She fell asleep in his office. He waited until she was safe inside.🐻

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Hey babes!

It starts with a brawl that wasn’t accidental.

A rogue shifter with no territory and too much calculation walks into The Claw on a Friday night and locks onto a human woman who smells, to his kind, like something worth claiming. He doesn’t make a scene. He waits. He watches.

Drake Voss walks him out with one word and a look that requires no further explanation.

But Shaun Veil isn’t done with Greypaw. And he isn’t done with Everly Marsh.

What follows is a forced proximity story that earns every inch of tension: a night that ends in a police sweep and a back office couch; a drive home at six in the morning when a dress is wrinkled and a bag is missing; a broken window latch that gets fixed by hands that had no reason to fix it; a mug of coffee set down before it can be refused.

Drake spent twenty years building something steady from the ruins of a different life — the kind of life he’s not going to describe in detail except to say that Alaric found him at twenty-six and offered him a frame. The work was his own. The rough edges that remain are the ones he decided were load-bearing.

Everly spent ten years building a good, quiet life after the phone call that ended her marriage and sent her back to Greypaw. She knows what it costs to want something and lose it. She’s not looking for complicated.

But she keeps thinking about the way he said I’d have remembered.

Drawn by the Bear is a full-length Bears of the Rockies novella: fated mates, a silver-fox hero who earned every grey hair, an independent heroine who has to choose vulnerability on her own terms, and a threat that escalates until Greypaw’s whole clan has to decide what they’re protecting.

The HEA is guaranteed. Getting there costs them both something real.

With love,

Peyton 🐻

xo

DRAKE

Friday nights at The Claw had a rhythm, and after twelve years working the door, my body knew it the way it knew how to breathe.

Eight o’clock: the after-work crowd, loggers and outfitters, men who’d been outdoors all day and wanted a dark room and something cold in their hand. Nine: the younger set drifting down from the lodge or up from the highway, tourists who thought a bar called The Claw was charmingly rustic without considering what might have named it. Ten: the serious drinkers, the ones who didn’t come for the atmosphere. They came because the mountains gave you something heavy to carry sometimes and a person needed a place to set it down.

I worked the door because Alaric had pointed me at it twenty years ago and it turned out I was good at it. Not the bouncing, though that too when it was needed. The reading of rooms. The small decisions made before anything became a problem. A bar worked the way a town worked, the way a clan worked — on trust maintained by people who paid attention. I’d spent enough of my life in places built on no trust at all to understand what the alternative felt like.

Twelve years. I knew most of Greypaw’s regulars by habit if not by name. Knew what they drank and who they’d start trouble with and who needed a cab called and who just needed someone to listen for five minutes before they went home. The work had given me a kind of usefulness I hadn’t known I was looking for until I had it.

Ten-thirty: the bachelorette party.

I heard them before I saw them. Laughter carrying down the block, the kind that had been building all evening and now required no further encouragement. Six women, maybe seven. A sash. At least one light-up crown. One of them was wearing a veil made of something that sparkled, which I was going to have to watch near the candles.

I stepped back to let them file past, already running the mental triage. The one in the veil — bride, obviously, name probably written somewhere on the sash I’d have to squint to read. The two flanking her, already tilting at about fifteen degrees, handles with care. The one texting, not present enough to cause trouble. The one laughing the loudest, watch that one, always the loudest one.

And then the last one through the door.

My bear went still.

Not quiet the way it went quiet when I was bored, or calm the way it went calm when everything was under control. Still. Like something had reached in and pressed a hand against my chest from the inside.

She was the last through because she’d stopped to pull the door fully shut behind her — small courtesy, automatic, the kind of thing a person did without thinking when they’d been raised to close doors properly. Mid-forties, dark hair loose around her shoulders, wearing a blue dress that suggested someone had told her this was a night out and she’d taken it seriously without overdoing it. No tiara. No sash. Sensible heels that she’d still managed to navigate the front step in without looking like she was calculating the physics.

She looked up from her phone and took in The Claw the way a person took in a place they’d been told about but had never had reason to visit themselves. Not disgusted. Not dazzled. Just noting it, cataloguing, deciding she could work with it.

Her eyes moved across the room and landed on me for exactly one second.

Not flirtatious. Not threatened. Just a person confirming the layout of the room she’d just walked into.

Then her friend grabbed her arm and she was gone into the crowd, and my bear was still doing that thing in my chest, and I had twelve years of standing at this door telling me to get my head straight because Friday nights didn’t take breaks.

I got my head straight.

I watched the room.

By ten forty-five, the party had taken over the high-top tables near the back. The bride was into her third drink and had accumulated a small court of admirers. The loud one was dancing to something that wasn’t quite in time with what was actually playing. The one with the phone had put it away and was talking to a man who looked genuinely interested in what she was saying, which was fine.

The woman in the blue dress was sitting slightly apart, nursing something that still had ice in it from the first round, watching her friends with the expression of someone who loved them completely and was also very aware that she was going to be the one making sure everyone got home.

I knew that expression. I’d been that person, though in different rooms, for different reasons.

A man drifted her way from the pool tables.

My bear lifted its head.

Shaun. Not his real name — he’d given the bar three different names in three different visits, and I’d stopped logging them. Nomad, by scent. Rogue, by behavior. He’d been in twice this month, caused no documented trouble, but he watched people the wrong way. Assessed. Calculated. Like a man taking inventory of things he might want later.

He leaned against the table beside her.

She shifted her weight, small, polite, making space while also making clear she wasn’t making conversation.

He leaned closer.

I was already moving.

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