You can read Baby For The Bear free below.
Blurb:
A bear shifter, surrogate pregnancy, billionaire romance story. Billionaire werebear Kenneth Brecker has one wish: to be a father. And now he wants to spend a fortune to make his dreams come true.
There I was, without a job, with the threat of losing my home when I stumble upon Kenneth’s unusual proposal: If I bore him a werebear cub as surrogate mother he would give me enough money and more to turn my life around! Desperate times calls for desperate measures, right? And I really couldn’t say no to all of that money.
It was meant to be a straightforward deal. And romance was definitely not part of the agenda. But life doesn’t always follow the script, does it? Let’s just say, our relationship is about to get wild. But before I say even more, can you guess how our story will end? Discover now in this paranormal werebear romance novel by Amy Star.
Chapter 1
In spite of everything else, the unemployment check arrived right on schedule.
Samantha Vance came to the front entrance of her building, carrying the bag of groceries that she had bought with what she still had in the bank for want of buying it with a paycheck, and gratefully plucked the unemployment check and the other mail that she dreaded to look at from her mailbox before heading upstairs. At least this little cushion beneath her could be counted on for a while, where what she had thought would be a steady and well-paying job had proved to be not so reliable.
She headed up to the apartment that she actually liked, but where she now wondered how long she would be able to stay, and was almost oblivious to the act of setting the bag and her purse down on the sofa while she sorted through the little bundle of mail in her other hand. Samantha could almost predict the content of what the postman had brought besides that one little lifeline of insurance money. Yep, she thought to herself as she flipped from one envelope to the next and dropped each one on the coffee table with about the same presence of mind as she had dropped the grocery bag on the sofa. All the usual suspects were here except for the student loan invoice, the invoice for her car loan, and the payment statement for the gym that came in her E-mail. There was an offer of a credit card that she wouldn’t have taken even if she did still have the income that had gotten her the apartment. The one credit card she had, for which she could now barely make the payments, was all she cared to have. There was the offer of a new cell phone and a great deal on service that was now not so great. And—ah, yes—there was the Cable TV bill for service that she would probably have to cancel after this month and switch to watching whatever television was available to her online. At least her Internet service came with the apartment—in which she was growing to fear, day by day, that her days were numbered.
All the other envelopes Samantha let drop onto the coffee table except for that one containing the check that was not the equal of the paychecks to which she had so quickly grown accustomed, but was now all that she had to work with. She let out a blubbering sigh of frustration that rustled aside the lock of curly blonde hair that had fallen over her face, and shook her head. For the moment at least, the feeling that churned in her stomach was more anxiety than hunger. But she honestly wondered if she could turn this situation around before hunger overtook anxiety.
Forgetting the purchases still lying on the sofa waiting to be unpacked and stored in the refrigerator or cabinets, Samantha walked over to the mirror over the non-functioning fireplace in her living room and took a good, long look at the pretty, 24-year-old girl staring back at her from the glass. Things just aren’t going according to plan, are they, Sammie? she thought to the reflection of her very pretty but now very anxious young face, wreathed in curly golden hair that tumbled over her shoulders.
And what was the plan? Go to college. Major in Economics. Get good grades. Get a good job. Work steadily, earn enough money to move away from Mom and Dad and be completely on her own—in her own place, with no roommates or housemates underfoot. Be a professional in a responsible job. Have a life. Step by step, it was all perfectly simple—except that life has a mocking and perverse way of mocking the steps one takes. Life had mocked Sammie Vance by throwing in her path the actions of the very kind of corporate go-getters that she was trying to become.
She was so proud of herself, landing an Assistant Office Manager’s position with a chain of upscale gourmet supermarkets. It was such a fashionable, trendy, “upwardly mobile” kind of job, such a gentrified position. Samantha had become what her parents’ generation had called a Yuppie. One never heard anything about Yuppies anymore; they still existed, but culture had moved on and fixated on other demographic phenomena. “Millennials” were the big thing today. But a Young Urban Professional was what Samantha had worked hard to be, and she was doing well at it—until the kind of business predators that had also emerged in those Yuppie days had their way. Once they were through with the Metro Foods market chain, Samantha’s journey through Yuppiedom was done and her plans pulled over to the shoulder of the road. One minute she was on the road to go anywhere, the next she had no idea where she was going or how she would get there.
Samantha blubbered again. What were her options now?
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She liked this apartment. It had a spacious living room, a cozy and serviceable kitchen, a bathroom that had been remodeled before she’d moved in, and an equally spacious bedroom. It was a great “starter” place. So many evenings she had come home from work, made herself a cup of tea, and settled down to relax and watch television on her sofa, and while relaxing she would glance over at the non-working fireplace and imagine the working one that she would have in her next apartment—or her house—after working for a while and getting herself a promotion. Samantha even entertained the idea of installing one more thing in this place: a boyfriend. A handsome, ambitious boyfriend; someone with a nice smile and a nicer body, who would very comfortably fill the queen-sized bed in the bedroom with her. Wouldn’t that be the perfect reward for all of a girl’s hard work?
As well as she’d worked on her life, Samantha had worked on herself. The 24-year-old body in her cotton shirt, jeans, and denim jacket was slim and nicely curved, thanks to the gym membership that she expected she might soon have to cancel along with the Cable TV if she didn’t work something out before too long. She had let go of looking for a relationship in the time she had spent establishing herself in what she had assumed would be the beginnings of a career, but the fact was that Samantha was a healthy young woman and had needs beyond those of a job and a cash flow. She’d had no intention of staying single or continuing to sleep alone. She’d had boyfriends in school, boys of her type—jocks with the kind of bodies she liked, who knew their way around a girl’s body and were as good lying down as they were on the field and the court. She had fully expected to start shopping around for a suitable guy—until the news came about the corporate maneuvers in which ownership of the Metro Foods chain changed hands, and the layoffs began. God—the layoffs.
It had hurt her to see the staff of associates and clerks on the sales floor decimated when the layoffs hit. It had broken her heart to see them leave with prospects even dimmer than what her own had now become. She had thought that at least the back offices would be spared, that at least she and her bosses and office mates would be safe from the economic mayhem going on out in the store as the workers filed out and the machines came in.
Then came the layoff notice with her name on it, and Samantha Vance was the next member of the Metro Foods family to be shown the door.
And what was her life now? Something not as certain as she had expected it to be; something much more tenuous and unpredictable, into which she was not ready to bring a boyfriend. If she were to have a relationship, Samantha resolved, she would have it as someone who knew where she was standing and knew where she was going. That, of course, meant finding a place to stand and figuring out in which direction to go next.