Rescued & Ravished: An Alpha's Conquest (A Paranormal Ménage Romance) Read Online Free

svelte, robust-looking girl, and the next she was a big, muscular grizzly sow, ambling powerfully down the mountainside. The sun glittered over her coarse, light-brown coat.
    Hudson changed, too, into an immense, dark-furred male grizzly, big and strong enough to fight an elk, and they both headed downhill.

***
    Harper struggled through fool’s huckleberry and fir saplings, making her way uphill. If she could just get to an overlook, she could figure out where she was in relation to Mystic Pass.
    Maybe.
    She hadn’t seen anyone for days, now. In fact, the only company she’d had since this morning had been a couple of yellow-pine chipmunks chattering near her tent. It was disturbing, the nobody-ness—she wanted to be alone, but not isolated. If she’d stayed on the trail, she would have seen other backpackers, maybe some horse tours. She would have seen someone.
    She didn’t kid herself. This was rapidly becoming a survival situation. She should never have left the trail.
    If wishes were horses, beggars would—
    Abruptly, she tripped and went down hard on the slope.
    “Damn!” she muttered, struggling up with a dirty, throbbing knee. Some pipits in a spruce overhead chittered like they were laughing. “Yeah, yeah. Thank you for your sympathy, you little shits.”
    She had to get to a vista. She had to.
    It didn’t help that the sky was greying up. Rain was the last thing she needed.

***
    “Hudson!”
    “I hear it too. Hush, girl!” Human on a dime, he gripped Dove’s arm to keep her quiet.
    “It sounds like somebody’s coming up the slope.” Dove’s brown-and-gold eyes were very large in her face. “Is somebody coming?”
    “Hush, I said!” But Hudson could already tell that somebody was coming, no doubt about it.
    “Is it that girl? It has to be that girl. Hazel was right,” Dove said. “The elders are never wrong, are they, Hud? We shouldn’t have doubted them. We—”
    “We don’t know who it is,” he cut in. “Follow me and we’ll find out. Quietly!”
    With all the skill of natural-born hunters, they slunk silently through the woods. Downhill, downhill, and downhill until they were only meters from the loud, obvious sounds of someone’s passage through the brush.
    “It is someone,” hissed Dove.
    “Quiet!” Hudson mouthed. He crept even closer to the sounds, Dove trailing him uncertainly.
    “It is a girl,” she breathed, once they’d come up behind a screen of bearberry. “It is.”
    It was. They could both see her pink, nylon-shell rain jacket, as well as her bright green backpacker’s pack and her light-blonde hair. She looked flushed and tired.
    “We should welcome her,” Dove whispered. “Let’s tell her there’s a clan near here, and she can rest, and it’s safe, and—”
    “No. Smell her, Dove! Smell her carefully.” His expression was grim. “She’s human .”
    “No!” Dove gasped. “A human? Here?”
    Hudson knew she had to be. She smelled like sports deodorant and polyester and grapefruit shampoo. No bear ever smelled like that. “She is.”
    Dove sniffed the air, her eyes dilating. “You’re right. Oh Hud, what do we do?”
    “We run her off,” he said, his eyes hard.
    “But… she looks lost.”
    She did. But the clan came first. “I’ll herd her back toward the valley. There’s a survival shed down there, with a radio. I stopped there when I was coming up, years ago.”
    “It’s… it’s a big valley, though… and sheds are tiny, and—”
    “I know, Dove, but she can’t come up. A human can’t be allowed to find us.”
    Dove bit her lip.
    “Stay back. I’ll handle her. I’ve got experience with these people.” He put a steadying hand on her shoulder. “Watch me.”

***
    Harper was hot and exhausted. She was almost looking forward to being soaked by the rain, even though she knew that getting cold and wet out here was dangerous. But hell, she was already soaked with sweat, wasn’t she?
    She paused, closing her eyes and leaning on