Spurred Bearback

By Becca Fanning

Sun Valley is in jeopardy. An age old debt has come due and the residents are in danger of losing their home. This weighs heavily on Valerie Rousseau’s mind. She was sent to Sun Valley by a company, interested in buying up the land.
At first it’s just another job, just another corner of the land that this machine she represents wants to eat up. But then she meets the people and falls in love with a Bear Shifter named Kyle. This changes everything for her. Now she has to work to keep her job, save Sun Valley and try to win the heart of the man she’s seriously falling for. But time is running out and there are no easy fixes as darker secrets come to light.
Will Valerie and Kyle find a way to save the beauty that is Sun Valley before time runs out?
This 13,000+ word novella has hot cowboy Bear Shifter action, a Happily Ever After, no cheating and no cliffhangers! I've attached some free stories afterward as my thanks to you.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gizmo Media
• Release date: May 23, 2021

Book preview

Fanning

Chapter 1

Valerie Rousseau drove the rental car along the road that would eventually lead out to Sun Valley. It was a pleasant day in fall, with a mild sun trying to break through some lacy cirrus clouds high in the deep blue sky. To say that her job took her all over the country was an understatement. Valerie owned an apartment in New York but spent so little time there that even her cactus had managed to die of dehydration, while things left in her fridge had become sentient and walked out on their own.

And here she was, away again.

This time to a small corner in a rather picturesque part of the country. And there was the problem in itself. Picturesque. Born in New Orleans she had a weakness for beauty. After all she had been raised in an old plantation house, with its columns out front and massive windows to let in the wonderful New Orleans sun. It was picturesque and Valerie loved the word and everything it conjured in her mind. It was the reason she had chosen property assessment as her profession.

New York was a lot of things, but picturesque wasn’t one of them. How she missed the simple beauty of old areas, not marred by commercialism and human madness. Clean, simple, open. You missed things like that in the cities where everything was loud, run by money and no matter what anyone said about going green, cities were primarily dirty.

Perhaps she had just been on the road too much lately. Perhaps all this thought of home, of Mama’s cooking, of the place she grew up, was just her tired mind and body telling Valerie that it was time to recharge. She should complete this job and then put in for leave. She had vacation days so why not take them? She could go home. Home. The word hung in her mind and ached in her heart.

Valerie came to realize that she was lost. Google Maps had been telling her this fact for the last how long? She didn’t know, she’d tuned out the noise of the robotic, annoying voice telling her it was recalculating.

Shit! she said and pulled the car over onto the verge.

The road ahead was heading into trees, a lot of them and then up into the mountains. Was this the right way to Sun Valley? All the signs so far had insisted that she was going the right way. She looked at her phone and sighed. Google was completely lost. It suddenly thought she was in California and not Colorado. She turned the GPS off, what was the point of keeping it on?

So the last sign had been about a mile back? Maybe more?

Dammit Val, why the hell were you daydreaming? she berated herself, loudly thumping the wheel.

Maybe she should drive a little way down the road. There was bound to be another sign soon, right? There had to be. Surely people came to Sun Valley all the time. Right?

Valerie slowly depressed the accelerator and the rental eased back onto the road. She drove along for another twenty minutes as the trees grew up around her. Suddenly the road just ended in a wall of green branches and leaves. To her right she could see something that looked like a little dirt track that was cleared of branches, and to her left nothing but forest.

On the right a very small, hand painted sign proclaimed that it was the way to Sun Valley.

Oh, but of course it is, Valerie said aloud to herself and sighed. It was clearly going to be one of those days. The vampire pool at HQ, Valerie’s pet name for the sisterhood of personal assistants and secretaries, that stood guard on all