Fighter Bear: Steel Protection (Return To Fate Mountain #9)

Chapter 1

Chapter

One

The breakfast rush was in full swing at eight in the morning when Stella Keenan pushed through the front door of the Fate Mountain Diner.

The grill hissed, mingling with the clatter of plates and silverware and the steady murmur of conversation.

The smell of coffee, bacon grease, and cherry pie filled the air.

Stella had been managing the diner since her parents, Shane and Lily Keenan, had semi-retired a decade ago.

She walked down the hall to her office and dropped her purse and jacket on her chair behind the desk.

Back out in the front of the restaurant, she poured herself a cup of coffee behind the counter.

One of her new servers was standing nearby, looking lost. She caught his eye and pointed to the order window where two plates were growing cold.

He jumped to attention, slid them onto a tray, and delivered them to table seven.

She watched the floor, made sure the tables were turning over, and handled a complaint about a cold omelet.

She comped a regular’s birthday breakfast and then ducked into the office to return a call from a vendor about the next week’s produce order.

While she was at her desk, she caught a scheduling conflict for Thursday’s dinner shift before it became a problem.

At four that afternoon, Nell Meadows, her assistant manager, walked into the diner with her backpack slung over her shoulders.

The twenty-year-old winter wren shifter was finishing her business degree at the Bright Institute for Shifters.

Stella had quickly noticed the young woman’s aptitude for numbers and promoted her to assistant manager.

Stella and Nell had developed a big sister-little sister type relationship over the last two years. With Stella taking Nell under her wing and mentoring her in the business. Stella knew that after Nell finished her degree, the younger woman would move on to bigger and better things.

But in the meantime, Stella had become Nell’s surrogate family. The younger woman was alone in an apartment in town, having left behind her shifter community in Northern California. Nell needed someone to look out for her while she was away from home.

Nell greeted Stella as she passed. Stella was printing her receipts for the shift change at the register at the end of the counter. Nell disappeared into the office and returned a few minutes later with a fresh till. “How was your day?” Stella asked as she pulled her cash drawer.

“My Management Principles professor put us in groups today. I got stuck with two guys who didn’t even bring a pencil. I had to go for a two-mile run after classes just to burn off the frustration.” Nell put the fresh drawer into the register.

“You are so dedicated to everything you do,” Stella said.

Nell impressed her with the focus and discipline she brought to everything.

That was the reason she’d trusted a twenty-year-old to be an assistant manager at the restaurant.

This was Nell’s first job, but she wouldn’t be staying here. Unlike Stella.

“I try,” Nell said quietly, the shy side of her personality coming out.

Nell had barely been able to talk to customers when she first started at the diner. And Stella had worked with her to come out of her shell. She’d progressed a lot, but once in a while, that shy side came back out.

“I’m going to go balance the till,” Stella said, taking the receipts and cash drawer out from behind the counter.

She walked down the hall to her office and sat at her desk. There was a framed dollar from when her father purchased and revitalized the diner on the wall. That was next to a photo of her brother Theo when he graduated from the Culinary Institute in Portland.

Her brother hadn’t worked at the diner since he was a teenager. As she counted out the cash from the drawer and balanced her receipts, she couldn’t help but think about how she was the one who never left. The one who stayed put. The one who was dependable, reliable, and boring.

She glanced at the daily joke calendar on her desk. “I started at the bottom, and I’ve been here ever since.” It wasn’t that she hated her job; it’s just that she sometimes felt like she’d sacrificed something vital in always playing the support role in her family.

Her phone pinged with a notification from , the shifter dating app that had been created before she was born by her father’s best friend, Corey Bright.

She glanced at it. The notification was just a software update.

She sighed and finished balancing the books.

When she was done, she grabbed her coat and purse and left the office.

Stella waved goodbye to the staff and to Nell, headed to her car, and drove home.

She owned a small house on the residential side of the village, close enough to walk to work on nice days, but far enough from the diner that work didn’t follow her home.

That was the theory, anyway. In reality, the diner followed her everywhere.

She fell asleep thinking about supply orders and woke up remembering she’d forgotten to call the refrigerator repair company.

She pulled up in front of her house and parked in the driveway.

It was a three-bedroom ranch with cedar and stone siding.

A paved path was flanked by a freshly cut front lawn.

The landscaping around the house was a mix of rhododendrons and calla lilies.

The petunias and marigolds in her window boxes were fading in the early autumn chill.

Stella walked up the porch steps and let herself inside.

She dropped her things on the table by the door and kicked off her shoes.

The house opened into the living room, where she had a sectional couch that faced the TV.

Built-in bookshelves bracketed the fireplace.

They were lined with thrillers, true crime, and suspense novels, interspersed with books about the Pacific Northwest outdoors.

There was a sliding glass door out to the backyard, with a patio, trimmed grass, rose bushes, and a Japanese maple just starting to change color.

She moved into her bedroom to change into sweats and a Fleetwood Mac t-shirt, removing the smell of grease and coffee from her body.

Her room was cozy and dimly lit, with a queen-size bed covered in a comforter with cats in business suits, sitting at tiny desks and holding briefcases.

After she washed her face, she walked into the kitchen to see what she could make for dinner.

The fridge was covered in magnets she’d collected from every place she’d ever visited, which wasn’t that many places.

Every time she looked at it, it reminded her that she’d never fulfilled her dream of going to Ireland after graduation.

There was a cartoon bear holding a coffee cup from a gift shop in Bend.

A chili pepper from a road trip to New Mexico she’d taken three years ago.

A magnetic poetry set that currently read “funky cheese dreams haunt the moon,” which was the result of Theo rearranging them the last time he was over with Selena and baby Arlo.

She looked inside and found some zucchini and leftover Alfredo sauce. Stella wasn’t a master chef like her brother, but she knew her way around the kitchen. She had to in her line of work.

After whipping up her simple meal, she took her plate to the living room and sat on the couch. She turned on a true-crime podcast on YouTube and ate her dinner. The podcast host was describing a cold case in rural Montana.

It cut to an interview with the husband of the missing hiker.

His voice cracked when he pleaded for information about his wife.

Stella usually believed the husband did it in situations like this.

But this guy was a shifter, and she could hear the agony in his voice at the loss of his mate.

Stella set her empty plate on the coffee table and picked up her phone, tapping on the icon for the app.

It loaded with the familiar interface and photos of happy shifter couples.

There were three notifications since the last time she’d checked it.

There were a few new matches. She looked at each guy's profile.

They were cute. There was even a human man in the mix.

But none of them were a 100% match. None of them were her mate.

Stella had been on since she graduated high school. That was… longer ago than she wanted to admit. At thirty-four, part of her believed that her time was running out.

She knew that wasn’t true. Her brother was thirty-six when he met Serena. And Serena had Arlo at thirty-nine. Shifters typically lived longer than humans, and shifter females could give birth much later in life. So it wasn’t like her biological clock was ticking. But she so often felt… lonely.

Stella had friends, a loving family, and a staff that felt like family most of the time. But there was a missing piece of her life that she couldn’t do anything about. She sometimes wondered if she didn’t actually have a mate. Some shifters went their whole lives without finding anyone.

She was glad that her brother had moved home after he’d had that breakdown in Portland seven years ago.

He’d always had issues with his inner bear.

And after a terrible tragedy in a bank, it all came to a head.

He met Serena at the Fate Mountain Wilderness Academy, where he’d been working.

But then transitioned to working at the Fate Mountain Lodge as head chef.

It was a job that suited him. He was a wizard in the kitchen.

His food was more like art than mere sustenance.

And Serena was the director of the Academy now.

Her parents had been overjoyed since their first grandchild, Arlo, was born.

They couldn’t stop gushing about him and demanded that Theo and Serena depend on them for babysitting.

Stella couldn’t be happier for her family. She loved them. She loved her life. She’d chosen to work at the diner full-time right after her two-year management degree and took over running the place after her parents retired. Loyalty was everything to her.

Her inner grizzly growled deep inside her mind. Stella, despite her dark sense of humor, had always been steady and dependable. And she prided herself on being there for the people she loved. It was her whole purpose. To be there for her family.

But her bear needed something. She needed to feel something. The urgency was pressing against the insides of her ribs, clawing at the backs of her eyes, like the beast was trying to get out.

She’d been trying to suppress that feeling for months now.

That low pull of wanting. The sense that her life, for all its routine and predictability, was missing something she couldn’t describe.

She’d tried to fill that sense of emptiness with longer hours at work, weekend hikes where she let her bear out on trails above the village, and renovation projects at the house.

But none of it worked. Nothing soothed the desperate hunger that ached inside her more deeply with each passing day.