Undercover Bear: Grady (BBW Paranormal Bear Shifter Romance) Read online

  A slow smile spread across my face. This woman was like none other I had seen before. Her honey colored eyes were gorgeous now that she was less panicked. My eyes trailed to her long eyelashes and then down her face. I could tell right away that she didn’t wear much makeup, which I loved. There was something about a woman who was confident enough to not have to hide herself behind a bunch of face paint. She cleared her throat nervously and walked over to one of the shelves along the walls. I couldn’t help but stare at her as she walked. She had curves in all the right places that were accentuated by the lab coat that she wore. She had this sexy scientist thing going for her that was a huge turn on.

  She grabbed a towel that was on the back wall and shoved it between the bars.

  “Take this, I can’t focus with you sitting there… naked.”

  I let out a laugh. Good thing I didn’t let myself think about how sexy she was for too long. Otherwise our conversation would have gotten a lot more awkward. I could see her hand slightly shake as I grabbed the towel from her. She was nervous that I was going to grab her hand. As soon as I took hold of the towel she quickly removed her hand and practically ran back to her lab desk. She looked away as I wrapped the towel around myself.

  “Have you never seen a naked guy before?”

  I saw the blood quickly rush to her face, and she let out a slight huff of air. “Of course I have. I just…”

  I let out another laugh. “It’s okay. I was only teasing you.” A genuine smile formed on her lips. Fuck, she was beautiful. I felt my cock stir and I was suddenly very thankful for the towel.

  “So… what do you need to know?”

  She flipped through her binder again. Either she was very forgetful, or she had no idea what she was doing. “I need to know if you have any medical conditions that could affect our trial. Do you have any history of mental illness, cancer, or…” She paused as she looked down at the paper. “…Or heart attacks?” I could see a slight mist form in her eyes when she realized what she was asking. I could tell that she was smart, and if she didn’t understand what was going on, she was starting to put the pieces together pretty quickly.

  She really had no idea that I was coming to her lab. I immediately felt bad for her. What lies was Purest telling her about the experiments she was conducting? How many others were in the dark like she was? I noticed the tension form in her shoulders, and I could tell that she was trying hard to be strong. Being alone in this lab with me was making her uncomfortable. What I needed to know was why. Was it because she was afraid of me? Was she scared of what I could turn into? Or did she feel bad for what she was doing here?

  “No I have no history of any of that,” I said flatly. She looked back down at her paper and filled in the questions.

  “I will need to take some vital signs and a few blood samples.” She got up from her desk and walked over to a cabinet. As she was pulling on her gloves, I glanced around the cage I was in. It was a fairly large cage, obviously big enough to hold a grizzly bear. I placed my hand on the metal and tried to slightly bend it. It was strong; it must have been steel. Even with my strength, it would not be something I would be able to bend easily. I looked up, and in the corner of the cage, I was able to see a label, which was stuck on the outside. I tilted my head and was able to read what it said.

  Subject 25063-9. That was all I was to these fucking people. A goddamn number. My bear bristled underneath the surface. I sucked in a breath to calm my nerves. Shifting now would only freak her out, and I needed her to like me. To somehow care for my well-being. She walked back over to the cage and stood there nervously watching me, as if she was trying to decide if I would snap her arm when she tried to take my blood.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said honestly.

  She let out a shaky breath and reached her hands between the bars. I felt my bear stir as she gently tied the elastic band around my arm to prep my veins. She swabbed my arm and quickly stuck the needle in. As my blood filled the tube her eyes met mine, and I felt the whole world stop around me. I was completely captivated by her, and I couldn’t explain why. Women never did this to me. I was never interested enough. It had to be the tranquilizer darts I was shot with earlier, messing with my mind. There was a loud noise outside the lab that made her jump slightly and she quickly broke her eye contact with me.

  “You’re going to feel a bit woozy for a while,” she whispered. I looked back at her face, but she continued to look away from me. “I’m guessing they shot you with some kind of tranquilizer?” I nodded. “It should wear off in a few hours. Drinking water should help you feel a bit more normal.”

  “Thanks for letting me know,” I said honestly.

  She looked at me out of the corner of her eyes. The vial of blood finished filling, and she reached for another one. I needed to keep her talking. She seemed like she was at least a little bit concerned about me. Maybe if I could make her see that I was human, just like her, she would start to question what she was doing.

  “How long have you been working here?”

  Her eyes quickly shifted to my face. She looked surprised that I was trying to have a conversation with her.

  “It’s okay, you can talk to me. I mean, I am your test subject, but I won’t hurt you.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

  “Oh come on, who would even know that you had a conversation with me? See, we’re talking now and everything is fine.” Her hands slightly began to shake. The last vial filled and she pulled the needle from my skin, but accidentally tugged too hard.

  “Careful now, darling, you don’t want to break the merchandise.”

  She looked up at me with a frightened look in her eyes and quickly walked over to the other side of the lab to label the blood. Shit. How do I make her not scared of me? I wondered. I wasn’t used to women being frightened; they usually just wanted to get into my pants.

  She walked back over and sat in silence as she filled out the rest of the paperwork. Every now and again, she would give me a sideways glance and then quickly look away, thinking that I didn’t notice. I tapped my fingers on the metal bars as I tried to think of ways to keep her talking.

  “What’s your name?” I asked.

  She looked up at me with a startled expression on her face. “I’m not sure I want to tell you my name.”

  I leaned a bit closer to her through the bars, and I could smell the sweet scent of her perfume. It smelled like lavender. For an instant, I wanted nothing more than to nuzzle my nose into her neck and breath her in. I quickly shook my head to regain my thoughts.

  “What’s the harm in me knowing your name?”

  She looked at me for a moment and then finally said her name in a barely audible whisper.

  “I’m Ava.”

  6

  Ava

  I slammed my mouth shut as soon as my name passed over my lips. I dropped my eyes quickly back down to my binder. Did I really just tell him my name? What the hell was I thinking? He was a subject in a clinical trial. A clinical trial that I thought was on consenting humans, not on captured shifters.

  What the hell was going on here? With shaky hands, I continued to fill out the paperwork. I just needed to finish things with him, and then I could go and find Michelle. This couldn’t be what Purest was working on. There had to be some logical explanation for all this. I could feel his stare, and shivers ran through my body.

  He cleared his throat. “I’m Max. But most people I know call me Grady.”

  My eyes shot up to his and I was taken aback by how blue they were. He smiled a warm smile and I felt my heart skip a beat. How was he even smiling when he was stuck here in a cage? Without thinking, I smiled back, and I felt my body lean closer to his. Did he have some power to control me this way? I hadn’t heard of shifters being able to force people to do things, but I wasn’t about to rule that out just yet. Focus on the work, Ava, I told myself. I quickly shook my head and went back to working on the paperwork.

  I noted his hair
and eye color and continued on to the next questions. I made it partway down the page when the paperwork asked for any physical abnormalities on the subject. I nervously moved my eyes over to him again and slowly trailed his large, muscular frame. His skin was flawless, and I could see his muscles rippling underneath it. I felt heat rush to my cheeks when I moved my eyes back up to his face and saw that he was smiling at me.

  “Are you checking me out, Ava?”

  “No, I just needed to check if you had any physical abnormalities.”

  He let out a loud laugh. “I’m pretty normal, Ava. In fact, I’m a lot like you. Except for the whole turning into a bear thing.”

  I froze for a moment at his words. He was a lot like me. From the moment he shifted into human form, I felt as though all of the air in the room had been sucked out. I was unexplainably drawn to him. My eyes trailed again over his strong jaw line which had just enough stubble on his chin. I moved my eyes upward to his hair that was dark brown and slightly disheveled, but in a sexy way. How the hell was I so attracted to a man that was trapped in a cage?

  My mind raced to find the logical explanation for all of this. By the questions on the paperwork, and the way that they had carted him in here, I slowly started to put the pieces together. All of the tests on stress hormone levels now started to make a lot more sense. My eyes shot back to the coolers that were filled with hundreds of test tubes. There had to be other shifters here at the lab. They couldn’t have gathered all of those samples by having one shifter here on site. Grady was the first one I ever saw on this floor, but this facility was gigantic. There were so many levels with different areas requiring security access. My heart started to beat fast in my chest. Jesus, who was this monster that I was working for? I sucked in a large breath. I thought about the screams that were supposed to be noises of old pipes. No, this can’t be happening, I thought.

  I jumped in my seat when I heard my lab door swing open. A large guard walked into the lab. A wave of panic rushed through my body. They were going to take him from me. A part of me wished I could just keep him here a little longer, to give him just a few more minutes without the pain I now guessed that he would endure.

  “Are you finished up with the in-take?” the guard asked.

  Could I lie? Could I say that I needed to answer a few more questions? A loud scream ripped through the air vents below the lab and I felt my body cringe at the sound. I saw Grady’s eyes shoot to mine, and then he looked back at the guard. The guard did not even flinch from the sound. You sick, cold-hearted bastard, I thought. My heart fell down to my stomach. No matter how long I tried to stall the guard, Grady would face the same fate. And there was nothing I could do about it.

  “Well?” the guard spat. “I don’t have all day to stand here, Ava.”

  I looked over at Grady and was surprised to see him staring back at me again. He was not looking at me with anger, but with sadness and concern. I dropped my eyes downward and wrung my hands together in a failed attempt to calm my nerves. The guard made me nervous.

  Suddenly Grady spoke up. “We’re finished, asshole.”

  My eyes shot back up to him, pleading him to be quiet. The guard let out a huff of air and walked around Grady’s cage. Panic seized my chest as the guard reached in between the bars and tased Grady. The loud pop of the taser had me scoot quickly from the lab desk in fear. What the hell was happening?

  “You’re just a piece of shit,” the guard grunted as Grady withered in pain. I wanted to scream to make the guard stop. Grady had done nothing wrong except call him a name. He didn’t deserve to be treated like this! A pit of fire burned in my stomach. The guard tased Grady again and he let out a low cry.

  “Stop!” I screamed without even thinking. The guard stopped and turned around to face me in surprise.

  Blood rushed to my face. What had I done? Thinking quickly, I formed an excuse to make him quit hurting Grady. “You’ll ruin the trial we’ve set up for him later. He needs to be at his full strength to start so we can see how his body reacts to stress.”

  The guard gave me the death glare as he removed his arms from in between the bars. I could tell he did not completely buy my excuse about the testing, but he at least stopped hurting Grady.

  “Fine,” the guard said. “I’m going to grab a drink of water. I’ll be back in a minute to take him to his cell. Make sure he’s ready to go when I get back.”

  I let out a breath that I did not know that I was holding when the guard finally left the lab. I looked over to Grady and noticed that he was curled into a ball near the edge of the bars. I jumped up and quickly grabbed an ice pack from the cooler and some water.

  “Here,” I said as I handed him the water and the ice pack through the bars. “This will make you feel a little bit better.” A piece of my heart broke to see him in pain.

  “Thank you for helping me, “ he whispered.

  “I wish I could have done more.” And I meant it.

  7

  Grady

  Her gentle hands on my skin felt nice. I felt my body unexplainably lean into her touch. She was the first person here at Purest that showed any form of compassion toward me since I got dragged in here. Everyone else seemed to treat me as something beneath them. They had all looked at me with disgust. But not Ava. When I first entered the lab, she looked right at me. Her look was not one of hatred, it was one of compassion. Like I was a human being.

  I let my head lean a bit more into her hands before I snapped myself out of it. Get it together, Grady. Now was not the time to start to have feelings for the sexy lab tech. I couldn’t deny that I was extremely attracted to her. Even just being in this lab for a few moments, I knew that there was some spark between us. But I couldn’t explain why. She worked for the enemy, which had to mean she believed all of this nonsense, right? I couldn’t have feelings for something that I was about to destroy.

  I looked up at her face and concern was etched over her beautiful, innocent features. God, she was lovely. I wanted to believe that she truly cared about my well-being. That this all wasn’t an act that she was playing. I wanted her to be worth fighting for. To be worth saving from all of this.

  But I still had a job to do. If she did have an ounce of compassion, maybe I could use that to get myself out of here, before everything was destroyed. I didn’t want to use her, but if she had the access that I needed, then I would have to in order to get the hell out.

  The mission was what was most important, not my feelings. If I failed, then so did everyone else. I was our last hope. I knew coming in here would be hard. I would end up being tortured. But deep down, I knew it was the right thing to do.

  I winced as Ava placed another ice pack on my forehead. I looked up at her face and took a minute to take in how beautiful she truly was. By the way she gently placed the ice packs, I could tell that she was worried that she was making things worse for me. It was adorable how hesitant she was about hurting me more than I already was. I always liked to pride myself on being able to read people. Hell, that was why I became a detective in the first place. I could spot a lie from a mile away. But Ava had me confused. She was the first woman I couldn’t clearly read, and that intrigued me. I wanted to believe that she couldn’t buy into all of this hatred. But I needed to find out for sure in some way. If she didn’t believe in all of this bullshit, then I would find a way to get her out of here before all hell broke loose.

  I felt her hands drop from my face quickly. The door behind me opened and I knew that prick of a guard had returned. I looked up at her one last time and tried to remember all the details of her beautiful face and her soft curves. I would find a way to see her again. I had to.

  The guard yanked my cage and jostled me the best he could.

  “Time to go, you piece of shit.”

  I clenched my jaw as he rolled me out of Ava’s lab. Picking a fight with this bastard right now would do me no good. I had to play the part and plan out my escape plan.

  The guard purposefully jostled
my cage as he rolled me down the hallway. I leaned on the bars and pretended to feel sick, while I took in my surroundings. I needed to memorize these hallways in order to get out of here. From Ava’s lab, we took a right down the hall. There were several rooms with closed doors that I assumed were either offices, or more labs like Ava’s. The guard turned my cage toward the left and swiped us through a set of double doors. That meant different areas of the facility required a key card. That would be something I would need to somehow get in order to move through the hallways and destroy what I needed to.

  We came up to a large freight elevator and waited. I wondered how many levels this facility had. The elevator doors rushed open with a ding and the guard pushed me inside. I quickly glanced at the buttons and saw that were three lower levels from the floor we were just on. That must mean that Ava’s level was the first level of offices and laboratories. Purest must keep the shifters down in the basement and do all of their real dirty work down there. Out of sight, out of mind.

  The elevator doors rushed open and the guard pushed me down a dark hallway. On each side there were cement walls and cells with different shifters in them. Some of them were in human form, while others were animals. We made a right turn down a hallway, and I almost let out a gasp as we passed a large tank with a great white shark inside. How the hell was I supposed to get a shark out of its tank? That was something I would have to worry about later, I thought.

  The guard passed the tank and went down another hallway filled with cages. We stopped at an empty cell and he unlocked the steel bars.

  “Get out, and get into the cell,” the guard spat.

  For a moment, I didn’t budge. I wanted to test how pissed off he got. The guard pulled out the taser and pointed it at me.

  “Get out of the fucking cage and get into the damn cell.”

  I put my hands up over my head and moved out of the cage to the cell. When I was within reach, the guard grabbed me and shoved me inside. The guard slammed the cell door shut and locked it and then left me in the darkness.