Stuck with the Bear (Steamy Shifters)

She blew a tire outside Harlow. He made sure she never left.

Jess Navarro is two hours from her new life when her tire explodes on a back road outside a town she's never heard of. One bar of signal. One search result. One call.

Gabe Briggs shows up in forty minutes—six-foot-five, two hundred and sixty pounds, engine grease on his forearms and a voice like warm gravel. He crouches down next to her blown tire, looks up at her once, and goes very still. Like a man who has just found something he stopped believing he would ever find.

He fixes the tire in forty minutes.

He tells her the axle needs three days.

There is nothing wrong with her axle. His apprentice knows it. The woman at the diner counter knows it. Half of Harlow knows it. Gabe Briggs has been waiting thirty-eight years for the mate he stopped expecting. He is not putting her back on the highway until she understands what that look meant.

By the time Jess figures out the car has been fine since day one, she's been fed at every meal, shown every back road in the county, and looked at like she hangs the sky.

She's still not sure she wants to leave. He's counting on it.