The BEAR Gene: A Gripping Paranormal Romance (WereGenes Book 2) Read online

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE

  BEAR GENE

  WEREGENES BOOK 2

  AMIRA RAIN

  Copyright ©2017 by Amira Rain

  All rights reserved.

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  About This Book

  With the public becoming more aware of the existence of “WereGenes”, Samantha Miller was the latest human to have herself tested.

  And the results were shocking.

  Not only was she a carrier of the BEAR GENE but she possessed the rare “Supergene”.

  And as a result the government were offering her a substantial cash payment if she were to become the mate of handsome WereBear Chief Reed Wallace.

  And it was an offer so good that Samantha simply could not turn it down...

  Download now to enter the world of “WereGenes”. Fans of Paranormal Romance and Shapeshifters will have a truly awesome time enjoying this complete novel from beginning to end!

  *

  Also available in the WereGenes collection:

  Book 1 - The Dragon Gene

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

  “When you see him, you’ll feel it deep within your bones.”

  This is what my great-great-grandma had told me when she’d been dying from emphysema at age ninety-six. I’d been fourteen.

  She’d been an Appalachian woman, my great-great-grandma, from West Virginia. From one of the many coal mining communities there. From “deep mine country,” as she’d told me. She’d been fond of giving life advice to her daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter, and great-great-granddaughter.

  “You’ll feel scared and elated all at once, when you see the man you’re meant to spend your life with,” she’d continued, holding my hand on her deathbed. “You’ll feel a quake deep within your bones.” Green eyes closing, she’d fallen asleep before startling awake and continuing, eyes wide open again. “Pay close attention to what he says to you first, Samantha, sweetie… because it’s what he says first that will reveal his greatest fears, and his greatest hopes and dreams to you. You may feel scared, and you may feel… unmoored somehow, but just listen. Just listen to what your man tells you first, because it’ll be a lie. But it’ll also tell you what he truly wants… and it may help you figure out what you truly want in the process.”

  Sitting beside my great-great-grandma’s deathbed, holding her hand, at age fourteen, I’d felt a little “scared and unmoored” right then. I’d never met her before. She talked with a funny sort of accent. She gasped for each breath, and when she did, her whole chest rattled and shook. I felt terribly sorry for her. I felt some vague sort of love for her. I wondered if she was crazy.

  My great-great-grandma didn’t get to say much to me before my grandma steered me away by separating our hands, gently pulling me up to stand, and then giving me a gentle push in the direction of the door.

  She then fixed my great-great-grandma with a small smile before speaking. “Just rest now, Grandma. Samantha doesn’t need any of the old advice from the hills. She’s the new generation. The closest thing she has to a ‘man’ is the lead singer of a boy band called Like My Page. His name is Justin Smith-Donovan-McGee, he’s fourteen years old, I’m sure he doesn’t know that Samantha exists, and I’m sure he doesn’t make her ‘quake’ in any profound sort of way.”

  My grandma chuckled at her own comments, but I just frowned at her.

  “Yes, Grandma Jeannie, Justin does make me ‘quake.’ And I want to stay here with great-great-grandma Mary. You can’t kick me out. And if you keep trying-”

  “Stop it, Samantha. You’ll upset your great-great grandma.”

  Underscoring her words, my grandma frowned at me, hard. Great-great-grandma Mary didn’t look “upset” in the least. In fact, she spoke in the strongest, clearest voice she had all day.

  “Just let me speak to her, Jeannie. I just…”

  Great-great-grandma Mary took a deep breath, and before she could continue, Grandma Jeannie spoke to her, frowning.

  “Just listen, Grandma. Samantha is the new generation. Her generation doesn’t understand or need any ‘advice from the hills.’ Girls don’t get married at fourteen, fifteen, sixteen anymore. For Christ’s sake. Samantha’s going to go to college. She’s going to establish a career. Then, she’s going to get married in her late twenties or her thirties, like most women do these days. And when she finally does get married, I’m sure it will be a union based on common interests and goals… maybe they’ll even work in the same career field. It won’t be a marriage based on some ‘voodoo from the hills’… some old-world ‘Appalachian quaking.’ Honestly, Grandma, why would you even talk to Samantha about any of this? About any of this… this old-fashioned folklore nonsense. Samantha won’t feel ‘elated’ or ‘scared’ when she meets her future husband; in fact, she’ll feel… well, I bet she’ll just feel nothing. That’s right. She’ll just feel nothing. That’s how women these days should feel. They should feel just like they’re meeting a fellow business colleague, because that’s probably just how it will be. Isn’t that right, Samantha? Once you’re out of your Justin Smith-Donovan-McGee phase, you’ll meet a man, and it’ll just feel like nothing. Isn’t that right?”

  My grandma was pretty much just talking to herself by this point. Because by this point, my great-great-grandma and I were just ignoring her. Great-great-grandma Mary was just looking at me, green eyes sparkling from her half-sitting position in the bed. Nearly to the doorway, I was looking only at her.

  “We have the same eyes, little Samantha. Bright green… wide-set.”

  In response to the simple fact she’d stated, I just nodded. “I know.”

  “Wait for it before you get married… wait for ‘the quake.’ Sometime in your life, someone will make you feel it. Pay close attention.”

  I nodded. “I will.”

  “Don’t be afraid if you feel scared. Does that make any sense at all?”

  “Yes, Great-great-grandma Mary.”

  Grandma Jeannie snorted. “All right.
That’s just about enough.” Frowning, she made a sweeping motion with her arm, looking right at me. “Go out to the kitchen, Samantha. Go make some sandwiches for your mom and yourself. There’s some turkey and cheese and lettuce in the fridge… I could use a sandwich, too, myself. Please add a little bit of mustard to mine.”

  Grandma Jeannie had motioned for me to leave the room again, and I’d left. I’d left, that is, after taking one more quick look at my great-great-grandma, whose eyes were so like my own.

  I hadn’t been allowed to sit by her bedside again.

  Her breathing had gotten worse. Her chest pain had gotten worse. In addition to emphysema, she also had early stage lung cancer. At her age, and because she’d wasted away to only eighty-something pounds, it was pretty much untreatable.

  Her doctor had called in morphine. My mom and grandma had picked it up from the pharmacy and had started giving it to her. It made her quiet. It made her so that she only woke up maybe once every couple of hours, and even then, only briefly.

  Two days after our conversation, I sneaked into her room and pressed a white, lined-paper heart into her hand. It read: I love you, Great-great-grandma Mary. I’ll take your advice. I’ll wait for ‘the quake.’ Thank you. Love, your great-great-granddaughter, Samantha

  An hour or so later, I’d sneaked into her room again and had seen the heart-shaped note open, pressed against her chest, indicating that she’d read it. She was resting, eyes closed, but she was smiling. I’d backed out of the room without making a sound.

  An hour or so after that, I’d heard Grandma Jeannie shriek.

  “Gail, get in here! Gail, hurry! She’s stopped breathing! Oh, God. Oh, Gail. Well… this is the right thing, Gail, right? This is how the doctor said it would go!”

  Gail was my mom, and she’d soon come flying into the bedroom, having been drawn by her own mom’s shrieks.

  This had been the first and last time I’d visited my great-great-grandma. Her daughter, my Great-grandma Liz, had died the year earlier. Massive stroke. Aged seventy-eight. Great-great-grandma Mary’s son, Charles, had also died by this time, also from a stroke, aged seventy-one. He’d left no children, or heirs of any kind. Women alone carried the family bloodline now, with me being the youngest carrier.

  The following year, when I was fifteen, Grandma Jeannie died in a car accident, aged fifty-six. This left only my mom and me, and some very distant relatives in the hills of West Virginia. I’d heard they were second cousins, or third cousins, once removed, or something like that. My mom wasn’t even really sure what they were. At any rate, they weren’t a part of our lives up in Fort Wayne, Indiana.

  The years passed. I left my teens behind and entered my twenties. Currently, I was twenty-seven, and currently, I was experiencing “the quake.” In the thirteen years since my great-great-grandma had told me to wait for it, I’d slowly come to chalk it up as some sort of an Appalachian myth, or a strange, nonsensical folktale, just like my Grandma Jeannie had basically said it was.

  What I was feeling at present was no myth, though. What I was feeling at present was one hundred percent entirely real. Some sort of a quake was rippling through my insides while I stood looking at the man in front of me. I felt a bit scared, for no good reason. I felt a bit elated, again for no good reason. I also felt more than a bit unmoored. In fact, if I were a boat, I would have been one bobbing adrift far out in the ocean, no anchor.

  Wearing a neutral expression, the man in front of me extended his hand. “I’m Chief Reed Wallace. Please call me Reed.”

  It’s just because he’s so handsome, I thought. That’s why you’re freaking out, Samantha. It’s just because of his looks.

  That was certainly plausible, because Chief Reed Wallace’s looks were something to “freak out” over, for sure. I was sure he was the most attractive man I’d ever seen in my life. The very picture of tall, dark, and handsome, he honestly looked like a Hollywood actor, or a model maybe, except just a bit more rugged than the average actor or model, not that this surprised me at all. Most actors and models weren’t bear shifters, entrusted with protecting thousands of lives.

  Struggling to remain looking into Reed’s eyes for some reason, I took his hand and began giving it what I hoped was a firm, entirely professional sort of handshake. “It’s nice to meet you, Reed. I’m Samantha Miller. Please call me Samantha.”

  After dipping his head in the slightest of nods, indicating that he would, he said that it was nice to meet me as well. The fraction of a second of silence that ensued was too long for me, and I suddenly blurted out a few words.

  “You have such a nice voice.”

  Right away, I cringed inwardly. Probably outwardly, too. Idiot.

  I had no idea why my mouth had seen fit to let pass the words that it had. Other than the fact that those words had been completely true, I supposed. Reed did have a nice voice, although nice didn’t even quite cover it. He had an amazing voice. Deep, rich, and tinged with just a hint of gravel, his voice was only further quaking my insides.

  The fact that I was experiencing the mythical “quake” that my great-great-grandma had spoken of was probably the second reason I’d said what I had. Somewhat startled by it, I was recalling her words to me somewhere in the back of my mind, almost like hearing her voice from a distance. I was recalling how she’d told me that I’d feel scared and elated all at once when I met the man I was supposed to spend my life with, which I obviously was, currently. However, a feeling of being extremely flustered was quickly becoming the predominant feeling I was experiencing.

  The third reason the words I’d spoken to Reed had just slipped right out of my mouth was probably because I was simply nervous, and had been since the moment I’d arrived in the village he was chief of, which was called Somerset. Really, I’d been low-level nervous during the lengthy drive to the village, too. It wasn’t every day that a woman met the bear shifter that she was being paid to produce a child with.

  *

  I hadn’t agreed to have a child with a bear shifter just for the money. Or, I had, rather, but not just for the money in and of itself. Not just to have money to blow on a new car or fancy jewelry or something. I wasn’t even into cars or fancy jewelry. The goal of getting the money was to save my mom’s life, and in order to do that, I needed a lot of money, and fast. I needed two hundred and thirty-eight thousand dollars cash, to be exact. This was how much the experimental treatment that might possibly save my mom’s life would cost.

  A few years earlier, just about at the tail end of the Great North American Shifter War, she’d been diagnosed with an extremely rare form of blood cancer. It was so rare, in fact, that the oncologists at the prestigious Cleveland Clinic, where she’d been diagnosed, had only ever seen a few dozen of cases of it. They informed my mom and me that this particular kind of cancer appeared to have no genetic component, meaning that I or my future children would almost surely never get it, but this wasn’t even remotely my first concern when my mom was diagnosed. I just wanted to know what needed to be done to cure her, and how fast her treatment could start.

  This was when the three oncologists sitting opposite my mom and me had all begin to look distinctly uncomfortable.

  “There is no cure,” one of them had said, wincing slightly as she did so. “There’s only ‘buying time’ with this kind of cancer.”

  Stunned and horrified, I hadn’t been able to speak.

  Calmly taking one of my hands, my mom spoke to the doctor in a clear, unwavering voice, as if she’d been expecting the diagnosis that she’d just received. “How much time can I ‘buy,’ Dr. Anderson? And how do I do that? What treatments do I need to undergo?”

  Dr. Anderson responded by saying that she could “buy” maybe three or four years by way of periodic rounds of chemotherapy. “This will slow the progression of the cancer… but it won’t stop it.”

  My mom seemed to accept her diagnosis, but I didn’t. And it was only after getting a second opinion, and then a third, that I finally
did.

  The next three years were a blur of doctor’s appointments, hospital stays, and caretaking. My mom quit her job as office manager at a pediatrician’s office, which was a job she loved and had held for nearly two decades. I quit law school to take care of her. This was no big personal sacrifice to me, because my heart hadn’t been in it anyway. Me becoming an attorney had been more my mom and Grandma’s dream. In fact, around the time of my mom’s diagnosis, I’d been trying to work up the courage to tell her that I wanted to quit law school and pursue a degree in early elementary education instead. This is what I’d originally wanted to go to school for, having decided at ten or eleven that I wanted to be a teacher, but my mom and grandma had convinced me by my early teen years that I was meant for something “better” than “wiping first graders’ noses all day,” as Grandma had once put it. So, I’d somehow wound up in law school.

  It was during year three of her periodic chemo treatments that my mom started saying she’d had enough. Enough of the poison, enough of its terrible side effects, enough of the hospital. Enough of it all. She’d added that, thanks to me, she’d checked off most of the things on her “bucket list” and was feeling “ready to go” anyway. Number one on her bucket list had been simply to “grow closer to my daughter—spend lots of time together,” and we’d done that. Number two on the list had been “look out on Paris from the top of the Eiffel Tower,” and we’d done that, too. During a several-month break between chemo treatments, when my mom had been feeling decent enough to travel, her best friend, Irma, and I had taken her on a week-long Parisian vacation, going up to the top of the Eiffel Tower with her not once, but three times. Since medical bills had bankrupted my mom by this point, the trip had been funded by generous donations from her friends, and an extremely generous donation from one of the pediatricians she’d worked for.