Like he might understand this one, too.
Which was inconvenient.
Deeply inconvenient.
“Let me guess,” she said, tucking the notebook against her chest. “You know a contractor.”
A flicker crossed his face.
“I do,” he said.
“Of course you do.”
That faint line appeared between his brows, as though he wasn’t entirely sure whether she was making fun of him.
“I can give you his number,” he said.
There it was again, that slight awkwardness, as if he was more comfortable with warped doors than with conversation.
Meryl, against her better judgment, found that oddly reassuring.
She looked past him at the lane, at the dark line of the trees, then back at the dim hallway yawning open behind the crooked front door.
She had arrived in Bear Creek expecting a house that needed updating.
Instead, she had inherited a money pit, a structural nightmare, and a far too capable local man who had appeared out of nowhere and was already proving difficult to ignore.
Perfect.
From somewhere deeper in the cottage came a low creak, as if the house were settling around them.
Or making its opinion known.
Meryl tightened her grip on the notebook and stepped back over the threshold, more carefully this time, far too aware of the man beside her and the old house opening up around them.
Whatever she had expected from Pine Cottage, it wasn’t this.
Chapter Two – Spencer
His mate was finally here.
After watching four of his brothers find their mates, Spencer had started to think fate had simply passed him by.
Then he had sensed her. Meryl.
He’d been running the mountain trails in his bear form, trying to shake off the restless tension that had been building in him for weeks.
But that was the past. Now his future was standing right in front of him.
It had started as a prickling sensation beneath his skin, an awareness he hadn’t been able to settle. Then it had sharpened into something he could not ignore, pulling him toward the old abandoned cottage with a certainty that made no sense until it suddenly made all the sense in the world.
Because the moment he had seen Meryl standing on Hilda’s broken porch, with that stubborn set to her shoulders and a section of railing in her hand, his bear had surged forward with absolute conviction.
Mate.
No more longing. No more dread that he was destined to live his life alone, Spencer thought now as he followed Meryl into Pine Cottage. No more watching his brothers build their new lives with their mates and pretending it didn’t leave a hollow place inside him.
Not anymore,his bear said, still sounding half wild with joy.But this house...
