Joel (BBW Bear Shifter Wedding Romance) (Grizzly Groomsmen Book 5) by Becca Fanning

that sense of recognition was.  

    Thundering towards them across the hills was a bear-a   bear carrying someone on its back. Iris stared in disbelief, even after everything she'd heard today, she still didn't feel ready for a sight like that. It just felt so…new, and disorientating. Even though she knew that logic dictated that this was all completely natural, she felt her chest tense. This was what her father had been. She'd never seen him in his shifted form, but it can't have been far removed from this, strong, enormous, slightly terrifying. Iris couldn't take her eyes from it, so much so that she didn't notice the wolves in hot pursuit.  

    She felt a pair of arms around her waist, pulling her back, and slamming the door in front of her. She fell back against Ian's chest, immediately struggling to get free.

    "But-"

    "The wolves, the wolves'll get here first," Ian replied urgently, hastily unbuttoning his jacket. "I'll go out there, just promise me you won't-"

    Before he had a chance to finish his sentence, the bear and it's cargo arrived outside the door, completely wolf-free. Ian hurried to open it for them, and pulled the woman who had been astride the bear in through the door. She had barely opened her mouth before a crash came from the room next door, glancing at Ian and the woman, Iris hurried through to see what help she could offer.

    A man was standing in the hall, bleeding heavily from a wound on his neck, everyone was crowding around him, each of them trying to get a better look, until Ian came striding out behind Iris.

    "Win!" He exclaimed, and hurried over to him. They conferred for a few minutes, and Iris found herself boggling at the fact he was still standing, those wounds looked as if they could have taken down, well, a bear. But right in front of her eyes, she watched as he began to heal, the wounds knitting together, fixing themselves up. Wait, could shifters do that? She had always supposed that she had a pretty good insider knowledge of what shifters could and couldn't do, but now she had been confronted by them, she found that her knowledge was shot full of holes. Ian finished his conversation with the injured man, and strode back over to Iris.

    "You okay to help me keep watch?" He asked. "It seems like we came off a bit worse for wear in the first encounter with them, but if we stay in the hotel we should be safe."

    "Of course," I nodded, looking round fearfully. "Is everyone okay? Are they all back?"

    "Yeah," Ian nodded. "Thank God. Though if I had my way…"

    He trailed off, and a look of strained panic passed over his face.

    "You would never have let them go?" She finished for him.

    "Precisely. Sometimes I feel responsible for them, you know? Like they're my kids or something." He immediately shook his head, contradicting himself. "Sorry, I didn't mean-"

    "I get it," she cut him off. "Where are we keeping watch? And when do you think the wolves'll be back?"

    "I suggest up in one of the rooms, they've got decent views over the island. And, no idea when or even if they'll be back. We might have scared them badly enough that they'll stay away, but I get the feeling that isn't the case," he shook his head. "My vote would be to hide out here until we can get off the island, but that's if those fuckers let us all get out of here unscathed."

    "Yeah, I get the feeling that they're not going to be done that easy," she agreed grimly. "Your room or mine?"

    He stared at her for a moment, as if convinced she was asking a very different kind of question, before it clicked in his head what she was actually referring to. She stared him out, enjoying the look of mild confusion on his face, and hey, it was nice to know that had she been suggesting the other thing he would exactly have shot her down in flames.  

    "Um, mine," he shook his head, as if dismissing all those kinds of thoughts from his head. "It can see right down over the hills, and someone said they were hiding out in the caves so