Three Grizzlies Gruff: A BBW Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance (Bear-y Spicy Fairy Tales Book 3) Read online

  Three Grizzlies Gruff: A BBW Bear Shifter Paranormal Romance Novella

  Bear-y Spicy Fairy Tales, Volume 3

  Sable Sylvan

  Published by Sable Sylvan, 2015.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  THREE GRIZZLIES GRUFF: A BBW BEAR SHIFTER PARANORMAL ROMANCE NOVELLA

  First edition. August 7, 2015.

  Copyright © 2015 Sable Sylvan.

  Written by Sable Sylvan.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Epilogue

  Sneak Peek: Rapunzel And The Billionaire Bear

  About The Author

  Chapter One

  The security cameras at Craston Bros. Honey showed the one thing that Daisy Craston despised most: three grizzlies who she recognized, even in their shift. They were the same three grizzlies she’d caught each and every time before, and this was going to be the last time she saw their hides on her farm. She was going to guarantee it.

  They were making their way across her land, and they were looking sour and gruff, stalking their way through her land without even caring to look back and see if anyone was watching them, least of all Daisy Craston. They knew that there were security cameras, they just didn’t care. If the trespassing hadn’t gotten on Daisy’s last nerve, the disrespect did. They could at least pretend to care about being caught, at least try to run through the land rather than walk through the rows of berries. Although the bears never touched her fruit, the fact they were on her land, without so much as asking for access, was enough to get her blood boiling.

  Daisy picked up her trusty shotgun and headed out. She was wearing her standard jeans and boots, as well as a navy blue tank top, a red bandana tying the front of her hair back, the rest of her hair in a long braid that went a few inches below her shoulders and hit her back, her curves swaying back and forth with every step through the rain and mud.

  She made her way angrily across the fields of marionberries. “What in tarnation do you think you grizzly bastards are doing?” she said angrily as she made her way across the field, shouting to the three shifters, who, upon sighting Daisy, hid behind the marionberry bushes...or rather, tried, and rather poorly.

  Daisy cocked her gun, keeping her finger off the trigger as she made her way to the big clump of brown fur. The three grizzlies were huddled together. “Oh heck no, you’re not going anywhere,” said Daisy, her gun in the face of one of the grizzlies. “You’re trespassing, there’s no two ways about it, and you know what the sheriff said last time I caught you boys on my land. You thought I was joking? Well, you thought wrong.”

  One of the bears roared, up into the air. “Don’t give me any of that guff,” she said, not moving her gun. She wasn’t going to shoot unless she was attacked, and she knew these boys wouldn’t hurt her. Well, she was ninety percent sure. While she was pretty sure these were shifters, she wasn’t sure enough to leave her trusty shotgun at the farmhouse. “Get out of those shifts, you’ve got explaining to do.”

  All at once, the three bears in front of her morphed back into men. There were huddled together in the mud, and covering their nakedness with their hands. As they shifted, Daisy shot into the ground away from the group, spooking the bears, before unloading the gun. “Please don’t call the sheriff,” begged the center man, looking up at her with his big brown eyes. The man was Bill Shepherd and he was covered from head to toe in mud, mud covering his entire chest, same as the rest of the guys.

  “Give me one good reason not to,” said Daisy, looking over the man. She knew the type: cocky, the kind of guy who got away with a lot, but when faced with someone who didn’t take an ounce of his nonsense, turned into jelly. Men were the same no matter where she went. “You come onto my land, after being told to keep away...and after calling me, what did you call me...oh yeah, the ‘toll troll’.”

  “Listen, we need to get through here for the moon watching ceremony,” said the one to the left of the man, Wylie Jackson. He was taller, but not as buff as the shorter man. Even in the rain, his hunter green eyes sparkled. “Your farm is the only way we can get to our traditional moon watching spot.”

  “Well, last I checked, it’s the bright of day,” said Daisy, pointing up towards where the sun would be if it wasn’t raining. “Okay. Maybe not so bright. But it’s day, dang it.” The Port Jameson area had a freak bout of bad weather that summer. It should have been hot and maybe humid, but not that rainy. The weatherman had said a storm might be hitting the area in a few weeks too.

  “Maybe we can come up with a trade,” said the third man, who was of medium height and strength. Like the other two men, he was a brunette, but he had the most distinctive eyes. His eyes were a pale blue, the kind of blue found on a Siberian husky or on a wolf shifter, nor the kind found on bears, other than some polar bears.

  “Oh yeah, what sort of a trade?” asked Daisy, squinting.

  “You could go on a date with any of us, or all of us, if you wanted,” said the average sized man, Liam Donovan, the leader of the trio and the one whose gears were constantly turning, coming up with plan after plan, many of the plans half-assed and fully hare-brained.

  Daisy squinted. “Liam Donovan, are you out of your frikkin’ mind?” asked Daisy. “Y’all are varmints, and would I date a raccoon I found digging through my trash? No frikkin’ way. Who are you to ask me, a good Texan woman, on a date, while you sit naked in the mud like a mangy polecat who done seen the wrong side of an alligator?” Whenever Daisy blew a fuse, she started to get even more Southern, her Southern accent and her colorful phrasing bubbling up.

  “Daisy...it’s coming close to harvest season,” said Wylie. He’d have to beat Liam up later for his dumb suggestion. “Your grandfathers always hired locals to help out with the harvest. It’s hard work, picking berries.”

  “It is...but what are you getting at?” asked Daisy. Wylie was the smartest of the three grizzlies...which meant she trusted him the least.

  “We’ll help you out with the harvest for free, every weekend during the season, if you let us use your land to get to the woods,” said Wylie.

  “Every week?” asked Daisy suspiciously. “What’re you trying to do, Wylie?”

  ‘Just...get us access to that land, is all,” said Wylie. Well, it was half true, the land wasn’t the only thing he wanted access to. “The moon ceremonies in the autumn are very special to us, what with the harvest moons and all, and the feasting for hibernation.”

  “Fine, but I better not catch any of you critter shifters eating my berries when I’m not looking,” said Daisy. “And keep your dang paws out of my honey!”

  The thought of Daisy’s honey sent Bill’s cock twitching, and he hoped to God she couldn’t see his naked manhood getting harder. Luckily for him, Daisy was too focused on Liam to notice.

  “We’ll be hard workers,” promised Liam.

  “Well, I’ll expect you on the farms from dawn to dusk,” said Daisy with a frown. “And toss in Wednesday nights, and you’ve got yourself a deal.”

  She thrust out her hand to shake Liam’s hand, even though his palms were covered in mud. Even through the mud, she could feel the hard calluses on his hands that mar
ked him as a bear shifter.

  “You won’t be disappointed,” said Liam.

  “Yeah, well, get your mangy coats off my darn land,” said Daisy. “I’ll see you in two weeks for the harvest, and not a day sooner. Now get!” Daisy pointed up towards the woods.

  The bear shifters didn’t have to be told twice. They started running across the mud, slipping and sliding against one another as they turned back into bears, their fur popping out from under their skin, their muscles and bones changing as they got into their shifts and started running up the hill and into the woods.

  Daisy chuckled to herself. Those bear shifters had no idea what they were getting into...but neither did Daisy. Once Daisy was sure they were off her land, she headed back inside to work on her accounting.

  Daisy had never been close to her grandpa. When he’d passed and left the farm to her, she was more surprised than anyone. It wasn’t like she was doing anything with her English major back in Texas. She packed up her things and moved up to rainy Oregon to run the farm. Once she went over the books and learned that the farm manager her grandfather had hired had been skimming money off the top, she sacked him and lawyered up, but litigation took time and money, two things that Daisy didn’t have a ton of.

  Meanwhile, Daisy learned to work the farm, mostly using guides she found on the Internet and books she bought in the local bookstores. Port Jameson was a quaint town that she found herself enjoying, even if she did miss living on her mother and father’s cattle ranch outside of Austin, Texas.

  Things weren’t perfect though. Although Daisy was a country girl, bees, berries and cows couldn’t have less in common. All the books and videos were helpful but they were no replacement for good old hard work, a baptism by fire that took up all of Daisy’s time, leaving her with little free time. She was up from dawn to dusk daily, working her fields, taking care of the bees and taking care of the berry canes.

  The bees took the most time during the spring and summer, but now that autumn was coming, the berry harvest was beginning. Right when Daisy had gotten into the swing of things, she had to learn about the berries, and it was like the rug had been pulled out from under her. Right when she thought she had everything together, she had to learn about something new that she might mess up entirely. She’d been great at dealing with cattle back in Texas, but berries and bees were nothing like her furry friends back home.

  That’s why Daisy was short on patience, and when she’d first caught the grizzlies passing through her land for the moon ceremony, she’d called the sheriff, but the grizzlies had fled. After making multiple calls to the sheriff about the bears, the sheriff had finally arranged a stakeout and caught the bears red handed (or rather, red pawed) as they walked across Daisy’s land, and as there wasn’t enough evidence to prove that Bill, Liam, and Wylie were the three men responsible for trespassing on Daisy’s land during the previous month, there’d been a gentleman’s agreement that the bears would stop walking through Daisy’s land, even though it was the only convenient way to get to the town’s moon watching spot. They’d walked through the berry canes and over a small bridge on Daisy’s land, a bridge that crossed over a creek, to make their way into the woods.

  Daisy had set up the security cameras and this was the first time that the cameras had proved helpful, as for four months after the confrontation involving the sheriff, the boys had stayed off their land...so why did their dumbasses come back? Daisy couldn’t figure it out, nor could she figure out why the three men were so much, well, nicer to her than they had been when she had first met them, when they’d been downright gruff.

  ...but they were also the sexiest men that Daisy had ever met, on either side of the Rockies, even when they were soaking wet and covered in more mud than the average Oklahoma hog.

  Daisy dashed the thoughts of the sexy men out of her head. She had accounting work to get finished up before she checked on the berries. She couldn’t afford to waste time thinking about the three men and their unique looks. Wylie, the tallest and tautest, reminded her most of the big bear shifters back in Texas, and he seemed to be the only one among the group that had a full brain. Bill seemed like a sweetheart, at least, when he wasn’t lumbering over her crops to get into the woods...and Liam, the leader of the group, was of average height and build for a bear shifter but still had a commanding presence.

  Daisy still remembered the first time she’d seen them: she’d been driving through town at night, after doing a drop off at the grocery store, and she’d passed by the Port Jameson Saloon. She’d thought the idea of a saloon was so corny, plus, the Port Jameson Saloon didn’t exactly look like it would fit into an Old West setting. It was basically a hole in the wall, with neon lights, the only dive bar in town.

  Three men outside the bar had caught her eye as her car was stalled, while she waited for a giggly gaggle of long-legged, small-waisted girls to get out of their car. The three men were the only men that weren’t staring over the hot twenty-somethings, who were already being drooled over by the human men. The men, tall and broader than the humans, and dressed in casual gear rather than in graphic shirts and designer denim, ignored the women who were looking them over...and they’d stared at Daisy, enjoying the soft curves of her shoulders, even though the rest of her curves were hidden by the car.

  Daisy broke eye contact with them and stared straight ahead. It always wigged her out when random men checked her out, and usually, when the men realized she was staring at them, they’d stop looking, but these men were different. She’d never been looked at by that many men before, and while shifters had always paid her mind back in Texas, but she knew that they couldn’t resist anything with curves. Once the car in front of her pulled away, Daisy drove off and didn’t look back at the three men...and she hadn’t seen them again until that night they’d trespassed onto her land.

  Daisy put down her pen and sipped at her coffee again. She wasn’t going to get any work done while she was still reminiscing about the first time she’d met the three Bills, and after their last interaction, she wasn’t sure which of her problems was bigger:, the problem with managing the farm, or the problem of the three grizzlies gruff.

  Chapter Two

  The next weekend, thirty minutes before dawn, Daisy woke up and yawned, stretched, and got changed into her trust farm jeans, a tank top, and her ass-kicking cowboy boots. She made herself a pot of coffee and looked out over her marionberry fields: the crop had come in nicely and there weren’t any bees to worry about. The marionberry flowers had come in a month or two earlier, and once the bees had finished pollinating the berries, Daisy had driven the bees to another farm, where they’d stay until the winter, when she picked them up and kept them back at the farm, safe in a roofless metal shed so that predators wouldn’t get at her bees, and they’d be safe until the next spring.

  As Daisy sipped her coffee and watched her fields, she noticed a rustling, and Daisy grabbed the baseball bat by the door and headed out the fields to see who was stealing her berries.

  Daisy kept her bat raised as she turned the corner and she put it down again when she realized who was in her fields, the three Bills, on their hands and knees, picking berries while wearing nothing but jeans and long-sleeved flannel shirts rolled up to the elbow. They weren’t sweating, nor were they chilled by the crisp Oregon morning, and there was no telltale trace of inky purple across their face, so they weren’t rustling Daisy’s berries.

  “You almost gave me a heart attack,” said Daisy. “Why didn’t you stop by the house and check in with me?”

  “We didn’t wanna wake you,” said Liam, looking up at Daisy, who looked resplendent with the morning sun starting to rise behind her. “Besides, you told us to start working at the crack of dawn...so, that’s what we’re doing.”

  “I thought I’d have to drag you all out of bed by the ears this morning,” said Daisy with a crinkled brow. “But I guess I was wrong. Come on, I’ll give you boys the tour. You want some coffee?”

  “That actu
ally sounds great,” said Liam, rising. Bill and Wylie stood up after him. “What should we do with the berries we already picked?”

  “You can have them as a snack,” said Daisy, watching the bear’s faces light up with glee, added, “This time. Just this time.”

  Daisy led the boys to the farmhouse. The kitchen overlooked the farm proper, the sink and counter topped with long windows. “This, obviously, is the farmhouse,” said Daisy, opening up the door. “In here is the kitchen. It’s not much, but it’s got a fridge, and if you bring a lunch, you can leave it in the fridge.” Daisy gave the mint green fridge a spank as she walked by it.

  Daisy led them down a hallway. “This is the living room, not that y’all are going to have much lounging time,” said Daisy. “And down here, there’s a bathroom, and it’s got a shower if you need to clean up. I’ve got a stack of guest towels in there, just leave those in the hamper.”

  Daisy shut the door to the bathroom. “And down there’s my office, you better keep out of it, or I swear I’ll have the sheriff on you, for real this time,” said Daisy.

  The three men followed Daisy back to the kitchen. “You can help yourself to coffee,” said Daisy, leaning against the counter. “You’re gonna need it.” Liam poured three cups of coffee and the shifters chugged them right down. Daisy’s eyes nearly popped from her head: there was no frikkin’ way they’d just chugged her nasty boiling hot coffee. Daisy wasn’t exactly proud of the coffee she made, but she bought the cheapest can of coffee down at the hardware store (yes, the hardware store) during her weekly trips to town, and it did the trick, but even she could barely stand to sip it.

  “Alright, now, around back, there’s the marionberry fields, of course,” said Daisy. “Way in the back, that shack with a crescent moon on it? That’s the outhouse, and I haven’t even seen that since I’ve got here, so I know it’s probably a mess.”