Lion in Waiting

Two injured shifters get a second chance at life…and love.


Matilda escaped into the wild to lick her wounds and heal as best she can from captivity and torture at the hands of people who hunt shifters and imprison them. She is a lioness, but her natural confidence has been shaken by the experience. What she needs is a second chance to live, to heal, and to find her lioness’s roar once more.

Georgio is a bear of a man who has seen and done things in foreign lands that have changed him forever. It takes a lot to harm a shifter of his strength, but being blown up by an Improvised Explosive Device just about did the job. He is looking for his lost sense of purpose, and something drives him to keep looking for the lost lioness when everyone else gives up.

When these two heart-wounded shifters finally meet, it’s just possible they will find their second chances start with each other. But the hunters are still hunting Matilda and they’re going after her only human friend to try to recapture her. Surprises, secrets, and reclusive billionaires notwithstanding, the bear and the lioness will have to come to terms with their sizzling attraction, and bruised hearts, if they’re going to forge a new future together.

Georgio Basset cursed under his breath. His bum leg was giving him trouble, but he refused to give in to the weakness. He’d been blown up and put back together, then shipped back stateside, but he would not allow physical weakness to impact the life he was trying so hard to reclaim.
Part of that was walking through the woods on two legs or four, doing his best to get back to what he had been. The soldier. The man. The search-and-rescue expert of the Grizzly Cove team.
He had a self-appointed task, and he wasn’t going to give up until he discovered—one way or the other—what had become of the Kinkaid Clan’s lost lioness. The others had given up long ago, but Georgio would not give up or give in to the weakness that still plagued his limbs after one too many injuries. Just as his mind would not give in to the fear riding him that he would never be whole, again.
Before he’d been blown up by a roadside bomb, he’d been held prisoner by barbaric tribesmen who had tortured him. They’d known he was a shifter, and they’d used poisonous silver on him, to keep him under their control. They’d been savage, but when his unit had finally found him after weeks of torture and captivity in a small cage, the terrorists had been the ones savaged. They’d been torn apart until not one was left alive.
The shapeshifters who had retired from the military and settled in Grizzly Cove had been incensed when they’d found their comrade, Georgio. So incensed that they’d killed all the captors and ripped them apart.
On the one hand, Georgio was grateful that his friends had taken revenge for him. He was glad those bastards were dead. They’d been beyond cruel, and the pain they’d caused him had damaged him—possibly permanently. On the other hand, he would’ve liked to kill just one of them himself. He’d been rescued, but he’d been too weak to do much of anything to effect his own rescue, and then, just a short time later, he’d been blown up by an encounter with a roadside bomb.
It had all been just too much. Georgio had come home to the States and stayed. He’d bought land in Washington State, on the coast where Big John had already planned to build the town of Grizzly Cove. John and the others had been buying up the land for years, with the idea that they’d all retire there when they left the military.
Georgio had taken his discharge and retreated to his parcel of land, even before the others had joined him and started building the new town. He’d concentrated on building his den and rebuilding his life.
The others had come, eventually, and he’d been glad to see them all. They were his brothers, but the experiences he’d had in the desert had forever changed him. Things had happened. Things had been done to him. Things that scarred his spirit and injured his soul. Things he had to work through before he could, just possibly, rejoin life fully.
One of the things he felt strongly about doing was finding the lioness. The woman’s plight spoke to him on a basic level. She’d been captured. Most likely tortured. She’d escaped into the unfamiliar woods and had not been seen since.
The moment Georgio had heard her story, he’d decided he had to do his best to try to find her. At first, he’d joined small groups of shifters who had gone out into the forest to look for her. Eventually, they’d all given up and gone on to other tasks, but Georgio had kept going out, hiking farther afield each time. He’d become a one-man search party that wouldn’t give up until he learned what had become of the woman.
There was something about her story, and the photos he’d seen of her from before her disappearance, that had spoken to him on a basic level. His bear growled inside him, interested in the fate of the lost lioness, when it had been mostly ambivalent to all of his other rescues. It was as if the bear recognized something about the lioness’s spirit. Something important.
Georgio wasn’t sure what it was all about, but he felt compelled to keep searching for her. He knew he could find her. He wanted desperately to be the one to find her…and hopefully figure out what it was about this woman he’d never met, that acted so deeply on his innermost thoughts.
While he was hiking through the woods far from Grizzly Cove, he was also keeping his eyes open. He’d been trained in reconnaissance, and he was making notes on human settlements in the wild places where shifters might want to roam. He’d already found at least three cabins where mountain men were living off the land, far from other humans. He’d crossed paths with a few older shifter trails but hadn’t met any in the flesh.
As an apex predator, he wasn’t too worried about any shifter he might encounter in the woods. Most wouldn’t mess with him if they had mischief in mind. Folks thought twice about getting on a grizzly’s bad side, which Georgio figured was all to the good in his case. He wasn’t out here to make friends, or enemies. He was on a mission. Looking for the woman and any other useful information he could pass along to the unit back in Grizzly Cove.
Each of his scouting trips took him farther away from his den for longer amounts of time. He figured this was a positive step. He’d become a little too comfortable in his cozy den with the exercise pool and every amenity he could want. What he needed to further his recovery was hard work and open spaces. He needed to let his bear out to roam the woods and allow his human side the solitude and healing peace of nature.
He thought maybe it was working. Each day he spent out in the forest, he felt a little better. He was moving better, too. His bum leg would stiffen up from time to time, but less so now than when he’d started on this quest. The exercise was working. He just knew it.
The only disappointment was that he’d yet to find anything more about the lioness. He only knew what everyone in Grizzly Cove already knew. An illegal private zoo had been holding a bunch of shifters captive in the woods of Oregon. The crazy koala who had escaped and found his way to Grizzly Cove had told the story of the lioness and a selkie boy he’d escaped with. The seal shifter had been found, safe and sound, down the coast in California, but the lioness had disappeared without a trace.
Georgio vowed to solve the mystery of her disappearance, no matter how long it took.