, slapping the table. “That means you can stay! You’re staying with us.”